History News Network -- 9-13-01 If bin Laden is responsible for these atrocities, he and the Taliban government that is his ally and friend are Frankenstein monsters of the U.S. rightwingers and cold warriors who trained them, armed them, and proclaimed them "heroic freedom fighters" in the 1980s. As the old German conservative Prime Minister Konrad Adenauer said to Dwight Eisenhower about Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, it is not so easy to get rid of such people once you create them (Adenauer was alluding to the German establishment's experience with Hitler). It is important that bin Laden's cold war and CIA connections not be forgotten, as were Saddam Hussein's and Manuel Noriega's.