Thursday, January 31, 2008

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?

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

ARUNDHATI ROY ON GENOCIDE AND ARMED RESISTANCE

"It's not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union & Progress. 'Union' (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide."
~ Arhundhati Roy.


Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy on genocide and armed resistance:


I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus one".

[ . . . ]

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really don't know which is worse.

[ . . . ]

It's an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself-genocide-was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as:

"Any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt.

Genocide, they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).

All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society.

[ . . . ]

Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. "Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition-or denial-of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade Organisation than to the United Nations.

The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military might.

In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur.

Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?

[ . . . ]

The history of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system.

[ . . . ]

Impunity is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.

India has a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill volumes with the details.

In a democracy, for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply through proper channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of several massacres, the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately, or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases, when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would refuse to register cases of murder.

[ . . . ]

The struggle for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily mean the physical extermination of people-by bludgeoning, beating, burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them (Except sometimes. Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become Terrorists).

[ . . . ]

People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalise the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists are ogws-overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience, liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help them now. They know no international marches, no globalised dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.

[ . . . ]

The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the "single largest internal security threat". There have even been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation.

Here's a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.

This government is at last showing some sense in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state governments to "choke" Naxal infrastructure and "cripple" their activities through a dedicated force to eliminate the "virus". It signalled a realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out through enforcement of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.

"Choke". "Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate". "Stamp Out".

Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced with extermination, they have the right to fight back. By any means necessary.


The entire thing is brilliant and is highly applicable to the Kurdish situation in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan. Read it all at ZNet.

For more on the legitimacy of armed resistance against colonialist and/or racist states, see UN Resolution 3103 (.pdf).

Meanwhile, the modern day Committee for Union & Progress meets this week in Washington (Thanks to the Saker for the link):


Gen. Ergin Saygun, deputy chief of the Turkish General Staff, will hold talks with Gen. James Cartwrigtht, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, later this week mainly to discuss intelligence sharing between the United States and the Turkish Armed Forces in the fight against PKK terrorists, officials said.Saygun is also expected to meet U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman and Gen. John Craddock, commander of U.S. forces in Europe (EUCOM) and supreme commander of NATO Allied Forces in Europe, as part of anti-PKK talks. EUCOM coordinates the U.S. military's intelligence-sharing mechanism with its Turkish counterparts.In the wake of the PKK's attacks on Turkish targets that escalated in September and early October, Ankara warned that it might send its army into neighboring northern Iraq where the PKK has bases.

[ . . . ]

Saygun, Cartwright and Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, have been designated as point men in coordinating the U.S. and Turkish armed forces' anti-PKK work.Today and Wednesday, Saygun and Mary Beth Long, U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security, will co-chair the annual meetings of the U.S.-Turkish High-Level Defense Group, a mechanism used by senior officials and generals to review the military and defense relationship of the two countries.

[ . . . ]

Saygun is scheduled to return to Turkey on Feb. 7 after visiting several U.S. bases throughout the country.


Remember that the intensification of operations in September was the direct result of Abdullah Gül's visit to Turkish military bases in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, proving the close cooperation between the AKP and the Turkish military in its joint program of continued genocide of the Kurdish people.

Also, the Saker is carrying an article from Dissident Voice by Gary Leupp on Sibel Edmonds and focusing on Marc Grossman, to include a timeline of key dates in Sibel's story from 2001 to present. Reading the timeline, you'll see that Grossman is far more of a neocon than he's let on.

Monday, January 28, 2008

PAŞAS IN A PANIC AND DEEP STATE DRUG TRAFFICKING

"Since the 1950s, Turkey has played a key role in channelling into Europe and the United States the heroin produced in the "Golden Triangle" comprised by Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The operation is run by mafia groups closely controlled by the MIT."
~ Kendal Nezan.


The Ankara regime has requested used Cobra gunships from the US and it seems to be in somewhat of a panic about it because the regime is described as "urgently" wanting the gunships. They want some of "the US military's own gunships." Those F-16's aren't working out so well against PKK, even with US and Israeli intelligence gathering for Ankara. Or maybe it's just a problem with dead or horribly maimed Turkish pilots. From Defense News:


Turkey, which urgently wants attack helicopters to help fight separatist Kurdish militants near its border with Iraq, recently asked Washington to sell about a dozen of the U.S. military’s own gunships, officials from both sides said.

To meet our short-term requirement, we would like to buy a number of attack helicopters that are presently in the U.S. military’s inventory,” one senior Turkish military official said.

[ . . . ]

The United States had not formally responded to the request by press time, and it was not clear if any such helicopters were available for sale. U.S. Marines are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Turkey last spring made a similar but informal inquiry, and at the time the U.S. government was not willing to declare that its military had attack helicopters available for transfer to the Turks,” the U.S. business source said. “But since then, the political climate has greatly improved between the two nations.”

[ . . . ]

The U.S. business source said Turkey also has shown some interest in the U.S. Army’s AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter.

But the Turkish military official said the Army had no infrastructure to support the Apache’s maintenance, and that the Army prefers the Cobras.


Good. Helicopters are a lot easier to shoot down than F-16s.

Imagine my shock to learn that the Ergenekon gang was involved with drug-trafficking:


Charges brought against the deep-state linked Ergenekon organization by a Turkish court have shown that the gang was after a military takeover in Turkey while records of phone conversations of its members in the hands of German police show that they were also involved in the drug trade.


Again, the Germans are named.


Germany’s Niedersachsen State’s anti-drug department, the LKA, which tapped the phones of some of the Ergenekon members as part of a narcotics investigation, proved that Ergenekon members were indeed in the drug business as well. The records of a Nov. 20, 2003 phone conversation between retired Capt. Muzaffer Tekin, arrested in June of last year as the owner of the munitions depot found in anİstanbul shantytown that started the Ergenekon operation, and Yılmaz Tavukçuoğlu, an alleged drug trafficker, shows that Ergenekon used drug money to fund its activities. The two men in these conversations talk about the sale of a plot of land in Ümraniye. According to the LKA’s Willi Neumann, the co-owners of the land were Tekin and Ertuğrul Yılmaz, the former owner of Doğuş Factoring, who was murdered in eastern Germany two years ago. Neumann’s report asserts that this piece of land might have been used to launder money from drug trading with Tavukçuoğlu.


