I was once a graduate student in a Texas university and later for a brief period of time a PhD candidate here at the University of Houston. During lectures and discussion sessions in class, every time the issue of terrorism would come up, people sort of paid attention to what I had to say because the killing of Osama bin Laden had just happened a few years ago. And everyone knew that I was from Pakistan. The leading newspapers at the time dedicated an enormous amount of space to stories of terrorism, Taliban, Al Qaeda, and so forth mostly having a connection with Pakistan.

While that reporting has died down with time, what has rather emerged recently is the most bizarre and direct connection that terrorism always has had with either the CIA or the FBI. I have written in this space back in March that the cult leader Charles Manson and the notorious Manson family murders had a CIA connection. The CIA wanted to understand the extent of how much a........

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