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The Real Story Behind American
Taliban John Walker Lindt and What
the U.S. Government Had to Hide
This book examines how America itself enables the rise of terrorism. A generation before
(the Afghan war) the United States had conspired to arm a violent rabble of Islamic
fundamentalists in order to eviscerate the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. When, like
Frankenstein's monster, the rabble broke out and began its violent rampage, why didn't
we take action? Why did we permit two of our supposedly close allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, free rein in advancing and financing Al-Qaeda? Was Washington asleep at the switch, or rather, sleeping with the devil?
Much of that answer is bound up in the crusade of one FBI agent, John O'Neill,
to sound the alarm in Washington before it was too late. O'Neill's struggle
to contain and defeat Al-Qaeda, a struggle that ended with his death on 9/11,
revealed a terrible thing: that the U.S. government itself was corruptly
compromised in the effort to stop terrorism. As accidental as the Spann-Lindh
encounter may seem in retrospect, it was also foreordained by cynical arrangements
born of Washington's own double dealing. Even after the events of September 2001,
that structure of corruption and misdirection continued. Thus, Afghanistan was invaded,
but Saudi Arabia, which provided Al-Qaeda $500 million as well as fifteen of the nineteen
hijackers, got off scot-free. Iraq, with no links to Al-Qaeda, was attacked, but Pakistan,
a criminal state where Bin Laden roams freely, was not. Why?
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