Necessary Enemy

Having sufficiently weakened the crumbling empire by attacking its “soft underbelly” in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was ripe for subversion. Scheming behind the scenes was Otto von Habsburg—Knight of Malta and co-founder of the synarchist Pan-European Union, and patron of Le Cerlce Pinay. In August 1989, merely months after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan on February 15, Otto von Habsburg organized the Pan-European Picnic, considered a significant milestone on the road to German reunification and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. At the picnic, several hundred East German citizens overran the old wooden gate, reaching Austria unhindered by the border guards. The Hungarian borders were opened on September 11, setting in motion a chain reaction, at the end of which the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain fell apart and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. The communist governments and the Warsaw Pact subsequently dissolved, ending the Cold War.

Having sufficiently weakened the crumbling empire by attacking its “soft underbelly” in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union was ripe for subversion. Scheming behind the scenes was Otto von Habsburg, Knight of Malta and co-founder of the synarchist Pan-European Union. In August 1989, merely months after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan on February 15, Otto organized the Pan-European Picnic, considered a significant milestone on the road to German reunification and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. At the picnic, several hundred East German citizens overran the old wooden gate, reaching Austria unhindered by the border guards. The Hungarian borders were opened on September 11, setting in motion a chain reaction, at the end of which the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain fell apart and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. The communist governments and the Warsaw Pact subsequently dissolved, ending the Cold War.

With the Soviet Union out of the way, the secret forces behind the Western powers needed a new enemy, now transforming the Mujahideen “freedom fighters” they had created into the specter of the “fundamentalist” Taliban. For the evangelical preachers of the CNP and their dispensationalist Christian Zionist sympathizers, according to their subjective interpretation of the Book of Revelation, the future of Christians is inextricably tied with the future of Israel, and that future may only unfold with the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, to make way for the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the return of the Messiah. For the most fanatical Evangelicals, the countdown to Armageddon began with the return of the Jews to Israel, followed quickly by further signs pointing to the nearness of a final showdown: nuclear weapons, European integration, Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem, and America’s wars in Afghanistan and the Gulf.[1]

As reported by Adam Curtis, the dichotomy created by the neoconservatives allowed them to feed the simplistic dualism of the Evangelical community, by framing the present conflict in Biblical proportions: “this dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay.”[2] Through the influence of Leo Strauss, the neoconservatives’ strategy represented the adoption of Carl Schmitt’s fascist concept of the “necessary enemy.” Strauss’s critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Strauss wrote to Schmitt in 1932, and summarized the implications of his political theology as follows:

[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state.[3]

According to Allan Janik in his review of A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought:

…George Bush’s politics of determined retaliation in the wake of September 11, 2001, follows a scenario entailing the United States identifying a mortal enemy against which it can clearly define itself that could well have been written by Schmitt. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and company (with perhaps even a few “New Europeans” thrown in)—like Schmitt—believe that powerful states have a mandate to assert themselves come what may, i.e., that international law is for the weak, not the strong as the United States demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq...[4]

The neoconservatives followed Strauss in thinking, “that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat,” as Drury wrote in her book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, and that, “following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured.”[5] In the early 1990s, with the Soviet Union effectively defeated and communism discredited, that new threat would become Islamic “fundamentalism,” to embark on a wholesale plan to reorganize the Middle East through the spread of “democracy.” However, according to Drury, the neoconservatives “really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they’re conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy.”[6] As Drury explained, even though Strauss “had a profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy, his disciples have gone to great lengths to conceal the fact.”[7]

Western liberal democracy, we are told by leading neoconservative Francis Fukuyama, is the “End of History” in a Hegelian sense, representing the triumph of centuries of intellectual progress. Fukuyama was strongly influenced by Alexander Kojève who, as early as 1948, believed that the United States was the model of economic life at the end of history. Long before the Cold War came to an end, Kojève anticipated the triumph of America over the Soviet Union, anticipating that it would not be a military triumph, but an economic one.[8] Ultimately, Fukuyma’s claim borrows indirectly from Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic conception of the process of human intellectual history. In other words, combined with the advent of liberal democracy, the supremacy of “Western” civilization supposedly marks the culmination of human intellectual evolution. In Fukuyama’s own words:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.[9]

However, as Fukuyama clarified in a 2008 Washington Post opinion piece, “Democracy’s only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism.”[10] It was in response to Fukuyama’s claim that Samuel Huntington developed the notion of a “Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. He also was co-author of The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies, a report issued by the Trilateral Commission during 1976. In 1977, his friend Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been appointed National Security Adviser in the administration of Jimmy Carter, invited him to become White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council.