This is all a bit hypocritical considering that the Ankara regime funds itself through the heroin industry:


Since the 1950s, Turkey has played a key role in channelling into Europe and the United States the heroin produced in the "Golden Triangle" comprised by Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The operation is run by mafia groups closely controlled by the MIT. One of their personnel described their relations with the police in the following terms: "Our people are able to pass through Yesilköy (Istanbul) airport whenever they wish, without being controlled by customs, with briefcases containing 3-5 million marks. Sometimes they stamp their passports, sometimes they don’t. Our boss has all kinds of false passports, stamps etc. (6)."

[ . . . ]

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).

Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the police and the army could possibly organise trafficking on such a scale. Drug barons such as Huseyin Baybasin have stated publicly, on Turkish television and in the West, that they have been working under the protection of the Turkish government and to its financial benefit (9). The traffickers themselves travel on diplomatic passports. According to witnesses at the Parliamentary Commission inquiring into the Susurluk accident, the drugs are even transported by military helicopter from the Iranian border. The president of the commission himself, deputy Mehmet Erkatmis, has protested against the fact that these damning allegations have been censured out of the commission’s official report.


The Turks aren't the only ones keeping truth out of official reports.

A year ago, Luke Ryland took a hard look at the US State Department's 2006 International Narcotics Strategy Report--in light of Sibel Edmonds' information--which named Turkey as "a key player in this industry." Comparing it to the World Bank's report on Afghanistan's drug industry, Luke noted that the World Bank made virtually no reference to Turkey's role:


At least three quarters of all heroin sold in Western Europe comes from Turkey - 4 to 6 tons every month - yet the World Bank report mentions Turkey exactly... once!

Here's the reference, in all it's glory:

"The large dealers in both Lashkar Gah city and Kandahar claimed that they deal directly with buyers in Pakistan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

That single reference to Turkey is all that the report could muster.

Why would Wolfowitz want to erase any mention of Turkey from his report?


Because those members of the Deep State in the US also benefit from Turkey's heroin industry no differently than their Turkish counterparts, as quoted earlier and as discussed by Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi in Luke's post. In other words, it's not just the handful of criminals in the Ergenekon gang who are involved in narco-trafficking. It's a globalized industry for the elites.

Speaking of Sibel, Luke has an interview with her, in which she slams the US media for its failure in reporting the treason in the American government with regard to US officials--particularly Marc Grossman--and nuclear proliferation activities:


Luke Ryland: Will the US media start reporting on this now that it is 'hot and sexy' again?

Sibel Edmonds: It's hard to know. After being told for years that they won't cover it because it is 'old news,' now there are certain officials in the agencies quietly telling journalists to stay away from the story because I came across a highly sensitive covert national security operation.

Also, Turkey's army of lobbyists in DC are very effective. The US press tends to stay away from any stories critical of Turkey, I would say even more than Israel.

There's also the possible problem of 'eating crow' but I hope this isn't an issue, this story is way too important for any of that. The information that has been published in the Times recently could have easily come out four years ago in the US press. We now need everyone to focus on the important issues.

I have one message for the US media: If they think this is over, it's not over. Much more will come out. They won't be able to ignore it any longer, and so I hope they get over any reluctance they might have.


And there's much more in the interview, so go over to Luke's place and take a look.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

APPEARANCES

"In Spain, the 28 murders committed by the GAL have become a matter of concern at the highest government level, whereas in Turkey, which likes to present itself as a law-abiding state and which is seeking admission to the European Union, not one single perpetrator of more than 4,500 unsolved murders carried out since 1991 - the so-called ’faili mesul cinayetleri’- has thus far been arrested. In my country, the murderers are on the streets and the intellectuals are behind bars."
~ Akın Birdal.


With the recent Ergenekon arrests, one should bear in mind that things are not always what they appear to be in Turkey. As one anonymous commenter remarked [emphasis Mizgîn's]:


Ergenekon was a part of the Turkish deep state. The Turkish state didn´t make a move against the deep state, there motive was against this fraction that operate independent. This was a clear message from the Turkish deep state. This was only matter of time. Our freedom movement PKK told the media many times in the past of the fractions inside the Turkish deep state. This is evidence!


As I mentioned, "we should not expect too much from this so-called 'operation'". It's very likely that Veli Küçük's Ergenekon gang will take the fall for purposes unclear at this moment. Remember, nature abhors a vacuum even in connection with the Deep State and their Islamist brothers. Let no one mistake the Ergenekon arrests for an exercise in the practice of democracy on the part of the AKP government, a government that is carefully controlled by the real rulers of the Ankara regime--the Paşas.

Reality is explained well by a heval at Kleine Kurdistan-Kolumne:


But appearances can be vastly misleading. Members of paramilitary terror gangs are arrested and released often. Most of those now arrested already appeared in the 1996 Susurluk scandal, and remained unmolested. Especially Veli Küçük, the imagined mighty founder of JITEM, the worst state-terrorism group of the'90s, enjoyed a hitherto unprecedented immunity. It remains to be seen whether that immunity for the obvious sponsors of the "Ergenekon" and likely perpetrators of the murder of Hrant Dink, now gets more than just a few scratches himself.

The "deep state" is unfortunately more than just a gang of 30 ultra-nationalists. It is based on a broad ideological consensus against Kurds, Christians and Left, and its ramifications extend far into bureaucracy, security apparatus and politics. To render the deep state unworkable requires a little more than a few media arrests. As long as Erdogan rides on the wave of nationalism, the shock of his police against a few excesses, especially anti-government, remains implausible.


