by Ben Atherton Updated Fri 9 Mar 2012
Photo: Father and son: Bashar al-Assad and Hafez al-Assad (Reuters)
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been accused of waging a brutal war against his own people as he fights rebels who want an end to his family's 40-year rule.
In doing so he is following in the footsteps of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who presided over the deaths of thousands of people when he unleashed his forces to crush an Islamist uprising in the early 1980s.
Bashar al-Assad had been showing signs of loosening his grip on the country until protests broke out last year.
"I admit to total incomprehension as to how this man has changed," French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who hosted Mr Assad in Paris in 2008, said recently.
"He was not a democrat, but two years ago he was not massacring women and children in Homs. He was not a murderer but he has become a murderer."
Below are key events in the modern history of Syria and the Assad dynasty:
1916
Diplomats from France and Great Britain draw up an agreement to carve up the Middle East into 'zones of influence' after the expected defeat of Ottoman Turkey in World War I. France will get the northern zone, including what are now Syria and Lebanon, while Britain will oversee the south, including Palestine, Jordan, and the Iraqi oil fields.
1918
The Sykes-Picot agreement, named after the diplomats who drew it up, is put into effect following the end of World War I.
1920
An independent Syria is established by Faisal I of the Hashemite dynasty, who had fought with Lawrence of Arabia against the Turks. His forces are defeated by the French, and French troops occupy Syria later that year.
Photo: Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi (centre), later Faisal I of Syria, with delegates including Lawrence of Arabia (in headdress third from right) at Versailles during the 1919 Paris peace conference. (Wikipedia)
1925-27
A rebellion launched by Sultan Pasha al-Atrash is put down by French troops amid heavy fighting in cities including Homs, Hama and Damascus - all flashpoints in the current rebellion.
Photo: Damascus in flames after a French air raid, October 18, 1925 (Wikipedia.fr)
1930
Hafez al-Assad is born into a minority Alawite family in western Syria.
1937
Syria and France negotiate a treaty to give Syria independence, but the government in Paris refuses to ratify it and World War II breaks out in 1939 before any progress can be made.
1940
France falls to Nazi Germany and Syria comes under the control of the puppet Vichy regime. The country is occupied by British, Commonwealth, and Free French forces in 1941.
Photo: Australian soldiers at the Vichy French Aleppo airfield, Syria, in June 1941. (Australian War Memorial/Wikipedia.fr)
1944
Syria is recognised as an independent state and French troops pull out in 1946, ushering in years of coups and political turmoil.
1958-61
Syria and Egypt unite under the banner of the United Arab Republic, with the head of state being Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, before Syria secedes following a military coup.
1963
The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party engineers another coup which gives its members a majority in a new cabinet.
1964
Now a high-ranking Ba'ath Party official, Hafez al-Assad becomes a general; in 1965 he will become commander-in-chief of the air force; by 1966, he is minister of defence.
1965
As his father rises through the ranks, Bashar al-Assad is born in Damascus.
Photo: The Assad family in the early 1970s. The young Bashar al-Assad stands in front of his father at far left. (Wikipedia)
1967
Pre-emptive Israeli strikes on Egyptian forces develop into the Six-Day War, with Syria and Jordan joining Egypt in attacks on the Jewish state. Israel prevails, and occupies Syria's Golan Heights along with the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Sinai peninsula.
Photo: Israeli tanks advance towards Syrian positions in the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War (Wikipedia)
1970
Hafez al-Assad seizes power in an internal Ba'ath Party coup. Assad loyalists are installed in key posts throughout the government. His regime builds up Syria's military and develops a cult of personality around the leader while ruthlessly suppressing internal dissent. But overall living standards rise and Syria experiences a relatively long period of stability
1982
Hafez al-Assad sends his troops in to crush a rebellion by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Up to 10,000 people die as troops bombard the city of Hama. During this period Syrian forces also take part in the civil war in neighbouring Lebanon.
Photo: A Syrian soldier and a member of the pro-Syria Amal militia next to a portrait of Hafez al-Assad in west Beirut, 1987.
1994
Bashar al-Assad, studying as an optician in London, is recalled to Syria as heir-apparent after his elder brother dies in a car crash.
