Importing terrorism: 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 AI-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, Al 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 communique 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 emigres 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.