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In the wake of the September 11 terror attack and the horrible loss of 5,000 lives two questions must be answered: Who is responsible? And how can such attacks be prevented in the future?

The US government's claim that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government that protects him were involved in the attack seems likely. But what is far more certain is that the United States CIA bears ultimate responsibility for the very existence of such groups and therefore deserves the ultimate blame for this outrage. The whole network of "fundamentalist" terrorist organizations, including Osama bin Laden's, was set up by the CIA during the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s. Before this, only a few tiny isolated groups existed. The US government, acting in close collaboration with Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence (ISI) and the Saudi Arabian government, created training grounds for these networks in Afghan refugee camps.

The CIA sent more than 35,000 mujahedeen fighters from around the world through these camps, where the mujahedeen were armed with $6-billion in US supplied weapons, trained in terrorist tactics and indoctrinated with a fanatic religious ideology that had been developed with US support at Egyptian and Saudi universities.
The CIA's aim was to construct an ideological and military counterweight to communism, to create a global jihad of Islam against the Soviet Union. This was not a covert operation-Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. all lavishly praised the mujahedeen as freedom fighters.

Yesterday's freedom fighters are today's terrorists. Osama bin Laden, a billionaire Saudi capitalist, was the richest and highest ranking Saudi to join the Afghan mujahedeen and was heavily backed by the ISI and Said Intelligence, under the close supervision of the CIA. With CIA help, bin Laden drew disparate groups of fighters into a global network of terror. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the terrorist leaders needed another enemy. They chose the United States.

In 1993 the US, realizing that bin Laden was no longer under their control, asked the Saudi government to strip him of his citizenship because of his "refusal to obey instructions issued to him." This is a clear admission that bin Laden had, up to that point, been following CIA orders. (Atlantic Monthly, May 1996, p. 36). By 1996 bin Laden had publicly declared the US his enemy and directed his network, trained and constructed with the full backing of the CIA, against American targets.

Who is responsible for the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC? In order to find out a thorough investigation must be conducted of those in the CIA who armed bin Laden and thousands of other terrorists. The CIA and government officials up to the level of the President directed the terrorists in killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians over many years. It is there the ultimate blame lies.

While the creation and continued support of these terror networks traces back to Washington, Congress now is urging that the CIA be allowed to hire human rights abusers and terrorists as counterweights to bin Laden. The CIA did nothing to stop this terror attack, could not even stop the Pentagon from being attacked, and instead supported the development of these terrorist networks. It is the core of the problem, not of the solution.

Nor do the US armed forces provide a solution. Military action against Afghanistan and other countries will add tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths to the five thousand already lost. Cutting off food supplies to Afghanistan and killing civilians will only punish the victims of the Taliban, not its defenders. War against innocent people will solve nothing.

We must rather demand that the US stop supporting terrorists around the world and the governments that nourish them. The only way to stop future attacks is to demand a TOTAL AND COMPLETE END TO ALL US ARMS EXPORTS AND ALL US MILITARY AID. These arms and financial support have fed terror and caused massive loss of innocent life around the world. We must demand as well a total halt of all CIA covert operations, which have done nothing to protect US residents but rather fed the terror networks.

Cutting off US military support to dictatorships, aggressive governments and terror organizations from Columbia to Israel to Pakistan will strangle the networks that breed terror and allow long-suffering peoples to throw off the bloodthirsty regimes that American power has imposed on them. That is the only way to stop terrorism. Until this occurs, there are reasonable security measures that can be taken to protect US residents without restricting our civil liberties. A simple policy of keeping the cockpit door locked at all times, a policy already adopted by many foreign airlines, would have prevented 18 people armed only with knives from killing 5,000. Such a policy can prevent airlines from being used as weapons in the future. There is no reason to live in fear of future attacks or be stripped of our civil liberties when there are readily available solutions.

The CIA and the US government have promoted fundamentalist religious groups and military dictatorships around the world in order to protect the IMF, the corporations, the world financial system and their globalization policies. They have been dividing workers along racial and religious lines to stop them from uniting against their real enemy.

In Pakistan, as in more and more countries, only religious or military dictatorship can enforce the austerity that the IMF and the corporations demand. In the US, the terrorist acts themselves are being used as an excuse to attacks immigrants, especially those from the Middle East and Central Asia. We must not only defend those under attack, but clearly point out those who are truly responsible.

We will battle against those who nourish the networks of terror - the CIA and the corporations who profit from the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. This is the only way to bring the real culprits to justice and end terror.

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