I have some personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (Democrat - 2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996) because, for close to 20 years, my representative in the 50th Congressional District of California was Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors.
Wilson and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee assignments in the House of Representatives - the Defense Appropriations Sub-committee plus the Intelligence Oversight Committee - from which they could dole out large sums of public money with little or no input from their colleagues or constituents.
Both men flagrantly abused their positions - but with radically different consequences. Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to game the system - retire and become a lobbyist - whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Clandestine Service's first "honored colleague" award ever given to an outsider and went on to become a US$360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan....
...The author of this glowing account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the CBS television news show 60 Minutes and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper.... However, he never once mentions that the "tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon....
...Crile repeatedly says that president Jimmy Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the mujahideen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion....
...Neither a reader of Crile, nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s....
... Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the US) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer, Osama bin Laden.... Charlie Wilson's war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire - and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars' worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves....
...Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi's summing-up for Cinematical: "Charlie Wilson's War isn't just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia."
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