No 409 6/12/13 “En mi opinión” Lázaro R
González Miño Editor ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’
Petition to Demand the Resignation of President Obama
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This is an unprecedented
time in our nation’s history. The American people are outraged by the display
of unconstitutional, corrupt, immoral, and criminal actions by President Barack
Obama and his Administration. We, the people, demand justice. We, the people,
demand that President Barack Hussein Obama resign immediately.We, the people, present the following:
The IRS Scandal:
- Whereas: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) intentionally abused their power by targeting conservative organizations; and
- Whereas: These actions demonstrate that the IRS was being used as a tool for partisan, political manipulation and advantage; and
- Whereas: President Obama will not reveal or admit to knowledge of the actions of his Administration, deeming him either ineffective or deceitful. At a minimum, this makes him guilty of betraying the trust of the American people; and
- Whereas: Accountability is crucial if we are to send a message to our elected officials and bureaucrats that committing crimes against the American people and our Constitution will not be tolerated;
- Therefore: We demand a thorough investigation and full disclosure of the matters concerning the IRS scandal; and swift, expedient action against all offenders, including the President of the United States, to the fullest extent of the law.
- Whereas: Key members of the Obama Administration, seemingly with President Obama’s knowledge, willfully denied support to the American ambassador and other brave Americans while they were under attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012; and
- Whereas: The ensuing cover-up,
including the intent to deceive the American people about the nature of
the attack, was politically motivated for the advancement of Barack
Obama’s re-election campaign; and
Whereas: The truths uncovered to date, which are too many to list, prove that the death of four Americans was exploited as a tool for partisan, political manipulation and advantage; and - Whereas: President Obama will not reveal or admit to knowledge of the actions of his Administration, deeming him either ineffective or deceitful. At a minimum, this makes him guilty of betraying the trust of the American people; and
- Whereas: Accountability is crucial if we are to send a message to our elected officials and bureaucrats that committing crimes against the American people and our Constitution will not be tolerated;
- Therefore: We demand a thorough investigation and full disclosure of the matters concerning the Benghazi scandal; and swift, expedient action against all offenders, including the President of the United States, to the fullest extent of the law.
- Whereas: The Obama Administration’s Department of Justice secretly obtained private telephone and fax records of Associated Press reporters and editors; and
- Whereas: The communicated intent, once this seizure was revealed, was to search for government leaks; the perceived intent was an attempt by government officials to intimidate and manipulate freedom of the press; and
- Whereas: The Department of Justice violated its own regulations which recognize the importance of freedom of the press, and exceeded their authority for the purposes of partisan, political manipulation and advantage; and
- Whereas: President Obama will not reveal or admit to knowledge of the actions of his Administration; deeming him either ineffective or deceitful. At a minimum, this makes him guilty of betraying the trust of the American people; and
- Whereas: Accountability is crucial if we are to send a message to our elected officials and bureaucrats that committing crimes against the American people, and our Constitution will not be tolerated;
- Therefore: We demand a thorough investigation and full disclosure of the matters concerning the Associated Press scandal; and swift, expedient action against all offenders, including the President of the United States, to the fullest extent of the law.
Read more: http://MinutemenNews.com/petition-to-demand-the-resignation-of-president-obama/#ixzz2W0Q7FBdc
· aunque estoy seguro lo saben se los recuerdo... Ricardo Samitier El comisionado del IRS, Douglas Shulman visito la Casa Blanca en 157 ocasiones antes de que sucediera el escandalo, y cuando el Comité de Finanzas del Senado le preguntaron al respecto, su cinica y arrogante respuesta fue una falta de respeto al pueblo Americano?
La
oficial del IRS en Cincinnati, Louis Lerner se amparo en la quinta enmienda de la Constitucion para no ser interrogada? Si la prensa vendida
hiciera su trabajo…, porque Barack Hussein Obama no sabia absolutamente nada!
¡Caramba! ¡Que mal informado mantienen a este presidente!
JUICY: Candidate Obama debates President Obama on Government Surveillance http://clashdaily.com/2013/06/juicy-candidate-obama-debates-president-obama-on-government-surveillance/
obama IRS SPIES. SUPER IMPORTANTE OPEN THE LINKS INMEDIATELY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKhEzquIX9g
Obama Could Be Indicted For War Crimes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNNQ1SfVKQU
Obama's SEAL Team 6 Coverup
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFVJoZdjZFw
The Chuck Schumer Republicans Roll Amnesty Train Down the Cliff
Daniel Horowitz (Diary) | | 97
RESIZE: AAA
The Senate just voted 82-15 to proceed with debate on the
amnesty/immigration deform bill. Every Democrat voted yes, laying waste
to the notion that there are still moderate red state Democrats. 15
Republicans voted to stand with We the People against the La Raza foreign
lobby/K Street juke box:Barrasso, Boozman, Crapo, Cruz, Enzi, Grassley, Inhofe, Kirk, Lee, Risch, Roberts, Scott, Sessions, Shelby, Vitter
McCain, Murkowski, and Coburn were not present for the vote. The former two would have voted for it anyway. [Update: Coburn voted yes on the second procedural motion to proceed.]
The rest of the Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, all voted to proceed with debate, thereby sealing the fate of the bill and ensuring that a phony cosmetic compromise is hatched to pass the bill and pressure the House.
We will hear a lot of statements about the need to proceed with debate in order to “strengthen” the bill. It’s akin to advocating for debate on Obamacare so we can fix the beast. This bill is beyond fixing, and even if there was a way to fix it, Democrats along with McConnell and Cornyn have made it clear that their idea of tweaking the bill is strengthening the enforcement after legalization. Rubio actually plans to offer amendments to place provisions in the bill that he originally claimed were a part of the legislation to begin with (the Zuckerberg ads still tout that original speech).
We will hear the establishment say that the status quo is unacceptable. Yes, the status quo of constant amnesty before enforcement is unacceptable. But just because the status quo is bad doesn’t mean we should make it worse just for the purpose of passing “something.” By that same logic, we should have passed Obamacare because there were problems with our current healthcare system. The status quo of Obama promulgating cap and trade regulations by executive fiat is unacceptable, so we need to pass a compromise cap and trade bill to fix the problem.
Now that we have brought the amnesty-first supporters out of the shadows, we need to call the following members and ask them what part of enforcement first don’t they understand:
|
Alexander
(R-TN)
Coburn (R-OK)Ayotte (R-NH) Blunt (R-MO) Burr (R-NC) Chambliss (R-GA) Chiesa (R-NJ) Coats (R-IN) Cochran (R-MS) Collins (R-ME) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Fischer (R-NE) |
Flake
(R-AZ)
Graham (R-SC) Hatch (R-UT) Heller (R-NV) Hoeven (R-ND) Isakson (R-GA) Johanns (R-NE) Johnson (R-WI) McConnell (R-KY) |
Moran
(R-KS)
Murkowski (R-AK)Paul (R-KY) Portman (R-OH) Rubio (R-FL) Thune (R-SD) Toomey (R-PA)) Wicker (R-MS) |
As we noted yesterday, it is quite evident that Democrats have 60 votes to pass any amnesty bill. They are aiming to work with McConnell and Cornyn to insert one or two shiny objects into the bill, so they can bring along another 15-20 Republicans into the fold. This way they will have the GOP share in the blame of another failed amnesty, and place enormous pressure on the House to jump off the cliff instead of following the prudent enforcement-first approach of the House Judiciary Committee - a position supported by the vast majority of the country.
Periodista que expuso el espionaje electrónico en EE.UU. dice que se revelarán más secretos
(CNN) — Mientras agentes federales reúnen pruebas
contra Edward
Snowden, el contratista de la CIA que expuso los controversiales
programas de vigilancia electrónica de la Agencia de Seguridad Nacional (NSA,
por sus siglas en inglés), uno de los periodistas que trabajaron con él
sostiene que hay más secretos que se revelarán pronto.
“Hay programas de espionaje extremadamente invasivos que el público aún no
conoce, en los que la NSA regularmente se involucra en otras capacidades (de
espionaje) que están desarrollando”, dijo Glenn Greenwald, columnista
para The Guardian, el diario británico que reveló
la historia con base en documentos secretos de la NSA.“Estamos trabajando justo en este momento en historias que creemos que son muy valiosas para el público para saber que de ninguna manera afectan la seguridad nacional, pero que arrojan luz sobre esta extremadamente reservada pero crítica agencia”, dijo este lunes a Christiane Amanpour de CNN.
Greenwald recibió los documentos de Edward Snowden, un empleado de 29 años del consultor computacional Booz Allen Hamilton, contratista para la agencia de inteligencia electrónica estadounidense.
Snowden dijo a The Guardian que dejó atrás a su familia y su trabajo en Hawaii para revelar la colección de datos telefónicos y de internet recolectados por la NSA, la cual describió como “una amenaza existencial a la democracia”.
Añadió que espera ser procesado por la filtración. Un agente de justicia federal dijo este lunes que agentes del FBI ya iniciaron una investigación, buscando en su hogar y en las computadoras de Snowden; además de entrevistas con su novia, familiares, amigos y extrabajadores.
Hasta el momento se desconoce el paradero exacto del responsable de las fugas. Snowden registró el lunes su salida de un hotel de Hong Kong donde había permanecido, pero continúa en el territorio semiautónomo chino, según dijo uno de los periodistas de The Guardian que trabajó con él, Ewen McAskill.
Las revelaciones han iniciado un debate sobre los registros del gobierno sobre llamadas domésticas y la actividad en internet, en medio de la búsqueda global de terroristas y criminales.
Defensores de las libertades civiles afirman que las medidas son una intrusión inaceptable a la privacidad de los ciudadanos. Pero quienes defienden los programas afirman que son legales y que tienen evidencia que sostiene su utilidad para meter a terroristas a prisión, aunque muchos de los detalles permanecen clasificados.
DICE FRANCISCO (EL PAPA) QUE HAY UN LOBBY DE MARICONES EN EL VATICANO… HAY UN LOOBY GAY EN EL VATICANO. (MARICONES EN EL VATICANO) DICE FRANCISCO (EL PAPA) Papa Francisco: Hay un lobby gay en el Vaticano
Por Daniel Burke, CNN
(CNN) – El Papa
Francisco dijo que existe un "lobby gay" en el interior del Vaticano,
según una página web católica,
una sorprendente admisión de un Pontificado joven que ya ha generado varias
sacudidas.
"En la Curia", dijo
Francis, refiriéndose a la burocracia central del catolicismo, "hay
personas santas. Pero también hay una corriente de la corrupción".
