When Ignorance Kills: The Clinton Administration and Al Qaeda in the Balkans
16 Dec 2003
On July 16, Republican Congressman Curt Weldon fired a warning shot across the bow of the Democrat machine. “Enough is enough,” he said around midnight on the floor of Congress. He pointed to the blatant lies told by the Clinton administration about Kosovo.
Republicans could have expected a new round in the Offensive Defensive. It happened first with renewed accusations that Bush lied about the war in Iraq, didn’t have an exit plan, moved too fast, and so forth and then with hysterical screaming about the “leak” of the name of a CIA operative (or analyst) that quickly became the most “dastardly” thing in modern history. That Republicans failed to understand the Democrat’s Offensive Defensive is evident in every counter-scream. Yes, the Democrats’ screams do not rise to the level of logical argument, but the screams are only, once again, desperate diversions.
The Offensive Defensive
The Offensive Defensive is a survival strategy for Democrats. Notone of them doubts that truth will eventually emerge, but every move is being made (accusing Bush of exactly what Clinton did to defray focus, repeating old lies, classifying “evidence” for 50 years, revising history in popular books and even encyclopedias, etc. to make sure all political andmedia whores (no slander to prostitutes, who are selling what is theirs, intended) are dead and gone when it does, when Americans learn that the biggest scandal of the past 50 years is not Gulf of Tonkin, not Watergate, not Whitewater, not Monicagate, not Chinagate, not CIA-training-Bin Laden-in-Afghanistan-gate, not Hill and Knowlton-gate (Gulf War I), but Balkangate.
When the American people learn that not only their safety (and theirgrandchildrens’ security) was sold for Middle East oil money but also thatof Christians, Hindus, Jews, and many Muslims in Asia and Africa, thefingers will point, not at Reagan or Bush administrations but at the Clinton administration.
Smoking Guns
Proof is in a two-hour Al Qaeda recruitment video in which Al Qaeda’s NumberTwo (Ayman Al Zawahiri), Bosnia’s Alija Izetbegovic, various Westerners in ties or uniforms, and Clinton, Chirac and company at the UN are co-stars.
The video, filmed over several days and edited to include additional clips, shows the planning and implementation of the attack on Bosnian Serbs in Vozuca. (Evidence from that battle-of decapitated Serb prisoners whose heads were reportedly sent to Iran and to Izetbegovic-has been turned over to TheHague.) The video shows excited Westerners (those who aren’t shamed) celebrating the victory of the mujahidin, two with an embrace (in the presence of Al Zawahiri), and traces the handing over at the UN of a majority Christian country (by any count) with only a handful of real Muslims to the jihad.
With Western complicity, Al Qaeda was able to acquire the strengthduring the war in Bosnia to become the international threat it is today. Now we know that the 2001 World Trade Center attack was planned in 1996, soon after the victory in Bosnia, and that an earlier plot to blow up American planes and crash one into the CIA headquarters is tied to Al Qaeda fighters in Bosnia and even code named bojinka, from Serbo-Croatian (language of the Bosnian Muslims) boj, meaning “battle” with a feminine suffix, or alternatively translated as “loud noise.”
The links between Al Qaeda associates and incidents in the Bosnian war were known from the beginning in 1992, as were the links between Izetbegovic and international terrorists, and several incidents that were widely publicizedas Serb “massacres” and “atrocities” were known to have been committed instead by Bosnian Muslim special forces, the mujahidin.
Prior to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, one might have argued that the Clinton administration was merely following an established policy of using “Afghan” fighters to do dirty work, like fighting the Russians in the 1980s.But soon afterward, the intent of the jihaders to turn on America was clear, and by 1994 and certainly by 1995 when the Al Mudgahidin video was made, the Clinton administration had no justification for continued support of the Bosnian Muslim government and its mujahidin.
