[Angelus Errare]

This is primarily directed at Destro:

I guess I should have put a sarcasm tag on my remarks on the Shi'ite-Sunni alliance. Iran is even now helping al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself and is providing VIP treatment to at least two of the group's top leaders.

"What a winning new term for Bosnian Muslim apologists whose lies about a true genocide have long been exposed as false. No Christian in the Balkans could ever live under Muslims, especially Muslims and Croats that had once killed them using SS uniforms."

Regarding the World War 2 antics of the Ustashi and the Muslim SS units, I would point out that the Ustashi were or at least claimed to be Catholic (and I'm Catholic as well, so this is hardly an attack on Catholicism), abeit the kind with an extreme anti-Orthodox bent to them. However, the actions of the Ustashi and the Muslim SS in no way justify the actions of such charming Serbian paramilitaries as the Sivi Vukovi, Arkan's Tigers, or the White Eagles. Things simply aren't as cut and dry as that when it comes to the Balkans.

As far as the use of my term genocide-lite, according to FAS, for example, Arkan's Tigers killed around 1,400 Bosnian Muslims between April and May of 1992 in Bosnia. That's a lot worse than anything say ... Robert Mugabe's done in Zimbabwe and most people have no problem considering the man a monster. So why does Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") get a free pass and Mugabe is hung out to dry?

Regarding the al-Qaeda office in Zagreb, it belonged to the Maktab al-Khidamat (the Services Office), which predates the establishment of al-Qaeda by nearly a decade and was originally formed for the purposes of transporting mujahideen to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. Maktab al-Khidamat also had at least twenty different offices INSIDE the USA well into the early 1990s. After the Afghan War, Maktab al-Khidamat and other such groups became the nucleus for bin Laden's shadow army, but this wasn't discovered until several years later.

I have no doubt that al-Qaeda maintained a front office in Zagreb or that it sent troops to Bosnia. The fact that Iran did the same is likewise unsurprising. However, there is no evidence that the Croatian government was aware that they were planning to establish the Islamic World Empire or that the Croatians thought that such an outcome would be a good thing for the Balkans.

The link to the BBC story you provided is posted at Rense.com, a conspiracy theorist website. Even if I assume the story is genuine, this doesn't do much for your credibility. Oplan Bojinka, the brainchild of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was considered to be the work of an isolated group of Middle Eastern extremists. At the time that Oplan Bojinka was busted, the threat was considered thwarted. When Yousef himself was arrested in Pakistan, he never divulged his connections to either al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. It wasn't until 1998 that US intelligence recognized that they had severely under-estimated al-Qaeda's capabilities. We still did after 1998, in fact.

The State Department's terrorist profile, for example, says that al-Qaeda may have "anywhere between several hundred to several thousand members." Well, we've KILLED several thousand and the group is still alive and kicking and planning new attacks, as what happened in Yemen yesterday illustrates. It looks like we under-estimated them again, but hey, hindsight is always 20-20.

Regarding your Karadzic quote, I would point out that the US has been opposed to Serb policy in Bosnia for several years at that point, just as it had been opposed to the Pakistani policy on Kashmir. So Karadzic's quote, while no doubt accurate, was probably filed under "ignore" just like Sheikh Kabbani's warning years earlier that over 80% of the mosques in America have been infiltrated by "extremists."

"Yea, no one knew in the CIA knew that the 'Bojinka' in Project Bojinka is a Serbo-Croatian word."

They likely did, but Ramzi Yousef spoke at least a dozen languages. Serbo-Croat was simply his flavor of the week for that operation.

"The CIA must have too busy looking the other way while the Iranians were using Croatia's good offices to transport jihadists and weapons to the Bosnian Muslims to make a connection in 1993 and again in 1995 why an Arab terrorists with plots to blow up airplanes and the World Trade Center was using a Bosnian (i.e Serbo-Croatian) word as the code word for his plots?"

The CIA likely assumed (and there are still members of the lidless eye brigade who refuse to acknowledge even the possibility of an al-Qaeda-Iranian alliance) that the Shi'ites and the Sunni could never cooperate. It's the same reason the CIA didn't share intelligence on who all was at the al-Qaeda summit in Maylasia with the FBI.

Oh and to piasa, if al-Qaeda and Iran ended in 1999, where exactly is Saif al-Adel (al-Qaeda's military commander) right now?