"En la curia hay gente santa,
de verdad, hay gente santa. Pero también hay una corriente de corrupción,
también la hay, es verdad… Se habla del 'lobby gay", dijo el Papa según el
sitio Reflexión y Liberación.
"Hay que ver qué podemos
hacer", agregó el Pontífice según el sitio.
Los rumores en torno a un posible
"grupo de presión gay" en el Vaticano surgieron por primera vez en
los medios italianos tras el escándalo
de filtraciones en la Santa Sede.
Las enigmáticas observaciones del
Papa tuvo ocurrieron durante una reunión el domingo con la Confederación
Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Religiosos y Religiosas (CLAR), a la
que pertenecen comunidades católicas de sacerdotes, religiosas y religiosos.
El sitio web de Reflexión y
Liberación de Chile, enfocado en la teología de la liberación, fue el primero
en informar de estas declaraciones atribuidas al Papa.
Un portavoz del Vaticano dijo a CNN
que "la Oficina de Prensa de la Santa Sede no tiene ningún comentario
oficial sobre la reunión privada".
Grupos de católicos gays y
lesbianas no respondieron de inmediato a las solicitudes de comentarios de CNN.
La Red de Sobrevivientes de
Abusados por Sacerdotes (SNAP, por sus siglas en inglés) dijo
que "la estructura, no la sexualidad, es el verdadero problema".
"La iglesia es una monarquía.
Los monarcas no son responsables. Hay tantos monarcas corruptos. Esto ocurre
tanto en las instituciones seculares como en las religiosas", dijo SNAP en
un comunicado.
Otros católicos recomendaron
cautela con hacer demasiadas interpretaciones de las palabras del Papa.
"No tenemos una explicación de
lo que significa 'lobby gay'", dijo Rocco Palmo, un observador del Vaticano
que dirige Susurros
en la Loggia, un sitio web de noticias católicas y de política en la
iglesia.
"Naturalmente, algunos en la
Iglesia tratarán de polarizar o interpretar esto, pero como ninguno de nosotros
somos el Papa, todavía necesitamos una explicación más detallada", agregó
Palmo.
Algunos expertos en temas de la
Iglesia creen que el reporte del sitio chileno parece auténtico ya que los
temas que se abordan corresponden con los que el Papa se ha enfocado en el
tiempo que lleva de Pontificado.
“En mi opinión” NO ME QUIERAN
CAMBIAR LA PANETELA. “DIJO BIEN CLARO QUE HAY UN BANDO DE MARICONES EN EL
VATICANO” ¿Para quién no le quedó claro esto? Y si el ataca esta gran verdad
que está destruyendo la moral del catolicismo, pues esto tiene que terminarse.
Creo que todos estarán de acuerdo conmigo de que el abuso que han cometido los
curas con los muchachos en las iglesias es una buena mariconada y un terrible
abuso… y eso tiene que acabarse. Lázaro R González Miño.
http://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2013/06/11/papa-francisco-hay-un-lobby-gay-en-el-vaticano/
El Departamento de Estado de EE.UU., investigado por prostitución y drogas
Por Ashley Fantz (CNN) — Es
probable que algunos altos funcionarios del Departamento de Estado de Estados
Unidos y de seguridad diplomática hayan encubierto u obstaculizado las
investigaciones acerca del comportamiento incorrecto o incluso delictivo del
personal, según un memorando interno procedente de la oficina del inspector
general de la dependencia.
Según la cronología de las acusaciones, los incidentes ocurrieron durante el
mandato de la exsecretaria de Estado, Hillary Clinton, lo que abre la
posibilidad de que crezca el escándalo y de que su trayectoria y sus posibles
ambiciones políticas se vean afectadas. Clinton recibió críticas por
el ataque contra la embajada estadounidense en Bengasi, Libia, en
septiembre de 2012.Respecto a las acusaciones más recientes, CNN recibió los documentos de manos del abogado de un exinvestigador de la oficina del inspector general.
En los documentos se incluye información acerca de:
• Un embajador estadounidense en activo que “rutinariamente se deshacía de su escolta para solicitar favores sexuales a prostitutas y menores de edad”, según el documento. En el memorando se afirma que la escolta del embajador y otras personas “sabían que esto ocurría”. Cuando un oficial de seguridad diplomática trató de investigar, el subsecretario de Gestión del Departamento de Estado, Patrick Kennedy, supuestamente ordenó que “no se abriera una investigación formal”.
El martes, CNN obtuvo una declaración del embajador, quien negó categóricamente las acusaciones y dijo que eran “infundadas”.
En el mismo memorando, supuestamente escrito por el embajador Larry Dinger, se indica que la información es producto de la charla de oficina.
“A veces la fuente es uno o varios agentes que se dieron cuenta del caso gracias al ambiente de camaradería con sus colegas”, indica el memorando.
• Un oficial de seguridad del Departamento de Estado en Beirut, Líbano, presuntamente “está involucrado en agresiones sexuales” contra ciudadanos extranjeros que trabajaban como guardias en la embajada. La oficina del inspector general indica que el oficial de seguridad también está acusado de cometer “ataques similares durante su destacamento en Bagdad y probablemente en Jartum y Monrovia”.
El memorando de la oficina indica que el investigador de la oficina del inspector general que fue a Beirut a tratar de efectuar una investigación no tuvo el tiempo suficiente para terminar su trabajo.
• Un miembro de la escolta de Clinton supuestamente “contactó a prostitutas durante los viajes oficiales en el extranjero”. El agente que el inspector general asignó para investigar “concluyó” que “el problema de prostitución es endémico”.
• En Iraq, es posible que exista un “círculo de drogas clandestino” en operación cerca de la embajada de Estados Unidos que “proporcionaba” drogas a los contratistas de seguridad del Departamento de Estado; sin embargo, el agente al que se envió a investigar no pudo terminar su trabajo.
La vocera del Departamento de Estado, Jen Psaki, respondió este lunes a las acusaciones.
“Todos los empleados se sujetan a los estándares más elevados”, dijo. “Tomamos muy en serio las acusaciones de mala conducta e investigamos concienzudamente. Todos los casos que se mencionan en el reporte de CBS se investigaron minuciosamente y siguen bajo investigación; el Departamento sigue tomando medidas”.
La cadena estadounidense CBS fue la primera en reportar este lunes las acusaciones.
Jill Dougherty, de CNN, colaboró con este reporte. http://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2013/06/11/el-departamento-de-estado-de-ee-uu-investigado-por-prostitucion-y-drogas/
State Department Cover-Ups: The Corruption is Endemic and Wide-Spread
The Diplomatic Security Service is the internal investigating arm of the United States State Department. The DSS, according to CBS News (of all places), has alleged that the United States State Department has covered up world-wide, illegal behavior by their operatives. These shenanigans have occurred under Clinton’s aegis, “ranging from sexual assaults to an underground drug ring.” Not Slick Willy’s administration; these cover-ups took place on Hillary Clinton’s watch.CBS cites a memo specifying eight examples of misconduct, including that of a State Department official in Beirut: “…who engaged in sexual assaults with foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and…members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries.” The report says the activity was “endemic.”
The DSS was, reportedly, not even permitted to establish cases for the crimes once they were uncovered. Former State Department internal investigator, Aurelia Fedenisn, went on the record: “We also uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases. Often times, other DSS agents were simply told to back off of investigations of high-ranking State Department members… hostile intelligence services allow criminal behavior to continue…In one such cover-up, investigators were told to stop probing the case of a U.S. ambassador who was suspected of patronizing prostitutes in a public park. The memo states that the ambassador was permitted to return to his post despite having, routinely ditched…his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from prostitutes.” Those orders, according to Fedenisn and her fellow investigators, came from “high up” in the State Department.
Ms. Fedenisn was not the only one that was upset by the “some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others” treatment that high ranking bureaucrats were getting. In an effort to disinfect the corruption with daylight, Investigator Fedenisn and her fellows issued an internal report. The report, concerned with the broad, negative effects such actions were having on the DSS’s credibility, reached the Inspector General. He, in turn, was angered by the black eye such hanky-panky gave the DSS. He issued his own report. He concluded by stating: “Hindering such cases calls into question the integrity of the investigative process can result in counterintelligence vulnerabilities and can allow criminal behavior to continue.” No kidding? Like the ambassador addicted to trawling for trollops in the park? The Attorney General’s ire didn’t seem to prevent investigator Fedenisn from becoming “former” investigator Fedenisn. Investigators from the State Department showed up at her door, a couple of hours after the charges in her report were filed.
The scandals currently rocking the regime may appear to dwarf these cover-ups; they don’t. Yes, all governments run shady operations; but the corruption of this regime is an order of magnitude worse. The U.S. State Department has been a law unto itself for longer than anyone cares to remember. There is no excuse for putting the fox in charge of the hen house. As long as we are considering ridding ourselves of rotten, government agencies, we should put the State Department on the list.
Obama: ‘We Don’t Want to Tax ALL Businesses Out of Business’…
(CNS News) – President Barack Obama says Democrats “don’t want to tax
all businesses out of business.”
“I know that there are a few Republicans here in the audience,” Obama
said Friday at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign in Palo
Alto, Ca. “If you talk to us, it turns out we’re pretty common-sense folks.
“We don’t think government can do everything,” he said. “We don’t
think that top-down solutions are the right way to go. We believe in the
free market. We believe in a light touch when it comes to regulations.”
“We don’t want to tax all businesses out of business,” Obama said.
“But we do think that there’s a role to play for government.”
The president’s remarks came at a private residence during a fundraising
tour last week for the 2014 midterm elections.
Obama has made similar statements in the past. When speaking about
implementing a cap and trade system when running for president in 2008, Obama
said he would bankrupt coal power plants.
The coal industry “would have to meet the rigors of that market and the
ratcheted-down caps that are being placed, imposed every year,” he said.
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just
that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for
all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” Obama said.
During the 2012 election campaign, Obama also drew criticism for a
speech where he said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.
Somebody else made that happen.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-we-dont-want-tax-all-businesses-out-business
HOW EASILY THE MEDIA PUNDITS AND POLITICIANS BIT INTO
POLITICAL DIVERSION JORGE AGUIAR
Amazing how easily the media in general, GOP politicians and others bit
into the NSA phone monitor and other related issues and leave the real
contentious issues. From the IRS conservative oppression enforcement to
Benghazi ineptitude and reckless disregard for those that serve and put their
life on the line everyday.
The NSA recent revelations is a distraction. How the political pundit and expert don't see it is beyond me. The NSA scandal can easy be handled and justified by the administration. The other political issues are the real problems and clearly show oppression and manipulation not to mention that the NSA scandal is not.
