the Rushkies knew Al-Qaeda was Bad News 25 years ago.
I don't think so. Osama was still in Saudi back then, counting Daddy's money.
Osama didn't show up until 1981 or 1982, and his logistical and financial network wasn't renamed "Al Q'aeda" until years later. He wasn't even the Numero Uno in that org until his mentor -- an Egyptian, I think -- got smeared by the Russians.
I'd like to know someday how much CIA mentoring went into the logistical framework of Al Q'aeda. I guess those files are long since toast. But nobody on this planet organizes like Americans do -- I was told that by a former Luftwaffe flyer who was my high-school German teacher -- and I smell American organizational genius behind Al Q'aeda, back when it was supposed to be a backbone for mujahedin fighting the Sovs.
Of course, back then it was in a good cause, so I don't mean this as a criticism of the CIA, but Bo's point that the people we taught are surly ingrates, shouldn't be lost. They turned on us just because we aren't Moslems. We sent people to Arabia to keep Saddam out of the Persian Gulf oil fields and kick his army out of Kuwait, and Osama and his fellow-believers instantly got their underwear in a wad -- or at least they said they did, in order to challenge the House of Saud for the custodianship of the shrines of Islam.
Takes a special kind of person to wage a worldwide campaign of death and destruction on people who have helped him mightily in the past, over a particularistic religious beef, doesn't it?
Bo knows.