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Neocons are back — and worse than ever! Debunking their unthinkable new defense


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Neocons are back — and worse than ever! Debunking their unthinkable new defense

You'd think disastrous failures would shame the Bush-loving neocons into hiding. Here's why they need to go -- now

 

 

 

There are several remarkable aspects of Reihan Salam’s recent essay “Why I am Still a Neocon,” but none so much as its timelessness. Though ostensibly a consideration of what it means to be a post-Iraq neoconservative, Salam’s essential arguments are the same as those of the pre-war neocons; a substantially similar version of the piece could have been run in 2002 under the headline “Why I am a Neocon.” Salam discusses what neoconservatives have cost this country and the world in these past 15 years, but the essay is a record of analytic and argumentative stasis.

 

 

There are two major planks to Salam’s argument, and they will ring familiar to anyone who lived in the immediate post-9/11 world: that America must have an aggressive and powerful army, first because our strength is required to bring stability to a vulnerable world, and second because there is so much evil in the world, we are required to defeat it. These are not, let’s say, the freshest of arguments when it comes to the defense of neoconservatism. But since he’s brought them back up, they should be addressed.

 

 

In essence, both arguments can be refuted with three words: should implies can. For the argument towards stability, I ask simply: we have endured a war in Iraq, we still have thousands of troops in Afghanistan, we have waged secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen. I ask you: how stable do you find the world? How stable was the world at the height of the Bush Doctrine? What possible evidence can be offered that neoconservatism brings stability in fact, rather than merely in rhetoric?

 

 

Nor is it clear that the enduring American military dominance Salam advocates for can be achieved. I would certainly oppose American military hegemony even if I thought such a thing were still possible, but it’s irrelevant, because I don’t. To quote Matthew Yglesias, relative decline is not a choice. That the United States cannot maintain its status as unipolar power forever should be obvious to anyone who has studied history and anyone with a newspaper subscription. The rapidly developing economies and massive populations of countries like China and India make that plain enough. That’s not to say that there will necessarily be a new dominant superpower, but it’s a reason you should bet on the field.

 

 

Salam acknowledges that the military spending of the United States is, well, insane, but waves that concern away by arguing that we’ll constrain costs by lowering our personnel costs, which are half of our military budget. This is a uniquely bad idea for neoconservatism, which requires hyperbolic valorization of the soldiers who we send away to be killed. But set that aside, and assume we can convince the country to pay soldiers less while we they are necessarily killed more often. Saying that half of our military budget is devoted to personnel is another way to say that half of it isn’t, and that half still dwarfs the next several largest militaries combined. And no amount of cost savings can address the vast disadvantage America has in manpower, for either our military or our workforce. The Chinese enjoy a billion-person advantage over the US, and India is rapidly approaching the same. However far behind they are now economically, they will close that gap through sheer population size eventually, and the world will reorient itself.

 

 

This is to say nothing of America’s shrinking middle class, always the engine of our economic dominance, or our refusal to properly task our immensely wealthy elite. It may happen in our children’s lifetime, it may happen in our grandchildren’s, but the end of American hegemony is coming, and no political philosophy dedicated to opposing that end will long survive.

 

 

I struggle to imagine the amount of anti-Americanism that would reign in Pakistan had we intervened militarily against it, considering it is already filled with (justified) rage against the US. Nor would I envy the military that had to invade Pakistan, then as now a strategic nightmare. But set those concerns aside, as well. How can we possibly be convinced that American military intervention would have succeeded in saving lives? If anything has been proven by the post-9/11 American experience, it’s the profound limitation of our military to prevent violence through military force.

 

 

Salam writes only that “[Archer Blood] also knew that had President Nixon decided to lift a finger, he could have forced Pakistan to stay its hand,” a frankly incredible piece of argument by assertion. Is it possible that the US military could have swooped in and stopped bloodshed without causing more? Sure. It’s just as possible that such intervention could have deepened what already threatened to become a regional conflagration, inflaming the bitter disputes between India and Pakistan and no doubt drawing direct Soviet response. Salam’s breezy, untroubled insistence that our good intentions would have been sufficient to save lives would have been bad enough in 2002, but in 2014, they are inexcusable. I find it just as likely to imagine that Salam’s uncle, or others like him, would have died through the terrible fallout that we should know enough by now to assume is the consequence of our military adventures.

 

 

I don’t begrudge anyone the urge to imagine counterfactuals in which a family member survives an immoral military excursion. But Salam’s invocation of his uncle means that we must think of a world made up of beloved, lost relatives. Iraq was filled with uncles, and brothers, and aunts, and cousins, and they died by the hundreds of thousands thanks to sentiments of equal nobility and equal delusion to Salam’s. This is the price of viewing the world through a lens of righteous fantasy: you are forever pitting the lives of the hypothetically saved against those of the actually dead.