Huntington was the founder of Harvard’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, that has been financed by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation. In addition, the Olin Foundation funded professors at leading schools all over the country and kept track of those who passed through Huntington’s Olin program, noting that many went into public service and academia. Between 1990 and 2001, fifty-six of the eighty-eight Olin fellows at the Harvard program continued on to teach at the University of Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Yale. Many others became public figures in government, think tanks, and the media. The roster of recipients included John Yoo, the legal scholar who went on to become the notorious author of the George W. Bush administration’s controversial “torture memo,” legalizing the American government’s brutal interrogation of terror suspects.[11]

The fabrication of the supposed threat of Islam obviously disguised more nefarious political goals. As Gilles Keppel explained:

Huntington’s clash of civilization theory facilitated the transfer to the Muslim world of a strategic hostility the West had inherited from decades of Cold War. The parallel drawn between the dangers of communism and those of Islam gave Washington’s strategic planners the illusion that they could dispense with analyzing the nature of the Islamic “menace” and could simply transpose the conceptual tools designed to apprehend one threat to the very different realities of the other.

The neoconservative movement played a crucial role in bringing about this rhetorical permutation. It placed a facile way of thinking in the service of a precise political agenda, aimed at expanding the American democratic model into the Middle East – the only part of the world that it had not penetrated at the end of the twentieth century – and at modifying U.S. policy in the region to give Israel’s security precedence over an alliance with the Saudi petro-monarchy.[12]

Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by conflict between cultural blocs. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. He suggests that it is different civilizations, as the highest rank of cultural identity, that will become increasingly useful to analyze the potential for conflict. As summarized by Bryan Turner, “the popular debate about the Huntington thesis has obscured its intellectual dependence on an academic tradition of political philosophy that sought to define sovereignty in terms of civilizational struggles between friend and foe, namely the legacy of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss.”[13]

First articulated in an article for Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the world’s preeminent globalist institution, Huntington explained the basis of the “Clash of Civilizations” as deriving from the new reality that, while the age of ideology had ended, the world’s normal state of affairs would be exposed, and characterized by conflict between cultural blocs. He argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. These are Western civilization, which is comprised of US, England, Western Europe and Australia. Latin America is marked by adherence to Catholic Christianity, and Huntington outlines Sub-Saharan Africa as a possible civilization.

Most important is the Orthodox world, consisting of the former Soviet Union, and then China and the Islamic world. Huntington also argues that civilizational conflicts are “particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims”, identifying the “bloody borders” between Islamic and non-Islamic civilizations. Huntington argues that a “Sino-Islamic connection” is emerging in which China will cooperate more closely with Iran, Pakistan, and other states to augment its international position. Russia and India are what Huntington terms ‘swing civilizations’ and may favor either side.

Project for a New American Century (PNAC)

9/11 provided a crucial opportunity for the architects of the Iraq war to initiate the War on Terror, as a means of advancing Israeli foreign policy by proxy. These include neoconservatives of Le Cercle, former U.S. Defense Secretary and President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and former Chairman of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board Richard Perle. A telling example of collusion between neoconservatives and Israel began with the publication of A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, a policy document that was prepared in 1996 by a study group led by Perle for Benjamin Netanyahu, then Prime Minister of Israel. The report has since been criticized for advocating an aggressive new policy including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and the containment of Syria by engaging in proxy warfare and highlighting its possession of “weapons of mass destruction.”[14]

The neoconservatives’ new strategy began to achieve dangerous proportions when in 1992 Wolfowitz, as Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of defense for policy, authored a “Defense Planning Guidance Paper,” which outlined the US’ strategic priorities in the post-Cold War era. Leaked to the New York Times, the document prescribed securing global supremacy for the US through military confrontation with various regimes, calling for America to assert its interests wherever they existed, with particular emphasis on oil supplies and the security of Israel. According to the authors, it was time for the US to achieve unparalleled military superiority through a massive build up of the country’s military capabilities.

