Importing Terrorism
By by William Norman Grigg
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Source: The New American, April 7, 2003
The U.S. government has thrown open our borders to potential Iraqi terrorists disguised as refugees. |
On
the eve of war with Iraq, federal agents swept through the country in
pursuit of suspected Iraqi and al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” — small groups
of saboteurs waiting orders to commit terrorist acts.
According
to the March 5th Los Angeles Times, U.S. intelligence officials had
“credible information” that Iraqi terrorist cells had been dispatched
around the globe. “The concern is not that there is a credible Iraqi
military threat,” commented one official. “We are concerned about the
increased likelihood of terrorist attacks.”
NBC News reported on
March 6th: “The FBI is conducting an intensive hunt for potential
‘sleeper cells’ of Iraqi agents planted to strike in the event of
war.... At least 70 Iraqi nationals are under active surveillance … and
agents have spread out to interview thousands of Iraqi men in an
attempt to track down hundreds who came to the United States and
disappeared.”
This sweep actually began in January, as FBI
agents fanned out to interrogate an estimated 50,000 Iraqis residing in
the United States. Aziz al-Taee, chairman of the Iraqi-American
Council, reported that the FBI was “asking if anybody knows someone who
worked with Saddam. They asked about a list of some who have vanished.
They are asking about terrorist cells.”
Many or even most of the
estimated 300,000 Iraqi-Americans and resident aliens are law-abiding
people who fled Saddam’s brutal reign, which UN sanctions have
exacerbated by targeting the civilian population while leaving the
dictator unmolested. It is reasonable to believe, however, that
Saddam’s intelligence apparatus seeded that population with terrorists
as a way of retaliating against the U.S., should the Gulf War resume.
In
fact, we know for certain that the Iraqi refugee population contains
highly trained assets of the Iraqi military, including the vaunted
Republican Guard. We know this because Washington brought them here.
At
the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, the first Bush administration
began a program, which the Clinton administration continued, to
resettle thousands of Iraqi POWs in the United States at taxpayer
expense. “According to the State Department, the former prisoners were
conscripted into the Iraqi Army against their will and have now been
classified by international agencies [meaning the UN] as refugees who
face persecution by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime if they
return home,” reported the August 25, 1993 Washington Post.
When
news leaked of the $70 million resettlement effort, a bipartisan group
of 75 congressmen sent a letter of protest to the White House. “We find
it disturbing that American taxpayers must fund the travel of former
Iraqi soldiers (who took up arms against our own soldiers) to the
U.S.,” declared the letter. “Ironically, we provide the [Iraqi POWs]
with welfare services while asking our own veterans and service
personnel to bear the burdens of deficit reduction.”
Alluding to
propaganda leaflets used to encourage Iraqi soldiers to surrender,
Congressman Clifford Stearns (R-Fla.) wryly commented: “When we dropped
those leaflets on the Republican Guard, we did not include a plane
ticket to Middle America and welfare entitlement benefits. When those
guys realized the war was lost, they changed into civilian clothes and
surrendered, and now we’re rolling out the red carpet.”
Hitting
up taxpayers to subsidize former Iraqi troops is outrageous. Bilking
taxpayers to support potential Iraqi terrorist agents is potentially
suicidal — and Saddam’s intention to infiltrate terrorists into this
country was well known more than a decade ago. The Washington Post
reported on January 28, 1991 that, according to “highly classified U.S.
intelligence reports,” Saddam Hussein had “dispatched more than 100
terrorists, both experienced and novice, to try to infiltrate the
United States.” Some might contend that the presence of Iraqi
“sleepers” in our nation justifies a “preemptive” war with Iraq. But if
defending our country is the object, our efforts should focus on
rolling up terrorist networks here, beginning with Iraqi suspects
brought here by our own government.
Iraq’s OKC Connection?
Among
the dubious, taxpayer-supported Iraqi refugees was Hussain Al-Hussaini,
one of several hundred former Iraqi soldiers — including Republican
Guard cadres — who took up residence in Oklahoma. Several eyewitnesses
to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing placed Al-Hussaini in the company of
executed terrorist Timothy McVeigh on the morning of that atrocity (see
“OKC’s Mideast Connection” in our September 14, 1998 issue).
