Before everything, Medicinal, I owe you an apology. I am sorry for my choice of words in my last post on this thread (now duly removed), where I wrote I thought you were being stupid. I hope you didn't take it seriously, and that you understood it was all in jest. You know I love you. :thumbsup:

Moving right along...

Fishman,

Boy oh boy, did you pick the wrong article to sustain your claims.

Sorry I took so long to respond (you didn't really think I'd give up this easy, did you?), but yesterday was busy. I hope some people - or at least you - continue to give a shit about this thread.

Get ready, folks, this is going to be a long one. :jointsmile:

I think I will start out by letting our public know just who Norm Dixon is, and what kind of a paper he works for.

Norm Dixon is a journalist for the ??Green Left Weekly,? the newspaper on which the article you appended first appeared. The Green Left Weekly is a self-admitted far-left, radical newspaper. The Green Left Weekly is a huge supporter of Hugo Chavez??s government. The Green Left Weekly says Chavez is blameless for having done what he did to RCTV. (Read all about it: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/711/36928) The Green Left Weekly??s website proudly links to the website www.resistance.org.au. :wtf:

I am pointing this out so that our readers can have an understanding of what kind of a newspaper the one your article hails from really is. They [the readers] might be fooled into thinking it??s a respectable and fair-minded publication, and that the allegations made in the article you posted are inspired by objective reporting. I hope that what I pointed out above will make them think twice about that.

You once scolded me for daring to quote out of the Weekly Standard, but relying on far-left newspapers with an ultra-bias that makes the WS look like the Christian Science Monitor is fair game? Really, now.

But hey, whatever dirt I can sling at the paper would not change the fact that the claim your article makes might be true, right? Even a broken clock is right twice a day (clichés kick ass). If the Green Left Weekly, a paper I have no respect for, printed that the sky is blue, I would not be questioning it just because it??s on the Green Left Weekly.

And after reviewing this article by Dixon with the open-mindedness and objectivity I always strive to apply to everything, I have come to the open-minded and objective conclusion that this article is disgustingly biased, shamelessly mendacious, and downright wrong. :woohoo:

The number of times Dixon doctors quotes and excerpts, omitting the parts that contradict his point, by itself is sickening, and you will see why.

One would think a fine, objective, truth-seeking mind like Dixon??s could go at least, I don??t know, about five or six paragraphs before he outs himself as the abject liar that he really is. But in this article, he outdoes himself. He distorts the truth right up front in the second (well, technically third, but the second he writes himself) paragraph.

??Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive ?? on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man ?? in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.?

Good job, Dixon, now can we please have the real, undoctored excerpt of the speech?

The speech Dixon is (supposedly) quoting from is a speech Ronald Reagan gave at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, on March FIRST, not 8th, 1985. The full transcript of the speech can be found here: 1985 CPAC Speech by President Ronald Reagan

And I do believe Reagan was actually quoted as saying the following.

??Throughout the world the Soviet Union and its agents, client states, and satellites are on the defensive??on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive.?

Okay, let??s stop right there for a second. Go compare and contrast for a bit. THE SOVIET UNION AND ITS AGENTS. Why is THE SOVIET UNION PART missing from Dixon??s excerpt? What does he want to accomplish by cutting out the Soviet Union and making it look like Reagan was referring to the subsequent ??freedom fighters? when he wasn??t?

Reagan goes on to say: ??Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They??re doing so on almost every continent populated by man??in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America. In making mention of freedom fighters, all of us are privileged to have in our midst tonight one of the brave commanders who lead the Afghan freedom fighters??Abdul Haq. Abdul Haq, we are with you? They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help.?

Dixon says Reagan had been specifically singing the praises of ??the murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators.? :what: I??m of the idea Dixon is reading a different speech, because in this one, I don??t see a reference to anything like that anywhere in it. What I do see is a shout-out to Abdul Haq. What I do see is a shout-out to ??freedom fighters? of the likes of Abdul Haq. Abdul Haq was an able Afghan commander ?? an actual Afghan, the only kind the U.S. ever supported ?? who among many others led the fight against the Soviets. Abdul Haq was also very anti-Taliban, so much so that he was named a United Nations Peace Mediator in 1998. He tried to lead an uprising against the Taliban after 9/11, but he was caught and executed by his enemy. :sadcrying

Having gone this far in proving how selective ?? and deceitful ?? Dixon is in doctoring his information, I could very easily choose to stop here, and claim I have also done much to discredit whatever new set of lies he has in store for us in the rest of his article.

But that would be too easy. And for the sake of truth, it might still be the case that Dixon is factually correct in supporting the idea of an Osama-CIA link in the 80??s.

