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Ooops, Now Failed Policy on Venezuela

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When the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez died, Barack Obama dispatched a delegation to the funeral as his representatives. 22 heads of state from 54 countries attended the funeral in Caracas. Yet there was more going on before the death of Chavez.

In March, before the death of Chavez:  The administration tried last year to cultivate Chavez’s designated heir, Vice President Nicolas Maduro, holding several phone calls and meetings with him and other top Venezuelans. But at a time when Chavez’s illness was paralyzing the government in Caracas, the Americans stopped getting any response to their inquiries, the U.S. official said.

“We had not gotten very far and were not sure that the government of Venezuela wanted to continue down that road, when [Chavez’s death] occurred,” the official said.

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, said he believed Maduro — considered by many to be the front-runner in the coming presidential election — may be open to a limited thaw in the relationship.

Maduro may, for example, agree to establishing regular communication between the two governments and exchanging ambassadors, Shifter said. He also may be open to cooperation on energy, because Venezuela’s oil industry, which is the source of most of its national income, needs technical help and new investment.

But Shifter noted that the next leader would not want to go too far in a thaw because “if he’s seen as embracing the U.S., it would be fatal with some sectors of Chavism.”]

Things did not work out well for the White House and their outreach plan with Venezuela. Seems Venezuela has turned their loyalty to China.

China has been generously co-signing financial transactions with the Venezuelan government including the borrowing of billions of dollars in exchange for future trade advantages. Since 2007, China has loaned Venezuela a total of $48 billion USD. But China’s help does not stop there. China’s generosity has reinforced the movement towards Latin America integration, fortified regional promotion of a multi-polar world, and it also has diminished somewhat the economic leverage of the United States in the region.

In January 2015, after a trip to Beijing and a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced that Venezuela will receive $20 billion USD in Chinese investments. Maduro also announced that this investment will be used on housing, technology, energy, and infrastructure projects. However the President did not provide further details on whether or not Venezuela will use this investment to import goods or pay old debts.2 Beijing’s financial help has been arousing controversies in the United States and the European Union, since Venezuela has been routinely accused of wanton human rights violations by corporation-funded but heavily biased western media.

The questions raised by western media have mainly focused on the alleged irrationality behind China’s loans to Venezuela. At times they expressed concern that Venezuela will not be able to pay back the nearly $50 billion USD due to falling global oil prices. The reality is that Venezuela already has paid back $24 billion USD, making the Chinese government confident that Caracas will pay back its debt. Due to the country’s heavy dependence on its oil production, when international oil prices plunged last summer, Venezuela’s economy suffered a serious setback. According to OPEC’s statistics, last September’s oil basket prices first dropped below $100, and then continued on a downward slope. As of January, 2015 oil WTI prices have plunged to $44.38. It was not until February, 2015 that oil basket prices first saw a minor recovery.3Real wages in Venezuela also are dropping along with oil production, while inflation rates skyrocket across the country. To add on to Venezuela’s economic misery, its oil production rate is also losing ground. Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.(PDVSA), state-owned oil company of Venezuela, is now pumping 2.7 million barrels of crude oil per day, 4 compared to 2006 when Venezuela was producing 3.2 million barrels per day.5

Statement by the Press Secretary on Venezuela

Today President Obama issued a new Executive Order to implement and expand upon the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014.  Venezuelan officials past and present who violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption will not be welcome here, and we now have the tools to block their assets and their use of U.S. financial systems.

We are deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government’s efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents.  Venezuela’s problems cannot be solved by criminalizing dissent.  We have consistently called on the Venezuelan government to release those it has unjustly jailed as well as to improve the climate of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, such as the freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly.  These are essential to a functioning democracy, and the Venezuelan government has an obligation to protect these fundamental freedoms.  The Venezuelan government should release all political prisoners, including dozens of students, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez and Mayors Daniel Ceballos and Antonio Ledezma.

The only way to solve Venezuela’s problems is through real dialogue – not detaining opponents and attempting to silence critics.  The Venezuelan people deserve a government that lives up to its commitment to democracy, as articulated in the OAS Charter, the Inter American Democratic Charter, and other fundamental instruments related to democracy and human rights.

We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela.  These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

It is unfortunate that during a time when we have opened up engagement with every nation in the Americas, Venezuela has opted to go in the opposite direction.  Despite the difficulties in our official relationship, the United States remains committed to maintaining our strong and lasting ties with the people of Venezuela and is open to improving our relationship with the Venezuelan government.

Muslim Brotherhood Embedded in USA Culture

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Keep in mind that all Muslim Brotherhood front operations in America have ‘non-profit; status with the Internal Revenue Service.

The Betrayal Papers Part I – Under Obama: U.S. Captured by the Muslim Brotherhood, presented a picture of a conspiracy that is manipulating the American government. Part II – In Plain Sight: A National Security “Smoking Gun” named several people in the Obama administration who have documented associations to Muslim Brotherhood front groups and the State of Qatar. This article will explore the deliberate strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration to cripple the middle class and to steer the American economy, as well as identify, to the extent possible, their role in many Obama scandals.

