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Hypocrisy? Lies? Deceit?  or business as usual for the USA and Terrorist
Ayatollahs.!

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Official Dutch report says that Pentagon broke UN embargo

Richard Norton-Taylor
Guardian

Monday April 22, 2002


US intelligence agencies secretly broke a UN arms embargo during the
1991-1995 war in Croatia by channelling arms through Islamist jihad groups
that Washington is now hunting down across Europe and Asia, according to
evidence from the Netherlands.

The evidence surfaced in a hitherto unnoticed section of the official Dutch
report into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre that led to the fall of the Dutch
government and the resignation last week of its army chief.

The Dutch report reveals how the Pentagon formed a secret alliance with
Islamist groups in an Iran-Contra-style operation.

US, Turkish and Iranian intelligence groups worked with the Islamists in
what the Dutch report calls the "Croatian pipeline". Arms bought by Iran and
Turkey and financed by Saudi Arabia were flown into Croatia initially by the
official Iranian airline, Iran Air, and later in a fleet of black C-130
Hercules aircraft.

The report says that mojahedin fighters were also flown in, and that the US
was "very closely involved" in the operation which was in flagrant breach of
the embargo. British secret services obtained documents proving that Iran
also arranged deliveries of arms directly to Bosnia, it says.

The operation was promoted by the Pentagon, rather than the CIA, which was
cautious about using Islamist groups as a conduit for arms, and about
breaching the embargo. When the CIA tried to place its own people on the
ground in Bosnia, the agents were threatened by the mojahedin fighters and
the Iranians who were training them.

The UN relied on American intelligence to monitor the embargo, a dependency
which allowed Washington to manipulate it at will.

Last month, the US seized a number of Muslims in Bosnia whom it claimed had
links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. They were arrested in
defiance of the Bosnian courts.

The contents of the section of the Dutch report entitled Intelligence and
the War in Bosnia, 1992-1995, are revealed in an article in today's Guardian
by Richard Aldrich, professor of politics at the university of Nottingham
and a leading expert on intelligence operations.

He also reveals that the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were
busy arming the Bosnian Serbs. Mossad, Israel's secret service, was
particularly active, concluding a substantial arms deal with the Bosnian
Serbs at Pale in return for the safe passage of the Jewish population of
Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, Prof Aldrich says.

"Subsequently, the remaining population who could not escape was perplexed
to find that unexploded mortar bombs landing in Sarajevo sometimes had
markings in Hebrew," he writes.

Both the UN and the Dutch government distanced themselves from the secret
services, depriving them of a crucial tool during the peacekeeping
operations in Bosnia.

The operation also raises the increasingly urgent issue of how to monitor
intelligence agencies, Prof Aldrich says.

"While oversight and accountability is developing on a national basis, this
is not remotely matched by international cooperation [between the agencies