Unfortunately for Dixon, and predictably enough, that isn??t the case.

Fishman, I don??t think you read my thread very thoroughly, else you would have been able to notice that Dixon is committing the same common mistake as all those who are as shortsighted as he on this issue. When he claims the CIA was funding, arming, and training the Mujahideen, he is making no distinction whatsoever between the various factions (i.e.: the official Afghan fighters and the Afghan Arabs I talked about). To him, the logic could not be any simpler: U.S. funding ISI > ISI funding Afghan rebels > Saudi Arabia funding extremists who are fighting alongside the Afghan rebels = U.S. funding the extremists just mentioned.

Very convenient of Dixon to spin it this way to make his point (in 2001, it was still all the rage to be making his kind of claims), but it doesn??t add up.

Dixon tries to cover up for his lies by making a few measly mentions of the ISI. If Dixon is such an authority on the ISI??s dealings and transfers, perhaps he should listen to ?? and value ?? what Mohammad Yousaf had to say on the matter. Mohammad Yousaf was the Pakistani Brigadier who ran ISI??s Afghan efforts from 1983 to 1987. In the Bergen book I already quoted from, he says:

??It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.?

The above account would sharply contradict Dixon??s subsequent claim that ??Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.? It was actually a pro-Islamist??s branch of the ISI that was partial to Hekmatyar due to his impressive military track record and vociferous Islamist stances. The U.S. could not have had a ??favorite,? other than the official Afghan fighters it hoped the ISI would behave about and give their money to, which it did in great part.

Yousaf refutes the Osama-CIA link. Even Osama himself refutes the Osama-CIA link.

But Dixon knows better than both of them. And nothing can stop him. He??s got a nation to smear.

We??ve seen how biased, selective, and deceitful Dixon can be in his reporting, and how he remorselessly and consciously distorts ?? or outright fabricates ?? facts to suit his point (i.e.: America evil, Muslim extremism faultless).

But let??s not stop here. :jointsmile:

Dixon next tries to build his case on the history of the MAK and what went on at Camp Peary. His main source for his new set of allegations appears to be John Cooley??s book ??Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism,? a book which I have read and own a copy of. But I??ll get to the book in a minute.

Let??s first talk about the part about Ali Mohamed. The article claims that Mohamed trained these fighters at the knowledge and endorsement of the CIA, and that it was with ??US assistance? that these operatives returned to Afghanistan. However, according to the Center for Cooperative Research (Ali Mohamed), Mohamed had actually stolen CIA plans without the CIA??s knowledge (and certainly neither endorsement) and passed them on to al-Qaeda, and the U.S. did not discover him doing this until 1990. He appears to have been playing both sides since 1984, and the CIA had been tracking him since then. At the time the article claims he was training extremists in the New York area, he was actually on official active duty at Fort Bragg, and would come to al-Kifah by his own will only on week-ends when he was free. At one point, the CIA did start suspecting he wasn??t being their good boy, and began monitoring him for this. Cooperative Research calls him ??a spy for bin Laden working in the US military.? Dixon is once again quite the dee-jay in remixing facts to make it appear Mohamed and his trainees had the CIA??s blessing all along, but it actually appears that the CIA had been secretly watching them the whole time! ??Some FBI agents have been assigned to watch some Middle Eastern men who are frequenting the al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. Each weekend, Mohamed??s trainees drive from al-Kifah to the shooting range, and a small FBI surveillance team follows them. The FBI has been given a tip that some Palestinians at al-Kifah are planning violence targeting Atlantic City casinos. By August, the casino plot fails to materialize, and the surveillance, including that at the shooting range, comes to an end. Author Peter Lance will later say that why the FBI failed to follow up the shooting sessions is a ??great unanswered question.? [Lance, 2003, pp. 29-33; New York Times, 10/5/2003]?

In regard to the article??s claim that Mohamed??s trainees were returning to Afghanistan with US assistance, Gerald Posner has a different view. He writes in his book ??Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11?:

??Mohamed conducted a series of weekend "training" classes and a two-week-long intensive seminar. Almost all the volunteers were Arab immigrants. They bought $600 one-way fares as a sign they were willing to give their lives for Islam."

According to him, these fighters were forking over their own money. So who??s right?

And as far as the al-Kifah Refugee Center goes, there exists no record that the U.S. was behind its activities (the capitalistic and individualism-driven culture of the United States likes to let people do whatever the fuck they want? well, perhaps with the exception of some Republicans). In fact, once things did start smelling fishy, the FBI cracked down on the center, and all MAK offices in New York were shut down. (Rohan Gunaratna, ??Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror?)

