Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 2013-02-13

 

President Barack Obama’s nominee for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief is a Muslim. John Brennan reverted to Islam between 1996 and 1999 when he was the CIA station chief in Riyadh.

Al Arabiya reports that in a radio interview with U.S. Trento Radio Show, Agent John Guandolo, who retired from the FBI in 2008, said Brennan revert to Islam in Saudi Arabia and visited Mecca and Medina during the hajj season along with Saudi officials, who may have induced Brennan to convert.

During the interview Guandolo referred to a video showing Brennan saying that during his time in Saudi Arabia, he “marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that pilgrimage.”

Guandolo's tale shadows elements of the plot of the hit show Homeland, in which U.S. Marine Nick Brody reverts to Islam while being held prisoner by al-Qaeda, only to begin working for the CIA after his release.

Brennan did indeed serve as CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s and today holds the official title of Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. The 57-year-old Brennan was nominated by President Obama on Jan. 7 to head the CIA, though he has yet to be confirmed. He would succeed retired General David Petraeus, who resigned amid an embarrassing and scandalous extramarital affair with his biographer.

Guandolo, is described as an anti-Islam activist by MSNBC that carried the story, said in the radio interview Brennan is “un-fit” to head the CIA. Guandolo has long warned that the federal government is being infiltrated by members of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. He now warns that by appointing Brennan to CIA director, Obama has not only chosen a man “naïve” to these infiltrations, but also picked a candidate who is himself a Muslim.

“That fact alone is not what is most disturbing; his conversion to Islam was the culmination of a counterintelligence operation against him to recruit him. The fact that foreign intelligence service operatives recruited Mr. Brennan when he was in a very sensitive and senior U.S. government position in a foreign country means that he either a traitor … [or] he has the inability to discern and understand how to walk in those kinds of environments, which makes him completely unfit to the be the director of Central Intelligence,” said Guandolo.