George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War - P. 338
“The scope and the disquieting details of the Muslim jihad that the CIA was then sponsoring surely warranted Congress’s attention. The Agency was not just flooding Afghanistan with weapons of every of nature; it was now unapologetically moving to equip and train cadres of high-tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower. But reporters did not choose to examine these themes in any depth. And before any congressional skeptics could investigate or seriously question whether the program might be growing too large, Humphrey, Eiva, and Free the Eagle shouted to anyone [who] would listen (and many who didn’t want to) that the CIA was denying the Afghans the weapons the president wanted them to have.
Meanwhile, Democratic liberals and reports, who might ordinarily have questioned the wisdom of these programs, simply could figure out to overcome the impression left by right-wing critics that ht CIA’s crime in this case was not doing too much but too little - that McMahon and the Agency were subverting the president’s clear mandate. While the CIA threw itself into arming, training, and funding the largest Muslim jihad in modern history, the only ones to register their outrage and demand change there those who seemed to believe that the CIA’s support was so meaningless as to constitute a betrayal of the Afghans.”
