Saudi intelligence tried to toss election to Clinton
By Wayne Madsen Report
The General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia -- known in Arabic as Ri'asat Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Amah and the best-funded spy agency in the Middle East -- is not very large personnel-wise but that is offset by its close alliance with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. And it is through that alliance and the presence of a pro-Wahhabist "Fifth Column" within the top ranks of the CIA that Saudi Arabia sought to tip the scales in the U.S. presidential election to Hillary Clinton.
It took years for Saudi intelligence to place one of its assets in close proximity to a Democratic presidential hopeful. For years, the Saudi leadership benefited from the personal relationship between its long-serving ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and the Bush family. Bandar was so close to Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush that the nickname bestowed on him by the Bush family was "Bandar Bush."
Saudi intelligence's top asset: Huma Abedin
Although the Saudis maintained a cordial relationship with Barack Obama, owing to the fact that his Kenyan father and grandfather were Sunni Muslims, although not of the Wahhabi sect, it was Hillary Clinton the Saudis had their eyes set upon for increased influence in America. The Saudis pinned their hopes on Mrs. Clinton's close aide Huma Abedin. Although Abedin was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, she grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her parents moved when she was two years of age. Huma Abedin lived in Jeddah to the age of 18. Her father, the late Syed Zainul Abedi, graduated from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh, India. In the early 1970s, he was a leader of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Western Michigan University. Since that time, a Saudi Students Association has branched off from the MSA.
Many Aligarh graduates had and continue to have important jobs in Saudi Arabia's business, oil, and banking sectors. From Aligarh's alumni association (known as the Aligarh Old Boy's Association) chapters in Saudi Arabia, Saudi intelligence was able to select assets with close connections not only in India but also in Britain. Syed Zainul Abedin had another specialty of great need to Saudi intelligence: expertise in Iranian history, religion, and culture. Such a talent would have been of primary interest to the Wahhabist Saudi intelligence service, considering its long history of conflict with the rival Shi'a Muslims who governed Iran and the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control of the Gulf region.
Saleha Mahmood Abedin, Huma Abedin's Pakistan-born mother, continues to hold the position of dean of the Dar al-Hekma college for women in Jeddah. Ironically, Saleha Abedin has defended the Wahhabist practices of female submissiveness, marriage of underage girls to older men, marital rape, public floggings and stoning to death for adulterous women, the circumcision of prepubescent girls, and the right of Muslim women to equally fight alongside men in Muslim jihads, or "holy wars."
Saleha Abedin is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, a Saudi-supported periodical focused on the expansion of Wahhabist influence in countries where Muslims remain minorities, albeit growing ones. Huma Abedin was listed as an assistant editor for the journal from 1996 to 2008, which included her time working within the Bill Clinton White House and as a Senate assistant to Senator Hillary Clinton.
In 2002, the journal published an article, obviously approved by Huma Abedin and her Jeddah-based mother, justifying the September 11, 2001, Wahhabist terrorist attacks on the United States:
"The spiral of violence having continued unabated worldwide, and widely seen to be allowed to continue, was building up intense anger and hostility within the pressure cooker that was kept on a vigorous flame while the lid was weighted down with various kinds of injustices and sanctions. . . It was a time bomb that had to explode and explode it did on September 11, changing in its wake the life and times of the very community and the people it aimed to serve."
Saudi intelligence and CAIR
Saleha Abedin has carried the water for Saudi intelligence around the world. For example, she founded the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) in Cairo. The IICWC has been at the forefront of pushing Egypt and other secular-inclined Muslim majority countries, from Turkey to Indonesia, to adopt sharia law. Saleha Abedin has also worked closely with the Saudi-financed Muslim pressure and lobbying group in the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Among various Saudi donors to CAIR, including institutions associated with the Saudi government, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud kicked in $500,000 between 2002 and 2004. The United Arab Emirates, always cognizant of Saudi attempts to co-opt its own Wahhabist population, declared CAIR a foreign terrorist organization in 2014. The UAE move was to the chagrin of the CIA, which has acted as a close partner of CAIR under Langley's Wahhabist sympathizer, director John O. Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Riyadh.
