DHS Takes Seriously Claim Militias May Collaborate with al-Qaeda on Bio Attack

According to The Washington Times, U.S. counterterrorism officials have “authenticated” a video by a supposed al-Qaeda recruiter who claims he has the ability to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border. In the video, Abdullah al-Nafisi also suggests that al-Qaeda might want to collaborate with “members of native U.S. white supremacist militias who hate the federal government.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” document conflates “white supremacists” with the militia movement, advocates of the Second Amendment, activists opposed to illegal immigration, and other loosely defined “antigovernment” groups. The Strategic Analysis Group, Homeland Environment and

Threat Analysis Division of the DHS created the document during the Bush administration and it was revived by the incoming the Obama administration. Veterans in particular took exception to the report because it claims “returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups.”

The Abdullah al-Nafisi “recruitment” video first surfaced on the Arabic news network Al Jazeera in February and was later posted on several web sites. It was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the notorious disinformation outfit linked to Israeli intelligence. Mossad and the IDF are infamous for planting stories in the media and engaging in psychological warfare.

MEMRI concentrates primarily on discrediting Palestinian and Arab nationalists and was co-founded by the neocon Meyrav Wurmser (married to David Wurmser, Cheney’s Principal Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs) and Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence. “Besides Carmon, several MEMRI staffers are former Israeli intelligence specialists. Especially troubling are suspected links between MEMRI and the current Israeli intelligence establishment,” Lawrence Swaim of InFocus wrote in 2007.

“MEMRI is a main arm of Israeli propaganda,” explains professor Norman G. Finkelstein, a well-known scholar on Israel and Palestine. It is “a Mossad operation pretending to be a media translation service.” Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA case officer, says “they (MEMRI) are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud.”

The group receives funding from the usual neocon suspects, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Randolph Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation. In addition to the MEMRI propaganda effort, these foundations also fund the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and importantly the Council on Foreign Relations. MEMRI has threatened to use “SLAPP” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) against critics, most notably the journalist Juan Cole.

Sean Smith, a spokesman for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said the U.S. takes the Abdullah al-Nafisi “recruitment” video seriously. “We can never stop being vigilant while there are individuals who seek to do harm on the American people,” he said.

“In the US, there are more than 300,000 white militia members, who are calling to attack the federal government in Washington, and to banish the Arabs, the Jews, and the negroes [sic] from the US. These are racist people. They are called ‘rednecks.’ The Ku Klux Klan. They are racists,” al-Nafisi declares in a MEMRI translation. “These militias even think about bombing nuclear plants within the US. May Allah grant them success, even though we are not white, or even close to it, right? They have plans to bomb the nuclear plant at Lake Michigan. This plant is very important. It supplies electricity to all of North Africa [sic]. May Allah grant success to one of these militia leaders, who is thinking about bombing this plant. I believe that we should devote part of our prayers to him. We should pray that Allah grants him success, so he can complete this mission, and we will be able to visit him and congratulate him, Allah willing.”

Abdallah al-Nafisi’s ludicrous assertion that militia members plan to bomb U.S. nuclear plants echoes the DHS claim that the militias are dangerous and recruiting returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to engage in “antigovernment” violence by playing on “several emergent issues,” including a racist hatred of “the first African American president” and a faltering economy.

A Google search of al-Nafisi’s claim that “white supremacists” allegedly aligned with the militia movement plan to blow up U.S. nuclear plants does not return any results.

The Arab newspaper Al-Ahram has connected al-Nafisi to the Muslim Brotherhood. The “Muslim Brotherhood was created, infiltrated, or at least promoted by British Intelligence,” writes Peter D. Goodgame (The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order). In addition, the CIA funded the Muslim Brotherhood as a wedge against Arab nationalism, specifically against Gamal Abddul Nasser’s nationalist policies in Egypt (see Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam).

It is now a well-documented fact that al-Qaeda is a western intelligence operation. For a detailed explanation on how the CIA, in collaboration with Pakistan’s ISI, created the al-Qaeda myth, see Norm Dixon’s How the CIA created Osama bin Laden. The current president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, told NBC’s David Gregory last month that Osama bin Laden was an “operator” for the United States. Zardari’s claim was all but ignored by the corporate media.

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida,” said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. “And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US.”

In January of 2008, the al-Qaeda myth expanded to include the cooked up specter of a “white al-Qaeda.” According to the Scotsman, al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen have converted white non-Muslims. “The trend is well established in the United States. American-born Adam Gadahn is one of the FBI’s top 10 most-wanted terrorists after converting to Islam and rising through al-Qaeda’s ranks to become a prominent spokesman.” Fox News amplified this phony threat. “If they can recruit a Scandinavian, that’s the holy grail for them.” Mike Baker, a former CIA agent and professional counter-terrorism expert, told Fox. “They need people who can move around freely and do their bidding.”

Now we are told al-Qaeda may collaborate with “white supremacists” and unleash an anthrax attack on the White House lawn. It remains to be seen if the lunatic ravings of Abdullah al-Nafisi — a probable intelligence asset — will be incorporated in the emerging DHS fairy tale designed to discredit and criminalize legitimate activism in the United States.

Fox has launched a propaganda campaign on the phony threat (see video above). Glenn Beck says he has talked about the “threat” supposedly posed by “white supremacist militias” for some time. In late 2007, Beck and guest David Horowitz — a virulent Muslim hater and Zionist shill — characterized “Ron Paul supporters, libertarians and the anti-war left as terrorist sympathizers and inferred that the U.S. military should be used to silence them, parroting a talking point that traces back to a September 2006 White House directive,” according to Paul Joseph Watson. “I think it’s very significant he (Ron Paul) chose Guy Fawkes as an image,” said Horowitz. Ron Paul never made the comparison.

If the comments of DHS spokesman Sean Smith are to be taken at face value, the government is already in the process of rolling MEMRI’s blatant propaganda into the effort to characterize activism as a dire threat to the homeland.