Vahe Balabanian at Hyelog carries a portion of an article from Sabah which mentions some of the assassinations ordered by Küçük. In another article from Sabah, Abdullah Gül is quoted as saying "There will be no unresolved murders," except in The Southeast, naturally.

Meanwhile, Zaman outlines some of the charges against the Ergenekon gang:


Evidence so far also suggests that 700 kilograms of explosives found loaded on a van in İstanbul belonged to this gang. An attack against the Association for the Union of Patriotic Forces (VKGB), also a murky group with shadowy affiliations, in Diyarbakır was actually staged by the VKGB itself, according the investigation. The attack had then been blamed on the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) organization.


Ah, yes, false flag operations . . . the hallmark of Gladio. It's odd, isn't it, that with all the talk of the alleged "War on Terror," that guys like those in the Ergenekon gang are never referred to as terrorists?

Now why is that?

Saturday, January 26, 2008

SIBEL, NUKES, AND COVERING ASS

"But I can tell you that Turkey is a classic example in our judgment of a nation that we would like to work in partnership with, not to bring old technology, but to bring advanced technology and the benefits of nuclear power."
~ Clay Sell, US Deputy Secretary of Energy.


London's Sunday Times has a third article out on Sibel's story, in which they discuss the Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings connections to the information Sibel heard on the wiretaps she translated at the FBI:


AN investigation into the illicit sale of American nuclear secrets was compromised by a senior official in the State Department, a former FBI employee has claimed.


And who was that "senior official in the State Department"? All together now: Marc Grossman!


Her latest claims relate to a number of intercepted recordings believed to have been made between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West’s nuclear secrets and technology.

Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb”, who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.

Plame, then 38, was the glamorous wife of a former US ambassador, Joe Wilson. Despite recently giving birth to twins, she travelled widely for her work, often claiming to be an oil consultant. In fact she was a career CIA agent who was part of a small team investigating the same procurement network that the State Department official is alleged to have aided.

Brewster Jennings was one of a number of covert enterprises set up to infiltrate the nuclear ring. It is is believed to have been based in Boston and consisted of little more than a name, a telephone number and a post office box address.

[ . . . ]

The FBI was also running an inquiry into the nuclear network. When Edmonds joined the agency after the 9/11 attacks she was given the job of reviewing the evidence.

The FBI was monitoring Turkish diplomatic and political figures based in Washington who were allegedly working with the Israelis and using “moles” in military and academic institutions to acquire nuclear secrets.

The creation of this nuclear ring had been assisted, Edmonds says, by the senior official in the State Department who she heard in one conversation arranging to pick up a $15,000 bribe.


And who was that "senior official in the State Department"? All together now: Marc Grossman!


One group of Turkish agents who had come to America on the pretext of researching alternative energy sources was introduced to Brewster Jennings through the Washington-based American Turkish Council (ATC), a lobby group that aids commercial ties between the countries. Edmonds says the Turks believed Brewster Jennings to be energy consultants and were planning to hire them.

But she said: “He [the State Department official] found out about the arrangement . . . and he contacted one of the foreign targets and said . . . you need to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they are a cover for the government.

“The target . . . immediately followed up by calling several people to warn them about Brewster Jennings.

At least one of them was at the ATC. This person also called an ISI person to warn them.” If the ISI was made aware of the CIA front company, then this would almost certainly have damaged the investigation into the activities of Khan. Plame’s cover would also have been compromised, although Edmonds never heard her name mentioned on the intercepts. Shortly afterwards, Plame was moved to a different operation.


Now, get this, from Grossman:


The State Department official said on Friday: “It is impossible to find a strong enough way to deny these allegations which are both false and malicious.”


Dude, try harder.

Let's hear what Phil Giraldi had to say, who wrote the recent article on Sibel for American Conservative magazine. Giraldi was interviewed by Scott Horton on Friday:


Quite honestly, if I were Marc Grossman, who allegedly is now making $3 million a year working for the Cohen Group, I would be kind of concerned about my personal reputation where people are saying that I was taking money, and I would want to straighten out the record and I would want to the FBI to produce a definitive statement about me, and he hasn’t demanded that. He hasn’t gone after that, and none of the other people in this case have gone after that, so I’m wondering why, if these people are innocent, they aren’t making a more serious effort to demonstrate that they are.


It's too bad Giraldi didn't mention Grossman's "consultation" work for Islamist-affiliated Ihlas Holding and his $100,000 monthly salary.

Anyway, it's an excellent interview which you can listen to here--thanks to Luke for that. The discussion of Sibel's story starts around 24 minutes into the interview. Luke also has the link and a full transcript of that portion of the interview which concerns Sibel. I urge everyone to take a look at Luke's post in order to read his always insightful comments.

Luke also has comments on the new Times article.


On Thursday, Luke posted information indicating that the Bush administration is pressing Congress for approval of sales of nuclear technology to Turkey. He highlights an interesting statement from the White House press release [emphasis from Luke]:


"My Administration has completed the NPAS review as well as an evaluation of actions taken by the Turkish government to address the proliferation activities of certain Turkish entities (once officials of the U.S. Government brought them to the Turkish government's attention)."


NPAS stands for nuclear proliferation assessment statement, but what's interesting about the statement is that in it, the Bush administration admits that there are already nuclear proliferation activities in Turkey, carried out by "certain Turkish entities". I'm willing to bet that these "entities" refer to the Turkish companies, very possibly including those that Sibel has mentioned in connection with nuclear technology black-marketing. Furthermore, according to the White House press release, the US government had to bring these "Turkish entities" to the attention of the Turkish government.

That is the biggest load of baloney ever! Does anyone--naive Westerners excepted, of course--honestly believe that, in a fascist regime like Turkey, either the civil government or the Paşas wouldn't know about nuclear "proliferation activities" taking place inside the country? Such an idea is not only absolutely preposterous, it's also impossible. Especially given that Turkey, along with Grossman, was involved with assisting Pakistan in it's own nuclear "proliferation activities."