CAIR acts as a virtual propaganda arm for Saudi intelligence from its two main offices in the United States, one on Capitol Hill, from which it lobbies the U.S. Congress, and the other at the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, from which it targets the U.S. news media and the United Nations. A third office, CAIR-Canada, is maintained in Ottawa to pressure the Canadian government on Islamic "rights." CAIR offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco can be expected to fight for California to nullify for the state any attempt by the incoming Donald Trump administration to block Muslim immigration or tourist or business visits from nations and regions experiencing Saudi-inspired jihadist rebellions, including Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Burma, Indonesia, and Iraq.
When one understands the relationship between CAIR , the marriage of Huma Abedin to former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner, makes a world of sense. Through the Abedin-Weiner marriage,foreign intelligence was able to maintain a close eye on the inner workings of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and, if Mrs. Clinton won the White House, into the Oval Office itself. Unfortunately, for the Saudis, Weiner's prurient sexual interest for underage girls, while completely understandable to the wretched human beings in the Saudi hierarchy, helped sink their chance for an ace asset in the Oval Office.
In 1996, Huma Abedin began working as an intern in the Clinton White House. It was not long before she attracted the eyes of Mrs. Clinton faster than Monica Lewinsky attracted the groping hands of Bill Clinton. While Mrs. Clinton's closest adviser at the State Department, Huma Abedin had a unique window on the most secret aspects of American diplomacy, information that would have been highly-valued by Saudi intelligence.
The CIA's functioning Saudi cell
Huma Abedin also had a fellow traveler in the CIA's Brennan, who moved from the White House National Security Council staff to lead his old agency in Langley after General David Petraeus resigned in November 2012 amid a fake sex scandal. In recent years and to the delight of Saudi intelligence, the CIA saw a number of converts to Islam move up the ranks. These included "Roger," the cover name for the CIA's director of counter-terrorism, in reality Michael A. D’Andrea, whose portfolio included the agency's drone campaigns in countries ranging from Libya and Somalia to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The converts, according to former FBI agent John Guandalo, include Brennan himself. Guandalo maintains that Brennan converted to Wahhabi Islam while he was CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s. Brennan made the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, a requirement for observant Muslims. Even the CIA-supportive "debunking" website Snopes claims that allegations that Brennan converted to Islam remain "unproven."
Another CIA convert to Islam was Andrew Warren, the agency's station chief in Algiers. He was ordered home and subsequently convicted in federal court for “abusive sexual conduct” with two Algerian women while in Algiers and the unlawful use of cocaine while possessing a firearm in Norfolk. He received a harsh 65-month prison sentence. More than likely, Warren, who spoke six Arabic dialects and Persian, was put on ice because of the knowledge he had of the Saudi influence ring in the CIA, as well as information on 9/11 while posted under commercial CIA cover at Citibank in New York on 9/11.
Muslim CIA employee Yaya Fanusie, confirmed to The Washington Post the presence of eight other Muslims at CIA headquarters between 2005 to 2012. Some of these worked inside the Counter-Terrorism Center. The Muslim working at Langley did not count Muslim agents, such as Warren, who were operating abroad. The Post reported that when some CIA employees created an image of the Islamic State black and white flag being burned, it and other similar images were banned because to desecrate the "Shahada," the Muslim creed that appears on the flag, is considered offensive to Muslims.
Foreign intelligence interference in Election 2016 was Saudi not Russian
Trump has good reason to doubt the intelligence about "Russian hacking" of the U.S. presidential election. What comes from Brennan in the way of intelligence bears the imprimatur of Saudi intelligence. The Saudis, more than any other country in the Middle East, lost out big with Trump's upset victory over Mrs. Clinton. It took years for the Saudi intelligence service to place an asset so close to a former First Lady, U.S. senator, and presidential candidate. All the Saudi investments crashed with Clinton's surprise defeat.
There was no better way for the Saudis to recoup their political losses than by having their chief asset in the CIA, Brennan, concoct intelligence about Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee emails and computer systems to taint Trump's legitimacy as president-elect. Brennan is known as a difficult, to put it nicely, adversary within the U.S. intelligence community.