Photo: Syrian girls chant slogans praising president Hafez al-Assad after he was elected to his fifth seven-year term in 1999 (Reuters: Khaled Al Hariri)
2000
Hafez al-Assad dies at the age of 69. Bashar al-Assad is elected unopposed as president with a claimed 97 per cent of the vote.
Photo: Bashar al-Assad at his father's funeral in Damascus, June 2000 (AFP: Rabih Moghrabi)
2007
Bashar al-Assad gets another seven-year term as president. During this period he makes cautious overtures to the West, with the so-called Damascus Spring leading to the release of hundreds of political prisoners. But Amnesty International says the Assad regime is still torturing and persecuting political opponents.
2011
Protests inspired by the wider Arab Spring movement break out in Syria in late January. Syrian forces violently put down a number of protest rallies. In June, Assad promises moves towards reform - but the repression continues. By the end of the year, Syria has been suspended by the Arab League and Assad's troops are engaged in a war with rebel forces, led by deserters gathered under the loose banner of the Free Syrian Army.
Photo: Syrian demonstrators protest against Bashar al-Assad on Christmas Day, 2011 (Reuters)
Source: ABC/Wikipedia/AFP/Reuters
Timeline: Syria and the Assads - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
For most people, the Internet arrived sometime between 1993-1995, but it did not just miraculously come into being. It is a long story of an almost accidental evolution of a government-funded military experiment named “ARPAnet” into today’s ubiquitous, commercial Web. Its evolution can be linked to ancient information-processing devises such as the abacus and travelling through the years to a series of rapid technological changes during the late nineteenth century--such as the typewriter, punch clock, cash register, and four-function calculators--that provided new ways of processing information. In the 1960s, a group of “anarchist hippies” from different organizations began realizing the potential which computer technology had for revolutionizing communication in ways that had not happened since the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago.
The ARPAnet
Worried that the U.S. was falling behind in terms of scientific achievement after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA had as its state mission to keep the U.S. ahead of military rivals by pushing research projects that promised significant advances in defence-related fields. ARPA had several project offices that funded research in different areas depending on the changing priorities of the Department of Defense (Burman 2003). One of these divisions, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) headed by J.C.R Licklider of Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) became a major funder of computer science in the United States and the driving force behind research into areas such as graphics, artificial intelligence, and networking.
One of Licklider’s visions was to create an “intergalactic network” of computers and people. His influential 1960 paper “Man-Computing Symbiosis” was a revolutionary conceptual shift because it cast computers not as number-crunching machines but as an exciting new communication medium. After Licklider left ARPA for MIT, his successor, Robert Taylor, remained committed to Licklider’s “intergalactic network” because it allowed ARPA researchers from around the country to access various computers in different locations (Abbate 1999).
Laying the Foundation of the Internet
Paul Baran of the United States Air Force-backed Research and Development organization (RAND) would help Lickliders’ dream become a reality by creating what would become the foundation for the Internet. In 1962, Baran was commissioned by the Air Force to research a decentralized, survivable way to maintain control over its missiles in the case of a nuclear attack. Baran’s final proposal was what was called a “packet-switched network.”
Unlike the traditional network system which channelled information through one source to be processed and then routed somewhere else, packet switching essentially split large sections of data into little sections called “packets” that could be sent through different routes which all led to the same place. Upon arrival, information would be reassembled (Segaller 1998). Packet switching allowed dynamic rerouting--in other words, information could to be routed and rerouted quickly to any computer.
Baran talked to Robert Taylor of ARPRA who pushed the project forward by awarding what was called the “ARPAnet” contract to BBN. The team at BBN proposed that this network be composed of what was called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), or routers that were connected with modems that would process data packets. BBN chose Honeywell’s DDP-516 to build the first IMP and, in 1969, the very first rudimentary peer-to-peer network was established when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and succeeded in transmitting the “l” and the “o” in the word “login” to Stanford before the system crashed. Hence, the first message on the Internet was “lo” An hour later, they were successful in transmitting the full “login.”
Later that year, four major computers at major universities (UCLA, University of Utah, Stanford Research Institute, and UCSB) joined the network, with other universities soon following (Burman 2003). As the network grew, however, ARPAnet managers realized that the original system supported only client-server applications like Telnet and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and couldn’t handle host-to-host connections. These limitations were overcome with the NCP, or Network Control Program, which allowed communications between different hosts running on the same network.