This same worldview was furthered with the creation of a specifically designed think tank, known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which was supported with funding from the Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation and Scaife Foundations.[15] The signatories to the project included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and leading neoconservatives, like Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams, who had been found guilty of lying about his role in the Iran-Contra operation, but was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush.

In September 2000, the PNAC drafted a plan for U.S. global domination. Titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” the PNAC report envisioned an expanded global military role for the US, by stipulating, “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. A “core mission” for the U.S. military, according to the PNAC, is to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars.” While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” However, it added, “even should Saddam pass from the scene,” the plan states, U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain, despite domestic opposition in the Gulf states to the permanent stationing of U.S. troops. Iran, it says, “may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests as Iraq has.”

Ominously, the document stated: “the process of transformation,” the plan further clarified, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[16] That event, of course, was the attack of 9/11, orchestrated to provide the neoconservatives with their needed pretext to expand their imperial objectives into the Middle East and Central Asia. Much like the Warren Commission before it, the myth of 19 hijackers was then fabricated by the 9/11 Commission, denouncing as “conspiracy theorists” all who dared to point to the mountains of evidence and simple common sense that undermined the official government version of events.

The Machiavellian purpose of the tragedy of 9/11 was described by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. While at Harvard, Zelikow had worked on the use of history in policymaking. He and his fellow researchers observed, as Zelikow noted in his own words, that “contemporary” history is “defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past.”[17] In writing about the importance of beliefs about history, Zelikow has called attention to what he has referred to as “searing” or “molding” events take on “transcendent” importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene.[18] In the November-December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, he co-authored an article entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism,” in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center had succeeded:

…the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.[19]

Again, during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president, Philip Zelikow revealed the true aims behind the US’ invasion of Iraq, which had supposedly been in retaliation for 9/11. Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts:

Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990—it’s the threat against Israel...

And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.[20]

The obvious pretext of the 9/11 attacks are revealed by General Wesley Clark, who would later join the 2004 race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In an interview with Democracy Now in 2007, Clark related that only nine days after the attack, on September 20, 2001, he visited the offices in the Pentagon of the Joint Staff who used to work for him, and was told confidentially by one of the generals, “We’re going to war with Iraq!” When Clark asked why, the general said, “I don’t know… I guess they don’t know what else to do.” When he went back to see him a few weeks later, by which time the Americans were already bombing Afghanistan, Clark recounts:

I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs”—meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office—“today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.[21]

Finally, just prior to America’s invasion of Iraq, Brian Whitaker reported in The Guardian in 2002 that “with several of the Clean Break paper’s authors now holding key positions in Washington, the plan for Israel to transcend its foes by reshaping the Middle East looks a good deal more achievable today than it did in 1996. Americans may even be persuaded to give up their lives to achieve it.”[22] Among the leading neoconservatives in this cabal was the Strategy of Tension’s Michael Ledeen, who became a holder of the Freedom Chair at AEI, and was a founding member of JINSA. Despite his dubious credentials, Ledeen’s ideas were quoted daily by such figures as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. In 2003, the Washington Post discovered that Ledeen was the only full-time international affairs analyst consulted by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s closest advisor.[23]

Ledeen prescribed that a destructive dynamism would transform the Middle East, not only Iraq, but also Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and beyond. According to Ledeen, the governments of all these countries must be overthrown, either by a US-supported internal rebellion or by outright military invasion. Ledeen predicted:

Our unexpectedly quick and impressive victory in Afghanistan is a prelude to a much broader war, which will in all likelihood transform the Middle East for at least a generation, and reshape the politics of many other countries around the world.[24]

