In a huge victory for President Bush and other staunch defenders of the Global War On Terror, the War On Drugs, the USA Patriot Act, the RICO Act and the new American foreign policy of waging preemptive wars against sovereign nations without good cause, the trees are finally beginning to bear their fruits…

From The New York Sun:

Senior Qaeda Theologian Urges His Followers To End Their Jihad
By ELI LAKE

WASHINGTON — One of Al Qaeda’s senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a “catastrophe for all Muslims.”

In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and for insulting the Prophet Muhammad by comparing the September 11 attacks to the early raids of the Ansar warriors. The lapsed jihadist even calls for the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and his old comrade Ayman al-Zawahri.

The disclosures from Mr. Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl and Abd al-Qadir ibn Abd al-Aziz, have already opened a rift at the highest levels of Al Qaeda. The group’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, a former associate of the defecting theologian in Egypt, personally mocked him last month in a video, remarking that he was unaware Egyptian prisons had fax machines. Meanwhile, leading Western analysts are saying the defection of Mr. Sharif indicates the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda.

The author of “Inside Al Qaeda,” Rohan Gunaratna said in an interview this week, “There is nothing more important than a former jihadist as important as Dr. Fadl criticizing the jihadist vanguard. …”

(Snip!)

“… Mr. Sharif, currently serving a life sentence in an undisclosed Egyptian prison, wrote in the 1980s two of the modern seminal texts for Sunni jihadism and in particular Al Qaeda, in “Fundamental Concepts Regarding Jihad” and “The Five Ground Rules for the Achieving of Victory or Its Absence.” Those books are scholarly justifications, citing the Koran and Hadiths, for joining a war against Muslim apostates such as the Egyptian ruling class and for a broader jihad against the far enemy of America. …”

(Snip!)

“… His latest texts are a renunciation of his earlier work, saying the military jihad or war against apostate states and America is futile. But the ex-jihadist also calls into question the virtue of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri. In some ways the manifesto reads in parts like a spicy Washington memoir by an embittered former official.

Of his old associates he writes, “Bin Laden, al-Zawahri, and others fled at the beginning of the American bombing [in Afghanistan], to the point of abandoning their wives and families to be killed along with other innocent people,” according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute. It goes on, “I think that a sharia court should be established, composed of reliable scholars, to hold these people accountable for their crimes — even if in absentia — so that those who are ignorant in their religion do not repeat this futility.” …

My apologies, dear readers. It took a lifetime but I’m now convinced: our surrendering of the civil liberties and Constitutional protections granted us by our Creator and signed in the blood of our Founding Fathers to defeat the military tactic known as “terror” was a good call after all. The strategeries of President “Surge” W. Bush and his G.O.P. cronies to install a theocratic, oligarchical Police State in America for the “greater good” and to defeat a disgusting military tactic is working, much to my surprise.

Gotta go now. I’ve hundreds of pro civil liberties and anti “gub’mint” files to delete before the Feds arrive.

***

See also (H/T to MemeOrandum): Captain’s Quarters (Right); The Daily Dish (Andrew Sullivan)

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