GIRALDI ON SIBEL, THE MEDIA, AND CONGRESS

"From what I understand, from what she has to tell, it has a major difference from the Pentagon Papers in that it deals directly with criminal activity and may involve impeachable offenses. And I don't necessarily mean the President or the Vice-President, though I wouldn't be surprised if the information reached up that high. But other members of the Executive Branch may be impeached as well. And she says similar about Congress."
~ Daniel Ellsberg.

There's something on why Sibel Edmonds, whose "story about high level corruption in the United States government involving Turkey and Israel," must be heard, from Phil Giraldi at The Huffington Post:

Why should Sibel be heard? Mostly because her story, if true, involves corruption at the highest levels of government coupled with the sale of secrets vital to the security of the United States. One of her claims is that a senior State Department officer who has been identified as Marc Grossman, recorded by the FBI while arranging to pick up bribes from a Turkish organization, also revealed the identity of the CIA cover company Brewster Jennings to a Turkish contact in late 2001. The Turk then passed on the information to a Pakistani intelligence officer who presumably warned the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network that the CIA was apparently pursuing. Some might call that treason and it should be noted that it occurred two years before Robert Novak's notorious exposure of Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings which led to the conviction of Scooter Libby.

Not only does Giraldi rip the US media for its silence on Sibel's story, but he names those who've been approached with the story, and have ignored it. The question is: Why?

But the media remains silent in spite of considerable efforts to get them on board and provide some coverage of her very serious charges. Since the recent Sunday Times articles, her story has been brought to the attention of news editors at MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, to PBS's Bill Moyers, to The New York Times, The Washington Times, and to both ABC and CBS news in an attempt to arouse some interest. But there has been no response, not even a courteous "Thank you very much for contacting us...." What are so-called gadflies like Olbermann and Moyers afraid of? The suggestion that the media does not want to face the potential legal consequences of the gag order has been cited but lacks substance as much of the Sibel story is already out in public and the details of her allegations can be pieced together without actually interviewing her in violation of the state secrets privilege. Also, no one in the media has actually claimed that the lack of interest is based on the potential legal consequences. The silence has been deafening, suggesting that other forces are at work.

You see, journalists are supposed to investigate, delve into, examine, nose around, probe, pry, and scrutinize. But the servile American media today does not include anyone who's capable of digging into a story. They won't dig into it when you give them all the initial information. They won't look at it. As Giraldi notes, they won't even give you a response. Why? They're owned.

Gore Vidal said: "To keep information from the public is the function of the corporate media".

Noam Chomsky agrees and expands on the idea: "The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly".

Edward Herman, who has collaborated with Chomsky on the manufacturing of consent in the US media further explains: "The propaganda system allows the U.S. Ieadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers".

Giraldi also sets Congress in the crosshairs:

Congress has a responsibility to look into Edmonds' allegations. Congressman Henry Waxman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been stonewalling Edmonds and her supporters, preferring instead to look into steroids use among professional athletes. To be sure, some in the media and Congress are undoubtedly nervous because the Edmond's story involves Israel and corrupt officials both in Washington and Tel Aviv. Many of the American former and current officials involved are considered to be particularly close to the Israeli government and to the Israeli lobby AIPAC. Others fear that FBI investigative reports or wiretaps revealing illegal contributions or bribery of congressmen could open up a can of worms that many would prefer to keep closed.

In other words, Congress is protecting its own--in an attitude no less servile than that of the US media.

Daniel Ellsberg has gone on the record to state that Sibel's story "is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers". The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's investigation and reporting of the Watergate scandal. To use Ellsberg's words, Sibel's story "is far more explosive" than Watergate and I have no doubt that a future Pulitzer Prize would be the result of any serious, comprehensive journalistic investigation of Sibel's story of the corruption and international and domestic intrigue surrounding "the theft and sale of United States defense secrets, most particularly nuclear technology".

More from Giraldi on Sibel:


Found in Translation.

Phil Giraldi chats about Sibel Edmonds, including mp3 (Sibel chat starts at 24 minutes into the interview).

Sibel, Giraldi, American Conservative Mag from May 2006.

THE MAN WHO GAVE PAKISTAN THE BOMB

"He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives."
~ Sibel Edmonds.