Evidently, the countries Ledeen lists in the Middle East do not present a “clear and present” danger to the United States. All these abstract articulations were designed to hide the ignoble pursuit of Israeli foreign policy objectives, as outlined in the Clean Break strategy. Acts of “preemption,” as it prescribed, would therefore include Israel engaging Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran, by confronting their proxies in Lebanon. Political commentator Phyllis Bennis pointed to the obvious similarities between the strategies outlined in the Clean Break and the subsequent 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.[25] Already in September 2006, Taki of The American Conservative reported:

…recently, Netanyahu suggested that President Bush had assured him Iran will be prevented from going nuclear. I take him at his word. Netanyahu seems to be the main mover in America’s official adoption of the 1996 white paper A Clean Break, authored by him and American fellow neocons, which aimed to aggressively remake the strategic environments of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. As they say in boxing circles, three down, two to go.

Shortly after, Joshua Muravchik, a self-confessed “dyed-in-the-wool, true-believer neocon,” outlined the pretext for America spreading “democracy” at the point of a gun. Speaking for the neoconservatives:

We agreed on the need to address the root causes of terrorism, but for us that root cause was the political culture of the Middle East. Political culture did not mean Islam. Rather, it meant a habit of conducting politics by means of violence. At the time of the attacks, not one of the region’s rulers (apart from Israel’s) had been freely elected to his post. All relied on force and intimidation.

The neocon solution involved overhauling the way the region thinks about politics so that terrorism would no longer seem reasonable. This was a wildly ambitious idea, of course, but similar transformations had occurred in Europe and much of Asia over the previous half-century. If democracy had shown its potency in discouraging war elsewhere, it stood to reason that it also could be a cure to terrorism in the Middle East.[26]

Similarly, Richard Perle’s book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, coauthored with fellow neoconservative David Frum, son of well-known Canadian journalist and broadcaster Barbara Frum, in 2004, criticizes American bureaucracy, suggesting that “we” as “Americans” must “overhaul the institutions of our government to ready them for a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy” including the FBI, CIA, armed forces, and State Department.[27] The book also defends the 2003 invasion of Iraq and outlines important neoconservative aspirations, including ways to abandon all Israeli-Palestinian peace processes, invade Syria, and implement strict US domestic surveillance, with biometric identity cards and public vigilance to hinder potential terrorist immigrant or terrorist sympathizer threats. Perle and Frum conclude, shamelessly: “For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause… There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust.”[28]

Terrorists 

But while the purported culprits were al Qaeda, along with the Muslim Brotherhood with the support of Saudi Arabia, these groups had also been involved in bringing George W. Bush to the White House. Not only had George W. long received the direct financial support of the Saudis, but it was also discovered in October 2001 that the Muslim Brotherhood’s Dr. Jamal Barzinji was at the time president of the Safa Group, a secretive group of prominent Muslim charities and businesses in Northern Virginia funneling millions of dollars to foreign terrorists, and part of a suspicious agenda designed to sway the Muslim vote in favor of George W. Bush’s run at the presidency. The probe of the groups in Herndon, Virginia, was the largest federal investigation of its kind in the world. The network was centered around the SAAR Foundation, named after its chief sponsor, Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al Rajhi, head of one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest families. The treasurer of SAAR was Cherif Sedky, an American lawyer for the Rahji family, and representative of George W. Bush’s former business partner and head of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz. The Safa trust provided funds for a political group with a name that is oxymoronic: the Islamic Free Market Institute. The nonprofit Islamic Institute was started by Grover Norquist in collaboration with Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief political adviser. Norquist, who along with other institute leaders, courted Muslim voters for the Bush 2000 presidential campaign, credits the “Muslim vote” of putting Bush in a position to win the Florida contest.[29] It is a sad commentary on the fatal ignorance of American Muslims, who voted in the President who incepted the War on Terror, a propagandistic euphemism for what is actually the “War on Islam.”

