Recorded August 22, 2004
REALAUDIO
NB: This stream contains both FTR #s 473 and 474 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.
Highlighting and clarifying the subject of the Islamofascist Muslim Brotherhood, this program presents the transcript of a talk by the heroic John Loftus, whose work has graced these pages extensively over the years. (For more about the fascist history of the Brotherhood, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 343, 369, 381, 355, 356.) After discussing the fascist origins of the group and its alliance with the Third Reich during World War II, Loftus traces the Brotherhood’s postwar sponsorship by both British intelligence and the CIA. In addition to setting forth the CIA’s role in relocating many of the Brotherhood from Egypt to Saudi Arabia in the 1950’s, Loftus traces the evolution of the Brotherhood into the MAK—the name given the anti-Soviet Brotherhood elements active in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. After the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, the MAK evolved into al Qaeda.
Program Highlights Include: British Intelligence’s use of the Muslim Brotherhood to crush the fledgling state of Israel; the CIA’s insertion of Brotherhood members into the Madrassas (Saudi Arabian religious schools); Loftus’ role in generating the 3/20/2002 Operation Green Quest raids; Loftus’ role in helping to launch the lawsuit on behalf of survivors of the 9/11 attacks against funding sources for al Qaeda.
1. Loftus begins by relating how his experience as a Justice Department investigator led to his awareness of the Holocaust: “It always seems a little strange to have an Irish-Catholic talking about Yom Ha Shoah. I had an unusual education in the Holocaust. When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a little town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C. and that’s where the US Government buries its secrets—literally. There are twenty vaults underground and each vault is one acre in size. Anyone see the movie ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’? The last scene of that movie is what the underground vaults are really like, only not as organized as they are in the movie. And in those underground vaults I discovered something horrible. I learned that many of the Nazis that I had been assigned to prosecute were on the CIA payroll, but the CIA didn’t know they were Nazis because the British Intelligence Service had lied to them. What the British Intelligence Service didn’t know was that their liar was Kim Philby, the Soviet communist double agent—a little scandal of the Cold War. But our State Department swept it all under the rug and allowed the Nazis to stay in America until I was stupid enough to go public with it.”
(“The Arab Nazi-Al Qaeda Connection” by John Loftus; Jewish Community News; August/2004; p. 18.)
2. “What do you do when you want to go public with a story like this one? You call up 60 minutes. We had a great time. Mike Wallace gave me 30 minutes on his show. For a long time, it was the longest segment that 60 minutes ever did. When the episode about Nazis in America went on the air back in 1982, it caused a minor national uproar. Congress demanded hearings, Mike Wallace got the Emmy award, and my family got the death threats. It was a great trip.” (Idem.)
3. Loftus has become counsel and outlet for a number of veteran intelligence agents as a result of his investigations of Nazis in the 1980’s. “Then a funny thing happened. Over the last 25 years, every retired spy in the U.S. and Canada and England all wanted me to be their lawyer, for free of course. So I had 500 clients, they paid me $1 apiece. So I am the worst paid lawyer in America, but among the better employed.” (Idem.)
4. Beginning the discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood, Loftus relates how he first encountered the historical record of the organization’s employment by the Third Reich, British intelligence and (finally) the CIA. “Let me give you an example. This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it’s called Sleeping with the Devil. I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing about how, when he worked for the CIA, how bad the files were. He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings. I called Bob up and said, ‘Bob, that’s wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ Here’s how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood—and you can do this too. I said, ‘Bob go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word ‘Banna’ B-A-N-N-A. He said, ‘Yeah.’ Type in ‘Nazi.’ Bob typed the two words in, and out came 30 to 40 articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, ‘Oh my god, what have we done?’” (Idem.)
5. Tracing the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood into al Qaeda, Loftus relates the history of the organization, beginning with the organization’s political marriage with the Third Reich. “What I’m doing today is doing what I’m doing now: I’m educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western Intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al Qaeda.” (Idem.)
