The War Party's New Torchlight Parade

Contrived Controversy: Protesting the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."

The most powerful patron of radical Islam is not Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. It is the government headquartered in Washington, D.C., which for more than a half-century has diligently cultivated Islamic terrorism. Yet millions of Americans are suffering what amounts to a collective loss of bladder control over the purported threat embodied in the proposed Cordoba House -- the Islamic equivalent of a YMCA -- in New York City.

Allowing the "Ground Zero Mosque" to be built, insists Newt Gingrich, would be tantamount to "surrender" in a struggle against those implacably committed to our destruction. New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino, a New York crony capitalist who anointed himself a paladin of the Tea Party movement, has made opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" the central plank of his campaign. Paladino, who has profited handsomely from government's redistribution of wealth, promises that if elected he will confiscate the property used for the Muslim Community Center through eminent domain and use the land to erect a war memorial.

Writing in National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy insists that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- the Kuwait-born U.S. citizen who leads the Cordoba Initiative -- is pursuing a "stealth jihad" as a fellow-traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood. "The Ground Zero project is a test of America's resolve to face down a civilizational jihad that that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from within," maintains McCarthy.

 

According to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA) the problem isn't the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. Rather, it's the fact that the government ruling us permits the existence of mosques anywhere in the United States. 

Since "every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruiting center for jihad," Muslims "cannot claim First Amendment Protections," maintains Fischer (who, in addition to supporting case-specific abolition of the First Amendment, has previously called for the abolition of the habeas corpus guarantee as well).

Rather than focusing exclusively on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, the AFA and like-minded organizations have instigated a nation-wide campaign to protest construction of Muslim houses of worship in more than a half-dozen states. Like McCarthy, Fischer treats Imam Rauf as an asset of the Muslim Brotherhood, which (according to Fischer) is "at the heart and center... the soul of Islam in America."

Here's a quick digest of the charges leveled by Fischer, which are typical of this manufactured controversy:

Islamic houses of worship serve as recruiting centers for soldiers of jihad, who will kill and die on behalf of Sharia Law. Many Islamic clerics, including Imam Feisal, are joined at the hip with the Muslim Brotherhood -- the most powerful element of the international Islamic terrorist network.

Jihadist at work? Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (right).

Stipulating that those concerns are genuine, and that the proper course of action would be to target the greatest offenders first, the campaign to shut down the global jihad should target the United States Government -- and the Republican-dominated Evangelical Churches that serve as military recruiting stations for the Regime in Washington.

During the past decade, a Middle Eastern nation of roughly 30,000,000 people once ruled by a secular government succumbed to Sharia Law. The predictable results of that catastrophe included a dramatic increase in religious violence, such as the persecution of professional women whose dress and conduct are now seen as unacceptable. More than half of the Christian population of that country -- which includes congregations tracing their roots back to the original disciples -- was driven into exile. 


That nation is Iraq, which suffered for decades under Washington's loathsome subcontractor Saddam Hussein before Saddam's employer decided to remove the middleman.

For a dozen years after the 1991 Gulf War -- which followed the Washington-instigated Iraqi assault on Kuwait, which itself was a sequel to the Washington-abetted Iraqi war with Iran -- the country was suffocated by a murderous embargo punctuated with the occasional terror-bombing. After being softened up for more than a decade, Iraq was invaded and occupied by U.S. troops who killed and died in order to install an Islamist government whose new constitution formally enshrines Sharia Law.

When American jingoists offer misty-eyed tributes to the soldiers who died in the course of "liberating" Iraq, it could be said that they are, in effect, praising the efforts of men and women who are martyrs to the cause of Sharia Law.  

This outcome is not an historical anomaly. For the past six decades, the Anglo-American elite (with Washington assuming the senior partner role after World War II) has assiduously promoted the most violent strains of revolutionary Islam, often -- but not exclusively -- as a strategic weapon in the context of the Cold War. 

Professional revolutionary: Afghani.

The Muslim Brotherhood -- which grew out of the late-19th Century agitation of Persian-born professional revolutionary Jamal Eddine al-Afghani -- has long been one of the Anglo-American elite's most important strategic assets, as well as the talent pool that was used to staff the deadliest terrorist network in the Muslim world.


While he was superficially the most devout and pious of Muslim believers, Al-Afghani, writes Robert Dreyfuss in his valuable book The Devil's Game, "a heterodox thinker who was a Freemason, a mystic, a political operative, and above all ... someone who believed in the `social utility of religion.'" 

After serving as a Russian agent in the 1860s, Afghani defected to the British. He was in London's employ when he made a disciple of an Egyptian Sugist named Mohammed Abduh. 