I cannot leave the conversation to express my dislike for Attorney General Eric Holder. Any person well informed that follows the issues closely can only conclude that Eric holder is no more than a thug that utilizes his position to enforce agendas NOT THE LAW OR THE CONSTITUTION. It is time to confront those that now is abusing their power in total clear terms. This people need to be confronted in a clear manner and don't let them dance around with ignorant responses. Don't be a useful fool like Senator McCain or Bill O'really . Don't be an idiot there is clear evidence of the facts already.
Also and while we still at it "think no one goes to jail or even gets fired" no matter what they do in this administration/agencies. The new word is "ONLY A SCANDAL" and lets leave it at that. This does not work going forward. There are consequences to corruption and outright improprieties . The infestation is NOT going to end there .
Jorge Aguiar
Doral, Florida
The NSA recent revelations is a distraction. How the political pundit and expert don't see it is beyond me. The NSA scandal can easy be handled and justified by the administration. The other political issues are the real problems and clearly show oppression and manipulation not to mention that the NSA scandal is not.
I cannot leave the conversation to express my dislike for Attorney General Eric Holder. Any person well informed that follows the issues closely can only conclude that Eric holder is no more than a thug that utilizes his position to enforce agendas NOT THE LAW OR THE CONSTITUTION. It is time to confront those that now is abusing their power in total clear terms. This people need to be confronted in a clear manner and don't let them dance around with ignorant responses. Don't be a useful fool like Senator McCain or Bill O'really . Don't be an idiot there is clear evidence of the facts already.
Also and while we still at it "think no one goes to jail or even gets fired" no matter what they do in this administration/agencies. The new word is "ONLY A SCANDAL" and lets leave it at that. This does not work going forward. There are consequences to corruption and outright improprieties . The infestation is NOT going to end there .
Jorge Aguiar
Doral, Florida
Los que deseen saber más sobre el ISLAMISMO GUERRERISTA... lean esto...
Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism "A Must Read"
Saudi
Arabia, Wahhabism and the Spread of Sunni Theofascism
Amb. Curtin Winsor, Ph.D. Enviado por Ricardo Samitier.
The United States has largely eliminated the infrastructure and operational leadership of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network over the past five years. However, its ideological offspring continue to proliferate across the globe.
American efforts to combat this contagion are hamstrung by the fact that its ideological and financial epicenter is Saudi Arabia, where an ostensibly pro-Western royal family governs through a centuries-old alliance with the fanatical Wahhabi Islamic sect. In addition to indoctrinating its own citizens with this extremist creed, the Saudi government has lavishly financed the propagation of Wahhabism throughout the world, sweeping away moderate interpretations of Islam even within the borders of the United States itself.
The Bush administration has done little to halt this ideological onslaught beyond quietly (and unsuccessfully) urging the Saudi royal family to desist. This lack of resolve is rooted in American dependence on Saudi oil production, fears of instability in the kingdom, wishful thinking about democracy promotion as an antidote to religious extremism, and preoccupation with confronting Iran.
Background
Wahhabism is derived from the teachings of Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth century religious zealot from the Arabian interior. Like most Sunni Islamic fundamentalist movements, the Wahhabis advocated the fusion of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the Caliphate, the form of government adopted by the Prophet Muhammad's successors during the age of Muslim expansion. What sets Wahhabism apart from other Sunni Islamist movements is its historical obsession with purging Sufis, Shiites, and other Muslims who do not conform to its twisted interpretation of Islamic scripture.
In 1744, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab forged an historic alliance with the Al-Saud clan and sanctified its drive to vanquish its rivals. In return, the Al-Saud supported campaigns by Wahhabi zealots to cleanse the land of "unbelievers." In 1801, Saudi-Wahhabi warriors crossed into present day Iraq and sacked the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing over 4,000 people. After the Saudis conquered Mecca and Medina in the 1920s, they destroyed such "idolatrous" shrines as the Jannat al-Baqi cemetary, where four of the twelve Shiite imams were buried (on the grounds that grave markers are bida'a, or objectionable innovations).
In return for endorsing the royal family's authority in political, security, and economic spheres after the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, Wahhabi clerics were granted control over state religious and educational institutions and allowed to enforce their rigid interpretation of sharia (Islamic law).
Wahhabism was largely confined to the Arabian peninsula until the 1960s, when the Saudi monarchy gave refuge to radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood fleeing persecution in Nasser's Egypt. A cross-fertilization of sorts occurred between the atavistic but isolated Wahhabi creed of the Saudi religious establishment and the Salafi jihadist teachings of Sayyid Qutb, who denounced secular Arab rulers as unbelievers and legitimate targets of holy war (jihad). "It was the synthesis of the twain-Wahhabi social and cultural conservatism, and Qutbist political radicalism- that produced the militant variety of Wahhabist political Islam that eventually (produced) al-Qaeda."[1]
The terms Islamofascism and theofascism have been frequently misused by Westerners to refer to virtually all forms of radical Islamism, but they are fitting appellations for Wahhabism today.[2] The sect's rejection of individual liberties, disparagement and reduction of women's rights and status,[3] disregard for the intrinsic value of human life, and encouragement of violence against unbelievers, are unparalleled among Islamic fundamentalist movements.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has used the term "Sunni theocratic totalitarianism,"[4] a term that highlights both the movement's "will to power" over the most minute aspects of Muslim daily life and its global ambitions. He also notes that its adherents do not raise the banner of Islam in pursuit of specific national, political, or territorial gains. Al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri has sharply rebuked the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas[5] and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood for participating in national elections.[6]
During the 1970s, Wahhabi clerics encouraged the spread of this revolutionary and atavistic ideological synthesis into Saudi universities and mosques, because it was seen as a barrier to the threat of cultural Westernization and spread of corruption that accompanied the 1970s oil boom. Consequently, the royal family and their religious establishment looked for a cause with which to deflect the growing zealotry from Wahhabist theofascism, a danger highlighted by the seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca by heavily armed Islamic Studies students in 1979. The diversion that the royal family seized upon was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Saudis financed a large-scale program of assistance to the Afghan mujahideen, in coordination with the Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI) and the CIA, while funding radicalized madrassas to disseminate neo-Wahhabi ideology and literature in the sprawling Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan. They also dispatched thousands of volunteer jihadis from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries to fight alongside the mujahideen.
These so-called "Arab Afghans" dispersed to far-flung areas of the world after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. They pursued further victories against "unbelievers" in the name of Islam, and they were accompanied by militant Wahhabi preachers. These elements would form the backbone of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was initially headquartered in Sudan, but returned to Afghanistan in 1996, following the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban. This was a new Afghan force, recruited in Wahhabi madrassas and, trained by the Pakistanis. Its goal was the establishment of a model Wahhabi state in Afghanistan.
The Saudi royal family revoked bin Laden's Saudi citizenship (in response to heavy American pressure), but did little to interfere with Wahhabi "charities" in the Kingdom and abroad. These entities raised money for al-Qaeda, while the religious onslaught of Wahhabism continued to receive government sponsorship and funding. Osama bin Laden is widely believed to have reached an agreement with Prince Turki al-Faisal, then-chief of Saudi National Security and Intelligence in the mid 1990s, whereby al-Qaeda would not target the Kingdom, and the Kingdom would not interfere with al-Qaeda's fundraising or seek bin Laden's extradition.[7] In fact, Al-Qaeda abstained completely from attacks on Saudi targets within the Kingdom prior to 9/11.
Terrorist attacks and clashes between Saudi police and Islamist militants have erupted erupting periodically since May 2003, after the Saudi Government began cracking down on underground cells in the Kingdom (under pressure from Washington). However, it appears that most Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups still respect this quid pro quo Hundreds of members of the Saudi royal family jet around the world without fear of assassination. The country's vulnerable petroleum industry has only once been targeted by terrorists, and then in a less that serious manner. In return, and notwithstanding its limited cooperation with Washington in restricting terrorist financing, the Saudi monarchy has maintained its commitment to propagating Wahhabism at home and abroad, providing the terrorist underground with a growing flood of eager recruits.
Wahhabi Indoctrination
"Man . . . requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill educated, he is the most savage of earthly creatures."
PlatoIt is estimated that well over one-third of Saudi Arabia's public school curriculum is devoted to Wahhabi teachings. Passages from Saudi textbooks quoted in the American media after 9/11 generated much controversy. One textbook, for example, informed ninth grade students that Judgment Day will not come "until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them," while another stated that it is "compulsory" for Muslims "to consider the infidels their enemy."[8] Embarrassed by the revelations, the Saudi government purported to launch a comprehensive review of its educational curricula and pledged that all such references would be removed. Last year, however, Freedom House published an exhaustive report on the new curriculum, concluding that it "continues to propagate an ideology of hate toward the 'unbeliever,' which include Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sufis, Sunni Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine, Hindus, atheists and others."[9]
Some analysts dismiss the relevance of this indoctrination on the grounds that "conforming to an ultra-conservative, anti-pluralistic faith does not necessarily make you a violent individual,"[10] but this reasoning is fallacious. If only one percent of the 5 million Saudi students exposed to these teachings resort to violence, this would produce 50,000 jihadis.[11] Not surprisingly, bin Laden himself denounced foreign interference in Saudi school curricula in an April 2006 audiotape.
