Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from the new e-book “The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama’s True Intergalactic Ambitions By An Anonymous White House Staffer,” edited and introduced by Daily Caller writers Jamie Weinstein and Will Rahn. You can buy the full book here. Seriously, buy it — it’s less than five bucks. Also, read the first, second, and third excerpts published earlier this week.
Chapter 5: Off to Pakistan
After my talk with Axelrod, I began listening to Doctor Garrett Mueller regularly so I could better understand the conspiracies that were being promulgated about the president. I even became a premium member on his website, The Fire Pit.
I also came to learn that Mueller wasn’t a doctor at all. Not that Mueller made the title up or anything. But Doctor was actually his first name. His audience largely remains in the dark about this little detail.
Mueller was actually a radio shock jock by training. For the first forty years of his life his friends couldn’t recall him saying anything political. They recall him as a shortish, perpetually unserious man who was fond of wearing his favorite FBI T-shirt for days on end. The T-shirt, mind you, didn’t stand for the Federal Bureau of Investigation—it stood for Federal Boob Inspector.
Up until his breakdown, the focus of Mueller’s career was crude radio stunts. But his fast life eventually caught up to him. After a series of arrests for Pee Wee Herman-like indecent exposure incidents at local “movie theaters” and drug-induced fights with homeless people, Mueller checked himself into rehab.
After rehab, he sobered up and reinvented himself. The corny and often grotesque radio handles he used as a DJ for small and medium-size radio markets across the United States—Doctor Demented, Doctor Demonic, Doctor Dildo—were trashed. He was a new man. A political man. A conservative’s conservative.
Though just months before he had been living anything but a conservative lifestyle and had never cracked open a book on conservative thought, Mueller was now preaching to a new audience with authority. The drug addict went to rehab, read a few books, and was suddenly William F. Buckley.
Like all conservative radio hosts, Mueller dreamed about being like Rush Limbaugh. But like the other pretenders, he didn’t have Limbaugh’s natural radio talent, his comic size. Nonetheless, his shtick attracted an audience, especially after President Obama was inaugurated.
Now, live from his bunker in the modern-day “Sodom,” as he called New York City, he was the voice of the most outlandish charges against the president. At least, Mueller’s charges seemed outlandish when I began investigating them.
There were really four main conspiracies that Mueller spewed out on a regular basis. One, President Obama was a secret Muslim. Two, President Obama was a secret Marxist. Three, President Obama was a secret homosexual. And four, President Obama was born in Kenya and therefore constitutionally ineligible to even be president.
Though most of the conservative movement rejected these theories, a sizable and passionate fringe were open to them if not entirely convinced by them. I wasn’t exactly sure why Axelrod was so concerned about them, but it was not for me to reason why. I was just supposed to thoroughly debunk them.
I began to put feelers out from Jakarta to Chicago to Mombasa to Honolulu. As a master of the black arts of opposition research, I had sources all over. And I could work a computer till it screamed—hack my way into obscure data banks, break any code. Did your third cousin once removed pay all his taxes in 1983? I could find out in ten minutes. Some of my sources were ex-CIA, some ex-FBI. But more important than my sources were the sources of my sources.
Soon after I got into high gear I received a strange call from a private number.
“Hello,” I answered.
The voice on the other end was gruff.
“Listen carefully and don’t say a word,” he said. “I heard that you are looking into the president’s past. I know a thing or two about it. I have been researching it for three years. What I know will shock you. If you are truly interested in getting to the bottom of these conspiracies, I can help you. But you need to promise me you are coming into this with an open mind. Can you promise me that?”
“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” I said.
“Just call me colonel.”
“Colonel what?”
“That’s not something you need to know.”
“Okay. But you’re an army officer? Can you tell me what branch?”
He paused for a moment.
“I am a retired commander of SEAL Team Seven.”
“SEAL Team Seven? I thought it only goes up to six?”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then laughter.
“You thought the pansy brigade was the highest special force unit America had?” the colonel asked rhetorically.
“Listen here, kid. Let me give you a wake-up call. SEAL Team Seven is so secret that some members of SEAL Team Seven don’t even know they’re in it. Most of the greatest achievements America has ever had are the result of us. The Miracle on Ice in 1980 when America upset the Soviet Union in hockey? That was us. Seinfeld? Our guys wrote it during downtime propping up dictators in the 1990s. More recently, how do you think Paul Krugman achieved popular success or Lincoln Chafee was elected to a position of responsibility? You think shit like that happens on its own? That’s SEAL Team Seven.”
I didn’t get it. “I’m confused,” I replied.
“I know. Trust me. SEAL Team Seven is so far above the comprehension of even the extraordinary that I don’t expect you to get it. But you have to trust me. Meet me in Peshawar in forty-eight hours.”
He hung up the phone. He sounded nuts. But his confidence had a magnetism. Could he be real? Axelrod had secured as much money as I needed to complete my task. I decided to take the risk. I was off to Pakistan.
…
“Welcome to the Federally Administered Tribal Region of Pakistan,” the colonel said, greeting me in the airport.
He was short, stocky, and sporting a gray beard. If you squinted your eyes you might have thought he was the Most Interesting Man in the World.
