Top US Intel Think-tank, CFR Says Obama Should Pal Al-Qaeda Affiliate Who Planned 911, To Hurt Iran And Syria - NewsRescue.com

Image: Ahrar al-Sham (Wikimedia Commons).

Elite think tank wants alliance with faction whose leader helped plan 9/11

Paul Joseph Watson
January 27, 2014

The Council on Foreign Relations, a highly influential Washington DC think tank, has called on the Obama administration to ‘befriend’ a terrorist group in Syria which has pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and whose leader helped plan the 9/11 attacks.

In an article entitled, The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham: An al Qaeda–Linked Group Worth Befriending, the CFR’s Michael Doran, William McCants, and Clint Watts argue that supporting the terrorist faction would help the United States “contain Iran and Syria” as part of Obama’s “larger strategy.”

The authors even admit that the leader of Ahrar al-Sham, Abu Khalid al-Suri, recently “published a statement praising bin Laden and al Qaeda’s current chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri,” underscoring the fact that, “Al Qaeda and Ahrar al-Sham are joined at the hip.”

According to reports, al-Suri, real name Mohamed Bahaiah, is a “longtime al Qaeda operative who worked as a courier for the terror network,” is al-Zawahiri’s representative in the Levant, and even “delivered surveillance tapes of the World Trade Center and other American landmarks to al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Afghanistan in early 1998.”

According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Other al Qaeda operatives hold key positions” with Ahrar al-Sham.

So essentially, the CFR, which is basically a front for the State Department, is now calling on the Obama administration to make an alliance with an Al-Qaeda group whose leader helped plan the 9/11 attacks – all in the name of destabilizing Iran and Syria.

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The article goes on to claim that Obama can justify supporting Ahrar al-Sham because, “not all terrorist organizations pose an equal threat to the United States and its allies,” despite the fact that the group is allied with terrorists who share the same vision of Sharia law across the region while they ransack Christian churches, burn US flags, chant anti-American slogans and sing the praises of Osama Bin Laden while glorifying the 9/11 attacks.

Ahrar al-Sham is currently fighting alongside the Free Syrian Army, which has been backed to the tune of billions of dollars from the U.S. and the UK and is currently being represented as part of the “opposition” camp at the Geneva II peace talks.

This is not the first time the CFR has praised Al-Qaeda and called on the U.S. to get behind the terror group in Syria. As we reported in August 2012, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Ed Husain hailed the presence of Al-Qaeda fighters in Syria at a time when the media was still treating their existence as a conspiracy theory. Husain even lauded the “deadly results” that Al-Qaeda militants had been able to achieve in the form of terrorist bombings.

The Council on Foreign Relations is considered to be America’s “most influential foreign-policy think tank” and has deep connections with the U.S. State Department. In 2009, Hillary Clinton welcomed the fact that the CFR had set up an outpost down the street from the State Department in Washington DC, because it meant “I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing.”

One would hope the State Department would not be sympathetic to making alliances with Al-Qaeda terrorists, although their VIP treatment of Al-Qaeda-linked Muslim Brotherhood members which recently came to light will do little to prove otherwise.

As we also recently highlighted, the United States and NATO powers have routinely supported or turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda’s activities for decades as part of a larger geopolitical strategy centered around using the terrorist groups to destabilize countries to grease the skids for regime change.

Watch a video clip below which shows the very Ahrar al-Sham terrorists that the CFR wants Obama to ‘befriend’.