DEEP STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE

"On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, Judge Reggie Walton made a decision and ruled on my case. Under his ruling, I, an American citizen, am not entitled to pursue my 1st and 5th Amendment rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States. The vague reasoning cited, without any explanation, is to protect 'certain diplomatic relations for national security.'"
~ Sibel Edmonds.

Earlier this week, Sibel Edmonds' organization, the National Security Whistleblower's Coalition, issued a press release describing another FBI agent's corroboration of Edmonds' own claims "of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities."

If you are a Kurd from Turkey, you won't need more corroboration of Ms. Edmonds allegations; history alone will testify to the veracity of her story, and by "history" I mean Susurluk.


For those who don't know--or don't remember--the Susurluk incident occured on November 3, 1996, when a Mercedes-Benz crashed into a truck on a highway in Susurluk, Turkey. All but one of the passengers in the Mercedes died at the scene, but they were no ordinary passengers. Sedat Bucak, the only survivor, was a Kurdish feudal landlord in the pay of the Turkish state, with thousands of village guards under his command, as well as being a former True Path Party (DYP) Member of Parliament. Coincidentally, Tansu Ciller was not only the leader of DYP at the time, but also Turkey's Prime Minister.

But Sedat Bucak was a relative small fry. The stunning discovery in the crushed Mercedes, and the thing that turned a traffic accident into a national scandal, was the body of Abdullah Catli, in the car with his former beauty queen-turned-Turkish mafia hitwoman mistress, a former Istanbul police chief and the erstwhile DYP parliamentarian, Bucak. Abdullah Catli was on the lam from police--from Interpol, to be exact--had been a convicted international drug-trafficker, and was head of the notorious Turkish fascist organization, the Gray Wolves. The Susurluk Affair briefly pulled back the curtain to reveal Turkish government and military involvement with the international drug trade and other Turkish mafia activities, Gladio operations, the dirty war in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, and numerous extrajudicial murders. From Covert Action Quarterly:

"It all started in early 1992," believes Ismet Berkan, senior Ankara correspondent for the national daily Radikal. "That year, the Turkish armed forces high command underwent a dramatic shift in its counterinsurgency strategy in the combat against [the] rebel Kurdish guerrilla PKK."

So began the Dirty War against the Kurdish people in Turkey's long-repressed "Southeast," which resulted in the forced removal of millions of Kurds from their traditional lands, the destruction of their homes, villages, livestock, and real property. Kurdish politicians, activists, journalists, and ordinary people were subjected to detention and arrest, always accompanied by horrific acts of torture on the part of Turkish security forces, as well as the "disappearance" or extrajudicial murder of thousands of others. It was Turkish state assassins, like Abdullah Catli, who carried out the "disappearances" and murders, and it was employees of the American military and US State Department, like Douglas Dickerson and Marc Grossman, who armed them.


Ankara enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Washington in what has become knows as the "Dirty War," by supplying the weapons and military training that facilitated the gross human rights abuses perpetrated against Kurds by Turkish security forces. Although many Americans seem to welcome a Democratic-dominated Congress after seven years of the Bush administration, it was the Clinton administration that hypocritically called for arms control even as it assisted with the slaughter of Kurds in Southeast Turkey, as reported by Frida Berrigan of the Arms Control Resource Center of the World Policy Institute, in 2000:

During the first five years of the Clinton administration the U.S. sold nearly $5 billion worth of weaponry to Turkey, with more than $1 billion in 1997 alone. Turkey has used these weapons in an aggressive and disproportionately armed civil war against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, which is seeking recognition for Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish minority.

Berrigan goes on to quote a 1995 Human Rights Watch report, "Weapons Transfers and Violations of the Laws of War in Turkey," a damning indictment of the severe abuses of Turkish security forces with the assistance of US arms sales:

This report documents the Turkish security forces' violations of the laws of war and of human rights, and their reliance on U.S. and NATO-supplied weapons in doing so. Drawing on investigations of twenty-nine incidents that occurred between 1992 and 1995, the report links specific weapons systems to individual incidents of Turkish violations. Supplemented by interviews with former Turkish soldiers, U.S. officials and defense experts, the report concludes that U.S. weapons, as well as those supplied by other NATO members, are regularly used by Turkey to commit severe human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war in the southeast.

The most egregious examples of Turkey's reliance on U.S. weaponry in committing abuses are its use of U.S.-supplied fighter-bombers to attack civilian villages and its use of U.S.-supplied helicopters in support of a wide range of abusive practices, including the punitive destruction of villages, extrajudicial executions, torture, and indiscriminate fire.

In spite of the extensive documentation contained in the 1995 HRW report, business was still booming in 1999, as a joint report of the World Policy Insitute and the Federation of American Scientists indicated.