 

 

And even this exercise, in considering whether the United States could have saved Salam’s uncle or people like him, is not enough. What an adult approach to foreign policy requires is exploring context; if that sounds cold, recognize that Salam performs similar mental calculations every day. However committed he may be to the regular deployment of other people into wars of choice, I highly doubt, for example, that he would support an invasion of North Korea on humanitarian grounds. However much American media enjoys making fun of that horrific regime, it is home to a massive military and is a nuclear power, and if any regime on earth is so insane as to deploy nuclear weaponry internally, it’s North Korea. So I highly question whether even Salam would sign us up for that misadventure. And yet uncles are starved to death every day in that country, they are tortured, they are thrown into internment camps, they suffer under routine and brutal subjugation. Salam, too, makes judgment calls about human lives. He simply works an unjustifiable optimism into his equation.

 

 

As others before him have, Salam contrasts neoconservatism with a supposedly corrupt and apathetic realism, arguing that the alternative to neoconservatism is “amoral realpolitik.” Like so much of neocon argument, this is asserted but unproved, and directly refuted by recent historical events. It would certainly come as a surprise to dissidents in Saudi Arabia to learn that neoconservatism is antithetical to “realist” coziness with ugly regimes. America has been tight with the corrupt theocracy in Saudi Arabia for a long time, but few times was it as cozy as during the Bush administration. You might well wonder what an administration bent against authoritarian governments and political Islam would be so complicit with the Saudi regime, but of course they were; they had to be. An aggressive military requires access to vast quantities of oil. No neoconservative administration will ever jeopardize the stability of the country with the world’s largest proven reserves. Salam’s basic reasoning is flawed: because his favored political philosophy requires enormous human effort and enormous expenditure of resources, it is moresusceptible to the demands of ugly regimes, not less. An endlessly adventuring military means a government that must break bread with some of the ugliest governments in the world, for reasons of simple expediency and need. It turns out that there is a great deal of real in even the most idealist politik. The notion that a neoconservative American government is less friendly to autocratic and illegitimate regimes is an empirical question, and one Salam has not even really attempted to prove. I find the historical evidence severely lacking in that regard.

 

 

What we’re left with, really, is the same old saw: that America should be an unapologetic, militarily assertive nation because we are good and because we are strong. This, despite brutally potent evidence that we are neither good enough nor strong enough to remake the world in the way we would prefer. It would be hard to overstate this point: Reihan Salam’s beliefs about the world and about military force could hardly have been more ruthlessly and efficiently debunked by the past 15 years. He resorts to pleasant fantasies about what might have been because real history is such a bleak landscape for him.

 

 

What’s left is a simple question: how could his neoconservatism possibly be refuted by events? What would it have to take, if the trail of blood this country has cut across the world in the last decade is not sufficient? I haven’t got a clue. I am, I suppose, as committed an anti-interventionist as any American I can think of, and yet I will admit that I would deploy our military to stop a Holocaust in a heartbeat. With Salam, what, exactly, would it take? How thoroughly would his pleasant fantasies have to be rebuked before he gave in? I have no idea, and that frightens me, and it should frighten you. Because however much he might want to express his neoconservatism as a Slate pitch, it is in fact the ideology of many of the most powerful people in the world. What remains to be seen is whether they will rise again, and in doing so accelerate our inexorable and certain decline.

Edited by dinar_stud
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Its funny how these libratards always like to spout off as to how many poor muslums died at the hands of the bad conservitive`s. But fail to mention the thousands of american lives lost in 911 which started the war in the first place. or the # of innocent lives taken by suicide bombers . Like we made them do it. and had we not been involved well everything over there would be just hunky dory.

What a crock of shat.

If we are so evil then pack your rags and get the hell out of my country. 

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Its funny how these libratards always like to spout off as to how many poor muslums died at the hands of the bad conservitive`s. But fail to mention the thousands of american lives lost in 911 which started the war in the first place. or the # of innocent lives taken by suicide bombers . Like we made them do it. and had we not been involved well everything over there would be just hunky dory.

What a crock of shat.

If we are so evil then pack your rags and get the hell out of my country.

Amen Dog!
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Ugh   <_<  .......and, doesn't the term bunk refer to, for lack of a better term, total crap.......and if it's debunked, it becomes, not crap.  This has always confused me.   :shrug: 

 

GO RV, and NO BV

 

 

   Bunk=little crap..  :lol:

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Its funny how these libratards always like to spout off as to how many poor muslums died at the hands of the bad conservitive`s. But fail to mention the thousands of american lives lost in 911 which started the war in the first place. or the # of innocent lives taken by suicide bombers . Like we made them do it. and had we not been involved well everything over there would be just hunky dory.

What a crock of shat.

If we are so evil then pack your rags and get the hell out of my country. 

9/11 started the war in the first place?

