American Intelligence; Unparallelled

"For decades, U.S. intelligence agencies have routinely shared critical information with the covert operations organizations of such allied countries as the United Kingdom, Israel, Germany and other NATO powers. However, these “old-line” powers do not possess the deep resources of human intelligence (“humintel”) required for understanding the new Middle East, U.S. State Department analyst Lazlo Toth told Fox News Reporters yesterday. “What is more, many of those countries have agendas that are in fact at odds with the development of new, fragile democratic movements in the Middle East. The old European powers, the Israelis, none of them have a vital agenda in the emergence of popular-driven government. In fact, some of them are actively opposed to it. So we realized that we needed to find new friends in the region. And now we have found them.”

Toth explained that U.S. intelligence agencies have for the past 12 months been working with new security partners: the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. “This once-controversial group, which long ago renounced the use of force, has an incredibly far-ranging web of connections,” Toth said. “Their assets extend through every Middle Eastern country, a number of nations in Asia, and even extend to a network of campus student organizations in the U.S. They have so much to offer us, now that we have won their trust,” Toth said. “It took time for us to convince some of the 'Old Guard' inside our intel agencies that we have no long-term quarrel with the Brothers,” Toth told Fox reporters. “But this administration has been unrelenting about this, making a number of transfers and forced retirements in order to clear away irrational opposition to our new approach.”

The Muslim Brotherhood shares America's concern with human rights, democratic governance, and the need for values-based political activism, Toth said. “We just needed to strongly motivate some of our senior staff in order to make them see it.” Posted by Roland Shirk on April 1, 2011 4:01 PM |on the Jihad Watch web site http://www.jihadwatch.org

And then there is another reality, one that appears to have bypassed U.S. Intelligence, but one that is shared by many writers who are knowledgeable about the Muslim Brotherhood, their very long history in Egypt, their agenda, and their spread throughout the world. Take, for example, the Canadian Muslim scholar Tarek Fatah and what he has to say about the Muslim Brotherhood in his book Chasing a Mirage, The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State:

From India to Indonesia and Morocco to Malaysia, the Muslim Brotherhood ideology of jihad and Islamic supremacy is being challenged by fellow Muslims. However, in Canada, the United States, and the West it seems the Muslim Brotherhood and its Pakistani wing, the Jamaat-e-Islami of Abul Ala Maudoodi, dominate the Muslim narrative. The few voices that do stand up to the open exhibition of jihadi ideology in Canada and the United States face serious obstacles. For example, two Muslim experts who were hired by the US TV network PBS to advise it on a series on Islam ensured that Canadian filmmaker Martyn Burke's documentary Islam vs. Islamists was excluded. It was later widely reported that the two knew the very Islamist groups that were the subject of the documentary investigation. It took months of lobbying by the producer, including a viewing for members of the US Congress, to compel PBS to lift what amounted to a covert ban.

But it appears that although Muslims themselves who are aware of the Brotherhood agenda, through familiarity with their insiders are not taken seriously by those in the U.S. who claim they know better. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood have taken great pains to cultivate the impression that they share "America's concern for human rights, democratic governance and the need for values-based political activism". It's just that inconvenient little fact that's being overlooked that it is their particular view of values and the political activism that they support; quite unlike, in fact, that of the Americans.

The contacts within the Muslim Brotherhood of which U.S. State Department Toth is so proud of having disarmed and cultivated represent a cleverly integrated suspicion-disabling group whose agenda is clear to some, though not to those whom Toth represents: "Today's movement for an Islamic theocracy is structured around the creation of an Islamic State based on the works of Abul Ala Maudoodi and Hassan al-Banna of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood." (Tarek Fatah)

There is also the opinion of an authoritative scholar on Middle Eastern affairs, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics who wrote in an article titled "The Left and the Jihad", speaking of political accommodation between Islamism and leftist groups:

"The latter show every indication of appearing to see some combination of al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and (not least) Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as exemplifying a new form of international anti-imperialism that matches - even completes - their own historic project. This putative combined movement may be in the eyes of such leftist groups and intellectual trends hampered by "false consciousness", but this does not compromise the impulse to "objectively" support or at least indulge them.

And, it would appear, under the new accommodating spirit of the American administration led by President Barack Obama that is the unifying principle; taking from the left's accommodation of political Islamism and reaching an accord with the very groups whose hidden agenda, and sometimes not-so-hidden agenda, is to collapse the values and priorities, political structure and justice system of the Western world, into a Sharia-led global caliphate; by any means and stealth as good as any.