Primer 

What do Common Core, “comprehensive” immigration reform, and IRS targeting of conservative groups have in common? They are just a few examples of Muslim Brotherhood-connected policy initiatives that are affecting the lives of Americans every day. Under Obama, many new domestic policies, as well as many scandals, can be traced back to, in varying degrees, the Muslim Brotherhood.

To understand why America no longer feels like America – why it seems that the government has its favorites and while others are targeted and even persecuted – it is important to understand two strong influences on the Muslim Brotherhood. The first is historical: the Nazi Party of Hitler’s Germany. The second is more contemporary: the strategy developed by Al Qaeda’s strategic mastermind, Abu Musab al-Suri.

“The Vampire Economy” and Economic Repression

In 1939, German economist Guenter Reimann published a study of the German economy under Hitler. The Vampire Economy described a corrupt, backwards economy that was not based on any economic logic, much less profit seeking, but instead on the politics of the Fuehrer (i.e., Leader), Adolf Hitler.

Like Communism, Nazism was a form of socialism. (The term Nazi is a contraction of the German word Nationalsozialismus, or National Socialism.) Unlike Soviet Communism, which, at least theoretically, depended on shared ownership of capital to direct the economy, in Nazi Germany the shops, farms, and factories remained, nominally, in private hands. Yet the outcome was basically the same in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany: total control over the economy by the Leader and the Party.

In Germany, the pseudo-legal rationale used by the Nazis was regulation, which was subject to change on a whim. If you stepped outside the regulations, you were punished with fines, political persecution, imprisonment, and possibly shipped off to a concentration camp. Sound familiar?

Yet pervasive corruption in the Third Reich ensured the rules applied differently to those in favor, and to those who opposed the Nazis. Specifically, in such an economy, there are party members in good standing, and there were dissidents. Party members can break rules with impunity, while dissidents face public character assassinations and blacklisting.

This calls to mind Obamacare’s implementation. Certain companies, approximately 1,200 in fact, received waivers from the law. Other businesses were forced to provide health coverage for abortions against the will and conscience of the business owners (though the Supreme Court later overruled this regulation). A similar comparison can be made for the fines and prosecutions unequally levied on banks for violating a myriad of complex and overlapping regulations.

Abu Musab Al-Suri’s Plan to Cripple the American Economy

Although most Americans know the name Osama bin Laden, very few know the name Abu Musab al-Suri. While bin Laden provided the charisma and wealth to found Al Qaeda, al-Suri, one of his top lieutenants, provided valuable strategic advice to the fledgling jihadi network. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood from the time he was a student, al-Suri rose to become a member of the Brotherhood’s military command in 1982.

Al-Suri was a calculating thinker, who recognized that to bring down America (and the West in general) would require something different than mass murders. He urged the targeting of high value targets, such as infrastructure, which would force the United States to incur significant economic costs. As an example of this strategy in practice, Al-Suri was the architect of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. There is a good case to be made that the World Trade Center was long in Al Qaeda’s sights precisely because it was a bastion of capitalism, an important hub of New York City’s communications network, and the home of many prominent companies.

Of course, there’s little sense in physically targeting an economy which has already been knuckled-down under onerous, impossible to keep-up-with regulations issued by Obama’s bureaucracies. Various sectors of the American economy have already been effectively taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood Obama administration, including: healthcare, banking, energy, agriculture (think EPA and FDA), and transportation. Last week, the Obama administration, without the consent of Congress or the people, seized untold new powers to regulate the internet.

Meanwhile, as the government unapologetically intrudes into every aspect of life and business, a case could be made that the middle class is being systematically bankrupted. Financial columnist Charles Ortel has shown that the economy is fundamentally as weak as it has been in a generation. Following the collapse in 2008, the government pumped in trillions of dollars to supposedly stabilize and jumpstart the economy (recall the misnamed “Stimulus”). But as of January 2015, there were fewer core jobs in the private sector economy than ten years earlier. Compounding this economic morass is national debt: in roughly the same period (2005-2014), debt has increased $16.5 trillion, to $58 trillion. Finally, information from 2012 and 2013 (the most recent data available), shows pre-tax incomes decreasing for high, middle, and low income earning households.

Abu Musab al-Suri had a terrorist superstar with Osama bin Laden. However, when it comes to economically knee-capping the American economy, Barack Hussein Obama has proved far more effective than the cave rat, Sheikh bin Laden.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Doha, Qatar – Bipartisan Influence by Muslim Brotherhood

What would be powerful enough to exert this influence over the American economy? What entity could be that pervasive as to reach into big business across the nation?

In February 2010, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce established their first legal Chamber in Doha, Qatar. Qatar, the reader should be reminded, is a prolific financier of terror. Qatar is also home to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, now an Interpol fugitive. The Chamber represents American business and also has an explicitly political and diplomatic mission. In the words of the Chamber’s Executive Vice President and COO, David Chavern, AmCham Qatar is “another concrete example of positive U.S. Engagement with the Muslim world.”

Among the companies and organizations which are premier sponsors of AmCham Qatar are ExxonMobil, The Boeing Corporation, Carnegie Mellon Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, and Fluor. Moreover, the following companies have significant involvement with the State of Qatar: Lockheed Martin, Bloomberg, Bank of America, Miramax, among many more.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with its close ties to Qatar, is by far the largest lobbying spender in Washington ($136.3 million in 2012). Business is a bipartisan pursuit, which means that money from Qatar – which is arguably today’s most prolific financial sponsor of Islamic terror – carries great weight in both Republican and Democrat circles.