6. “Here’s how the story began. In the 1920’s there was a young Egyptian named al Banna. And al Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Banna was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930’s, al Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence. The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the Fifth Column, an army inside Egypt.” (Idem.)
7. “When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommel and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria. The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine. These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called in the ‘Handjar’ Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler’s new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa—grand dreams.” (Idem.)
8. Next, Loftus sets forth the manner in which the Brotherhood jumped from the service of the Third Reich to service on behalf of the British, who used them against the fledgling state of Israel in the 1940’s. “At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service. Then a horrible thing happened. Instead of prosecuting the Nazis—the Muslim Brotherhood—the British government hired them.” (Idem.)
9. “They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.” (Ibid.; pp. 18–19.)
10. After their tenure working for the British, the Muslim Brotherhood found employment with the CIA, working in an anti-communist capacity throughout the Middle East. “Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could, but they failed to quash the State of Israel. What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. It may sound stupid; it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against [them]. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.” (Ibid.; p. 19.)
11. After their expulsion from Egypt by Nasser, many of the Brotherhood’s key personnel were relocated to Saudi Arabia by the CIA. In Saudi Arabia, many of them assumed prominence in that benighted country’s theocratic infrastructure. Loftus notes that Wahhabiism has been rejected and labeled a heresy by the vast majority of the world’s Muslims. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 362, 406, 430.) “But the Egyptians became nervous. Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt, or else he would imprison or execute them all. During the 1950’s, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like [Abdullah] Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrassas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism. Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam—the Saudi version of Islam—is typical, but it’s not. The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. The Wahhabiism was only practiced by two nations, the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. That’s how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It has always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.” (Idem.)
12. Osama bin Laden was mentored by Abdullah Azzam—a key Brotherhood figure who was among those relocated to Saudi Arabia by the CIA. “For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and that country was the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood, and fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools. And there was a young student who paid attention—and Azzam’s student was named Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.” (Idem.)
13. Next, Loftus highlights the CIA’s resurrection of the Brotherhood and the agency’s employment of the Islamofascist organization as combatants against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Brotherhood was recast as the MAK. “In 1979, the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn’t call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK. And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn’t know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section of the CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.” (Idem.)
14. Recapping information from FTR#465, the program highlights the fact that the elder George Bush oversaw the operations of the MAK in the 1980’s. “Specifically, as vice president in the mid-eighties, Bush supported aiding the mujahideen in Afghanistan through the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) or Services Offices, which sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar. ‘Bush was in charge of the covert operations that supported the MAK,’ says John Loftus, a Justice Department official in the eighties. ‘They were essentially hiring a terrorist to fight terrorism.’”
(House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger; Scribner [HC]; Copyright 2004 by Craig Unger; ISBN 0–7432-5337-X; p. 102.)
15. “Cofounded by Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, the MAK was the precursor to bin Laden’s global terrorist network, Al Qaeda. It sent money and fighters to the Afghan resistance in Peshawar, Pakistan, and set up recruitment centers in over fifty countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even the United States to bring thousands of warriors to fight the Soviet Union. The MAK was later linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York through an office in Brooklyn known as the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. It is not clear how much contact he had with bin Laden, but Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ was masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, also appeared in Peshawar on occasion.” (Idem.)
16. Returning to Loftus’ address, we examine how the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan led to the formation of al Qaeda: “Azzam and his assistant, Osama bin Laden, rose to some prominence from 1979 to ’89, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, ‘We won, let’s go home!’ and we left this army of Arab fascists in the fields of Afghanistan.” (Idem.)
17. In order to prevent the MAK/Brotherhood from returning to Saudi Arabia, that country’s power elite began paying bribes—in essence “protection money”–to al Qaeda. This development and a schism in the MAK spawned al Qaeda in its present form. “The Saudis didn’t want them to come back. Saudis started paying bribes to Osama bin Laden and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated, apparently by Osama bin Laden himself. The radical group—the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists—Osama called that al Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the residue of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organization you know as ‘Hamas’ is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin a month ago, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East and on 911, it began to spread around the world.” (Ibid.; pp. 19–21.)