Becoming an ARPAnet user, however, was difficult. The first challenge for any potential user was getting access to the network. For a site to get an ARPAnet connection, someone would have to have a research contract with ARPA or had to pay the cost of setting up their node which, in 1972, might run anywhere between $55,000 and $107,000. When a site was approved, ARPA had to order a new IMP from Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, reconfigure the network to include the new node, and arrange with AT&T for a telephone link between the new node and the rest of the ARPAnet. Once a site was connected to ARPAnet, though, access to its controls was much looser (Abbate 1999). In theory, access within each site was to be limited to individuals doing work for ARPA, though few sites actually enforced that policy.
Many members of ARPAnet suspected that ARPA managers were aware that unsanctioned users were on the network and did not object. Unauthorized users who contributed improvements to the system were even tacitly encouraged. In fact, “science fiction lovers” mailing lists were apparently allowed to operate over ARPAnet provided they generated enough traffic to allow ARPA managers to observe the network’s behaviour under the load. Another unofficial but tolerated activity was Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg, which made an effort to make historically significant documents available over the network. Hart was not an ARPA researcher but had acquired an account at the University of Illinois and began by posting the Declaration of Independence on his site’s computer in December of 1971. Project Gutenberg is still in operation on the Internet to this day (Abbate 1999).
Once on the network, users had access to some of the most advanced computer systems in the U.S., but using it was difficult or unappealing, and new sites were given little direction on how to get started. In addition, navigating what was available on the ARPAnet was difficult because the network search tools that Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) users would later take for granted did not exist. ARPAnet, however, would change forever with the creation of “net notes” (later “email”) created by Ray Tomlinson. Email quickly became the network's most popular and influential service, surpassing all expectations. Email was not included in the original blueprint for the network, and its success represented a radical shift in the ARPAnet’s identity and purpose. The network was originally built to provide access to computers rather than to people, but email and emailing created a deeper level of community among ARPAnet users (Murphy 2002).
In 1972, ARPAnet was successfully demonstrated to the International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington in the presence of AT&T and other international telephone companies. In July, 1974, the ARPAnet was transferred to the Defense Communication Agency as an operational network where it continued to perfect protocols and expand the ARPAnet to function internationally by satellite links. Over the course of the decade, the ARPAnet, which was a single network that connected a few dozen sites, would be transformed into the Internet, which was a system of many interconnected networks, capable of almost indefinite expansion (Burman 2003).
Designing the Internet
NCP, the first standard networking protocol of ARPA (now called DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), was rapidly becoming unable to accommodate growing network traffic. Vinton (“Vint”) Cerf and Robert Kahn created the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in the mid-1970s, which added flexibility and sophistication to the network. In fact, the move from NCP to TCP/IP is considered by many people as the beginning of the Internet (the first use of the word “Internet” was in a 1974 paper by Cerf and Kahn on Transmission Control Protocol). TCP did more than just set up a connection between two hosts--it also controlled the rate of data flow between the hosts, compensated for errors by retransmitting lost or damaged packets, and verified the safe arrival of packets using acknowledgments (Segaller 1998).
Cerf and Kahn planned for TCP to replace NCP as the ARPANET’s host protocol and be the standard host protocol in every subsequent network built by ARPA. They also proposed splitting the TCP protocol into two separate parts: a host-to-host protocol and an internetwork protocol (IP), which would become known as TCP/IP. IP would pass individual packets between machines and TCP would be responsible for ordering these packets into reliable connections between pairs of hosts.
In March 1981, Major Joseph Haughney announced that all ARPAnet hosts would be required to implement TCP/IP in place of NCP by January of 1983. The replacement became a major ordeal and Dan Lynch, a computer systems manager, made up buttons that read “I Survived the TCP Transition.” After converting ARPAnet to TCP/IP, DARPA created a separate MILnet site equipped with encryption devices and other security measures to support their military functions while ARPAnet would continue to host civilian academic researchers. ARPAnet’s military roots would continue to be downplayed and, in 1987, the supervision of the Internet was transferred from the Department of Defense to the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Abbate 1999).
