STRATEGY OF TENSION IN ISTANBUL

"I was quite surprised to learn that by far the most extensive and destructive stay-behind operations were those carried out in Turkey under the code name Counter-Guerrilla."
~ Tim Howells, "How Our Governments Use Terrorism To Control Us".

There was a minor incident in Istanbul today when three armed gunmen attacked the police at the entrance to the American consulate compound. The NYTimes is as good a rag as any to give you the basic rundown. The media lapdogs are dutifully echoing the straw man of the US embassy in Ankara, Ross "If I Only Had A Brain" Wilson, in blaming this little shoot-out on Al-Qaeda.

However, an item from the AP tells me that something else entirely is going on and it doesn't have too much to do with Al-Q:

NTV television and Dogan news agency identified the attackers as Erkan Kargin, 26, and Raif Topcil, 20, from the southeastern city of Bitlis and Bulent Cinar, 23, from the eastern city of Igdir. Police would not confirm their identities, but Interior Minister Besir Atalay said two of the assailants had criminal records.

Why, oh why do I smell Turkish Hezbollah? Could it be because the gunmen were recruited from The Southeast, where the AKP has been attempting to resurrect the Turkish Hezbollah? Turkish media is proposing that the gunmen were members of the IBDA-C (İslami Büyükdoğu Akıncılar Cephesi; Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front) and I wasted too much time reading various articles with headlines that were too promising compared to what information was actually delivered. Basically, there are suggestions of a similar ideology between IBDA-C and Al-Q but nothing that substantially, well, substantiates a deeper relationship that would justify equating IBDA-C with Al-Q. It does, however, make great propaganda copy for the lapdog media.

There has also been linkage in Turkish media with IBDA-C and the series of bombings in Istanbul in 2003 which included attacks on the British consulate in Istanbul, the HSBC bank, and two synagogues. Here's something on that, from the BBC:

In 2003, the group claimed responsibility for devastating bombings of the British consulate in Istanbul, the local headquarters of the HSBC bank and two synagogues, which together which left 58 dead, including British Consul General Roger Short.

Although last year saw the jailing of 48 people for their roles in the bombings - seven of them for life - their connection with IBDA-C is still unclear.

Turkish officials have always maintained that the bombings were the work of a separate group with direct links to al-Qaeda, known as the "Warriors for Islam" and that IBDA-C lacked the organisational ability to launch such a complex operation.

If the perpetrators of the latest attack are found to be members of IBDA-C and the reports of their recent return from Afghanistan prove to be true, the Turkish police may be forced to rethink their opinion of the group.

But, Turkish Hezbollah was more widely recognized as having carried out those bombings.

It's also widely recognized that the Ankara regime created Turkish Hezbollah.

As the Ankara regime tried to use Turkish Hezbollah to attempt to crush the PKK and then forgot about it until a shoot-out in Istanbul in 2000, so now it seems to have forgotten about its creation again until the shoot-out today. Could it be that the Ankara regime took a page out of the CIA's playbook, thinking it would be a very easy thing to control its creature, Turkish Hezbollah, even as the CIA thought it would be a very easy thing to control its own creature, Al-Q?

It's also widely recognized that other Islamist groups use Turkey, particularly Istanbul, as a staging ground, in cahoots with the Gray Wolves, and that these groups move freely across the borders. Other groups, such as Nizam-i Alem are involved with the Ergenekon gang.

Now ask yourself: Why was the attack carried out the way it was? Why go up to the entrance to the consulate compound and try to blast your way in with guns? The area around the consulate is wooded; it would be easy to use an RPG to blast it under cover. Why do it the stupid way instead? I suspect this attack is yet another act in the show known as the Strategy of Tension, as the Deep State reorganizes itself according to agreements reached between the AKP and the TSK.

Fırat News is awaiting a statement from HPG about the seizure of three German climbers. Of one thing, we can be guaranteed: These Germans will receive much better treatment from HPG than Kurds receive from German authorities. Remember the PKK way In the meantime, Hevallo opines.

Also check out Gordon Taylor's recent post--which I've been meaning to mention for a few days now--on the spread of HPG's areas of operation.

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.

LET THE COVER-UP BEGIN

"The 'deep state' is made up of elements from the military, security and judicial establishments wedded to a fiercely nationalist, statist ideology who, if need be, are ready to block or even oust a government that does not share their vision."
~ Gareth Jones, reporting for Reuters on TDN.

Trabzon . . . The shooter was from Trabzon; why am I not surprised? Trabzon, the spawning ground of the MHP and its assassins, the Gray Wolves.

