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In reply to the discussion: The GOP is one of the most dire threats this country has ever faced [View all]canuckledragger
(1,992 posts)CIA trained & armed back in the 80's to fight the Russians in Afghanistan
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1245.htm
BIN LADENS BEGINNINGS
As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscows invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistans state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIAs primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscows occupation.