FOLLOWING THE BLOOD MONEY TRAIL

"And, yes, I refer to it as blood money because where I come from, when you take money to deny the killing of innocent women and children, that is blood money."
~ David Krikorian.

Luke Rosiak at The Sunlight Foundation has more information on the Turkish lobby in the US and it's relationship to US defense contractors. Rosiak focuses on someone who's been highlighted here at Rastî--Yalçın Ayaslı of Hittite Microwave:

Turkey’s efforts have now been augmented by a domestic effort launched by a Turkish-American entrepreneur. Yalcin Ayasli founded Hittite Microwave in 1985 as a one-man company with a grant from the U.S. Air Force, and built the electronics company into a firm worth $1.2 billion, with half of its products sold overseas, according to a company presentation. The company had $180 million in revenue in 2008, according to SEC filings.

Since 2004, Hittite Microwave has received roughly $30 million in contracts directly from the government—mostly to sponsor research and development—and has also done business with Lockheed Martin and other prime contractors, many of whom use Hittite electronics in their jets and other equipment, sold to both the U.S. military and Turkey.

In 2007, Ayasli transferred $30 million in stock to fund a new endeavor, the nonprofit Turkish Coalition of America. The organization is headquartered in a Washington suite that has also been listed as the address for the Turkish Coalition USA PAC, the lobbying firm of Lydia Borland (who has represented the Turkish government), and the law firm of Bruce Fein and Associates (Fein comprises half of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund).

The family of Hittite founder Ayaslin contributed nearly half a million dollars to federal politics in 2007-2008, donating near the maximum amount to the House campaign committees for both parties, but largely neglecting the Senate.

Read the rest and make sure to check out the great mind map Rosiak created to illustrate the connections of this web. Toward the end of the piece, Rosiak highlights the role of major US corporations that have lobbied Congress for their own interests in Turkey.

David Krikorian was completely on target when he labeled lobby money as "blood money", with that blood first being Armenian and then being Kurdish, and that's something that Sibel Edmonds confirmed on the day of her deposition.

This time, there's no need for me to ask what Sibel would think because she's got her own opinion of Rosiak's piece up at her place, 123 Real Change.

For more on Ayaslı, Hittite Microwave, and Schmidt v. Krikorian, see these:

Turkish Espionage Operations Target Congress

Who Is Paying the Piper?

THE DEEP STATE'S CANDIDATE

"We should work more to both protect the Kurds and make sure they will not provide shelter to terrorists in their territory."
~ Hillary Clinton.

A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for the war industry, according to Britain's Independent. The military-industrial complex (MIC) realizes that the Republicans stand a proverbial snowball's chance of winning the White House in the next election, so the employees of the MIC have chosen Hillary with their campaign bucks:

Mrs Clinton's wooing of the defence industry is all the more remarkable given the frosty relations between Bill Clinton and the military during his presidency [Bullshit--Mizgîn]. An analysis of campaign contributions shows senior defence industry employees are pouring money into her war chest in the belief that their generosity will be repaid many times over with future defence contracts.

Employees of the top five US arms manufacturers – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon – gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to the Republicans. "The contributions clearly suggest the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed," said Thomas Edsall, an academic at Columbia University in New York.

In spite of what the article says about Bill Clinton's relationship with the military itself--certainly not as cozy a relationship as he had with any number of women--Bill Clinton was the MIC's dream come true. From Multinational Monitor, 1995:

Arms industry lobbyists say they are delighted with the Clinton administration’s record. “Clinton has been very helpful through [Commerce Secretary] Ron Brown,” says Ana Stout, executive vice president of the American League for Export Assistance, Inc., an industry association that promotes unimpeded defense sales to U.S. “friends and allies.”

“We’re quite satisfied with what we see the thrust of the policy to be,” adds Joel Johnson, vice president for international affairs at the Aerospace Industries Association. “It’s 180 degrees different from Carter. They won’t throw up obstacles to every arms sale to every country. The Clinton people are very supportive of specific sales. They are more dynamic than any administration we’ve seen.”

Under the sidebar:

A fellow NATO ally, the United States is Turkey’s closest military partner. Between 1987 and 1991, 77 percent of all arms deliveries to Turkey came from the United States, according to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

For fiscal years 1986-1995, Congress has appropriated $5.1 billion in military aid for Turkey, making it the third-largest recipient after Israel and Egypt. In terms of commercial sales, Turkey is the fifth-largest consumer of U.S. arms after Saudi Arabia, Japan, Taiwan and Egypt. Turkey bought $9.4 billion in U.S. arms during fiscal years 1984-1993. In 1994 alone, Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign cost an estimated $6.5 billion.

The Clinton administration helped Turkey acquire more cluster bombs, which were used on the Kurdish people:

Human Rights Watch’s Arms Project revealed in December 1994 that the U.S. government is weighing a Turkish request to buy almost 500 U.S.-made CBU-87 Combined Effects Munitions (CEMs), or cluster bombs.

[ . . . ]

One type of bomb the Turkish air force dropped on Zaleh in January of 1994 was the U.S.-made, Vietnam-era Mk20 Rockeye cluster bomb. This is the only cluster bomb now thought to be in the Turkish arsenal. “Turkey already has [cluster bombs] in its inventory,” says an arms lobbyist, who asks not to be identified. “Human rights shouldn’t be involved. What does [blocking new cluster bombs exports] accomplish?”

