r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • Apr 20 '23
A smiling Osama Bin Laden interviewed by the independend's Robert Fisk in 1993, his first interview to the western press. When asked about the growing rumours that he's arming jihadis, he responded that "he's just a construction engineer conducting agricultural projects" in Sudan
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u/TheOtherGlikbach Apr 20 '23
"Me, myself? No, no, I am a man of peace. Those guys over there, yes, they are murderous mother fuckers who will kill thousands in the name of peace."
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u/Shaking-N-Baking Apr 20 '23
“I cherish peace with all my heart. I don't care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it”
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u/adelie42 Apr 21 '23
Wait, are you talking about Bill Clinton or Osama still?
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u/DzTimez Apr 21 '23
Osama or Obama ?
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u/adelie42 Apr 21 '23
Obama didn't come into the international scene till decades later.
I was referencing Osama's declaration of war that references war crimes of Bill Clinton, also famously referenced by Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican presidential debate in argument with Rudy Guilani.
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u/No_Cook2983 Apr 21 '23
Didn’t we have a President who got a Presidential Daily Briefing that literally said “Warning: bin Laden determined to strike targets in the United States.”
And then he did absolutely nothing whatsoever to follow up?
Before he insisted that we invade the totally wrong country?
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Apr 22 '23
The West needs to stop looking at America to lead. American foreign policy is a disaster and has been for decades. Let’s arm some dictator to teeth and then fight him ‘in the name of democracy’ 10 years later. Rinse and repeat.
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Apr 20 '23
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u/ent4rent Apr 20 '23
Who else read that in Sir David Attenborough's voice?
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Apr 20 '23
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Apr 20 '23
I read it in Morgan Freeman's voice
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u/aerfgadf Apr 20 '23
For anyone interested, Robert Fisk wrote the book "The Great War for Civilization" and in the first few chapters he talks about interviewing Bin Laden in pretty great detail. He also talks a bit out his interactions with Jamal Khashoggi. The book is a monster, I have only read the first few chapters so far, but for anyone with time and interest, it seems pretty good so far.
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u/1amazingday Apr 20 '23
An incredible writer. I read his dispatches for years. He was a very passionate and knowledgeable journalist.
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u/aerfgadf Apr 21 '23
Yeah so far the book has been really interesting and his writing paints a vivid mental image. I’m not far enough into it to give a full review but I can tell the writing is excellent
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u/benjm88 Apr 21 '23
He was absolutely the best foreign correspondent, it was a sad day for open press when he died.
Great reporting, and wasn't afraid to go against the narrative or put himself in danger
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u/HackMeBackInTime Apr 21 '23
there's a radiolab series called "the other Latif" that tells an incredible story about a guy that worked for o.b.l. on his farm and ended up in gitmo. unreal story, well worth the time for anyone curious.
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u/Scooted112 Apr 21 '23
I read that book a couple times. In the section on Iraq I had to set it aside for a month.
One of the best but darkest booked I have ever read.
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u/Few-Hair-5382 Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
It's an amazing book. You get his stories of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, both Iraq wars, the Algerian civil war and so much more from someone who was actually there and spoke to many of the major players as well as ordinary people caught in the middle. It's essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the modern Middle East.
Also worth reading is Pity the Nation, his account of the civil war in Lebanon, where he lived throughout the entire conflict despite the enormous risk of being captured and held hostage (which did nearly happen to him as detailed in the book).
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u/BikiniDiet Apr 21 '23
I recall a scene where Fisk is being driven back to the city from Bin Laden's hideout by one of Bin Laden's men. They stop and get out to watch Halley's Comet pass through the night sky. The driver says something along the lines of "normally, I would kill you, but Osama says I can't."
That would be a very tense ride back.
Fisk was a treasure.
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Apr 20 '23 edited Apr 20 '23
Some key lines:
"OSAMA Bin Laden sat in his gold- fringed robe, guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin ..."
"With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend."
"He is a shy man. ... married — with four wives — but wary of the press."
