This former FBI translator, from her classified work, says this:

to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.

So bin Laden and Taliban were involved in a very close alliance with U.S. covert foreign operations long after the training of (what later became called) Al Qaeda (literally, "the data-base" of trained fighters) by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.....all the way up until 9/11 that is, when suddenly they became the patsies and the prey, despite their denials of knowledge or participation in foreign press, including BBC.

Actually the Taliban denial of Bin Laden's involvement in 9/11 was reported on NBC by Tom Brokaw here (YouTube video), as well as other news sources, until the Bush administration called for the media to not parrot statements from overseas (but only from the Bush administration) due to "national security" (i.e. propaganda).