According to reports, Khalid bin Mahfouz, who had maintained close business relationships with the Bush family, transferred millions of dollars through NCB to charities operating as fronts for al-Qaeda. Mahfouz personally owned a 20% stake in BCCI, and in 1993, he was indicted by a New York state grand jury for fraud but denied any culpability. The fraud charges were settled for $225 million in lieu of fines. Mahfouz also helped set up a charity organization called the Muwafaq Foundation, which in 2001 the U.S. Treasury Department named a front organization. In 2002, a raid by Bosnian authorities on the Sarajevo offices of the Benevolence International Foundation, a multimillion-dollar charity, led to the discovery of a document called the “Golden Chain,” a list of Al Qaeda sponsors. According to Jim Unger, “The donors of the Golden Chain were not just wealthy Saudis—they were the crème de la crème of the great Saudi industrial and mercantile elite.”[30] In addition to bin Mahfouz, they included three billionaire bankers, a former government minister, and leading Saudi merchants and industrialists, as well as the bin Laden brothers who ran the Bin Laden Group. By that time, bin Mahfouz had taken over NCB, and become the banker of the Saudi royal family, and the most powerful banker in Saudi Arabia.

Daniel Hopsicker, in Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida, reveals that least eight of the terrorist pilots received their initial training in Venice, Florida, at either of the flight schools owned by Arne Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers, who were part of a hornets’ nest of CIA activity. Yeslam bin Laden also provided several students for training at Huffman, though he still claims to be estranged from his step-brother. Less than three months before the two terrorists began flight training, a Lear jet owned by Wally Hilliard, Dekkers’ financier, carrying 43 pounds of heroin, was seized by the DEA. Hilliard was then loaned a plane—a Beechcraft King Air 200, worth over $2 million—by Truman Arnold for only one dollar. Arnold, the chief fund-raiser for the Democratic Party in 1995, also played golf with Clinton. The plane was conveyed from Arnold to a Hilliard company, Oryx, founded by Sheik Kamal Adham—former director of Saudi intelligence, and BCCI front-man—and Adnan Khashoggi. Wally Hilliard also did business with Myron Du Bain, who had worked alongside late ex-CIA director John McCone, on the boards of several banks.

Britannia Aviation, which operated from a hangar at Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport, had a “green light” from the Justice Department’s Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Venice Police Department “had been warned to leave them alone.” It was also found that Britannia had been providing maintenance services for Caribe Air, a Caribbean company, and notorious CIA proprietary carrier. Britannia was contracted to operate a large maintenance facility at the Lynchburg, Virginia, Regional Airport. Britannia’s move from Venice to Lynchburg, VA, was eased because Hilliard had loaned Jerry Falwell a million dollars. Many flight trainers who trained the Arab terrorists also moonlighted by flying “Christian missionary” flights to Central and South America, out of the Venice and Sarasota Airports, for Falwell crony, Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing.[31]

Hilliard was also involved in the mysterious evacuation of a number of leading Saudis in the days immediately following 9/11, at a time when every other private plane in the nation was grounded due to safety concerns. The Tampa Tribune called it “The Phantom Flight from Florida,” because the federal government denied it ever took place. It carried a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of that nation’s defense minister, as well as the son of a Saudi army commander, and it flew from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky. They flew on Wally Hilliard’s charter aircraft to private fields of military contractor Raytheon, and departed on a 747.

Boarding a plane from Lexington was Prince Ahmed bin Salman, a nephew of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Ahmed’s father, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, was the governor of Riyadh and member of the Sudairi clan, who had worked closely with Osama bin Laden during the Afghanistan war. Ahmed was better known as the owner of many top racehorses, like Point Given, the 2001 Horse of the Year, which won two legs of the Triple Crown. When Abu Zubayda, the chief of operations for al Qaeda, was captured in Pakistan. The CIA attempted to intimidate him into confessing by sending a team of Arab Americans posing as Saudi security agents, because of their reputation for brutality. The opposite was the effect. Instead, Zubaydah was relieved, and provided the agents the contact information for Prince Ahmed bin Salman, explaining, “he will tell you what to do.”  He said that, several years earlier, the royal family had settled a deal with al Qaeda, by which the Saudis would help the Taliban, if al Qaeda would refrain from attacking Saudi Arabia. Therefore, Zubayda added, he dealt with Prince Ahmed.[32]