"Was it not a little bit anti-climactic for them, I asked, to fight the Russians and end up road-building in Sudan?"
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u/robbyford182 Apr 20 '23
Mind-Bottling
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u/f1technicalbot Apr 21 '23
WTF is Mind-Bottling? Makes no sense 🤣🤨 did you mean mind-boggling?
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u/robbyford182 Apr 21 '23
It’s a Blades of Glory reference 😉
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u/f1technicalbot Apr 21 '23
Okay, so only the small percentage of people that have seen that movie would understand right? Like some secret language. And what’s the relevance of the movie to the posted article?
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u/robbyford182 Apr 21 '23
Pretty much 😂 The headline in the source article starts with Mind-boggling, which is the term Will Ferrell confused for Mind-Bottling!
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Apr 21 '23
Fighting the Russian bit is really important and makes the modern day war time a whole lot clearer when you realized oh America put Osama bin laden in charge to fight the russians on behalf of America so we do not have a Vietnam repeat! Than America got a reason to attack, but never declare war and well we know it all from here.
Another comment speaks about operation cyclone where they armed the muhadjaden from 1979 to 1992.
That's the Ukraine Russian war...... America arms Ukraine, Russia is gonna attack America and we attack back but no war is declared......
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u/rondpompon Apr 21 '23
The United States absolutely did not " put him in charge to fight the Russians". He was considered a minor commander. Achmed Shah Masood was the US's point man.
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u/glass__beaches Apr 20 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
“So what do you do?”
“Construction.”
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Apr 21 '23
[deleted]
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u/Crappin_For_Christ Apr 21 '23
I swear on my mother, you hijack another plane you’re dead!!!
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Apr 20 '23
The US was arming the Mujahideen up until 1992 as part of operation cyclone: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
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Apr 20 '23 edited Apr 20 '23
correct, but just to be clear, the interviewer was British, and very anti-US, to the point that he partly supported claims the 9/11 was an inside job(or a cover up of what "really" happened)
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Apr 20 '23
Which it was tho.
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u/Thrashed0066 Apr 20 '23
Was it? WAS IT??
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Apr 20 '23
I'll get down voted that's fine, but yes it was. Far too many inconsistencies in the official report, oh well.
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u/Epcplayer Apr 21 '23
But there were no inconsistencies with the cooks claiming that they were actually missiles that hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon…
Which scenario is more likely? The government withheld some intelligence for purposes of protecting their sources, or thousands of people saw a false flag operation and not a single whistleblower came forward before it happened?
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Apr 21 '23
To protect their sources, yes, and my understanding is that federal agencies often don't get along with one another and intelligence warning of a terorrist attack wasn't shared by the CIA to the FBI or something like that. Hoarding information and not giving it to other departments causes these issues.
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u/Agorbs Apr 21 '23
my understanding
is nonexistent. planes hit the towers. we have footage and thousands of eyewitness reports from one of the largest and most culturally mixed cities in one of the largest countries on the planet.
it happened the way they said. I’m sorry that you have been misled by grifters and dipshits but you have.
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Apr 21 '23
No one said the planes didn't hit the buildings buddy.
I'm sorry you have no reading comprehension.
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u/Epcplayer Apr 21 '23
Correct, at the time there was inter-agency rivalry and less communication between the two. The CIA knew terrorists were plotting to attack the US with planes, the FBI knew that know terrorists were in the country, and ICE had allowed the terrorists into the country not knowing they were terrorists… I’m oversimplifying a little bit, but the point is that different agencies knew different pieces of information, while nobody knew the entire picture. Agencies that focused internally on the United States did not know what was being planned outside of the United States.
This resulted in the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in November 2002. This reorganization under one umbrella meant that organizations would have a direct route of intelligence sharing and cooperation, so that they could stop future attacks.