Indeed, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is on the record last year as saying, “I’m going to embrace being a Chamber of Commerce Republican.” He was part of a bipartisan Senate delegation to Qatar this January which also included Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Bob Corker (R-TN), John Barrasso (R-WY), Angus King (I-ME) and Tim Kaine (D-VA).

The Brotherhood’s Connections to Policies and Scandals of the Obama Administration

In June 2012, The Daily Caller reported that the CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, had attended “hundreds” meetings with the Obama administration. CAIR, it will be recalled, is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization very closely tied to Hamas.

Why so many meetings? What incredible portfolio of business does CAIR have to discuss with an American administration? What follows is a snapshot of various policies and scandals that are linked, often directly, to Muslim Brotherhood individuals, organizations, and their goal of “civilization jihad.”

Militarization of the Department of Homeland Security: While running for President, Obama stated several times that America needed a civilian national security force that matched the might of the U.S. military. Candidate Obama stated in 2008, “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

To many, this sounded like a call for a militarized federal police force. Given that DHS has been advised by such people as Mohammed Elibiary, Arif Alikhan, Eboo Patel, and Mohamed Magid, who each have documented ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, is it not possible that DHS has been weaponized as a force against the American people by the Islamists?

Domestic Spying and Wiretapping: While journalists at AP and Fox News have been subjects of wiretapping ordered by Eric Holder’s misnamed Department of Justice, the NSA’s dragnet on regular Americans has been revealed to be broader than virtually anyone suspected.

Curiously, the spreadsheets that were leaked detailing the email tracking of Muslim American leaders stop in 2008. CAIR Director Nihad Awad is listed as a target, as is Faisal Gill, a Republican operative who held a top-secret security clearance with the Department of Homeland Security. The spreadsheets were leaked in 2014 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Purge of Military Officers and Christianity: Over the past several years, the U.S. military has been purged of hundreds of high ranking officers. Many of these dedicated military officers were dismissed based on trivial offenses. Occurring simultaneously is a purge of Christianity, indeed even Bibles, from the U.S. military.

 

Anti-Police Protests: In conjunction with the militarization of DHS, state and local law enforcement have been targets of the Obama administration and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. This anti-police agenda culminated last summer with riots in Ferguson, Missouri and violent protests New York City. Among the most prominent groups involved in these protests was ANSWER, a pro-Palestinian group that had on its original steering committee the Muslim Students Association.

Finally, the NYC cop killer Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley stated on his own Facebook page that he was previously an employee of the (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). At the time of the killing, the president of ISNA was Mohamed Magid, an advisor to Obama, DHS, and the National Security Council.

Immigration and Amnesty: Revealed in a recent editorial, “Between 2010 and 2013, the Obama administration imported almost 300,000 new immigrants from Muslim nations — more immigrants than the U.S. let in from Central America and Mexico combined over that period.” Given the paucity of background and security checks, as well as the high incidence of terrorism from such countries, it is any surprise that the FBI now admits that ISIS is active in all 50 states?

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), another Muslim Brotherhood front organization operating in the United States, conveniently issued a policy paper in September 2013 calling for “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Moreover, in January the Obama appointed Fatima Noor, a veiled Muslim woman, to the position of “Special Assistant in the Office of the Director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Department of Homeland Security.” Other than her religion, her credentials are very thin.

It is hardly an exaggeration to state that the administration is taking gradual steps to eliminating the very concept of American citizenship. In fact, a recent White House conference call made it explicit that these new immigrants are not supposed to assimilate into American society, but instead establish their own ethnic communities within the United States. Does this remind anyone of Gaza, or the no-go zones in Europe?

Common Core: Even classroom education has not escaped the tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood. The connection between Common Core and the international terror group is through, once again, Qatar. The Connect All Schools initiative is a program to promote “One World Education.” It is aligned to Common Core State Standards, and is funded by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI). The director of QFI’s Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics is Tariq Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna.

According to WND, in 2011 QFI “partnered with the Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education to facilitate matchmaking between classrooms in the U.S. and international schools through … the “Connect All Schools” project.” QFI explains on its own website that the initiative was founded in response to Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech, during which Obama had the Muslim Brotherhood seated in the front row.

Participation of the Qatar Foundation International puts in proper context the ever more prevalent cases of Sharia (i.e. Islamic law) incursions into American schools, such as: girls forced to cover up like devout Muslims on school sponsored trips to mosques; Islamic vocabulary lessons in high school; the teaching of Islamic culture; teaching the five pillars of Islam and “A call to jihad;” and Qatar investing $5 million to teach Arabic in schools.

Finally, any treatment of Common Core would not be complete without mentioning the involvement of another one of Obama’s mentors, domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers received $49.2 million from Vartan Gregorian, a board member of Qatar Foundation who is also part of Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission. Gregorian is an integral part of Connect All Schools.