 

Please remember 1991 US invasion of Iraq/Kuwait (based on another lie)

10 years of sanctions before that with thousands of innocent kids killed by lack of medicine

Our support of Iran/Iraq war

Our using Osama bin Laden against Soviets in Afghanistan

Their dictators in our pockets so we could get their oil - Mubarek of Egypt, the Shah, Saddam...emir of Kuwait, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia...

Our overthrow of democratic elected Iranian leader in 1956 to install our own brutal dictator the Shah

 

They finally decided to hit back. (if you believe 9/11 was them and not a false flag attack, another story)

 

So when did the war start, Dog?

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Its funny how these libratards always like to spout off as to how many poor muslums died at the hands of the bad conservitive`s. But fail to mention the thousands of american lives lost in 911 which started the war in the first place. or the # of innocent lives taken by suicide bombers . Like we made them do it. and had we not been involved well everything over there would be just hunky dory.

What a crock of shat.

If we are so evil then pack your rags and get the hell out of my country. 

 

You know I'm not a "libratard" Dog... however I will say that what "my country" did in Iraq had nothing to do with 911 and was wrong.

 

If 911 was the reason... we should have gone and bombed Saudi Arabia since that was the decent of the bombers.

 

Starving 500,000 Iraqi children through 10 years of sanctions before 911 clearly had nothing to do with the "terrorist attack" in New York ...

 

and certainly was not "worth it" as Albright and other Neocons said... they do not represent the majority of Americans... and certainly not me.

 

If you agreed with them... your choice... I'm certainly not asking you to leave OUR country... just hope you'll see the truth sometime soon.

 

Maybe you are just having a bad day?

 

 

 

AmericanInc... you and I were posting at the same time... you type faster than I do. :D

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Something that bothered me greatly in this article was this...

 

"Salam acknowledges that the military spending of the United States is, well, insane, but waves that concern away by arguing that we’ll constrain costs by lowering our personnel costs, which are half of our military budget. This is a uniquely bad idea for neoconservatism, which requires hyperbolic valorization of the soldiers who we send away to be killed. But set that aside, and assume we can convince the country to pay soldiers less while we they are necessarily killed more often. Saying that half of our military budget is devoted to personnel is another way to say that half of it isn’t, and that half still dwarfs the next several largest militaries combined. And no amount of cost savings can address the vast disadvantage America has in manpower, for either our military or our workforce. The Chinese enjoy a billion-person advantage over the US, and India is rapidly approaching the same. However far behind they are now economically, they will close that gap through sheer population size eventually, and the world will reorient itself."

 

 

 

Read it for yourself... and think for yourself... after you do.


 
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Its funny how these libratards always like to spout off as to how many poor muslums died at the hands of the bad conservitive`s. But fail to mention the thousands of american lives lost in 911 which started the war in the first place. or the # of innocent lives taken by suicide bombers . Like we made them do it. and had we not been involved well everything over there would be just hunky dory.

What a crock of shat.

If we are so evil then pack your rags and get the hell out of my country. 

RIght on!

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9/11 started the war in the first place?

 

Please remember 1991 US invasion of Iraq/Kuwait (based on another lie)

10 years of sanctions before that with thousands of innocent kids killed by lack of medicine

Our support of Iran/Iraq war

Our using Osama bin Laden against Soviets in Afghanistan

Their dictators in our pockets so we could get their oil - Mubarek of Egypt, the Shah, Saddam...emir of Kuwait, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia...

Our overthrow of democratic elected Iranian leader in 1956 to install our own brutal dictator the Shah

 

They finally decided to hit back. (if you believe 9/11 was them and not a false flag attack, another story)

 

So when did the war start, Dog?

 

Ok so am I to understand that . Iraq did not really invade Kuwait ?

So glad you do not teach history.

We also did not use osama bin laden in afghanistan .

The rebel afghans did. Like many saudis he went to the aid of his fellow muslims against the russians.

all on his own accord Professor.

No maggie not having a bad day . Just tired of hearing all the bullshat.

Of course sanctions hurt. Its what they are suppose to do. You see sanctions are the alternative to bombs and bullets. 

You cant have it both ways mag. Take off the rose colored glasses and see the world as it really is.

You cant stop the bankers. You cant stop the jihadist. You cant stop the insane from shooting people up.

You cant stop big GOVT`s from wanting our land . Our way of life. Liberals walk through the world with blinders on thinking all the bad is just going to go away.

and if you treat other countries nicely well they will leave you alone and want to be your best buddies.

 

Well

Good luck with that. 

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Ok so am I to understand that . Iraq did not really invade Kuwait ?

So glad you do not teach history.

We also did not use osama bin laden in afghanistan .

The rebel afghans did. Like many saudis he went to the aid of his fellow muslims against the russians.

all on his own accord Professor.

No maggie not having a bad day . Just tired of hearing all the bullshat.

