Posted on 07/20/2004 9:39:00 PM PDT by Pikamax
Washington and its allies have complained periodically about the mujaheddin, who were technically obligated by international treaty to leave the country in 1995. But Western complaints lacked urgency until two months ago, when U.S. law enforcement authorities discovered that a handful of the men who have visited or lived in this area were associated with a suspected terrorist plot to bomb targets in the United States on New Year's Day.
Among them was Karim Said Atmani, who was identified by authorities as the document forger for a group of Algerians accused of plotting the bombings. He is a former roommate of Ahmed Ressam, the man arrested at the Canadian-U.S. border in mid-December with a carload of explosives, according to authoritative Western sources.
[SNIP]
"We have been concerned about this community for years," said a senior U.S. official in Washington, who spoke by telephone and asked not to be named. "We flushed out a lot of them [after the end of the war]. Bosnia's not becoming the crossroads of terrorists. [But] we find the whole group of them a threat, and we want them out of there." Atmani, for example, obtained his first Bosnian passport in 1995, using a false address in Sarajevo. After being deported by Canada in October 1998 and escorted to Sarajevo, he was allowed to stay without a valid passport. He obtained a new passport last June in Zenica, 35 miles northwest of Sarajevo. He traveled to Istanbul, then returned to Sarajevo in late December before dropping out of sight.
So far, complaints about the town by Western diplomats and international officials charged with resettling displaced Serbs have largely fallen on deaf ears in the Bosnian government, which is run by the same Muslim leaders who welcomed Islamic fighters during the war. Bosnian officials have said the former mujaheddin--who came here from Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria and Afghanistan, as well as Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries--obtained citizenship by marrying Bosnian women, many of them war widows. That made it hard to enforce the Dayton peace accord's December 1995 requirement that foreign fighters leave within 30 days.
"They should have been gone long ago, but now we're stuck with them," said a senior Western official in the area. He said NATO soldiers, who are charged with policing implementation of the Dayton accord, have been reluctant to act against them, in part for fear of retaliation. "There is absolutely no reason why Muslims can't be here," said British Lt. Gen. Michael Willcocks, the deputy chief of NATO operations in Bosnia. "We can't singularize people over beards and veils. . . . They are not engaged in overt acts of terrorism, nor do we have evidence of them sitting around and indoctrinating people. We investigate and carry out surveillance, and there is no evidence of . . . ranges [for weapons or military training] of the kind most people have in mind."
But the real reason the former fighters have stayed, Western officials complain, is that Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim member and chairman of Bosnia's three-member presidency, wants them to stay. They say that Izetbegovic turned Bocinja Donja over to 100 members of the "7th Muslim Brigade" after the Bosnian army organized a massive sweep during the last months of the war and forced Serbian residents to flee.
Few Americans are aware that Clinton deployed U.S. forces in the Balkans to help prop up Muslim warlords in the heart of Europe – men who preach jihad against Christian civilization and who have military ties to al-Qaeda and the global Islamist movement.
One of the "poor Muslims" we helped was Alija Izetbegovic, who served as the dominant member of Bosnia’s three-man presidency until resigning in 2000.
In his 1970 tract, The Islamic Declaration, Izetbegovic called for "a united Islamic community from Morocco to Indonesia." He wrote:
"There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions… the Islamic movement must and can take over political power as soon as it is morally and numerically so strong that it can not only destroy the existing non-Islamic power, but also build up a new Islamic one."
The breakup of Yugoslavia enabled Izetbegovic to put his pan-Islamic vision into practice. As leader of the Bosnian Muslims during Bosnia’s 1992-1995 civil war, Izetbegovic received money, arms and even troops from Muslim states around the world.
Mujahedeen from Egypt, Afghanistan and elsewhere flocked to join Izetbegovic’s Bosnian Muslim army, quickly gaining a reputation for barbarous cruelty. In a report to the International War Crimes tribunal in The Hague, Yugoslavia charged that Izetbegovic’s mujahedeen tortured, murdered and terrorized Bosnian Serb civilians and prisoners-of-war held in detention camps.
Osama bin Laden played a key role in deploying these mujahedeen – evidently with the full knowledge and approval of the Clinton administration.
"The United States… turned a blind eye to [bin Laden’s] activities in organizing, arming, and funding mujahedeen units in Bosnia and Kosovo because Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia was Enemy Number One," observes Nikolas K. Gvosdev of the Institute on Religion and Foreign Policy.
Gvosdev charges that al-Qaeda bases remain in Kosovo and that al-Qaeda is now stirring up trouble in Macedonia. Several al-Qaeda suspects have turned up with Bosnian passports. Bosnia reportedly issued one to Bin Laden himself in 1993.
Great! I'm glad the DSL had this clue for you!
The Terrorist Within: Chapter 15: Puzzle Pieces
John O'Neill, head of the FBI's National Security Division in New York, had been the FBI's most single-minded pursuer of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. O'Neill figured the young agent leading the Ressam case out of Seattle could use all the help he could get.
When he called Fred Humphries in early January, the agent listened intently. There's someone you have to meet, O'Neill said. He may have a lot of answers for you.
The man was O'Neill's friend and fellow cigar aficionado, Jean-Louis Bruguière, one of the world's premier terrorist-trackers. Bruguière had called O'Neill from Paris after learning of Ressam's arrest to say he had important intelligence about the captive's activities and connections in Montreal.
This subject certainly died a quick death in the media didn't it?
I wasn't following closely at the time, but my recollection is I heard a little about some Millennium-related arrests but not much in the way of details or follow-up. I also recall the media at the time was trying to discourage Y2K panic, which was probably also a factor in the coverage. It'd be interesting to go back and see how it was actually covered by the "mainstream" media.
ALGIERS, Algeria, Sept. 11, 2001 — FBI Agent Fred Humphries ate honeyed pastries and drank strong coffee, fueling himself for his day's mission: interviewing an imprisoned accomplice of Ahmed Ressam. . .When Humphries was able to show Ressam a photograph of Moussaoui, Ressam said he recognized the French national as having been with him at the Khalden camp in 1998.
In 1996, following a failed car bomb attempt in Lille on the eve of a G7 summit there, French cops picked up two ethnic-Arab suspects, one of whom cracked under questioning and revealed the true nature of "gang of Roubaix". . .The French simply followed Kamel around the globe for six months prior to his arrest, taking note of those with whom he met. That turned up names who'd cropped up elsewhere, and revealed some of the point men for the various regional networks with which Kamel had been put in contact. Based on Kamel's visits to Montreal, France's top anti-terrorist cop Jean-Louis Brugiere wanted to pay a call on Ahmed Ressam — but he was discouraged by incredulous Canadian authorities who considered the Algerian expatriate no more than a petty crook. This was the same Ahmed Ressam who in 1999 was arrested en route to Seattle with a car full of explosives.
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