While
Al-Hussaini insists that he was an innocent refugee seeking asylum from
Saddam’s vicious regime, he admitted in an interview with the Oklahoma
Gazette that he had belonged to the elite Republican Guard before
emigrating in 1992. (According to one intelligence report, Al-Hussaini
served in the Guard’s Hammurabi Division, the same division that
arch-terrorist Ramzi Yousef also reportedly served in. Yousef came to
the U.S. around the same time in 1992 to mastermind the first World
Trade Center bombing.) After working at Boston’s Logan airport,
Al-Hussaini moved to Oklahoma City, where he lived with several other
Iraqi soldiers. One of his OKC roommates, Ali Al-Sidii, confirmed in a
1998 interview with this magazine’s William F. Jasper that he
(Al-Sidii) had served with Al-Hussaini in Saddam’s army during Desert
Storm.
Al-Hussaini, Al-Sidii, and other young Iraqi men worked
for, and lived in houses owned by, Dr. Samir Sharif Khalil, a convicted
felon who served prison time for insurance fraud and was investigated
by federal authorities as far back as the 1970s because of alleged ties
to terrorists. It’s possible that Al-Hussaini defected legitimately.
But U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged that Saddam may have
planted terrorists in U.S.-supported resistance groups.
The
March 11, 1998 New York Times reported: “Six Iraqis who worked in
concert with the CIA in failed plots against Saddam Hussein have been
declared threats to U.S. national security in a court ruling so secret
that their lawyers cannot read it.” That ruling, handed down by a
federal immigration judge, reported the Times, described the Iraqis as
“a danger to the national security of the United States” based on
secret evidence provided by FBI agents.
One of the Iraqis, Ali
Yasin Mohammed Karim, worked with the CIA-created Iraqi National
Congress in northern Iraq. “We came to this land legally, on account of
the U.S. government, and they put us in jail,” protested Karim. Once
again, in the murky netherworld of CIA-sponsored “resistance” groups,
it’s difficult to distinguish friend from foe. But one clear-cut case
is that of Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing. Yousef claimed to be a member of an anti-Saddam
resistance group when he entered the United States on an Iraqi passport
in 1992.
Acting on behalf of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network,
Yousef devised a plan called “Operation Bojinka,” which called for
simultaneously bombing 11 U.S. civilian airliners, and using an
airplane in a suicide bombing attack on CIA Headquarters. In the
aftermath of 9-11, the Filipino police and intelligence officials who
had broken up the “Bojinka” plot — and shared their intelligence with
the FBI — described it as the first draft of the Black Tuesday attack.
(See “Could We Have Prevented the Attacks?” in our November 5, 2001
issue.)
Bin Laden’s Balkan Buddies
Intriguingly, the
term “Bojinka,” meaning “loud bang,” is neither Arabic nor Tagalog (a
Filipino dialect), as one might suspect. Instead, it is a
Serbo-Croatian term with Turkish roots — a small but potentially
significant connecting link to the Balkans, a region now infested with
radical Muslim terrorist cells loyal to both Osama bin Laden and
revolutionary Iran. Following the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the
Serbian province of Kosovo was turned into a UN-supervised radical
Muslim enclave under the rule of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army
(KLA). In February 1998, Robert Gelbard, the Clinton administration’s
special envoy for Kosovo, told Agence France Presse that the KLA “is,
without any questions, a terrorist group.”
Ralf Mutschke,
assistant director for Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence Directorate,
pointed out in December 2000 congressional testimony: “In 1998, the
U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization,
indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the
international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and
individuals, among them allegedly Osama bin Laden.” Mutschke pointed
out that bin Laden lent the KLA one of his military commanders, who led
“an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict.”
On August 24,
1998, shortly after U.S. cruise missiles struck purported bin Laden
assets in Sudan and Afghanistan, the terror chieftain’s World Islamic
Front (WIF) issued a communiqué urging its followers to “direct your
attacks to the American army and her allies, the infidels.” The KLA was
among the al-Qaeda-connected groups to which that directive was issued.
Nonetheless, in late 1998, the Clinton administration repealed its
description of the KLA as a terrorist group, and began to supply it
with assistance and training via the CIA.
