With friends like this

Just because someone appears to take up your side of a cause doesn't make him credible, reliable or worth paying attention to. It may be tempting, especially if he presents impressive credentials and lobbies with vigor and enthusiasm for an agenda near and dear to your heart. But in the end there will always be those individuals who do more damage than good because, well, perhaps they're just plain nuts.

One such individual is John Loftus. This is a man whose extreme and distorted right-wing views carry him within snuggling distance of the uber-Left -- a sort of mirror image of Lyndon Larouche. Yesterday, a pro-Israel blogger posted his recollections of remarks Loftus made at a gathering somewhere or other and pronounced him "one of the most knowledgeable intelligence people in the world." "What he had to say," this blogger wrote, "will astound you."

Well, it no doubt would. I've never read anything written by John Loftus that didn't astound me. But for all the wrong reasons. Here are a few samples.

What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11:

A captured Al Qaida document reveals that US energy companies were secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline. The document was obtained by the FBI but was not allowed to be shared with other agencies in order to protect Enron. Multiple sources confirm that American law enforcement agencies were deliberately kept in the dark and systematically prevented from connecting the dots before 9/11 in order to aid Enron’s secret and immoral Taliban negotiations.

Or how about this interview on Australian radio:

Well see, some of our American bankers wanted to get a foothold in Arabian oil and the British were keeping us out, so they hired a group of private thugs. They hired the Saudi tribe which were Wahibbi extremists, and we gave them guns and put them in power, and the first thing they did was to sign an oil contract with Aramco, the Arab American Oil Company. So we actually back in the 1920s, funded this extremist group and brought them to power, and the leader of the Wahabbi sect, Ibn Saud, named the kingdom after himself. That’s how Saudi Arabia was born.

Then there's How the Bush family made its fortune from the Nazis* (see extended entry)

No wonder Allen Dulles had sent Paul Manning on a wild goose chase to South America. He was very close to uncovering the fact that the Bush's bank in New York City was secretly owned by the Nazis, before during and after WWII. Once Thyssen ownership of the Union Banking Corporation is proven, it makes out a prima facie case of treason against the Dulles and Bush families for giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.

[ . . . ]

The bottom line is harsh: It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920's, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush's bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen's coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family's complicity.

For a more sober discussion of the Bush/Thyssen/Nazi connection (yes, there was one), try this.

Finally, on one of my favorite topics, The Truth About Jonathan Pollard.

Pollard in fact did steal something that the U.S. government never wishes to talk about. Several friends inside military intelligence have told me that Pollard gave the Israelis a roster that listed the identities of all the Saudi and other Arab intelligence agents we knew about as of 1984. (This has been corroborated by Israeli sources, as well.) At that time, this list, known in intelligence circles as the "blue book," would have been relatively unimportant to the United States—but not to Israel.

Since 9/11, however, Pollard’s "blue book" is of profound interest to everyone, including the U.S. These particular agents are now a major embarrassment to the Saudis and to the handful of American spy chiefs who had employed these Saudi intelligence agents on the sly. Some of the names on this list—such as Osama Bin Laden—turned out to be leaders of terrorist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood and what we now call Al Qaeda.

In hindsight, we now know that Pollard stole the one book—that, incidentally, was alluded to in Weinberger’s secret memorandum—that unquestionably proves that the Americans knew as early as 1984 about the connection between the Saudis and terrorist groups.

Moreover, as Pollard's website admiringly notes, Loftus contends that Israel did, in fact, deliberately bomb the USS Liberty in 1967 -- but only because the United States was actively engaging in "hostile espionage" to aid the Arabs in their attempt to destroy the Jewish State. Yes, that's what he claims.

Also instructive is this list at Amazon.com:

Customers who bought titles by John Loftus also bought titles by these authors:

Antony C. Sutton
Barry Chamish (* see extended entry)
Greg Palast
Russell S. Bowen
Pete Brewton

Now if you click on those links, you'll discover an assortment of some of the most wacked-out conspiracy theories you can find this side of the Internet. That's the world of John Loftus.

And so a word of caution. If you're a supporter of Israel, or a citizen genuinely concerned about the threat of terrorism, or a person who's sincerely disturbed by the obvious reluctance of our State Department and, indeed, our Executive Branch under any President of record, to confront the Saudis head-on, don't rely on the likes of John Loftus for help or guidance. Whatever his true intentions may be, he's probably not on your side, after all.

Shabbat Shalom.