British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on Al-Qaeda

Today I see this graphic on the internet with a quote from this guy called Robin Cook. He said Al-Qaeda as a product of a western intelligence.

So I wanted to look into that because that is pretty startling and you can’t trust quotes you read on the internet are true so this what the story is.

In a column for the Guardian four weeks before his death, Cook caused a stir when he described Al-Qaeda as a product of a western intelligence: Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.

Munir Akram, Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations from 2002 to 2008, wrote in a letter published in the New York Times on January 19, 2008:

The strategy to support the Afghans against Soviet military intervention was evolved by several intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A. and Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. After the Soviet withdrawal, the Western powers walked away from the region, leaving behind 40,000 militants imported from several countries to wage the anti-Soviet jihad. Pakistan was left to face the blowback of extremism, drugs and guns

A variety of sources—CNN journalist Peter Bergen, Pakistani ISI Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, and CIA operatives involved in the Afghan program, such as Vincent Cannistraro—deny that the CIA or other American officials had contact with the foreign mujahideen or Bin Laden, let alone armed, trained, coached or indoctrinated them.

Bergen and others argue that there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land since there were a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight; that foreign mujahideen themselves had no need for American funds since they received several hundred million dollars a year from non-American, Muslim sources; that Americans could not have trained mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of them to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan; and that the Afghan Arabs were almost invariably militant Islamists reflexively hostile to Westerners whether or not the Westerners were helping the Muslim Afghans.

According to Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with bin Laden in 1997, the idea that “the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden …[is] a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. … Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. … The real story here is the CIA didn’t really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.”But Bergen conceded that, in one “strange incident,” the CIA appeared to give visa help to mujahideen-recruiter Omar Abdel-Rahman.^[282]

In his widely praised account of al-Qaeda, English journalist Jason Burke wrote:

It is often said that bin Laden was funded by the CIA. This is not true and, indeed, would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul-Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia’s cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets’ ‘Vietnam’ was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channelled through the Pakistani government, which in effect meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers, was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world

So you can make up your own mind and follow those links and look for more but as I see it there is may or may  not be a direct connection between the CIA and Bin Laden, but he is certainly part of the “Blow Back” from CIA operations in the Mid-East and South West Asia at a bare minimum.  Activity that has gone on since the CIA got started and we were trying to build empire there along with the UK and the Russians for a long time. This guy was a blow hard. He didn’t die under “Mysterious circumstances” it seems and there is some truth to what he was saying but he was saying it to be partisan and not to be “Transparent”. He was after all, a professional politician with no other redeeming values.