[piasa]

I don't think Iran's clerics/leaders and Al Qaeda 'ended' their relationship at all. In fact, I think there is much more coordination going on between groups and states than anyone has suggested; on some other threads I've posted some interesting timelines that do raise some eyebrows in that regard. The list I just posted here consists of snippets from news articles collected over time and they are for the most part written by reporters off of newswire reports, errors and all, and don't reflect my personal opinion.

Thanks very much for the reply.

[smokegenerator]

FAS is a Company outfit, fits their agenda to demonize Arkanovci.
The 1200 is a ficticious number grabbed with total casualty count, Serb, Muslim KIA/WIA, etc...

Arkan is doing the exact same thing the Israelis are doing to the Palestines, effective termination.
white eagles/m.jovic and co. were very effective as they were not as mobile/roving unit such as the Arkanovci.

White Eagles were held more accountable for their actions, so there was restraint with their actions.

The Israelis are getting away with what Arkan was doing for the simple fact of they are not Jewish. If it were Arkanowicz, he would be held as a hero.

[joan]

Throughout Bosnia, except for the Muslim followers of Fikret Abdic, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats were slaughtering, ethnically cleansing, torturing, etc. just about all the Serbs they could. Typical treatment for Serbs was continuous beatings in jails and other prisons. Most of these Serb survivors would be in very sorry shape today, if they'd be shown to a camera - many lost several of their teeth and had bones broken. A freeper who workd with refugees knows a Bosnian Serb man whose facial bones had all been broken by Muslims, he left the U.S. and went back (but to Yugoslavia and not Bosnia, as I understand it), and one reason was because he saw two of the Muslim men who tortured him living here.

And they were doing this from the very start. 99% of those in mass graves in Sarajevo have been, IDENTIFIED (keyword!) as Serbs. This includes many Serbs who were decapitated - and this was done by Balkan Muslims before the Mujahadeen came. I can also find reports which show Bosnian Muslim involvment in Croatia before the Bosnian war. A couple Bosnian Muslims accidently blew themselves up when they meant to attack Montenegro beach goers - that was August 1991.

http://www.newint.org/chronicle/CRONIC.HTM

BOSNIA Recently released secret documents reveal that in the first days of the war, Muslim paramilitary leaders murdered scores of Bosnian Serb civilians in Sarajevo.

Mass graves of Sarajevo Serbs

According to our documentation, about 460 Serbs were killed in different parts of Sarajevo, including the outer suburbs Hrasnica, Tarcin, Pazaric etc. However, based on the number of the uninvestigated [mass graves] (these data are confirmed by the individuals close to the authorities and foreign organizations active in this field) the actual number is three times higher, at least 1,500. There are estimates that the actual number of victims is as high as 3,000...

Unfortunately, "Kazani" is only one of the places where the corpses of the murdered people were hidden, if I can use that expression. Some of them were not Serbs, but 99 percent of them were. According to the information available to us, all together 30 corpses were found in "Kazani". Actually, 30 heads and 29 bodies. All the corpses were decapitated. However, murders occurred elsewhere as well...

Besides the infamous "Kazani" during the war corpses of the victims had been found in other parts of the city: in gutters, on the Trebevic bypass road, on the road to Pale, in Velesici, Pofalici, Brijesce, Buljakov Potok, Hrasno Brdo, Dobrinja... It is very important to mention that private prisons in which, according to certain evidence, murders of Serbs had taken place, were never investigated. As an example, I would like to mention prison "Stela" in Novi Grad, prison "Sunce" in Dobrinja, prison run by the then Fourth Motorized Brigade in Hrasnica, camp "Silos" in Tarcin and some other places.

[Destro]

The Christian/Croat thing was a typo. It should have read: No Christian SERB in the Balkans could ever live under Muslims, especially Muslims and Croats that had once killed them using SS uniforms.

What I meant by that is that Bosnian Muslims are for the most part Serbo-Croatian converts to Islam. I wanted to diff. between Christian Serb and Muslim Serb.

A re-hash of hostory never does harm.

[Destro]

The link to the BBC story you provided is posted at Rense.com

Read it again. The by line says it is an AFP story. The article at Rense.com is posted without alteration of the original.

[Destro]

There is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant nor is their such a thing as genocide-lite.

Your other assertions are just that, observations based on how you see the world (which is fine, so are mine). I at least try to back up my thesis with checkable references.

I can't tell you for instance why the CIA did this or the State Dept did that. Motivations and competance are beyond my ability to judge with the info at hand. All I can judge is by what the results on the ground were an are.