We have not heard too much from Sibel Edmonds since the end of October, when she let it be known publicly that she was willing to tell the whole story of her work at the FBI and the information she learned from the translations she made--information that would expose and damn the Turkish lobby in the US and that great American work of fiction, The 9/11 Commission Report.

The silence since Sibel's offer to go public has been mainly the result of the chickenshit American media, which continually refuses to show any interest in Truth or in telling a story that requires a bit of mental concentration to understand--no matter how important the story is. So much for the tradition of muckraking.

Until today, anyway.

Britain's The Sunday Times has placed Sibel's story front and center to tell who it was that was involved with selling nuclear secrets to Pakistan:

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one 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.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

Oh, let me take three nanoseconds of my time to guess who that "well-known senior official in the US State Department" was: Marc Grossman.

Those familiar with the details of the conflict of interest surrounding the State Department's appointment of Lockheed Martin's Joseph Ralston as "PKK coordinator" for Turkey, will remember that Ralston works as a vice-chairman of The Cohen Group. The other vice-chairman of The Cohen Group is Marc Grossman.

The Cohen Group, founded by former Defense Secretary William Cohen--a Clinton appointee--has been involved in nothing but dirty business since its creation, such as its role in the cover-up of Oil-for-Food kickbacks and the Australian Wheat Board. Then, of course, there was the appointment of Ralston as "special envoy" to Turkey to "coordinate" the PKK, even while he was listed as a lobbyist for The Cohen Group in order to export tactical fighter aircraft--and this while maintaining his position as a member of the Board of Directors of Lockheed Martin.

So it should come as no surprise that The Cohen Group should attract and employ a major rodent like Grossman.

Marc Grossman climbed his way to the number three position at the State Department during his 29 years at the department, during which time he worked in Turkey and Pakistan. As the US ambassador to Turkey, he supervised the procurement of American military hardware for the Turkish military and the guy who was directly in charge of that procurement was none other than US Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson who, with his wife, MİT operative Melek Can Dickerson, figures prominently in Sibel's story.

Note that Grossman and Dickerson worked together to provide Turkey with American weapons and military training at the height of Turkey's genocidal Dirty War against the Kurdish people, during which time the US provided more weapons to Turkey than it had during all the other combined years of the Cold War.

Grossman has also been seriously implicated in tipping off both the Pakistanis and the Turks as to the true nature of Brewster Jennings, earning him the status of "subject of interest" by US intelligence circles:

"When Beyaz Enerji began to encounter 'consultants' with Brewster Jennings, they expressed an interest to their ATC interlocutors in buying the firm along with other energy consulting companies. In the two phone calls intercepted by the FBI, Grossman told the called parties to 'stay away from Brewster Jennings . . . they're the government . . . they're nothing but a cover.' One of the calls was to a Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) top agent in Washington. The other call, bearing an almost identical message, was made to a Northrop Grumman official who was a key player with the ATC. The Northrop Grumman official made a phone call to his ATC handler, stating, 'Our guy warned us off Brewster Jennings.' A U.S. intelligence source stated that 'Grossman's name was all over the FBI wiretaps in 2001.'

"Grossman, who now works for the Cohen Group of former Defense Secretary William Cohen, was, according to U.S. intelligence sources, a subject of interest to counter-intelligence agents since his stint as U.S. ambassador in Ankara."

Then there was Grossman's Pakistan connection:

Ahmed [General Mahmoud], the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to "retire" by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?

A better question: Why hasn't the US demanded that Marc Grossman be questioned and tried in court?

Did claims against our "subject of interest" pan out? If not, then why did Grossman resign from the number 3 position at the State Department under cover of darkness--normal activity for rodents--by the beginning of 2005?

Sibel herself put it best:

The second Vice Chairman of Cohen’s firm is Marc Grossman, who was the U.S. Undersecretary for Political Affairs in the State Department from 2001 until 2005. From November 1994 to June 1997, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. In January 2005 Grossman resigned from his position and joined the Cohen Group. In late December 2005, Grossman joined Ihlas Holding, a large and alleged shady Turkish company which is also active in several Central Asian countries. Grossman is reported to receive $100,000 per month for his advisory position with Ihlas.’ Most and foremost, Grossman is known for his extraordinarily cozy relationship with Turkey and Israel; followed by Pakistan.