We know that Turkey is using cluster bombs against the civilian population in South Kurdistan yet again.

And there's more on Bill Clinton's illegal arms transfers to Turkey, from Human Rights Watch and at the Federation of American Scientists.

Let us also remember that our friends at The Cohen Group all worked for the Clinton administration, with William Cohen as Defense Secretary, Marc Grossman in a number of State Department jobs including ambassador to Turkey, and Joseph Ralston as military head of NATO.

Deep State Hillary will not be any better than her husband when it comes to the situation in North Kurdistan? The situation there is a return to the Dirty War, complete with the state's black operations, a new OHAL, and greater efforts at enforcing a media blackout on the area.

In fact, she may be worse; females are always the more deadly of the species.

FOR LOVE AND BLOOD MONEY

"Everybody knows Northrop Grumman and G.E., but if you went out on the street and asked who the top 10 [defense] contractors are, I can guarantee you that SAIC would not be one of them."
~ Glenn Grossenbacher, in "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow".

Last Thursday, I posted a link to a long article on the Wolfowitz scandal from The New Yorker and carried at Truthout, noting that the article suggested that Wolfowitz had been appointed to the World Bank in an effort to keep events in Iraq moving according to the Bush Administration playbook.

More on that has come out today, from the NYTimes:

The Defense Department directed a private contractor in 2003 to hire Shaha Ali Riza, a World Bank employee and the companion of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, to spend a month studying issues related to setting up a new government in Iraq, the contractor said Monday.

The contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, said that it had been directed to hire Ms. Riza by the office of the under secretary for policy. The head of that office at the time was Douglas J. Feith, who reported to Mr. Wolfowitz.

After her trip to Iraq, Ms. Riza briefed members of the executive board of the World Bank on efforts to rebuild after the American invasion and specifically on the status of Iraqi women, according to Ms. Riza’s supervisor at the time.

All of this is very loaded. For example, SAIC is perhaps one of the worst corporate parasites sucking blood money out of Iraq. Check this excellent rundown on the SAIC bloodsuckers at in a Vanity Fair article from last month:

The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.

And since we just celebrated Tax Day in the US, check this out:

It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.

How much did you donate last year to SAIC's war industry welfare?

What everyone agrees on is this: No Washington contractor pursues government money with more ingenuity and perseverance than SAIC. No contractor seems to exploit conflicts of interest in Washington with more zeal. And no contractor cloaks its operations in greater secrecy. SAIC almost never touts its activities in public, preferring to stay well below the radar.

Naturally, there's a link to what Sibel Edmonds has referred to as Dime-a-Dozen Generals:

Civilians at SAIC used to joke that the company had so many admirals and generals in its ranks it could start its own war. Some might argue that, in the case of Iraq, it did.

[ . . . ]

SAIC executives have been involved at every stage of the life cycle of the war in Iraq. SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the first place, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. Then, as war became inevitable, SAIC secured contracts for a broad range of operations in soon-to-be-occupied Iraq. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission that was set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong.

It's all an inside job, and a completely cynical one at that. There's more backgrounder on SAIC at CorpWatch, and a search of that site for "Science Applications International Corporation" reveals more info. Then there's a listing at Sourcewatch.

Another connection between the Wolfowitz girlfriend scandal and Sibel's information is the mention of Douglas Feith. In the NYTimes article, once again Feith feigns Alzheimer's disease by claiming that he can't recall a damned thing about ordering Wolfowitz's main squeeze to be hired by SAIC or to be sent to Iraq. Of course, "Doug Feith's International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey . . ." as Lukery has previously posted, meaning that Feith is deep into the deep shit of the Deep State.

More on Feith's stupidity vis-a-vis Iraq here. Feith also cooked the books, so to speak, on the al-Qaeda/Saddam connection.

And what about Shaha Ali Riza? Well, for one thing, the arrangements Wolfowitz made for her put her in the State Department and increased her salary from $132,660/year to $193,590/year--with no donations to SAIC required because, not being a resident of the US, Riza paid no taxes on income. That tax-free salary definitely put her way over Condoleeza Rice, who earns $186,000 before taxes, according to the BBC.

Riza herself took to playing the helpless, innocent victim last week, an angle that the LATimes has begun to manufacture. But is Riza really so helpless or innocent?

The story is that Riza moved out of the World Bank to the State Department because Wolfowitz took over as the World Bank chief and you can't have that kind of conflict of interest at the World Bank. But with the news today of Doug Feith's involvement with this business, I suspect Riza's move was contrived to continue to facilitate blood money rolling in to war industry contractors, like SAIC, from Iraq. In the build-up to the Iraq war, there was considerable tension, if not downright hostility, between the State Department and CIA, and the Pentagon. Kanan Makiya talked about the hostility in a PBS Frontline interview in 2003. That hostility continued during the so-called reconstruction and continues this day through the neoconservative gang vs. Baker-Hamilton gang (read that as Pentagon gang vs. State/CIA gang).

If Wolfowitz was appointed to lead the World Bank in order to facilitate the Pentagon gang's interests in Iraq, then my money says Riza was moved to the State Department not to avoid a conflict of interest at the World Bank, but to keep tabs on the State Department's handling of Iraq for the Pentagon gang. That's the real reason why everyone's making a big deal of this affair.

With the big blood bucks of the war industry on the line in Iraq, the antagonism between the Pentagon gang and the State/CIA gang continues, only this time underground and with a mole--Shaha Ali Riza.