GOP Big Lie For 2006 Elections: "We're Tough on Terror"
Sat Aug 26, 2006 at 08:16:39 PM PDT
I hate to be the one to rain on the Republican's parade, but the tough talk of the GOP on terrorism is bogus. The Republicans have done more to further the cause of international terrorism than any other group in the past 25 years, al Qaeda included.
They didn't call themselves the Taliban, in the early Eighties, but the future Taliban was the same axis of Afghan Mujahiddin leadership that Bin Laden and al Qaeda fought on behalf of in the Afgahn war. The Reagan adminstration supported that exact same group of "freedom fighters."
During Reagan's 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent millions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. Since it was a covert operation the State Department and the CIA will catgorically denied it but nearly every reporter covering the war knew about the CIA presense in Tora Bora. I used to watch film of CIA operatives helicoptering in suitcases of American cash, Stinger missle launchers, and state of the art sniper rifles to the mujahideen on CBS News.
Journalist Amy Goodman wrote this during the pagentry of Reagan funeral:
Vice President Dick Cheney opened the 34-hour period of Reagan's lying in state by saying, "It was the vision and the will of Ronald Reagan that gave hope to the oppressed, shamed the oppressors and ended the evil empire."
What Cheney along with the corporate media failed to mention yesterday was the Reagan administration's role in financing, arming and training what was destined to become America's worst enemy in the Middle East and Asia.
During most of the 1980's, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to Afghanistan to support the mujahedeen - or holy warriors - against the Soviet Union, which had invaded in 1979.
The U.S.-supported jihad succeeded in driving out the Soviets but the Afghan factions allied to the US gave rise to the oppressive Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.
Steve Coll, Puliter Prize-winning journalist and managing editor of the Washington Post. During the Eighties Coll was a correspondent who actually covered Bin Laden mujahideen jihadists during the Afghan War.
Here's part of what Mr. Coll said in a 2004 interview:
STEVE COLL:Well, it of course begins in 1979 when the Soviets invaded during the Carter administration, and it really swelled between 1981 and 1985. Essentially, under Bill Casey, the CIA created a three-part intelligence alliance to fund and arm the Mujahadeen, initially to harass Soviet occupation forces and eventually they embraced the goal of driving them out. The three-way alliance in each of the parties had a distinct role to play. The Saudi, their intelligence service primarily provided cash. Each year the congress would secretly allocate a certain amount of money to support the CIA's program. After that allocation was complete, the US Intelligence liaison would fly to Riyadh and the Saudis would write a matching check. The US role was to provide logistics and technological support as well as money. The Saudis collaborated with Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, to really run the war on the front lines. It was the Pakistani army, in particular the ISI, that picked the political winners and losers in the jihad, and who favored radical Islamist factions because it suited the Pakistan's army goal of pacifying Afghanistan, a long-time unruly neighbor to the west, whose ethnic Pashtun nationalism the army feared.
It's interesting to go back and look at the public discourse about this. During the Reagan years in particular, it was a very superficial, certainly, Reagan often used the terminology of his, you know of freedom. These were freedom fighters. These were noble freedom fighters. I don't want to overstate this, but the Afghans were regarded with some distance almost as noble savages in some sort of a state of purity fighting for an abstract idea of freedom.
Journalist David M. Gibbs wrote this about the Reagan/al Qaeda connection:
Forgotten Coverage of Afghan "Freedom Fighters"
The villains of today's news were heroes in the '80s
The current war in Afghanistan is increasingly presented as a war for the human rights of the Afghan people, to liberate them from their oppressive Taliban rulers. The Taliban's severely regressive policies toward women have received particular attention, with even First Lady Laura Bush issuing condemnations of this repression. And the press has overwhelmingly followed suit, portraying the war as an ideological struggle against the evils of Islamic extremism.
But the U.S. government and the American press have not always opposed Afghan extremists. During the 1980s, the Mujahiddin guerrilla groups battling Soviet occupation had key features in common with the Taliban. In many ways, the Mujahiddin groups acted as an incubator for the later rise of the Taliban in the 1990s.
In an effort to augment the Mujahiddin forces, the U.S. encouraged the influx into Afghanistan of thousands of idealistic Muslims, eager to participate in the struggle, from countries throughout the Middle East.
One of the first of these expatriate Arabs was Osama bin Laden, who was "recruited by the CIA" in 1979, according to Le Monde (9/15/01). Bin Laden operated along the Pakistani border, where he used his vast family connections to raise money for the Mujahiddin; in doing so, he "worked in close association with U.S. agents," according to Jane's Intelligence Review (10/1/98).
