CLINTONS, KURDS, MORE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

"President Nursultan Nazarbaev retained power in the December 2005 presidential elections, which international observers found did not meet international standards."
~ Human Rights Watch, Report on Kazakhstan.

Do you live in one of the world's top surveillance societies? Check the map:




Here's the color key:




From Wired:

Privacy International, a UK privacy group, and the U.S.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center have put together a world map of surveillance societies, rating various nations for their civil liberties records.

Both the U.S. and the UK are colored black for "endemic surveillance," as are Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, China and Malaysia.

Here's a link to the data. Isn't that interesting?

We know that the Clinton administration did all it could to enrich the military-industrial complex by selling more MIC product to Turkey than during all the combined years of the Cold War. We also know that it was the Clinton administration that appointed criminals like Marc Grossman and Joseph Ralston to important positions whereby they were able to set themselves up very comfortably in private life--working to sell Turkey more MIC product or warning off Turkish interests from CIA front companies like Brewster Jennings. We might say that the term "conflict-of-interest" is the term that best describes everything that happened while the Clinton administration was in charge.

Today, the NYTimes tells us that the former president has been assisting Canadian buddies in swinging uranium deals in that well-known bastion of democracy--Kazakhstan:

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

If Hillary Clinton goes to the White House, Bill, with all his conflicts-of-interest and privileges bestowed on "friends", will go with her. Of course, Hillary boasts of her previous experience in the White House during her two terms as first lady:

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her "eight years with a front-row seat on history."

[ . . . ]

Clinton's role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented. Yet little has been made public about her involvement in foreign policy and national security as first lady. Documents about her work remain classified at the National Archives. Clinton has declined to divulge the private advice she gave her husband.

Don't forget that Hillary is owned by, among others, Mehmet Çelebi and the MIC. In case you've forgotten, Mehmet Çelebi was one of the producers of Kurtlar Vadisi İrak. Note the following:

Celebi, who led Chicago-based the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA) during a time Vanity Fair magazine claimed the local Turkish community was under FBI counterintelligence surveillance, is an up and coming movie producer.

The Vanity Fair article in question is the article by David Rose on Sibel Edmonds from September 2005.

And since I've pointed out Bill Clinton's Kazakh connections, take a look at what's happening to Kurds in Kazakhstan:

Fearing for their physical safety, many ethnic Kurds say they plan to leave southern Kazakstan, as reports of low-level violence against them continue.

Zara, an inhabitant of the southern city of Shymkent, says her family and many other local Kurds plan to sell up and leave following a spate of attacks on the community last November.

“Of course we are afraid to leave - we have lived here all our lives - but we are also afraid to stay,” Zara told IWPR.

“We don’t know what is coming next. The newspapers are writing bad things about us Kurds. If the community elders say so, we will certainly leave.”

The trouble dates from the end of October, when a Kurdish teenager from the village of Mayatas, in the Tolebi district of South Kazakstan region, was accused of sexually assaulting a four-year-old Kazak boy. (See previous IWPR story, Kazakstan: Ethnic Clash a Worrying Sign.) After the latter’s father went to the police, locals took the law into their own hands and started burning and looting houses and beating up Kurds.

The violence then spilled over into other towns and villages where to Kurds live.

[ . . . ]

Official statistics suggest that there about 46,000 Kurds now living in Kazakstan, of whom 7,000 live in the South Kazakstan administrative region.

The Kurds belong to a community deported wholesale from Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1937, and from Georgia in 1944. Like hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars and other ethnic groups, they were deemed suspect by Stalin, who ordered them to be shifted far into the interior of the Soviet Union.

The entire Kurdish community of Kazakhstan is punished for the alleged wrongdoing of one. There's no mention of a trial, not even of a trial in a kangaroo court, but the entire Kurdish community has already been judged. Hard to believe, isn't it, especially since Kazakhstan is considered part of Greater Turan.

Bill Clinton praised the Kazakh dictator, Nazarbaev, for "opening up the social and political life of [his] country," and hoped Kazakhstan would lead the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This must be the US position on Kazakhstan anyway since Dick Cheney and other US officials have recently "failed to comment publicly on the government’s human rights record during their visits" to the country.

Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch has a different opinion about that.

But Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, and an entire host of US officials would never lie to us . . . right?