During the 1870s, Afghani and Abduh used Cairo's storied Al-Azhar mosque as a recruiting center for a revolutionary network, which gathered cadres from throughout the Middle East and Europe. Afghani also founded a lodge of his Arab Masonic society, which became the headquarters of what Egyptian police called "young Thugs" -- a description invoking India's notorious Thugee Cult, an oath-bound fraternity of murderers. 


When Afghani was eventually expelled from Egypt, his disciple Abduh remained, eventually rising to become the nation's Mufti (supreme interpreter of Islamic law) in 1899. Like his mentor, Abduh considered revolution to be his religion, and the Islamic faith to be a vessel for his political ambitions. Among those who fell under Abduh's influence was Hassan Al-Banna, the schoolteacher who gave tangible form to Abduh's revolutionary designs by founding the Ikhwan al-Mulimeen (Islamic Brotherhood) in 1928.

Disciple and organizer: Abduh.

Reflecting the influence of Afghani and Abduh, Banna organized the Brotherhood into cells (called "families") of five to seven members. 


The Brotherhood "was more than a movement," writes Dreyfuss. "It was a cult, it was a revivalist party, it was an intelligence operation, it was a paramilitary unit, and it was an international organization that was rapidly building branches in many Middle Eastern countries." During World War II, Dreyfuss continues, Brotherhood cadres were recruited by British, Nazi, and Soviet intelligence agencies. 



"In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands," writes Eliza Griswold in The New Republic, summarizing the findings in Ian Johnson's recent book A Mosque in Munich. "The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps; some Muslims became German soldiers, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists.... Once World War II ended, many of these men, stuck in Germany and having lost their homelands, found a new employer: the United States."

Brotherhood founder al-Banna.

A CIA-created propaganda arm called Radio Liberty employed "many of these former Nazi sympathizers," Griswold points out. In 1953 -- the same year the CIA and MI6, working through a network of Islamic radicals, brought down the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh -- the White House hosted 27-year-old Said Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief international organizer in addition to being son-in-law to Hassan al-Banna's son-in-law, who had been assassinated in 1949.



In subsequent years, many adherents of the Brotherhood -- including former Nazi sympathizers who worked with the CIA -- affiliated with the Al-Quds Mosque in Munich. Among them was Mahmoud Abouhalima, a Brotherhood member who became a leader in the CIA-funded Afghan mujahadeen and later played a prominent role in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. 

Abouhalima, who spent the late 1980s networking with radicals among American Muslims, sponsored the 1990 visit of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in the 1993 WTC attack. Despite being on a State Department terrorist watch list, Sheik Omar was granted a visa at the U.S. consulate in Khartoum: As something other than coincidence had it, the CIA station chief personally attended to the matter by substituting for the consular official who was usually in charge of issuing visas. 

Ike and Ikhwan: Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan is at the far right, holding papers.

Like practically everyone else involved in the 1993 WTC plot, Omar had also been an asset of the U.S. Government.  The same is true of former U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Ali Mohammed, who -- according to investigators -- most likely "called the shots" in the bombing conspiracy. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- that fact, Mohammed went on to become a "privileged asset" of the FBI. 

In 2001, Mohammed pleaded guilty -- "in exchange for considerations" -- to charges arising from the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He then disappeared into the witness protection program, where he remains to this day. 


The extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood is (in Bryan Fischer's phrase) "the soul of Islam in America" reflects the tireless efforts of our rulers to nurture radical Islam as a strategic asset -- both for prosecuting war abroad and making war on us at home by terrorizing us into supporting its corrupt, needlessly bellicose foreign policy. 


In his eagerness to strip American citizens who profess the Muslim religion of their rights, Bryan Fischer offers an analogy to the recent arrest of the so-called Hutaree Militia in Michigan on charges of seditious conspiracy.  "The fact that they were a Christian militia did not stop them from being locked up,"Fischer told an interviewer. 


Had his research into the Hutaree case been more exhaustive than scanning headlines, Fischer may have discovered that the rapidly disintegrating case against that group was built entirely on the claims made by an informant-provocateur employed by the FBI. The same is true of practically every recent "terrorism" case involving American Muslims. 


If there is reason to be suspicious of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it would not be his sensible criticism of Washington's foreign policy; instead, it would be his willingness to cooperate with the FBI, which seems more interested in manufacturing "terrorist plots" than interdicting them.