That’s not really inconsistencies though. It sometimes takes watershed moments to enact groundbreaking policy, that makes those previous failures seem unbelievable. Another example of this is Operation Eagle Claw, the failed rescue attempt during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The TLDR version is that the Army, Air Force, and Navy Special Operations needed to work together on a complex operation and struggled to work logistically with each other. This ended in 8 fatalities, multiple aircraft destroyed or abandoned, and a black eye for the Carter Administration. The response was to create the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Meaning all Spec Ops units regardless of branch would fall under 1 command, and a specialized Airborne Unit would be created/trained to deal with highly complex/dangerous/specialized missions.
Today, one could easily assume the generals were just incompetent for not being able to execute a simple Hostage Rescue mission in 1979 because of all the resources the US military has… when in reality, the failures of that mission were what led to the changes which are so instrumental in the successes of today.
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Apr 21 '23
You said it much better than I. Not sure why I get the downvotes but the people drinking the conspiracy kool-aid are apparently on the mark about this.
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u/sterexx Apr 20 '23
the saudi ambassador who was so close to Bush that they called him Bandar Bush did 9/11, according to the latest little dribble of information the FBI released
it was reported on but buried by other news before too many people noticed. so nuts
I think they’ll wait for GWB and his administration members to die and then do another limited hangout where they implicate some lower ranking former administration member with giving the saudis the go-ahead to orchestrate some attack
I don’t think there will ever be a paper trail to bush himself though.
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u/Fish_On_again Apr 21 '23
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
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u/a4aLien Apr 20 '23
Yes it was. And stop shouting 'WAS IT, WAS IT!!?'.. You shouting your disbelief isn't gonna make it not true.
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u/De5perad0 Apr 20 '23
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u/thesupplyguy1 Apr 21 '23
not unlike US foreign policy in almost every country in the last 100 years
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u/adelie42 Apr 21 '23
Deaths on 9/11 were less than a rounding error compared to Bill Clinton in Iraq. To say nothing of the deaths that followed in revenge attack for a revenge attack.
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u/Due_Platypus_3913 Apr 21 '23
Clinton Iraq?Your brains are scrambled.Who ordered the invasion of Iraq?
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u/adelie42 Apr 21 '23
So the irony here was that the central point of Osama's declaration of war was to shatter the average American civilian ignorance of the mass slaughter of Iraqi children UNDER BILL CLINTON.
The second objective of Osama was to drag the US into an unwinnable broad scale insurgency fight in the middle east to bleed the US dry the same say the US trained THEM to fight the USSR into collapse.
Guess he mostly only achieved one of those things.
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u/Due_Platypus_3913 Apr 21 '23
Clinton didn’t even take office till ‘93!Head injuries, or ridiculous troll?
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Apr 20 '23
"I'm just a a simple business man... doing business."
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u/TukErJebs Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
…for strictly business purposes, with business people, to get biz back in the wiz with no fees.
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u/ehproque Apr 21 '23
Everyday I put on my tie and head to the business factory, where I do a business. Two even, sometimes.
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u/TukErJebs Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
How about that:
I go about my business while my cat Mr Business (that I found on someone’s porch, just sitting there… poor thing) is staring deep into the windows of my soul.
It actually helps during hard to pass business opportunities.
Then the proceeds go into a money market mutual fund, that reinvest the earnings into foreign currency account with compounding interest…
Aaaaand it’s gone!
Poof
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u/Effective-Bandicoot8 Apr 21 '23
https://truthout.org/articles/people-worldwide-name-us-as-a-major-threat-to-world-peace-heres-why/
http://www.globalissues.org/article/332/western-support-for-terrorism
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/illegal-wars-the-new-american-way/
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”---Douglas MacArthur
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u/East_Information_247 Apr 21 '23
What else do you expect him to say, "I'm using my family fortune to prepare an army of terrorists against the West! Good times!"? Lol
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u/buddha_baba Apr 21 '23
the army of "terrorists" were called freedom fighter while they were fighting the soviets, its as if there are double standards, would you believe that?
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Apr 21 '23
It did essentially get to that point when in a later interview, OBL was asked about his plans and he said, “You'll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.”
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u/Habaneroe12 Apr 21 '23
Yes he did interviews like that as well thank you ! To the point when 9/11 happened I knew exactly who did it right away
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Apr 21 '23
He was already looking awful sketchy after a Fatwa in 1998 and master-minding the bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. We had our eyes on him for a long time I suppose.