IRS Targeting of Conservative and Pro-Israel Groups: The targeting of Obama’s political enemies is reminiscent of the politicized bureaucracies of all tyrannies, from Nazism to Communism and everything in between. Among the persecuted by apparatchik Lois Lerner were: hundreds of conservative groups, Constitutional groups, groups that criticized Obama, 5 pro-Israel groups, and an 83 year old Nazi concentration camp survivor.

As usual, the pattern of targeting conservatives, Israel, and Jews in general is the trend of the Obama administration … and the Muslim Brotherhood. The IRS targeting nearly mirrors DHS’s profiling of “right wing sovereign citizens and extremist groups” as the primary terrorist threat facing the country, which was CAIR approved.

In addition to suppressing political enemies, the IRS has actually enabled the Muslim Brotherhood through Obama’s half-brother, Malik.
In 2011, the IRS granted a 501(c)(3) statuses to two groups connected to Barack Obama’s half-brother, Malik Obama: the Barack H. Obama Foundation (BHOF), and Mama Sarah Obama Foundation (MSOF).

This would not be of particular concern, but for the fact that Malik Obama has documented associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, wanted terrorists, and terrorist organizations. These include Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood leader Omar al-Bashir, the organizers of the infamous 2010 Gaza Flotilla, and Hamas. In fact, contravening all standard practices, the IRS granted the tax exempt status to BHOF retroactively, after it was learned that Malik was falsely and criminally representing his organization as a charity (which, at the time, it was not). A full report on these activities was produced by the Shoebat Foundation, and can be read here.

The George Soros Connection

In more than one of these instances, the fingerprints of billionaire investor (and breaker of nations and currencies) George Soros can be found. Soros operates a vast network of various “leftist” front organizations. In reality, these organizations are anything but liberal. They regularly attack capitalism, Israel, and fund the subversion of American society. It is not the intention here to dissect Soros’s network and political machinations, but to place him in context in the above scandals.

Combating “Islamophobia”: Soros has “donated” $10,117,186 to the Center for American Progress since 2000. One of the major initiatives of CAP is to combat “sharia hysteria” by the “religious right.”

Ferguson unrest: Soros’s Open Society Institute donated $33 million in one year to various activist groups in Ferguson who were active in the protests and subsequent destruction.

Immigration: Prominent Muslim American immigration lawyer Rabia Chaudry is employed by another Soros-controlled group, the New America Foundation. Previously Chaudry was Media Relations Director of CAIR-CT.

Common Core: A project of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), Common Core was conceived under the direction of John Podesta, while he was President of CAP. Podesta is currently Counselor to Obama, and also a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. (Note: Georgetown has a campus of their School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. All campus costs are fully covered by a grant of the Qatar Foundation, which also funds aspects of Common Core.)

Net Neutrality Regulation: According to Washington Examiner, Soros funded “net neutrality” groups to the tune of $196 million. Net neutrality was adopted last week by a committee vote of the FCC, and is widely expected to be used to regulate content on the internet and television.

Conclusion

Tyranny, whatever name it’s given, has one recipe. It starts with a base of fear, it’s spiced with terror, and served with sides of persecution and intimidation. The poorer and more desperate the people become, the more readily they’ll meld into the pottage of political domination by their government.

Taken alone, none of these events would be of much concern in a country of 300+ million people. Even the general feeling of depression and oppression by government could be overlooked as a result of global economic conditions, many which are out of the control of even the President of the United States.

But viewed together through the lens of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to dominate America and bring her down from within, dismissing them as coincidence would be to ignore a carefully constructed plan. Whether attacks on cops, downright crazy immigration policies, the persecution of American citizens by the IRS, or the takeover of school curricula, there is a rhythm to all of these scandals that jives seamlessly with the song of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Evidence above suggests a bipartisan infection, a betrayal of the American people by the crony establishment in both parties. What will it take before the pundits, politicians, and regular Americans start to demand answers and accountability from the people in their own government who are each day plotting their demise, and will only be content when the American people are destitute and servile?

*This is Part 3 in a 5 Part Series. Click to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

 

 

al Qaeda Founder Changes Sides

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The spy who came in from al-Qaeda

Aimen Dean

Aimen Dean is a founder member of al-Qaeda, who changed tack in 1998 and became a spy for Britain’s security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Interviewed by Peter Marshall, he describes his years working in Afghanistan and London as one of the West’s most valuable assets in the fight against militant Islam.

Bosnia

Dean was brought up in Saudi Arabia, where opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s made military jihad a noble concept. He was a teenager when Yugoslavia splintered, and Bosnian Muslims found themselves in mortal danger from Serb nationalists. He and a friend, Khalid al-Hajj – later to become the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia – set off to become mujahideen.

I would say it was the most eye-opening experience I ever had. I was a bookish nerd from Saudi Arabia just weeks ago and then suddenly I find myself prancing up on the mountains of Bosnia holding an AK-47 feeling a sense of immense empowerment – and the feeling that I was participating in writing history rather than just watching history on the side.

And also at the same time, being in the military training camps, receiving knowledge that I never thought in a thousand years I would be receiving about warfare and war tactics and military manoeuvres, and to be receiving it alongside people from many different nationalities, with the one common factor among them that they were all Muslims. And they were all there in order to participate in the jihad in defence of the Bosnian population, was in itself also an overwhelming experience.