Launching the Internet
As the Internet grew, its backbone network, ARPAnet, was unable to keep up. ARPAnet managers and the NSF agreed to connect the ARPAnet sites to the NSF’s regional networks and have the NSFnet take over as the backbone of the Internet. NSFnet had higher-speed lines and faster switches, and it could handle more traffic. Since the NSF and DARPA were already operating their network services jointly, the merger would be relatively painless. During 1988 and 1989, various DARPA sites transferred their host connections from ARPAnet to NSFnet. On 28 February 1990, ARPAnet was formally decommissioned, the remaining hardware dismantled, and military operation of the Internet came to a close. Soon after the completion of NSFnet’s new and faster T1 lines, Internet traffic increased rapidly, and its T1 lines are usually considered the tool which opened the Internet to the world (Burman 2003).
In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) developed the next phase of the development of the Internet, the vocabulary of the World Wide Web, while the debut of the first browser, Mosaic (whose developers founded Netscape), provided easy access to information dispersed through servers all over the world by means of the Web’s hyperlinks. By 1995, the Internet had grown into a new communications paradigm. It had started as a network offering file sharing, remote login, and resource sharing for a small group of scientists and had evolved into a global network accessible by anyone who had an ordinary telephone and a personal computer (Murphy 2002).
In 1995, the NSF privatized the Internet and contracted with several companies to carry most of its traffic. Today these companies, or Internet Service Providers (ISPs), include Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, and IBM. There are also smaller ISPs such as cable and DSL companies. Within these backbones are IXPs, or Internet Exchange Points, that allow networks to exchange data. For example, while Verizon and Sprint provide a part of the Internet’s backbone, they aren’t connected--they need an IXP to connect.
Currently, there are several organizations that oversee the Internet’s protocols and infrastructure to ensure that information from one computer to the next can be can be understood. These organizations include The Internet Society, The Internet Engineering Task Force, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Burman 2003). But while the framework of the Internet is carefully designed and cared for, the content continues to be extremely democratic and free.
Future of the Internet
The Internet’s democratic nature has made it seen as needing careful regulation in countries such as China and India. However, as one scholar argues, the seemingly boundless freedom of the Internet is not guaranteed. Some scholars argue that the generative power of the Internet could be on a path to lockdown by Internet-entered products such as iPods, iPhones, Tivos which can’t be easily modified by anyone except vendors. Instead of using personal computers which can run any program from any source without approval from a third party, we are entering a world where centralized approval becomes necessary. These scholars continue to assert that the Internet needs to remain “Wikipedia-ean” in which there are no clear boundaries between users and creators. If the Internet is to continue as an innovative means of collaboration, it will need to preserve its legacy of adaptability and its democratic nature (Declan 2007).
Whatever its future holds, the Internet sits at the centre of virtually all media crossroads.
-- Posted January 12, 2009
References
Abbate, Janet. 1999. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Burman, Edward. 2003. Shift!: The Unfolding Internet Hype, Hope, and History. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.
McCullagh, Declan. November 28, 2007. “News.com Talk: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” News.com.
Murphy, Brian Martin. 2002. “A Critical History of the Internet.” Critical Perspectives on the Internet. Ed. Greg Elmer. New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Segaller, Stephen. 1998. Nerds: A Brief History of the Internet. New York, NY: TV Books.
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
Published: November 28, 2011
LONDON — As the novelist George Orwell observed, he who controls the past controls the future, so it is perhaps not surprising that Orwell’s home country is the latest setting for a battle over what history is and how it is taught. In recent weeks, two conferences here have seen the polite tones of academic debate shattered as historians traded accusations of racism, dumping down and just plain ignorance.
David Cannadine, a professor of history at Princeton, at a conference in London last week on the teaching of history. He said claims of a crisis were based on the myth of a golden age.
At the same time Michael Gove, the education minister, has been urged by some of the country’s most eminent historians to abandon his plan to revamp the way history is taught in schools.
David Starkey, the author of several books about Henry VIII and his wives and a frequent guest on British television programs, argued at a historians’ conference in London this month that schools ought to focus more on Britain’s “own culture.”