Moreover, these teachings are reinforced by Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, who advocate jihad against enemies of "true" Islam - outside the kingdom." Incitement to violence against Shiites is particularly common. In December 2006, a high-ranking cleric close to the Saudi royal family, Abdul Rahman al-Barak, denounced Shiites as an "evil sect . . . more dangerous than Jews and Christians."[12]
In November of 2004, twenty-six clerics, most of whom held positions as lecturers of Islamic studies at various Saudi state-funded universities, issued a call for jihad against American forces in Iraq. Two Saudi officials denounced the fatwa in interviews with the Western media, but no retraction was made in Arabic to local media outlets. Months later, a Saudi dissident group released a videotape showing the Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia's Supreme Judicial Council, Saleh bin Muhammad al-Luhaidan, advising young Saudis at a government mosque on how to infiltrate Iraq and fight US troops, as well as assuring them that Saudi security forces would not punish them after their return.[13] While Luhaidan publicly retracted his statements, videotapes of prominent Saudi clerics exhorting the public to wage jihad in Iraq and elsewhere continue to surface.[14]
Exporting Hatred
While Saudi citizens remain the vanguard of Islamic theofascism around the world, the growth potential for this ideology lies outside the Kingdom. The Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad during the past two decades,[15] and the scale of financing is believed to have increased in the past two years as oil prices have skyrocketed. The bulk of this funding goes to the construction and operating expenses of mosques, madrassas, and other religious institutions that preach Wahhabism. It also supports the training of imams; domination of mass media and publishing outlets; distribution of Wahhabi textbooks and other literature; and endowments to universities (in exchange for influence over the appointment of Islamic scholars). By comparison, the Communist Party of the USSR and its Comintern spent just over $7 billion propagating its ideology worldwide between 1921 and 1991.[16]
Wahhabism has made less headway in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, despite the fact that decades of Communist rule had weakened their traditional Islamic institutions. Several successor governments, especially the Uzbekis, have cracked down harshly on militant Islamist groups, while encouraging educational systems in the Hanafi tradition that promote tolerant and peaceful Islam. Africa is also a critical area of Wahhabi expansion, as it offers a multitude of "failed states" and communal cleavages ripe for exploitation, most notably in the Sudan and Nigeria.[19]
In all of these areas, the central dynamic is the same - it is the overwhelming wealth of Saudi Arabia that enables the Wahhabi sect to proselytize on a global scale, not the intrinsic appeal of its teachings. Throughout the world, moderates echo the assessment of Somali journalist Bashir Gothar, who writes that his country's tolerant Sufi-infused Islamic culture has been: "swept aside by a new brand of Islam that is being pushed down the throat of our people - Wahhabism. Anywhere one looks, one finds that alien, perverted version of Islam."[20]
Wahhabism in the West
Wahhabi proselytizing is not limited to the Islamic world. The Saudis have financed the growth of thousands of Wahhabi mosques, madrassas, and other religious institutions in Western countries that have fast-growing Muslim minorities during the past three decades.[21] Wahhabi penetration is deepest in the social welfare states of Western Europe, where chronically high unemployment has created large pools of able-bodied young Muslim men who have "become permanent wards of the state at the cost of their basic human dignity."[22]This is a perfect storm of alienation and idleness, ripe for terrorist recruitment. The perpetrators of the 2005 London subway attacks were native-born Britons of Pakistani descent, recruited locally and trained in the use of explosives during visits to Pakistan. The Dutch Moroccan who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theodor Van Gogh in 2004 (for producing a film critical of Islam) was also a product of Wahhabi indoctrination.
The Wahhabis have had less traction in the United States, which lacks the masses of unassimilated young people that exist in Europe. US welfare laws no longer allow able-bodied young men to have indefinite periods of government subsidized unemployment and immigrants (both Muslim and non-Muslim) tend to find a more stable niche in American society.
Nevertheless, Wahhabi penetration of US mainstream Islamic institutions is substantial. A 2005 Freedom House Report examined over 200 books and other publications distributed in 15 prominent Saudi-funded American mosques. One such publication, bearing the imprint of the Saudi embassy and distributed by the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, contained the following injunctions for Muslims living in America:
Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.
[W]hoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself.
Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.[23]
Although Saudi-funded religious institutions have been careful not to incite or explicitly endorse violence since 9/11, they unapologetically promote distrust toward non-Muslims and self-segregation. In effect, they are trying to reproduce in America the kind of social conditions that have fueled radicalization and terrorist recruitment in Europe.
While the Saudi ambassador in Washington said last year that his government was undertaking a "very intense review" of all missionary activities in the United States,[29] it is clear that the Saudis are concerned primarily with avoiding bad publicity, not abandoning their drive to dominate Islamic institutions in America.
Causes of American Inaction
The Bush administration has been reluctant to put serious pressure on the Saudis to stop propagating Wahhabism, despite the enormous threat to American security posed by Sunni theofascism. There are several reasons for this.
The first is American dependence on the kingdom's abundant oil reserves, which enable to the Saudis to maintain roughly 3 million b/d in spare production capacity. This spare capacity has been called the "energy equivalent of nuclear weapons," because it puts the Saudis in a unique position to compensate for disruptions in supplies from other producers and discourage price gouging - a service provided to the United States (and other industrialized nations) in exchange for protection.[30] However, the argument that a firm public stance against Saudi propagation of religious hatred might lead the kingdom to retaliate economically is spurious. Saudi Arabia's use of the oil weapon would alienate the entire industrialized world, while threatening the relative economic prosperity that preserves stability in the kingdom.
Some politicians and writers have voiced concern that pushing the Saudi royal family to curtail the Wahhabis could lead to terrorist attacks on the country's vulnerable petroleum infrastructure or lead to the collapse of the monarchy, which would produce an even worse outcome - a Saudi state controlled exclusively by religious fanatics. While these are serious risks, it must be borne in mind that most Wahhabi radicals view the monarchy (and its oil fields) as a golden goose. It is only by disguising Saudi Arabia as a 'friendly nation' that they have been able to go as far as they have in spreading their atavistic perversion of Islam.
Such concerns reveal a tendency to imagine or spin the Saudi royal family as fundamentally pro-Western. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who served as ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005, has played an important role in masking Saudi - Wahhabi realities. His personal charm, Washington Post journalist David Ignatius writes, "many American leaders and even presidents to forget that he represented a secretive, repressive Muslim kingdom that survived because it had made a pact with 'puritanical' Wahhabi clerics who despised America."[31]
Bandar was also instrumental in the growth of what Daniel Pipes has called a "culture of corruption" that renders the executive branch of the American government "incapable of dealing with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the farsighted and disinterested manner that US foreign policy requires." Pipes points to a "revolving door syndrome" afflicting senior diplomats and policymakers who deal with the Saudis in their official capacities.[32] Very often, they have enjoyed lucrative post-government careers working as consultants for Saudi businessmen and companies, or running Saudi-financed nongovernmental organizations. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," Bandar once reportedly told a close associate: "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office."[33]
Unable or unwilling to combat the spread of Sunni theofascism at its main source (Saudi Arabia), the Bush administration launched a democracy promotion campaign intended to eradicate political conditions receptive to its global spread. However, rather than building stable and less oppressive systems resistant to religious extremism in Afghanistan and Iraq, the accumulating shortfalls of American intervention in both countries have made them magnets for jihadist recruitment.
The Question of Iran
The Bush Administration's reluctance to challenge the Saudis after 9/11 initially encountered impassioned objections from conservative and liberal commentators alike, but the outrage has tapered off as attention has became increasingly focused on Shiite Iran and its nuclear program which is hipped by Israel. In the view of the administration, the Iranian threat to American national security not only supercedes the threat of Sunni theofascism, but supercedes it to such a degree that a more accommodating policy toward Saudi Arabia is warranted. However, while the prospect of militant Shiite clerics in possession of nuclear weapons is understandably disconcerting to many Americans, the Iranian threat is mitigated by several important factors.
For all of the shrill and unsettling words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his government's foreign policy is driven more by Iranian nationalism than Shiite Islamism (this is evident, for example, in Tehran's support for the predominantly Christian nation of Armenia in its dispute with Shiite Azerbaijan). This is not surprising, as Iran (known as Persia prior to the twentieth century) has existed in one form or another since biblical times, while it embraced Shiite Islam just 500 years ago. While Ahmadinejad exploits Iranian nationalism to win public support in his confrontation with the West, it can easily turn against him if he were to embark on a global adventure. Wahhabi clerics may support the Saudi royal family as a necessary evil in order to protect their global proselytizing mission, but they recognize no Saudi Arabian "nation" whose interests take precedence over their agenda. Such is not the case in Iran.
Furthermore, Shiite Islamism does not exhibit theofascist tendencies. Radical clerics in Iran have been responsible for horrendous abuses of power, but they do not regard non-Shiite Muslims as "unbelievers" who must be systematically purged. Basically in Islam Christians and Jews are considered as belivers and in Quran are referred to as "the people of book". Even within the Shiite world, there is no prospect of a Wahhabi-style Iranian takeover of religious discourse because unlike the Sunnis, Shiite Islam is rigidly hierarchical. Iraqi and Lebanese Shiites gladly accept Iranian financial and military support, but they are fiercely loyal to their own clerical establishments.
An even greater fallacy is the widespread belief in Washington that a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia is an asset in confronting Iran. On the contrary, coddling the Saudis makes it more difficult for the United States to deal with Iran. The Bush administration's refusal to hold Saudi leaders accountable for their incitement of Wahhabi jihadists (who have murdered far more Shiites than Americans, mostly in Iraq and Pakistan) is a source of deep resentment in the Shiite world. It is no surprise that the only two major public demonstrations against Al-Qaeda in the Islamic world after the 9/11 attacks were both organized by Shiites (in Tehran and Karachi, Pakistan).
It is interesting to note that the recent escalation of US - Iranian tensions has made the Saudis less accommodating about Iraq than ever before. Reports that the Saudi Government is threatening to openly fund and arm Sunni insurgent groups if American forces withdraw from Iraq are a case in point.[34] In effect, the Saudis are signaling to the Bush administration that they will thwart any American plan to cede control of Iraq to its Shiite-dominated, democratically-elected government, while signaling to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq that they can reject American efforts to broker a political settlement and not be left to face the consequences alone.
Iran has no history of direct aggression against its neighbors, and unlike Saddam's Sunni-dominated Iraq, they have never used weapons of mass destruction during invasions of neighbors or against their own people. The strongest argument for this approach lies with the extent that Iran craves recognition of its actual status as the historically authentic nation state in the Middle East. Iran has long aspired to be and probably will be the region's predominant Islamic regional power. On the other hand Iranians are the most pro American and pro west people in the middle-east, although the recent Israeli pushed American forced sanctions are damaging this view.
The Road Ahead
Washington will eventually have to face the reality that derailing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons (and, more broadly, its emergence as the predominant Islamic regional power) may be impossible over the long-term, and possible in the short term only at the expense of fatally undermining efforts to contain the spread of Sunni theofascism. The United States would do better to find a mutually acceptable means of working with this reality, rather sustaining a deadlocked confrontation by conditioning its willingness to normalize relations with Tehran on the abandonment of its nuclear aspirations. US - Iranian engagement will greatly enhance American leverage over the Saudis, as well as check the threat of Sunni theofascist terrorism in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. Saudi officials have urged the Bush administration not to talk with Iran because they know that a reduction in US - Iranian tensions will draw more attention to their unbridled export of Wahhabism.
Reducing American dependence on Saudi oil must also be part of any comprehensive strategy for addressing the threat of Sunni theofascism. Although President Bush has expressed commitment to developing alternative energy sources, the surplus production capacity of the Saudis enables them to lower prices as necessary to ensure that this will not be cost effective for a long time. Barring radical breakthroughs in fuel technologies, an optimistic forecast would have bio fuels (ethanol, synthetic diesel and bio oil) making up to 30% of US petroleum equivalent needs by 2030.[35] For the short to medium term future, only conservation can significantly alter American petroleum dependency.