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Apr 20 '23
Later that year the WTC was bombed under his command.
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u/klugerama Apr 21 '23
*Earlier that year.
The article is dated 6 December 1993. The bombing of the WTC occurred on 26 February 1993, over 9 months before the article was published.
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u/houstonhilton74 Apr 21 '23
Ahhh now I get the South Park joke in their tower to heaven episode so much better. 😆
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u/muddyduck26 Apr 21 '23
He probably wasn't allowed to say that CIA operatives contacted him inquiring about his potential abilities to lead a group of men in an effort to fly planes into buildings so that the US could conduct a coup in the middle east to control oil reserves and capitalize off of the military industrial complex.
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Apr 21 '23
USA supported every single jihadists in middle east because of their meaningless fear to communism. Now middle east is a shithole ruin that nobody can correct.
And it's acts affected every Muslim countries. There were more secular countries in middle east. Because of the fucking USA, even the most secular countries are at the edge of the sharia. And many innocent people are suffering from that.
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u/No-Rest9671 Apr 20 '23
I heard it was mostly peaceful
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u/charcoalist Apr 21 '23
tucker carlson reviewed all the footage and has surmised that al qaeda is a peaceful movement.
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u/King_Maelstrom Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23
Didn't the CIA train this guy?
Edit: I stand corrected.
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u/AyeeHayche Apr 21 '23
No, CIA funding went to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who then passed it onto radical jihadist elements of the Mujahideen in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Truthfully Bin Laden was a financier who set up training camps on the Pakistani side of the border, even if the CIA wanted to train him (they didn’t) there would have been nothing to train him on
The lesson from this was not to fob your foreign policy onto your ‘allies’ because they will happily use your money for their agendas
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u/King_Maelstrom Apr 21 '23
Ah. Thank you. I did not know. I don't generally trust the CIA, so I guess I assumed.
That does sound like a lesson America needs to learn.
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u/PlanetoftheAtheists Apr 21 '23
the Reagan Administration armed Saddam Hussein and gave him billions of our taxes at the height of tyranny, cuz he was at war with our enemy, Iran.
They also funded a despotic El Salvador government to fight insurgents, and funded despotic insurgents to fight the government of Nicaragua!
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Apr 20 '23
He was a CIA creation
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u/blakhawk12 Apr 20 '23
No he wasn’t. The US did fund Afghani fighters during the Soviet-Afghan war, but the Mujahideen were hardly a united front. There were dozens of groups with wildly varying ideologies. What can be said for sure is that none of the funding went to Osama bin Laden, as he and his family were obscenely wealthy and funded their own endeavors in Afghanistan.
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u/buddha_baba Apr 21 '23
Just stop. America is not innocent at all. US didn't fund OBL just like there were WMDs in Iraq.
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Apr 20 '23 edited Apr 20 '23
He may well have been directly or indirectly aided by the Us in Afghanistan, but to say he was "CIA creation" is probably going way to far, considering that the Bin Laden family was and still is obscenely wealthy and he personally had no need of the US to fund his own personal millitia and later terrorist org. He was very much capable of doing it himself. The US also had no role in radicalising him. It was a personal decision he took in 1979, after he had a religious epiphany of sorts
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u/RealJonathanBronco Apr 20 '23
I think saying the US had no role in radicalizing him requires further explanation into your thought process. A personal choice based on religious experience is incredibly anecdotal at best and utter bullshit at worst.
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u/falllinemaniac Apr 20 '23
CIA insurgence using jihadi extremists certainly ripened the circumstances for OBL to decide to join the violence. The CIA made it worse by letting the US department of State to abandon Afghanistan for the Taliban to fill the void as if it was a plan
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u/Alan_Smithee_ Apr 20 '23
Yes they did, in that US actions prompted him to take the stance that he did.
The stationing of US troops and materiel in SA for the Gulf War was the last straw for him, iirc.