When another historian argued that contemporary Britain was “rather diverse,” Mr. Starkey replied: “No it’s not. Most of Britain is a mono-culture,” adding that large parts of the country were “unmitigatingly white.” Mr. Starkey made headlines last summer after claiming, in comments on several days of riots, that Britain’s poor whites had “become black; a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion.”
Last week, David Cannadine, a professor of history at Princeton, told Mr. Gove that claims there is a crisis in the way students are taught history are based on the “myth of a golden age” when boys and girls could recite all the kings and queens of England. Speaking at a conference at the University of London to launch his new book, “The Right Kind of History,” which examines the way the subject has been taught for the past century, Mr. Cannadine said: “Complaints about the inadequacy of teaching history in English schools have been going on for as long as history has been taught in English schools.”
Currently high school students in Britain are allowed to stop studying history at the age of 14 — unlike most other European countries, Mr. Cannadine said. If the government wanted to improve the state of historical understanding it should make the subject compulsory until the age of 16, he said. But the curriculum, he said firmly, “really ought to be left alone.”
Because it tells a country’s own story, history is often a controversial subject. Last year in Texas, the State Board of Education voted to require that textbooks used in the state’s schools portray conservatives in a more positive light and emphasize the role of Christianity in American history. The board’s initial decision to delete Thomas Jefferson from a list of thinkers whose work inspired other revolutions was widely derided — and eventually reversed. But the Texas board did impose many other changes to the state’s history curriculum.
In Germany in the 1980s the Historikerstreit, or historians’ quarrel, began after Ernst Nolte, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, published an article in which he described the Holocaust as essentially “a reaction, born from fear” of the Russian revolution. His argument that Germans should stop apologizing for their past, and that Hitler’s actions were “understandable, and up to a certain point, indeed, justified,” prompted a dispute that raged for several years.
Richard Evans, at the time a young historian at the University of East Anglia, took an active role in the controversy, pointing out the similarity between some of Mr. Nolte’s arguments and those long used by anti-Semites in Europe and the U.S.
The current British battle began in the spring of 2010 when the Harvard professor Niall Ferguson made a speech at the Hay literary festival complaining “in this country, the vast majority of school pupils learn only about Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King,” adding that his own children had never been taught about the original Martin Luther. Mr. Gove, who was in the audience, raised his hand and asked “Will Harvard let you spend more time in Britain to help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum?”
It was later announced that Mr. Cannadine and Simon Schama, a British historian who teaches at Columbia, had also been recruited to help revamp the national curriculum. Then in March Mr. Evans, now the Regius professor of history at Cambridge, launched an attack on the whole project in The London Review of Books.
Mr. Evans accused the government of wanting to foist “a celebratory history” that would gloss over the darker parts of Britain’s past — and neglect the contribution of darker peoples to the country’s heritage. The result, he warned, “would be a radically ignorant form of dumping down.”
Mr. Ferguson denied any such intention. “I don’t know why he feels the need to create the fiction that I’m some kind of reactionary monster — a hate figure for the febrile liberal imagination,” he said in an interview. “Anybody who reads my stuff knows I’m not arguing for the imposition of some kind of Tory meta-narrative.”
Mr. Evans, who attended both recent conferences, said that the effort to “convert history teaching in the schools into a means of forging a national identity went beyond party politics.” The former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown “was also very keen on this,” he said.
Mr. Ferguson also found an unlikely defender. Eric Hobsbawm, author of “The Age of Revolution,” described Mr. Ferguson as “a very smart man, and a very good historian. Loath as I am to take the Tory line, on this issue they have more of a point than most of us academics are prepared to admit.”
“History is supposed to teach people perspective and proportion,” Mr. Cannadine said, bemoaning the way the current debate has become “polarized around a set of entrenched positions: those who stress the importance of historical knowledge — facts — over historical skills, those who want a narrative of national greatness versus a warts-and-all portrait of the past, and those who want to focus on the country you’re in rather than our relationship with the broader world.”
Part of the fault, Mr. Cannadine said, lies in the nature of the discipline. “If you’re taught geometry in Adelaide or Vancouver it’s pretty much the same subject. History is taught very differently.
“I was much struck by the fact that this discussion of how history is taught was totally devoid of historical perspective. What’s being said now has been said for 100 years,” Mr. Cannadine said.