Without the billions of dollars in Saudi funds, the ideological, political, and psychological edifice of Wahhabi theofascism will begin to crumble, particularly if a concerted effort is made by the Bush administration to promote moderate Islamic institutions (a recent study by the RAND Corporation offers some insightful recommendations).[36] Ultimately, the devil is not in the details - it is the administration's broad lack of resolve in confronting the threat of theofascism, not the lack of viable methods of combating it, that imperils American security.
REFERENCES
[1] See Mohammed Ayoob, "Political Islam: Image and Reality," World Policy Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall 2004.
[2] Fascism is "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." See Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 218.
[3] Saudi police 'stopped' fire rescue, BBC, 15 March 2002. Wahhabi religious police (mutaween) prevented Saudi schoolgirls from fleeing a burning school because they were not properly veiled, leaving fifteen of them to die inside in 2002, an outrage equaled only by the Taliban's rein of terror against women in Afghanistan.
[4] R. James Woolsey, "The Elephant in The Middle East Living Room: Watching Wahhabis," The National Review, 14 December 2005.
[5] Zawahiri declared in a December 2006 videotape, "How could they not demand an Islamic constitution before entering these elections? Are they not an Islamic movement?" See: "Al Qaeda Warns U.S. on Fighting in Muslim Lands," The New York Times, 21 December 2006.
[6] Zawahiri accused it of being "duped, provoked and used" by the United States after it participated in the 2005 legislative elections. See "Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader praises U.S. hints of troop reduction in Iraq," The Associated Press, 6 January 2006.
[7] In his 2003 book, Why America Slept, Gerald Posner cites two unidentified senior Bush administration officials as saying that captured Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah revealed details of a Saudi-Pakistani-Bin Laden triangle. See Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, (New York: Random House, 2003).
[8] "Inside the Kingdom," Time, 7 September 2003.
[9] Nina Shea, Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance, Freedom House, 2006.
[10] John Esposito, quoted in Gary Leupp, On Terrorism, Methodism, Saudi 'Wahhabism' and the Censored 9-11 Report, Counterpunch, 8 August 2003.
[11] Ali al-Ahmed of the Washington Institute for Gulf Affairs makes this point. See Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance, CBN.org, 14 June 2006.
[12] "Top Saudi cleric issues religious edict declaring Shiites to be infidels," Associated Press, 29 December 2006.
[13] More Evidence of Saudi Double Talk?, MSNBC, 26 April 2005.
[14] In an April 2006 lecture, Saudi cleric Nasser bin Suleiman al-Omar cautioned his audience not to "get involved in things that are not jihad . . . [and] divert the strife and calamity into the lands of the Muslims, instead of aiming them directly at the enemies." He continued, saying that: "there are places where jihad is proper - in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, and the Philippines." See Saudi Cleric Nasser bin Suleiman Al-'Omar: 'America is Now Disappearing From the Hearts Within America Itself . . . MEMRI Special Dispatch #1154, 4 May 2006.
[15] Alex Alexiev, "Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States", Testimony before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, 26 June 2003.
[16] Author interview with Evgueni Novokov, Ph.D., former colonel, senior staff officer for the Soviet Politburo and deputy director for Middle East Operations, in charge of Arabic Department, and relationships with CPSU Central Committee front organizations and friendly parties; advised Central Committee members on Islamic affairs, 1986 -1988. 22 October 2006.
[17] Author interview with Abdel Guzman, Grand Imam of Jolo, Jolo City, Sulu Province, The Philippines, 5 March 2004.
[18] Author's interview with Abdel Guzman, The Grand Imam of Jolo, Op. Cit.
[19] See Freedom House, The Talibanization of Nigeria: Radical Islam, Extremist Sharia Law, and Religious Freedom, March 2002.
[20] "Against the Saudization of Somaliland," Addis Tribune (Ethiopia), 21 November 2003. http://www.addistribune.com/Archives/2003/11/21-11-03/Against.htm
[21] In March 2002, the official Saudi magazine Ain al-Yaqeen estimated that the Saudi royal family in countries where Muslims were a minority has funded 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges, and 2,000 madrassas. The number of all Saudi Government and charitably funded institutions beyond Saudi Arabia is much higher. Cited in "Inside the Kingdom," Time, 7 September 2003.
[22] Alex Alexiev, "France at the Brink", The San Diego Union Tribune, 20 November 2005. See also: Alex Alexiev, Europe's Islamist Future is Now, The Center for Security Policy, 13 June 2005.
[23] Other publications examined include textbooks from the Saudi Ministry of Education and collections of religious edicts by state-sanctioned clerics in the kingdom. See Freedom House, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques, January 2005.
[24] Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, "Wahhabism in the Big House: The Teaching of Jihad in American Penitentiaries," The Weekly Standard, 26 September 2005.
[25] "Terrorist Recruitment in Prisons and The Recent Arrests Related to Guantanamo Bay Detainees," Testimony of John S. Pistole, Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, FBI, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security, 14 October 2003.
[26] Testimony of Dr. J. Michael Waller before the US Senate Judiciary Committee's Terrorism Subcommittee, 14 October 2003.
[27] Frank Gaffney, A Troubling Influence, Front Page Magazine.com, 9 December 2003.
[28] Glenn Simpson, "Suspect Lessons: A Muslim School Used by Military Has Troubling Ties," The Wall Street Journal, 3 December 2003.
[29] "For Conservative Muslims, Goal of Isolation a Challenge; 9/11 Put Strict Adherents on the Defensive," The Washington Post, 5 September 2006.
[30] Edward L. Morse and James Richard, "The Battle for Energy Dominance," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002.
[31] David Ignatius, "The Operator," The Washington Post, 5 November 2006, p.7.
[32] Daniel Pipes, "The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations," The National Interest, Winter 2002/2003.
[33] "Oil for Security Fueled Close Ties; But Major Differences Led to Tensions," The Washington Post, 11 February 2002.
[34] In November 2006, Nawaf Obaid, a close advisor to Prince Turki, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that a phased American withdrawal from Iraq will result in "massive Saudi intervention," with options including "funding, arms and logistical support" to Sunni insurgents. "As the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene." See Nawaf Obaid, "Stepping Into Iraq: Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis if the U.S. Leaves," The Washington Post, 29 November 2006.
[35] Outlook on Renewable Energy in America, Volume II: Joint Summary Report, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), March 2007.
[36] The Rand Corporation, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, 2007.
Curtin Winsor, Jr. is a former United States Ambassador to Costa Rica. He graduated from Brown University in 1961 with a degree in English literature, and then received a Masters in Latin American studies in 1964 and a Ph.D. in international studies in 1971 from the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. He worked as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Robert Dole, as well as for the U.S. Foreign Service. * This article had previously been published in the Mideast Monitor.
Amb. Curtin Winsor, Ph.D. Enviado por Ricardo Samitier.
The United States has largely eliminated the infrastructure and operational leadership of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network over the past five years. However, its ideological offspring continue to proliferate across the globe.
American efforts to combat this contagion are hamstrung by the fact that its ideological and financial epicenter is Saudi Arabia, where an ostensibly pro-Western royal family governs through a centuries-old alliance with the fanatical Wahhabi Islamic sect. In addition to indoctrinating its own citizens with this extremist creed, the Saudi government has lavishly financed the propagation of Wahhabism throughout the world, sweeping away moderate interpretations of Islam even within the borders of the United States itself.
The Bush administration has done little to halt this ideological onslaught beyond quietly (and unsuccessfully) urging the Saudi royal family to desist. This lack of resolve is rooted in American dependence on Saudi oil production, fears of instability in the kingdom, wishful thinking about democracy promotion as an antidote to religious extremism, and preoccupation with confronting Iran.
Background
Wahhabism is derived from the teachings of Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab, an eighteenth century religious zealot from the Arabian interior. Like most Sunni Islamic fundamentalist movements, the Wahhabis advocated the fusion of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the Caliphate, the form of government adopted by the Prophet Muhammad's successors during the age of Muslim expansion. What sets Wahhabism apart from other Sunni Islamist movements is its historical obsession with purging Sufis, Shiites, and other Muslims who do not conform to its twisted interpretation of Islamic scripture.
In 1744, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab forged an historic alliance with the Al-Saud clan and sanctified its drive to vanquish its rivals. In return, the Al-Saud supported campaigns by Wahhabi zealots to cleanse the land of "unbelievers." In 1801, Saudi-Wahhabi warriors crossed into present day Iraq and sacked the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing over 4,000 people. After the Saudis conquered Mecca and Medina in the 1920s, they destroyed such "idolatrous" shrines as the Jannat al-Baqi cemetary, where four of the twelve Shiite imams were buried (on the grounds that grave markers are bida'a, or objectionable innovations).
In return for endorsing the royal family's authority in political, security, and economic spheres after the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, Wahhabi clerics were granted control over state religious and educational institutions and allowed to enforce their rigid interpretation of sharia (Islamic law).
Wahhabism was largely confined to the Arabian peninsula until the 1960s, when the Saudi monarchy gave refuge to radical members of the Muslim Brotherhood fleeing persecution in Nasser's Egypt. A cross-fertilization of sorts occurred between the atavistic but isolated Wahhabi creed of the Saudi religious establishment and the Salafi jihadist teachings of Sayyid Qutb, who denounced secular Arab rulers as unbelievers and legitimate targets of holy war (jihad). "It was the synthesis of the twain-Wahhabi social and cultural conservatism, and Qutbist political radicalism- that produced the militant variety of Wahhabist political Islam that eventually (produced) al-Qaeda."[1]
The terms Islamofascism and theofascism have been frequently misused by Westerners to refer to virtually all forms of radical Islamism, but they are fitting appellations for Wahhabism today.[2] The sect's rejection of individual liberties, disparagement and reduction of women's rights and status,[3] disregard for the intrinsic value of human life, and encouragement of violence against unbelievers, are unparalleled among Islamic fundamentalist movements.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has used the term "Sunni theocratic totalitarianism,"[4] a term that highlights both the movement's "will to power" over the most minute aspects of Muslim daily life and its global ambitions. He also notes that its adherents do not raise the banner of Islam in pursuit of specific national, political, or territorial gains. Al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri has sharply rebuked the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas[5] and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood for participating in national elections.[6]
During the 1970s, Wahhabi clerics encouraged the spread of this revolutionary and atavistic ideological synthesis into Saudi universities and mosques, because it was seen as a barrier to the threat of cultural Westernization and spread of corruption that accompanied the 1970s oil boom. Consequently, the royal family and their religious establishment looked for a cause with which to deflect the growing zealotry from Wahhabist theofascism, a danger highlighted by the seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca by heavily armed Islamic Studies students in 1979. The diversion that the royal family seized upon was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Saudis financed a large-scale program of assistance to the Afghan mujahideen, in coordination with the Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI) and the CIA, while funding radicalized madrassas to disseminate neo-Wahhabi ideology and literature in the sprawling Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan. They also dispatched thousands of volunteer jihadis from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries to fight alongside the mujahideen.