18. “I know this sounds like some sort of a sick fantasy, but go to your computer and type in the words ‘Banna,’ B-A-N-N-A and the word ‘Nazi’ N-A-Z-I, and you will see all of the articles come up. Those are all the pieces of information that the CIA was trying to hide from its employees. It did not want them to know the awful past.” (Ibid.; p. 21.)
19. “So in 1984, when I was exposing European Nazis on the CIA payroll, at the same time they were trying to hide from Congress the fact that they had Arab Nazis back on the payroll to fight the Russians—a stupid and corrupt program. So, when Bob Baer studied his files, he was just stunned. A whole generation: the current CIA people know nothing about this. And believe me, the current generation CIA are good and decent Americans and I like them a lot. They’re trying to do a good job, but part of their problem is their files have been shredded. All of these secrets have to come out.” (Idem.)
20. Next, Loftus relates how his intelligence contacts/clients turned him on to the primary Islamist funding apparatus in the country. In turn, his lawsuit against Sami al-Arian led to the Operation Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. (For more about Operation Green Quest, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 356, 357, 382, 387, 406, 423, 425, 432, 433, 435, 462, 464, 467.) “So, of course, my clients in the intelligence community said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ They gave me an example. They said, ‘Here’s how the Saudis finance these groups. The Saudis have established a group of charities on a street in Virginia. It’s 555 Grove St., Herndon, Virginia.’ So I said, ‘OK the Saudis are terrorists, so what?’ These charities fund Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda. The Saudis are getting tax deductions for terrorism. They have set up front groups so all the terrorists groups in the U.S. and the front groups get the Saudi money as a charitable donation.” (Idem.)
21. “I said, ‘You’re kidding me.’ Nope. And they told me that right near where I lived in Tampa, Florida was one of the leading terrorists in the world. There were these two professors at the University of South Florida. One had just left—and he was now in Syria—and he was the world head of Islamic Jihad. His number two, the head of Islamic Jihad in the Western Hemisphere, was Dr. Sami al-Arian, who is still employed as a professor at the University of South Florida. You’ve got to be kidding. This can’t be true. Yes, these guys are raising money all across America and shipping it to Syria to go down to Palestine, the Palestinian areas, and hire suicide bombers to kill Jews.” (Idem.)
22. “They sent me the video tapes. There was Professor al-Arian on stage and one of his friends gets up and says, ‘Now, who will give me $500 to kill a Jew? There are people standing by in Jerusalem who will go out in the street and stab a Jew with a knife, but we need $500.’ And he said, ‘All of this money will go to the Islamic committee for Palestine.’ And that is the front group in the United States for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” (Idem.)
23. “So I had all my friends in the FBI and CIA send in these files. I said, ‘Why haven’t you prosecuted this guy? You’ve known about him since 1989.’ ‘We’d love to. We’ve tried to prosecute him but we were told we couldn’t touch him because he gets all of his money from the Saudis, and we are all under orders not to do anything to embarrass the Saudi government.’ I said, ‘I don’t mind embarrassing them.’” (Idem.)
24. “You know what I did? I donated money to the charity that was the terrorist fund, because under Florida law, that gave me the right to sue the charity to find out where my money was going. It was hilarious. In early March, 2002, I drafted a long lawsuit exposing Professor Sami al-Arian, naming all the crimes he’d committed, all the bombings in Israel, the fundraising in America with terrorism. I mentioned how his money got to him from the Saudis and how the Saudis had convinced our government not to prosecute him for political reasons. Because of my high-level security clearances, everything I write is sort of classified material and has to be sent back to the government before publication, for censorship. So I sent my long lawsuit complaint to the CIA, and they loved it. They said, ‘Oh, great. We don’t like the Saudis either. Go sue them.’” (Idem.)
25. “Three days later two FBI agents showed up at my door, saying, ‘You know, there are only 21 people in the U.S. government that knew some of this information, and now you’re 22. How did you find out?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you, attorney-client privilege.’ That’s why my clients pay me $1.00 each.” (Idem.)
