The CIA and their operative Osama bin Laden

Aug. 24, 1998 - Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.

April 25, 2001 - The United States trained and equipped the Afghan rebels, the mujahideen, with billions of dollars of weapons to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

The mujahideen won the war with the help of volunteers from around the Islamic world. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the United States immediately stopped supporting the fighters.

Many people here in Afghanistan say they feel abandoned and complain that the West used them.

“The anti-Americanism that has developed in this region has developed as a result of what many Islamists call the great American betrayal: ‘We fought your war for you during the Cold War and then you walked away from it,’” says noted journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of a new book about the Taliban regime that now rules most of Afghanistan.

May, 1996 - The CIA ... had been obsessed with driving out the Soviets. As a result the CIA helped to train and fund what eventually became an international network of highly disciplined and effective Islamic militants — and a new breed of terrorist as well...

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96may/blowback.htm

November 6, 2001 - Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA, and that agency's military and financial assistance helped the Afghan rebels build a set of encampments around the city of Khost. Tragically, those same camps became terrorist training facilities for Bin Laden, who uses some of the same soldiers our military once trained as lieutenants in his sickening terrorist network. Our heroic pilots are now busy bombing the same camps we paid to build, all the while threatened by the same Stinger missiles originally supplied by our CIA. Once again, the stark result of our foreign aid, however well-intentioned, was the arming and training of forces that later become our enemy.

Our foolish funding of Afghan terrorists hardly ended in the 1980s, however. Millions of your tax dollars continue to pour into Afghanistan even today. Our government publicly supported the Taliban right up until September 11.

Here are links to two more articles on the CIA, Lee Harvey Osama, and the Taliban regime provided by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

Americans don't seem to understand why they are hated by people in other faraway countries. One piece of the puzzle that's needed for a complete picture of the situation is the knowledge of what the CIA has been up to for the past half-century.

The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA.

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