Similar unfounded insinuations are made in regard to MAK somehow having the U.S.??s total blessing as well. MAK was one of many fraudulent ??charities? that was secretly channeling money to the Arab Afghans?? activities in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was not ??running? the organization as much as its actual founder, Abdullah Azzam, but yes, bin Laden definitely had his own stake in MAK. During a debate with Peter Lance (who actually seems to claim bin Laden wasn??t much of a MAK presence at all), Richard Miniter describes him as more of a ??quartermaster.?

??There were two distinct fronts in that war in Afghanistan. One was composed of the Mujahideen, those were the native Afghans who were fighting the Soviets, they had about seven factions. Then the second front was composed of the Arab Afghans who were composed of radicals funded by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Azzam was attempting to fuse them into one solid coherent force and Bin Laden was key to that effort because he was negotiating with the military leaders, trying to keep people at peace. Bin Laden was essentially the quarter master creating guest houses, training facilities, food and also most importantly a database of who all of these Islamic fighters were so that they could get letters home and things like that. So, he was working with Azzam at that point, Azzam wasn't even the senior partner.? (lance/miniter)

Now, on to Cooley??s claims. Those who have not read the book should know that he is not very fond of citing sources in it, but even I will admit that this is a cheap shot on my part, and it also has little to do with how mind-bogglingly incorrect Dixon is in his article.

Dixon writes ?? Dixon has the audacity to write: ??John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American ??black Muslims? were taught ??sabotage skills?.?

I can only hope that Mr. Cooley was immediately informed of how horribly misrepresented and misquoted he was here, and that he contacted the Green Left Weekly, or Dixon, to give them a piece of his mind. :cursing:

Because I am holding Cooley??s book right here in front of me, open on pages 86-7, the only part in the book where Camp Peary is mentioned.

In the interests of truth and factualness, both virtues which Dixon and his paper savagely rape on a constant basis, I will transcribe word for word all of what Cooley wrote about Camp Peary, even seemingly irrelevant details such as its geography and size, instead of omitting such parts and replacing them with periods. Why? Because as we have seen, Dixon has (and will once again, as I shall demonstrate in a bit? I??m far from finished with the guy) shamelessly used sequences of periods to fool the reader into believing he was omitting irrelevant parts, when in truth he was conveniently expelling the parts which were incompatible with his point. What a true piece of shit, he is.

??Camp Peary, nicknamed ??The Farm? in the American spy world, was and probably still is the CIA??s main place of training for spies, infiltrators and covert operators of all sorts. Its very existence was classified secret until various visitors discovered it and began to write about it at the beginning of the 1990s. The Farm is a parcel of land about 25 square miles in area, just northeast of Williamsburg, Virginia, running between US Route 64 and the James River. Some of the future Afghan warrior-trainers, chiefly Pakistanis sent by the ISI, were probably able to see [Colonel Charles] Beckwith and his men train on a model of the occupied American embassy compound in Tehran, rehearsing all their hypothetical moves once they got over the wall. Camp Peary was also where members of the CIA Career Training Program, many of them officers seeking advancement and new assignments in covert action in Afghanistan and elsewhere, studied and worked out. Subjects, which were imparted to the trainees for the Afghan war, included use and detection of explosives; surveillance and counter-surveillance; how to write reports according to CIA ??Company? standards; how to shoot various weapons, and the running of counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations. There were also classroom courses in the all-important subject of recruiting new agents, couriers and assorted helpers. Paramilitary training also went on at another CIA-used Army Special Forces site, Harvey Point, North Carolina.?

Unless my eyes fail me, there??s no mention of ??Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin? being ??sent to Camp Peary,? just U.S.-backed and ISI-backed Pakistani ??warrior-trainers.? Whereas until now Dixon spinned facts and bended the truth, in this instance he is downright making shit up.

If anyone is not yet convinced of what a lying and biased weasel Dixon really is, then let me also quote another excerpt from Cooley??s book which Dixon appears to have conveniently skipped:

??Grass-roots recruiting for the jihad in the United States was not handled directly by the CIA, despite its overall management of the program. Various local cover groups, often legitimate Muslim charities and mosque communities in cities such as New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and other large centers of Arab-Americans, shielded the CIA from direct recruiting. Such recruiting, and weapons training in America which followed, if directly run by the men from Langley, Virginia, would have been a flagrant violation of the CIA??s charter, which forbids all domestic activity inside the United States.?

I can??t believe that I??ve come this far, and there??s still more.

Dixon writes: ??Milt Bearden, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, ??Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did ... [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.??