Q: You weren’t afraid?

A: Between you and me, I think at the beginning I was afraid of the unknown rather than afraid of the fact that I’m going into, embarking on a journey that might end up with all of us being killed actually.

Q: You didn’t fear death?

A: I would be lying if I say no I didn’t fear death but I started to come to peace with the idea that yes, I am entering Bosnia. Most likely I will never come out of it.

Q: Did you want martyrdom, did you want to die?

A: Yes.

Jihad school

By the end of the Bosnian conflict I started to notice something else within my comrades. Those who survived started to adopt a rather more anti-Western, anti-globalisation feeling that the global community were conspiring against the Muslims in Bosnia because they were turning the tide of the war in their favour – so they wanted to end the war there and then before they score any more victories.

At least that’s the perception. And with that perception, I think they started to feel that the West is fighting Islam as a religion… and that led to further radicalisation that made it easy for them to make the transformation from being mujahideen into being jihad operatives.

Bosnia was a school in which many talented leaders of al-Qaeda were born. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed [accused of being the architect of the 9/11 attacks] was one of those people who were in Bosnia.

The impression I had at that time, was that he was there in Bosnia in order to spot talent, let’s put it this way, in order to you know scout for talents who will be useful for the later struggle.

I remember that one of the things he said, and it was in a wedding where we were seated next to each other basically, and one of the things he said, he said, “Well, the Bosnian war seems to be ending here, that you know the end is in sight but what will happen after the war? The question is are we going to roam the globe from one hopeless battle to another trying to save a Muslim population until someone else, and then someone else come and reap the reward?”

In other words, there will be a government that is secular and doesn’t rule by the rules of Sharia. He says that this cycle need to end and that we have to think about another front where we can serve Islam and basically resurrect the spirit of jihad within the Muslim world. I think that little speech was the first indication that things are moving from jihad being an instrument to defend Muslim populations on the frontiers to an instrument to bring down regimes and to fight a terror war… against the US interests in the region.

Q: To become terrorists rather than soldiers?

A: Absolutely.

Joining al-Qaeda

I was invited to Kandahar to give the allegiance basically and as with everyone who give allegiance Osama bin Laden will give you know a one-to-one meeting basically with those who are joining and then he welcomed me into the fold. He basically said that there will be many, many years of difficulties and hardship, and that the cause of jihad is not going to start with him or end with him.

Q: You swore an oath?

A: Yes.

Q: What was the oath?

A: “I give you an allegiance to fight alongside you in good times and in bad times and to fight the jihad against the enemies of god and to obey my commanders.”

Q: What were you doing when you were swearing the oath? Do you stand, do you kneel?

A: You sit next to him on the floor basically and you know you have your hand on a copy of the Koran and you say it. Almost knees touching each other basically.

Q: And this is a moving moment presumably?

A: Yes, although like you know I have to say looking back at it basically, I felt you know the same dread of the unknown that I felt before I went to Bosnia.

Q: You knew it was a big leap you were taking?

A: Yes.

Afghanistan

At home in Saudi Arabia Aimen Dean had been a Muslim theological prodigy. In Afghanistan it was his responsibility to train al-Qaeda recruits – many from Yemen – in the basics of Islamic theology and history and the essentials of religious practice. This opened his eyes to the jihadists’ different motivations.

There is no single process of radicalisation. Some people, it took them years to be convinced of coming to the jihad and some people it took them minutes. Some people were studying in religious seminaries – they’re a minority by the way – and then decided to come and some people basically just came straight out of a night club you know while he was consuming alcohol basically to come and seek redemption there in the jihadist world.

So you know you see immediately that you know there isn’t one single classical journey there, that there are so many journeys.

Q: But they all want martyrdom?

A: They all want martyrdom and redemption and to various degrees. Some people will come to you and say you know I’m really tired, I want to be martyred as soon as possible. And some people will come to you and say I want to be martyred but not before I give the enemies of god hell on this earth. I want to live for as long as possible to give them as much hell as possible and then taken out by them.

Q: So some, some are basically suicidal to begin with, and others just have blood lust?

A: Yes.

Doubts

Dean was at a training camp in Afghanistan when the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam took place in 1998. He was concerned to learn that as well as the 12 American casualties, 240 or more local people died, and 5,000 were wounded.

I think that is when the horror of it started to sink in. And this is when I realised that if this is the opening salvo of this war, where is the next target? Argentina, South Africa, Mozambique? Are we going to fight Americans in Africa in order to expel them from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula? It just didn’t make sense.

And as a theologian, that’s when I started to have doubts about the legality of the whole thing. So I started to ask questions. I went, I remember, to Abdullah al Mohaja, who was the de facto mufti of al- Qaeda… I said, “It’s not that I have doubts or anything but can you please enlighten me about the religious justifications for attacking an embassy belonging to the enemy, yes, but at the same time the fact that it’s surrounded by potentially huge collateral damage?”

And he said to me, “Well look, there is a fatwa issued in the 13th Century AD throughout the Muslim world, which legitimises attacking an enemy even if it means there are civilian deaths because the enemy is using them as a human shield.” And he said, “This fatwa is comprehensive, it gives us justification and there is no doubt about the legality of what we have done.”