At last week’s conference, Mr. Gove partially disarmed his critics. Though he complained again about the neglect of British history in favour of either “Hitler and the Henrys” or a unit on the American West, which he referred to as “cowboys and Indians,” he added: “It’s dangerous if politicians impose too many of their own prejudices on the national curriculum.”
He also said he had “a totally open mind” on whether history should be taught till age 16.
He refused to abandon plans to revamp the curriculum, saying he thought “much more history should be taught” and in a “more demanding” way. But in an exchange with Mr. Evans, he conceded the importance of placing British history in a global context.
“He back pedalled a little,” Mr. Cannadine said afterward. Mr. Gove, he added “is clearly someone we can work with. And we have to work with him.”
Written by Alex Newman
The popular narrative surrounding the life of Osama bin Laden is filled with questions, intrigue, and misinformation. Though he ultimately became one of the most loathed figures in the American psyche, it’s important to remember that bin Laden was once a good friend of the U.S. government. In many ways, he can even be considered a creation of American officials and their allies. His Mujahedeen, or Islamic warriors, were even armed, trained, supplied and financed by America and some of its allies.
Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, writing in the U.K. Guardian, had some interesting observations. Noting that “throughout the 80s [bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan,” Cook called bin Laden “a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies.” And while not everybody agrees that it was an accidental miscalculation, the fact that he worked with the U.S. government and other Western powers is beyond dispute.
But how and why did bin Laden and the loose confederation of Muslim extremists known as the Mujahideen — supported by the U.S. government and its allies at various other times in recent decades, too — ultimately become so rabidly anti-American? The answers, as with everything about bin Laden, are complicated and debatable.
Bin Laden was born into a life of privilege in Saudi Arabia, the son of a supremely wealthy businessman with a construction empire. After developing a passion for Islam, likely during his college years, he became outraged by the Soviet infidel invasion of Afghanistan. Like other men of faith, he saw the communist menace as a threat to his religion. So bin Laden traveled to the region, recruited soldiers, and played an important role in defeating the barbaric communist occupation and its puppet regime.
In a 1995 interview, bin Laden boasted that his Islamic fighters in Afghanistan were trained by U.S. forces. "I created my first [military] camps, where these volunteers underwent training led by Pakistani and American officers," he told a French newspaper. "The arms were supplied by the Americans.... Our objective was the Islamic Revolution." Ironically, the CIA lessons in terror, combat and sabotage provided to the Jihadists were laced with fanatical Islamic teachings.
And there was probably a reason for it. "These [establishment-backed] regimes [like the Taliban] and organizations [such as bin Laden’s] are serving a hidden — though increasingly visible — purpose ... built into menacing perils to, among other things, justify the transformation of the UN's blue helmets into global gendarmes capable of enforcing UN dictates on all peoples and nations," William Jasper wrote in a 1998 cover story about bin Laden and "American-made terrorists" for The New American magazine.
As it turns out, the U.S. government was deliberately sending the most aid to elements of the Mujahideen that were especially rabid in their anti-American and anti-Western sentiments. One of the largest Mujahideen recipients of U.S. support — the Hekmatyar — was actually collaborating with the communist invaders the CIA was supposedly trying to expel. The U.S. government sent stinger missiles, heavy weaponry, money, and trainers to the Muslim fanatics in massive convoys. And the biggest beneficiaries of the assistance were probably the worst suited to receive it.
After the Soviet Union was expelled from Afghanistan, bin Laden and his men would eventually turn on their former allies — using their U.S.-provided weapons, ideology, and training on new targets. It appears that the problems may have started when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the early '90s and the Saudi dictatorship became concerned that its own kingdom might be next.
Bin Laden offered to do everything in his power to repel a feared Iraqi assault on Saudi Arabia. But, he was adamantly opposed to inviting foreign troops onto what Muslims believe is holy soil. The Saudi royal family, however, allowed U.S. and allied forces into the country anyway for what then-President George H.W. Bush called an effort to forge a “New World Order” by repelling the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Bin Laden was enraged, or so the story goes. And finally, after government pressure failed to silence him, he was exiled from Saudi Arabia, taking refuge under the hard-line Islamic dictatorship ruling the Sudan. It was there bin Laden reportedly decided that eliminating corrupt Arab dictatorships and replacing them with true Islamic governments free of Western influence would require attacks on the source of their power: the Western regimes — and the U.S. government in particular — that were propping them up.