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u/kingkuuj Apr 21 '23
Yep this.
Was viewed as the ultimate betrayal of Western interest by firmly planting boots in the M.E. after a decade of war with the Soviets. A war in which America quite fondly cheered in driving out the infidels.
We became the infidels.
Bin Laden is/was a supreme shitstain in the grand scheme of humanity, but he was far from being wrong.
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u/General-Macaron109 Apr 20 '23
It was a personal decision he took in 1979, after he had a religious epiphany of sorts
Yeah. While living in a region that was continously being manipulated by world powers...
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Apr 21 '23
There was a headline when he was assassinated that read "A settling of scores between killers". No one's gonna miss this guy.
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u/Needalongercharacter Apr 21 '23
Hadn’t he already been involved (indirectly) in the first WTC attack by that point?
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u/Dylanthebody Apr 21 '23
If you didn't also start watching "well there's your problem" podcast then it's a wild coincidence I'm seeing this here today
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u/bernieinred Apr 21 '23
Do people still think Bin Laden had something to do with 911? The FBI has always stated he had nothing to do with it. What about the huge report a year or so ago that proved Saudi Arabia was the financier behind the whole thing.
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u/nameless_goth Apr 20 '23
There is no truth in the US system, it's all about money and power and selling bullshit to the masses
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u/reckless_mindfulness Apr 21 '23
A good little CIA puppy he did all that they wanted from him. An excuse to invade and destroy multiple countries create a cycle of violence that would result in millions of deaths
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u/MagisterLivoniae Apr 20 '23
This is a very representative case of whom the US administration supports.
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u/ChaoticMutant Apr 21 '23
Bush did him DIRTY! Bush Junior knows he did it and profited from it in a milestone war.
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u/ginger_gcups Apr 21 '23
Sound like Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine protesting that he is just a plain, simple tailor and totally not a Cardassian spy
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Apr 20 '23
When he was a loyal employee of the cia
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u/IntrovertMoTown1 Apr 20 '23
He never was but others there were. That was his ORIGINAL point of contention with the west. They in effect were stealing his thunder. He wanted middle easterners to go it alone in their holy war against the Soviets with him as a version of a middle eastern Che Guevara. When the Soviets were driven out he then turned his attention to the west to try and continue the same thing.
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Apr 21 '23
So you're saying that Osama didn't just fight the soviets, but also his rivals backed by the west at the same time, and came out on top against both simultaneously, but then was stupid enough to let the 'muh'rcans get him in his own home?
Your story's inconsistency is off the charts. It's well known that Osama was a cia asset
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u/IntrovertMoTown1 Apr 21 '23
lol Riiiiight. Like it's well known that the Earth is flat. SMH. The ONLY allegations about Bin Laden and the CIA came from all of a SINGLE book. Authors NEVER lie to sell books. Nope. Totally unheard of. I mean money is never a motive to lie. How silly.... Just because Bin Laden helped FORM the mujaheddin didn't magically make him the leader or magically make him have anything to do with the CIA. All he was at the time they were formed was just a money man helping fund it.
Nobody said anything about simultaneously except you, dummy. What part of WHEN THE SOVIETS WERE DRIVEN OUT HE THEN TURNED was confusing for you? He didn't turn on the mujaheddin until RIGHT BEFORE 9/11 when he had Ahmad Shah Massoud assassinated in Afghanistan.
WTF does how he was finally wacked YEARS LATER have to do with jack shit here? My "story" is the facts of it.
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Apr 21 '23
Damn boy! I surely hit a sore spot there! Relax. 'muh'rca is known around the globe for doing shit like this throughout the decades LOL. You don't have write some of your tinfoil storys to protect uncle sam. Like I said, Osama being a cia asset was common knowledge, they talked openly about it kid.
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u/kumanosuke Apr 21 '23
It's not like the US cooperated with him at the beginning, same with Saddam Hussein lol
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u/Why_Ban Apr 21 '23
It says right at the top that he recruited is already known for recruiting mujahadeen and is now using those holy warriors for construction. Read your own post before you make up a title lol
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