Of course sanctions hurt. Its what they are suppose to do. You see sanctions are the alternative to bombs and bullets. 

You cant have it both ways mag. Take off the rose colored glasses and see the world as it really is.

You cant stop the bankers. You cant stop the jihadist. You cant stop the insane from shooting people up.

You cant stop big GOVT`s from wanting our land . Our way of life. Liberals walk through the world with blinders on thinking all the bad is just going to go away.

and if you treat other countries nicely well they will leave you alone and want to be your best buddies.

 

Well

Good luck with that. 

 

Took off the "rose colored glasses" a long time ago Dog.

 

Here... maybe you and Sport should look at these pictures and read a little bit...

 

 
Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11

isi_and_cia_directors_in_mujahideen_camp

Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)

reaganandmujahideen1.jpg

Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)

 

Preface:   The director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan – Lt. General William Odom - noted:

Odom also said:

 

Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

(audio here).  Background here.

 

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

 

This essay does not address any “inside job” theories for 9/11 or other terrorist attacks on America.  Instead, it focuses on the well-documented fact that the virtually continuous U.S. backing of Al Qaeda terrorists since the late 1970s has led to blowback which has come back to bite us numerous times.

We Created Al Qaeda to Fight the Soviets in Afghanistan

Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of “Al Qaeda” in the 1970s to fight the Soviets.

Brzezinski told Al Qaeda’s forefathers – the Mujahadin:

 

We know of their deep belief in god – that they’re confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over – there is yours – and you’ll go back to it some day, because your fight will prevail, and you’ll have your homes, your mosques, back again, because your cause is right, and god is on your side.

 

CIA director and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confirmed in his memoir that the U.S. backed the Mujahadin in the 1970s.

Secretary of State Hillarious Clinton agrees:

 

 

MSNBC reported in 1998:

Indeed, the U.S. started backing Al Qaeda’s forefathers even before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  As  Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur in a 1998 interview:

 

As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar – the MAK – which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.

 

What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.

***

The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

***

To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.

 

“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

 

The Washington Post reported in 2002:

 

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

***

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

 

B: 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?

The Council on Foreign Relations notes:

The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….

And see this.

 

The 9/11 Commission report (PDF) released in 2004 said some of Pakistan’s religious schools or madrassas served as “incubators for violent extremism.” Since then, there has been much debate over madrassas and their connection to militancy.

***

New madrassas sprouted, funded and supported by Saudi Arabia and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, where students were encouraged to join the Afghan resistance.

 

Veteran journalist Robert Dreyfuss writes:

 

In other words, if the U.S. and our allies hadn’t backed the radical violent Muslims instead of more stable, peaceful groups in the Middle East, radical Islam wouldn’t have grown so large.

 

For half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the “Islamic right” as convenient partners in the Cold War.

***

In the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.

***

By the end of the 1950s, rather than allying itself with the secular forces of progress in the Middle East and the Arab world, the United States found itself in league with Saudi Arabia’s Islamist legions. Choosing Saudi Arabia over Nasser’s Egypt was probably the single biggest mistake the United States has ever made in the Middle East.

 

A second big mistake … occurred in the 1970s, when, at the height of the Cold War and the struggle for control of the Middle East, the United States either supported or acquiesced in the rapid growth of Islamic right in countries from Egypt to Afghanistan. In Egypt, Anwar Sadat brought the Muslim Brotherhood back to Egypt. In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And … Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.

 

Still another major mistake was the fantasy that Islam would penetrate the USSR and unravel the Soviet Union in Asia. It led to America’s support for the jihadists in Afghanistan. But … America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.

 

Would the Islamic right have existed without U.S. support? Of course. This is not a book for the conspiracy-minded. But there is no question that the virulence of the movement that we now confront—and which confronts many of the countries in the region, too, from Algeria to India and beyond—would have been significantly less had the United States made other choices during the Cold War.

 

Pakistani nuclear scientist and peace activist Perez Hoodbhoy writes:

And the chief of the visa section at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (J. Michael Springmann, who is now an attorney in private practice) says that the CIA insisted that visas be issued to Afghanis so they could travel to the U.S. to be trained in terrorism in the United States, and then sent back to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets.

Every religion, including Islam, has its crazed fanatics. Few in numbers and small in strength, they can properly be assigned to the “loony” section. This was true for Islam as well until 1979, the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Indeed, there may well have been no 911 but for this game-changer.

***

Officials like Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense, immediately saw Afghanistan not as the locale of a harsh and dangerous conflict to be ended but as a place to teach the Russians a lesson. Such “bleeders” became the most influential people in Washington .

