Albanian terror and the Fort Dix Six: Check your ears for cider
By John David Powell (05/11/07)
As of this writing, we know that on May 7, federal authorities busted the so-called Fort Dix Six before the alleged Muslim terrorists launched their murderous attack on the military installation. Four of the six are ethnic Albanians. Three of the four are brothers.
And the fourth, according to authorities, was a sniper in Kosovo.
The arrests came after several months of surveillance, according to FBI director Robert Mueller. The feds became interested in the men after viewing a video of ten men shooting rifles at a remote Pennsylvania firing range while shouting about jihad. The FBI knows the identity of the other four, but doesn’t believe they pose a threat.
Mueller told reporters the FBI chose to arrest the six after they bragged about buying more weapons, including a Yugoslavian SKS assault rifle.
Geometry teaches that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If the charges against the Fort Dix Six stick, then that line leads from ethnic Albanians in the U.S. directly to their terrorist counterparts in Albania and Kosovo.
One does not need a stretch of the imagination to draw the line. Law enforcement agencies in this country and in Europe have known for decades about the Albanian contributions to international terrorism. And sometimes, the good guys used the bad guys to promote shared political agendas, as happened in Serbia and Kosovo.
Nearly twenty years ago, The New York Times ran a story about the rising ethnic strife in Yugoslavia. The Nov. 1, 1987, story recounted how an ethnic Albanian soldier in the Yugoslav army killed four Slavic soldiers as they slept in their bunks. The army later found hundreds of ethnic Albanian cells within its ranks, according to the story.
The story also told of ethnic Albanians attacking Orthodox churches, poisoning wells, and burning crops.
The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the U.S. State Department no longer lists among the world’s terrorist organizations, was an ethnic Albanian guerilla group that led the battle for Kosovo’s secession from Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. The Clinton administration turned a blind eye to their activities designed to lure the Serbian government into armed conflict, thereby forcing the West to jump in under the pretext of preventing the slaughter of Muslims by Serbian Christians.
In early April of 1999, American officials and KLA leaders held secret talks about supplying the terrorists with heavy weapons and other support, according to the April 26, 1999, issue of U.S. News & World Report. Defense Secretary William Cohen later told Republican senators the KLA was no “choirboy circle,” according to the magazine.
Stories about the Balkan Connection have been around for more than twenty years. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 9, 1985, on heroin trafficking by a loosely organized group of ethnic Albanians centered in New York. U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials claimed the Balkan Connection moved as much as forty percent of the U.S. heroin supply, according to the WSJ.
The Observatire Geopolitique Des Drogues, a Paris-based narcotics-monitoring group, released a report in June 1994 that claimed Albanian groups in Kosovo were trading heroin for weapons for use in a brewing conflict. On June 9, 1998, Agence France-Presse reported that Italian police staged a nation-wide anti-drug operation and arrested a group of ethnic Albanians smuggling arms back to Kosovo to use in their battle against the Serbs.
Independence was not the only goal of the KLA and the drug traffickers, according to an unnamed Italian Special Operations Section source quoted in the Oct. 15, 1998, edition of Milan’s Corriere della Sera. “On the basis of phone calls that we have intercepted, we have discovered that the drugs are not only a source of wealth, but also a tool in the struggle to weaken Christendom,” the source said.
On March 24, 1999, just before the start of NATO’s air campaign against Serbia, The Times of London reported that Europol, the European police authority, was preparing a report for interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs.
According to The Washington Times of June 4, 1999, a secret intelligence report by NATO’s Office of Security said the KLA had received smuggled weapons paid for by money raised through the sale of drugs and sex. The 24-page report apparently included the United States among five countries that believed the KLA participated with an organized crime network to smuggle heroin into Western Europe and the U.S.
Jump now to Dec. 9, 2006. Serbian television reported that the director of the government’s media relations office asked the UN special envoy to Kosovo to condemn ethnic Albanian separatists and their bombing of the Zvecan-Kosovo Polje rail line. A week later, a Montenegrin newspaper reported that the FBI and the Albanian special prosecutor’s office issued wanted circulars for a terrorist group suspected of transporting 170 kilograms of radioactive material, enough to make a dirty bomb, to Albania from Montenegro.
On Jan. 12 of this year, a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle launched a rocket attack on the U.S. embassy in Athens. An embassy spokesperson said the war in Iraq and other conflicts, such as those in Kosovo, served as catalysts for the attack. And, the rocket launcher, according to investigators, almost certainly came from the Balkans or Albania.
Inter Pres Service reported in February on a study published by the International Strategic Studies Association that suggests a link between the KLA and the Revolutionary Struggle. It also predicts an increase in anti-U.S. activity in Greece led by proponents of an independent Kosovo.
The Fort Dix Six may be home-grown terrorists with no connection to any organized group, as the FBI says. It just may be a coincidence that four of them are ethnic Albanians and that one of them was a sniper in Kosovo. But then, a line comes to mind from the movie “Guys and Dolls,” the one where Sky Masterson says:
“One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
John David Powell is an award-winning writer and Internet columnist, university lecturer, and contributor to the Christian History Project.
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