In addition to violations of the laws of war, US-backing of the Turkish government's Dirty War against the Kurds facilitated Turkey's role in the international drug trade, as Kendal Nezan reported in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998:

After the Gulf War in 1991, Turkey found itself deprived of the all-important Iraqi market and, since it lacked significant oil reserves of its own, it decided to make up for the loss by turning more massively to drugs. The trafficking increased in intensity with the arrival of the "hawks" in power, after the death in suspicious circumstances of President Turgut Özal in April 1993. According to the minister of interior, the war in Kurdistan had cost the Turkish exchequer upwards of $12.5 billion (7). Whereas, according to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 (8).

Here again, the principal players in the Susurluk Affair were involved; however, it's quite likely that they were not alone, but had American counterparts, as mentioned in the Vanity Fair story about Sibel Edmonds:

In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.

It is here that we pick up the threads of Susurluk that reach deeply into the bureaucratic and lobbyist milieu of Washington DC.

In 2004, in an interview with Christopher Deliso, former FBI translator and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds spoke of her encounter with Douglas and Melek Can Dickerson and their attempts to recruit her into the American Turkish Council. Douglas Dickerson was an US Air Force officer who had been stationed in Turkey sometime between 1991 and 1995, where he met and married MIT agent Melek Can Dickerson. Major Dickerson was in charge of weapons procurement for, among other countries, Turkey.

In 2006 more information surfaced on Dickerson, who "worked in the embassy's military attaché office and was responsible for logistics matters with the Turkish military." Furthermore:

In 1996, the Defense Department's Inspector General's office launched an investigation of a U.S. military officer at the Ankara embassy who was caught receiving a bribe from MIT agents. Shortly after the investigation started, Dickerson was transferred to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany.

Turkish MIT was heavily involved with the people who died in the car crash in Susurluk in the same year, namely MIT's counter-"terror" chief Mehmet Eymur, and Interior Minister Mehmet Agar (DYP).

Dickerson worked under the direction of American Deep Stater, Marc Grossman, who served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Ankara from 1989 to 1992, and then as ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997. According to the same 2006 report, Grossman became a person of interest "to counter-intelligence agents since his stint as U.S. ambassador in Ankara." Was he also investigated, along with Dickerson, for his involvement with MIT? Was he also taking bribes from MIT? For what reason? Why did Grossman resign from the State Department at the beginning of 2005 when he held the third-ranking position in the department after an apparently successful 29-year career? How much Kurdish blood is on Marc Grossman's hands?

Undoubtedly Grossman was involved with the very same weapons transfers that HRW condemned in 1995. The fact that Grossman is now a vice-chairman of The Cohen Group, a lobby firm for the war industry headed by former Clinton-appointed defense secretary, William Cohen, indicates that he is cashing in on old relationships built during his Ankara days.

Interestingly enough, the other vice-chairman of The Cohen Group, former NATO commander, Joseph Ralston, was a member of the American Turkish Council's Advisory Board for 2006; is a member of the Board of Directors of Lockheed Martin, for whom he also lobbies; and was appointed at the end of August, 2006, as the US "special envoy" to "coordinate the PKK" for Turkey. Choosing to reject PKK's offer of a political solution for the Kurdish situation, and choosing to reject a PKK unilateral ceasefire, it would appear that the only thing Ralston has been successful with coordinating has been some $13 billion in Lockheed Martin contracts with the Turkish general staff.

All of this history, this unfinished business of Susurluk and the spread of the Deep State to the US, fits seamlessly with the allegations made by Sibel Edmonds and discussed by her in Part 1 and Part 2 of "Highjacking of a Nation." Of course, it has not been simply one nation that has been highjacked, but three: the American nation, the Turkish nation, and the Kurdish nation. Of these three, it has been the Kurdish nation that has paid the highest price so far. For that reason, it serves the interests of the Kurdish nation to support American demands for open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case. For more on that, including up-to-the-minute updates, check Lukery's new blog, Let Sibel Edmonds Speak.

For more information, Lukery's still running the Kill The Messenger blog and, his always fascinating political blog, WotIsItGood4--now coming at you in the new, improved, industrial-strength Blogger.

With its cast of characters and real-life international intrigue; with subsequent wars and rumors of wars, the Susurluk Affair and intervening decade would appear to be made-in-Hollywood material. For Americans in particular it's unfortunate that the story is not acted out on the big screen because, at the time, the Susurluk scandal threatened to expose the corruption of the Turkish government. Today, it should serve to expose-and put an end to--the same corruption on American shores.

If Sibel Edmonds--or ordinary Kurds--tell about the reality which is the Deep State, the threat it poses in the current global political climate, and how it came to be such a threat in the first place, Americans won't believe it.

But let Oliver Stone tell them; then they'll believe.