By any definition, the
KLA must be considered one of the most loathsome terrorist groups in
existence. In the March 28, 1999 New York Times, Balkans correspondent
Chris Hedges pointed out that the group’s leadership echelons were
occupied by “diehard Marxist-Leninists (who were bankrolled in the old
days by the Stalinist dictatorship next door in Albania)” as well as
descendants of World War II-era fascist militias.
Writing in the
May-June 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs, Hedges pointed out that the
KLA’s ideology displays “hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of
communism on the other,” and its leadership includes the heirs and
descendants of “the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the
Nazis … [who] took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of
[Kosovo’s] few hundred Jews during the Holocaust.”
While bin
Laden and the CIA collaborated to train the KLA’s military personnel,
the group’s chief source of revenue was the international heroin trade.
In 1994, when the KLA was an embryonic menace, France’s Observatire
Geopolitique Des Drogues (a counter-narcotics bureau working with the
European Commission) reported that “heroin shipment and marketing
networks are taking root among ethnic Albanian communities in Albania,
Macedonia, and the Kosovo province of Serbia, in order to finance large
purchases of weapons destined … for the brewing war in Kosovo.”
Pascal
Auchlin of Switzerland’s National Center for Scientific Research
corroborated that analysis: “Here and in a half-dozen other Western
countries, there is now an ant’s trail of individual drug traffickers
that leads right to Kosovo.”
The Balkan connection reaches into
Albanian expatriate communities in the United States. According to an
essay published by criminologist Gus Xhudo in the Spring 1996 issue of
Transnational Organized Crime, Albanian mobsters have been involved in
“drug and refugee smuggling, arms trafficking, contract killing,
kidnaping, false visa forgery, and burglary.” Between 1985 and 1995,
wrote Xhudo, “authorities estimated that 10 million U.S. dollars in
cash and merchandise had been stolen from some 300 supermarkets, ATM
machines, jewelry stores, and restaurants” by Albanian gangsters, a
healthy cut of which was sent to fund the KLA’s terror campaign.
During
the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, thousands of refugees from Kosovo
arrived in the United States. At the same time, thousands of Kosovo
Albanians living in U.S. cities enlisted in the KLA. The April 20, 1999
Washington Times reported that the call to enlist in the KLA “is
considered obligatory for all men ages 18 to 55. Only those who are
sick or who can contribute financially to the KLA are considered
exempt.” Albanian émigrés from Philadelphia, Detroit, New York,
Chicago, and other U.S. cities repaired to the KLA banner, joining
thousands more from Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other European
nations.
Little attention was paid to this now largely forgotten
display of the KLA’s potential strength as an al-Qaeda fifth column
within the United States. Immediately following 9-11, intelligence
analyst Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War
on America, told The New American that the KLA and its allies in the
Albanian Mafia compose a vital part of bin Laden’s terrorist apparatus
within the United States.
“The role of the Albanian Mafia, which
is tightly connected to the KLA, is laundering money, providing
technology, safe houses, and other support to terrorists within this
country,” Bodansky explained to The New American. “This isn’t to say
that the Albanians themselves would carry out the actual terrorist
operations. But there are undoubtedly ‘sleeper’ agents within the
Albanian networks, and they can rely upon those networks to provide
them with support. In any case, a serious investigation of the Albanian
mob isn’t going to happen, because they’re ‘our boys’ — they’re
protected.”
Courting Disaster
Seeking to justify
aggressive war against Iraq, President Bush and his supporters insist
that action must be taken to preempt the potential threat posed by
Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction.” The alternative, we are
constantly reminded, could be a biological, chemical, or even nuclear
terrorist strike on an American city.
Introducing the doctrine
of military “preemption” during a June 1, 2002 West Point address,
President Bush stated: “We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt
his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” This
might include action to uproot terrorist networks “in 60 or more
countries,” predicted the president — beginning, of course, with Iraq.
This
will certainly keep our troops busy overseas. Among them will be tens
or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of reservists called up from the
ranks of state and local law enforcement personnel, who might otherwise
be helping to expose and shut down terrorist networks planted in this
country with the invaluable help of Washington, D.C. If, God forbid,
another incident of mass terrorism decimates an American city, it will
likely be the handiwork of enemies brought within our gates — and
perversely protected — by our own government.
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