Obama’s PSD-11 and the Muslim Brotherhood
In 2010 the US Administration under President Barack Obama had developed a top secret blueprint for the most ambitious and far-ranging series of US-backed regime change across the Islamic Middle East since World War I and the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement. It was to set off a wave of wars and chaos, of failed states and floods of war refugees unimaginable to the most cynical veteran diplomat, and beyond the belief of most lay persons in the world.
In August, 2010, six months before Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution was launched by the Washington NGOs including the NED, the Soros Foundations, Freedom House and others, President Obama signed Presidential Study Directive-11 (PDS-11), ordering Washington government agencies to prepare for “change.” The change was to be a radical policy calling for Washington’s backing for the secret fundamentalist Islamic Muslim Brotherhood sect across the Middle East Muslim world, and with it, the unleashing of a reign of terror that would change the entire world.
According to US Congressional testimony of Peter Hoekstra, former Chairman of the US House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Obama Administration PSD-11 directive–as of March 2017 still classified Top Secret–“ordered a government-wide reassessment of prospects for political reform in the Middle East and of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in the process. ” [1]
A Grandiose Task Force
To draft the contents of PSD-11, a top secret task force was established within the Obama National Security Council (NSC), headed by Dennis Ross, Samantha Power, Gayle Smith, Ben Rhodes and Michael McFaul. [2]
The PSD-11 Task Force members were remarkable in many regards. Samantha Power, who would go on to become Obama’s UN Ambassador and lead the demonizing of Russia after the CIA’s Ukraine Color Revolution coup in 2014, was to play an instrumental role in convincing President Obama that Libya’s Mohammar Qaddafi must be militarily removed for what she called “humanitarian reasons.” [3] Dennis Ross, accused by Palestinian opponents of being “more pro-Israeli than the Israelis,” co-founded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-sponsored Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). He was Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director at the NSC for the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia when he was part of the PSD-11 task force. [4]
Gayle Smith would later go on in 2015 to head the USAID, the CIA-linked State Department agency that funneled US taxpayer millions to finance the NGOs of the Arab Spring and other Color Revolution regime changes.[5] Michael McFaul, who once described himself as a “specialist on democracy, anti-dictator movements, revolutions,” was later named Obama’s Ambassador to Moscow where he coordinated opposition protests against Putin. [6]
Perhaps the most influential of the PSD-11 Task Force members who formulated the top secret Obama Administration radical policy change to back Muslim Brotherhood regime transitions through the Arab Spring, was the one least qualified to make United States Government policy on the Middle East in terms of professional background. His name was Ben Rhodes.
Rhodes’ official title was invented by the Obama White House just for him–Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. He would write all major Obama foreign policy speeches for seven years, until January, 2017 when Obama left office. He was a mere 32 years old when he joined the fateful PSD-11 NSC Task Force, with academic study that had included a major in English literature and a Masters degree in “creative writing-” Rhodes had no prior diplomatic nor academic experience with the Middle East. Rhodes, who as speechwriter met with President Obama sometimes up to three hours daily, was instrumental among other things in convincing Obama to withdraw support from Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, becoming a key adviser during the 2011 Arab Spring, and then joining with Samantha Power, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, convincing the President to use military force to topple Libya’s Qaddafi.[7]
The Top Secret PSD-11 report that the Task Force drew up was partially revealed in a series of legal Freedom of Information Act requests to the State Department. Released official documents revealed that the NSC Task Force had concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood was a “viable movement” for the US Government to support throughout North Africa and the Middle East. A resulting Presidential directive ordered American diplomats to make contacts with top Muslim Brotherhood leaders and gave active support to the organization’s drive for power in key nations like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Syria, at the 2011 outset of the “Arab Spring.” The PDS-11 secret paper came to the bizarre conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of political Islam, combined with its fervent nationalism, could lead to “reform and stability.” It was a lie, a lie well known to the Obama PSD-11 Task Force members. [8]
The True Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood or Ikhwan–Arabic for The Brotherhood–is a secret masonic-like organization with a covert or underground terrorist arm and a public facade of “peaceful doing of charity.” It was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna who developed the cult’s guiding motto. The credo of his Society of Muslim Brothers was incorporated into a chant of six short phrases:
