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Chaingang -> Plausible Deniability (8/15/2006 2:21:57 PM)
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With CNN hyping a TV show on the subject of OBL, I found these articles of interest:
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"Bergen: Bin Laden, CIA links hogwash"
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/08/15/bergen.answers/index.html?section=cnn_topstories
Q: If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still?
Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada
BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.
The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.
The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.
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"Did the U.S. "Create" Osama bin Laden?"
Allegations that the U.S. provided funding for bin Laden proved inaccurate
http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Jan/24-318760.html
"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.
Former CIA official Milt Bearden, who ran the Agency's Afghan operation in the late 1980s, says, "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." Similar sentiments from Afghans who appreciated the money that flowed from the Gulf but did not appreciate the Arabs' holier-than-thou attempts to convert them to their ultra-purist version of Islam. Freelance cameraman Peter Jouvenal recalls: "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.'"
... 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." [Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: The Free Press, 2001), pp. 64-66.]
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I'm not married to the idea that OBL was in cahoots with the CIA but the denial seems to be coming quite late in the game and under the umbrella of an intentional campaign to conceal U.S. activities in Afghanistan. And FWIW, I can see reasons on both sides for wanting to deny that possible relationship: The U.S. does not want to be directly responsible for creating it's own monsters (although no matter how you look at it OBL is at minimum blowback for a schizophrenic U.S. policy abroad); and OBL does not want to seem as if he ever had to kowtow to the U.S. Duh!
I take the denial with a grain of salt and now place the OBL/CIA nexus into the "probable but not 100%" category.
Compare it to the statement made by George Galloway over here:
"Is it not obvious? When I was on the Labour Benches and spoke in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I said that I despise Osama bin Laden. The difference is that I have always despised him. I did so when the Government, in this very House, gave him guns, money and encouragement, and set him to war in Afghanistan. I said that if they handled that event in the wrong way, they would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past two and a half years? If they do, they have their head in the sand."
http://democracyrising.us/content/view/280/164/
George Galloway - a member of British Parliament - seems to think the nexus between Britain and OBL exists as a simple matter of fact. Moreover, it was a relationship he decried apparently on more than one occasion - although I admit I am not fact checking his statement. But I guess the U.S. took no part in that relationship. Uh huh...
History is *REWRITTEN* by the winners, apparently.
P.S. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the disclaimer that I am probably wrong because the U.S. does not disseminate propaganda. Propaganda would be beneath U.S. dignity. The U.S. always conducts itself in a completely ethical and stainless manner before the world. I am just a conspiracy nut who cannot accept that the hidden activities of the U.S. government do not indicate the existence of a whole multitude of conspiracies, each most likely unaware of the existence or the activities of the others because that's just how wasteful and idiotic our government actually is. So actually there is nothing to read here, you should have already moved on, and you have just wasted your valuable time.
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