The CIA is Responsible for World Terrorism

The spread of terror as a tactic is largely an outgrowth of American cold war foreign policy. After Vietnam, the American government shifted from a strategy of direct intervention in the fight against global Communism to one of supporting new forms of low-level insurgency by private armed groups.

"In practice, it translated into a United States decision to harness, or even to cultivate, terrorism in the struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet," argues Mahmood Mamdani in his new book, "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror" (Pantheon). The real culprit of 9/11, in other words, is not Islam, but rather non-state violence during the final stages of the stand-off with the Soviet Union. Using third and fourth parties, the C.I.A. supported terrorist and proto-terrorist movements in Indochina, Latin America, Africa and, of course, Afghanistan,

"The real damage the C.I.A. did was not the providing of arms and money, but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence — the formation of private militias — capable of creating terror." The best-known C.I.A.-trained terrorist, Mamdani notes dryly, is Osama bin Laden.

 

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