Following The Money Creates Bizarre Scenarios

"About 200 Muslims of Pakistani origin were sent from the United Kingdom at the behest of Bill Clinton to train for warfare in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Fundamental jihadists in Pakistan did the training! Christian Orthodox Serbs were the purported boogiemen; more Islamic states were the promise. The dismantling of Yugoslavia's socialist federation was the objective, and western investors would eventually be the winners."

Holy Terrors, Part I

The London bombings rocked western Europe and the world a year ago last Friday. Three suspected bombers were young Brits of Pakistani descent and one was Jamaican-born. They did not live to tell their tales, but what they all had in common was having trained in jihadist, or "holy warrior", camps inside Pakistan.

The 21-year-old who detonated himself on the subway near Aldgate worked in his family's fish 'n chips shop, played cricket and was studying sports medicine - plus he had just returned from Pakistan. The 19-year-old who "planted" himself on the double-decker bus was a former street-tough who turned devoutly religious after visiting Pakistan in 2004. The Jamaican was a member of the secretive JUF, a Pakistani jihad group thought to recruit blacks from the Americas by infiltrating security forces in Canada, the United States and Caribbean states.

But why Pakistan? Why such violent means and ends? The roots of these tragedies lie, oddly, in the U.S. Balkan interventions of the 1990s. About 200 Muslims of Pakistani origin were sent from the United Kingdom at the behest of Bill Clinton to train for warfare in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Fundamental jihadists in Pakistan did the training! Christian Orthodox Serbs were the purported boogiemen; more Islamic states were the promise. The dismantling of Yugoslavia's socialist federation was the objective, and western investors would eventually be the winners.

Among British youth thus radicalized in Pakistan was Omar Sheikh, mastermind of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl's murder there in 2002. After Bosnia, Sheikh (a former student at the London School of Economics) wreaked havoc in India and Afghanistan before opening al-Qaeda's office in Lahore, Pakistan in 2000. At the time of his death, Pearl was there investigating the link between Richard Reid (of Caribbean descent), the hapless "jet shoe bomber" of 2001, and his handlers in Karachi and Lahore. That link was likely the shadowy JUF.

It gets stranger: Omar Sheikh wired Mohammed Atta the $100,000 which financed 9/11, documented by the FBI's financial crimes unit. But the 9/11 Commission of 2004 refused to question Sheikh, imprisoned in Pakistan for Pearl's murder. In fact, the Commission finally declared, "The U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance." I find that statement breathtakingly disingenuous!

... to be continued August 10

Sources for this article include the Madras-based Observer Research Foundation, its convener and distinguished fellow, B. Raman, director of Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and a retired cabinet secretary of India. Also, The Guardian Weekly, UK. Kathryn Albrecht of San Antonio has worked in libraries for over twenty years. Her opinions do not necessarily represent the Mountain Mail.

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