26. “The day before I went to file the lawsuit, I got a frantic phone call from the United States Department of justice. They said, ‘John, please don’t file the lawsuit tomorrow. We really are going to raid these Saudi charities. We’re going to close them down. Just give us more time.’ ‘Oh yeah, you’re going to raid them. That’s what you told me in January—and again in February, and now it’s March. You want more time? I’ll give you until 4:00 o’clock tomorrow. I’m filing my complaint at 10:00 a.m., so that at 4p.m., I’m going to release the address of the Saudi charities.” (Idem.)
27. “Back tomorrow. I filed my lawsuit at 10:00 o’clock, and told the press I was going to hold something back for a little bit. At 10:15, the U.S. Government launched Operation Green Quest, a massive raid on all the Saudi charities in homes and businesses, and in one hour we shut down the entire Saudi money-laundering network in America.” (Ibid.; p. 23.)
28. “From March 20, 2002 to the present, the government has found more and more evidence seized in those archives on that single raid that day. The evidence was so compelling that Professor al-Arian is no longer giving his speeches. He is now in federal prison awaiting trial. His accomplice, Hammoudeh, has also been indicted. Some 32 different people have been indicted in the United States as a direct result of these efforts.” (Idem.)
29. In addition to his pivotal role in precipitating the 3/20/2002 Operation Green Quest raids, Loftus played a decisive part in developing the trillion-dollar lawsuit against the Saudis and others implicated in the funding of al Qaeda. “But not the Saudis—not the Saudis. A month after I filed my lawsuit against al-Arian, I did it: I caused some trouble. I invited some 40 of the top trial lawyers in America to come down to St. Petersburg, Florida. Boy, did I have a deal for them. I wanted them to put up millions of dollars of their own money—I’m poor, I had no money to give them—but I wanted to do something for America. These are lawyers like Ron Motley that had won billions of dollars in their lawsuits against the tobacco industry and the asbestos industry. I said, ‘What I want you to do is look at the evidence I’ve collected. It’s the same Saudi banks and charities that funded Sami al-Arian that also funded al-Qaeda.’ I said, ‘I want you to bring a class action in Federal Court in Washington on behalf of everyone who died on Sept. 11th. I’m going to work for free and collect all the evidence, introduce you to the experts, provide all the exhibits and documents . . . and we have to do this for America.’ The lawyers studied all the documents I collected, and on August 15, 2002, they filed the largest class-action lawsuit in American history in the Federal District Court in Washington D.C., asking for one trillion dollars damages against the Saudis.” (Idem.)
30. “The lawsuit said essentially that all these Saudi banks had one thing in common. They were bribing Osama bin Laden 300 million dollars a year to stay out of Saudi Arabia and go blow up someone else. Well, on 911, we found out we were someone else, and the Saudis had to pay for their negligence. So that lawsuit is coming along very well.” (Idem.)
31. Loftus’ heroic efforts have led to his having some media access on major media outlets. “And more and more people in the CIA and FBI are sort of using me as a back channel to get out information. So, believe it or not, they’ve actually given me my own TV show now on Sunday mornings on FOX TV nationwide. I’m on at 11:20 eastern standard time. And ABC Radio has given me a national radio program, but I’m on at 10:30 at night and it’s past your bedtime.” (Idem.)
32. Loftus sums up the evolutionary path of the Muslim Brotherhood from Nazi allies to the MAK to al Qaeda: “What I’ve become in my old age is a teacher. Twenty-five years ago I was a lot younger, a lot thinner, but now every day I get 500 to 1,000 e-mails from honest men and women around the world from the intelligence community. And we have to end the evil in this world. We have to recognize that al-Qaeda simply didn’t spring up on its own. The evil root was Nazism. The al-Qaeda Doctrine is the same as the Arab Nazis held. They hated Jews, they hate democracy, and they hate Westerners for Western culture. Al Qaeda is nothing more than the religious expression of Arab Fascism. We allowed this branch of the Nazi trunk to survive, to flourish, and it has come back to haunt us.”
Martin Borman, Nazi in Exile
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