Remember that the tapes Sibel listened to dated back to the late 1990s, and Turkey has been attempting to acquire nuclear technology for allegedly "peaceful" purposes, i.e. nuclear power. Greenpeace has some documentation on Turkey's efforts to acquire nuclear power dating back to 1998.

There are two things to remember when considering nuclear power plants in Turkey. The first is that Turkey is one of the most active and dangerous earthquake zones in the world. The second is the question of what the Ankara regime would do with nuclear waste. Given the facts that the Ankara regime has destroyed and then neglected the Kurdish region for the last 84 years and that the Ankara regime is dead set on continuing the destruction of the Kurdish region with the Ilisu Dam project, what is the likelihood that the regime would store its nuclear waste in North Kurdistan?

In addition, you have to worry when TDN comes up with an article titled, "Turkey to face serious brainpower deficit in nuclear power". In reporting on a meeting about nuclear energy in Istanbul on January 18, it's clear that Turkey is not ready to address even the most basic questions on the matter. But that may not make any difference. Those who worship the almighty dollar are going to want to turn an buck anyway. A year ago, the US State Department--the same people who brought you Lockheed Martin's Joseph Ralston as "PKK coordinator" and his co-worker at The Cohen Group, Marc Grossman--announced another scam: the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Apparently, the State Department is as enthusiastic about selling nuclear energy to Turkey as it is about selling Lockheed Martin product:


QUESTION: Thank you. Onur Sazak with Turkish Business Daily Referans. There are rumors that Turkey is buying nuclear energy -- nuclear reactors from the United States. Can you confirm that? And my second question is certain lawmakers in Turkey are accusing of the -- the United States of selling raw (inaudible) technology, first-generation nuclear reactors to the country. And if I can get your comments on this. Thank you.

DEPUTY SECRETARY SELL: I cannot confirm the rumor. But I can tell you that Turkey is a classic example in our judgment of a nation that we would like to work in partnership with, not to bring old technology, but to bring advanced technology and the benefits of nuclear power. So I would anticipate this is something that leaders in Turkey would -- I would welcome and it's something that I hope we could work with them on.


That brings us back to the White House press release mentioned in Luke's post, and his commentary, specifically in reference to this phrase: "(once officials of the U.S. Government brought them to the Turkish government's attention)"[my emphasis]:


Given that the entire press release is basically written in 'legalese', this unnecessary parenthetical aside stands out like a sore thumb. I wonder who injected this statement into the announcement, and why. It sure looks like butt-covering to me, given the latest revelations in the Times.

The phrase 'once officials...' also appears to be a curious formulation. I'm not overly familiar with presidential statements and US government protocols, but I would imagine that "Agencies" or "Departments" would normally communicate with foreign governments on such important matters, and I would imagine that presidential statements would normally refer to such agencies, rather than 'officials.' Perhaps I'm wrong, and perhaps this is common practice, but it sure looks like an attempt to exonerate certain individuals such as Marc Grossman who was accused of some very serious crimes in the Times article.


I have to agree, it certainly does look like "an attempt to exonerate certain individuals such as Marc Grossman," who have been deep into the deep shit of the Deep State's nuclear black-marketing. What is more worrying, however, is Luke's closing:


Congress has 90 days to amend or block this legislation, otherwise it automatically becomes law.


This is exactly what happened with regard to the Pentagon deal to upgrade Turkey's F-16's. Since the White House is quietly pushing for congressional approval, while the State Department officially promotes the spread of nuclear technology to regimes as unstable as Turkey, we may all be screwed.



And since I've mentioned Ralston, Grossman, and The Cohen Group, check out Scott Horton's recent interview with Chalmers Johnson to learn more about how dependent the US economy is on the military-industrial complex and ridiculous schemes like the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

ERGENEKON BUSTED?

"There are three bases to the [organized] gang. First is the police, second is the [state] bureaucrats and third is the military. We can question the police and some of bureaucrats, but we cannot question the military."
~ Mehmet Elkatmış, Chairman, Susurluk Commission.


The most interesting news of the day comes from Bianet:


Retired Major General Veli Kücük, nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, lawyer Fuat Turgut, who is the defense lawyer of Yasin Hayal, a murder suspect in the Hrant Dink case, Aksam newspaper journalist Güler Kömürcü, retired Colonel Fikri Karadag, who is the leader of the ultra-nationalist Kuvayi Milliye Association, and Turkish Orthodox Patriarchy spokesperson Sevgi Erenerol, are under police custody.

All 33 taken from their homes on Tuesday (22 January) are charged with forming a clandestine group to plot against the government, and attempts at the lives of Kurdish politicians, as well as storing weapons in a secret arsenal.


Photo Radikal. Article: "İşte Ergenekon."


That's right, folks, the Ergenekon gang is in police detention. The news appeared in Turkish online media late last night, US time, but it may have only a brief appearance, as noted in the Bianet article:


According to the NTV news, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecution made a written statement about the detentions and then immediately announced a broadcasting and publishing ban on the case.


It's this ban that tells us we should not expect too much from this so-called "operation." If they're ordering censorship about the case, it means that there is something to hide on the part of the government. However, one should remember Veli Küçük in connection with the Susurluk scandal, as a close associate of the notorious Grey Wolf, Abdullah Çatlı and the infamous Turkish state assassin, Mahmut Yıldırım, aka Yeşil. Küçük was also named in connection with the 2006 Council of State attack and with Hrant Dink's murder. For a roundup of Küçük's crimes, see a Rastî post from last year.

Zaman has more about what Küçük and the rest of the Ergenekon gang has been up to:


The gang was plotting to kill Nobel Literature Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk and had already hired the hit man to do the job, the investigation found. Thirty-three suspects accused of being part of the gang, which calls itself Ergenekon, were detained by the İstanbul Police Department's counterterrorism unit in İstanbul and other parts of the country in dawn raids on Tuesday, the culmination of an eight-month operation. The police have been observing the actions of the suspects for three-quarters of a year as part of an investigation into a house full of explosives and ammunition found in a shantytown in İstanbul's Ümraniye district in the June of 2007.