So I decided to go and look for myself, and this is when I received a big shock. The fatwas were issued in response to questions sent by Muslim cities in Central Asia, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, asking this particular question: “Look, the Mongols are invading. Every time they sack a city, they take a segment of the population from that city, a thousand or two or three, and make them push the siege towers towards the walls of the next city. So do we shoot at our fellow Muslims, who are against their wills pushing the siege towers into the walls of our city, or not?”

And then the fatwa came: “Yes, this is a case where the Mongols are using civilian Muslims as human shields in order to achieve a military aim and if you don’t shoot at them, you will end up being killed yourself if the attacks succeed.”

Now when I learned of this, I was thinking: “OK, how do I reconcile this fatwa which applies to a life-and-death situation, regarding a vicious enemy using people as human shields to sack another place and to kill every man, woman and child in that city, with what happened really in Nairobi and Tanzania?” There is no resemblance here.

Q: And this fatwa based on siege towers from 800 years ago, that’s what’s used to justify all acts of jihadi terrorism?

A: That would result in civilian casualties, yes.

Q: So it’s important?

A: It is important but you know I’m not going to say it has shaky foundations. It has no foundations at all. It’s basically castle of sand in the air.

Q: It’s nonsense?

A: Absolutely, and two months down the line I decided that it’s no longer for me and that I wanted to leave.

Becoming a spy

Still barely out of his teens, and deeply troubled, Dean says he went to the Gulf for medical treatment, having privately decided not to return. Instead, he found himself in the hands of MI6. In 11 days, he says, he was turned. After four years and two months as a jihadi, he landed in London on 16 December 1998, and the debriefing began.

I think seven months of debriefings, that was more or less helping them put together a better picture of these organisations and the groups and who are the influential people within them.

Q: Because you knew Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubeida. You knew everybody.

A: Yes… Seven months into the debriefings, that’s when the suggestion [came]: “What about you going back to Afghanistan and doing some more work for us?” And my answer was unequivocally, “Yes.” I didn’t have any qualm with that at all.

Q: What did you do?

A: Passing back information, that’s what my primary objective was, to collect as much information as possible – and that wasn’t an easy task because you have to rely entirely on your memory. You can’t write anything. Everything has to be stored in the mind, nowhere else… Whatever moral misgivings I had, I have my ex-comrades to thank for driving those moral misgivings away because the more I see what they were planning – for example, I was there basically when al-Qaeda was constructing their first workable chemical device and talking about this with such glee and such deep psychopathic satisfaction… – that is when you say to yourself, “Why do I have any moral misgivings about spying on you guys?” Whatever they are doing is justifying whatever you are doing.

Q: You had to play along with them obviously?

A: Of course. I was still preaching, I was still stating how committed I am to the cause.

Q: That must be tricky, though, because in some ways because you’re there preaching, you’re again giving theological justification for some of the bad things that you know that they’re up to.

A: Yes, but at the end of the day if you want to catch rats, you have to go into the sewage system basically and get dirty yourself.

Q: So you were in Afghanistan and you were coming back and forth to the UK as well.

A: Yes.

Q: But al- Qaeda thought they were sending you back to the UK presumably?

A: Yes. I think that’s the beauty of it.

Q: So they think you’re working for them?

A: Yes.

Q: When you’re actually working for the West?

A: Absolutely.

Spying in London

While in the UK Dean would be watching and gathering information on people like Babar Ahmed, a British man who admitted providing material support to terrorists, and Abu Hamza, convicted in the US earlier this year of supporting terrorism, and Abu Qatada, who was cleared of terrorism charges by a court in Jordan last autumn after a long legal battle to extradite him from the UK. Dean kept an eye on them and others while preaching in mosques and Islamic societies.

Q: The difficulty is though that if you’re there under cover, welcomed there as an al-Qaeda man, you have to keep up this pretence by talking to people at the mosque, you have to encourage them to join the jihad?

A: Yes… although there are limits. I was aware of my boundaries basically about how much you can incite. You use guarded words about general rather than specific incitement. But then the most difficult part actually was after 7/7, 2005. That’s when the laws and regulations regarding incitement like you know were really tightened.

Q: So you couldn’t say what, and you could say what?

A: You can’t specifically urge someone to go. You can’t specifically call for an attack. You can’t glorify violence committed against civilians. You know you have to be careful there. You can sit down there basically and blast the West for what they do. You can sit down there and talk about martyrdom in general without you know touching directly on what’s happening right now. So you have to be clever about how you phrase your words.

Q: Do you ever feel guilty about having encouraged somebody to go to jihad?

A: Yes.

Q: Are there many occasions that this might have happened?

A: There were some occasions where that happened.

Q: What’s the nature of the guilt, because of what they might have been involved in or because of how they ended up?

A: I’m glad that no one was killed. However, one particular person ended up in prison for a long time.

Q: And you were instrumental in getting him out there?

A: I was a contributing factor but I wasn’t the only one.

Saving lives

Dean says he foiled attacks involving suicide bombings and the use of poisons against civilians. He was also able to hand plans to British intelligence of a device that was intended to be used for a chemical attack on the New York subway. In the event, Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off the attack.

