Yes, those Muslim Brotherhood guys are a just a bunch of non-violent, secular community organizers - at least according to James Clapper,Obama's Director of National Intelligence:
Here's his full statement:
"The term 'Muslim Brotherhood'...is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam," Clapper said. "They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera.....In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally."
With those kind of views, at least we can see why President Obama gave him the job.
Needless to say, he attempted to walk back his statements afterwards.
(via memeorandum)
If he really believes this, as I suspect he does, then obviously we can't formulate a strategy to confornt this entity as an enemy because we don't recognize this as an enemy!! I would agree with him that this is a very "heterogeneous" group, however, a unifying theme among them is their hatred of America.
ReplyDeleteThe media jumped on this speech by Mr. Clapper like a dog jumps on a juicy piece of meat. Why should we trust US intellegence? Didn't tehy get Iraqi wmd wrong. Even if we buy into the notion that "Bush lied" then this means the CIA and other US intellegence agencies allowed themselves to be politicized. If so, are they being politicized now? How can we be sure? In other words, only a partsian hack would rely on ANYTHING coming from these people.
ReplyDeleteIt appears the CIA was taken by surprise by Mr. Mubarak's refusal to resign. How can this be? The whole fiasco bolsters what I've been saying for years. The CIA and US intellegence agencies are completely and wholly incompetent.
My advice to Congress and the White House would be to completely disband the CIA and other intellegence services and start over from scratch. Tbhere are other nations who can help us construct a competent intellegence service. While we're doing this, we will have to primarily rely on other nations for our intellegence. Unfortunately with the Wikileask fiasco this is going to be harder to do than it would have been without this situation. Will othe rnations trust us with valuable information?
With the right approach I think they might. Part of our training will have to be in how to secure classified information. As I said, start from scratch with new intellegence services.
At least BamBam didn't appoint Van Jones to this post!
ReplyDelete