These so-called "Arab Afghans" dispersed to far-flung areas of the world after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. They pursued further victories against "unbelievers" in the name of Islam, and they were accompanied by militant Wahhabi preachers. These elements would form the backbone of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was initially headquartered in Sudan, but returned to Afghanistan in 1996, following the seizure of Kabul by the Taliban. This was a new Afghan force, recruited in Wahhabi madrassas and, trained by the Pakistanis. Its goal was the establishment of a model Wahhabi state in Afghanistan.
The Saudi royal family revoked bin Laden's Saudi citizenship (in response to heavy American pressure), but did little to interfere with Wahhabi "charities" in the Kingdom and abroad. These entities raised money for al-Qaeda, while the religious onslaught of Wahhabism continued to receive government sponsorship and funding. Osama bin Laden is widely believed to have reached an agreement with Prince Turki al-Faisal, then-chief of Saudi National Security and Intelligence in the mid 1990s, whereby al-Qaeda would not target the Kingdom, and the Kingdom would not interfere with al-Qaeda's fundraising or seek bin Laden's extradition.[7] In fact, Al-Qaeda abstained completely from attacks on Saudi targets within the Kingdom prior to 9/11.
Terrorist attacks and clashes between Saudi police and Islamist militants have erupted erupting periodically since May 2003, after the Saudi Government began cracking down on underground cells in the Kingdom (under pressure from Washington). However, it appears that most Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups still respect this quid pro quo Hundreds of members of the Saudi royal family jet around the world without fear of assassination. The country's vulnerable petroleum industry has only once been targeted by terrorists, and then in a less that serious manner. In return, and notwithstanding its limited cooperation with Washington in restricting terrorist financing, the Saudi monarchy has maintained its commitment to propagating Wahhabism at home and abroad, providing the terrorist underground with a growing flood of eager recruits.
Wahhabi Indoctrination
"Man . . . requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized; but if he be insufficiently or ill educated, he is the most savage of earthly creatures."
PlatoIt is estimated that well over one-third of Saudi Arabia's public school curriculum is devoted to Wahhabi teachings. Passages from Saudi textbooks quoted in the American media after 9/11 generated much controversy. One textbook, for example, informed ninth grade students that Judgment Day will not come "until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them," while another stated that it is "compulsory" for Muslims "to consider the infidels their enemy."[8] Embarrassed by the revelations, the Saudi government purported to launch a comprehensive review of its educational curricula and pledged that all such references would be removed. Last year, however, Freedom House published an exhaustive report on the new curriculum, concluding that it "continues to propagate an ideology of hate toward the 'unbeliever,' which include Christians, Jews, Shiites, Sufis, Sunni Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine, Hindus, atheists and others."[9]
Some analysts dismiss the relevance of this indoctrination on the grounds that "conforming to an ultra-conservative, anti-pluralistic faith does not necessarily make you a violent individual,"[10] but this reasoning is fallacious. If only one percent of the 5 million Saudi students exposed to these teachings resort to violence, this would produce 50,000 jihadis.[11] Not surprisingly, bin Laden himself denounced foreign interference in Saudi school curricula in an April 2006 audiotape.
Moreover, these teachings are reinforced by Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia, who advocate jihad against enemies of "true" Islam - outside the kingdom." Incitement to violence against Shiites is particularly common. In December 2006, a high-ranking cleric close to the Saudi royal family, Abdul Rahman al-Barak, denounced Shiites as an "evil sect . . . more dangerous than Jews and Christians."[12]
In November of 2004, twenty-six clerics, most of whom held positions as lecturers of Islamic studies at various Saudi state-funded universities, issued a call for jihad against American forces in Iraq. Two Saudi officials denounced the fatwa in interviews with the Western media, but no retraction was made in Arabic to local media outlets. Months later, a Saudi dissident group released a videotape showing the Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia's Supreme Judicial Council, Saleh bin Muhammad al-Luhaidan, advising young Saudis at a government mosque on how to infiltrate Iraq and fight US troops, as well as assuring them that Saudi security forces would not punish them after their return.[13] While Luhaidan publicly retracted his statements, videotapes of prominent Saudi clerics exhorting the public to wage jihad in Iraq and elsewhere continue to surface.[14]
Exporting Hatred
While Saudi citizens remain the vanguard of Islamic theofascism around the world, the growth potential for this ideology lies outside the Kingdom. The Saudis have spent at least $87 billion propagating Wahhabism abroad during the past two decades,[15] and the scale of financing is believed to have increased in the past two years as oil prices have skyrocketed. The bulk of this funding goes to the construction and operating expenses of mosques, madrassas, and other religious institutions that preach Wahhabism. It also supports the training of imams; domination of mass media and publishing outlets; distribution of Wahhabi textbooks and other literature; and endowments to universities (in exchange for influence over the appointment of Islamic scholars). By comparison, the Communist Party of the USSR and its Comintern spent just over $7 billion propagating its ideology worldwide between 1921 and 1991.[16]
Wahhabism has made less headway in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, despite the fact that decades of Communist rule had weakened their traditional Islamic institutions. Several successor governments, especially the Uzbekis, have cracked down harshly on militant Islamist groups, while encouraging educational systems in the Hanafi tradition that promote tolerant and peaceful Islam. Africa is also a critical area of Wahhabi expansion, as it offers a multitude of "failed states" and communal cleavages ripe for exploitation, most notably in the Sudan and Nigeria.[19]
In all of these areas, the central dynamic is the same - it is the overwhelming wealth of Saudi Arabia that enables the Wahhabi sect to proselytize on a global scale, not the intrinsic appeal of its teachings. Throughout the world, moderates echo the assessment of Somali journalist Bashir Gothar, who writes that his country's tolerant Sufi-infused Islamic culture has been: "swept aside by a new brand of Islam that is being pushed down the throat of our people - Wahhabism. Anywhere one looks, one finds that alien, perverted version of Islam."[20]
Wahhabism in the West
Wahhabi proselytizing is not limited to the Islamic world. The Saudis have financed the growth of thousands of Wahhabi mosques, madrassas, and other religious institutions in Western countries that have fast-growing Muslim minorities during the past three decades.[21] Wahhabi penetration is deepest in the social welfare states of Western Europe, where chronically high unemployment has created large pools of able-bodied young Muslim men who have "become permanent wards of the state at the cost of their basic human dignity."[22]This is a perfect storm of alienation and idleness, ripe for terrorist recruitment. The perpetrators of the 2005 London subway attacks were native-born Britons of Pakistani descent, recruited locally and trained in the use of explosives during visits to Pakistan. The Dutch Moroccan who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theodor Van Gogh in 2004 (for producing a film critical of Islam) was also a product of Wahhabi indoctrination.
The Wahhabis have had less traction in the United States, which lacks the masses of unassimilated young people that exist in Europe. US welfare laws no longer allow able-bodied young men to have indefinite periods of government subsidized unemployment and immigrants (both Muslim and non-Muslim) tend to find a more stable niche in American society.
Nevertheless, Wahhabi penetration of US mainstream Islamic institutions is substantial. A 2005 Freedom House Report examined over 200 books and other publications distributed in 15 prominent Saudi-funded American mosques. One such publication, bearing the imprint of the Saudi embassy and distributed by the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles, contained the following injunctions for Muslims living in America:
Be dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.
[W]hoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself.
Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.[23]
Although Saudi-funded religious institutions have been careful not to incite or explicitly endorse violence since 9/11, they unapologetically promote distrust toward non-Muslims and self-segregation. In effect, they are trying to reproduce in America the kind of social conditions that have fueled radicalization and terrorist recruitment in Europe.
While the Saudi ambassador in Washington said last year that his government was undertaking a "very intense review" of all missionary activities in the United States,[29] it is clear that the Saudis are concerned primarily with avoiding bad publicity, not abandoning their drive to dominate Islamic institutions in America.
Causes of American Inaction
The Bush administration has been reluctant to put serious pressure on the Saudis to stop propagating Wahhabism, despite the enormous threat to American security posed by Sunni theofascism. There are several reasons for this.
The first is American dependence on the kingdom's abundant oil reserves, which enable to the Saudis to maintain roughly 3 million b/d in spare production capacity. This spare capacity has been called the "energy equivalent of nuclear weapons," because it puts the Saudis in a unique position to compensate for disruptions in supplies from other producers and discourage price gouging - a service provided to the United States (and other industrialized nations) in exchange for protection.[30] However, the argument that a firm public stance against Saudi propagation of religious hatred might lead the kingdom to retaliate economically is spurious. Saudi Arabia's use of the oil weapon would alienate the entire industrialized world, while threatening the relative economic prosperity that preserves stability in the kingdom.
Some politicians and writers have voiced concern that pushing the Saudi royal family to curtail the Wahhabis could lead to terrorist attacks on the country's vulnerable petroleum infrastructure or lead to the collapse of the monarchy, which would produce an even worse outcome - a Saudi state controlled exclusively by religious fanatics. While these are serious risks, it must be borne in mind that most Wahhabi radicals view the monarchy (and its oil fields) as a golden goose. It is only by disguising Saudi Arabia as a 'friendly nation' that they have been able to go as far as they have in spreading their atavistic perversion of Islam.
Such concerns reveal a tendency to imagine or spin the Saudi royal family as fundamentally pro-Western. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who served as ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005, has played an important role in masking Saudi - Wahhabi realities. His personal charm, Washington Post journalist David Ignatius writes, "many American leaders and even presidents to forget that he represented a secretive, repressive Muslim kingdom that survived because it had made a pact with 'puritanical' Wahhabi clerics who despised America."[31]
Bandar was also instrumental in the growth of what Daniel Pipes has called a "culture of corruption" that renders the executive branch of the American government "incapable of dealing with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the farsighted and disinterested manner that US foreign policy requires." Pipes points to a "revolving door syndrome" afflicting senior diplomats and policymakers who deal with the Saudis in their official capacities.[32] Very often, they have enjoyed lucrative post-government careers working as consultants for Saudi businessmen and companies, or running Saudi-financed nongovernmental organizations. "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office," Bandar once reportedly told a close associate: "you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office."[33]
Unable or unwilling to combat the spread of Sunni theofascism at its main source (Saudi Arabia), the Bush administration launched a democracy promotion campaign intended to eradicate political conditions receptive to its global spread. However, rather than building stable and less oppressive systems resistant to religious extremism in Afghanistan and Iraq, the accumulating shortfalls of American intervention in both countries have made them magnets for jihadist recruitment.