They would have used chemical weapons if it wasn’t for al-Zawahiri saying, “No, don’t use it.”

Because it was a cell that was seeking permission from al-Zawahiri saying, “We are in possession of this weapon, we know how to use it now, we know how to deliver it and we have a target for you. It’s the New York subway because we believe that the subway system with all the ventilation mechanism there will be a perfect vehicle for delivering the gas and dispersing it across a wide network.”

And so that’s where Zawahiri said, “No, don’t do it because the retaliation could get out of control.”

Q: He didn’t stop it because he thought it was the wrong thing to do, to put gas on the subway?

A: He stopped it because he was afraid of the ramifications.

Q: So you got these important plans. Can you tell me where you got those plans from?

A: Well, I wouldn’t say even if I was allowed to!

Q: The fact you got those plans though suggests you had a high degree of clearance in al-Qaeda, trust.

A: I think I was privy to these plans because I have a certain talent, and I [pretended I] wanted to use that talent for enabling these attacks. That’s why.

Q: That’s what al-Qaeda thought?

A: Yeah.

Q: What was your certain talent?

A: I wouldn’t say!

Valued first by al-Qaeda and then British security and intelligence, Aimen Dean’s life under cover came to an abrupt end when the cover was blown. An American writer disclosed his identity with details that could only be sourced to Dean. That was eight years ago.

Why Nemtsov was Murdered

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Breaking: (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Saturday Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered because he planned to disclose evidence of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s separatist conflict.

Poroshenko paid tribute to Nemtsov, who was shot dead late on Friday, and said the fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin had told him a couple of weeks ago that he had proof of Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis and would reveal it.

“He said he would reveal persuasive evidence of the involvement of Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Someone was very afraid of this … They killed him,” Poroshenko said in televised comments during a visit to the city of Vinnytsia.

More than 5,600 people have been killed since pro-Russian separatists rebelled in east Ukraine last April, after the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula.

Kiev and its Western allies say the rebels are funded and armed by Moscow, and backed by Russian military units. Moscow denies aiding sympathizers in Ukraine, and says heavily armed Russian-speaking troops operating without insignia there are not its men.

And there is more as noted below.

Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said he feared Vladimir Putin would have him killed just days before he was gunned down in front of his Ukrainian model girlfriend.
The former deputy Prime Minister, 55, and fierce critic of the Russian leader said ‘I’m afraid Putin will kill me’ in an interview shortly before he was killed in a ‘politically motivated’ attack.


Nemtsov, a married father-of-four, was shot four times by assailants in a white car as he walked across a bridge in central Moscow with Anna Duritskaya on Friday night, but the model was unhurt.
Just hours before his death he accused Putin of pushing Russia into a crisis through his ‘mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine’ and was due to attend an protest on Sunday.
Nemtsov had been working on a report presenting evidence he believed proved Russia’s direct involvement in the separatist rebellion that erupted in eastern Ukraine last year, For a full background of events leading up to the hit job, click here.

In part from Foreign Policy: Given these recent events, most Russian opposition leaders have given up hoping that Obama will be able to change much inside Russia. Opposition activist Boris Nemtsov met with Obama in Moscow back in 2009, but this time around he didn’t see any point to a meeting with the U.S. president.

“Obama is a Hollywood actor, a weak man with no balls,” Nemtsov said, cutting to the point. “Nobody should ever expect him to help Russians seeking civil freedom.”

While Nemtsov initially backed Putin’s presidential run, calling him “responsible and honest”, he swiftly changed his mind and became one of his bitterest foes.

He was one of the founders of Russia’s Union of Right Forces liberal party, and its leader in the early 2000s, serving as an opposition lawmaker in the parliament where he criticised Putin’s initial steps to curb political freedoms.

Always tanned and flashing smiles, Nemtsov had a quasi rock-star image, wearing designer jeans and often wearing his shirt with an extra button open. He was known for his colourful love life and popularity with women.

Along with other opposition leaders, Nemtsov unsuccessfully sued Putin after he said Nemtsov and others “wreaked havoc” in Russia during the 1990s, pillaging it of billions of dollars.

Hate figure for pro-Kremlin groups

With the Kremlin’s rhetoric focused on discrediting the political climate of the 1990s, Nemtsov became one of the most reviled faces among the opposition and pro-Kremlin groups routinely put him on their lists of “traitors” in recent years.

He had been a victim of hacking and wiretapping, and pro-Kremlin websites had written reports about his personal life and alleged affairs.

A physicist by education, Nemtsov worked in a research institute in the late Soviet era as a young man and was among a wave of academics and scientists to be swept up by the political upheaval of the perestroika reform movement, becoming a deputy in Russia’s first post-Soviet lawmaking body.

Like most others in the opposition, Nemtsov was a prolific user of social networks, calling on Muscovites to attend an opposition rally on Sunday in his most recent blog entry.

In recent years he compiled a series of pamphlets exposing corruption under Putin, zooming in on the gas behemoth Gazprom, the residences allegedly owned by Putin, and most recently the misappropriations and graft during preparations for Russia’s Olympic Games in Sochi last year.

Though he continued to be a key figure in opposition events in Moscow, Nemtsov gradually withdrew over the past decade as a younger generation of opposition leaders such as charismatic lawyer Alexei Navalny appeared.

