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CounterPunch January 28, 2003 Bin Laden and the CIA Is Bush Guilty of Mass Murder? By KURT NIMMO "How can you call George Bush a mass murderer?" a recent email asked. "In order for him to be classified as a mass murderer, he would have to kill all those people you say he's killed with his own hands." Let us begin by using the logic of government, in particular the government of California when it prosecuted Charles Manson over thirty years ago. Manson did not personally murder Sharon Tate, et al, he ordered his crazed minions to do it. In fact, when the murders occurred, Manson wasn't even at the scene. Yet he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death (a sentence that was never carried out after California repealed in the death penalty in the early 70s). If we use the above criteria, Bush is a mass murderer. But then presidents are never prosecuted for murder, let alone convicted. Bush ordered the US military to bomb Afghanistan -- an act resulting in approximately five thousand murders -- supposedly to get bin Laden and his cronies who are believed to have perpetuated the 911 atrocities. Yet bin Laden was not killed or were any of his high-ranking followers. The people who died were mostly peasants and lowly Taliban. Exactly zero percent, far as we know, of these people were responsible for 911. I will go one better. Bush didn't kill bin Laden because the Saudi is a CIA asset. Bin Laden was the "Pearl Harbor" the neocons have talked about now for years, well before Bush was elected (excuse me, appointed) to the presidency. It's common knowledge that bin Laden was funded by the CIA to fight the Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan. Andrew Evered Allen, a reclusive millionaire and CIA insider, admitted as much in court documents. He also admitted the CIA is attempting to overthrow the government of Myanmar, or Burma. Overthrowing governments and killing dissidents is what the CIA does. Mark Zapezauer has written extensively on CIA operations in Afghanistan under the Reagan regime. Reagan and the CIA spent between five and six billion dollars to bankroll and equip the drug trafficking Afghan mujihadeen, the largest and most expensive operation ever conducted by the CIA. As Ahmed Rashid has detailed, between 1982 and 1992 some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries trained and fought with the Afghan mujihadeen. Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, orchestrated the recruitment and arming of these vicious anti-Soviet warriors. One of these warriors was a young Saudi student, Osama bin Laden. It's not like the CIA to let an asset like that wither on the vine, especially considering the well-documented connections between Bush Republicans and Osama bin Laden going back 20 or more years. (Read Michel Chossudovsky's "Who Is Osama Bin Laden?") As Michael C. Ruppert points out, "Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorist acts but as a trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the world. Included in bin Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. ally), and rebel groups leading the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya." In other words, the CIA used the bin Laden network (the media calls it "al-Qaeda," although no such organization really exists) on several occasions. The CIA (and the Bush neocons) will use it again in the future. It's too valuable to eradicate. Bush and the neocon chicken hawks tapped into this CIA-cultivated network well before 911. The neo-fascist PNAC (Project for the New American Century) organization (a "think tank" founded by the warmongers Robert Kagan and William Kristol) essentially sketched out the Bush worldview and plan of attack for global dominance, which naturally includes plenty of mass murder (no problem for the butcher of Texas, who oversaw the execution of 152 humans while governor). As Australia's Sunday Herald reported last September, the Bush neocons-in-waiting (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dubya's little bother Jeb, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby) had PNAC contrive a "blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence... and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests," an ambitious conspiracy to be carried out by "the cavalry on the new American frontier." Read this artilce in full goto: http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo01282003.html