Not having access to his unspoken plans and motives, I cannot say whether Imam Rauf is sincere or duplicitous in his efforts to encourage mutual respect and understanding among people of different faiths. However, I am impressed by the answer he gave in 2006 when asked what his "Ramadan wish" would be for the world:


"[I would wish that] we would remember that the two greatest commandments that God gave us through the mouths of his many prophets and messengers, including Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed  -- to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbors. It also means do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you. If that can be the criterion of our foreign policy, I guarantee you that our foreign policy will be successful and wildly popular." 

As the treatment given to its Author demonstrates, preaching the Golden Rule will always provoke the murderous hostility of the ruling elite.  Apparently, the last thing many American Christians can abide is the spectacle of an American Muslim leader who -- whatever else he may be up to -- insists that we abide by the central moral tenet of the Christian faith. 

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Dum spiro, pugno!

"Nothing's Either Good or Bad...." (pt.II): Some of the Missing "Family Jewels"

“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, rape, and pillage with the sanction of the all-highest?” --

Federal counter-narcotics agent George White (left, center), who conducted involuntary drug tests on unwitting subjects as part of the CIA's MKULTRA program.

As an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), the forerunner to the Drug Enforcement Administration, George White “knew how to milk a drug bust for all it was worth – a skill that grew out of early years spent as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and Los Angeles,” notes John Marks in his perversely fascinating study The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.

White migrated from journalism to law enforcement in 1934. Although he was too late to find employment enforcing alcohol prohibition, he was just in time to make a handsome living in the emerging field of narcotics enforcement, which began in earnest in 1937. Decades later, before dying of the liver disease brought about by his insatiable appetite for liquor (he reportedly could consume a bottle of gin in a single sitting), Marks would serve as a consultant for TV detective dramas, helping to create the now-customary image of police as intrepid, largely incorruptible paladins of public order.

Many police have earnestly tried to live up to that image. Marks – a short, stocky man with a tonsured head – had little use for such pretense. As a missionary in the service of the Almighty State, Marks indulged every familiar whim, as well as some that would never occur to most people.

For example: I doubt that most people would be party to an experiment in which an aerosol dispenser would be used to subject unwitting guest to a potent dose of LSD. That particular experiment went awry because of unfavorable weather, but White and others involved in the CIA's MKULTRA program were successful in testing the drug on many unsuspecting people. It's likely that we'll never know how many.

During World War II, when the proto-CIA was known as the OSS, Marks – while on the payroll of a federal counter-narcotics agency, mind you – was used to test concentrated marijuana on several people associated with the Manhattan Project, both volunteers and unwitting non-volunteers. He also slipped a dose to August Del Gracio, a lieutenant in Lucky Luciano's criminal syndicate. (In exchange for “strategic cooperation” from his Sicilian syndicate in World War II, Luciano was permitted to run his criminal enterprises – which included the American heroin trade -- unhindered from his prison cell.)

White was eager to join the CIA after WWII, but somehow this was prevented by J. Edgar Hoover. He also sought appointment as head of New York City's narcotics bureau, only to have his candidacy blocked by Governor Thomas Dewey. But his talents – such as they were – and, more importantly, his connections made White irresistible to Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, and the others involved in MKULTRA, who were eager to learn of LSD's utility as a truth serum, mind control drug, and general-purpose chemical weapon.

“As a high-ranking narcotics agent, White had a perfect excuse to be around drugs and people who used them,” writes Marks. “He had proved during the war that he had a talent for clandestine work, and he certainly had no qualms when it came to unwitting testing. With his job, he had access to all the possible subjects the Agency would need, and if he could use LSD or any other drug to find out more about drug trafficking, so much the better.”

"My name is Sid Gottlieb. I'm a nice, clean-living Jewish man married to an equally upright Presbyterian woman. I milk goats every morning. My hobby -- nay, passion -- is folk dancing. My career is mind control." (All of these biographical details are accurate.)

In May 1953, White and Sid Gottlieb set up a “safehouse” in Greenwich Village that was used to lure guinea pigs for drug experiments of various kinds (particularly LSD and concentrated marijuana), as well as tests involving knock-out drops and various kinds of surveillance equipment. The CIA paid all the bills, including the exorbitant expenses involved in keeping White's liquor cabinet full.

Two years later, with questions being asked by New York officials about White's activities, the CIA transferred the “safehouse” operation to the San Francisco Bay Area; he opened his first “pad” on Telegraph Hill, and later set up a branch in Marin County. The Bay Area safehouses were used to test drugs “on individuals of all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign,” noted an Inspector General's report years later. (San Francisco, ironically, was one of the first American jurisdictions to enact severe anti-narcotics laws in the late 19th Century.)

