Republican Congressman and his strange dealings with the Afghan mujahideen

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http://www.ocweekly.com/features/features/rogue-statesman/21591/

September 5, 2002

Rogue Statesman

Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s absolutely crazy, quite possibly illegal back-channel chats with the villains of Sept. 11



"{Rohrabacher} says the Taliban are devout traditionalists—not terrorists or revolutionaries. He believes a Taliban takeover {of Afghanistan} would be a positive development."

—Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 1996 issue

<snip>As a speechwriter and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher played a key role in the late 1980s getting money and arms, including U.S.-made Stinger missiles, to Afghan holy warriors, then at war with the Soviet Union. He once bragged of being "certainly a major player" in a coalition inside the White House that supported anyone "opposing Communist domination around the world." In November 1988, he even visited the Afghan front lines during a five-day hike with an armed mujahideen patrol in eastern Afghanistan. Among those fighters he encountered, he later recalled, were "Saudi Arabians under a crazy commander named bin Laden."

<snip>The next day, The Orange County Register reported in a top story, "Horror and Hindsight," that the terrorist attacks "could turn out to be a horrific told-you-so" for Rohrabacher. To make sure his "angry" comments were amplified, the congressman granted multiple television, radio and newspaper interviews and authored an unsolicited column that carried this note: "A must read. You will be livid over the level of incompetency in our intelligence agencies." In it, Rohrabacher claimed that the Clinton administration—out of office for eight months when the attacks occurred—had ignored his pleas not to negotiate with the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic party controlling most of Afghanistan since 1996. (A hardcore partisan Republican, Rohrabacher remained silent about numerous meetings between George W. Bush’s advisors and the Taliban throughout 2001.) On Sept. 17, 2001, the congressman declared, "There is rage in my soul."

Right-wing organizations across the nation immediately picked up on Rohrabacher’s anti-Taliban, anti-Clinton statements and hailed him a "hero."

In fact, Rohrabacher’s post-Sept. 11 finger-pointing was a fraud designed to distract attention from his own ongoing meddling in the foreign-policy nightmare. Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a "dual tract" policy with the Taliban.

A veteran U.S. foreign-policy expert told the Weekly, "If Dana’s right-wing fans knew the truth about his actual, working relationship with the Taliban and its representatives in the Middle East and in the United States, they wouldn’t be so happy."