***

The task of creating such solidarity fell upon Saudi Arabia, together with other conservative Arab monarchies. This duty was accepted readily and they quickly made the Afghan Jihad their central cause…. But still more importantly, to go heart and soul for jihad was crucial at a time when Saudi legitimacy as the guardians of Islam was under strong challenge by Iran, which pointed to the continued occupation of Palestine by America’s partner, Israel. An increasing number of Saudis were becoming disaffected by the House of Saud – its corruption, self-indulgence, repression, and closeness to the US. Therefore, the Jihad in Afghanistan provided an excellent outlet for the growing number of militant Sunni activists in Saudi Arabia, and a way to deal with the daily taunts of the Iranian clergy.

***

The bleeders soon organized and armed the Great Global Jihad, funded by Saudi Arabia, and executed by Pakistan. A powerful magnet for militant Sunni activists was created by the US. The most hardened and ideologically dedicated men were sought on the logic that they would be the best fighters. Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the Jihad.

 

American universities produced books for Afghan children that extolled the virtues of jihad and of killing communists. Readers browsing through book bazaars in Rawalpindi and Peshawar can, even today, sometimes find textbooks produced as part of the series underwritten by a USAID $50 million grant to the University of Nebraska in the 1980′s . These textbooks sought to counterbalance Marxism through creating enthusiasm in Islamic militancy. They exhorted Afghan children to “pluck out the eyes of the Soviet enemy and cut off his legs”. Years after the books were first printed they were approved by the Taliban for use in madrassas – a stamp of their ideological correctness and they are still widely available in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

At the international level, Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally, the United States, funneled support to the mujahideen. Ronald Reagan feted jihadist leaders on the White House lawn, and the U.S. press lionized them.

1993 World Trade Center Bombing

New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau believed that the intelligence services could and should have stopped the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, but they were preoccupied with other issues cover.  As well-known investigative  journalist Robert I. Friedman wrote in New York Magazine in 1995:

Friedman notes that intelligence agents had possession of notes which should have linked all of these terrorists, but failed to connect the dots prior to 1993.

 

Shiekh Omar Abdel Rahman commands an almost deified adoration and respect in certain Islamic circles. It was his 1980 fatwa – religious decree – condemning Anwar Sadat for making peace with Israel that is widely believed to be responsible for Sadat’s assassination a year later. (Rahman was subsequently tried but acquitted.)

***

The CIA paid to send Abdel Rahman to Peshawar ‘to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime,’ according to Professor Rubin. By all accounts, Rahman was brilliant at inspiring the faithful.

 

As a reward for his services, the CIA gave the sheikh a one-year visa to the United States in May, 1990 – even though he was on a State Department terrorism watch list that should have barred him from the country.

 

After a public outcry in the wake of the World Trade Centre bombing, a State Department representative discovered that Rahman had, in fact, received four United States visas dating back to December 15, 1986. All were given to him by CIA agents acting as consular officers at American embassies in Khartoum and Cairo. The CIA officers claimed they didn’t know the sheikh was one of the most notorious political figures in the Middle East and a militant on the State Department’s list of undesirables. The agent in Khartoum said that when the sheikh walked in the computers were down and the Sudanese clerk didn’t bother to check the microfiche file.

 

Says one top New York investigator: ‘Left with the choice between pleading stupidity or else admitting deceit, the CIA went with stupidity.’

***

The sheikh arrived in Brooklyn at a fortuitous time for the CIA. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s retreat from Afghanistan, Congress had slashed the amount of covert aid going to the mujaheddin. The international network of Arab-financed support groups became even more vital to the CIA, including the string of jihad offices that had been set up across America with the help of Saudi and American intelligence. To drum up support, the agency paved the way for veterans of the Afghan conflict to visit the centres and tell their inspirational war stories; in return, the centres collected millions of dollars for the rebels at a time when they needed it most.

 

There were jihad offices in Jersey City, Atlanta and Dallas, but the most important was the one in Brooklyn, called Alkifah – Arabic for ‘the struggle.’ That storefront became the de facto headquarters of the sheikh.

***

On November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultra-right-wing Zionist militant, was shot in the throat with a .357 magnum in a Manhattan hotel; El-Sayyid Nosair was gunned down by an off-duty postal inspector outside the hotel, and the murder weapon was found a few feet from his hand.

A subsequent search of Nosair’s Cliffside Park, New Jersey home turned up forty boxes of evidence – evidence that, had the D.A.’s office and the FBI looked at it more carefully, would have revealed an active terrorist conspiracy about to boil over in New York.

***

In addition to discovering thousands of rounds of ammunition and hit lists with the names of New York judges and prosecutors, investigators found amongst the Nosair evidence classified U.S. military-training manuals.

***

Also found amongst Nosair’s effects were several documents, letters and notebooks in Arabic, which when eventually translated would point to e terror conspiracy against the United States. The D.A.’s office shipped these, along with the other evidence, to the FBI’s office at 26 Federal Plaza. ‘We gave all this stuff to the bureau, thinking that they were well equipped,’ says one source close to the D.A.’s office. ‘After the World Trade Centre, we discovered they never translated the material.’

