Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes, reports Jason Burke in Peshawar , theguardian.com, Sunday 17 January 1999
The consortium of terror:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jciyiL3CzwM
When Clement Rodney Hampton-el, a hospital technician from Brooklyn, New Jersey, returned home from the war in Afghanistan in 1989, he told friends his only desire was to return. Though he had been wounded in the arm and leg by a Russian shell, he said he had failed. He had not achieved martyrdom in the name of Islam.
So he found a different theatre for his holy war and achieved a different sort of martyrdom. Three years ago, he was convicted of planning a series of massive explosions in Manhattan and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Hampton-el was described by prosecutors as a skilled bomb-maker. It was hardly surprising. In Afghanistan he fought with the Hezb-i-Islami group of mujahideen, whose training and weaponry were mainly supplied by the CIA.
He was not alone. American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist.
Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia in 1979, aged 22. Though he saw a considerable amount of combat - around the eastern city of Jalalabad in March 1989 and, earlier, around the border town of Khost - his speciality was logistics.
From his base in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, he used his experience of the construction trade, and his money, to build a series of bases where the mujahideen could be trained by their Pakistani, American and, if some recent press reports are to be believed, British advisers.
One of the camps bin Laden built, known as Al-Badr, was the target of the American missile strikes against him last summer. Now it is used by Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistan-based organisation that trains volunteers to fight in Kashmir.
Some of their recruits kidnapped and almost certainly killed a group of Western hostages a few years ago. The bases are still full of new volunteers, many
Pakistanis. Most of those who were killed in last August's
strikes were Pakistani.
A Harkut-ul-Mujahideen official said last week that it had Germans and Britons fighting for the cause, as well as Egyptians, Palestinians and Saudis. Muslims from the West as well as from the Middle East and North Africa are regularly stopped by Pakistani police on the road up the Khyber Pass heading for the camps. Hundreds get through. Afghan veterans have now joined bin Laden's al-Qaeda group.
Some have returned to former battlegrounds, like the university-educated Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, a key figure in the Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist group. Al-Zawahiri ran his own operation during the Afghan war, bringing in and training volunteers from the Middle East. Some of the $500 million the CIA poured into Afghanistan reached his group. Al-Zawahiri has become a close aide of bin Laden and has now returned to Afghanistan to work with him. His al-Jihad group has been linked to the Yemeni kidnappers.
One Saudi journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1989 remembers three of his close associates going under the names of Abu Mohammed, Abu Hafz and Abu Ahmed. All three fought with bin Laden in the early Eighties, travelled with him to the Sudan and have come back to Afghanistan. Afghan veterans, believed to include men who fought the Americans in Somalia, have also returned.
Other members of al-Quaeda remain overseas. Afghan veterans now linked to bin Laden have been traced by investigators to Pakistan, East Africa, Albania, Chechnya, Algeria, France, the US and Britain.
At least one of the kidnappers in Yemen was reported to have fought in Afghanistan and to be linked to al-Quaeda. Despite reports that bin Laden was effectively funded by the Americans, it is impossible to gauge how much American aid he received. He was not a major figure in the Afghan war. Most American weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, were channelled by the Pakistanis to the Hezb-i-Islami faction of the mujahideen led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Bin Laden was only loosely connected with the group, serving under another Hezb-i-Islami commander known as Engineer Machmud. However, bin Laden's Office of Services, set up to recruit overseas for the war, received some US cash.
But according to one American official, concentrating on bin Laden is a mistake. 'The point is not the individuals,' he said last week. 'The point is that we created a whole cadre of trained and motivated people who turned against us. It's a classic Frankenstein's monster situation.'
Others point out that the military contribution of the 'Arabs', as the overseas volunteers were known, was relatively small. 'The fighting was done by the Afghans and most of them went back to their fields when Kabul fell to the mujahideen,' said Kamaal Khan, a Pakistani defence analyst. 'Ironically, the bulk of American aid went to the least effective fighters, who turned most strongly to bite the hand that fed them.'
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam
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The consortium of terror:
President Ronald Reagan Meeting Some Mujahideen - YouTube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3f9mlUQzJA
Mar 5, 2009 - Uploaded by MadnessUponMadnessPresident Ronald Reagan Meeting Some Mujahideen.
Ronald Reagan Dedicates Space Shuttle Launch To Taliban-Mujahedin Freedom Fighters - YouTube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=06xI83Esc8I
May 22, 2011 - Uploaded by VexZeez
'In 1982, Ronald Reagan dedicated the Space Shuttle Columbia to the resistance ... We support the Mujahidin. .... Ronald Reagan Meets In The White House The Afghan Freedom Fighters (And Mullah Omar?)
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So he found a different theatre for his holy war and achieved a different sort of martyrdom. Three years ago, he was convicted of planning a series of massive explosions in Manhattan and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Hampton-el was described by prosecutors as a skilled bomb-maker. It was hardly surprising. In Afghanistan he fought with the Hezb-i-Islami group of mujahideen, whose training and weaponry were mainly supplied by the CIA.
He was not alone. American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist.
Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia in 1979, aged 22. Though he saw a considerable amount of combat - around the eastern city of Jalalabad in March 1989 and, earlier, around the border town of Khost - his speciality was logistics.
