A couple of hours up the road from where some September 11 hijackers learned to fly, the new head of Aryan Nation is praising them -- and trying to create an unholy alliance between his white supremacist group and al Qaeda. "You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah."With his long beard and potbelly, August Kreis looks more like a washed up member of ZZ Top than an aspiring revolutionary. Don't let appearances fool you: his résumé includes stops at some of America's nastiest extremist groups -- Posse Comitatus, the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation. "I don't believe that they were the ones that attacked us," Kreis said. "And even if they did, even if you say they did, I don't care!"
Kreis wants to make common cause with al Qaeda because, he says, they share the same enemies: Jews and the American government. The terms they use may be different: White supremacists call them ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government, while al Qaeda calls them the Jews and Crusaders. But the hatred is the same. And Kreis wants to exploit that.