<BUZZER> :error:

Nice try, Norm ??Lying Shit? Dixon, but we??re well aware of your antics by now. You try once again to disguise parts that contradict you with periods, so now we wonder, what could be hiding behind that gap between ??Yes, I did? and ??[Guys like]??

Gigliozzi is here to tell you:

(Actual quote

??Did I know he was out there? Yes, I did, but did I say this tall, slim, ascetic Saudi was instrumental? No, I did not. There were a lot of bin Ladens who came to do jihad, and they unburdened us a lot. These guys were bringing in up to twenty to twenty-five million dollars a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It??s an extra two hundred to three hundred million a year. And this is what bin Laden did. He spent most of the war as a fund-raiser, in Peshawar [Pakistan]. He was not a valiant warrior on the battlefield.? (Mary Ann Weaver, ??The Real Bin Laden,? New Yorker, January 24, 2000.) (http://www.newyorker.com/FROM_THE_AR...17fr_archive07)

We can also listen to the words of Abdullah Anas, an associate of Abdullah Azzam. On September 12, 2004, he told the French television program Zone Interdit (??Forbidden Zone?), ??If you say there was a relationship in the sense that the CIA used to meet with Arabs, discuss with them, prepare plans with them, and to fight with them ?? it never happened.? (The United States did not create Osama bin Laden - US Department of State)

So there. :thumbsup:

Dixon continues: ??Bin Laden only became a ??terrorist? in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.?

Um, no. Bin Laden became a ??terrorist?? in US eyes after he was found responsible for orchestrating the bombing of the Goldmore and Aden Hotels in Aden, Yemen, on December 29, 1992, which killed two people, neither of them Americans. (More people would have died, but several bombs, including a truck full of them, had been found ahead of time and disarmed.) Bin Laden had targeted the hotel because it was at the time the temporary home of almost one hundred U.S. Marines, who had been stationed there for a supply operation. Unbeknownst to bin Laden, the Marines he had originally intended to harm had checked out of the hotels two days earlier. ??It was only after this bomb in Aden that first word came through of bin Laden??s connections and how he might target America,? said a former senior official at the CIA??s directorate of operations. (??The Road to Ground Zero,? The Sunday Times, January 6, 2002.) The CIA did not even set up a bin Laden ??station? inside its headquarters until January 1996. (Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 184.)

That??s about as much as I can take of shooting down Norm ??The Inventor? Dixon??s roller-coaster ride of hateful, anti-American bullshit. But before I hang up on this idiot, I think I??ll pass the ball to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden??s second in command. In 2001, he wrote a manifesto for Al-Qaeda called Knights Under the Prophet??s Banner. Here is what he says in it about this issue:

??While the United States backed Pakistan and the mujihideen factions with money and equipment, the young Arab mujihideen??s relationship with the United States was totally different.
Indeed, the presence of those young Arab Afghans in Afghanistan and their increasing numbers represented a failure of U.S. policy and new proof of the famous U.S. stupidity. The financing of the activities of the Arab mujihideen came from aid sent to Afghanistan by popular [Arab] organizations. It was substantial aid.
The Arab mujihideen did not confine themselves to financing their own jihad but also carried Muslim donations to the Afghan mujihideen themselves. Osama bin Laden has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujihideen that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years? [The Arabs] formed fronts that trained thousands of the Arab mujihideen and provided them with living expenses, housing, travel, and organization.
If the Arab mujihideen are mercenaries of the United States who rebelled against it as it alleges, why is it unable to buy them back now? Are they not counted now ?? with Osama bin Laden as their head ?? as the primary threat to U.S. interests? Is not buying them more economical and less costly than the astronomical budgets that the United States is allotting for security and defense??
---------------------------------------

So the conclusions here are the following:

1) Norm Dixon is an asshole, who has read and knows the truth but wants to lie to us and his readers simply to propel his hateful beliefs. How this man is allowed to work for a newspaper is beyond me.
2) The Green Left Weekly is just as much at fault for having this fraud on their payroll.
3) The United States did not ??fund, arm, and train? bin Laden. Just let it go, people.
4) Ron Paul is STILL wrong, and unfit for the presidency.

Fishman, in rushing to find a published article to counter my argument, you ended up trusting a pathetically incorrect and outrageously dishonest piece. Did you at all bother to verify Dixon??s ??reporting? as you were reading it?

I hope my merciless analysis of it will prompt you to consider taking the time to do that in the future. I would hate to see you, or anyone, fall prey to the nauseating misinformation of bullshit-cannons such as the Green Left Weekly.

Whoo! That??s it. That??s the end, right here, people. Congratulations to all who got this far. Wasn??t that easy on me either. Took me all morning to research and write this.

Can I get some kudos?