[ . . . ]

Please do not make the grave and naive mistake of assuming that Grossman found and obtained his highly lucrative and questionable positions after his resignation in January 2005. Within two months after his confident resignation, this boy got the vice chairmanship of the Cohen Group. Only six months later, Grossman ended up securing a ‘special advisory’ position for a foreign company that reported his monthly fee at $100,000 a month. The industrious Grossman seems to be juggling so many balls simultaneously: numerous foreign sponsored dinner speeches, the demanding pimping activities of Cohen’s firm, the very ‘special advising’ of a shady foreign company…

As Sibel noted, that "shady foreign company" is Ihlas Holding, a Fethullacı (i.e. Islamist) business. Obviously Marc Grossman was able to make a very comfortable transition to the private business world because he had made a lot of lucrative connections during his time at the State Department. These connections were his retirement plan, you might say. The fact is also that Grossman didn't cultivate any of his connections for high-minded ideological purposes; he did it for the money and the power.

Let's make it clear what I'm saying here, and what Sibel is saying: Marc Grossman sold nuclear secrets to the Turks, who turned around and sold them to Pakistan. Marc Grossman gave Pakistan The Bomb.

The rodent Grossman is in complete denial, again from today's Sunday Times:

The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds’s allegations: “If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.”

But American intelligence types corroborate Sibel's version of the story, just as every official investigation into Sibel's accusations have done:

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

And if Grossman is truly innocent, he won't have anything to hide and, therefore, will not mind a public investigation . . . will he?

By the way, check out this little zinger at the beginning of the article:

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Let's see now . . . Turkey . . . that would be America's close ally and Model of Democracy for the Middle East, right . . . training 9/11 hijackers in Turkey?

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Americans are so stupid.

For more on Sibel and The Sunday Times, see Luke Ryland's latest post at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak. Also, see Grossman backgrounders:

"Marc Grossman, Man of Mystery".

"Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Marc Grossman"

"Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame"


In order to put faces to names, Sibel has a State Secrets Rogues Photo Gallery. The list of rogues reads as follows, from left to right:


Richard Perle
Douglas Feith
Eric Edelman
Marc Grossman

*****

Brent Scowcroft
Larry Franklin

*****

Dennis Hastert
Roy Blount - ( Republican, Missouri)
Dan Burton - (R - IN)
Tom Lantos - (D- CA)
?
Bob Livingston
Stephen Solarz

*****

Graham Fuller- RAND
David Makovsky - WINEP
Alan Makovsky- WINEP
?
?

*****

Yusuf Turani (President, Turkistan)
Professor Sabri Sayari (Georgetown, WINEP)
Mehmet Eymur (Turkish MIT)


UPDATE: Luke has a post with the photos of the guilty. Take a look and read the comments.

POLITICS, FOLLY, AND SCHIZOPHRENIA

"In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."
~ George Orwell.

Let's see . . . first item tonight: Mîr at Rastbêj throws out his ideas of what needs to be done now for the Kurdish situation, all laid out in four points for the Southern Kurdish leadership as follows:

1) Create a common Kurdish National Policy,

2) Use oil contracts with Western countries as a card against them,

3) Found high quality universities to train the brightest youths from all over Kurdistan,

4) Use international media effectively,

The bottom line? Cooperate or die.

Andrew Lee Butters, at TIME, has a few historical reminders for all those who can't remember what happened yesterday, much less ten years ago:

In 1995, the Turkish army invaded northern Iraq, sending some 35,000 soldiers across the border to destroy the guerilla infrastructure of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) a militant group made up of Turkish Kurds that had found refuge in the lawless mountain region. Operation Steel, as it was called, killed over 500 militants, but still the PKK survived to fight another day. In early 1997, the Turks sent in another 30,000 soldiers — this time as part of Operation Hammer — to finish the job. They didn't. The Turks had to go in again later that year with Operation Dawn.

This month the Turks launched yet another operation against the PKK, and there is little to suggest that it will be any more effective than the others. So far 300 Turkish commandoes crossed briefly into Iraq, while Turkey has staged three air strikes, including one Wednesday. Turkey claims to have attacked some 200 PKK locations, and killed hundreds of militants. A PKK fighter told TIME that just five of the group's members had been killed. Whatever the true figure, the operation would seem to be a minor chapter in Turkey's seemingly never-ending civil war with radicals among its oppressed Kurdish minority population, who took up arms in the 1980's.

