Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

I was promised a recession.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

DeSantis transforms Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

You are here: Home / Another One Bites the Dust

Another One Bites the Dust

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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.

Reader Interactions

12Comments

  3. 3.

    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.

  4. 4.

    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!”?

  6. 6.

    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.

  7. 7.

    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.

  8. 8.

    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.

  9. 9.

    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!

  10. 10.

    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.

  11. 11.

    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.

  12. 12.

    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.

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