We have a lot of speakers, so I’ll keep this short. The first thing we need to remember today — Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday — is that in 1999 a jury verdict found that the governments of Memphis, of Tennessee, and of the US conspired to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King. They used the Carlos Marcello Mafia family to do the dirty work, but Military Intelligence also had a sniper team there for backup. What they call “organized crime” is actually one of their assets, and so are terrorists. I’m going to speak today about Ali Mohammed (“the American”), the best example we know about of our government’s Islamic terrorist foreign policy assets.

Mohammed, born in Egypt, comes out of a long history of US diddling in Middle Eastern politics. After the Second World War, our government released hundreds of Nazi war criminals and used them to infiltrate other governments around the world. They used some of these recycled Nazis to set up security for Egypt’s President Nasser. But Nasser wasn’t co-operative enough, so our government started backing the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist Islamic group opposing him.

Over the decades US clients and allies in the Middle East built up a secret military strike force (called the “Safari Club”) that enforced a “favorable business climate” throughout Africa. Roughly the same elements spawned the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, then the Taliban and al-Qaeda. They brainwashed their troops with an ultraconservative branch of Islam allied with the Saudi royal family, with the CIA printing the textbooks for the “schools.”

Mohammed, a captain in the Egyptian Army, belonged to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and in 1984 the Army expelled him as a religious extremist. He approached the CIA offering to spy for them, but the CIA says it rejected him and placed him on the terrorist watch list. The next year he was at Ft. Bragg, N. Carolina in the US Army; he stayed there three years, rising to the rank of sergeant, and taught Islamic culture to Special Forces troops. But he also taught radical Arabs in the US how to shoot and use hand grenades, and gave them stolen Army manuals. Two of his students went on to work for Ramzi Yousef on the 1993 WTC bombing. The Army gave Mohammed an honorable discharge, and he stayed on in the reserves. In 1993 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police picked him up as he was escorting a known al Qaeda terrorist, but released him after talking to the FBI.

At various times during his US Army career, Mohammed went to Afghanistan and trained Mujaheddin to fight the Soviets and trained Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards. His Army superiors told their superiors that he had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Mujaheddin, but nobody did anything about it. Later on he became an FBI informant and traveled to Kenya to take pictures of the US Embassy so that Osama bin Laden could point out where to place the bomb that killed over 250 people in 1998. After that attack, the FBI arrested Mohammed; in 2000 he pleaded guilty to training some of the bombers, but the US released him in July 2005. Neither he, his lawyer, nor the government is talking about his case.

Publicly, our government calls people like Ali Mohammed “terrorists,” but really they’re assets – troublesome perhaps, to be disposed of perhaps — but not to be allowed to talk. What our government secretly means by “terrorists” is people like us: people who believe in real democracy, who believe in real justice, who believe in sustainability — Green Party values. The “War On Terror” is a war on us. So as a founding member of the Northern california 9-11 truth Alliance, I’m proud to support Carol in her bid for Congress.

Return to- January 15, 2006