Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi by Kenneth R. Timmerman

clearer than Hillary Clinton’s description of administration policy.
    When asked about the Muslim Brotherhood at a House Intelligence Committee hearing as the Brotherhood was poised to take over Egypt, Director of National Intelligence Lieutenant General James Clapper called it “largely secular.” Clapper was just repeating what he was being fed by U.S. government intelligence analysts, who had been steeped in the politically correct doctrines of the Obama administration. To NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, who had worked in the Middle East for many years and seen how the Brotherhood operates, Clapper’s comment showed a “wild misreading of this organization.” 4
    THE AGENCY ANALYST
    One of those intelligence analysts, Quintan Wiktorowicz, was hired by the White House in January 2011 to implement the president’s outreach policies toward the Muslim world. It is no coincidence that he took up his new position right at the start of the Arab Spring. He lent an academic patina to the White House policy of shunning moderates and empowering Muslim supremacists from Dearborn, Michigan, to Benghazi. Obama instinctively knew that he preferred Muslim Brotherhood spiritual guide Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to Google executive Wael Ghonim. Quintan Wiktorowicz explained why he was right.
    Wiktorowicz had just returned from two years at the U.S. Embassy in London, from 2009 to 2011, where he’d been sent by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to study Britain’s Prevent program. Set in motion after homegrown Muslims killed fifty-two commuters during attacks on London subways and buses on July 7, 2005, Prevent was touted as a deradicalization program, which would prevent future terrorist attacks by marginalizing violent groups and steering young at-risk Muslims away from radical Muslim clerics. It proved to be an abysmal failure, says Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a specialist in Islamic ideology and irregular warfare.
    “Just as Britain was waking up to the fact that all their counterradicalization policies were bankrupt and were actually empowering the bad guys, [Wiktorowicz] was sitting there taking notes,” Dr. Gorka told a conference of U.S. policymakers in September 2013. Shortly after Wiktorowicz left London, the British ditched the Prevent program and revamped their approach to the Islamist threat. “So he’s got the wrong recipe, and this bad recipe is what we’re now living in America,” Dr. Gorka said. 5
    Wiktorowicz separated the Islamists into two main groups: those he called purists , or nonviolent Islamists, and the jihadis. The purists included preachers such as al-Qaradawi, who championed dawa , proselytizing the faith. They also included political Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Wiktorowicz argued that the United States should invest in these allegedly nonviolent Islamists, in the hope that they could deter or marginalize their violent brethren, al Qaeda and its affiliates.
    But there was a problem. “Every single al Qaeda leader was first a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Dr. Gorka pointed out. “It’s a completely overlapping diagram. There is no hermetic separation between purists, politicians, and violent terrorists.”
    Beyond that, the two groups of Islamists were bound by the same ideology. “Despite the fact that the nonviolent jihadists, the stealth jihadis, outnumber the violent jihadis by factors of thousands, they both have the same theocratic goals: undemocratic societies from Washington to Cairo. They argue amongst themselves, but the arguments are almost exclusively about timing and tactics,” Gorka explained.
    Wiktorowicz was instrumental in getting the FBI and the U.S. counterintelligence community to abandon all teaching on Islam that highlighted the Islamic ideology of supremacy and jihad. He also helped craft new guidance for federal and local law enforcement authorities that pushed political correctness to silly and dangerous extremes. He argued