The investigation has found that the gang is linked to a clandestine phenomenon referred to as the "deep state" in Turkey that stages attacks using "behind-the-scene" paramilitary organizations such as Ergenekon to foment public opinion according its own political agenda. Ergenekon is the title of a legend that describes how Turks came into existence.

This particular gang is suspected of involvement in a number of political attacks on individuals and institutions, including the murder of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. At least eight of the suspects are retired from the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK).

The suspects, who include retired military generals, journalists and underground bosses, have not yet been charged and are still under interrogation, but the police found a list of people the gang had planned to assassinate, including pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) deputies Ahmet Türk, Leyla Zana and Sebahat Tuncel; Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir; Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk; and journalist Fehmi Koru, who is also a regular columnist for Today's Zaman.


Khaleej Times adds a little more information:


Police are also investigating whether the suspects were involved in several politically motivated attacks that shocked Turkey over the past two years, the daily Sabah said.

They include the murders of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro and a senior judge killed by a gunman who stormed into the country’s top administrative court, the daily said.


And, in what may be a very felicitous coincidence, Martin Lee--who's done more to expose the Deep State, Grey Wolves, and the likes of Veli Küçük, in English than anyone else--may now be connecting Sibel Edmonds' case about the Deep State criminals in the US with the Deep State criminals in Turkey. At least Consortium News, which ran Lee's original article on the Deep State in 1997, feels it's necessary to run the article again to give some background context to Sibel's story. From Consortium News, "Turkey's Drug-Terrorism Connection":


Edmonds, who left the FBI in 2002, said she stumbled upon this corrupt network – which also may have involved money laundering and drug trafficking – when she was hired after the 9/11 attacks to translate a backlog of tapes dating back to 1997.

That was the same year when Consortiumnews.com published a remarkable story by Martin A. Lee about Turkish government officials caught in a web of corruption with notorious drug traffickers and right-wing terrorists.

In view of the Sunday Times article and a follow-up on Jan. 20, we are republishing our earlier story to provide historical context for Edmonds’s allegations:

In broad daylight on May 2, 1997, 50 armed men set upon a television station in Istanbul with gunfire. The attackers unleashed a fusillade of bullets and shouted slogans supporting Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Ciller.

The gunmen were outraged over the station's broadcast of a TV report critical of Ciller, a close U.S. ally who had come under criticism for stonewalling investigations into collusion between state security forces and Turkish criminal elements.

Miraculously, no one was injured in the attack, but the headquarters of Independent Flash TV were left pock-marked with bullet-holes and smashed windows. The gunfire also sent an unmistakable message to Turkish journalists and legislators: don't challenge Ciller and other high-level Turkish officials when they cover up state secrets.

For several months, Turkey had been awash in dramatic disclosures connecting high Turkish officials to the right-wing Grey Wolves, the terrorist band which has preyed on the region for years. In 1981, a terrorist from the Grey Wolves attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Vatican City.

But at the center of the mushrooming Turkish scandal is whether Turkey, a strategically placed NATO country, allowed mafiosi and right-wing extremists to operate death squads and to smuggle drugs with impunity. A Turkish parliamentary commission is investigating these new charges.

The rupture of state secrets in Turkey also could release clues to other major Cold War mysteries. Besides the attempted papal assassination, the Turkish disclosures could shed light on the collapse of the Vatican bank in 1982 and the operation of a clandestine pipeline that pumped sophisticated military hardware into the Middle East -- apparently from NATO stockpiles in Europe -- in exchange for heroin sold by the Mafia in the United States.


Read the rest at Consortium News.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

STUPIDITY AND CRIMINALITY

"What's a Kurd, anyway?"
~ Norman Podhoretz.


Okay. Here's an example of just how stupid the "counter"-terrorists are:


The U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center says it was a mistake to include the symbol of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- the political party headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani -- on a list of "terrorist logos" that police should be on the lookout for during traffic stops and other contacts with members of the public.

The PUK, one of the two Kurdish political parties that makes up the regional government in Iraq's Kurdish area, is not on the lists of designated foreign terror groups maintained by the U.S. departments of State or Treasury, and indeed is considered by many in the U.S. government as one of the closest U.S. allies in its war on terrorism.

"After a review, we determined that the PUK logo should not have been included, and we have updated the online version," National Counter-Terrorism Center spokesman Carl Kropf told United Press International Saturday.


In other words, after the morons at the U.S. National Counter-Terrorism Center pulled their heads out of their asses . . .

That level of stupidity ranks right up there with the stupidity of neoconservative freak Norman Podhoretz, as related by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:


Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurdistan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.


And these are the idiots who are running the War on Terror, Inc. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Speaking of the so-called War on Terror, Edward Herman, along with David Peterson, has an excellent article at ZNet in which they call out the emperor for wearing no clothes. Some Rastî readers may remember that Edward Herman co-authored Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky. Like Chomsky, Herman has also spoken out against the Ankara regime's brutal repression of Kurds, and American backing of Turkish repression.

Now, Herman confirms what we already knew, that there is no "War on Terror," and he does it very, very well. From ZNet:


The United States and Israel actually engage in big-time terror, like strategic bombing, helicopter attacks, torture on a continuing basis, and large-scale invasions and invasion threats, not lower-casualty-inflicting actions like occasional plane hijackings and suicide bombings. This has long been characterized as the difference between wholesale and retail terror, the former carried out by states and on a large scale, the latter implemented by individuals and small groups, much smaller in scale, and causing fewer civilian victims than its wholesale counterpart.[20] Retail terrorists don’t maintain multiple detention centers in which they employ torture (at the height of its state terror activities in the 1970s the Argentinian military maintained an estimated 60 such centers, according to Amnesty International;[21] the United States today, on land bases and naval vessels and in client state operated facilities, uses dozens of such centers).