There is little doubt that the FBI director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were pressured by Brennan into agreeing with the CIA's very dubious assessment that not only Russia but President Vladimir Putin were involved in hacking Democratic Party computers to throw the election to Trump. There is also little doubt that Brennan has been behind spreading malicious insider "gossip" about Trump's National Security Adviser-designate retired General Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Flynn was fired by Obama on the advice of Brennan. The Saudis, Brennan, and the Wahhabist cell inside the CIA did not care much for Flynn claiming that Obama and the CIA were nurturing and supporting the Islamic State cadres fighting in Syria and Iraq.
Obama and Brennan, two jihadist sympathizers, will soon be gone from office
Flynn as U.S. National Security Adviser represents a nightmare scenario for the Saudis and their jihadist allies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, including the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. The Saudis, through their agents and assets in the CIA, CAIR, and other organizations, want to make Trump's presidency as difficult as possible. That is why Saudi friends like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are championing a U.S. commission, on the scale of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate Russian hacking of election-oriented computer systems during the campaign. Brennan, McCain, Graham, and other Saudi fellow travelers have one simple order from their Saudi intelligence masters in Riyadh: keep the investigation of election malfeasance focused completely on Russia.
A fight between Christianity, now headquartered in Moscow, and Saudi radical Wahhabism
For the Saudis, Russia represents a threat from Christianity it has never experienced since the formation of the Saudi state. Russia has become the vanguard of protecting Christianity in the Middle East and around the world. It is Russia that has battled against the forces of jihadism in Syria, thus helping to save many Christians and moderate Muslim Alawites from Saudi-provided beheading swords. It is Russia that supports the populist parties of Western and Eastern Europe that are opposed to Saudi- and Turkish-directed Muslim refugee waves inundating Christian cities, towns, and villages. It has been Russia that has helped Iran serve as a bulwark against Saudi and Wahhabist expansion in the Gulf and in Yemen and Oman. Pope Francis talks of accommodating radical Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia while Christian Orthodox Russia rejects any concordats with the misogynists and pedophiles who rule in Riyadh.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election saw interference from a foreign intelligence agency. It was not Russia's but the General Intelligence Directorate. Don't look for the corporate media, which receives its orders from the CIA, to set the record straight any time soon.
By Wayne Madsen Report
The General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia -- known in Arabic as Ri'asat Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Amah and the best-funded spy agency in the Middle East -- is not very large personnel-wise but that is offset by its close alliance with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. And it is through that alliance and the presence of a pro-Wahhabist "Fifth Column" within the top ranks of the CIA that Saudi Arabia sought to tip the scales in the U.S. presidential election to Hillary Clinton.
It took years for Saudi intelligence to place one of its assets in close proximity to a Democratic presidential hopeful. For years, the Saudi leadership benefited from the personal relationship between its long-serving ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and the Bush family. Bandar was so close to Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush that the nickname bestowed on him by the Bush family was "Bandar Bush."
Saudi intelligence's top asset: Huma Abedin
Although the Saudis maintained a cordial relationship with Barack Obama, owing to the fact that his Kenyan father and grandfather were Sunni Muslims, although not of the Wahhabi sect, it was Hillary Clinton the Saudis had their eyes set upon for increased influence in America. The Saudis pinned their hopes on Mrs. Clinton's close aide Huma Abedin. Although Abedin was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, she grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her parents moved when she was two years of age. Huma Abedin lived in Jeddah to the age of 18. Her father, the late Syed Zainul Abedi, graduated from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in Uttar Pradesh, India. In the early 1970s, he was a leader of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at Western Michigan University. Since that time, a Saudi Students Association has branched off from the MSA.
Many Aligarh graduates had and continue to have important jobs in Saudi Arabia's business, oil, and banking sectors. From Aligarh's alumni association (known as the Aligarh Old Boy's Association) chapters in Saudi Arabia, Saudi intelligence was able to select assets with close connections not only in India but also in Britain. Syed Zainul Abedin had another specialty of great need to Saudi intelligence: expertise in Iranian history, religion, and culture. Such a talent would have been of primary interest to the Wahhabist Saudi intelligence service, considering its long history of conflict with the rival Shi'a Muslims who governed Iran and the competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control of the Gulf region.