Islamic State

ISIS, explained Graeme Wood, pursues the reestablishment of a territorial caliphate that is believed necessary for the coming of the Mahdi, who is believed to precede the return of Jesus. Wood proposes that the capture of the Syrian town of Dabiq, for example, was heralded as a great victory not because it is strategically important—because it isn’t—but because it has been prophesized as the location of the final battle, much like Megiddo, the plain in Northern Israel Armageddon is to take place. Dabiq is also become the name of the ISIS’ newsletter. The specific prophecy is that the armies of “Rome,” which in Islam and Judaism is a euphemism for Christianity, will come to Dabiq, and lose in a great battle. Then, the victorious caliphate will expand. Then the Dajjal will arise from Persia, or ISIS’s current nemesis, Iran. And though most of the caliphate will be defeated, a remainder will retreat to Jerusalem, where Jesus will emerge and finally defeat the Dajjal.

During an interview on Veterans Today Radio Show with Stew Webb, Gordon Duff, Senior Editor of VeteransToday.com, stated that the CIA, Mossad and Saudi Intelligence created ISIS. Professor Jim Fetzer of VeteransToday further stated that Alan Sabrosky, “will have a report that a retired U.S. Army Major General Paul E. Valley is guiding the terrorists and their operations against Assad.”  Fetzer then asked Duff if he could confirm or deny the charge, after which Duff responded: “Vallely is the commander of ISIS, yes.”[33]

A declassified secret Defense Intelligence Agency report, written in August 2012, predicted precisely the outcome in Syria, effectively welcoming the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al Qaeda-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to Western claims at the time, the document identifies al-Qaeda in Iraq—in other words, ISIS—and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” and asserts that “western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria. Mentioning the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality,” the Pentagon report further adds, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”[34]

A key agent of reviving the specter of al Qaeda in Iraq was another prominent Jihadi Salafi, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, whose spiritual mentors included veterans of the “Jihad” in Afghanistan, such as Abu Qatada and the Palestinian-Jordanian Abu Mohammed al Maqdisi. Maqdisi, considered the founder of Salafi-Jihadism, spent time in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, where his writings and speeches legitimizing violence influenced al Qaeda. Originally influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, al Maqdisi began to see the rulers of the Muslim world as apostates (Kafirs) who should be fought in order to apply the Shariah.

Abu Qatada is a known M15 agent. A Palestinian militant of Jordanian citizenship, Qatada is under worldwide embargo by the UN for his affiliation with al-Qaeda, and is considered to have acted as the ideologue for that organization and as the leader of terrorist groups in Algeria, the US, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and Jordan. Abu Qatada became infamous after 1994 when he supported the Fatwa of an Algerian cleric that the killing of women and children by the militants in the Algerian civil war was justified. However, in the mid-1990s Abu Qatada offered his services to MI5, boasting of his wide influence, but promising that he would not “bite the hand that fed him.”[35] Britain then ignored warnings from half a dozen governments about his links with terrorist groups and refused to arrest him.

Zarqawi, the initial leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, achieved notoriety for decapitating hostages. However, an ideological rift emerged between he and al Maqdisi in 2004, due to Zarqawi’s Takfiri pronouncements against the Shia of Iraq, who had subsequently become the focus of his violence instead of the Americans. Al Maqdisi was briefly released from prison and criticized Zarqawi’s car-bombing campaign against the Shiah. Those pronouncements led some to accuse him of becoming a tool for the Jordanian or American authorities, an accusation that has been renewed in recent years.[36] The writings of al Maqdisi still have a wide following. A study carried out by the Combating Terrorism Center of the United States Military Academy (USMA) concluded that al Maqdisi “is the most influential living Jihadi Theorist” and that “by all measures, Maqdisi is the key contemporary ideologue in the Jihadi intellectual universe.”

The current name of the group originally founded by Zarqawi, known as the Organization of Monotheism and Jihad, is now the infamous ISIS, or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who by continuing to base their violence on the errant Mardin Fatwa, serve as the new specter used to exaggerate fears about Islam as a violent religion, and to provide Israel with the needed pretext to justify continued American support and to expand its colonial ambitions in the region.

[1] Richard G. Kyle. Apocalyptic Fever: End-Time Prophecies in Modern America (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012), p. 4.

[2] Adam Curtis. “The Power of,” BBC documentary, 2004.

