Nevar Forget!

[Melf]

Lol, I was just thinking of that one.

[Shooting Love]

(...) they won lots of battles but never had any control of the region itself making the entire endeavor hopeless.

Like Iraq?

[icarusfall]

Oh, shit!

[BerringerX]

HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!

[kingoffighters]

This thread's gone downhill.

[BerringerX]

Gone?

Click for full size


Well, that morning Iwalked into work and my manager told me that a plane had hit the WTC. I thought he meant the one on Dallas. We tried to get more info, but all the news sites were all locked up. We went upstairs to look at the news right after the second plane hit. It really was surreal.

[Doc Holliday]

This thread's gone down...

...down like The World Trade Center!

[Doc Holliday]

[Josh]

[SpoDaddy]

Bin Laden was part of the mujahiden, in fact he was hailed as one of its heroes. This is not disputed. The fact that Saudi Arabia contributed a lot of money doesn't change that the United States sent taxpayer money to them through Pakistani intelligence. Effectively laying the groundwork which would after the end of the Afghan Civil War both lead to both the rise of the Taliban and also the beginning of the al Queda terrorist network. But hey, don't take it from me, you might find this insane liberal saying the same thing more compelling.

I was wondering where you were getting your marching orders from, should have known it was Ron Paul (the guy every liberal loves to point to since he's technically a Republican). This whole "the CIA created Bin Laden" myth is convenient for anti-US government arguments and political campaigns but it's got no basis in reality. Ayman al-Zawahiri himself confirmed that the Afghan Arabs received all their funding during the war in Afghanistan from arab countries, not the U.S., in his book "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner".

Paul Bergen, the world's foremost expert on Bin Laden and the senior terrorism analyst for CNN:

"While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they don't make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of gray. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to favor the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA."

Here's a quote from his book "Holy War":

"There was simply no point in the CIA and the Afghan Arabs being in contact with each other. The Afghan Arabs functioned independently and had their own sources of funding. The CIA did not need the Afghan Arabs, and the Afghan Arabs did not need the CIA. So the notion that the Agency funded and trained the Afghan Arabs is, at best, misleading. The 'let's blame everything bad that happens on the CIA' school of thought vastly overestimates the Agency's powers, both for good and ill."

Former CIA official Milt Bearden, who ran the Agency's Afghan operation in the late 1980s:

"The CIA did not recruit Arabs, as there was no need to do so. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight, and the Arabs who did come for jihad were very disruptive . . . the Afghans thought they were a pain in the ass."

Freelance cameraman Peter Jouvenal:

"There was no love lost between the Afghans and the Arabs. One Afghan told me, ‘Whenever we had a problem with one of them we just shot them. They thought they were kings.'"

Abdullah Anas, one of the foremost Afghan Arab organizers and the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, said on the French television program Zone Interdit:

"If you say there was a relationship in the sense that the CIA used to meet with Arabs, discuss with them, prepare plans with them, and to fight with them -- it never happened."

Marc Sageman worked with the Afghan Mujahideen as one of Milt Bearden's case officers from 1987 to 1989. Here's a quote from his book "Understanding Terror Networks":

"No U.S. official ever came in contact with the foreign volunteers. They simply traveled in different circles and never crossed U.S. radar screens. They had their own sources of money and their own contacts with the Pakistanis, official Saudis, and other Muslim supporters, and they made their own deals with the various Afghan resistance leaders. Their presence in Afghanistan was very small and they did not participate in any significant fighting."

The argument that the U.S. should not have gotten involved at all is fine (I'm not a big fan of CIA proxy wars myself) but the notion that the U.S. created Bin Laden or Al Qaeda is confirmed bullshit.

The argument that Bush lied to get us into Iraq is juvenile and silly, I expect better from you. If Bush lied then so did 95% of Congress (on both sides of the aisle) as well as the intelligence agencies of Britain, France, and Israel. Saddam funded and supported terrorists all over the region and the coalition invaded Iraq on a U.N. mandate that was long overdue. We've been over this already.