“We don’t have a lot of time. Follow me,” he said.
We got in the colonel’s car and he began to weave a tale as he drove.
“In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It inflamed the Muslim world. Jihadists from around the world poured into Peshawar. They would help the Afghan mujahideen liberate their country from the godless invaders. The Arabs among them came to be known as the Arab Afghans. You will have heard of some of them: Osama bin Laden, Ayman al- Zawahiri,” he said with a wry smile.
“They were all here to help facilitate the support for the Afghan campaign.”
After a few minutes, we stopped in front of a run-down compound. The windows were broken, bullet holes riddled the exterior and part of one wall was completely collapsed.
We got out of the car. The colonel continued his soliloquy.
“In the 1980s with the help of Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden founded the Maktab Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-’Arab, otherwise known as the Afghan Services Bureau. From here, they coordinated Arab fighters for the Afghan jihad. What you are looking at is its headquarters. This is where the Arabs planned their role. This is where the Arab fighters who flowed into Pakistan in transit to Afghanistan stayed. This is where American enemy number one Osama bin Laden lived for much of the 1980s.”
I cut him off. “That’s all interesting, Colonel. But what does this have to do with Obama?”
“I was just about to get there,” he said.
“In 1981, we know Barack Obama traveled to Pakistan. But he never wrote about it in his book. He rarely talks about it, certainly never in detail. What was he doing here?”
The colonel then ushered me forward. He pushed open the door with his shoulder. The air was musty. But it was like we entered a time capsule. It was obvious that very few people, if any, had been in this place in years. And yet it looked as if those who had once resided there just left for a moment. Korans, pictures, and papers were scattered about.
The colonel led me to a corner.
“What Obama was doing here was joining the Afghan jihad. Yes, the politically astute know that Obama visited Pakistan in 1981. What most don’t know is that he spent most of his college vacations here and all his vacations as a community organizer. Barack Hussein Obama joined the Afghan jihad as Osama bin Laden’s American apprentice.”
The colonel then pointed to a picture hanging on the wall. It was of Obama and bin Laden. Obama was sporting the college Afro we often see in pictures from his college days. Bin Laden had his arm around him and they were smiling. As I looked more closely at the other pictures in the compound, there were many more of Obama. There was Obama and bin Laden drinking tea together, giving each other high-fives, holding a dead goat, and wielding shoulder-fired missiles, the kind that ultimately helped the Afghans defeat the Soviets. There was even one where the two were playing what appeared to be a version of pin the tail on the donkey but instead of a pin they seemed to be using a knife and instead of a donkey there was a picture of Salman Rushdie.
“I thought the fatwa on Rushdie was issued in 1989,” I said. “And why would a Sunni outfit like al-Qaida listen to a fatwa from a Shia cleric?”
“Iran and al-Qaida have always had a connection. And blasphemy is blasphemy,” the colonel explained. “As for 1989, it was a jihadi reunion. It was their last time together at the compound, as far as I can tell.”
I looked a little closer at some of the pictures. Besides bin Laden and Obama, a lady was present in many of them. She looked familiar.
“Valerie Jarrett,” the colonel said. “She often traveled with him to the compound. She is said to be the only woman bin Laden ever allowed into the Shura council meetings.”
Before I could process what he said, the colonel then pointed me to a book. Inside were a few pages of Arabic text and then a multitude of signatures. One of them was Obama’s.
“No terrorism expert believes that al-Qaida began earlier than the end of the 1980s as the Afghan jihad was winding down. Many believe it began much later and some don’t think al-Qaida as a formality ever really existed. But they are all wrong. What you are looking at is the founding papers of al-Qaida from 1986. The Arabic text lays out al-Qaida’s principles. Those signing the document were also swearing an oath of allegiance—Bay’ah, in Arabic—to the group’s leader, Sheikh Osama. As you can see, Obama was among them.”
I stood there for a moment taking it all in. I went over to the pictures again and examined them. They looked real. I snuck one of them in my pocket so I could further examine it back in the States.
The colonel then said we ought to leave. He had a flight to Abu Dhabi to catch.
On the drive to the airport, the colonel broke down what it all meant.
“There are limits to what all this information tells us. We know that Obama was a Muslim. I would presume he still is. Is he still a radical? Does he still consider bin Laden his leader? I can’t say. But he certainly did.”
We drove the rest of the way in silence. I’m a pretty hard-nosed guy. In my line of work, you have to be. I had seen some pretty fucked-up skeletons locked deep in the closets of the various candidates I was tasked with destroying. But nothing like this. Nothing.
I just didn’t want to believe what he was showing me. It was too ludicrous. How do you explain what you saw to someone else and not have them think you should be institutionalized? But how could I rationalize the photos away?
When we arrived at the airport, the colonel told me to meet him in Moscow in two weeks.
“We’ve only just begun this journey,” he said.
From THE LIZARD KING by Jamie Weinstein and Will Rahn Copyright © 2012 by Jamie Weinstein and Will Rahn. Reprinted courtesy of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
You can buy the book in many different e-formats at HarperCollins.com, or directly for your Kindle at Amazon.com or for your Nook at BarnesandNoble.com.
