The Center for American Progress and Islamist Influences over the White House

Over the last four years, the United States has suffered a series of comprehensive intelligence failures. These intelligence failures ranged from a lack of preparation for the attacks of September 11, 2012, the misguided assessment that there was a moderate group of Taliban willing to form a government and the refusal to believe that the Arab Spring would lead to Islamist takeovers, rather than liberal open societies.

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy has been one disaster after another and it has been quick to blame intelligence failures for its own mistakes. When accounting for its lies about a YouTube trailer leading to the attack on the Benghazi mission, Obama blamed the intelligence. But it turned out that the intelligence had been edited and censored for political reasons. What appeared to be an intelligence failure in Benghazi was actually political manipulation. And the same may well be true of the entire Arab Spring, of Afghanistan and the entire spectrum of attacks on September 11, 2012.

As a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was proven correct in all the areas where the Obama Administration and its political allies suffered from intelligence failures.

In September 2011, one year before the attacks, Michele Bachmann warned that the Arab Spring was a disaster that would lead to the rise of radical elements across the Middle East. Widely ridiculed for it at the time, she was demonstrating the insight and foresight that a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is supposed to have.

Where Obama was proven wrong; Bachmann was proven right. When Michele Bachmann first warned about the Muslim Brotherhood, it was an obscure organization to most people in Washington D.C. After its successful seizure of power in Egypt however, Bachmann’s critics no longer have any excuse for pretending that condemning the group’s ruthless manipulations is a conspiracy theory. Not when Egyptian liberals are among the loudest voices warning about the Muslim Brotherhood threat; not just to Egypt or the Middle East, but to America as well.

A recent article in the Egyptian magazine, Rose El-Youssef listed some of the prominent and influential Muslim Brotherhood figures with access to the policymaking apparatus of the Obama Administration. Two of those figures were in the Department of Homeland Security. This article was another piece of evidence in a mountain of evidence, much of it collected by the FBI, about the conspiratorial activities of the Brotherhood and its front groups in the United States.

It wasn’t the intelligence that failed. It was the political operation that allowed Muslim Brotherhood operatives close access to the policymaking apparatus of the United States government that led to the politicized intelligence and the policy failures. Those policy failures led to the ascendance of Al Qaeda in North Africa and the Middle East, the triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the attacks of September 11, 2012.

Nevertheless liberal organizations have launched a petition demanding that she be removed from the intelligence committee for spreading “conspiracy theories” and attacking “dedicated public servants”. After the complete implosion of Obama’s foreign policy, such attacks should be seen for what they are; an attempt to silence one of their critics who had been right all along while covering up their own lies.

To understand the source of the politicized environment that led to the foreign policy disasters, we need look no further than the Center for American Progress and its tentacle, Think Progress.

The Center for American Progress is a secretive think tank funded by covert donors which was described by Time Magazine as Obama’s idea factory and the single greatest influence on his administration. For all intents and purposes, CAP was the criminal brain in the Frankenstein of old Clinton staffers that would become the Obama Administration.

Faiz R. Shakir, the Editor of Think Progress and a Vice President at the Center for American Progress, led the charge against Bachmann. And the one issue that Shakir appeared obsessed with was Bachmann’s warnings about Muslim Brotherhood influence in the Obama Administration. One of Shakir’s videos, since taken down, had the revealing title, “In final debate, Bachmann stands by her Muslim Brotherhood smears.”

Under Shakir, the Center for American Progress attempted to silence terrorism investigators by issuing a report titled, “Fear Inc.” which claimed that all suspicions about Islamist activities in America were really the bigoted products of a Jewish conspiracy. Besides Shakir, the report’s authors included members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. During his time at Harvard, Shakir had been a member of the Harvard Islamic Society and served as the co-chair for a week of events that included an attempt to raise money for a Hamas front group.

Shakir has since gone on to bigger and better things, as a senior adviser to Nancy Pelosi, moving higher in the political echelons of a Democratic Party that has refused to accept any accountability for four years of foreign policy disasters. Accepting responsibility would require accountability. It would force the political leadership to take a close look at the Center for American Progress’ influence over the policymaking apparatus of the White House and at the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence over the White House, the State Department and the Center for American Progress.

Had the Arab Spring really led to liberalization and freedom, had the Taliban proven willing to make a deal and had the accusations of Muslim Brotherhood influence proven unfounded, then the left might have some cause for criticizing Bachmann. But when Bachmann has been proven to be correct, then a petition to remove her is nothing more than a cover up by a leftist club that is desperate to conceal its complicity in the murder of Americans and the chaos and violence spreading across the Middle East.

In the 20^th Century, Communist infiltrators used their positions to influence American foreign policy in the direction that Moscow wanted it to go, while the left did its best to shout down and ridicule any suggestion of espionage or infiltration.

Now in the 21^st Century, the century of the Islamist infiltrator, the left is still up to its old tricks, still leading America to disaster abroad while covering up its destructive activities as intelligence failures at home.