The ties that bind: U.S. intelligence and neo-con links to Balkan groups allied to "Al Qaeda"

January 10, 2007 -- According to Federal law enforcement sources, two influential businessmen -- Turkish Sunni Muslim Fetullahci charismatic leader Fetullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania after being acquitted in Turkey in 2006 of plotting against the secular republic, and Saudi BMI Islamic investment chief investor Yasin Qadi, a major investor in Turkey who was named in October 2001 by President Bush as a Special Designated Global Terrorist -- were both involved with the CIA in the late 1990s in funneling weapons and other support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an Albanian terrorist group operating in the former Yugoslavia. The KLA was allied with the Clinton administration and supported by leading neo-cons such as Richard Perle, whose lobbying firm, International Advisors, Inc., counts Turkey as its major client. Gulen's books have been translated into Albanian.

BMI's founder, Soliman Biheiri, also helped to start PTech, a Braintree, Massachusetts-based firm that had active software contracts with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Pentagon on 9/11. PTech's offices were raided by Federal authorities in December 2002 after it came under suspicion for terrorist financing. Qadi is suspected of using a series of northern Virginia-based businesses and charities to fund "Al Qaeda" activities in Bosnia. Osama Bin Laden was granted a special passport by the Bosnian government in 1993.

The ties that bind: U.S. intelligence and neo-con links to Balkan groups allied to "Al Qaeda."

Qadi was reportedly a business partner of Turkish businessman Cuneyd Zapsu, an adviser to the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Reconciliation Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP).

Perle was also a major player in the Bosnia Defense Fund, which acted as a financial liaison to funnel money between Muslim nations and the government of Bosnia. An adviser for the now-defunct Riggs Bank, which handled the finances for the Bosnia Defense Fund and its accounts at the Bosnian Central Bank in Sarajevo, claimed that Perle was not alarmed when he was told that some of the Bosnian Defense Fund money was bleeding over into the hands of people connected with terrorism in Bosnia. Perle's response to the concern of the adviser was reportedly, "Just make it fucking happen."