Well, okay, maybe it is radical to fight back when someone is trying to kill you.

Butters notes that not even the peşmêrge are able (even if they would be willing) to do anything about PKK, since the peşmêrge are stretched thin trying to hold Iraq together for the Americans. Besides, the peşmêrge fought PKK in the 1990s, too, and they were unable to do much more to PKK than inflict a few scratches on the organization.

Butters' comment about the Turks' relationship with Turkmen is amusing and on the mark as well.

He concludes with a moral about what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket:

Kurdish leaders in Iraq have been relatively subdued since the Turkish operations began, acquiescing perhaps to the fickle will of their American masters. They know better than anyone that, without American protection, it's doubtful their hostile neighbors — not just Turkey, but also Iran and Syria, which have restive Kurdish minority populations of their own — would limit themselves to a few air strikes.

Well, maybe not if some of Mîr's ideas had been at the top of the agenda in 2003.

It sounds like Hillary Clinton has appointed Mehmet Çelebi as one of her delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in the summer of 2008, putting Çelebi in the lead for MİT--as in Milli İstibarat Teşkilatı and not Massachusettes Institute of Technology--Asset of the Year.

Anyone who votes for Hillary should be horsewhipped within an inch of his life anyway.

Mother Jones has a nice little timeline showing how the US worked to encourage the rise of militant Islam. You might want to keep that in mind when thinking about the recent assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

I'm no expert on Pakistan, however there is a blogger who does seem to follow the Pakistani scene and I highly recommend two of his posts on the Bhutto assassination. The first by Winter Patriot was posted today:

And you'll hear lots of talk about extremists in the near future in connection with this assassination, and in nearly every case you will be expected to make the mental connection between the word "extremists" and the wild men in the mountains of the northwest. But you will remember, won't you, that in addition to these more famous extremists, there are extremists working for Musharraf, and extremists working for Bush ... and there may even be extremists working for the PPP, the party Benazir Bhutto betrayed.

The second was posted yesterday:

You will see media reports of shock and grief at her death, but you will not likely see anything about how thoroughly she betrayed her country for personal gain.

Her death will be painted as a blow to George Bush and his plan to make Benazir the face of Pakistani "democracy". It will also be painted as a blow to Pakistani "democracy" itself.

But if there were anything approaching democracy in Pakistan and the USA, Benazir Bhutto and George Bush would both have been in prison a long time ago.

And people think Kurdish politics is a mess. . .

THE MAN AND THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

"To us, he [David Albright] was the most credible guy, someone who was able to document something really specific: that is, the role of Turkey in the build-up of the Pakistani nuclear program. Albright told us that Turkey started helping since the very beginning. We didn’t know that. He confirmed that some stuff most likely ended up in Al-Qaeda’s hands. And to us, that was sign that the cycle was complete: we had the Christian fundamentalists, ultra right-wing zionists and the Muslim fundamentalists all in the same bed, because of their hatred of communism."
~ Mathieu Verboud, director, Kill The Messenger.

Here's something very important that my money says you won't see in mainstream American media. When you read it, think of one thing: Sibel Edmonds. From Britain's Guardian:

Rich Barlow idles outside his silver trailer on a remote campsite in Montana - itinerant and unemployed, with only his hunting dogs and a borrowed computer for company. He dips into a pouch of American Spirit tobacco to roll another cigarette. It is hard to imagine that he was once a covert operative at the CIA, the recognised, much lauded expert in the trade in Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

He prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a political scandal - a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb - he found himself a marked man.

In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan. It was known the Islamic Republic had been covertly striving to acquire nuclear weapons since India's explosion of a device in 1974 and the prospect terrified the west - especially given the instability of a nation that had had three military coups in less than 30 years . Straddling deep ethnic, religious and political fault-lines, it was also a country regularly rocked by inter-communal violence. "Pakistan was the kind of place where technology could slip out of control," Barlow says.

He soon discovered, however, that senior officials in government were taking quite the opposite view: they were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology.