As the CIA examined the possible field use of LSD against hostile foreign leaders – such as Fidel Castro – it was necessary to test it on as many unsuspecting targets as possible. To facilitate such “dry runs,” White expanded his little federally sponsored criminal syndicate by setting himself up as a full-service vice lord – both drug pusher and pimp.

John Marks describes how this worked:

“An unsuspecting john would think he had bought a night of pleasure, go back to a strange apartment, and wind up zonked. A CIA document that survived Sid Gottlieb's shredding recorded this process.... For the MKULTRA chief, the whores were `certain individuals who covertly administer this material [that is, the narcotics] to other people in accordance with [White's] instructions. White normally paid the woman $100 in Agency funds for their night's work.... The CIA's auditors had to settle for canceled checks which White cashed himself and marked either `Stormy' or, just as appropriately, `Undercover Agent.' The program was also referred to as `Operation Midnight Climax.'”

By the time White's grimy business was shut down in 1963, the harvest had begun to come in from Sid Gottlieb's efforts – which had begun ten years earlier – to cultivate the drug culture in academia. Using tax-exempt foundations as cut-outs – particularly the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research – Gottlieb funded “LSD pathfinders” in such institutions as Columbia University, the University of Rochester, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois Medical School, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Boston Psychopathic,and the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky (which was also funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health).

These CIA-sponsored researchers have been described as the “Johnny Appleseeds of LSD”; nearly all of them tried the drug themselves before experimenting with it on others. Prison inmates were offered various inducements – including other hard narcotics – to serve as test subjects. Among those recruited into this program was a small-time thug named James Bulger, who would go on to become the FBI-protected head of Boston's Irish Mob.

“Sharing the drug with the Army here, setting up research programs there, keeping track of it everywhere, the CIA generally presided over the LSD scene during the 1950s,” writes Marks. It is no small matter that there were, at that time, two companies producing LSD – Eli Lilly and the Swiss firm Sandoz; Lilly turned over its entire supply to the Agency, and Sandoz kept it apprised of every shipment it made anywhere in the world.

By the mid-1960s, the trade in narcotics – including LSD – had become more diversified, thanks in no small part to the academic “Johnny Appleseeds” who had worked with MKULTRA.

A 1969 study of LSD published by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (George White's employer) noted that the drug's “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of higher status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower-classmen.” The BNDD described this as a “trickle-down phenomenon,” but as Marks points out, the agency missed the point that “somebody had to influence the teachers, and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.”

There's more than simple nastiness involved in the CIA's creation of the modern narcotics industry.

About a decade ago, former DEA undercover agent Mike Levine -- one of the bravest and most self-effacing men I've been honored and blessed to meet -- described a 1979 conversation with a CIA officer in Argentina.

"There was a small group of us gathered for a drinking party at the CIA guy's apartment," Levine recounted to me. "There were several Argentine police officers there as well; at the time, Argentina was a police state in which people could be taken into custody without warning, tortured, and then `disappeared.'"

In other words, it was essentially the same as the United States under the reign of Bush the Dumber and Cheney the All-Malignant. Got it. To continue:

"At one point my associate in the CIA said that he preferred Argentina's approach to social order, and that America should be more like that country."

Wherever that guy is, assuming he's still among the living, he must be exceptionally pleased with what America has become; he may be playing a hands-on role in the nasty business he found so attractive. But again, I digress:

"Somebody asked, `Well, how does a change of that sort happen?' The spook replied that it was necessary to create a situation of public fear -- a sense of impending anarchy and social upheaval in which the people will literally plead with Congress, `Take whatever rights you need, but save us...."


That is, "save us" from the scourge of drugs, or terrorism, or violent crime, or whatever social plague leaves the public usefully terrified.


Levine, who spent decades in "deep cover" operations for the DEA, candidly admits that the "war on drugs" turned the federal government into "essentially a criminal enterprise." He also acknowledges that "the CIA has long been a major supporter of the people and organizations responsible for supplying drugs to this country"; this includes various factions of the Afghan Mujahadin and the Nicaraguan Contras, Khun Sa's Shan United Army in Burma's Golden Triangle, small-caliber despots like Manuel Noriega (anybody remember him?), the Kosovo Liberation Army, and others of that ilk.





"Los Novios de La Muerte," the paramilitary group that -- with the CIA's help -- turned Bolivia into (Klaus) Barbie's Playhouse.



The CIA, according to Levine, has also staged coups in order to install narco-regimes, as it did in Boliva in 1980, working in concert with Los Novios de la Muerte ("The Fiancees of Death"), a paramilitary force recruited by Nazi fugitive Klaus Barbie.



