Ex-Bosnian officials arrested for terrorisim and espionage walk free

serbianunity.net ^ | October 1st, 2002 | AFP

[piasa]

Speaking of Iranians... we just deported two or three Iranian UN diplomats who had been caught videotaping the Brooklyb Bridge and some subway tunnels in New York.

[piasa]

1992 : (HIZBALLAH, IRAN, BIN LADEN, AL QEADA) Bin Laden makes a proposal to the Shiite organization Hizballah that they set aside their differences to cooperate in a common objective of killing US troops stationed in Asia and Africa. - MSNBC

1990s early : (HIZBALLAH & AL QAEDA STILL LINKED) Testimony in the East Africa embassy bombings trial, concluded last year (2001), lays out connections between al-Qaida and the Iranian government, an unidentified senior Iranian religious leader and Iran’s most favored terrorist group, the Hizballah, during the early 1990s. - MSNBC

1990s early and mid : (AL QAEDA & IRANIAN OFFICIALS MEET) Specifically, the transcript of the trial shows that as early as 1998 the United States was aware that on “various” occasions during the early to mid-1990s, high-ranking al-Qaida members met with Iranian officials and that bin Laden himself met with the leader of its terrorist surrogate, the Hizballah, to “cooperate against the perceived common enemy,” the United States. Among the prosecutors’ revelations at the embassy bombing trials was that Iran and Hizballah provided weapons and weapons training to al-Qaida and its ally, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and that “Osama bin Laden and other ranking members of al-Qaida, stated privately ... al-Qaida should put aside its differences with Shiite Muslim terrorist organizations, including the government of Iran and its affiliated terrorist group Hizballah, to cooperate” against the United States. Moreover, there was testimony that bin Laden met with Imad Mugniyeh, the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks that took more than 300 American lives in Beirut during the 1980s.- MSNBC

1992 - 1996 : (AL QAEDA'S SALIM, IRANIAN CLERIC, AL QAEDA, NATIONAL ISLAMIC FRONT OF SUDAN, IRANINA GOVERNMENT) The meetings between al-Qaida and the unidentified Iranian religious leader took place in Sudan with Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, bin Laden’s former financial manager, representing al-Qaida. They took place at “various times” between 1992 and 1996, according to prosecutors. All the meetings apparently took place in Sudan. According to U.S. prosecutors, “At various times between in or about 1992 and in or about 1996, the defendant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum as part of an overall effort to arrange a tripartite agreement between al-Qaida, the National Islamic Front of Sudan and elements of the government of Iran to work together against the United States, Israel and other Western countries.” Salim goes on trial in New York early next year, and it is expected that details of those dealings will be made public.

1994 : (BIN LADEN & IMAD MUGNIYAH MEET) The bin Laden meeting with Mugniyeh, the military chief of Hizballah, was held in 1994. The meeting apparently took place in Sudan.

1996 : (MOGADISHU TERRORIST 'SUMMIT,' HIZBALLAH, BIN LADEN) According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers.

1990s late : (AL QAEDA & TALIBAN ATTACK IRANIANS) But there is also significant evidence that al-Qaida worked with the Taliban in anti-Iran operations in the late 1990s and in at least one case, even before that.

1999 (RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IRAN AND AL QAEDA APPEAR TO DETERIORATE) Historically, there appear to have been exploratory talks and some action involving Iranian officials and al-Qaida years ago, but there also is evidence of a deterioration and outright hostility between the two sides by the end of 1999.

[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]

But, you must also rememer the company boys were supplying the Krajina Serbs of the North Krajina in the early stages of the conflict. Evening out the playing field, kapeesh?

[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.

[Angelus Errare]

Please understand, I'm not disputing the Bosnian Muslim atrocities or justifying them or apologizing for them. As I said in another thread, Wahhabiyyah Islam seems to spring up such groups like weeds. As the Soviet Bloc crumbled and freedom of religion became widespread it strikes me as only natural that they would act in such a fashion. Wahhabism is every bit as poisonous to Islamic societies as communism is to democracies.

However, I think that it's naive at best to claim that the Serbs committed no atrocities in Bosnia or Kosovo simply because elements of the Muslim paramilitaries (the same folks who are now turning Macedonia into a hellhole) and that as the fighting went on that they became further radicalized. But there is no excuse for lumping all of the Bosnian Muslims into the same group and failing to recognize that Serb forces and their paramilitary counterparts did some very nasty things in Kosovo.