Furthermore, retail terror is often sponsored by the wholesale terrorists—notoriously, the Cuban refugee network operating out of the United States for decades, the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan contras, Savimbi’s UNITA in Angola in the 1980s, backed by both South Africa and the United States, the South Lebanon Army supported by Israel for years, and the Colombian rightwing death squads still in operation, with U.S. support. Thus, a meaningful war on terror would surely involve attacks on the United States and Israel as premier wholesale terrorists and sponsors, a notion we have yet to find expounded by a single one of the current war-on-terror proponents.

In short, one secret of the widespread belief that the United States and Israel are fighting—not carrying out—terror is the remarkable capacity of the Western media and intellectual class to ignore the standard definitions of terror and the reality of who does the most terrorizing, and thus to allow the Western political establishments to use the invidious word to apply to their targets. We only retaliate and engage in “counter-terror”—our targets started it and their lesser violence is terrorism.


We can add Turkey to complete the US-Israel-Turkey troika of wholesale terror. Of course, that brings up another item: Sibel Edmonds. There's another interesting article on her case and the recent revelations in London's Sunday Times, from Philip Giraldi and American Conservative magazine. An interesting point made by Giraldi is that Sibel was not hit with court-ordered gags from the FBI, but by the Pentagon and the State Department, whose personnel were the ones identified as big time criminals on the FBI wiretaps:


Curiously, the states-secrets gag order binding Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon—which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. It would have been much simpler for the government to marginalize her by demonstrating that she was poorly informed or speculating about matters outside her competency. Under the Bush administration, the security gag order has been invoked to cover up incompetence or illegality, not to protect national security. It has recently been used to conceal the illegal wiretaps of the warrantless surveillance program, the allegations of torture and the CIA’s rendition program, and to shield the telecom industry for its collaboration in illegal eavesdropping.


There's a lot there, too, on Grossman, the Turks, and Grossman's bribe-taking from the Turks. Go read, because this particular article explains a lot about Sibel's case in plain English.

Once again, while there remains a deafening silence about American officials and their rat's nest of Turkish and Israeli moles, and the sale of nuclear information to Pakistan, another British paper has taken up Sibel's story, this time in the form of an op/ed from The Guardian, which slams the US media for its refusal to touch Sibel's story:


An American human rights group attempted to obtain further proof of this amazing tale by making a freedom of information request for a specific numbered document relating to the case. The FBI responded by claiming that it did not exist. But the Sunday Times countered that it had obtained another document, signed by an FBI official, showing the existence of the file.

That's why the Sunday Times's latest story, under its old Insight logo, began by accusing the FBI of a cover-up. This looks to me like a very hot story indeed that should surely have been taken up by mainstream newspapers in the United States.


As always, Luke Ryland has his own commentary on The Guardian's piece, so make sure to take a look at it, and check the rest of Luke's posts for the most complete information.

Luke also puts us on notice that Grossman will be present at a congressional committee hearing tomorrow, Wednesday, January 23, at 10am, at Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Sibel is urging supporters to show up and give Grossman hell and take video of the event.

So if you're in the DC area tomorrow and can dish some hell, go to it.

Monday, January 21, 2008

MONDAY'S NEWS AND THEN SOME

"Congress could do a good job theoretically, but it can't. Why? It's owned lock, stock, and barrel by Corporate America."
~ Mike Gravel, former US Senator (D-AK).


Oh, you have to see the photos Hevallo has up from the protest against war criminal Yaşar Büyükanıt, in London on Sunday. I'll post one here as a teaser:




Isn't that great?! Go take a look at the rest. Big kudos to Hevallo and all those in the UK who helped to expose the Turkish Pinochet! Now expect some big Turkish military operations in the near future because, as a friend noted, trips by the Paşas to the UK tend to precede big operations. Credit where credit is due, after all. It was the British who cooked up the Gladio program. I mean, who else would come up with such a stupid Latin name for terrorism? The sows who populate the British government think they are such classicists.

Perhaps the biggest news on Sibel's news from yesterday's Sunday Times article on the FBI's cover-up of evidence against the Deep State in the US, is the commentary on the US media by Daniel Ellsberg. He's the guy who leaked the Pentagon's top-secret, in-house study of how the US government was making decisions on the Vietnam War--during the Vietnam War. This study became known as the Pentagon Papers. Here's a little backgrounder on the release of the Pentagon Papers, from Wikipedia:


Because he held an extremely high-level security clearance, Ellsberg was one of the very few individuals who were given access to the complete set of documents. They revealed that the government had knowledge, early on, that the war would not likely be won, and that continuing the war would lead to many times more casualties than was ever admitted publicly. Further, the papers showed that high-ranking officials had a deep cynicism towards the public as well as disregard for the loss of life and injury suffered by soldiers and civilians.

Ellsberg was appalled by the cynicism and hypocrisy reflected in these papers, and, after a period of soul-searching, became determined to make their contents public. He knew that releasing the papers violated the trust placed in him by his colleagues, would damage reputations and would most likely result in his conviction and a lengthy prison sentence.

[ . . . ]

Throughout 1970, Ellsberg covertly attempted to persuade a few sympathetic U.S. Senators — among them J. William Fulbright, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George McGovern, a leading opponent of the war — to release the papers on the Senate floor, because a Senator could not be prosecuted for anything he said on-the-record before the Senate.

When these efforts came to naught, Ellsberg finally leaked the documents to New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan. On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the Times published the first installment of the 7,000 page document.


Obviously, Ellsberg has some experience in the matter of releasing classified materials to the American public, which makes him the best expert to comment on Sibel Edmonds' story and to blast the mainstream American media for its complicity in the cover-up of Sibel's story. From The Brad Blog:


In support of the official cover-up, various American journalists in the last weeks have reportedly received calls from "intelligence sources" hinting that "what Sibel Edmonds stumbled onto" is not a rogue operation by American officials and Congressmen working to their own advantage --- as believed by Edmonds and some other former or active FBI officials --- but a sensitive covert operation authorized at high levels. If there is any truth to that, we clearly have another prize candidate --- giving us, as blowback, the Pakistani Bomb and nuclear sales --- in the category of "worst covert operation in U.S. history," rivaling such contenders as the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, and the secret CIA torture camps abroad.