The "war on drugs," as I've pointed out elsewhere, is a narcotics price support program, in addition to being a form of employment insurance for various three-letter agencies and militarized police units across the country.


I'm convinced that one reason so much effort is invested in drug "interdiction" campaigns -- which is a bit like taking a sponge mop to the Atlantic Ocean -- is that this inflates the amount of off-the-books funding available to the CIA and its satellite organizations. And as Levine points out, it's not true that the War on Drugs is a losing proposition: "The fundamental problem with the so-called war on drugs is that both sides are winning -- the drug lords and the `suits' -- because they both are making a killing."

Point of personal privilege....

My friends, please pray for my dear wife Korrin. Her health has taken a severe turn for the worse, and I'm at the end of both my wits and resources in trying to help her.

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Bad Company: Yet Another "Terrorist Plot" Orchestrated by the CIA?

He's a Company man: Russell DeFreitas, a former employee of the CIA's Evergreen Airlines, appears in court.

When asked what he thought of Western Civilization, Ghandi reportedly replied that he thought it would be a good idea.*

One could very well speak in the same vein of the entity called the Central Intelligence Agency. It might be useful if the federal government (once thrown back into its constitutional cage, of course) had an agency devoted to collecting relevant intelligence, rather than what it has now – a body involved in propagating turmoil, terror, and subversion throughout most of the world.

He who sows the wind, we're told, reaps the whirlwind, and the CIA's directorate of operations is staffed with people who play a role best described as “Johnny Appleseeds of the global jihad,” sowing and nurturing the seeds of terrorism, nourishing them by fomenting unrest, and helping to bring in the murderous harvest of “blowback.” We can see a potent reminder of this fact in the alleged plot to blow up JFK Airport.

According to Newsday, Russell DeFreitas, commonly identified as a former “baggage handler” at JFK, actually worked as a baggage handler and/or a “trainee supervisor” in the employ of Evergreen International Airlines, a CIA front company based in McMinnville, Oregon. A TV news report out of Oregon revealed that DeFreitas “trained” at Evergreen's McMinnville facility between July 2000 and May 2001.

As this observant fellow points out, it's odd for a man in his mid-50s to spend the better part of a year “training” for a job he'd already done for a number of years.

Evergreen, in fact, is a direct descendant of the infamous Air America, the CIA proprietary outfit that has been implicated in drug smuggling, covert arms shipments (according to this former Evergreen pilot, the CIA was providing weapons to both sides in various Cold War brushfires), and – more recently -- “extraordinary rendition” flights. More than a few Evergreen flights have served as “torture taxis,” shuttling detainees to various destinations in the CIA-operated global torture archipelago.

DeFreitas left Evergreen's employ in May 2001. It's not clear whether he worked at JFK between May 2001 and his arrest last week. But it is clear he worked at the airport in the late 1990s.

According to former Customs Department Special Agent Diane Kleiman, DeFreitas's background means one thing: “He was working at JFK doing drug smuggling.”

“The CIA has always been involved in drug smuggling, and Evergreen or Air America has played a big role in it,” Kleiman told me in a recent phone interview. “When I was working Customs at JFK, we had this huge problem with airline personnel using their secure keys to give unauthorized access to `sterile corridors' that bypassed Customs inspection. Quite often this involved drug smuggling, and I've got ample reason to believe that Evergreen and other CIA assets were involved in it.”

It's worth remembering that the “confidential informant” who infiltrated the supposed plot to blow up JFK was a convicted drug smuggler. Significant as well is the fact that Jamaat al Muslimeen (JAM), the Trinidad & Tobago-based radical Sunni group implicated in the alleged JFK plot, has been implicated in drug smuggling.

Making matters that much more interesting is the reported fact that JAM leader Umar Abdullah reportedly fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a fact that raises the possibility that he, too, was on the CIA's payroll at one time.

I find myself irresistibly reminded of the fact that several members of the terrorist cell responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 had been funded, trained, or otherwise aided by the US federal government. The “spiritual leader” of that cell, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, was permitted to come to the US in 1990 despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorism watch list, suspected of involvement in the plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat.

It was Abdel-Rahman's great good fortune that on the particular day he visited the US Consulate in Khartoum in search of a visa, the consular official was absent – and in his place was a CIA operative eager and willing to issue the requested visa.

Funny, isn't it, how things of this kind happen? And isn't it just as remarkable to see that in the alleged plot to bomb JFK, both the putative ringleader and the Confidential Informant had connections to the CIA-haunted narcotics underworld?

*(Thanks to Anonymous for catching, and correcting, a slip-up in my paraphrase of the quote attributed to Ghandi.)

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