Post by PhantomWolf on Dec 6, 2008 17:03:48 GMT -4
Ummm...... it appears that I was. Once I started looking, almost everything led back to Grabbe. But I found a couple of items that may not be tainted at the source and I'm reading them now. What I've learned is that although the CIA funded the Afghani jihadists who ended up under the command of bin Laden, he may not have been an official CIA asset/agent.
Well extensive searches through the CIA's files by those interested in when they learned about him can't find any reference until 1993, when they first meet his group in Sudan. Dispite a lot of unproven claims otherwise by people who have never provided any evidence, OBL himself, the CIA, and the ISI (who dished out the CIA cash and had the sole respeonsibility to determine who got it) all say that the MAK (Bin Laden's group) didn't get anything, and the GID (Saudi Intelligence) called OBL their man, and have admitted funding his group and operating with him in Afghanistan until 1990 when he turned on them. There are also plenty of other known sources in Saudi Arabian and across the world where the MAK, and then later AQ were getting money.
One of the true ironies is that if we really could trace all the money used for 9/11, a lot of it would likely trace back to the US and other Western Countries. Not via the governments, but rather Muslim Charities, and money spent on oil which then passed through Arab hands and through to AQ. You have to see the humor in that the payment for the very source of energy that drives our society has helped to fund and train one of the biggest threats to our society, Fundamentalist Islam. It was oil money that set up the hundreds of Madrasses along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border where the Taliban were born too.
Of course a number of the groups now considered terrorist groups and who have links to AQ were funded and equipped from the CIA's money and weapons, though this was not by the CIA themselves. The Pakistani ISI chose which groups would get the help, and due to several reasons they tended to prefer to support the fundamentalist groups over the non-fundamentalist. These reasons included that the fundametalist groups were more willing to go and fight, and that they wanted to create an Islamic state, which Pakistan approved of and felt they could control. Thus they focused the funding channel into groups lead by people such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The two major qualifications for ISI funding were that you had to be out there fighting (which the MAK wasn't) and you had to be Afghani (which the MAK wasn't.) The MAK simply didn't fit into the ISI's operational plans as far as funding. In fact the MAK was essentially doing the exact same job as the ISI, except that the people it was recruiting, funding and equiping were Arabs.
So yes, people in terrorist groups, including some that joined AQ and many that are simply connected, were funded by CIA money, and some were even trained by the CIA, but they weren't recruited to be terrorists, nor were they directly selected by the CIA, officially the CIA weren't even allowed into Afghanistan or the Peshawar to contact the fighters directly (they did have a few links though, mostly with moderates including Hamid Karzai and later Ahmed Massoud.) Finally, other than the Stinger Buyback Scheme, all CIA funding to Afghanistan groups ceased in 1990 and wouldn't restart until the late 90's when the CIA relinked with Ahmed Massoud and a small number of anti-Taliban fighters in an attempt to get them to locate and either kill or capture OBL.