In the first two of those, the American press gullibly responded to official warnings of "sensitivity" and sat on information they should have reported (as did the New York Times, for a year, on the illegal NSA surveillance program). If the Washington Post had heeded such warnings and demands with respect to the covert torture camps, they would have missed a well-earned Pulitzer Prize and the camps would still be torturing.

Many, if not most, covert operations deserve to be disclosed by a free press. They are often covert not only because they are illegal but because they are wildly ill-conceived and reckless. "Sensitive" and "covert" are often synonyms for "half-assed," "idiotic," and "dangerous to national security," as well as "criminal." All of these would apply to the pattern of activities revealed by Edmonds if it were truly presidentially authorized, as is being whispered. Such activities persist, covertly, to the point of national disaster because the press neglects what our First Amendment was precisely intended to protect and encourage it to do: expose wrongdoing by officials.


Ellsberg asks if the mainstream American media would publish the Pentagon Papers today. I doubt very much that they would. The chickenshit American media is nothing more than a propaganda tool to "manufacture consent" for Corporate America. Remember, Sibel offered her story to the chickenshit American media way back in October 2007 and nothing happened. NOTHING.

All of this nonsense from the manufacturers of consent in the chickenshit American meida about Sibel stumbling onto some "rogue" operation is just that--NONSENSE. Anyone who knows anything about how the Turkish state works, or about Susurluk and hundreds of other Turkish scandals, or Sibel's posting of Mehmet Eymür's photo in her "Most Wanted" gallery, or the Turkish Dirty War against the Kurdish people--anyone who knows these facts also knows, without a shadow of any doubt that what Sibel says about the Deep State in the US is pure truth.

Luke also has a post up on Ellsberg's reaction, and he asks the following:


As an aside, where are the major bloggers on this story? They justifiably criticize journalists for being stenographers, and they justifiably criticize journalists for delaying stories like such as the New York Times withholding the illegal spying story for a year. Where are they on this story? It's time to step up, people.


Luke's absolutely correct; major bloggers have done as excellent a job as the chickenshit American media in avoiding exposure of the Deep State in the US. And if the FBI has destroyed the evidence connected to Sibel's claims and translation work, then things are even worse. The guilty should be strung up publicly.

Don't miss Luke's interview today with Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio (run time about 45 minutes). Luke got up at 4:30 in the morning to talk about Sibel, so honor his sacrifice and listen.

Now, it's been noted before that the criminals associated with Sibel's story come from both the Demopublicans and the Republicrats. In other words, the Deep State in the US is completely bi-partisan and, since this is an election year in the US, I wouldn't want anyone to think that their vote meant a damned thing. In that vein, check out a video interview with former senator, Mike Gravel (D-AK), brought to my attention by the The Saker and reposted here. Let me add, too, that Gravel was the only Senator to enter a large portion of the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record of his subcommittee back in 1971:





Seriously, the best thing that could possibly happen to the US would be the reinstatement of the draft.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE AND SIBEL EDMONDS

"... But isn't the full name of Kubrick's film 'Doctor Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb'?"
~ Mathieu Verboud, director, Kill The Messenger.


While the CIA has been busy destroying its own torture videotapes, it looks like the FBI has been busy "covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets."

Again, from London's The Sunday Times:


The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency’s investigation of the network.

[ . . . ]

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file.

Edmonds believes the crucial file is being deliberately covered up by the FBI because its contents are explosive. She accuses the agency of an “outright lie”.


Marc Grossman was mentioned as the "well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan" in connection with the 6 January report in The Sunday Times, and he's mentioned again in today's story:


The anonymous letter names a high-level government official [Note: Grossman] who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the ATC.


Just as over the last two weeks there has been a deafening silence in the US media over Sibel's story and the connection of Marc Grossman to the sale of nuclear secrets to Pakistan through the ATC and the Turkish Embassy in DC, expect another deafening silence over the FBI's continuing attempt to cover up the agents of foreign interests that have infested Washington.

In the meantime, expect to see more bullshit stories like the one that surfaced this week in US media, about a US lawmaker-turned-lobbyist who was involved with a charity group that allegedly funnelled a piddly $260,000 to an Afghan warlord in cahoots with the Taliban and al-Qaeda--both of which are long-time CIA assets. The chump change mentioned in this stupid little distraction went to Pakistan--the country to whom Grossman sold The Bomb. Now, ask yourself why that son-of-a-bitch Grossman isn't indicted for selling nuclear secrets to Turkish middlemen who turned around and sold them to Pakistan. This would be the same Marc Grossman who, as ambassador to Turkey in the mid-1990's facilitated the Ankara regime's genocide of the Kurdish people.

So the US media is telling us, by all means let's go anal over the details of a bare quarter of a million dollars to some Afghan warlord in Pakistan but, whatever we do, let's not breathe a word about high-ranking US government officials who have done all they can to push the nuclear clock much closer to midnight.

Check out more on the latest Sibel news over at Luke's place. In the first post, Luke addresses the following questions:


a) The use of Turkish front groups to supply nuclear hardware to the network

b) The extraordinary legal steps the US and UK governments have used to hide their guilt


Along with the usual suspects (the ATC and the Turkish Embassy), Luke focuses on Giza Technologies, in New Jersey, and Turkish businessmen Selim Alguadiş (of EKA) and the late Güneş Cire (of ETI Elektroteknik--now operating under the direction of Cire's son). Luke also discusses the so-called "state secrets privilege" as a way for both the US and the UK to cover up the criminals in government who have been crucial to the nuclear arming of states like Pakistan.