Telling details are in Richard Holbrooke’s To End a War: When Bosnian Serbs asked for a cease-fire in mid-September, 1995, the Clinton administration’s Holbrooke was not ready. A massive offensive had to be set up and executedto grab more Serb land because the Bosnian Muslim government, even with help from thousands of mujahidin, controlled only a small part of the territory in Bosnia.
Holbrooke makes clear that, although the Clinton administrationpretended to be neutral and expected Bosnian Serbs to believe they were, they were anything but neutral and actively supported the Bosnian Muslims, knowing full well their connection to the “Iranians and mujahideen” for thethree years of the war. Holbrooke says, “American intelligence had long known of their existence-they were prominently mentioned, in fact, in my January 1993 memorandum to the incoming Administration-but during the war Washington had not made an issue of their presence since they were helping the otherwise isolated Bosnians to survive.” Holbrooke also notes that Clinton, in a December, 1995, meeting in Paris with Izetbegovic, “focused on the dangers posed to the NATO troops by the Iranians and the mujahideen. ‘Ifany action is taken against our troops,’ [Clinton] said, ‘it could shatterthe whole venture and jeopardize our ability to equip and train your forces.
’” Izetbegovic responded with what Clinton and Holbrooke knew was a lie-thatmost of the foreign fighters “had already left.” Yet, the Clinton administration failed to enforce the Dayton agreement and allowed the mujahidin to stay, creating a permanent destabilization in Bosnia and providing a safe-haven for Al Qaeda. The Clinton administration’s helping Al Qaeda operatives escape the anti-terrorism efforts of other countries, notably Egypt in 1997 to keep Bosnian-based Al Qaeda from attacking U.S. troops in a move to take all of Bosnia, reveals more of Clinton’s duplicity.
While timid Republicans defend Democrats’ accusations against the Bush policies in Iraq with accusations that Clinton didn’t do enough to get bin Laden, they are too uninformed to play hardball. The few mentionings of Clinton’s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo are usually defended with (mumbled) statements such as “that was a different kind of mission” or “that was to prevent ‘ethnic cleansing’ or some such nonsense, and Republicans shut up.
Republicans would do well to become armed with some basic facts about the war in Bosnia.
Open Secrets
The open secrets (to informed politicians, but not the American people) are as follows:
1. The war in Bosnia was not, as presented to the American public, about “ethnic hatred.” In May, 1996, Ambassador Peter Galbraith testified in closed session before angry congresspeople who wanted to know why in hell the Clinton administration lied to Congress and to the American people about collaborating with Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims (and Arab mujahidin). As some congressmen showed their ignorance or malice by trying to justify missteps by repeating misinformation, Galbraith dropped this bombshell, “The most important thing to understand about what happened in the former Yugoslavia was that it was not the resurgence of ancient hatreds; it was something that was organized. And I think the organizers would never have continued it if they’d been met early on with resolute action, and I don’t think it would have required much.”
What Galbraith didn’t say but must have known was that Germany, the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia were at the forefront of the organized effort. The West wanted an oil pipeline through the Balkans and lots of plunder-the UN is now preparing to sell off (cheaply) Serb assets in Kosovo, and Germany is buying (cheaply) the hotels on the Adriatic that were built by all Yugoslavs. Iran and its network of jihader-drug traffickers wanted a foothold in Europe through which to funnel thousands of mujahidin (and lots of dope) for the future jihad (and present drug market) in Western Europe.
2. Bosnia was never a majority “Muslim” country. By even the revisionist counts, Bosnia was (and is) 60% Christian. Prior to the planned break-up of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, there was no Bosnian Muslim ethnic group. They were counted as Serbs, and there was a 10% Muslim population for the entirety of the former Yugoslavia (under Religions). In the late 1980s, many of the young people had no idea that they were anything except Yugoslavs.
Only after teachers were forced to make students identify themselves according to an ethnic group did they learn their “identities.”