 

According to other sources familiar with the case, the FBI told District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau that Nosair was a lone gunman, not part of a broader conspiracy; the prosecution took this position at trial and lost, only convicting Nosair of gun charges. Morgenthau speculated the CIA may have encouraged the FBI not to pursue any other leads, these sources say. ‘The FBI lied to me,’ Morgenthau has told colleagues. ‘They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.’

 

Three years later, on the day the FBI arrested four Arabs for the World Trade Centre bombing, saying it had all of the suspects, Morgenthau’s ears pricked up. He didn’t believe the four were ‘self-starters,’ and speculated that there was probably a larger network as well as a foreign sponsor. He also had a hunch that the suspects would lead back to Sheikh Abdel Rahman. But he worried that the dots might not be connected because the U.S. government was protecting the sheikh for his help in Afghanistan.

***

Nevertheless, some in the D.A.’s office believe that until the Ryder van exploded underneath New York’s tallest building, the sheikh and his men were being protected by the CIA. Morgenthau reportedly believes the CIA brought the sheikh to Brooklyn in the first place….

 

As far as can be determined, no American agency is investigating leads suggesting foreign-government involvement in the New York terror conspiracy. For example, Saudi intelligence has contributed to Sheikh Rahman’s legal-defence fund, according to Mohammed al-Khilewi, the former first secretary to the Saudi mission at the U.N.

 

CNN ran a special report in 1994 called “Terror Nation? U.S. Creation?“, which noted – as summarized by Congressman Peter Deutsch:

This is interesting because it is widely-acknowledged that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was enthusiastically backed by the U.S.  For example, U.S. News and World Report says:

 

Pro-Western afghan officials …  officially warned the U.S. government about Hekmatyar no fewer than four times. The last warning delivered just days before the [1993] Trade Center attack.” Speaking to former CIA Director Robert Gates, about Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Peter Arnett reports, “The Pakistanis showered Gulbuddin Hekmatyar with U.S. provided weapons and sang his praises to the CIA. They had close ties with Hakmatyar going back to the mid-1970′s.”

***

Some Afghan groups that have had close affiliation with Pakistani Intelligence are believed to have been involved in the [1993] New York World Trade Center bombings.

 

As the New York Times, CBS News and others reported, an FBI informant involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center begged the FBI to substitute fake bomb power for real explosives, but his FBI handler somehow let real explosives be used.

 

[He was] once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.

 

  Bosnia

As professor of strategy at the Naval War College and former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer John R. Schindler documents, the U.S. supported Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists in Bosnia.

2001

As reported by Newsweek, the New York Times and others, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to 2 of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000 while they were in the U.S., but then failed to stop them.

 

Indeed, former counter-terrorism boss Richard Clarke theorizes that top CIA brass tried to recruit the hijackers and turn them to our side, but were unsuccessful. And – when they realized had failed – they covered up their tracks so that the FBI would not investigate their illegal CIA activities , “malfeasance and misfeasance”, on U.S. soil.

 

(The Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.)

 

One of the main trainers of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda worked at various times for the Green Berets, the CIA and the FBI.   As former ABC News investigative reporter Peter Lance says (as summarized by Raw Story):

 

Bloomberg reported in 2006:

Ali Mohamed … was something of an al Qaeda super-spy who managed to work with terrorists, the Green Berets, the CIA and become an FBI informant, even while ensuring Osama bin Laden’s safe passage around the middle east.

***

Mohamed … was actually responsible for writing portions of the terror network’s training manual and played a key role in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa which left over 200 dead…

 

“He believes that chagrin over the fact that bin Laden’s spy stole top-secret intelligence (including, for example, the positions of all Green Beret and SEAL units worldwide) led to a decision on high to bury the entire Able Danger intelligence program, which identified the Al Qaeda cell active in Brooklyn months before the 9/11 attacks, and also identified Ali Mohamed as a member of bin Laden’s inner circle as early as March 2000.”

 

Rocky Mountain News noted in 2006:

Mohamed trained terrorists how to hijack airliners, bomb buildings and assassinate rivals. He created al-Qaeda cells in the U.S., even helping with fund raising. He also arranged meetings between bin Laden and Hezbollah leaders and scouted bombing targets, including U.S. embassies in East Africa.

What makes it all especially disturbing is that during much of this time Mohamed was a U.S. citizen, an operative for the CIA and FBI, and a member of the U.S. Army.

***

Mohamed’s initial infiltration of the U.S. military came in 1981 when, at the age of 29, he participated in an exchange program at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of the Green Berets and Delta Force.

 

After returning to Egypt he was drummed out of that country’s military because of his radical Islamic views. No matter. The CIA took him on in 1984, sending him to infiltrate a Hamburg mosque. There, Mohamed quickly blew his cover, resulting in his name being added to a watch list of suspected terrorists.