[ . . . ]

Barlow came to the conclusion that a small group of senior officials was physically aiding the Pakistan programme. "They were issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment that was critical for their nuclear bomb programme and that the US Commerce Department had refused to license," he says. Dismayed, he approached his boss at the CIA, Richard Kerr, the deputy director for intelligence, who summoned senior State Department officials to a meeting at CIA headquarters in Langley. Barlow recalls: "Kerr tried to do it as nicely as he could. He said he understood the State Department had to keep Pakistan on side - the State Department guaranteed it would stop working against us."

[ . . . ]

US foreign aid legislation stipulated that if Pakistan was shown to be procuring weapons of mass destruction or was in possession of a nuclear bomb, all assistance would be halted. This, in turn, would have threatened the US-funded war in Afghanistan. So there were conflicting interests at work when Barlow got a call from the Department of Energy. "I was told that a Pakistani businessman had contacted Carpenter Steel, a company in Pennsylvania, asking to buy a specific type of metal normally used only in constructing centrifuges to enrich uranium. His name was Arshad Pervez and his handler, Inam ul-Haq, a retired brigadier from the Pakistan army, had been known to us for many years as a key Pakistan government operative." Barlow and US customs set up a sting. "Pervez arrived to a do a deal at a hotel we had rigged out and was arrested," Barlow says. "But ul-Haq, our main target, never showed."

Trawling through piles of cables, he found evidence that two high-ranking US officials extremely close to the White House had tipped off Islamabad about the CIA operation. Furious, Barlow called his superiors. "The CIA went mad. These were criminal offences," Barlow says. The State Department's lawyers considered their position. They argued that an inquiry would necessitate the spilling of state secrets. The investigation was abandoned just as Reagan made his annual statement to Congress, testifying that "Pakistan does not possess a nuclear explosive device."

But the Pervez case would not go away. Congressman Stephen Solarz, a Democrat from New Jersey, demanded a closed congressional hearing to vet the intelligence concerning Pakistan's bomb programme. Barlow was detailed to "backbench" at the meeting, if necessary offering advice to the White House representative, General David Einsel (who had been chosen by Reagan to head his Star Wars programme). An armed guard stood outside the room where the hearing was held.

Barlow recalls that Solarz got straight to the point: "Were Pervez and ul-Haq agents of the Pakistan government?" Without flinching, Einsel barked back: "It is not cut and dried." It was a criminal offence to lie to Congress, as other hearings happening on the same day down the corridor were spelling out to Colonel Oliver North, the alleged mastermind behind Iran-Contra. Barlow froze. "These congressmen had no idea what was really going on in Pakistan and what had been coming across my desk about its WMD programme," he says. "They did not know that Pakistan already had a bomb and was shopping for more with US help. All of it had been hushed up."

Then Solarz called on Barlow to speak. "I told the truth. I said it was clear Pervez was an agent for Pakistan's nuclear programme. Everyone started shouting. General Einsel screamed, 'Barlow doesn't know what he's talking about.' Solarz asked if there had been any other cases involving the Pakistan government and Einsel said, 'No'." Barlow recalls thinking, " 'Oh no, here we go again.' They asked me and I said, 'Yes, there have been scores of other cases.' "

The meeting broke up. Barlow was bundled into a CIA car that sped for Langley. It was a bad time to be the US's foremost expert on Pakistan's nuclear programme when the administration was desperate to prove it didn't exist. Shortly after, Barlow left the CIA, claiming that Einsel had made his job impossible.

[ . . . ]

In January 1989, he was recruited by the Office of the Secretary of Defence (OSD) at the Pentagon to become its first intelligence analyst in WMD.

[ . . . ]

Still optimistic, still perhaps naive and still committed to the ideal of thwarting the Pakistan programme, Barlow convinced himself that his experience in the CIA was untypical, the work of a handful of political figures who would now not be able to reach him. When he was commissioned to write an intelligence assessment for Dick Cheney, defence secretary, giving a snapshot of the Pakistan WMD programme, he thought he was making headway. Barlow's report was stark. He concluded that the US had sold 40 F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan in the mid-80s - it had been a precondition of the sale that none of the jets could be adapted to drop a nuclear bomb. He was convinced that all of them had been configured to do just that. He concluded that Pakistan was still shopping for its WMD programme and the chances were extremely high that it would also begin selling this technology to other nations. Unbeknown to Barlow, the Pentagon had just approved the sale of another 60 F-16s to Pakistan in a deal worth $1.4bn, supposedly with the same provison as before.