British researcher Fred Halliday noted (London Guardian, 4/3/86): "The policies of the guerrillas are, despite some whitewashing by their friends abroad, those of Islamic fundamentalism." As early as 1980 (The Nation, 1/26/80), Halliday wrote that some of the Mujahiddin "make Khomeini look like a graduate student at MIT."
Alfred W. McCoy, wrote in The Politics of Heroin:
The Mujahiddin increasingly turned to drug trafficking as a means to finance their guerrilla operations, turning Afghanistan into a major world source of opium. Long a producer of opium poppies for local and regional consumption, Afghanistan began shipping large quantities to Pakistan for the production of heroin, which was then shipped throughout the world. As the Mujahiddin were the principal traffickers, the CIA sought to block investigations into this "Afghan connection.
Despite CIA denials of any direct Agency support for Bin Laden's activities, a considerable body of circumstantial evidence suggests the contrary. During the 1980s, Bin Laden's activities in Afghanistan closely paralleled those of the CIA. Bin Laden held accounts in the Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the bank the CIA used to finance its own covert actions (London Daily Telegraph, 9/27/01). Bin Laden worked especially closely with Hekmatyar--the CIA's favored Mujahiddin commander (The Economist, 9/15/01). In 1989, the U.S. shipped high-powered sniper rifles to a Mujahiddin faction that included bin Laden, according to a former bin Laden aide (AP, 10/16/01).
Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger would later comment about the Afghans (The Economist, 4/25/98):
We knew they were not very nice people.... We had this terrible problem of making choices."
I'm not a very nice person when I hear a statment like that coming from Cap Weinberger.
(May God have mercy on his soul, if he has one).
The choice that Weinberger and his colleagues made was, of course, to back the Mujahiddin, along with their Arab supporters, in spite of their records and ideologies. Predictably enough, the press strongly endorsed this policy and proceeded to praise the Mujahiddin groups.
PBS Reporter Jim Leher said this about bin Ladens Islamic Mujahiddin "freedom fighters in December 1985:
President Reagan's birthday message today was: the Soviets are using barbaric methods of war, and the United States still stands with the Afghan freedom fighters against them.
The anniversary word on the physical war itself is that it remains the same, only worse. The Muslim Mujahadeen guerrillas are backed by a reported $250 million in covert U.S. aid and double that from China and Saudi Arabia. Now they have more and better weapons to assault Soviet bases and convoys. The result from most accounts is stalemate and more casualties. A United Nations human rights report estimated more than a half-million Afghan civilians have died in the fighting.
What I find so reprehensible about the Republican's misrepresentation of themselves as anti-terrorist crusadersis that it makes a shameless attempt to edit out their own involvment with Bin Laden, by crimes of ommision. The GOP will never be held accountable for being the Dr. Frankenstien who created the Bin Laden monster. The Republicans even have the unmitgated gall to accuse the Democrats of being weak on terror and insinuating that they are giving aid and comfort to the enemy!
The Afghan war the central event that put Bin Laden on the international stage, and in the Eighties and early Nineties, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. and Dick Cheney were all running around praising Bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Afghan Mujahiddin (the future Taliban) as "freedom fighters". And these are the guys that are supposed to be protecting us from Bin Laden?
Had it not been for the support of three Republican regimes in Washington,. Bin Laden would have remained an obscure character in a historcal footnote to the Afghan war.After leading the Saudi and Egyptian contingents of the Mujahiddin, during the Afghan, Bin Laden, by all accounts, was ready to call it quits and manage his father's extensive property holdings in Saudi Arabia. It was Operation Desert Storm that enraged Bin Laden, and after the United States military established permanent bases the Arabian Gulf Peninsula region,in the wake of the first Gulf War, Bin Laden declared fatwa.
The Republican Party protecting me from terrorists? What a freakin' joke that is ! The GOP has done more to promote the cause of international terrorism than anyone I can image:
* In the Eighties the Reagan/Bush regimes supported al Qaeda as "freedom fighters."
* In the Nineties the elder Bush launched Operation Desert Storm and the American troops he left stationed in the Arabian Gulf Peninsula was the primary reason why Bin Laden declared fatwa on the United States.
* Then in the 2000s,sonny boy Dubya comes along and mucks things up even worse by declaring a "war on terror." In 1999 the last year of the Clinton administration there were 392 incidents of global terrorism, four years after Bush's declaration of the "war on terror, in 2005 there were 3200 incidents of international terrorism.
Do the math, chucklehead. Some war on terror, huh?
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