 

That still didn’t stop Mohamed, who was allowed to re-enter the U.S. in 1985.

***

He joined the U.S. Army a year later, which took him back to Fort Bragg, where his superiors were alarmed by his praise of the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. His radicalism did not lead to his dismissal, though. Instead, Mohamed was asked to share his views with officers so that they might better understand the Islamic way.

***

He stole documents at Fort Bragg and fashioned them into a terrorism training manual, which he used to help bin Laden’s personal security forces and countless terrorists. He also used his military credentials to take an unauthorized trip to Afghanistan, where he fought Soviet forces, a violation for which he was not disciplined.

 

After his military service ended, Mohamed did bin Laden’s bidding on many other fronts, including scouting bombing targets such as U.S. embassies in East Africa. He was arrested in 1998 after his part in the plots was revealed, and pleaded guilty in 2000 to five counts of conspiracy.

***

Mohamed is thought to be supplying information helpful to the U.S. government from an undisclosed prison cell, and at least one person thinks his final chapter has yet to be written.

 

David Runke, a defense attorney in the African embassies bombing case, says, “I think the most likely thing that will happen is he’ll be released, he’ll be given a new name and a new identity, and he will pick up a life someplace.”

 

UC Berkeley Professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott is even less generous in regards to our government’s failure to stop Mohamed:

 

Currently in U.S. custody, his whereabouts and legal status are closely guarded secrets, according to National Geographic Channel officials.

While this post does not address any “inside job” theories, there is evidence that intelligence services made other priorities – perhaps 1) covering up their previous backing of Al Qaeda, 2) trying to turn Al Qaeda operatives to our side, or 3) reserving the possibility of using them in future missions in other parts of the world – more important than capturing and disrupting Al Qaeda leadership:

 

It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed (known in the al Qaeda camps as Abu Mohamed al Amriki — “Father Mohamed the American”) worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.

 

The 9/11 Report mentioned him, and said that the plotters against the U.S. Embassy in Kenya were “led” (their word) by Ali Mohamed.

***

Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney who negotiated a plea bargain and confession from Ali Mohamed, said this in testimony to the Commission

 

Patrick Fitzgerald knew Ali Mohamed well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989. Thus, from 1994 “until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries.” Shortly after 9/11, Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department and CIA official, faulted the FBI publicly for using Mohamed as an informant, when it should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist plotting against the United States.

 

Ali Mohamed. …. trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership – including Bin Laden and Zawahiri – and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers. He gave some training to persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing…. From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, he lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator.

 

n 1993 Ali Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports. Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the United States, and the call secured his release. We’ve since been told that it was Mohamed’s West coast FBI handler, John Zent, “who vouched for Ali and got him released.”

 

This release enabled Ali to go on to Kenya, take pictures of the U.S. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for the Embassy bombing plot.

In August 2006 there was a National Geographic Special on Ali Mohamed. We can take this as the new official fallback position on Ali Mohamed, because John Cloonan, the FBI agent who worked with Fitzgerald on Mohamed, helped narrate it. I didn’t see the show, but here’s what TV critics said about its contents:

 

Ali Mohamed manipulated the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army on behalf of Osama bin Laden. Mohamed trained terrorists how to hijack airliners, bomb buildings and assassinate rivals. [D]uring much of this time Mohamed was …, an operative for the CIA and FBI, and a member of the U.S. Army. …Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa.

 

That Mohamed trained al Qaeda in hijacking planes and wrote most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual is confirmed in a new book by Lawrence Wright, who has seen US Government records. Let me say this again: one of al-Qaeda’s top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes was an operative for FBI, CIA, and the Army…

 

Within days of 9/11 Cloonan rushed backed from Yemen and interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out – including details of how he’d counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures.

 

If all these latest revelations about Ali Mohamed are true, then:

1) a key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was simultaneously an informant for the FBI.

2) This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist attacks inside the United States – the first WTC bombing, the New York landmarks plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in Somalia and Kenya.

3) And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been sentenced for any crime.…

All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in the late 1980s at a rifle range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance in the fall of 1989.

 

The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict, and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed…

  • A high-level military intelligence officer says that his unit – tasked with tracking Bin Laden prior to 9/11 – was pulled off the task, and their warnings that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were being targeted were ignored
  • The CIA may have helped many of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.
Nothing Has Changed … We’re STILL Backing Terrorists to Carry Out Geopolitical Goals

If you assume that this is ancient history, remember that:

  • The U.S. and Saudi Arabia are currently supporting Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria (see this, this and this)

 

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/sleeping-with-the-devil-how-u-s-and-saudi-backing-of-al-qaeda-led-to-911.html

 

 

Perhaps you should remember that when you are pointing a finger at someone...