Young people who had never seen a Koran or been in a mosque became “Muslims” on the census, but they still shared the Yugoslav culture. Their secular parents also dressed and behaved like other Yugoslavs, at least until Arab mujahidin came into their homes and smashed their liquor bottles. Saudi Arabia paid starving young women 100 deutsche marks per month to wear veils so Bosnia would appear to have some real Muslims.
The Bihac pocket was controlled by moderate Muslims under the elected moderate Fikret Abdic who was pushed out by Izetbegovic. Twenty thousand
Muslims fled the area in August, 1995. They fled from Izetbegovic’s mujahidin-led 5th Corp, not from Serbs. In an AP report, Safet Kantarevic is quoted as saying, “I’m a Muslim and I’m not ashamed of it. But I don’t want to fight Serbs. I don’t want to go to war. I don’t want my children to learn the Koran and Arabic.” A few religious Muslims, a handful of them like Alija Izetbegovic (a leader in the World War II Nazi “Young Muslim” group), only through U.S. and Islamist support, co-opted power and disenfranchised the majority of “Muslims” who were moderate-and with the full intention (and result) of oppressing not only moderate Muslims but also Orthodox and Catholic Christians in Bosnia.
3. Much of the news (from “the most trusted name in news”) the world watched during the war in Bosnia was created in the American PR firms of Ruder& Finn and Hill and Knowlton and paid for by the Bosnian Muslim government with money from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Christianne Amonpour, who shamelessly admits not being objective in her reporting from Bosnia, was referred to by a Bosnian Muslim government official as the Bosnian Muslim’s “artillery.”
The brag to French journalist Jacques Merlino by Ruder & Finn CEO James Harff about his success in hoodwinking American Jewish organizations with the Nazi-concentration camp fraud is only one example. The entire thing started with staged photos from the refugee camp at Trnopolje where a British ITN crew filmed free refugees (one with a deformed ribcage) from inside a barbed-wire-enclosed storage area in August, 1992, making it appear that Muslims were being held behind barbed-wire. Pictures were circulated immediately with “proof” that Serbs were committing Nazi-like atrocities.
4. The war in Bosnia was part of the Islamist Jihad, led by Al Qaeda’s Al Zawahiri at least by September, 1995. Reports of Al Qaeda’s involvement are leaking out in bits and pieces. Most of the new books and profiles include only a sentence or two about Al Qaeda in Bosnia: Al Zawahiri “reportedly operated out of Albania into Bosnia and Kosovo.”
“Bin Laden saw the conflict as a ‘European Afghanistan’, and sent Arab Afghans into Albania and then Bosnia to fight alongside their Muslim brothers against the Serb aggressors.”17 (Someone please explain how Bosnian Serbs, fighting foreign terrorists in their own backyards, were the aggressors.)
“The war in Bosnia, and to a lesser extent the subsequent conflict in Kosovo, became popular jihads that attracted radical Islamists . . . .Some had government sponsorship (specifically that of Iran).”
Daniel Pipes sees as a warning signal in detecting sleeper cells, “Travel to hot spots where Muslims are fighting non-Muslims (Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, Kashmir); . . . .”
Robert Baer reports, “When NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, founded by Prince Salman, they found before-and-after photos of the destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and of the World Trade Center (when it still stood), and of the U.S.S. Cole, as well as files on the use of crop-duster planes and materials for forging official U.S. identity cards.”
Brendan O’Neill notes that the U.S. training of mujahidin in Afghanistan to fight Russians is well known, “Yet America’s role in backing the mujahedin a second time in the early and mid-1990s is seldom mentioned-largely because very few people know about it, and those who do find it prudent to pretend that it never happened. . .