His most recent post was as a regional lawmaker in the city of Yaroslavl north of the capital.

 

Cables Reveal Iran’s Weapons Status

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Item 7 of leaked intelligence cables from 2012 explains conditions on status of weapons.

Item 7 Iran

 

From an IAEA brief noted December 2014:
*Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since at least the late 1980s.
*In 1989, it set up a management structure for the program responsible to the Ministry of Defence, which it has reorganized over the years.
*At the start, a lot of Iran’s technical knowledge to produce nuclear weapons came from the same underground network which helped countries like Libya. *Iran has also been getting help from an unnamed “nuclear weapon state” (Russia? China?), but it has developed considerable scientific and technical capabilities of its own.
*The program has involved extensive procurement activity, much of it clandestine using false front companies, but benefitting from the fact that many of the components sought have both civilian and military applications.
*In addition to enriching uranium, Iran has been working on converting highly enriched uranium (HEU) into metal, and casting and machining it into the components of a nuclear core.
*It has done modelling and calculations on how an HEU device would function.
*Engineering work has been done on integrating a nuclear device into a missile delivery vehicle.
*Iran has been experimenting with a multipoint initiation system, with the explosives used having the dimensions of a payload that would fit into the warhead chamber of an Iranian Shahab 3 missile which has a range of some 1300 kilometers. (Iran is also working on a longer range missile.)
*Iran has been working on the development of safe, fast-acting detonators which can be triggered within a microsecond of each other in order to set off an implosion-type nuclear device.
*Work has been done on a prototype system for fuzing, arming and firing a nuclear weapon which could explode both in the air above a target and on impact.
*Iran has conducted a number of practical tests to determine how firing equipment might function over long distances with a test device located down a deep shaft; and it has studied safety arrangements for conducting a nuclear test.

***  

By the next decade, according to the IAEA, the regime would consolidate its weaponization researchers under an initiative called the “AMAD Plan,” headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer and senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The AMAD Plan was charged with procuring dual-use technologies, developing nuclear detonators and conducting high-explosive experiments associated with compressing fissile material, according to Western intelligence agencies. The AMAD Plan’s most intense period of activity was in 2002-03, according to the IAEA, when current President Hasan Rouhani headed Iran’s Supreme National Security Council before becoming its chief nuclear negotiator.

Feeling the heat from the MEK’s disclosure of two nuclear facilities in 2002 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the mullahs apparently halted the AMAD Plan’s activities in late 2003. But Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his scientists didn’t stop their weaponization work. As former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright told us, “Fakhrizadeh continued to run the program in the military industry, where you could work on nuclear weapons.” Much of the work, including theoretical explosive modeling, was shifted to Defense Ministry-linked universities, such as Malek Ashtar University of Technology in Tehran.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh has continued to oversee these disparate and highly compartmentalized activities, now under the auspices of Iran’s new Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Persian acronym, SPND. The MEK first disclosed the SPND’s existence in 2011. Now the opposition group has obtained what it says are key new biographical details and the first photograph of the 56-year-old Mr. Fakhrizadeh, whom Iran has refused to make available to the IAEA for long-sought interviews.

The MEK has also compiled a list of what it says are 100 SPND researchers. Far from disbanding the SPND, the MEK alleges, the Tehran regime has kept its nucleus of researchers intact. Possibly to avoid detection by the IAEA, the MEK says, the regime recently relocated the SPND’s headquarters from Mojdeh Avenue in Tehran to Pasdaran Avenue. “The new site,” the MEK adds, “is located in between several centers and offices affiliated to the Defense Ministry . . . , the Union of IRGC, the sports organization of the Defense Ministry . . . and Chamran Hospital.”

To further mask the illicit nature of the relocation from the IAEA, the MEK says, “parts of Malek Ashtar University’s logistical activities were transferred to the former site of SPND. The objective was to avoid closing [the former] center, and in the event of inspections, to claim that the site has always had the current formation.” Don’t expect the regime to fess up to much of this by the August 25 deadline set in its joint communique with the IAEA.

The fact that the IAEA and the Western powers are now turning to the weaponization question is a sign of how far the Iranian nuclear-weapons program has progressed. As the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s Henry Sokolski, a former nonproliferation director at the Pentagon, told us: “A concern about weaponization followed by testing and use is the moral hazard when you don’t pay attention to fissile-material production.”

In other words, having ceded a right to enrich and permitted the Islamic Republic to develop an advanced enrichment capability, the West is now left with preventing weaponization as the final barrier against a nuclear-capable Iran. The diplomacy of Mr. Rouhani and his Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, is intended to soothe jittery Western nerves on weaponization.

That palliative effect will be reinforced by the IAEA’s latest quarterly report, also released last week, in which the Agency reported that Iran has sharply reduced its stock of 20% uranium and hasn’t enriched above 5% since the November interim agreement took effect. The report also highlights the Islamic Republic’s new willingness to address at a technical level the “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” including Tehran’s development of exploding bridge-wire detonators and high-explosives testing.

But if past is precedent and the MEK’s new disclosures are to be believed, Mr. Fakhrizadeh will continue to do his work as he has to this day. The snake may shed its skin but not its temper, runs an old Persian proverb.