THE US PKK COORDINATOR AND LOCKHEED MARTIN

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Ill be watching you
~ The Police, Every Breath You Take.

It looks like Lockheed Martin is going to guarantee the failure of the PKK ceasefire, from the Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

The Pentagon has notified Congress it plans to allow Turkey to buy 30 F-16 fighter jets and related equipment, a $2.9 billion deal that would provide new work for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co.’s Fort Worth assembly plant.

An official of the Turkish Air Force, which already flies some 200 older model F-16s, said recently that the country was looking to buy new F-16s as replacements for even older planes in its arsenal.

Congress has 15 days to object to the sale. If it does not, the deal can be consummated without further consultation.

Joe Stout, Lockheed spokesman said in a prepared statement that the company was pleased with the announcement by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

“Turkey has been a valued customer for the F-16 and other Lockheed Martin products for many years, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to continue that relationship," Stout said.

The reason I know that Lockheed Martin will guarantee the failure of the ceasefire, even before it began, can be explained in three little words: Conflict of Interest. You see, Lockheed Martin has an insider on its board of directors, and that insider is none other than the new US PKK coordinator, Joseph Ralston, also of The Cohen Group. Don't believe me? Check Lockheed Martin's Board of Director's page yourself. There's his smiling face! You can even click on his name to get a bio, and if you do, you'll see that he's listed as vice-chairman of The Cohen Group.

It's such a small world, isn't it?

Lockheed Martin happens to be an ATC Golden Horn member, too. If anyone out there is thinking about becoming a Golden Horn member so that you can hobnob in high style with all the other corporate mass murderers, you'd better be prepared to dish out $11,000 annually for the privilege. After all, it don't come cheap to count yourself among the movers and shakers of the Deep State.

With this in mind, you should ask yourself what, exactly, General Ralston is coordinating. We all know the real deal, don't we? We all know who have been the targets of those F-16's in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Kevin McKiernan recorded it for us, back in 1999:

Since 1980 the United States has sold or given Turkey--a NATO ally--$15 billion worth of weapons. In the last decade the Turkish army has leveled, burned, or forcibly evacuated more than 3,000 Kurdish villages. That is roughly three-quarters the number of Kurdish settlements destroyed in Iraq in the 1980s during Saddam Hussein's infamous "Anfal" campaign, when the West was arming Iraq and turning a blind eye to widespread human rights violations.

Most of the destruction in Turkey took place between 1992 and 1995, during the Clinton administration's first term. In 1995 the administration acknowledged that American arms had been used by the Turkish government in domestic military operations "during which human rights abuses have occurred." In a report ordered by Congress, the State Department admitted that the abuses included the use of U.S. Cobra helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and F-16 fighter bombers. In some instances, critics say, entire Kurdish villages were obliterated from the air.

The attitude of the genociders in Corporate America, as well as those in Ankara, is that all this joy should be spread around. As a result, the Ankara regime spread the joy into South Kurdistan, with the collusion of coalition forces. From John Pilger, 2002:

A long-running insurrection by Turkey's Kurdish population is regarded by Washington as a threat to the "stability" of Turkey's "democracy" that is a front for its military which is among the world's worst violators of human rights. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish Kurds have been displaced and an estimated 30,000 killed. Turkey, unlike Iraq, is "our friend".

In 1995 and 1997, as many as 50,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and fighter aircraft, occupied what the West called "Kurdish safe havens".

They terrorised Kurdish villages and murdered civilians. In December 2000, they were back, committing the atrocities that the Turkish military commits with immunity against its own Kurdish population.

For joining the US "coalition" against Iraq, the Turkish regime is to be rewarded with a bribe worth $6billion. Turkey's invasions are rarely reported in Britain. So great is the collusion of the Blair government that, virtually unknown to Parliament and the British public, the RAF and the Americans have, from time to time, deliberately suspended their "humanitarian" patrols to allow the Turks to get on with killing Kurds in Iraq.

In March last year, RAF pilots patrolling the "no fly zone" in Kurdish Iraq publicly protested for the first time about their enforced complicity in the Turkish campaign. The pilots complained that they were frequently ordered to return to their base in Turkey to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the very people they were meant to be "protecting".

Those RAF pilots knew the real deal, too. So did those researchers who compiled a report on US arms sales to Turkey under the Clinton administration, part of which specifically addressed the repression and atrocities of the occupation and Turkey's response to the last unilateral ceasefire. But they also found that the old cash cow of the American corporate world was milked to provide F-16's free of charge to the Ankara regime. The cash cow I refer to is, of course, the American taxpayer:

Finding 3 - The vast majority of U.S. arms transfers to Turkey have been subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. In many cases, these taxpayer funds are supporting military production and employment in Turkey, not in the United States. Of the $10.5 billion in U.S. weaponry delivered to Turkey since the outbreak of the war with the PKK in 1984, 77% of the value of those shipments - $8 billion in all - has been directly or indirectly financed by grants and subsidized loans provided by the U.S. government. Many of the largest deals - such as Lockheed Martin's sale of 240 F-16s to the Turkish air force and the FMC Corporation's provision of 1,698 armored vehicles to the Turkish army - involve coproduction and offset provisions which steer investments, jobs, and production to Turkey as a condition of the sale. For example, Turkey's F-16 assembly plant in Ankara - a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) - employs 2,000 production workers, almost entirely paid for with U.S. tax dollars.

[ . . . ]

Recommendation 2 - All future U.S. arms sales to Turkey - from M-16 rifles to F-16 combat aircraft - should be conditioned on concrete improvements in human rights and democratization (as specified above) and efforts to negotiate peaceful settlements to the Cyprus dispute and Turkey's war against the Kurdish resistance in the southeast. Linking U.S. arms sales to peace and democratization may cause friction with the Turkish government in the short-term, but it offers the best hope of building a stable, long-term relationship between the United States and Turkey that addresses the best interests of the people of both nations.

I guess you could say that is isn't much fun being the skunk at the garden party, but with all of this, and with all the statements we've heard from the Ankara regime, things don't bode well for the future. On the positive side, it's clear that failure will not be the result of a lack of effort from the Kurdish side. We have the statements and the demands available for worldwide consumption, and PKK's demands for ceasefire (from August, 2006) are completely in line with Turkey's EU accession criteria.

In the meantime, we're watching you, Deep State.



ITEM OF INTEREST: If you want to get a general heads' up on Erdogan's visit with Bush tomorrow, check out a related article in The Economist, titled, "Turkey, America and Europe: The awkward partners." It notes that Ralston's role as PKK coordinator remains "vague," but it doesn't seem that vague to me. He seems to be moving that F-16 deal right along.