Quote by George W. Bush on 06/26/01 (source)
Presidents of the United States, and high ranking government officials have often repeated phrases with similar meaning. They would like to make a clear distinction between USA and the terrorists. We don’t use terrorism and violence, they claim.
How wrong they are, and how well they know it. The political history of USA is filled with connections to foreign terrorists. Whenever there has been a terrorist group opposing one of the enemies of USA, it has received funding and information in plenty from Washington.
One of these in who else but Osama Bin Laden. Before being accused of bombing some US embassies in Africa in 1998, he was very useful to the government in the 1980s. The Soviet-Afghan War in 1979-1989 made supporting the fundamentalist terrorists a priority. They were, after all, enemies of enemies, so they should be helped. And they weren’t terrorists - they were anti-communists, after all.
Another important terrorist group that was supported by Washington for years was the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer. After Vietnam, supported by the Soviet Union, occupied Cambodia in 1979, US saw it important to support the insurgent groups that rebelled against the Vietnamese, including the Khmer Rouge.
Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pal Pot, has been compared to Hitler and the Nazi government. This is due to them killing an estimated 1.3 million people. Of course, when they rebelled against Vietnam, which was seen as an opponent in Washington, they were not terrorists. No, they were only “tactical military allies”.