"We - the befuddled infidels - talk airily about "reforming" Islam. But what if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? What if the long percolation of Islam through Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian revolution, and contemporary Western-promoted whining over grievances such as "colonialism" is the reform? Mark Steyn, America Alone

Muslim victimhood crying aloud for understanding and commitment to their cause on the part of the West's judicial and political and intelligence establishment. Permitting their supporters to feel superior to others who view the poor misunderstood victims of Islamophobia as harbouring an agenda whose fulfilment will make victims of them, while allowing the triumph of political Islamism through both violent and disarmingly diplomatic overtures to the better natures of those in the West who do not want to be labelled anti-Islam.

In his book Descent Into Chaos, Ahmed Rashid documents compellingly just how stupidly blind the United States and Britain and their allies have been in going into Afghanistan, in being manipulated by Afghans and by Pakistan, allowing themselves to be used, bled of treasury and personnel, while sectarian, tribal and inter-country intrigues, drawing in Iran, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with Russia and nearby Uzbekistan have proceeded in a drawn-out, endless bloody conflict.

"Afghanistan had always tried to balance regional powers, taking money from the Soviets and the United States and balancing the demands of both Iran and Pakistan. However, Mohammed Daud overrode Afghanistan's balancing act and tilted decisively toward the Soviets, thereby increasing the influence of the two rival communist parties Khalq (the Masses) and Parcham (the Flag). Daud's tilt led to a crackdown on the country's nascent Islamic fundamentalist movement, which in order to avoid arrest fled across the border to Pakistan in 1975. The Afghan Islamists were linked with the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan's Jamiat-e-Islami, who gave them sanctuary."

In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood, throughout its long history has worked tirelessly to spread their gospel of violent jihad to overthrow moderate Islam, and it is their inspiration along with that of the Saudi's Wahhabist school of fundamentalist Islam that has promoted the concept of an re-awakening among the world's Muslims, to submit themselves entirely to Islam, to reject any accommodation with forbidden Western values. And, as Ahmed Rashid demonstrates, the Muslim Brotherhood remains an inspiring jihadist Islamist force to this day, despite its clever manoeuvres to intellectually disarm its detractors, those who are determined to look behind their veil of sinister intent:

Seizing the opportunity to weaken India, the ISI encouraged young Kashmiris to come to Pakistan for training. The ISI first trained secular and nationalist Kashmiri groups but quickly switched its support to Kashmiri Islamic groups, who were linked to Pakistan's own Islamic parties. These Kashmiris drew their inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood and described their struggle as an Islamic war of national liberation, but not as a jihad. However, in 1995-1996, fearing that the insurgency was petering out, the ISI shifted its support again - this time to Pakistani and Kashmiri extremist groups belonging to the Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam, which believed in a jihad to defeat India and "Islamize" Kashmir. It was precisely at this juncture that the ISI also switched its support in Afghanistan from Gulbuddin Hikmetyar to the Deobandi-inspired Taliban. This decision had less to do with religion than with the fact that in both Kashmir and Afghanistan such groups were more extreme in their hatred for India and more willing to do the ISI's bidding. the ISI soon shifted many of the Kashmiri training camps to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

This just happens to be the very same tail-that-wags-the-dog ISI, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate that has been infiltrated through-and-through with Islamists that influences whatever the government of Pakistan has done, and with whom the United States intelligence services have traditionally done business with.

"Washington had lavishly aided Pakistan's military, and U.S. legislators now asked where were the results of that aid. Between 2002 and 2007, the Bush administration had provided Pakistan with $3.5 billion in aid, more than half of that for the military. Between 2002 and 2005 the military had received another $3.6 billion in payments for use of its facilities and services by the U.S. Defence Department, while the United States had forgiven Pakistani debt worth over $3.0 billion. The CIA had paid large secret sums to the ISI in order to improve its performance and provide reward money for catching al-Qaeda leaders. the army received another $30 to $40 million to improve border security. Washington provided for the computerization of all international passenger traffic at the country's airports, the creation of an air wing for the army to monitor FATA, the building of access roads in FATA* and police training in several fields, including crime scene analysis and a centralized fingerprint ID system. Officially by 2007, the United States had provided $10 billion in aid to Islamabad, and unofficially the figure was much higher, yet FATA and indeed Pakistan were now greater threats than ever before. With terrorism on the increase, U.S. legislators were asking the Bush administration where the money had gone. *Federally Administered Tribal Areas Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos

And now, in 2011, with a new Democratic American administration replacing the Republican-Bush era, legislators can look around them at the accomplishments of the State Department, the CIA, the diplomatic and the military-industrial machinery, and ask, even while their country is in the deep dudgeon of monumental debt, what has been achieved by liberally sprinkling their treasury funds around the Middle East and the Muslim world, to achieve a detente, and to better understand the Islamist agenda.

Quite outstanding intelligence work there. Understandable why they would not seek the assistance of countries whose intelligence networks traditionally and conventionally they had sought. It might be too embarrassing to admit how utterly gulled they have been.

Unparalleled professionalism.