Earlier today, five former national security officials sent a letter to John Boehner urging him to rethink his condemnation of Michele Bachmann's witch hunt for Islamist influence in the government. David Weigel managed to get his hands on a copy.
The name that should raise the most eyebrows among the signatories is Jerry Boykin, the former Pentagon staffer turned religious right activist. Boykin also has close ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, the out-and-out fascist offshoot of the religious right that seeks to bring about the Second Coming by taking over the world. Other signatories include former Pentagon IG and Blackwater executive Joseph Schmitz, former CIA director James Woolsey, former Defense Intelligence Agency director Harry Soyster, and former federal prosecutor and current National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy.
The letter is a conspiracy theorist's dream. It claims that the Obama administration is in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood on a number of nefarious schemes:
• assisting the Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt;
• co-sponsorship of a UN Human Rights Council resolution intended by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to restrict freedom of expression;
• the release of $1.5 billion in an unconditional, lump-sum grant to the Egyptian government shortly after the election of a Brotherhood-dominated parliament and right before the election as president of a top Muslim Brotherhood official;
• excluding Israel from a multilateral forum on terrorism, apparently indulging the Islamist contention that attacks on Israel are not terrorist atrocities but legitimate “resistance”; and
• the granting of a visa to Hani Nour Eldin, a member of the Designated Terrorist Organization Gama’at al-Islamia – the Islamic Group, for the purpose of discussing the release of that organization’s leader, convicted jihadist cleric Omar Abdul Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”).
The letter goes on to urge Boehner to lend his support to the efforts of Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Lynn Westmoreland, Trent Franks and Tom Rooney to investigate this further. However, if Boehner has anything in him, he'll put this letter in the shredder posthaste. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence--and unless I missed something, this letter doesn't have it.