[3] Heinrich Meier. Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: the hidden dialogue (University of Chicago Press 1995), p. 125.

[4] Allan Janik, book review of “A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought.” By Jan-Werner Miiller. (Central European History (2005), 38 : pp 500-502)

[5] Jim Lobe. “POLITICS-U.S.: Strong Must Rule the Weak, said Neo-Cons’ Muse,” Inter Press Service (May 7 2003)

[6] Leo Strauss and the American Right (St. Martin’s 1999)

[7] Shadia B. Drury. “Saving America: Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives,” Evatt Foundation (11 September 2003).

[8] Shadia Drury. Alexandre Kojève, p. 43.

[9] The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama, 1992)

[10] Francis Fukuyama. “They Can Only Go So Far,” The Washington Post (August 24, 2008).

[11] Jane Mayer. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: DoubleDay, 2016).

[12] Gilles Keppel. The War for Muslim Minds, p. 62.

[13] Bryan S. Turner. “Sovereignty and Emergency Political Theology, Islam and American Conservatism.” Theory, Culture & Society 2002 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 19(4): 103–119.

[14] Ernest Hollings. Making Government Work (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). p. 299; Greg Cashman. An Introduction to the Causes of War: Patterns of Interstate Conflict from World War I to Iraq. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) p. 331.

[15] “Grants to New Citizenship Project, Inc.” Media Transparency (accessed February 7, 2008).

[16] “America Pearl Harbored.” American Free Press (April 12, 2004). Retrieved from http://www.americanfreepress.net/12_24_02/America_Pearl_Harbored/america_pearl_harbored.htm

[17] Philip Zelikow. “Thinking About Political History.” Miller Center Report, Winter 1999.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ashton B. Carter, John Deutch, & Philip Zelikow “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 1998).

[20] Emad Mekay. “Iraq was invaded ‘to protect Israel’—US official,” Asia Times (Mar 31, 2004).

[21] Video Interview with General Wesley Clark. Democracy Now (March 2, 2007).

[22] Brian Whitaker. “Playing skittles with Saddam,” Guardian Unlimited (September 3, 2002).

[23] Jim Lobe. “Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran.” Asia Times (June 26, 2003).

[24] Ibid.

[25] Phyllis Bennis. “Washington’s Latest Middle East War,” Common Dreams (July 25, 2006).

[26] Joshua Muravchik. “Can the Neocons Get Their Groove Back?” The Washington Post (Sunday, November 19, 2006).

[27] Janine R. Wedel. Shadow Elite (2009), p.147–191

[28] Gary Kamiya, “‘An End to Evil’ by David Frum and Richard Perle.” Salon (January 30, 2004).

[29] Alex Constantine. “Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists.” Part XXIII: Nazi & Republican Party Ties to Three 911 Hijackers. Retrieved ferom [http://thewebfairy.com/911/constantine/part23.htm

[30] Craig Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud, (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 112.

[31] Hopsicker. Welcome To Terrorland, p. 320.

[32] Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud. p. 268-7.

[33] “ISIS Commander Confirmed by VeteransToday.” Retrieved from http://www.wikiarmy.com/index.php/15-breaking-news/97-isis-commander-confirmed-by-veteranstoday; Preston James, Ph.D. “Historic Speech in Damascus sends Shockwaves around the World.” Veterans Today (December 13, 2014).

[34] Seumas Milne. “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq.” The Guardian (June 3, 2015).

[35] Daniel McGrory & Richard Ford “Al-Qaeda cleric exposed as an MI5 double agent.” Times Online (March 25, 2004).

[36] Robert F. Worth. “Credentials Challenged, Radical Quotes West Point,” New York Times (April 29, 2009). 

Volume Five

1. Team B

2. Secret Team

3. The Reagan Doctrine

4. Reaganomics

5. Second New Right

6. Project Monarch

7. Down Under

8. Sex, Lies and Wiretaps

9. Noosphere

10. Project Stargate

11. New Age

12. Psychic Warriors

13. Disclosure

14. Christofascism

15. The Clash of Civilizations

16. Black Order

17. Sacred Geopolitics

18. Third Secret of Fatima

19. Order of Eurasia