Who Is Osama Bin Laden? Yahoo! Users Want to Know

We still have "Doonesbury". Good grief, Charly Brown!

There's no excuse for a child not to know who bin Laden is! As far back as I can remember, I knew who Hitler was, and he was certainly before my time!

I found it shocking that anyone would have to ask who #Osama bin Laden was!

13-17 year olds are not interested in current events. They are into the opposite sex. :)

Let's see: bin Laden was the CIA's point man when it came to importing high-tech sniper rifles into Afghanistan in the 1980's. He was the recruiter of 4,000 fighters there and a conduit for massive amounts of money from Saudi Arabia to bolster the US-backed campaign against the Soviets for an entire decade. The resultant "Afghani" network, consisting of fighters in the Afghan-Soviet war, originally trained and equipped by the US, has been linked to terrorist attacks in the U.S., Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Algeria, Morocco, France, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, etc. That's just one chapter in the "who is bin Laden" story, of course.

Does that help?

Now here's a 17 year old who's got it together!

The 13-year-olds were, uh, 13-10=3, yeah, about 3 years old when 9/11 took place. I have parents who lived through both the Great Depression and WWII, both of which I luckily missed out on, but studied in much the same way I studied the American Revolution or the Civil War. When I was old enough, I could recognize the effects these later events had on my parents and grandparents, though.

What are today's adolescents learning from us about these events that are still so clearly etched--in our minds?

You know, I was thinking of the ages these kids would have been at the time. Those were my first thoughts, but then I remember that I knew who Castro was (in fact, I had a crush on him) and I was very frightened during the Cuban missile crisis. I remember trying to make light of it with my friends to assuage my fear. I remember saying that the bomb might rip a huge hole in our homework and Sister would be worse to deal with than Castro.

So maybe, if kids in that age group haven't gotten to that point in history in their studies, they might have been sheltered from the whole 9-11 debacle. and not know who he is.

Of course, though maybe some would think more a stretch, we can also attribute this lack of knowledge to the new ideas that America is to blame for all these awful things that happen and we don't want to depict any foreigners as bad guys before they can understand the evils of Americans.

Bin Laden was a bad actor before the CIA began funding him, Suze. He was our bad actor back then, though. I would call all the s*** that came down thereafter the unintended consequences of American territorial hegemony. "Americans" may be too broad a term to describe the proponents of endless war: call them the American Enterprise Institute Americans, or the Neocon Americans, or just the Cheney-Kristol-McCain Americans for short.

You can use my comment to segue into factionailzing government corruption if you'd like, Dave, and I'm not refuting their part, but I'm also not willing to create an imaginary border between what you call the unintended consequences of the Neocon Americans/Cheney-Kristol-McCain Americans and the elitist tribe's intended consequences.

Are you trying to teach the young'uns the "evils of Americans," Suze? Perhaps you could amplify a bit.

I think you've already been amply deafened by my amplifications, Dave, so I'll spare your ears in this thread at least, but if you insist just keep following and reading.

And here I thought you'd sort it all out for the gentle readers. I call the consequences arming and training of bin Laden and his minions in the 80's "unintended" because I don't think any of the American strategists expected what they got for their money later on. Those who would later be labeled Neocons were on the scene, a number of them in government (the Wolfowitz Doctrine was embedded in GHWB's Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992). The impetus that brought about the coalescence the Neocons (Cheney, Kristol, Perle, Libby, etc.) was their sense that America ought never again be humiliated, as they felt that it had been in Vietnam. That animated their input into the war crimes of Reagan throughout the 80's--Iran-Contra, empowering Saddam with attack helicopters and poison gas, arming bin Laden, etc.--all the way to the Bush doctrine (preemptive strikes against possible aggressors). They weren't the only people at Reagan's foreign policy "party," of course. Perhaps their influence has been sustained longer than that of other well-connected groups, in part because of the success of Republican presidential candidates in this era and the capitulation of Bill Clinton to some of their demands in the late '90s.

"I call the consequences arming and training of bin Laden and his minions in the 80's 'unintended' because I don't think any of the American strategists expected what they got for their money later on."

So you're saying their strategy was stupid and imprudent because they didn't think that bin Laden et al would use the weapons and training we provided against us? I can't say that I think they weren't smart enough to realize that, but that they knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway. Our leaders have no allegiance except to themselves. What's expedient today they know will reap consequences tomorrow, but that is never an issue today.

For how long was Mubarak an ally of ours? 30 years? Suddenly he's our #1 enemy. It has nothing to do with humanitarian issues except as a facade. If you read here, Chomsky also said that Obama said, "he [Mubarak] was a "force for stability and good in the region." Chomsky goes on, "This is one of the most brutal dictators of the region — how anyone could have taken Obama’s comments about human rights seriously after that is a bit of a mystery."

Read this and it exemplifies just a little bit of all of what we are told that is not so at all by your very trusted, elitist news sources like Time and Newsweek, in this case the denial that there was even any peace negotiation presented by Anwar Sadat.