The Question of Iran
The Bush Administration's reluctance to challenge the Saudis after 9/11 initially encountered impassioned objections from conservative and liberal commentators alike, but the outrage has tapered off as attention has became increasingly focused on Shiite Iran and its nuclear program which is hipped by Israel. In the view of the administration, the Iranian threat to American national security not only supercedes the threat of Sunni theofascism, but supercedes it to such a degree that a more accommodating policy toward Saudi Arabia is warranted. However, while the prospect of militant Shiite clerics in possession of nuclear weapons is understandably disconcerting to many Americans, the Iranian threat is mitigated by several important factors.
For all of the shrill and unsettling words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his government's foreign policy is driven more by Iranian nationalism than Shiite Islamism (this is evident, for example, in Tehran's support for the predominantly Christian nation of Armenia in its dispute with Shiite Azerbaijan). This is not surprising, as Iran (known as Persia prior to the twentieth century) has existed in one form or another since biblical times, while it embraced Shiite Islam just 500 years ago. While Ahmadinejad exploits Iranian nationalism to win public support in his confrontation with the West, it can easily turn against him if he were to embark on a global adventure. Wahhabi clerics may support the Saudi royal family as a necessary evil in order to protect their global proselytizing mission, but they recognize no Saudi Arabian "nation" whose interests take precedence over their agenda. Such is not the case in Iran.
Furthermore, Shiite Islamism does not exhibit theofascist tendencies. Radical clerics in Iran have been responsible for horrendous abuses of power, but they do not regard non-Shiite Muslims as "unbelievers" who must be systematically purged. Basically in Islam Christians and Jews are considered as belivers and in Quran are referred to as "the people of book". Even within the Shiite world, there is no prospect of a Wahhabi-style Iranian takeover of religious discourse because unlike the Sunnis, Shiite Islam is rigidly hierarchical. Iraqi and Lebanese Shiites gladly accept Iranian financial and military support, but they are fiercely loyal to their own clerical establishments.
An even greater fallacy is the widespread belief in Washington that a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia is an asset in confronting Iran. On the contrary, coddling the Saudis makes it more difficult for the United States to deal with Iran. The Bush administration's refusal to hold Saudi leaders accountable for their incitement of Wahhabi jihadists (who have murdered far more Shiites than Americans, mostly in Iraq and Pakistan) is a source of deep resentment in the Shiite world. It is no surprise that the only two major public demonstrations against Al-Qaeda in the Islamic world after the 9/11 attacks were both organized by Shiites (in Tehran and Karachi, Pakistan).
It is interesting to note that the recent escalation of US - Iranian tensions has made the Saudis less accommodating about Iraq than ever before. Reports that the Saudi Government is threatening to openly fund and arm Sunni insurgent groups if American forces withdraw from Iraq are a case in point.[34] In effect, the Saudis are signaling to the Bush administration that they will thwart any American plan to cede control of Iraq to its Shiite-dominated, democratically-elected government, while signaling to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq that they can reject American efforts to broker a political settlement and not be left to face the consequences alone.
Iran has no history of direct aggression against its neighbors, and unlike Saddam's Sunni-dominated Iraq, they have never used weapons of mass destruction during invasions of neighbors or against their own people. The strongest argument for this approach lies with the extent that Iran craves recognition of its actual status as the historically authentic nation state in the Middle East. Iran has long aspired to be and probably will be the region's predominant Islamic regional power. On the other hand Iranians are the most pro American and pro west people in the middle-east, although the recent Israeli pushed American forced sanctions are damaging this view.
The Road Ahead
Washington will eventually have to face the reality that derailing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons (and, more broadly, its emergence as the predominant Islamic regional power) may be impossible over the long-term, and possible in the short term only at the expense of fatally undermining efforts to contain the spread of Sunni theofascism. The United States would do better to find a mutually acceptable means of working with this reality, rather sustaining a deadlocked confrontation by conditioning its willingness to normalize relations with Tehran on the abandonment of its nuclear aspirations. US - Iranian engagement will greatly enhance American leverage over the Saudis, as well as check the threat of Sunni theofascist terrorism in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. Saudi officials have urged the Bush administration not to talk with Iran because they know that a reduction in US - Iranian tensions will draw more attention to their unbridled export of Wahhabism.
Reducing American dependence on Saudi oil must also be part of any comprehensive strategy for addressing the threat of Sunni theofascism. Although President Bush has expressed commitment to developing alternative energy sources, the surplus production capacity of the Saudis enables them to lower prices as necessary to ensure that this will not be cost effective for a long time. Barring radical breakthroughs in fuel technologies, an optimistic forecast would have bio fuels (ethanol, synthetic diesel and bio oil) making up to 30% of US petroleum equivalent needs by 2030.[35] For the short to medium term future, only conservation can significantly alter American petroleum dependency.
Without the billions of dollars in Saudi funds, the ideological, political, and psychological edifice of Wahhabi theofascism will begin to crumble, particularly if a concerted effort is made by the Bush administration to promote moderate Islamic institutions (a recent study by the RAND Corporation offers some insightful recommendations).[36] Ultimately, the devil is not in the details - it is the administration's broad lack of resolve in confronting the threat of theofascism, not the lack of viable methods of combating it, that imperils American security.
REFERENCES
[1] See Mohammed Ayoob, "Political Islam: Image and Reality," World Policy Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall 2004.
[2] Fascism is "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." See Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 218.
[3] Saudi police 'stopped' fire rescue, BBC, 15 March 2002. Wahhabi religious police (mutaween) prevented Saudi schoolgirls from fleeing a burning school because they were not properly veiled, leaving fifteen of them to die inside in 2002, an outrage equaled only by the Taliban's rein of terror against women in Afghanistan.
[4] R. James Woolsey, "The Elephant in The Middle East Living Room: Watching Wahhabis," The National Review, 14 December 2005.
[5] Zawahiri declared in a December 2006 videotape, "How could they not demand an Islamic constitution before entering these elections? Are they not an Islamic movement?" See: "Al Qaeda Warns U.S. on Fighting in Muslim Lands," The New York Times, 21 December 2006.
[6] Zawahiri accused it of being "duped, provoked and used" by the United States after it participated in the 2005 legislative elections. See "Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader praises U.S. hints of troop reduction in Iraq," The Associated Press, 6 January 2006.
[7] In his 2003 book, Why America Slept, Gerald Posner cites two unidentified senior Bush administration officials as saying that captured Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah revealed details of a Saudi-Pakistani-Bin Laden triangle. See Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, (New York: Random House, 2003).
[8] "Inside the Kingdom," Time, 7 September 2003.
[9] Nina Shea, Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance, Freedom House, 2006.
[10] John Esposito, quoted in Gary Leupp, On Terrorism, Methodism, Saudi 'Wahhabism' and the Censored 9-11 Report, Counterpunch, 8 August 2003.
[11] Ali al-Ahmed of the Washington Institute for Gulf Affairs makes this point. See Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance, CBN.org, 14 June 2006.
[12] "Top Saudi cleric issues religious edict declaring Shiites to be infidels," Associated Press, 29 December 2006.
[13] More Evidence of Saudi Double Talk?, MSNBC, 26 April 2005.
[14] In an April 2006 lecture, Saudi cleric Nasser bin Suleiman al-Omar cautioned his audience not to "get involved in things that are not jihad . . . [and] divert the strife and calamity into the lands of the Muslims, instead of aiming them directly at the enemies." He continued, saying that: "there are places where jihad is proper - in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, and the Philippines." See Saudi Cleric Nasser bin Suleiman Al-'Omar: 'America is Now Disappearing From the Hearts Within America Itself . . . MEMRI Special Dispatch #1154, 4 May 2006.
[15] Alex Alexiev, "Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States", Testimony before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, 26 June 2003.
[16] Author interview with Evgueni Novokov, Ph.D., former colonel, senior staff officer for the Soviet Politburo and deputy director for Middle East Operations, in charge of Arabic Department, and relationships with CPSU Central Committee front organizations and friendly parties; advised Central Committee members on Islamic affairs, 1986 -1988. 22 October 2006.
[17] Author interview with Abdel Guzman, Grand Imam of Jolo, Jolo City, Sulu Province, The Philippines, 5 March 2004.
[18] Author's interview with Abdel Guzman, The Grand Imam of Jolo, Op. Cit.
[19] See Freedom House, The Talibanization of Nigeria: Radical Islam, Extremist Sharia Law, and Religious Freedom, March 2002.
[20] "Against the Saudization of Somaliland," Addis Tribune (Ethiopia), 21 November 2003. http://www.addistribune.com/Archives/2003/11/21-11-03/Against.htm
[21] In March 2002, the official Saudi magazine Ain al-Yaqeen estimated that the Saudi royal family in countries where Muslims were a minority has funded 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, 202 colleges, and 2,000 madrassas. The number of all Saudi Government and charitably funded institutions beyond Saudi Arabia is much higher. Cited in "Inside the Kingdom," Time, 7 September 2003.
[22] Alex Alexiev, "France at the Brink", The San Diego Union Tribune, 20 November 2005. See also: Alex Alexiev, Europe's Islamist Future is Now, The Center for Security Policy, 13 June 2005.
[23] Other publications examined include textbooks from the Saudi Ministry of Education and collections of religious edicts by state-sanctioned clerics in the kingdom. See Freedom House, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques, January 2005.
[24] Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, "Wahhabism in the Big House: The Teaching of Jihad in American Penitentiaries," The Weekly Standard, 26 September 2005.
[25] "Terrorist Recruitment in Prisons and The Recent Arrests Related to Guantanamo Bay Detainees," Testimony of John S. Pistole, Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, FBI, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security, 14 October 2003.
[26] Testimony of Dr. J. Michael Waller before the US Senate Judiciary Committee's Terrorism Subcommittee, 14 October 2003.
[27] Frank Gaffney, A Troubling Influence, Front Page Magazine.com, 9 December 2003.
[28] Glenn Simpson, "Suspect Lessons: A Muslim School Used by Military Has Troubling Ties," The Wall Street Journal, 3 December 2003.
[29] "For Conservative Muslims, Goal of Isolation a Challenge; 9/11 Put Strict Adherents on the Defensive," The Washington Post, 5 September 2006.
