Like Scheuer, the Times ignored the fact that al Qaida did not exist before 1999, according to experts like director of Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, Yossef Bodansky. Scheuer quotes from the Times:
"The main function of the camps was and is to produce quality and uniform religious and paramilitary — or insurgent —training to young Muslims...Since the mid- 1980s, the camps have produced large numbers of skilled fighters — who then return home to fight and train others — not swarms of Terrorists. The terrorists trained in the camps are more accurately viewed as al Qaeda's urban warfare arm, or special forces. The camps' dual-production capability has been obvious for nearly thirty years, but this was little noticed in a West fixated on the small number of terrorists these camps produced. That the camps were producing far larger numbers of well-trained insurgents did not receive a serious think-through — and still has not — and, meanwhile, the trainees learned, according to documents captured in Afghanistan, how to use: AK-47s, Stinger missiles, GPS systems, advanced land navigation, RPGs, map reading, demolition techniques, celestial navigation, hand-to-hand combat techniques, trench digging, weapons deployments, escape and evasion techniques, first aid, scientific calculations to plot artillery fire, first aid, secure communications, et cetera, et cetera."
The "et cetera," part that Scheuer left out from the New York Times referred to the training that the mujahedeen had received from a United States Army Special Forces manual which showed
''methods for fabricating explosives, detonators, propellants, shaped charges [you know, the ones that only Iran is capable of constructing], small arms, mortars, incendiaries, delays, switches and similar items from indigenous materials.''
The training included detailed knowledge for advanced terrorism, like manufacturing explosives from common household items and the conversion of basic electronic items like watches, toy remote controllers, and other items into sophisticated triggering systems - the knowledge that has spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, has served as the basis for traps that have killed American troops, even shaped charges. The camps trained paramilitary soldiers and hi-tech "super terrorists."
The Times article notes the excellence of the military training for a
"ragged band of fanatics, had achieved a level of competence that American military officials say was on par with the world's best guerrilla forces...One senior military instructor noticed a familiar streak of professionalism 'Wherever they got this, it was modeled after somebody's program. It was not made by some guys on some goat farm outside of Kabul.'''
Scheuer promotes the vision of the camps that the CIA wants us to believe, that of Islamic camps producing assassins and suicide bombers, while the virtuous American government and CIA did nothing about it. The army of non- Afghan Muslims and hundreds of paramilitary trainers who came out of these camps is blamed on Islamists who were brought together by us, but the CIA, as usual, tries to maintain "plausible deniability" in relation to the Afghan/Soviet war and the "Islamic threat" we created, which grew out of it. The former head of the CIA's "Bin Laden Unit" wants us to believe in the tortured claims of Shaykh al-Libi (that had been proven false by the time he wrote his book) "the camps housed WMD experts who were building weapons and training others to do so or to use them," even after it had become common knowledge within the US intelligence community that the charge was false.
Newsweek confirmed that a copy of the DIA report "would have been sent" to the Bush administration's National Security Council. The CIA also produced a document containing similar conclusions about al-Libi in January 2003, Hubris came out in 2004.
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