From his base in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, he used his experience of the construction trade, and his money, to build a series of bases where the mujahideen could be trained by their Pakistani, American and, if some recent press reports are to be believed, British advisers.
One of the camps bin Laden built, known as Al-Badr, was the target of the American missile strikes against him last summer. Now it is used by Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, a Pakistan-based organisation that trains volunteers to fight in Kashmir.
Some of their recruits kidnapped and almost certainly killed a group of Western hostages a few years ago. The bases are still full of new volunteers, many
Pakistanis. Most of those who were killed in last August's
strikes were Pakistani.
A Harkut-ul-Mujahideen official said last week that it had Germans and Britons fighting for the cause, as well as Egyptians, Palestinians and Saudis. Muslims from the West as well as from the Middle East and North Africa are regularly stopped by Pakistani police on the road up the Khyber Pass heading for the camps. Hundreds get through. Afghan veterans have now joined bin Laden's al-Qaeda group.
Some have returned to former battlegrounds, like the university-educated Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, a key figure in the Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist group. Al-Zawahiri ran his own operation during the Afghan war, bringing in and training volunteers from the Middle East. Some of the $500 million the CIA poured into Afghanistan reached his group. Al-Zawahiri has become a close aide of bin Laden and has now returned to Afghanistan to work with him. His al-Jihad group has been linked to the Yemeni kidnappers.
One Saudi journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1989 remembers three of his close associates going under the names of Abu Mohammed, Abu Hafz and Abu Ahmed. All three fought with bin Laden in the early Eighties, travelled with him to the Sudan and have come back to Afghanistan. Afghan veterans, believed to include men who fought the Americans in Somalia, have also returned.
Other members of al-Quaeda remain overseas. Afghan veterans now linked to bin Laden have been traced by investigators to Pakistan, East Africa, Albania, Chechnya, Algeria, France, the US and Britain.
At least one of the kidnappers in Yemen was reported to have fought in Afghanistan and to be linked to al-Quaeda. Despite reports that bin Laden was effectively funded by the Americans, it is impossible to gauge how much American aid he received. He was not a major figure in the Afghan war. Most American weapons, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, were channelled by the Pakistanis to the Hezb-i-Islami faction of the mujahideen led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Bin Laden was only loosely connected with the group, serving under another Hezb-i-Islami commander known as Engineer Machmud. However, bin Laden's Office of Services, set up to recruit overseas for the war, received some US cash.
But according to one American official, concentrating on bin Laden is a mistake. 'The point is not the individuals,' he said last week. 'The point is that we created a whole cadre of trained and motivated people who turned against us. It's a classic Frankenstein's monster situation.'
Others point out that the military contribution of the 'Arabs', as the overseas volunteers were known, was relatively small. 'The fighting was done by the Afghans and most of them went back to their fields when Kabul fell to the mujahideen,' said Kamaal Khan, a Pakistani defence analyst. 'Ironically, the bulk of American aid went to the least effective fighters, who turned most strongly to bite the hand that fed them.'
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/17/yemen.islam
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
US history - "How Jimmy Carter & I Started the Mujahideen"
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981 (Jan.1998)
"Q: 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 Mujahideen 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: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: 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?
Q: Some stirred up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries."
* There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not included in the shorter version.
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower"
Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*
http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html
Taliban/Al Qaeda Machinator?
In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.
Interviewer: How did you interpret Soviet behavior in Afghanistan, such as the April revolution, the rise of... I mean, what did you think their long-term plans were, and what did you think should be done about it?
Brzezinski: I told the President, about six months before the Soviets entered Afghanistan, that in my judgment I thought they would be going into Afghanistan. And I decided then, and I recommended to the President, that we shouldn't be passive.
Interviewer: What happened?
Brzezinski: We weren't passive.
The National Security Archive, Interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for CNN's Coldwar Series, June 13, 1997
7 months after the interview for the CNN series, Brzezinski, in a interview for the French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, was more forthright, and unapologetically claimed to be the mastermind of a feint which caused the Soviet Union to embark upon a military intervention to support their client government in Kabul, as well as training and arming extremists, which later became the Taliban government.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: 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?
Le Nouvel Observateur, Interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paris, January 15-21, 1998, translated by Bill Blum -
Source: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874
Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874#m8ryIeFBMQX6sFsD.99
US Sec. of State, Regarding the Mujahideen (ie, Al-Qaeda) - YouTube
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jciyiL3CzwM
Mar 19, 2013 - Uploaded by DidderBodderU.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Regarding the Mujahideen (ie, Al-Qaeda; wecreated them) - April ...
CIA AND ISI NURTURED MUJAHIDEEN AND TALIBAN
therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option...
Jul 31, 2010And joining us again are Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, ... who we know was involved originally in the '80s in helping create the Taliban.
The Haqqani Network: The Background
Dr. Charles G. Cogan | Posted 11.13.2012 | World
The network of Jalaludin Haqqani was "a leading recipient of CIA money" during the Afghan mujahidin struggle against the Soviet Union. While this was basically the case, a few clarifications are in order.Read Whole Story ...
US history - "How Jimmy Carter & I Started the Mujahideen"
www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874
Apr 22, 2009
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