Claremont Neocon Iran Plays Tiddlywinks with “al-Qaeda”

Kurt Nimmo
Saturday September 29, 2007

In an effort to pave the way for the total destruction of Iran, the neocon think-tanks are marching out “experts” to convince us, the mostly clueless and witless American public, that Iran is the epicenter of evil in the world, thus its hospitals, kindergarten classrooms, and water treatment plants justly deserve to be bombed.

One such instance of this shameless fear mongering and transparent propaganda comes from the Claremont Institute, described by Media Transparency as “a bastion of Straussian scholarship,” that is to say promulgation of Machiavellian deception and “noble lies,” as Strauss called lying to the people, taking his cue from Plato. As should be expected, the Claremont Institute is funded by the usual suspects, including the Scaife foundation, presided over by the CIA asset, Richard Mellon Scaife.

Recently Claremont met Frontpage, the neocon website run on Scaife money. “Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Thomas Joscelyn, an expert on the international terrorist network,” the site, operated by vehement Arab-hater and former Marxist David Horowitz, begins. “He has written extensively on al Qaeda and its allies, including Iran. He is the author, most recently, of Iran’s Proxy War Against America, a booklet published by the Claremont Institute and available for download at its web site.”

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Naturally, as the neocons are in a tizzy due to the fact the Devil incarnate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dared to step foot on hallowed American soil, the “interview” begins by dismissing the president of Iran as a “puppet for the Ayatollah and his attending mullahs, who have the real power in Iran.” Instead of demonizing Ahmadinejad, a quite popular sport in the corporate media these days, Joscelyn declares the Iranian “clerical regime, which rose to power in 1979, is intrinsically opposed to America and her allies throughout the world. When they chant ‘Death to America,’ they mean it. The Iranian regime is also dedicated to revolution. That is, they want to export the Iranian revolution throughout the Middle East and the world. And they have often done so on the backs of terrorists.”

Of course, it is not difficult to ascertain who these “terrorists” are. If you said “al-Qaeda,” the Brothers Grimm, cave-dwelling terror klatch fabricated straight out of the labs of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, you win a Cupie Doll, never mind it is common knowledge to those who pay attention that Iran’s ruling Shi’ites don’t trust the Sunni Wahabbists of the late Osama bin Laden’s stripe far as they can throw them, that is to say not far. Never mind, as well, that the “Wahabis consider the Shiites apostates largely because their brand of Islam reveres a populous hierarchy of saints. The austere Wahabis, with their narrow focus on Allah, consider this akin to idolatry,” as USA Today admitted. In other words, it is patently absurd to think these two sects would collaborate.

But this does not stop Thomas Joscelyn. “According to Lawrence Wright in his book The Looming Tower, a top al Qaeda operative named Ali Mohamed told the FBI that Ayman al Zawahiri and the Iranians agreed to cooperate on a coup attempt in Egypt in 1990.” Joscelyn makes a big deal out Ali Mohamed, even calls him an FBI “star witness” in the prosecution of “the al Qaeda terrorists” supposedly responsible for the August 7, 1998, embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Ali Mohamed, of course, worked for the CIA, as Joscelyn is forced to admit, although he characterizes this relationship as “feigned cooperation” on Mohamed’s part. As should be expected, this “feigned cooperation” worked swimmingly for both the CIA and the FBI. So valued was Mohamed, he was able to slip Ayman al-Zawahiri into the country for a Bay Area fund-raising mission.

“Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian intelligence officer, was fired in 1984 because of his religious extremism,” writes Tim Howells.

In spite of this and in spite of the fact that his name was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, he was granted a visa to enter the US and became a US citizen. By 1986 he was a sergeant in the US Army and an instructor at the elite Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. While in this position Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden, and he assisted with the training of al-Qaeda operatives both in Afghanistan and in the US. His immediate supervisors at Fort Bragg were duly alarmed by these illegal activities, and reported them up the chain of command. When their reports failed to produce any action, not even an official debriefing of Mohamed upon his return from Afghanistan, at least one of his supervisors, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, concluded that Mohamed had been acting as part of an operation sanctioned by an American intelligence agency, “probably the CIA.”

Mohamed’s activities in support of al-Qaeda throughout the 1990s were of the highest significance to that organization. In 1991, he handled security for bin Laden’s move from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan. In 1993, Mohamed accompanied bin Laden’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, on a fund raising tour of the United States, again handling security arrangements. The funds raised helped support Zawahiri in a Pentagon supported mission in the Balkans, which will be discussed in the next section.

The al-Qaeda members trained by Mohamed in the United States included several who were later convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Top secret US Army training manuals supplied by Mohamed to the defendants were produced as evidence at their trial.

Mohamed himself did the initial surveillance for the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At the time Mohamed was on active reserve with the Special Forces and was a paid FBI informant. Mohamed was at long last charged with crimes in connection with the 1998 embassy bombings. In October 2000, he was convicted of five counts of conspiracy to murder nationals of the United States. However, the nature of Mohamed’s plea agreement, the sentence handed down, if any, and Mohamed’s present whereabouts remain secret.

In other words, it was an awfully curious “feigned cooperation,” one with FBI and CIA agents walking around like automatons, quite unable to resist the machinations of Ali and Osama.

Joscelyn spends the remainder of his interview with neocon and Scaife functionary Jamie Glazov attempting to convince us “that al Qaeda is an enemy we have never really understood” and now is the time, with 9/11 six years in the murky past, “we got rid of some of our more shallow assumptions about our terrorist enemies,” even those amply documented as CIA constructs, and “we should start asking President Ahmadinejad why it is that his nation harbors scores of al Qaeda terrorists to this day,” although there is, as usual, a paucity of evidence in this regard.

As a casual Google search will reveal—not that we can expect Mr. Joscelyn to engage in such—Iran “has arrested a number of Iranian supporters of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group” and “wants to try other Al Qaeda suspects it has detained who come from countries viewed as unfriendly,” according to Reuters, back on Sunday, July 18, 2004. It might be added that such “countries viewed as unfriendly” include the United States and its various intelligence agencies, documented as creating much of the so-called Islamic terrorist threat out of whole cloth.

Finally, the situation appears to be the exact opposite of what Joscelyn tells us, as “al-Qaeda” has produced a “number of threats” against Iran over the years and has threatened to carry out attacks against the country, as should be expected of a CIA contrivance (see Iran “holding senior al Qaeda men,” CNN, Thursday, July 24, 2003). In July, 2005, Ali Younessi, Iranian information minister, told Nazila Fathi of the International Herald Tribune, that “Al Qaeda had organized and formed different groups in eastern Iran to carry out terrorist attacks in larger cities, including Tehran, the capital.”

It is very interesting how “al-Qaeda” consistently vows to attack the enemies of the neocons, including Joscelyn and his host, David Horowitz. And yet we are expected to believe the exact opposite, a peculiar yet enduring property of Bushzarro world.

In short, if anything, the alleged relationship between “al-Qaeda” and Iran constitutes “feigned cooperation.” But then all of this makes certain sense, as Iran is the next target on the hit list and, as recent history reveals, the neocons are fond of tall tales and outright lies in ritual preparation for their obsessive serial murder attacks against dreaded enemies, including no shortage of grade school kids and grandmothers.

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