Another myth put to bed:
Two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, no memorial service, cable-news talkfest or university seminar seemed to have been complete without someone emerging from the woodwork to wonder darkly why the CIA ever financed Usama bin Laden “in the first place.”
Everyone from Washington Post reporters to Michael Moore seems to buy some version of this.
It is time to lay to rest the nagging doubt held by many Americans that our government was somehow responsible for fostering bin Laden. It’s not true and it leaves the false impression that we brought the Sept. 11 attacks down on ourselves. While it is impossible to prove a negative, all available evidence suggests that bin Laden was never funded, trained or armed by the CIA.
Bin Laden himself has repeatedly denied that he received any American support.
Lonewacko: Blogging Across America and currently in Maine
We might not have supported OBL himself, but we did of course support the Afghan mujahadeen and the Taliban, both of which are pretty close to OBL in spirit if not completely in malice.
John Cole
Lonewacko- Did you read the article I linked to?
scott h.
No, we never supported the Taliban. The Taliban didn’t exist at that time. The Taliban was originally made up of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, former mujahediin didn’t join up until after the war with Russia. And the Taliban didn’t take over Afghanistan until 1996.
scott h.
Along the same lines as the article: Has anyone else noticed the tendency for some on the left to transform our modest support for Saddam into “We installed him, we put him in power!”?
Kimmitt
I . . . guess. We backed him pretty hard back in the 70s before he took power.
JKC
It’s more an indictment of the culture of secrecy in Washington. The current Administration seems to have a really bad case of it.
Do things in the open, kids, and spurious charges are much harder to put forth.
Andrew Lazarus
Even if we didn’t support the Taliban directly, we did support the Pakistani ISI (intelligence), including money to redistribute to Afghan anti-Soviets, and they were extremely close to the Taliban.
Emperor Misha I
Yep. Let’s have the CIA do all of their business in plain view of everyone. That ought to do wonders for our national security.
G-d, you’re brilliant, JKC.
How ’bout we declassify the NSA as well? Oh, and let’s share all of our military secrets with anyone willing to pay for the Xerox.
Emperor Misha I
Sure, Andrew.
And even if we didn’t do that either, we DID fight the Germans in WWII, who they were friendly with the Arabs, which probably pissed them off, so it’s really all our own fault no matter how you put it.
And even if THAT isn’t the case, we most likely at one point helped somebody who was allied to somebody, who was the enemy of somebody else, who once lost a cousin thrice removed, who had a bad childhood, who grew up to be a member of [insert organization here], who were allied with the Taliban.
So there. Ha!
HH
Don’t forget that money we gave to the Taliban. Sure we actually gave it to the people of Afghanistan via the UN, but clearly we’re responsible for them.
scott h.
Again, the Pakistani ISI was not close to the Taliban when we were funneling money through them because the Taliban did not exist at that time.
Kimmitt: How did we support Saddam in the ’70s? I haven’t seen any evidence that we did.
Kimmitt
Okay, I should have typed 60s instead of 70s, as that’s when we allegedly did the most sponsorship. Essentially, the Ba’ath Party, of which Saddam was a ranking member, is thought to have been sponsored by the CIA in assassinating the previous military leader of Iraq, General Kassem in 1959. Saddam is believed to be one of the putative assassinators. Saddam fled the country, then came back in 1963, after other Ba’ath Party thugs finished the job. The Ba’athists lost power after a few months, then regained it in 1968; it is believed that the CIA sponsored both him and the Ba’athists during that period and into the 70s in an attempt to maintain access to Iraqi oil.
Interestingly, the Iraqi leadership ended up tilting Soviet for most of that period, up until the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, when the US quietly sponsored Iraq as part of an overall geopolitical game.