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Specifically, as vice president in the mid-eighties, Bush supported
aiding the mujahideen in Afghanistan through the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) or Services Offices, which sent money and fighters
to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar. "Bush was in charge of the covert operations that supported the MAK," says John Loftus, a Justice Department official in the eighties.
"They were essentially hiring
a terrorist to fight terrorism." [19]
Cofounded by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, the MAK
was the precursor to bin Laden's global terrorist network, Al Qaeda.
It sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set up recruitment centers in over fifty countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even the United States to bring thousands of warriors to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. [20]The MAK was later linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York through an office in Brooklyn known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center.
***
And so, the
United States escalated. By 1987, well into the second term of
the Reagan-Bush administration, the United States began
to provide the rebels with nearly $700 million in military
assistance a year. In addition, the CIA began supplying the
mujahideen with intelligence, training, and equipment that
allowed them to make scattered strikes against factories,
military installations, and storage depots that were actually
inside the Soviet Union. They gave the Islamic rebels satellite
reconnaissance data, intercepted Soviet intelligence, and
provided sniper rifles, timing devices for tons of C-4
explosives for urban sabotage, antitank missiles, and other
sophisticated equipment. [32]
Most
coveted of all were the Stinger missiles, portable,
shoulder-fired antiaircraft guided missiles with infrared
seekers for downing low-flying helicopters and planes, [33]
missiles so sophisticated that, as one CIA officer put it, "a
nearsighted, illiterate Afghan could bring down a few million
dollars' worth of Soviet aircraft." [34] With a hit rate of 89
percent, the Stingers downed an average of one plane every day.
Soon, the Afghan air force was depleted, and for the Soviets,
the cost of the war soared. [35]
Meanwhile,
bin Laden built a major arms storage depot, training facility,
and medical center for the mujahideen at Khost in eastern
Afghanistan. Peshawar became the center of a burgeoning pan
Islamic movement. More than twenty-five thousand Islamic
militants, from the Palestinians' Hamas, from Egypt's Al Gama'a
al-Islamiya and Al Jihad, from Algeria's Islamic Salvation
Front, from the Philippines' Moro Liberation Front, from
countries all over the world, made the pilgrimage through
Peshawar to the jihad. [36]
"You can
sit at the Khyber Pass and see every color, every creed, every
nationality, pass," a Western diplomat said. "These groups,
in their wildest imagination, never would have met if there had
been no jihad. For a Moro [iv] to get a Stinger missile! To make
contacts with Islamists from North Africa! The United States
created a Moscow Central in Peshawar for these groups, and the
consequences for all of us are astronomical." [37]
A new
network of charities grew into a formidable infrastructure to
support the growing pan-Islamic movement. Money flowed into
the Services Offices in Peshawar. A new leadership emerged that
included Sheikh Azzam and his best friend, the rotund, blind
Sheikh Omar from Egypt. CIA forces in Peshawar saw him as a
valuable asset, letting pass his militant anti Western
sentiments because he was such a powerful force in uniting the
mujahideen. [38]
***
"The Iron
Curtain still stretches from Stettin to Trieste," Bush
said. "But it's a rusting curtain. Shafts of light from the
Western side, from our side, the free and prosperous side, are
piercing the gloom of failure and despair on the other side.
"The truth is being sought as never before," he added. "And the
peoples of Eastern Europe, the peoples of the Soviet Union
itself, are demanding more freedom, demanding their place in the
sun."
***
"We set up the very system [of Islamist terrorism] we are now trying to dismantle," says a senior investigator who participated in the Senate probe into BCCI.
***
Even a
decade later one of the principal architects of the policy,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, evinced few regrets. "What is most
important to the history of the world?" he asked the French
weekly the Nouvel Observateur. "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?" [56]
***
Not long
after he took office in 1989, President Bush was warned about
exactly this possibility by someone in a position to know.
Displeased that the president continued to support extremist
radical Muslims, Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto let him
know about the dangers. Arming the mujahideen might initially
have been the right thing, she told Bush. But, she explained,
"The extremists so emboldened by the United States during the
eighties are now exporting their terrorism to other parts of the
world to the extent that they use heroin trafficking to pay for
their exploits."
It had gone
too far, she said. By aligning the United States with the most
extremist mujahideen groups, she told him, "You are creating a
veritable Frankenstein." [57]
***
At the same time that Nayirah was telling Americans about Iraqi
atrocities, the Pentagon began telling Americans about the looming Iraqi military threat. By mid-September, even before Nayirah's testimony,
the Bush administration claimed that 250,000 Iraqi troops were in
Kuwait and the surrounding region. But there was compelling evidence that the Iraqi military threat to the Saudis had either been vastly overstated by the United States or that Iraq had withdrawn its troops. In August, a Japanese newspaper approached Peter Zimmerman, a fellow with the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, with photos of Kuwait taken by a Soviet commercial satellite company. Zimmerman showed the photos to various other experts and "all of us agreed we couldn't see anything in the way of military activity." [50]
The media, however, was too cautious to run with a story saying that
the Pentagon had exaggerated the Iraqi military threat. Nevertheless, ABC News pursued the story and bought a set of five Soviet satellite pictures of eastern Kuwait and southern Iraq, which were taken on September 13, at a time during which the United States asserted that the Iraqi military force was at full strength. [51] According to Zimmerman, the photos were "astounding in their quality." [52]
But when he reviewed them with another expert, both of them were shocked not by what they saw, but by what they didn't see. "We turned to each other and we both said, 'There's nothing there,' " said Zimmerman. Nothing suggested an Iraqi military presence anywhere in Kuwait. "In fact," Newsweek reported, "all they could see, in crystal-clear detail, was the U.S. buildup in Saudi Arabia." [53] Where were the Iraqi soldiers? The evidence strongly suggested that Cheney's presentation to Prince Bandar six weeks earlier vastly overstated the Iraqi threat
-- or that the Iraqis had retreated.
ABC News, however, had neglected to obtain a photo showing one
thirty-kilometer strip of land in Kuwait. Perhaps all the Iraqi troops were hiding in that sector. But an enterprising reporter in Florida named Jean Heller got her newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, to purchase the missing photo. It too showed no sign of the missing Iraqi troops.
"The Pentagon kept saying the bad guys were there, but we don't see anything to indicate an Iraqi force in Kuwait of even twenty percent the size the administration claimed," Zimmerman told Heller. [54]
As the story
spread, the Pentagon's PR machine shifted into damage-control mode. A
spokesman said the military "sticks by its numbers," then went to work discouraging ABC, CBS, and the Chicago Tribune from pursuing the story. ABC News's Mark Brender explained that the network dropped it partly because the photos were inconclusive, but also because there was "a sense that you would be bucking the trend. ... If you're going to stick your neck out and say that the number of Iraqi forces may not be as high as the administration is saying, then you better be able to say how many there are."
[55] One of the few major newspapers to suggest that Iraq never really showed up for battle en masse was Newsday, which, after the Gulf War was under way, reported that American troops had encountered a "phantom enemy." It noted that most of the huge Iraqi army, which was said to have half a million troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq, simply was nowhere to be seen. In addition, as if foreshadowing the Iraq War of 2003, Saddam Hussein's supposed chemical warfare never
materialized.
One senior American commander told a Newsday reporter that the
information about the Iraqi defenses put out before the war was highly exaggerated. "There was a great disinformation campaign surrounding this war," he said. [56]
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