Bin Laden: Financed and Trained By the US

The news of the apparent murder/execution of bin Laden has been met with jubilation by many Americans.  I do not share this emotion.  Amy Goodman, in her 2004 book, The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, writes

After 9/11, Osama bin Laden became a household name across the globe. But for decades before the attacks, his name was familiar to a small, powerful group in Washington. The reason? Osama bin Laden was financed and trained by the United States.

Goodman explains that bin Laden was "the answer to Washington's prayers" in the 1980s when the US government tried to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan. Between 1982 and 1992 we spent $3 billion training and arming Islamist radicals to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was the largest US covert operation since WW II.

The US aided and trained the Afghan mujahedeen, or holy warriors, months before the Soviets invaded. President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had no regrets about the operation. He was asked about this in 1998, and he responded:

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Goodman states: "Brzezinski got his answer on 9/11."

Osama bin Laden was a paymaster for the Afghan mujahedeen. The bin Laden family brought in millions of dollars for the war. The US was happy about this help since the Soviet Union was our chosen enemy then. But after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the devastation of Afghanistan, we had no more need of the Islamic groups who had helped us. So we cast them off. In 1991, when 540,000 US troops arrived in Saudi Arabia to fight in the Persian Gulf War, we became enemies to bin Laden. He fell out of favor. He ended up in Afghanistan and became patron to the Taliban. That's how he came to hate the US.

This information was gleaned from Amy Goodman's book, The Exception To the Rulers, Chapter One: Blowback. Goodman used the heading:  Our Guy: Putting the U-S-A in "Usama".

I have friends who have said that bin Laden deserved to die because he killed 3000 Americans on 9/11.  You don't hear much about the thousands of US soldiers who have died and thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been killed and millions more severely injured and made into refugees, all in an effort to get bin Laden- to avenge the loss on 9/11.  I personally would have preferred to have captured bin Laden alive and to have tried him in a court of law.  This would have created an important historical record at least.  The US says it stands for law and order.  Wouldn't this have been more in keeping with our stated beliefs?

Everything is connected.  Our foreign policies, the wars we are now engaged in, globalization, oil, all are related.  So our actions in regard to Osama bin Laden have everything to do with  the natural gas/oil corporations and their control of governments worldwide.  The neoconservative notion of American Empire underlies what we see in the headlines.  Visit the website of The Project for the New American Century.

Members of the PNAC: Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen,  Midge Decter,  Paula Dobriansky,  Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg,  Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney,  Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan,  Zalmay Khalilzad,  I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz,  Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz

Do you recognize any of these names?

Sometimes it is necessary to zoom out from the un-natural gas industry destruction of our country and look at the big picture.