"Officials at the OSD kept pressurising me to change my conclusions," Barlow says. He refused and soon after noticed files going missing. A secretary tipped him off that a senior official had been intercepting his papers. In July 1989, Barlow was hauled before one of the Pentagon's top military salesmen, who accused him of sabotaging the new F-16 deal. Eight days later, when Congress asked if the jet could be adapted by Pakistan to drop a nuclear bomb, the Defence Department said, "None of the F-16s Pakistan already owns or is about to purchase is configured for nuclear delivery." Barlow was horrified.

On August 4 1989, he was fired. "They told me they had received credible information that I was a security risk." Barlow demanded to know how and why. "They said they could not tell me as the information was classified." All they would say was that "senior Defence Department officials", whose identities were also classified, had supplied "plenty of evidence".

[ . . . ]

The Pentagon officials who were responsible for Barlow's downfall would all be out of government by 1993, when Bill Clinton came into the White House. In opposition they began pursuing an aggressive political agenda, canvassing for war in Iraq rather than restraining nuclear-armed Pakistan. Their number now included Congressman Donald Rumsfeld, a former Republican defence secretary, and several others who would go on to take key positions under George Bush, including Richard Armitage, Richard Perle and John Bolton.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz headed the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which concluded in July 1998 that the chief threat - far greater than the CIA and other intelligence agencies had so far reported - was posed by Iran, Iraq and North Korea: the future Axis of Evil powers. Pakistan was not on the list, even though just two months earlier it had put an end to the dissembling by detonating five nuclear blasts in the deserts of Balochistan.

It was also difficult not to conclude that Islamist terrorism was escalating and that its epicentre was Pakistan. The camps that had once been used to train the US-backed mujahideen had, since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, morphed into training facilities for fighters pitted against the west. Many were filled by jihadis and were funded with cash from the Pakistan military.

It was made clear to the new president, Bill Clinton, that US policy on Pakistan had failed. The US had provided Islamabad with a nuclear bomb and had no leverage to stop the country's leaders from using it. When he was contacted by lawyers for Barlow, Clinton was shocked both by the treatment Barlow had received, and the implications for US policy on Pakistan. He signed off $1m in compensation. But Barlow never received it as the deal had to be ratified by Congress and, falling foul of procedural hurdles, it was kicked into the Court of Federal Claims to be reviewed as Clinton left office.

When the George Bush came to power, his administration quashed the case. CIA director George Tenet and Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, asserted "state secrets privilege" over Barlow's entire legal claim. With no evidence to offer, the claim collapsed. Destroyed and penniless, the former CIA golden boy spent his last savings on a second-hand silver Avion trailer, packed up his life and drove off to Bear Canyon campground in Bozeman, Montana, where he still lives today.

Even with Barlow out of the picture, there were still analysts in Washington - and in the Bush administration - who were wary of Pakistan. They warned that al-Qaida had a natural affinity with Pakistan, geographically and religiously, and that its affiliates were seeking nuclear weapons. Some elements of the Pakistan military were sympathetic and in place to help. But those arguing that Pakistan posed the highest risk were isolated. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were in the ascendant, and they returned to the old agenda, lobbying for a war in Iraq and, in a repeat of 1981 and the Reagan years, signed up Pakistan as the key ally in the war against terror.

Contrary advice was not welcome. And Bush's team set about dismantling the government agency that was giving the most trouble - the State Department's Nonproliferation Bureau. Norm Wulf, who recently retired as deputy assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, told us: "They met in secret, deciding who to employ, displacing career civil servants with more than 30 years on the job in favour of young, like-thinking people, rightwingers who would toe the administration line." And the administration line was to do away with any evidence that pointed to Pakistan as a threat to global stability, refocusing all attention on Iraq.

The same tactics used to disgrace Barlow and discredit his evidence were used again in 2003, this time against Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador whom the Bush administration had sent to Africa with a mission to substantiate the story that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material to manufacture WMD. When Wilson refused to comply, he found himself the subject of a smear campaign, while his wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA agent. Libby would subsequently be jailed for leaking Plame's identity (although released on a presidential pardon). Plame and Wilson's careers and marriage would survive. Barlow and his wife, Cindy's, would not - and no one would be held to account. Until now.

