McMaster FIRES Top Counter Jihad Official at National Security Council

One of the best people in the Trump National Security Council on jihad terror and the threat to the West was fired by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Richard T. Higgins, who has been an outspoken critic about the “faulty strategic assessment that is the basis for current U.S. security.” “National Security officials are prohibited from developing a factual understanding of Islamic threat doctrines, preferring instead to depend upon 5th column Muslim Brotherhood cultural advisors.”

His expertise is political warfare and developing strategies to battle against the ideologies and tactics used to carry out terror attacks.

Political warfare includes both non-violent and violent actions working in synthesis, Higgins says. The left, with enemy-friendly Muslim Brotherhood allies, is able to control the dominant cultural narrative with the media and the government, blinding us in the war on terror and impacting how Americans think, he argues.

Higgins calls for a “strategic and operational pause” in America’s misguided battle to stop the terror. He would, instead, ask new leadership to develop a comprehensive political warfare plan, while removing the subversive policies and personnel causing America to lose this paramount battle.

He cites the “purges” carried out by law enforcement and intelligence officials throughout government, which Phil Haney, Sebastian Gorka and Steve Coughlin have made public.

Now Higgins, a Bannon ally, has been purged.  As have a number of other Trump loyalists at the NSC.

Higgins has worked with Steve Coughlin, author of Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, and Dr. Sebastian Gorka.

Steve Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamic extremism, was fired from his position on the military’s Joint Staff back in 2008. The action followed a report in this space last week revealing opposition to his work for the military by pro-Muslim officials within the office of the Deputy Defense Secretary. Coughlin had run afoul of a key aide to Mr. England, Hasham Islam who sought to have Mr. Coughlin soften his views on Islamic extremism.

It appears Rich Higgins suffered the same fate. This is not what we expect from the Trump administration. Trump was elected to address the infiltration and islamization our counter terrrorism and intel agencies.

Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster is a long time apologist for Islam and I was deeply disappointed by his appointment. McMaster insists jihad terrorists were operating according to “an ideology that uses a perverted interpretation of religion to justify crimes against all humanity.” .How many years and untold horrors must we suffer before our generals understand that our “Muslim allies” have quite different priorities from what we would wish to believe?

President Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser has told his staff that Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion, rejecting a key ideological view of other senior Trump advisers and signaling a potentially more moderate approach to the Islamic world.The adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, told the staff of the National Security Council , in his first “all hands” staff meeting, that the label “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful because terrorists are “un-Islamic,” according to people who were in the meeting.(more here)

The Atlantic reports that Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a director for strategic planning, was ousted on July 21 over a memo he wrote.

From the uber-left Atlantic:

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda.

His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.

Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a director for strategic planning, was let go on July 21. Higgins’s memo describes supposed domestic and international threats to Trump’s presidency, including globalists, bankers, the “deep state,” and Islamists. The memo characterizes the Russia story as a plot to sabotage Trump’s nationalist agenda. It asserts that globalists and Islamists are seeking to destroy America. The memo also includes a set of recommendations, arguing that the problem constitutes a national-security priority.

“Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed,” the memo warns. It argues that this has led “Islamists [to] ally with cultural Marxists,” but that in the long run, “Islamists will co-opt the movement in its entirety.”

Higgins wrote the memo in late May, and at some point afterwards it began circulating among people outside the White House associated with the Trump campaign to whom Higgins had given it.

Higgins, according to another source with direct knowledge of the incident, was called into the White House Counsel’s office the week before last and asked about the memo. On July 21, the Friday of that week, he was informed by McMaster’s deputy Ricky Waddell that he was losing his job.

NSC spokesman Michael Anton declined to comment on Higgins’s firing, saying that the White House does not comment on internal personnel matters.

“In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state power,” the memo reads. “Functioning as a hostile complete state acting within an existing state, it has an alternate infrastructure. Political warfare operates as one of the activities of the ‘counter-state.’” I was able to review large portions of the memo, and to secure extracts for publication.

“Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives … These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum, and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

 Sources offered conflicting accounts of how the memo came to McMaster’s attention. Several sources with knowledge of the events said they believed the memo made its way to Trump’s desk, a version that others disputed.

Higgins’s bosses at the NSC were not pleased with the memo, sources say, the creation of which was not part of Higgins’s job. Higgins, seen as an ally of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had only served on the council for a couple months.

Higgins had also “pushed for declassification of documents having to do with radical Islam and Iran,” according to a source close to the White House. A source close to Higgins said that specifically, Higgins had been pushing for the declassification of Presidential Study Directive 11, a classified report produced in 2010 by the Obama administration which presaged the Arab Spring, outlining unrest throughout the Middle East. The directive has become a shibboleth of activists such as Frank Gaffney, who see it as evidence of the Obama administration’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

Higgins’s past writings focus on similar themes. “National Security officials are prohibited from developing a factual understanding of Islamic threat doctrines, preferring instead to depend upon 5th column Muslim Brotherhood cultural advisors,” he wrote in September. Higgins gave an interview to the Daily Caller News Foundation last year that outlines many of the same ideas laid out in the memo.