Omar Mateen was a follower of Marcus Dwayne Robertson, a former US Marine who acted as a bodyguard for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdul-Rahman, according to news reports.

Fox News reports:

The gunman who murdered at least 50 people in a Florida nightclub early Sunday morning was a follower of a controversial gang leader-turned-bank robber [Marcus Dwayne Robertson] who was released from prison last year despite warnings from prosecutors that he would recruit people to carry out violent acts, sources told FoxNews.com.

Abdul-Rahman was a spiritual leader of the CIA-backed mujaheddin in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, he “became involved with the US and Pakistani intelligence officials who were orchestrating the [Afghan] war. The sixty or so CIA and Special Forces officers based there considered him a ‘valuable asset,’ according to one of them, and overlooked his anti-Western message and incitement to holy war because they wanted him to help unify the mujaheddin groups,” The Atlantic Monthly reported.

After Osama bin Laden mentor Abdullah Azzam was assassinated in 1989, the CIA worked closely with Abdul-Rahman. The agency brought him to the United States on numerous occasions despite the fact he was on a terrorism watch list. He was also paid by the CIA to visit London where he radicalized Muslims and recruited them for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan (see Sean O’Neill, The Suicide Factory, Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque). In New York, according to a “very high-ranking Egyptian official,” Abdul-Rahman continued to work with the CIA.

Abdul-Rahman was implicated in the assassination of radical Zionist rabbi Meir Kahane, but the CIA blocked an investigation. “It was no accident that the Sheikh got a visa and that he’s still in the country. He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA,” an FBI agent said, according to the Village Voice.

The CIA would later block and investigation into Abdul-Rahman’s involvement in the plot to bomb the WTC and other landmarks in 1993. He was eventually arrested and charged. An internal CIA document concluded that the agency is “partially culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing because it helped train and support some of the bombers.

Marcus Dwayne Robertson, aka Abu Taubah, was a Marine and a New York gang member who worked with the CIA. “While this claim may seem fantastical, a sentencing memorandum issued by his lawyers in late April states that the government has confirmed a number of Robertson’s claims regarding past clandestine activities he conducted on the government’s behalf,“ writes Murtaza Hussain for The Intercept.

Robertson, who also worked as an FBI informant for 15 years, was arrested, imprisoned and charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in 2011. He was the imam of the Orlando-based Fundamental Islamic Knowledge Seminary at the time. In the early 1990s, he acted as Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman’s bodyguard.

“Bill Warner a private investigator in Sarasota Fla and anti-Mulsim extremist activist, has been tracking Marcus Robertson since 2009. He claims that in addition to the most recent crimes, Robertson has ‘links to Al Qaeda going back to at least 1993 in New York City’ and also previously was associated with Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called ‘Blind Sheik’ whose Muslim extremist group is blamed for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Rahman, convicted of seditious conspiracy with nine others, is serving a life sentence at the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina,” Fox News reported last March.

Fox News and the rest of the corporate media have avoided the obvious—Abdul-Rahman, Robertson and, it can be reasonably assumed, Omar Mateen were under the control of the CIA and probably the FBI.

This, of course, conflicts with the emerging narrative that Mateen was a lone wolf inspired by the Islamic State, itself a variant of al-Qaeda that was cobbled in the wake of the Afghan War against the Soviets in the 1980s (the Taliban, as well, was fashioned from mujahideen remnants).

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