Sibel's side of the story, told by John Stanton and picked up by Cryptome:

Religious types like to say that “God/Allah works in mysterious ways.” Interestingly, thanks to September 11, 2001, it appears that such a God/Allah may have been at work to expose some of the demons in American government and business, and their counterparts at work around the world. Who would have thought that Sibel Edmonds would encounter a lot of archived and/or then current documentation flowing through the intelligence pipeline that exposed criminal activity across the board by an array of conniving characters.

American, Turkish and Pakistani operations (and history), planned and unplanned, were, perhaps, uncovered by her in the brief but heady days of worldwide cross-intelligence agency sharing following 911. Imagine the treasure trove of finds!

The actors in this drama include cultural and semi-legitimate groups like the American Friends of Turkey/American Turkish Council (and affiliates and chapters); the Atlantic Council; American (CIA), Turkish (MIT) and Pakistan (ISI) intelligence agencies; Pentagon intelligence operatives like USAF Major Douglas Dickerson and Jan Malek Can Dickerson; former Turkish ministers like Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz under investigation for corruption; Turkish-run companies like Giza Technologies of New Jersey, implicated and then cleared of WMD proliferation charges**; and US officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

As an aside, US defense contractors--like Textron, Lockheed Martin and Halliburton ­figure in this story too as they, with US government approval, have regularly exhibited at defense weapons expos in Turkey, Pakistan, and elsewhere for decades. Why China and Iran are vilified as of late for being legitimate participants in these Expos there and here in the USA Homeland remains an intriguing question. It’s interesting to note that MSNBC reported that Cheney’s big visit to China in 2004 included marketing Westinghouse’s nuclear reactors to China. No surprise there as US nuclear technology has been marketed to the world over the years by Cheney and Rumsfeld (the latter in North Korea) to include North Korea.

But go figure. Buying some conventional weapons capability and basic nuclear generation technology from dullard US defense contractors is one thing. The real question is this: How did Pakistan and Turkey escaped [sic] US scrutiny while developing nuclear weapons and Turkey helped pay for them with drug money and technology?

And from Sibel Edmonds herself:

Another well-known and documented case involves Pakistan. Over two decades ago Richard Barlow, an intelligence analyst working for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney issued a startling report. After reviewing classified information from field agents, he had determined that Pakistan, despite official denials, had built a nuclear bomb. In the March 29, 1993 issue of New Yorker, Seymour Hersh noted that “even as Barlow began his digging, some senior State Department officials were worried that too much investigation would create what Barlow called embarrassment for Pakistan.” Barlow's conclusion was politically inconvenient. A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, and it would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad. A few months later a Pentagon official downplayed Pakistan's nuclear capabilities in his testimony to Congress. When Barlow protested to his superiors, he was fired. A few years later, the Executive Branch would slap Barlow with the State Secrets Privilege.

As we all now know, Pakistan provided direct nuclear assistance to Iran and Libya. During the Cold War, the U.S. put up with Pakistani lies and deception about their nuclear activities, it did not enforce its restrictions on Pakistan's nuclear program when it counted, and as a result Pakistan ended up with a U.S.-made nuclear weapons system. Yet again, after 9/11, the Bush administration issued a waiver ending the implementation of almost all sanctions on Pakistan because of the perceived need for Pakistani assistance in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who ironically were brought to power by direct U.S. support in the 1980s in the first place.

Weiss, in the May-June 2004 issue of the Bulletin states: “We are essentially back where we were with Pakistan in the 1980s. It is apparent that it has engaged in dangerous nuclear mischief with North Korea, Iran, and Libya (and perhaps others), but thus far without consequences to its relationship with the United States because of other, overriding foreign policy considerations--not the Cold War this time, but the war on terrorism.” He continues: “But now there is a major political difference. It was one thing for Pakistan, a country with which the United States has had good relations generally, to follow India and produce the bomb for itself. It is quite another for Pakistan to help two-thirds of the "axis of evil” to get the bomb as well.”

Of course, oodles of stuff on Pakistan, Turkey, nuclear technology, and all the dirty players in this mess are archived at Luke Ryland's Kill The Messenger blog.

Okay, so tell me again: Who are the real terrorists??