Reddit mentions of The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader

I don't see why somebody would downvote you for asking a straight forward question.

I'll take a stab at answering it.

The name Al-Qaeda in its current context was first mentioned in a Manhattan court room. They wanted to prosecute the guys that carried out the US embassy bombings in Ethiopia* {Edit, Kenya, see Ashagari's comment below}. It's widely recognised that this was done by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad out of Sudan. Al Zawahiri being their leader but friends with Osama Bin Laden, who bankrolled. At the time Osama Bin Laden was saying all sorts of things to annoy Arabic countries. He was advocating people should rise up and overthrow their governments for his brand, and radical understanding, of Islam. Egypt banned him, Libya was the first country to put a warrant out on him, Saudi Arabia flagged his passport and was trying to shut down his access to his money. Under pressure Sudan asked him to leave. Unfortunately the U.S. couldn't prosecute him in-absentia unless they used the RICO laws, statutes brought in to prosecute Mafia bosses without them being present. To use them they had to prove Bin Laden was head of an organized network. The name Al Qaeda was thought up. Prior to this the CIA had had a computer database of information of all the contacts from Operation Cyclone, the CIA run project to recruit and train Mujahideen fighters in the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden had been involved in this even if largely unsuccessfully. He'd set up the MAK in Afghanistan but had only been successful in recruiting around a hundred fighters with $2million, much of it his own money. The CIA and MI6 efforts recruited a 100,000 Afghans and another 30,000 from overseas. The MAK were used by them and Pakistan's ISI to courier weapons and money from Pakistan into Afghanistan but the MAK had a limited role. Never the less Osama Bin Laden appeared on the CIA database - Arabic for
'the database' being 'Al-Qaeda'.

In Manhattan the intelligence services latched onto a Jamal al-Fadl, who had been an accountant for Osama but, unhappy with only being paid $500 a month, had skimmed off $100,000 for himself. When Osama had asked him to pay it back he defected in Eritrea and was being passed around between intelligence services with nobody really trusting him. The whole intelligence for Osama Bin Laden setting up Al-Qaeda comes from al-Fadl, in return for which he was put into the witness protection scheme where he earned himself a reputation for financial scheming, womanizing and mood swings.

The kicker being that neither al-Zawahiri or Osama Bin Laden ever mentioned the name Al-Qaeda themselves, or referred to any such network, until after 9-11. Somebody had forgotten to tell them they now ran an international terrorist cell network. It was only when Rumsfeld and Cheney stood in front of reporters and starting using the name Al-Qaeda, which had only ever been to used to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence, did Osama start using it himself. And so did every other terrorist that didn't like America and happened to agree with Osama's aims; whether they had connections with him or not.

Osama was contaminated. Everybody that he came into near contact with was fair game to be called Al-Qaeda whether they worked with, or for him, or not. If you're a radical Sunni Wahhabist; you can be called Al-Qaeda. If you appear on the CIA database, put together and recruited by the CIA under Operation Cyclone, you can be called Al-Qaeda. He was friends with Al-Zawahiri who was in charge of the very real Egyptian Islamic Jihad: all damned now as Al-Qaeda. The bombing of USS Cole had never been attributed to Osama Bin Laden. Now it was open season; blame it on Al-Qaeda. It was the ultimate Witch Finder General: if you wanted to arrest or kill someone, instead of calling them 'a witch' first, you just had to call them 'Al-Qaeda'.

If Al-Qaeda was real then Osama and al Zawahiri, in their numerous recordings prior to 9-11, would have been talking about it, the network, the name and its size, amongst their numerous threats and promises they were making. They didn't. The Osama narrative [wasn't even a popular one among Islamic militants. His MAK had imploded shortly after the Soviet occupation; Bin Laden and Zawahiri had advocated even attacking Muslims to set up their idea of an Islamic state, fellow MAK founder Abdullah Yusuf Azzam disagreed and was assassinated in 1989; the suspects, numerous, ranging from the CIA or Mossad to Pakistan's own ISI or Afghan militia leaders themselves, maybe even the MAK. Whilst Taliban rule appealed to Osama, and as such was relative a safe ground for him although isolated, the Taliban were only interested in Afghanistan and fighting the Northern Alliance - they were actively in talks with the US for a trans-Afghan oil pipeline, they certainly didn't want the US as an enemy. Yet Osama leaves Sudan in 1996, a US NIE estimate briefly mentions him in 1997 sans network, CIA Station Alec set up to trace Bin Laden earns the moniker 'The Manson Family' amongst the CIA for their alarmism in looking for a network before evidence of a network is seen, and yet by 2001 this unpopular message is sold as an organization that has grown exponentially, something that he hadn't been able to achieve in two decades, when he was supposedly in isolation and on the run. Not only had he not been talking about it, the pertinent question has to be: how did he achieve it now in Afghanistan, constantly on the move, when it would have been contrary to the Taliban's aims?

Al-Qaeda went from being a manufactured courtroom prosecution tool of an absent financier in January 2001 to a world-wide terror network in September of the same year, despite the 9-11 commission ultimately stating in 2004 that whoever financed the 9-11 attack was unknown and as 'not being of great significance'. That's a huge leap without having anything to back it up.

> We propped up Osama Bin Laden up until he got smart and turned on us.

Please read a book about this, I beseech you. Nothing is worse than internet pop history/international relations. I'd suggest these:

https://www.amazon.com/Bin-Ladens-Arabian-American-Century/dp/0143114816

https://www.amazon.com/Osama-bin-Laden-Know-History/dp/0743278917/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+bin+laden+i+know&qid=1556584133&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr

https://www.amazon.com/Looming-Tower-Al-Qaeda-Road-11/dp/1400030846

Bin Laden wasn't supported by the US, not because the US is a good guy (it's not, no country is despite redditors wishing it wasn't so), but because they just didn't care about him and he was already rich. There were a few hundred Afghan Arabs as opposed to tens of thousands of mujahideen. The CIA supported the latter, they just didn't give a shit about the former.

You're going to be hard pressed to find any content on Osama bin Laden without some agenda. He was a uniquely polarizing figure, hated in the west for obviously heinous crimes, and celebrated by many stringent Islamists for similar reasons.

I will plug Peter Bergen's The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader for being both a good read and presenting bin Laden with his own words. Further, if you have access to JSTOR (you will if you attend a serious academic institution, even a good high school) just punch his name into the search bar and feast your intellect upon much of the reputable academic content that has been penned about him and his unique demise.

Very quickly, I will note that I have a number of anecdotal encounters with strict Muslims and other Middle Easterners with strong disdain for OBL. These individuals see him as predominantly responsible for inviting direct Western intervention in the Middle East after it had declined significantly. It's important to remember that the Second Gulf War is a direct response to his behavior. It's particularly frustrating to them that, as a man of his resources, connections, and significance following his time with the Mujaheddin he was preeminently capable of communicating with the world in a plethora of ways. He chose violence as his means of speech, which makes him despicable.