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Trump's Pentagon Bombs Caves Built by the CIA

KURT NIMMO | APRIL 22, 20171 COMMENT
After the United States dropped a GBU-43B, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombthe largest conventional bomb in its arsenalon a tunnel complex in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, both WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden tweeted the complex was built by the CIA.
"Those tunnels the U.S is bombing in Afghanistan? They were built by the CIA," WikiLeaks tweeted on April 13.
"Those mujahedeen tunnel networks we're bombing in Afghanistan? We paid for them," Edward Snowden tweeted on the same day.
Both cited an article published by The New York Times on September 11, 2005, four years after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
It is worth quoting the Times at length:
"The first time bin Laden had seen the Tora Bora caves, he had been a young mujahedeen fighter and a recent university graduate with a degree in civil engineering. It had been some 20 years before, during Washington's first Afghan war, the decade-long, C.I.A.-financed jihad of the 1980's against the Soviet occupation. Rising to more than 13,000 feet, 35 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Jalalabad, Tora Bora was a fortress of snow-capped peaks, steep valleys and fortified caves. Its miles of tunnels, bunkers and base camps, dug deeply into the steep rock walls, had been part of a C.I.A.-financed complex built for the mujahedeen. Bin Laden had flown in dozens of bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment from his father's construction empire, the Saudi Binladin Group, one of the most prosperous construction companies in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Persian Gulf. According to one frequently told story, bin Laden would drive one of the bulldozers himself across the precipitous mountain peaks, constructing defensive tunnels and storage depots." (Emphasis mine.)
This fact was not reported by the establishment media after the MOABMother of All Bombswas dropped in Nangarhar, allegedly on a faction of the Islamic State said to have occupied the tunnel and cave complex.
The Tora Bora caves, known locally as the Spīn Ghar cave complex, are also located in Nangarhar on the border with Pakistan.
According to reports, fighters from the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP) present at the complex when the MOAB was dropped were from Uzbekistan and Pakistan and included a group of Orakzais and other tribal fighters from the Tehrik Taleban Pakistan, veterans of Pakistan's tribal area insurgency who were forced across the border by the Pakistani military in the Zarb-e Azb offensive, launched in June 2015, according to Borhan Osman, Kate Clark, and Martine van Bijlert writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
Nangarhar is in the same region as the Khost province. In 1986 during the CIA engineered war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and the Pakistani intelligence service ISI worked together to build a tunnel complex in Khost.
Matthew Forney of Time Magazine visited part of the Tora Bora cave complex. "For the first time, the infamous man-made caves of Tora Bora were thrown open," he wrote on December 11, 2001. "These weren't the five-star accommodations with internal hydroelectric power plants and brick-lined walls, areas to drive armored tanks and children's tricycles, and tunnels like capillaries that have captured the world's imagination. Such commodious quarters might exist higher in the White Mountains, but these were simply rough bunkers embedded deep into the mountain. They were remarkable nonetheless."
Noted Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote in his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, bin Laden "helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding as a major arms storage depot, training facility, and medical center for the Mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border. For the first time in Khost he set up his own training camp for Arab Afghans, who now increasingly saw this lanky, wealthy and charismatic Saudi as their leader."
The Guardian (11/13/2000), The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (9/23/2001), the Hindu (9/27/2001) and other newspapers reported the CIA had helped build the complex (see 1986: Bin Laden Works Indirectly with CIA).
Although the establishment media briefly touched on Osama bin Laden's connections to the CIA prior to and shortly after the 9/11 attack, since that time any serious mention of the connection has either found its way to the memory hole or is dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory. The CIA insists it had no relationship with the Saudi later said to be assassinated on the orders of President Barack Obama (in fact, numerous news reports state bin Laden died of natural causes in December, 2001; this was reported by the Egyptian newspaper al-Wafd on December 26, 2001).
Omission, however, does not change historical fact. According to Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's first bin Laden unit, between 1980 to 1989 about $600 million passed through Osama bin Laden's charity fronts. Most went to Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known as Al-Kifah, and came primarily from rich donors in the Persian Gulf. The money was used to supply the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviets (See Robert Dreyfuss: Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam; The New Yorker also reported this on January 24, 2000 but the article has since disappeared from the internet). Elements of the Mujahideen eventually splintered into al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
As noted, MAK was also supported by Pakistani intelligence. "MAK [is] nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation," NBC News reported on August 24, 1998, well before the official narrative on Osama bin Laden changed following 9/11. A United Press International article published on June 14, 2001 states that "bin Laden worked closely with Saudi, Pakistani, and US intelligence services to recruit mujaheddin from many Muslim countries."
"With the support of Pakistan's military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, the U.S. began recruiting and training both mujahideen fighters from the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and large numbers of mercenaries from other Islamic countries," writes Phil Gasper. "Estimates of how much money the U.S. government channeled to the Afghan rebels over the next decade vary, but most sources put the figure between $3 billion and $6 billion, or more. Whatever the exact amount, this was "the largest covert action program since World War II"much bigger, for example, than Washington's intervention in Central America at the same time, which received considerably more publicity."
How much of this money was spent on the Khost and the Nangarhar province cave and tunnel complexes is unknown.
The MOAB bombing in the Nangarhar province is not the first time the US targeted caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. In November, 2001 the CIA urged then President Bush to attack the caves of Tora Bora where it was said Osama bin Laden was hiding (although this is improbable considering the Saudi was deathly ill and passed away a few weeks later).
"A fierce debate was raging inside the upper reaches of the US government. The White House had received a guarantee from [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf in November that the Pakistani army would cover the southern pass from the caves," writes Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11.
Musharraf and the Pakistanis, however, didn't live up to their end of the deal and al-Qaeda fighters were allowed to escape after a ceasefire arranged by US-allied warlord Haji Zaman Ghamsharik and Hazrat Ali. The US also made the escape possible by refusing Brigadier General James Mattis (currently Donald Trump's Secretary of Defense) to move around 4,000 troops into the Tora Bora area to seal off the caves. The New York Times later reported the Bush administration secretly concluded "that the refusal of Centcom to dispatch the marinesalong with their failure to commit US ground forces to Afghanistan generallywas the gravest error of the war."
The recent MOAB bombing and the earlier attack on Tora Bora reveal a distinct patternthe United States is in the business of covertly creating terrorist organizations and infrastructure and using these to perpetuate the war on terror and thus permitting a huge windfall realized by the military industrial complex and associated industries.
The Mother of All Bombs attack was not a strategic military move by the Pentagon. It is a political stunt designed to send a message to North Korea as tensions between the Hermit Kingdom and the United States reach an unprecedented level. It is also being used to shore up consensus for the use of large munitions. According to polls, the bombing is supported by nearly 70 percent of the American people.
According to former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the use of the weapon "an immense atrocity against the Afghan people."
Despite claims by the government the bomb killed 96 militants, we will never know for sure the extent of the damage or the real number of casualties. On Thursday, Defense Secretary James Mattis said during a trip to Israel he does not intend to discuss damage estimates. "For many years we have not been calculating the results of warfare by simply quantifying the number of enemy killed," Mattis said.
Journalists have not been allowed to access the area.