Saleha Mahmood Abedin, Huma Abedin's Pakistan-born mother, continues to hold the position of dean of the Dar al-Hekma college for women in Jeddah. Ironically, Saleha Abedin has defended the Wahhabist practices of female submissiveness, marriage of underage girls to older men, marital rape, public floggings and stoning to death for adulterous women, the circumcision of prepubescent girls, and the right of Muslim women to equally fight alongside men in Muslim jihads, or "holy wars."
Saleha Abedin is also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, a Saudi-supported periodical focused on the expansion of Wahhabist influence in countries where Muslims remain minorities, albeit growing ones. Huma Abedin was listed as an assistant editor for the journal from 1996 to 2008, which included her time working within the Bill Clinton White House and as a Senate assistant to Senator Hillary Clinton.
In 2002, the journal published an article, obviously approved by Huma Abedin and her Jeddah-based mother, justifying the September 11, 2001, Wahhabist terrorist attacks on the United States:
"The spiral of violence having continued unabated worldwide, and widely seen to be allowed to continue, was building up intense anger and hostility within the pressure cooker that was kept on a vigorous flame while the lid was weighted down with various kinds of injustices and sanctions. . . It was a time bomb that had to explode and explode it did on September 11, changing in its wake the life and times of the very community and the people it aimed to serve."
Saudi intelligence and CAIR
Saleha Abedin has carried the water for Saudi intelligence around the world. For example, she founded the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) in Cairo. The IICWC has been at the forefront of pushing Egypt and other secular-inclined Muslim majority countries, from Turkey to Indonesia, to adopt sharia law. Saleha Abedin has also worked closely with the Saudi-financed Muslim pressure and lobbying group in the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Among various Saudi donors to CAIR, including institutions associated with the Saudi government, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud kicked in $500,000 between 2002 and 2004. The United Arab Emirates, always cognizant of Saudi attempts to co-opt its own Wahhabist population, declared CAIR a foreign terrorist organization in 2014. The UAE move was to the chagrin of the CIA, which has acted as a close partner of CAIR under Langley's Wahhabist sympathizer, director John O. Brennan, a former CIA station chief in Riyadh.
CAIR acts as a virtual propaganda arm for Saudi intelligence from its two main offices in the United States, one on Capitol Hill, from which it lobbies the U.S. Congress, and the other at the Interchurch Center on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, from which it targets the U.S. news media and the United Nations. A third office, CAIR-Canada, is maintained in Ottawa to pressure the Canadian government on Islamic "rights." CAIR offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Francisco can be expected to fight for California to nullify for the state any attempt by the incoming Donald Trump administration to block Muslim immigration or tourist or business visits from nations and regions experiencing Saudi-inspired jihadist rebellions, including Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Burma, Indonesia, and Iraq.
When one understands the relationship between CAIR , the marriage of Huma Abedin to former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner, makes a world of sense. Through the Abedin-Weiner marriage,foreign intelligence was able to maintain a close eye on the inner workings of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and, if Mrs. Clinton won the White House, into the Oval Office itself. Unfortunately, for the Saudis, Weiner's prurient sexual interest for underage girls, while completely understandable to the wretched human beings in the Saudi hierarchy, helped sink their chance for an ace asset in the Oval Office.
In 1996, Huma Abedin began working as an intern in the Clinton White House. It was not long before she attracted the eyes of Mrs. Clinton faster than Monica Lewinsky attracted the groping hands of Bill Clinton. While Mrs. Clinton's closest adviser at the State Department, Huma Abedin had a unique window on the most secret aspects of American diplomacy, information that would have been highly-valued by Saudi intelligence.
The CIA's functioning Saudi cell
Huma Abedin also had a fellow traveler in the CIA's Brennan, who moved from the White House National Security Council staff to lead his old agency in Langley after General David Petraeus resigned in November 2012 amid a fake sex scandal. In recent years and to the delight of Saudi intelligence, the CIA saw a number of converts to Islam move up the ranks. These included "Roger," the cover name for the CIA's director of counter-terrorism, in reality Michael A. D’Andrea, whose portfolio included the agency's drone campaigns in countries ranging from Libya and Somalia to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The converts, according to former FBI agent John Guandalo, include Brennan himself. Guandalo maintains that Brennan converted to Wahhabi Islam while he was CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s. Brennan made the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, a requirement for observant Muslims. Even the CIA-supportive "debunking" website Snopes claims that allegations that Brennan converted to Islam remain "unproven."
