Hard News: Appeasing Osama
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Darryl,
This seems a very far cry from your latest position that bin Laden was merely 'aware of the CIA's presence'.
The phrase "aware of the CIA's presence" did not come from me, it came from Fisk...I merely quoted that entire paragraph to counter your claim that Fisk said the idea that Bin Laden, or his associates were funded by the US or ISI was, to use your word "nonsense". He said nothing of the sort...the paragraph from Fisk's interview with Bin Laden the US right drew such solace from was the one I quoted, but when the likes of Fox ran their rebuttal pieces they didn't use the full paragraph, preferring to edit it down, and changed the drift of it somewhat.
Oh, and the CIA denies it funded MAK? After 9/11, is this a surprise, and I would hazard, even a credible denial.
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and btw, it is hardly likely that bin Laden would front up to a British journalist and say, "Yes, we knew there was money and weapons coming from the Americans."
it might dent his street cred.
so saying he was "aware" is pretty much a full admission of what had gone on in the 80s:
CIA procures funding and weapons; passes it on to ISI; who then dollops it out to all their client mujahadeen groups and helps out with training, etc.by the time Fisk did his interview, bin Laden had seen off the Soviets and was now keen to kick the US military out of Saudi Arabia. Why would he want to go into details of his past connections?
(and someone called me naive earlier on in the thread?
LOL!) -
and btw, it is hardly likely that bin Laden would front up to a British journalist and say, "Yes, we knew there was money and weapons coming from the Americans."
it might dent his street cred.
As Simon points out, this is what exactly what Zawahiri said - but he said it in 1980, and I doubt he had even heard of Osama bin Laden back then.
Since, as I've said earlier, bin Laden was in Pakistan because he was unhappy with US involvement in Afghanistan (infidels on Islamic soil and all that), and his main goal was to provide alternative muslim aid to the Mujihadeen, isn't it more likely that he denied recieving US money because he didn't actually get any US money, because he had loads of money flooding in from Islamic (mostly Saudi) sources and taking money from the US would have defeated the entire purpose of his enterprise?
Stop me if I'm going too fast for you.
Stephen - this is not unlike arguing with a religious person - you seem to be very adept at ignoring or explaining away evidence you don't like, but somehow never get around to producing evidence of your own. bin Laden, US intelligence and the various journalists who have written about this issue all deny that the US provided assistance to bin Laden - what exactly is your proof that they did?
radical Islam is mainly a product of western interference (Russian, European, American) in the Islamic world, and particulary the Middle East, stretching back to the First World War.
This was a pretty neat trick, since the current strains of radical Islam date back several centuries. Try looking up subjects like the Mahdi army or Salafism. Al Qaeda read books by Sayyid Qutb and Abu Al-Ghazali, not T E Lawrence. The Koran itself has many, many references to Jihad in which it instructs muslims to slay 'idolators' and to 'fight unbelievers until they are in a state of submission'. This strikes me as pretty radical. (It always astounds me when people claim that Islam is 'a religion of peace' which rather ignores the life of the prophet, much of the Koran and subsequent muslim theology and the last 1300 years of Islamic history.)
I recommend Stephen finds his way to Shinjuku and picks up a copy of Lawrence Wrights book 'The Looming Tower' from Kinokuniya. You'll find that the history of Al Qaeda and modern radical Islam is much stranger and more interesting than is dreamt of in your Daily Kos diaries.
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of course! that's right!
Pakistan's ISI never received any arms, funds or training from the US and ISI never had anything to do with bin Laden at all. how silly of me not to realize these facts when so many US intelligence sources tell us this irrefutable truth. end of story.and also true, radical Isalm doesn't exist, it's just that Islam is pretty radical. and the old testament is not violent at all, either.
so I'll just have to take your word for it that Islam has a monopoly on violence. and war. and that trillion dollar "defence" budgets and oil are irrelevant.
over and out.
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