9-11: the Balkans & prior warning. (Insider Report).

Saudi nationals Tareq and Yaser al-Jahini are among the 345 people sought by the FBI in connection with Black Tuesday. According to the November 11th Portland Oregonian, Tareq came under FBI scrutiny more than three years before the 9-11 atrocity. At the time, he was studying aircraft maintenance at Portland Community College, with the supposed objective of becoming a mechanic at Saudi Arabian Airlines. "But as FBI agents traced his movements ... they found some connections that suggested other possible motives for his interest in aviation," notes the paper.

Tareq's brother Yaser was among the Muslim mujahedin fighters who "visited Bosnia in the early 1990s to help local Muslims wage war on the Serbs," continues the Oregonian. "The government also thinks he told a known al-Qaeda operative he would identify potential terrorism targets while in the Southwest...." Tareq was also connected to people accused of terrorist acts in the Middle East. In a memo written in early 2001, Phoenix FBI counter-terrorism agent Kenneth Williams connected the al-Jahini brothers with "nine other instances of Middle Eastern students enrolled in aviation courses" in America. One Muslim aviation security student "had tried to enter a commercial airline cockpit in 1999, later saying he thought it was a bathroom," relates the paper.

According to an intelligence summary prepared by congressional researcher Eleanor Hill, Agent Williams concluded that "Islamic extremists, studying everything from aviation security to flying, could be learning how to hijack or destroy aircraft and to evade airport security." His detailed warnings, tragically, were ignored.

FBI agents in Pakistan are pulling on another Balkans-connected al-Qaeda thread trying to locate Osama bin Laden. Dr. Amer Aziz, a British-educated Pakistani physician, "was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents near his home ... and handed over to U.S. interrogators seeking information on surviving 'inner circle' members of the terrorist network's command structure," reported the November 15th Herald of London. Dr. Aziz is believed to be the physician who treated bin Laden's kidney ailment two years ago, and the FBI suspects he treated the terrorist for bomb splinters after he fled from Afghanistan last December.

During the mid-1990s, reports the Herald, Dr. Aziz "volunteered to help Muslims in Kosovo," where the bin Laden-supported narco-Marxist Kosovo Liberation Army was seeking to tear away that Serbian province as part of a scheme to create a "Greater Albania." With the help of the UN, NATO, and the Clinton administration, bin Laden's Balkan allies now control both Kosovo and large parts of Bosnia -- a handy platform for launching terrorist assaults on Europe.