 

there are three fingers pointing back at you.

 

"Rose colored glasses"... Right... :rolleyes:

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Here is a shorter article that may help drive it home...

 

 

 
Saturday, August 3rd, 2013 | Posted by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
It’s Official: US Funding Al Qaeda and Taliban afghanistan-320x257.jpg

At Least 43 Reconstruction Contracts Going to Terrorist Groups

 

by Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall

 

It’s extremely ironic for the US State Department to be issuing travel alerts for US citizens in the Middle East and North Africa the same week we learn that the Pentagon is contracting with Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters to carry out Afghan reconstruction projects.  

 

Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News cites a quarterly report to Congress by Special Inspector for Afghan Reconstruction John Sopko.The report reveals Sopko asked the US Army Suspension and Disbarment office to cancel 43 contracts to known Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters. They refused. The reason? The Suspension and Disbarment Office claims it would violate Al Qaeda and Taliban “due process rights.”

 

Curious, isn’t it? Official terrorist groups have due process rights, but not whistleblowers, Guantanamo detainees, or ordinary Americans subject to continual surveillance by NSA.

 

The intelligence community has been quietly leaking evidence for more than a decade that the US is secretly funding Al Qaeda to promote political instability (and justify continued military intervention) in the Middle East. In the last two years the CIA has been caught red-handed funding and training Al Qaeda militants in
and
.

Based on Sopko’s report, Pentagon support for Al Qaeda and the Taliban is official as of August 1.

 

Let me see if I can think this through: the Pentagon is giving Al Qaeda and the Taliban funding, even though Al Qaeda and the Taliban are planning to carry out attacks on US citizens. How can this be happening? It would appear the US government is at war with their own people.

 

The 236 page quarterly report Sopko submitted to Congress also raises grave concerns about Obama’s request for $10.7 billion in 2014 for Afghan reconstruction projects. All would be carrying out by civilian contractors, of which 30-40% would be local Afghan businesses.

 

Sopko argues the Pentagon already fails abysmally in monitoring an existing $32 million program to install bars or gratings in culverts to prevent insurgents from planting roadside bombs in them. He thinks at bare minimum the Department of Defense should now how many contracts they have issued under this program. They don’t.

 

Thus it seems pretty obvious they aren’t vetting the contractors, much less monitoring where the money is going.

 

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/08/03/its-official-us-funding-al-qaeda-and-taliban/

 

 

No need to say "Thanks"... But don't get all uppity when you don't like (or want to know) the truth.

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I know all of this maggie. Its history.

Only Hindsight is 20/20.

Yes GOVT`s will back a certain horse and there`s never any way of knowing if that horse will turn around and kick you in the a$$.

You can use this same scenario in a million different situations throughout the history of mankind.

WHAT IF WE HAD DONE IT DIFFERENTLY.

But we cant see the future and we cant tell whats going to happen before it happens.

At the time the soviets were our most dangerous enemy . Of course we backed the afghans and the muja houdin.

and no there was no al qaeda they were not even formed yet. My god where do these people come up with this crap. 

Yes al qaeda branched off these afgan forces later on. But to say we backed 

  al qaeda is just slippery talk from the left.

John wayne gacy was a nice clown that did birthday partys for children

till they found 30 of them under his floor. So lets just bash all those people who hired him as a clown cause they didnt know he was a monster .

It`s such a ridiculous concept.  Reagan was doing what he thought was a good thing. Trying to stop the invasion of the soviets in to afghanistan .

and you really believe he knew that the people he was arming would someday become our enemy.

 

OK

Bad choices has been made throughout history.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

I could go on and on and on.

Bottom line America has not always made the right choice.

and GOVTS and political parties may come and go.

But you do not turn your back on this land

and you do not feel ashamed for what you have done to her enemies.

and in the course of her actions she unintentionally creates new enemies.

 

OH well.

They are enemies none the less.

It`s kinda hard to apologize when they are shooting at you.

 

 

Ok I feel much better now    :)

 

Luv ya mag

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My point was that if you look at the evidence... they did empower and fund "terrorist". That is what gave them so much power to hurt us.

 

They knew what they were doing...  and they have no regrets. They are still doing it.

 

"Bottom line America has not always made the right choice.

and GOVTS and political parties may come and go.

But you do not turn your back on this land

and you do not feel ashamed for what you have done to her enemies.

and in the course of her actions she unintentionally creates new enemies."

 

Bottom line for me is to acknowledge what some very bad US people in power have done and are still doing... and I say...

 

"Oh He$$ No!!! You are not doing this in the name of  the American people... and getting our support... I detest their actions with a fury! "

 

I do not turn my back on this land... I hold these people accountable for creating this and putting us in eminent danger and leading to the peril of so many innocent lives... Our kids most of all.

 

Thanks and I feel better now too after getting my position across clear and straight..

 

Love You Too Dog.

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