Who is Osama bin Laden?

Although it remains unclear in these early hours who was responsible for the suicide attacks that have destroyed the world trade center and left many thousands dead, the growing evidence against Osama bin Laden should be supplemented by an understanding of bin Laden's past, particularly his important involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency in the war against the Peoples Democratic Party government of Afghanistan and its Soviet military supporters. An excellent article by Dilip Hiro in the Nation in 1999 makes important points about bin Laden's anti-Communist cold war connections and the blowback effects of his actions. First, the CIA , its Pakistani equivalent (ISI) and the government of Saudi Arabia provided the money, weapons, and material to recruit both Afghani and non-Afghani contras, train them in camps on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and direct their activities. The feudal regime in Saudi Arabia and the rightist military dictatorship in Pakistan both used religious"fundamentalism" as a rational for their activities.

Bin Laden, scion of a wealthy Saudi family in the construction business, served as a leading organizer of Arab volunteers, a fund-raiser among wealthy Saudis for the campaign, and an important logistics person for the Afghan contras, working closely with the CIA and developing close relations with leaders of the present Taliban government. In the aftermath of the Gorbachev withdrawal and the CIA Afghan contra victory in Afghanistan, bin Laden emerged as a leader of Saudi veterans of the Afghan Contra war championing an extreme clerical policy in Saudi Arabia to the right of the feudal government, which banished him to Sudan in 1994. From then on, bin Laden, who went back to Afghanistan in 1995 and his supporters, called"Afghanis" in Saudi Arabia, have transferred the rhetoric that they used against Soviet Union to the United States,"Zionist Jews," and Christian"Crusaders." They have also applied the tactics of terror and murder that they were trained in by Pakistani and CIA personnel in the 1980s, first against U.S. installations in Saudi Arabia, then in Africa, possibly now perpetrating the greatest loss of life by a military attack on U.S. soil since the Civil War.

If bin Laden is responsible for these atrocities, he and the Taliban government that is his ally and friend are Frankenstein monsters of the U.S. rightwingers and cold warriors who trained them, armed them, and proclaimed them"heroic freedom fighters" in the 1980s. As the old German conservative Prime Minister Konrad Adenauer said to Dwight Eisenhower about Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, it is not so easy to get rid of such people once you create them (Adenauer was alluding to the German establishment's experience with Hitler). It is important that bin Laden's cold war and CIA connections not be forgotten, as were Saddam Hussein's and Manuel Noriega's.

It is also important that progressives in Congress demand a full investigation of what has been the most colossal failure of intelligence in U.S. history, since warnings of a major attack were coming in from many sources over the last few weeks. Calls for expanding the present $330 billion military budget should be answered forcefully by saying that a military industrial complex that exists to provide billions in profits for corporations and police the world, but was nowhere to be found when it came to defending the people of the United States, needs to be re-examined. That President Bush seemed to be running and hiding rather than offering leadership as the attack should also be investigated.

If we do not understand the policies that produced the horror that has now engulfed our nation and people, we risk an escalating cycle of violence that may repeat it.