[30] Edward L. Morse and James Richard, "The Battle for Energy Dominance," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002.
[31] David Ignatius, "The Operator," The Washington Post, 5 November 2006, p.7.
[32] Daniel Pipes, "The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations," The National Interest, Winter 2002/2003.
[33] "Oil for Security Fueled Close Ties; But Major Differences Led to Tensions," The Washington Post, 11 February 2002.
[34] In November 2006, Nawaf Obaid, a close advisor to Prince Turki, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that a phased American withdrawal from Iraq will result in "massive Saudi intervention," with options including "funding, arms and logistical support" to Sunni insurgents. "As the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene." See Nawaf Obaid, "Stepping Into Iraq: Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis if the U.S. Leaves," The Washington Post, 29 November 2006.
[35] Outlook on Renewable Energy in America, Volume II: Joint Summary Report, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), March 2007.
[36] The Rand Corporation, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, 2007.
Curtin Winsor, Jr. is a former United States Ambassador to Costa Rica. He graduated from Brown University in 1961 with a degree in English literature, and then received a Masters in Latin American studies in 1964 and a Ph.D. in international studies in 1971 from the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. He worked as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Robert Dole, as well as for the U.S. Foreign Service. * This article had previously been published in the Mideast Monitor.
Troops 'targeted by NSA for anti-Obama views' - El complejo depersecusion es bien aparentemente - le tienen terror a sus propios soldados!
Attorney claims visits from FBI, Secret Service about Web postings
The NSA is
systematically monitoring the Internet posts and telephone conversations of
U.S. military returning from Afghanistan, according to a civil-liberties
attorney.
“The FBI and
the Secret Service are showing up to request an interview to question specific
Internet posts the veteran has placed on websites such as Facebook,” explained
attorney John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute.
Whitehead said
the agencies are looking for “anti-Obama views that can be interpreted to
reflect psychological problems of sufficient seriousness to disqualify the
veteran from ever owning a firearm.”
Rutherford
told WND credible sources within the National Security Agency have told him the
NSA is downloading 1 trillion communications on the Internet per month,
including posts to various websites, emails, instant message communications and
texting messages.
As WND reported last
week, Whitehead and the Rutherford Institute in a lawsuit filed in the U.S.
District Court in Richmond, Va., are representing Marine veteran Brandon Raub,
27, who was arrested by FBI and Secret Service agents for comments he made on
Facebook expressing dissatisfaction with the present direction of the U.S.
government.
Whitehead said
his office has received numerous calls from U.S. military returning from
Afghanistan with reports they are being visited by the FBI and Secret Service
to ask questions about their Internet postings.
“We are
advising veterans being visited by the FBI or the Secret Service to take the
Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions that might end up with a diagnosis
of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, which goes into the veteran’s file and
can be used in the future to prevent the veteran from purchasing a firearm,” he
said.
Whitehead said
that in most of the cases, there isn’t enough information to obtain a search
warrant from a judge.
But if the
veteran answers questions, he said, the Secret Service or the FBI might get a
psychiatrist to visit with the vet for 10 or 15 minutes in the jail cell to
acquire enough information to certify in front of a judge that the person
should be placed in a civil commitment because of a psychological problem.
In February, Investors.com
reported a complaint by Michael Connelly, executive director of the United
States Justice Foundation, that veterans have been getting letters from the
Veterans Administration informing them they have been declared mentally
incompetent.
The vet must
provide evidence to the contrary within 60 days. If the vet desires a hearing,
he or she must inform the Veterans Administration within 30 days.
According to
the provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act any person
receiving a determination of incompetency can be prevented from purchasing,
receiving, owning, or transporting a firearm or ammunition.
Ronald S.
Honberg, director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on
Mental Illness, testified
before the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government
Reform Committee on May 10, 2007, that the term “adjudicated as a mental
defective” is both stigmatizing and incompatible with modern terminology used
in the diagnosis and treatment of people with a mental illness.
“No state
official charged with carrying out the requirements of the Brady bill could
possibly know what this means, as it is a term that has been obsolete for close
to 40 years,” Honberg explained to Congress. “We have received emails and other
communications in the past few weeks from people who are incredulous that such
a term would still be used in federal law.”
Whitehead
explained the problem is intensifying as an increasing percentage of the U.S.
military serving in Afghanistan have become disillusioned with Obama
administration policy toward the war.
“I’ve had
veterans returning from Afghanistan tell me that they passed by the opium
fields and it shocked me that the U.S. government was helping the Afghans plant
that stuff,” Whitehead said.
“There’s a lot
of corruption in the Afghanistan government, passing around bags of cash to top
officials, and our troops are beginning to ask, ‘Why am I here?’
He said of
these veterans “enlisted wanting to be a great soldier, but they are coming
back disillusioned.”
“I’m getting a
lot of reports that soldiers are getting pronounced PSTD and there’s nothing
they can do about it,” he said. “Then they come home and the process continues.
The NSA is targeting veterans, there’s no doubt about it.”
Whitehead said
“the technology is driving the show now” at the NSA, with computer software
identifying “problematic phrases” that target a person as a potential troublemaker.
He said that
with the NSA is doing a trillion downloads a month, “the surveillance is
pervasive.”
“Anything
digital is subject to government investigation, typically without the person
having any knowledge it is happening,” he said. “If you want to go on Google
and be anti-war, you are going to end up in a file and you are going to be
subject to further investigation.”
Whitehead
warned that the telephone call interviewing him for this article was almost
certainly being recorded by the NSA and that the contents would end up in a
file both for him and for WND.
“The United
States is already in a police state, such that the only question is how we are
going to deal with it,” he stressed. “With Bush, the surveillance state was
beginning. Under Obama, the NSA has blossomed to a whole new level unimaginable
in an era only a few years ago before this computer technology existed.”
Whitehead told
WND he was convinced Operation Vigilant Eagle was still in operation targeting
military veterans as potentially dangerous “right-wing extremists,” even though
the DHS, the Department of Defense and the FBI have dropped since 2009 any
specific reference to the programs.
“When the
drones get here, another Obama program, the drones are going to be awesome,” he
warned.
“The drones
will have scanning devices that can fly over your home and grab all the digital
data in the place where you live. The drones are going to up the ante, there’s
no doubt about it. The only question is whether this is still the United States
of America. There’s nowhere to hide anymore.”
IRS Steals 60 Million Medical Records, What Other Personal Liberties Will Obamacare Destroy - See more at: http://www.ohiolibertycoalition.org/irs-steals-60-million-medical-records-what-other-personal-liberties-will-obamacare-destroy F. Hidalgo
9:32 AM To: Lazaro Gonzalez,
IRS Steals 60 Million Medical Records,
What Other Personal Liberties Will Obamacare Destroy
One of the frequently touted reforms included in Obamacare
was the call for electronic medical records. We were told the
efficiencies gained by having every single American’s most personal medical
details online were certain to bring down the cost of health care as well as
improve the quality of care. Nevermind the exorbitant cost of such
systems, the increase in workload to maintain them, or the inevitable security
lapses. Nevermind that half of all doctor visits will now be spent
watching the M.D. type the intimate details of patient conversations into a
computer screen. These concerns were brushed aside in the wave of
positive change Obamacare would bring.
Obamacare’s start date,
January 1, 2014, has not even passed and we already have a major breach in
security for 10 million Americans over their medical records. And the
culprit is none other than our own IRS. The same IRS that has been targeting tea
parties and which has been put in charge of policing the ACA. Could it be
that the IRS is taking their new health care enforcement role a little too
seriously?
Courthouse News
reports that the John Doe Company of
California has sued 15 IRS agents in Superior Court for seizing 60,000,000
medical records of 10,000,000 Americans. In 2011, the IRS agents raided
the company over a tax issue connected to a single former employee, but used
the opportunity to appropriate the medical records of millions of innocent
Americans who to this day do not know that their medical privacy has been
violated. The suit states:
“No search warrant authorized
the seizure of these records; no subpoena authorized the seizure of these
records; none of the 10,000,000 Americans were under any kind of known criminal
or civil investigation and their medical records had no relevance whatsoever to
the IRS search.”
The lawsuit emphasizes the
sensitive nature of the records explaining that they include “information
about treatment for any kind of medical concern, including psychological
counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual or drug treatment, and a wide
range of medical matters covering the most intimate and private of concerns.”
In his
American Spectator piece, David Catron, puts the
IRS theft into stark perspective. As the mainstream media builds a “firewall”
to deny the connection between the IRS targeting scandal and Obamacare, the IRS
theft of medical records proves that the the two are “inextricably linked”
because it was Obamacare that made the stealing of 60 million private medical
records possible. Obamacare mandates that every health care provider in the
country maintain electronic medical records, and as such, our medical records
are now vulnerable to abusive government agencies and to security lapses
precipitated inadvertently by employees connected to the heatlh care industry.
David Catron pointedly states,
“Last Week’s revelations concerning that agency’s treatment of Tea Party and
anti-abortion groups demonstrates that the IRS is sufficiently corrupt to abuse
its power. And its theft of 60 million medical records shows that it is also
eminently able to invade the privacy of Americans. I’ll conclude, then, with a
little more food for thought: The class action lawsuit filed by the John
Doe Company involves 10 million patients, “roughly one out of every twenty-five
adult American citizens.” And, since only 10 percent of the affected patients
reside in California, the rest are obviously scattered across the nation. Are
you one of the other 9 million?”
David Catron’s conclusion
powerfully points out that medical privacy in the U.S. is a thing of the past.
As Obamacare continues to be implemented, what other precious American rights
will be lost?
Please help us fight Obamacare
here in Ohio. Get engaged in the fight to stop Obamacare’s Medicaid
expansion. Read the posts about
Medicaid expansion on our site and
contact your State Rep and State Senator. Let them know that Statehouse
Republicans are hastening the destruction of our health care system and our
personal liberties through their ill-conceived policy to expand Medicaid in our
state and thus entrench Obamacare.
- See more at:
http://www.ohiolibertycoalition.org/irs-steals-60-million-medical-records-what-other-personal-liberties-will-obamacare-destroy/#sthash.vG5GD27E.dpuf
Por favor reenvíen
información contenida en este número a todos sus contactos, Muchas Gracias,
LazaroRGonzalez@hotmail.com, http://enmiopinionlrgm.wordpress.com/
LazaroRGonzalez@hotmail.com, http://enmiopinionlrgm.wordpress.com/
“THE FREEDON NEVER IS FREE”
“En
mi opinión” Lázaro
R González Miño Editor ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’
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