In the mid '90s, bin Laden moved back to Afghanistan and reportedly announced “Jihad,” or Holy War, against the U.S. government. His primary goal, he said, was to drive American troops from Islamic lands and eliminate U.S. and Western support for the corrupt regimes terrorizing much of the Muslim world.
The name al-Qaeda, which in Arabic means “the base,” was originally applied to the CIA’s database of thousands of friendly Muslim extremists who were recruited, armed, and trained by the U.S. government. But under the al-Qaeda banner, bin Laden would inspire legions of Muslims angry at American meddling in the Middle East to unleash a reign of terror upon his new-found enemies.
As part of the loose alliance of Islamic fundamentalists labeled al-Qaeda — though without any true global organizational structure such as the one mythologized in the press — bin Laden and his men reportedly struck at America 1998. According to a federal indictment, they were involved in the bombings of two American embassies in Africa. After that, bin Laden’s men reportedly drove C4 explosives into a U.S. Navy ship. They were also suspected in other bombings.
But incredibly, the U.S. government and various Western intelligence agencies were once again helping bin Laden’s Islamic warriors in the late '90s, even as then-President Clinton was pretending to show concern about bin Laden by bombing a pharmaceutical plant in the capital of Sudan. This time around, the American assistance to the Islamic extremists was provided in the former Yugoslavia via the al-Qaeda-linked Kosovo Liberation Army.
"Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan," former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissett told the Canadian National Post. "There is no question of their participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented." Afterward, many Islamic extremists and Mujahedeen stayed in the region, even receiving passports from the U.S.-backed Muslim government in Sarajevo.
After 2001, the story of bin Laden’s becomes particularly murky. Credible sources have been reporting his death since late 2001. At the same time, however, other sources — including U.S. officials — have claimed that bin Laden was deliberately being allowed to escape by high-level authorities in America, Pakistan, and other nations on more than a few occasions.
According to the official assassination narrative, which has continued to change dramatically since May 1, bin Laden managed to elude capture for more than a decade. President Obama said he was shot in the head after finally being tracked down to a compound outside the capital of Pakistan.
Where bin Laden may have been during that decade — assuming he was actually alive — is currently unclear. Obama’s terror czar suggested he was in the Pakistani compound for the last five or six years. But even if he had been alive and hiding there, he almost certainly was not any sort of leader any longer, according to analysts.
But Islamic fundamentalists affiliated with what has come to be known as al-Qaeda are still around. And almost incredibly, they’re still receiving support from the American government in Libya and elsewhere.
The reality is that bin Laden and his fellow Muslim extremists enjoyed — and in many respects Muslim extremists continue to enjoy — a sort of love-hate relationship with the American government. The militants are often useful to Washington, pursuing the same goals as the U.S. foreign policy establishment from time to time. Even today, the American government is arming, funding, training, and supporting Islamic extremists in the joint effort to oust former U.S. ally Muammar Ghaddafi in Libya.
As The New American reported, senior al-Qaeda leaders were among the first to openly back the rebellion in Libya. The U.S. government, NATO, and the United Nations came in later, providing air support and weapons to the militants. Some of the leaders of the uprising are in fact associated with al-Qaeda by their own admission. The U.S. government admits it, too.
In fact, a former “high risk” Guantanamo Bay detainee assessed as a “probable” member of al-Qaeda and affiliated terror groups is now a U.S. ally and a leader in the Libyan rebellion. Another al-Qaeda fighter from Guantanamo was actually working for British and Canadian intelligence while blowing up churches in Pakistan. And the leader of another al-Qaeda-linked organization that was sending fighters to battle U.S. and international forces in Iraq is also leading the Libyan uprising.
Critics of America’s foreign policy have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of supporting terrorists, extremists, and dictators for as long as the U.S. government has been doing it. But under Republican and Democratic control alike, the unconstitutional U.S. government meddling around the world has only been accelerating. Today, America is involved in three openly announced wars in foreign countries and many more covert ones. And unfortunately for the American people, the consequences can be deadly.Photo of Osama bin Laden: AP Images
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