In his second recent post, Luke discusses today's Times article and makes the case that either the FBI is lying about the file on Grossman, the ATC, the Turkish Embassy, Giza Technologies, et.al., or the FBI has taken a page out of the CIA's playbook and has "destroyed the evidence of this multi-year investigation concerning the corruption of high-level US officials, the nuclear black market, money laundering and narcotics trafficking."


In other news, here's a "person of interest" you should know about: Robert Wexler (D-FL), thanks to an email from a friend:


Robert Wexler loves to talk Turkey. The congressman from Boca Raton gobbles on and on about that troubled country, calling it a role model for all Muslim nations to follow and praising its help in the so-called war on terrorism.

[ . . . ]

It's a stretch to call the Republic of Turkey a democracy, but everything is a little exaggerated when it comes to Wexler and Turkey. He doesn't just vote for the country's causes; he founded the Congressional Turkey Caucus last year to help build a pro-Turk coalition in the capital. He isn't just friendly with the powerful Turkish lobby; he won a "leadership award" from the American-Turkish Council this past March. Wexler doesn't just want to increase trade with Turkey; at the behest of leading Turkish businessmen, he is working hard in Congress to end tariffs on the country's exports to the United States.

All this for a near-military state with a terrible history of human rights abuses, illegal invasions, and genocide. The republic's anti-democratic ways have kept it from membership in the European Union, but the congressman, along with the Bush administration, hails it as a shining light among nations.

And Wexler, bless him, is doing it all for war.


If you read on, you'll see that Wexler is a kind of hub, a "person of interest" in whom both the Turkish and the Israeli lobbies intersect. Of course, he's doing it all for war; he voted a resounding "YEA" to give carte blanche to Bush and Cheney for the Iraq War, which turns his current project as head impeachment crusader into nothing more than politics-as-usual. Why didn't Wexler initiate impeachment proceedings in November 2006, when the Democrats took the majority in Congress? Because Wexler's little project is only for show and contains absolutely no substance.

What else does Wexler do for war? Condemns PKK, with no mention of PKK's August 2006 offer of a peaceful, political solution to the Kurdish situation in Turkey. In this, he resembles no one so much as Lockheed Martin's Joseph Ralston.

When you think about the Deep State in the US, don't forget to think about Wexler.

Finally, Hîwa's got a post up about a spat that's developed between the KDP and PUK on one side, and Michael Rubin and Hawlatî on the other, and it looks like Talabanî intends to take Erdoğan's approach and sue Hawlatî, because Hawlatî published a translation of one of Rubin's articles about the corruption in South Kurdistan.

I'm as frustrated as Hîwa over the corruption issue and I have to agree with his conclusions, particularly this:


It is time to take a tough love approach to Iraqi Kurdistan.


Yes, indeed. It's high time for the "tough love approach."

Saturday, January 19, 2008

WE DO NOT FORGET

"The brutality, the impunity, the violence of Hrant’s murder serves several political ends. First, it makes Turkey less interesting for Europe, which is exactly what some in the Turkish establishment want. Second, it scares away Armenians and other minorities in Turkey, from pursuing their civil and human rights. Third, it scares those bold Turks who are beginning to explore these complicated, sensitive subjects in earnest."
~ Vartan Oskanian, Armenian Foreign Minister.



One year ago.


The victim.


The murderers.


The survivors.


The protesters, one year later, outside the office of the Agos newspaper.

From Bianet:


In the year since the murder, the Dink family has had to discover that it is difficult to “question the darkness.” Although the official murder suspects are on trial, it seems clear that those really responsible are will not be prosecuted. The Trabzon Gendarmerie and the Istanbul Police are accused of gross negligence, as they knew of murder plans long before the attack happened. Evidence has been withheld and permission to investigate security officers has been refused.

[ . . . ]

Saying that “the pain has made us relatives,” Rakel Dink reminded the crowd of the many sickening indicators of approval of the murder: the gendarmerie officers arresting suspected triggerman O.S. [note: Ogün Samast of Trabzon], who put a flag in his hand and took souvenir photographs of themselves with the suspect, football fans who reacted to the slogan at the funeral procession by shouting in stadiums, ‘We are all Ogün’ [referring to one of the murder suspects], the intelligence officer Muhittin Zenit who spoke to Erhan Tuncel , police informant and murder suspect, shortly after the murder and evidently knew of the murder plan.


There is no justice from the "Model of Democracy" yet for the Dink family or for the people of Turkey. Until justice comes, there will be no resting in peace for anyone.

Gordon Taylor at Progressive Historians has a little something from his own experience with Turkish fascists, the same kind who murdered Hrant Dink and others this past year, and have gone around terrorizing Kurds for 84 years:


On the night appointed for Turan's address I took my place in the lecture hall and waited with great interest, my pencil and notebook at the ready. Turan was introduced. Then, smiling, he strode to the lectern and proceeded to deliver the most appalling speech I have ever heard outside the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl. When he began, Turan pitched his voice slightly below a scream. There, for the next thirty minutes, it remained. Occasionally it dipped somewhat in pitch; more often it rose into a keening wail. Never did it present the slightest coherent argument for a "Turkish position" on the Cyprus problem. Turkish babies were starving; this was clear. Turkish houses were destroyed. Turkish women were being violated. Turkish men were slaughtered. And, yes, Turkish babies were still starving. As a speech, it was quite effective at one thing: it kept the question-and-answer period to a minimum. No one had the least interest in asking questions of someone who had spent the last half hour shrieking at us. Imagine a press conference post-Nuremberg: "Excuse me, Mr. Hitler: could you explain a bit more your position on the Jews?" Afterward, as we stood in line for coffee and cookies, I spied Turan with several embarrassed-looking Volunteers. He smiled at me and nodded, seemingly eager to talk. Somehow I managed a smile, but I knew that talking was out of the question. With my empty notebook in hand, I found a convenient exit.


Don't forget to read the rest for much more.