Tillman, an ex-NFL star who threw away his career and a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to fight Bush's war as an Army Ranger, was killed in Afghanistan this week.
...So, how did the CIA indirectly kill Pat Tillman? It's quite simple, actually -- the CIA created and provided sustenance for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
...For millions of Americans, conditioned daily by the corporate pro-war media, the Taliban and al-Qaeda came out of nowhere, a rabble of terrorists united simply by their undivided hatred of our way of life and revulsion for our so-called freedom, as Dubya the Christian Zionist Crusader would have it.
Never mentioned is the possibility that Pat Tillman was murdered by militant Islamic warriors trained by the CIA at Camp Peary, Virginia, also known as the "Farm" (see Giles Foden, Blowback chronicles, the Guardian, September 15, 2001). Instead of attributing Tillman's death to blowback and failed policies, the Bushites wasted little time elevating the misguided and brainwashed football star's "patriotism" to mythical proportions and, unfortunately, they have cynically exploited it as an example of selfless "sacrifice" in the "war on terrorism," in other words the neocon war against Islam in the name of Israel, oil, neoliberalism, and corporate carpetbaggerism.
...After the Soviets unwisely invaded Afghanistan, the CIA and its Pakistani client, the ISI, recruited the most vile and demented Muslim fundamentalists it could scrounge up. For instance, guys like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, "a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater," as journalist Tim Weiner writes. "[Hekmatyar's] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil."
So enamored was Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brezinski, Harold Brown, Pakistan's military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq, Ronald Reagan -- he liked to call Hekmatyar and his cutthroat associates "freedom fighters" - William Casey and the CIA with the so-called Afghan rebels, they spent a whopping $6 billion grooming them. Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia, and the Far East were recruited.
Reagan was so excited about the idea of the mujahideen killing conscripted Soviet teenagers he issued National Security Decision Directive 166,29, a secret plan to significantly escalate covert action in Afghanistan. Reagan's directive came bundled with all sorts of fancy high-tech equipment and military assistance.
...One of these radical Muslims was Osama bin Laden.
...Although the Bush Ministry of Disinformation likes to claim Reagan and the CIA did not directly support bin Laden, defendants accused of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya have revealed the CIA shipped high-powered sniper rifles directly to bin Laden's operation in 1989, a fact confirmed by the Tennessee-based manufacturer of the rifles. "In 1988, with U.S. knowledge, bin Laden created al-Qaeda (the Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread across at least 26 countries," explains Indian journalist Rahul Bhedi. "Washington turned a blind eye to al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the U.S."
Of course, on September 11, 2001, everything changed.
As for the Taliban, they were nurtured by the ISI and the Pakistani army. According to Selig Harrison, the creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA." Glyn Davies, State Department spokesperson, saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law on the war-battered people of Afghanistan.
Strict Islamic law, naturally, is good for business, just like it is in Saudi Arabia.
"The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis," a US diplomat predicted in 1997. "There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." As well, they could live with the Taliban executing people for listening to music and women teachers. In May 2002, after Bush invaded, Hamid Karzai, the handpicked "interim ruler" of Afghanistan, held talks with his counterparts in Pakistan and Turkmenistan to finalize details on an 850-kilometer gas pipeline.
But it wasn't simply gas pipelines that motivated the CIA and the ISI -- it was, as well, the profits to be gained from drug production and smuggling.
full Counter Punch article.
One of the events at the Solidarity Encounter in Caracas a couple weeks ago was a "Trial of the CIA." A group of panelists from Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, U.S. and Venezuela discussed the CIA's involvement and crimes in Latin America. It's an incredible story that doesn't get any notice in American media. There's a book,
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, which chronicles the long list of intervention and assassinations by the CIA (not limited to Latin America).
And if you want to know more about the ongoing real motive for the "war on drugs", Al Giordano's
Narco News keeps track.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