The Bosnia venture appears to have been very important to the rise of mujahedin forces, to the emergence of today’s cross-border Islamic terrorists who think nothing of moving from state to state in the search of outlets for their jihadist mission.” In Israel, at least some are aware of the relationship between the Clinton administration and Islamists. In an article calling for Bush to enlist the help of Orthodox Christian Serbs in fighting terrorism in the Balkans, which now serves as a transit route to the U.S. via Western Europe, Naji N.Najjar writes, “The Saudi regime pushed the Clinton Administration to fuel anti-Western Jihad in the heart of Europe and backed and financed the Islamic rebels in the Balkans. . . . The breakdown of the Serbs and the emergence of the Bosnian Muslim government, backed by Saudi Arabia [and Iran], was one of the causes that galvanized and consolidated Islamic fundamentalism, encouraging it to hit the United States on September 11th 2001.”
5. Osama Bin Laden acquired a Bosnian passport in 1993 and made several trips to Bosnia; several of the 9/11 hijackers have also been linked to Bosnia. I was told about bin Laden’s passport by Bosnian Serbs in 2000, but who could believe them? At that time, I believed CNN’s reporting and thought that all Serbs were monsters (or “bastards,” as Sen. Joe Biden described them). In 2001, a UN medic told me where Bin Laden had acquired the passport (the Bosnian Embassy in Vienna). Yossef Bodansky and Gregory Copley at The International Strategic Studies Association have now documented not only BinLaden’s passport but also those of many other Al Qaeda terrorists who came to Bosnia to fight in the jihad for a country in Europe and established links to some of the 9/11 hijackers.
Wall Street Journal Europe, relying heavily on the work of Yossef Bodansky, says, “For the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Burgaria, Turkey and Bosnia.”
It is inconceivable that in an area covering the square of about 55 miles, crawling with NATO and UN personnel, no one had a clue that bin Laden was a guest of the mujahidin and of Alija Izetbegovic himself. He was seen in Izetbegovic’s waiting room twice by reporter Renate Flottau of Der Spiegel.
Srebrenica-Code word to Legitimize a Fraud
To divert attention from the question of how and why our long-time Serb allies became our enemies and Arab mujahideen our friends, the focus fast-forwards to the July, 1995, Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica.
There is no mention of the facts that the “safe area” was never demilitarized; mujahideen had conducted raids on surrounding Serb villages, slaughtering villagers as deliberate provocations; Gen. Mladic warned Bosnian Muslim forces that the attacks must stop or he would be forced to act to protect civilians; Mladic’s warnings were answered with increased massacres (especially after Izetbegovic’s visit with Clinton in Washington); 5,000 mujahideen deserted in mass toward Tuzla before the Bosnian Serb attack and turned up later on the Red Cross missing list, 3,000 of which voted in the 1996 election; during the “massacre,” Gen. Mladic was sipping tea with British UN envoy Rupert Smith, and the UN was all over the place; the hyperbole regarding numbers of Muslim fighters killed at Srebrenica started a month after the battle when Madeline Albright showed a satellite photo as proof that thousands were massacred near Nova Kasaba (33 bodies were later found there); the pre-battle population of the town is matched by the number of registered survivors combined with the 5,000 fighters who escaped to Tuzla prior to the Serb attack; and in scouring the country-side looking for bodies, only a few hundred, not a few thousand, have been found, and many of those are certainly of Serb victims who were killed in Nasir Oric’s raids on civilian villages.
The response to the facts has been to ignore them and make a hoopla over the “genocide” at Srebrenica, creating a huge story about the “greatest atrocity since World War II” and spending U.S. taxpayer money to build a monumentthat Gregory Copley reports, based on Islamist sources, “was intended to become a shrine for radical Islamists in Europe and site for annual pilgrimages.”
No one seems to have noticed evidence of the Clinton fraud: the monument is engraved with Arabic messages. The Bosnian Muslims speak Serbian (called Serbo-Croatian after World War I; now called Bosniak, Croatian, and Serbian). The Arabic is an insult to all but a few radicals; Bosnian Muslim (long-lost) roots go to the Ottoman Empire, which used the Roman alphabet after Attaturk. Were only Arab mujahidin killed at Srebrenica? Was not one of the killed a Bosnian Muslim?