Allah is our goal; The Prophet is our Leader; The Qur’an is our Constitution; Jihad is our Way; Death in the service of Allah is the loftiest of our wishes; Allah is Great, Allah is Great. [9]
Al-Banna created a secret or hidden arm of the Ikhwan in Egypt and later worldwide, known as the Special Section (al-nizam al-khass), or, as it was referred to by the British in Egypt, the Secret Apparatus (al-jihaz al-sirri). That was the military wing of the Brotherhood, in effect, the “assassination bureau.” Al-Banna taught his recruits, exclusively male, that “Jihad is an obligation of every Muslim.” He preached the nobility of “Death in the Service of Allah,” and wrote, Allah grants a “noble life to that nation which knows how to die a noble death.” He preached a death cult in which “Victory can only come with the mastery of the ‘Art of Death.’” For the Brotherhood that “mastery” was perfected in the killing of “infidels” in Jihad or Holy War in the name of Allah. The infidels could be other Muslims such as Shi’ite or Sufi who did not follow Al-Banna’s strict Sunni practice, or Christians. [10]
Hasan Al-Banna called for adoption of the very strict Islamic Shari’a law, the complete segregation of male and female students, with a separate curriculum for girls, a prohibition of dancing, and a call for Islamic states to eventually unify in a Caliphate. [11]
During World War II, leading Muslim Brotherhood figures spent exile from British-controlled Egypt by fleeing to Berlin where, among others, Al Banna’s close Muslim brotherhood ally, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, worked intimately with the SS and Heinrich Himmler to create special Muslim Brotherhood terror units of the SS, so-called Handschar SS, to kill Soviet soldiers and Jews. In the 1950’s the CIA discovered the Nazi Muslim Brotherhood recruits in exile in postwar Munich and decided they could be “useful.” [12]
Virtually every major Jihadist terrorist organization and leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. Osama bin Laden, who worked for the CIA in Pakistan recruiting Jihadist Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, was a Muslim Brotherhood member who was recruited by the CIA and Saudi Intelligence head Prince Turki al-Faisal, to create what came to be called Al Qaeda. Other known terrorist members of the Ikhwan were Al Qaeda’s Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and the blind Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman who recently died in a US prison serving time for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Sheikh Omar was accused of conspiring to assassinate Egypt’s Mubarak and masterminding the Muslim Brotherhood assassination of Anwar Sadat in addition to the bombing of the World Trade Center. [13]
The members of the Obama Administration National Security Council PSD-11 Task Force that recommended a US Government embrace of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood in Islamic countries of the Arab Middle East, knew very well who they were dealing with. Since the 1950’s the CIA had worked with the Ikhwan around the world. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda in Iraq and in Syria, al Nusra Front in Syria, as well as the so-called Islamic State or ISIS all were created out of Muslim Brotherhood networks, changing names as a chameleon lizard changes color to suit its surroundings.
The seeds of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and later of ISIS or IS, the murderous wars and chaos sweeping across the Arab Middle East and into Western Europe since 2010, could all be directly traced back to those Washington policies, their so-called Arab Spring, coming from that August 2010 PSD-11 Presidential Task Force directive. Now the Obama Administration was to apply their Muslim Brotherhood project in Tunisia in a Color Revolution led by its fake democracy NGO’s.
[1] Peter Hoekstra, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, HOUSE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY, September 22, 2016, http://docs.house.gov/meetings/HM/HM09/20160922/105384/HHRG-114-HM09-Wstate-HoekstraP-20160922.pdf.
[2] MEB, The Case of Egypt (2): Six Months of Insider Emails from Obama Administration Show Groundwork for Muslim Brotherhood Power Grabs, Middle East Briefing, June 30, 2014, http://mebriefing.com/?p=84
[3] Wikipedia, Samantha Power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Power
[4] Wikipedia, Dennis Ross, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ross
[5] Wikipedia, Gayle Smith, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayle_Smith
[6] Wikipedia, Michael McFaul, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_McFaul
[7] Wikipedia, Ben Rhodes,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rhodes_(White_House_staffer); Mark Landler,Worldly at 35, and Shaping Obama’s Voice, The New York Times, March 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/world/middleeast/benjamin-rhodes-obamas-voice-helps-shape-policy.html.
[8] MEB, The Case of Egypt (2)…, op. cit.
[9] F. William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon, mineBooks, Wiesbaden, 2016, pp. 67-71.
[10] Richard P. Miller, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Oxford University Press, New York, 1969, p. 206-207.
[11] Wikipedia, Muslim Brotherhood, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood#cite_note-Women-38
[12] F. William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon…, op. cit., pp. 75-85.
[13] Leo Hohmann, Georgetown prof.: ‘Muslim Brotherhood does not exist in US,’ March 5, 2017, http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/georgetown-prof-muslim-brotherhood-does-not-exist-in-u-s/
This originally appeared on F. William Engdahl Newsletter.
Copyright © F. William Engdahl