CIA and Osama

A line by Peter Berger in Bruce's recent post caught my eye. Berger claims the CIA did not know about Osama Bin Laden until 1995. In his own words:

The real story is that the CIA did not know about Bin Laden until 1995. Often
people say that Bin Laden was a CIA creation, but there's never been any evidence.

Now this guy is a real life terrorism expert! He's actually interviewed Osama Bin Laden! So if this guy says the CIA had didn't know about Osama bin Laden until 1995 who am I to question such authority?

Unfortunately I've been steeped in the lore of logic which tells me that no argument can rest on authority alone. That, my friends, would be a logical fallacy. So I choose another route.

The first thing I do when I hear anything said so confidently is ask, "Is this true?" Seems like a good place to start. Let me just let you take a ride through my own thought processes.

What do we know? Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brezinski, has admitted that US aid to the rebels began prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Apparantly the aid began about six months before the Soviets invaded. So what does that mean?

The CIA was involved in this from the start. At the very beginning the Mujadeen were comprised of elements from within Afghanistan but it wasn't long before radical Muslims from other countries were recruited by the CIA and began joining the movement. One of the first of these radicals was the infamous Osama Bin Laden. Eventually some 35,000 radical Muslims from over 43 different countries would be recruited.

Now if Osama Bin Laden was just a nameless fighter among these 35,000 "Freedom Fighters" (a term coined by Ronald Reagan to refer to these men) I might believe that the CIA didn't know about him. But there's a problem with that story. Osama Bin Laden wasn't just some nobody. He was a college educated civil engineer from one of Saudi Arabia's most wealthy families and a man who had close ties to the Saudi Royal family. This is a man who personally recruited 4,000 Saudis to help fight and helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the Saudi elites to fight the Soviets.

Does this sound like a guy that the CIA wouldn't know about? It's not that he was the leader or anything, but clearly he played a fundamental role in all of this.

I don't think you have to be a terrorism expert to see through this official lie. Peter Berger committs a very common practice among journalists: amplify the lie. The media quite often takes an official lie, like the official CIA denial of any involvement with Osama Bin Laden, and simply repeat it. There's no doubt a kernal of truth to what Berger says. There probably is no concrete evidence to prove the CIA aided Bin Laden; but you'd have to pretty naive to not put the pieces of this puzzle together and see the Bin Laden CIA connection.

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