Chew on this
If the Bosnian Serbs had killed 7,000-8,000 Muslim men and boys (like the one pictured above with the Uzi) as Mladic was meeting with Rupert Smith and the UN was all over the place, those same men and boys would not be killing our troops in Iraq, setting up bombs or sending homicide bombers to kill civilians in Chechnya, the Philippines, Kashmir, Moscow, Kosovo, Israel, Indonesia, and, well, New York City.
Results of Clinton’s Intervention in Bosnia
Balkanization of Yugoslavia, dividing it into ethnically pure states, was done by the international community, the UN and Clinton-led NATO, not the Serbs. In Serbia and the Serb Republic, ethnic groups still live together.
Two hundred thousand members of various non-Serb ethnic groups live in Belgrade alone. Thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled the bombing in Kosovo to go to Serbia, not Albania. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled the fighting in Bosnia to go to Serbia, not to, well, Turkey or Iran.
In the Serb Republic, Bosnian Muslims have returned to reclaim their property, but Serbs are not returning to the Federation if they value their lives. The few Serbs in the Islamist-controlled area of Bocinja were recently told they must convert to Islam if they want live. That fate awaits all Bosnian Serbs when Bosnia becomes “one Bosnia.”
Clinton knew exactly the vision of the Islamist-controlled Bosnian Muslim government from the beginning. Secular Bosnian Muslims are leaving theFederation in droves, and the shotgun wedding of Bosnian Muslims and Croats that know-it-all Richard Holbrooke bullied them into for the purpose of stealing land from Serbs was made in hell from the start. In the Federation, Muslims and Croats still kill each other regularly. Orthodox Christian Serbs, who “occupied” about seventy percent of Bosnia and one-third of Croatia during the war (and for the past several hundred years) are displaced around the world or isolated in the Serb Republic where the economy has been in the toilet for so long that farmers are having to sell land because they can’t buy seeds, and teachers, doctors, and police officers go for months without getting paid.
While France screams about Iraq, Chirac has no qualms about participating inan occupation force in Bosnia that is headed by a dictator, High Representative Paddy Ashdown, who can remove elected officials at will or force them to sign political “confessions.” And the pro-Arab (for money) European Union (aka Germany) once again has troops and control over Bosnian Serbs and is determined to crush a people it failed to crush in both World Wars by, like the UN before it, strangling the economy and making sure the clever Serbs are denied the technology to educate their children to compete in tomorrow’s economy. The civilian infrastructure is still, after eight years, below pre-war levels.
While Democrats and the hypocrites at the UN scream at Bush to “turn Iraq over to the Iraqis,” Bosnia has fallen into an Orwellian hole as Democrats brazenly repeat lies, daring uninformed Republicans to challenge them.
Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) said on Fox News “Bosnia is working well” (March 30, 2003). Informed viewers, after picking themselves up, must have asked, “For whom?” Bosnia worked well only for Al Qaeda, for the jihad, but Democrats don’t have to explain anything as long as they can keep accusations at a high pitch with distractions of the Offensive Defensive. But they fail to consider that sooner or later the American people will learn that not only has their safety and security been compromised by the Clinton administration’s collaboration with Al Qaeda in the Balkans but also their very freedom if we can believe Thomas Jefferson’s, “If a nation, in a state of civilization, expects to be [both] ignorant and free, it expects what never has been and never will be.” The lies have left us ignorant.
While there may be no salvation for the destroyed lives in the Balkans, the public must learn how Al Qaeda became the force that threatens the entire free world. Some mea culpas are in order. News networks can start by showing the Al Mudgahidin video to the public and explaining how and why they misinformed the public. Some politicians, especially those prominent Democrats who are screaming their heads off about Iraq, can start explaining their complicity in the biggest fraud of the past fifty years. The result may be that the word recall takes on a whole new meaning.