Another CIA convert to Islam was Andrew Warren, the agency's station chief in Algiers. He was ordered home and subsequently convicted in federal court for “abusive sexual conduct” with two Algerian women while in Algiers and the unlawful use of cocaine while possessing a firearm in Norfolk. He received a harsh 65-month prison sentence. More than likely, Warren, who spoke six Arabic dialects and Persian, was put on ice because of the knowledge he had of the Saudi influence ring in the CIA, as well as information on 9/11 while posted under commercial CIA cover at Citibank in New York on 9/11.
Muslim CIA employee Yaya Fanusie, confirmed to The Washington Post the presence of eight other Muslims at CIA headquarters between 2005 to 2012. Some of these worked inside the Counter-Terrorism Center. The Muslim working at Langley did not count Muslim agents, such as Warren, who were operating abroad. The Post reported that when some CIA employees created an image of the Islamic State black and white flag being burned, it and other similar images were banned because to desecrate the "Shahada," the Muslim creed that appears on the flag, is considered offensive to Muslims.
Foreign intelligence interference in Election 2016 was Saudi not Russian
Trump has good reason to doubt the intelligence about "Russian hacking" of the U.S. presidential election. What comes from Brennan in the way of intelligence bears the imprimatur of Saudi intelligence. The Saudis, more than any other country in the Middle East, lost out big with Trump's upset victory over Mrs. Clinton. It took years for the Saudi intelligence service to place an asset so close to a former First Lady, U.S. senator, and presidential candidate. All the Saudi investments crashed with Clinton's surprise defeat.
There was no better way for the Saudis to recoup their political losses than by having their chief asset in the CIA, Brennan, concoct intelligence about Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee emails and computer systems to taint Trump's legitimacy as president-elect. Brennan is known as a difficult, to put it nicely, adversary within the U.S. intelligence community.
There is little doubt that the FBI director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were pressured by Brennan into agreeing with the CIA's very dubious assessment that not only Russia but President Vladimir Putin were involved in hacking Democratic Party computers to throw the election to Trump. There is also little doubt that Brennan has been behind spreading malicious insider "gossip" about Trump's National Security Adviser-designate retired General Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Flynn was fired by Obama on the advice of Brennan. The Saudis, Brennan, and the Wahhabist cell inside the CIA did not care much for Flynn claiming that Obama and the CIA were nurturing and supporting the Islamic State cadres fighting in Syria and Iraq.
Obama and Brennan, two jihadist sympathizers, will soon be gone from office
Flynn as U.S. National Security Adviser represents a nightmare scenario for the Saudis and their jihadist allies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, including the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. The Saudis, through their agents and assets in the CIA, CAIR, and other organizations, want to make Trump's presidency as difficult as possible. That is why Saudi friends like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are championing a U.S. commission, on the scale of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate Russian hacking of election-oriented computer systems during the campaign. Brennan, McCain, Graham, and other Saudi fellow travelers have one simple order from their Saudi intelligence masters in Riyadh: keep the investigation of election malfeasance focused completely on Russia.
A fight between Christianity, now headquartered in Moscow, and Saudi radical Wahhabism
For the Saudis, Russia represents a threat from Christianity it has never experienced since the formation of the Saudi state. Russia has become the vanguard of protecting Christianity in the Middle East and around the world. It is Russia that has battled against the forces of jihadism in Syria, thus helping to save many Christians and moderate Muslim Alawites from Saudi-provided beheading swords. It is Russia that supports the populist parties of Western and Eastern Europe that are opposed to Saudi- and Turkish-directed Muslim refugee waves inundating Christian cities, towns, and villages. It has been Russia that has helped Iran serve as a bulwark against Saudi and Wahhabist expansion in the Gulf and in Yemen and Oman. Pope Francis talks of accommodating radical Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia while Christian Orthodox Russia rejects any concordats with the misogynists and pedophiles who rule in Riyadh.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election saw interference from a foreign intelligence agency. It was not Russia's but the General Intelligence Directorate. Don't look for the corporate media, which receives its orders from the CIA, to set the record straight any time soon.