That being said, the very idea that all of these al-Qaeda militias (let's face it, that's the accusation being floated around here) operated with the full support of the Croatian government borders on pure absurdity. The Croatians are Catholics, do you really think that they wouldn't be the first ones on the chopping block in the event such groups succeeded? Don't you think that this would have at least crossed their minds?

[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.

[Destro]

Communists attracted all groups. Tito, the founder of Socialist Yugoslavia was a Croatian, no?

There were no Chetniks in uniform until after the Nazis came and established the Ustashe.

[Destro]

From: The Parachute Ward
A Canadian Surgeon's Wartime Adventures in Yugoslavia
— Brian Jeffrey Street —
Chapter 4
"An Unjustly Lost War"

Among the earliest to organize were the Cetniks. The word was a traditional name for militia guerrilla troops which were loosely maintained during the pre-war years. The Cetniks at this point were under the command of Kosta Pecanac, a Serbian hero of the First World War who had organized and led an uprising against the Austrians in 1917...The Yugoslav Government-in-Exile, then in London, had urged all Yugoslavs to wait until Allied aid arrived. Nevertheless, the Cetniks soon attracted attention outside the country. An American journalist in Istanbul wrote an article in which Mihailovic and the Cetniks were (correctly) described as the only legitimate and effective resistance front in Yugoslavia.

[Destro]

A great read online

From: The Parachute Ward
A Canadian Surgeon's Wartime Adventures in Yugoslavia
— Brian Jeffrey Street —
Chapter 4
"An Unjustly Lost War"

Among the earliest to organize were the Cetniks. The word was a traditional name for militia guerrilla troops which were loosely maintained during the pre-war years. The Cetniks at this point were under the command of Kosta Pecanac, a Serbian hero of the First World War who had organized and led an uprising against the Austrians in 1917...The Yugoslav Government-in-Exile, then in London, had urged all Yugoslavs to wait until Allied aid arrived. Nevertheless, the Cetniks soon attracted attention outside the country. An American journalist in Istanbul wrote an article in which Mihailovic and the Cetniks were (correctly) described as the only legitimate and effective resistance front in Yugoslavia.

[Angelus Errare]

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

My apologies. It's just that Rense.com isn't exactly what I'd consider a reliable source and it has a history of "cutting and pasting" articles to support the tin foil theory of the week.

Regarding the article itself, Oplan Bojinka (like current al-Qaeda plots to use sarin or cyanide to attack Western interests) was dismissed largely because it was thwarted. When Ramzi Yousef was finally apprehended, he refused to divulge who he worked for or how he obtained the funds to carry out his attacks (which may explain why al-Qaeda has such a high regard for him and has even taken hostages in an effort to secure his release). There was some speculation at the time that he might have been an Iraqi intelligence agent, though that line of thought collapsed after 1998 when it was learned that he was in fact an operations commander for al-Qaeda.

Additionally, the various pieces of information about planes being used as giant missiles has been around since at least 1994, when members of the GIA (another al-Qaeda affiliate) tried to crash a jetliner into the heart of downtown Paris. As I said, hindsight is always 20-20.

I also don't understand the signifigance of the fact that Bojinka is a Serbo-Croat word that means "explosion." As I said, Yousef spoke any number of languages and was very much a worthy successor to Carlos the Jackal as far as Islamic terrorism is concerned. He could have just as easily picked out an Urdu, Farsi, or Arabic term for the operation, as he spoke those languages as well.

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

The term refers to basically a little bit of genocide carried out on a small-scale. The Laskar Jihad (another al-Qaeda affiliate) did the same in East Timor after the nation declared independence. While it isn't anywhere on the scale of what happened in Rwanda or in Europe under Nazi rule, that doesn't make it any less wicked. And the same holds for the Muslim atrocities.

"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."

My assertions are based on what I consider to be reasonably credible reports from mainstream and alternative news media as well as a basic understanding that when speaking in terms of an ethnic or religious group there is no good guy/bad guy distinction when it comes to the Balkans. Had the Serbs been allowed to continue unopposed I have no doubt they would have engaged in a great deal of "ethnic cleansing" before the day was over. We stopped the Serbs, but now we have the twin evils of Albanian hyper-nationalism and al-Qaeda to deal with in the Balkans. The place isn't called the powder keg of Europe for nothing.

Regarding the Chetniks (and my knowledge is quite limited in this regard), my understanding was that they, like most European communist groups, played nice with the Nazis and stayed quiet until after the Axis invasion of the USSR began, at which point they were called to arms by their Comintern masters.