Aaron Sorkin's script for "Charlie Wilson's War" is a  stupid, sexist joke (cf. Aaron Sorkin Steals a Great Role From Julia Roberts"), and the tut-tutting of liberal bloggers about UBL and 9/11 is even stupider, along with the miserable failure of tired old men like Chalmers Johnson to acknowledge that Joanne Herring was the principle player in "Charlie Wilson's War."

No material link between UBL and 9/11 has ever been established, neither money nor planning, and even the FBI doesn't list 9/11 on its charge-sheet against Usama. 9/11 had a lot to do with American troops in Saudi Arabia, and a lot to do with Palestine, and a lot to do with corporate modernism in general, and almost no connection with Afghanistan.

It's convenient for Bush to have one big bogeyman out there, instead of many little bogeymen like Mohammed Atta, and the liberal blogosphere has bought this narrative to avoid even the most distant association with the swamp of ludicrous 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Joanne Herring used Charlie Wilson like a horny little puppet to fund her own really brilliant scheme for transferring Russian shoulder-launched missiles to Pakistan through Israel. The Russians suddenly had a problem they couldn't solve, and the rest would have been local history in the vast shit-hole of Afghanistan if the United States hadn't invaded it.

Chalmers Johnson has probably done more than anyone else to demonstrate the absolute uselessness of the CIA, but he just keeps singing the same old song, and it really needs an update. Farther down on the food chain, a couple of bush-league historians have managed to get themselves on TV by claiming that Joanne Herring's missiles played a relatively insignificant role in Afghanistan compared to the rest of Reagan's assistance. None of these bozos has ever seen helicopter gunships in action, with twin Gatling guns blazing the life out of everything below them, even down to earthworms in the soil under Shia villages in southern Iraq and all over Afghanistan.

If Joanne Herring hadn't provided missiles for the Mujahideen to knock those monsters out of the sky, the Russians would still be running the show in Afghanistan, and everybody except a few semi-literate mullahs would be a lot happier.

Qui vit sans folie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit.