We all know that the Sept. 11 terror attacks by al Qaeda were blowback, that is, the result of a former CIA client organization turning on and attacking its former paymaster.
But the backstory is a lot deeper than that, according to John Loftus, who bravely uncovered CIA employment of Nazis in the Cold War when working for the Reagan Justice Department.
Short and sweet -- al Qaeda's roots reach back to a Nazi-allied Arab organization, that was picked up by MI6, then the CIA, after World War II.
Long and sour, below.
This is from a Bartcop link to a
speech Loftus gave in 2004 to commemorate the Holocaust. The speech was entitled "Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis and Al Qaeda."
Bartcop linked to the most unsettling part of the speech -- the CIA had scrubbed its files so that its own officers were unable to find out the unpleasant facts of our sponsorship of the major Arab/Nazi organization.
This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer, wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it's called "Sleeping with the Devil." I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing how when he worked for the CIA how bad the files were.
He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings. I called Bob up and said, "Bob, that's wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago." He said, "What do you mean?"
Here's how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood -- and you can do this too. I said, "Bob, go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word "Vanna," V-a-n-n-a. He said, "Yeah." Type in "Nazi." Bob typed the two words in, and out came 30 to 40 articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, "Oh my God, what have we done?"
What I'm doing today is doing what I'm doing now: I'm educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western Intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al Qaeda.
Loftus lays out the unknown (even to CIA officers) history of the Muslim Brotherhood that explains a lot about our current problems with Mideast terrorism:
Here's how the story began. In the 1920's there was a young Egyptian named al Bana. And al Bana formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Bana was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930's, al Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence.
The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt.
When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.
The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. Here, too, was a man, the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine. These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the "Handjar" Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler's new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa -- grand dreams.
At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service. Then a horrible thing happened.
Instead of prosecuting the Nazis -- the Muslim Brotherhood -- the British government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could, but they failed to quash the State of Israel.
What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. It may sound stupid; it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.
"They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture"; sounds a lot like the curiously elusive Osama bin Laden.
Nasser outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but the CIA took care of their people, moving many Muslim Brotherhood members to the safety of Saudi Arabia, according to Loftus.
Now when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrasas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism.
Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam -- the Saudi version of Islam -- is typical, but it's not. The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence.
snip
Fascism and extremism were mingled in these (Saudi) schools. And there was a young student who paid attention -- and Azzam's student was named Osama Bin Ladin. Osama Bin Ladin was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.
In 1979 the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK.
And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn't know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.
Azzam and his assistant, Osama Bin Ladin, rose to some prominence from 1979 to '89, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, "We won, let's go home!" and we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.
Saudis didn't want them to come back and started paying bribes to Osama Bin Ladin and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated apparently by Osama Bin Ladin himself. The radical group -- the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists -- Osama called that al Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda.
Osama Bin Ladin's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the results of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
This speech helps explain why the most powerful nation ever cannot and/or will not find and kill the architect of 9/11. We've been at it, notionally, for longer that the US was fighting World War II, and somehow Osama has eluded our grasp.
Is this just bad luck, or professional courtesy to a former CIA employee, who served us so well in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan?
Loftus may have exaggerated some in a speech to a Jewish group on Yom Ha Shoah; but the essential point that a once-Nazi-allied, virulently anti-Semitic group, funded for decades by the CIA and the Saudis, is at the root of most Mideast terrorism is certainly credible.
And given the Bush family's longstanding connections to the CIA and the Saudis, is it any wonder that they decided to fight the War on Terror in Iraq?