Whatever conclusions you come to and blame you want to place are based on what you have read and what you have heard, but I am always unsure of the dynamics behind all of it, what we don't see and hear because I know that they play a major role in changing what parts we are told, often very different from what is really so.

Sure, you can put together your analysis and say that you just don't think they knew what the consequences would be, thinking that they had everyone's best interests at heart, but it didn't work out the way they thoght it would. I just don't happen to think all people in power are are all that stupid so I can't rest assured that they didn't know any better and didn't have other motives.

No, I'm not saying that the administration strategy was stupid and imprudent because they didn't realize the monster they were creating in bin Laden. They were stupid and imprudent in other ways before even getting to the question of whether anyone could have built a truly adequate profile of a sick murderous creep.

"Our leaders have no allegiance except to themselves."

Ok, Suze. That certainly covers a wealth of sins. Regardless of personal motivations, administrations still want to get (re)elected. But whether driven by realpolitik (1980s) or neocon (2000s) ideology, the goal of American territorial and economic hegemony, especially in the ME, has never wavered. That's going to generate fallout, with or without bin Laden.

Should we be hopeful that the Obama administration is not trying to arm the Libyan rebels? Might the government have actually learned a bin Laden lesson?

First: "I call the consequences arming and training of bin Laden and his minions in the 80's 'unintended' because I don't think any of the American strategists expected what they got for their money later on."

Next: "No, I'm not saying that the administration strategy was stupid and imprudent because they didn't realize the monster they were creating in bin Laden. They were stupid and imprudent in other ways before even getting to the question of whether anyone could have built a truly adequate profile of a sick murderous creep."

uh huh

Christine, I don't know. I'm not impressed with Obama's approach to defense policy. Still two wars, still Gitmo, still USAPATRIOT civil rights violations, disappointing Nobel Prize acceptance speech, indistinct policy in various regions. Too early to tell in Libya, I guess.

You may have to read that a couple of more times, Suze, or email me and I'll walk you through it.

I agree, Dave, it's likely more a reluctance to engage more deeply in another front than learning anything. Like Clinton, I feel like once Obama got to Washington, the Republicans have been able to move him toward the right. Do Dems have a hard time holding their ground?

My older son was 5 when 9/11 took place. One day, as I was walking him to school, he suddenly grabbed my hand and held tight. He was deathly afraid of dogs, so I thought he may have seen one, but the object of his fear turned out to be a Fedex (or other) delivery man with a beard, Sikh headdress, and South Asian complexion. "That's the man who did the war!" the kid told me, in that kind of half-whisper that you can hear across a crowded room exactly when you definitely shouldn't. I could only hope the poor guy didn't.

Otherwise, my comment is that in any large enough group of people, there will always be some who don't know X, whatever simple and obvious and universally known fact X might be. My favorite example remains a satirical "poll" done on the streets of Budapest when I was a teen. They asked people who Lenin Boulevard, Marx Square, and Engels Square were named after, and of course only kept the hilarious responses for the show. We learned that Marx-Engels-Lenins was one person; namely, a Russian revolutionary executed by the czar. In another version, one was the wife of another, though I don't remember the exact pairing.

You would have, of course, expected everyone there to know who these men were, whether from the official teachings or the unofficial but frequent curses showered on them, but there just isn't any such thing as everyone knowing a thing. (The official names for those public spaces were rarely used in colloquial speech--there were alternate ways of referring to them, which added the surreal touch but probably also helped set the confused, taken-by-surprise mood.)

Well Christine, I drafted a longer comment earlier where I mentioned that the two presidents since Vietnam who advanced world peace happened both to have been Democrats--Carter (Camp David) and Clinton (Northern Ireland, Kosovo). Both had notable failures, as well. Since I live in Illinois I was aware that Obama is more of a centrist and seeker of consensus than a radical or firebrand, although he has obviously accomplished far more in 2-1/2 years than GWB did in eight, and without tripling the national debt (so far) or causing the deaths and displacement of millions around the globe. He may come out better than it looks now, when all is said and done.

Walk me though it? Nah, thanks anyway. I don't own a pair of boots that high,

Anikó - You may be aware of the segment that Jay Leno, "Tonight Show" host does where he walks around and asks simple questions of people on the street and shows even grown-up people to be stunningly uninformed about seemingly very basic facts. I like to imagine that he throws away a lot of good answers and airs the really dumb ones, but I sometimes wonder.

Would Jay Leno know the difference?

I've seen similar gigs here, and one of them may have been Jay Leno's. I watch so little TV that I wasn't aware this was a regular feature. :)

How do we know the ages of those asking that question? I've met some really 'out of the loop' adults. Clueless but they vote.

Scary to think, but no doubt there are adults who don't know who #Osama bin Laden is!

Children who have everything just handed to them live in a fairy tale world and could care less about the things that tax their minds concerning the deeper meanings behind the scene ... sadly many of them never grow up and mature so continue even into middle and old age just accepting what their favorite leaders, religious and secular tell them ...

So right you are!