IHT reports that Ogun Samast, the shooter, is seventeen and from Trabzon. "Described as a quiet but courageous boy by his uncle," yet he dropped out of high school and was kicked out of a soccer club due to "undisciplined behavior." Described as "totally open to manipulation," by one of the soccer officials.

They also say "he couldn't have done this alone," that "[s]ome people must have exploited him," and

Kazim Kolcuoglu, head of the Istanbul Bar Association, said that young people are sometimes used as assassins because they face lower penalties than adults convicted of the same crime.

Exactly. In addition, ordinary criminals are routinely granted a general amnesty, something that never applies to political prisoners. More from IHT on another suspect:

One of the suspects, Yasin Hayal, an alleged Islamic militant who learned to make bombs from Chechen militants at a camp in Azerbaijan and who served 11 months in jail for the bombing of a McDonalds restaurant in Trabzon in 2004, is suspected of masterminding the attacks on both Dink and Father Santaro.

Did you get it? A Turkish Islamist bombs a McDonalds in Turkey and only gets 11 months in jail. What happened to Turkey's noble war on terror? Ask yourself why an Islamist who bombs a McDonalds only gets 11 months in jail.

Does anyone remember that Alparslan Aslan, the shooter in the Council of State attack last May, was also an Islamist with ties to ultra-nationalists? From DozaMe:

The Atabeyler gang’s existence — believed to be an ‘open secret’ in the corridors of Ankara — was unearthed by the Turkish AKP administration after an attack on the Turkish Council of State on May 17, 2006. The Turkish judge Mustafa Yücel Özbilgin of the Second Chamber was killed and four other judges were wounded. The assailant, Alparslan Aslan, a lawyer with Islamic fundamentalist and Turkish ultra-nationalist sympathies, was arrested for the murder.

Alparslan Aslan’s interrogation led to the arrest of several retired and serving military service men and police officers. The operation was named as “Atabeyler Operation” but satisfying results could not be obtained due to interference by the higher Turkish military echelon who claimed most of the suspects as “their own.” A reference in Turkey enough to make anybody an ‘untouchable’.

Alparslan Aslan is an Islamist and an ultra-nationalist. He reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" before murdering a judge, and he claimed to have no connections to any organizations. Yasin Hayal is an Islamist, and since he's affiliated with Chechen militants, he's most likely a Turkish ultra-nationalist as well. Here's a history lesson on that, from CNN:

Today the most active group aiding the Chechens is a branch of the Gray Wolves movement called Nizami Alem, or "universal order." Nizami Alem is an ultra-nationalist group created from a split in the official Gray Wolves political party, known by its initials MHP.

Nizami Alem accuses the Gray Wolves of not being sensitive enough to Islamic thought. For its part, Nizami Alem maintains strong ties to the more radical Muslim groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Turkish allies of the Chechens have a party known as the BBP (or Party of Great Unity). Positioned on the extreme right of the Turkish political spectrum, the party is enjoying considerable success.

You can get an idea of some of BBP's stupidity and one of the axes they have to grind with AKP, here. They also didn't like the idea of the Pope's visit, from Genocide Watch:

A group of Turkish ultra-nationalists protested anew against Pope Benedict XVI's planned visit to the country next week. The group also occupied Hagia Sophia . . .

[ . . . ]

The group of protestors belonged to the Great Unity Party (BBP), an ultra-nationalist political formation in current Turkey, a mixture of extreme nationalist thought intermingled with Islam. It was led by Kemal Kerincsiz, an ultra-nationalist lawyer who has won notoriety for launching multiple court cases against Turkish intellectuals, contesting the official line on the extermination of Turkey's Christian minorities of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians under Ottoman rule, which Ankara ostensibly rejects as genocide, or condemning human rights abuses against Kurdish nationals.

Maybe they should haul Kemal Kerincsiz in for questioning.

Nizam-i Alem is mentioned in the IHT article about Hrant Dink's murderer, Ogun Samast, but it is much more likely that Yasin Hayal is affiliated with Nizam-i Alem because he has the Chechen connections. CNN also conducted an interview with an Islamist who had been a former fighter in Chechnya. At the time of the interview, he was living in Istanbul:

Suddenly, after seeing those images of the war [in Chechnya], I decided to go to Chechnya as a volunteer. The next day I talked about it with a Turkish friend of mine, a former Gray Wolf. He belongs to the ultra-nationalist branch of that movement, known as Nizami Alem, or "Universal Order." I put myself in their hands.

Do you know about the myth of the gray wolf? It is the heroic wolf that shows the Turkish people the road out of Asia, leading them to their new homeland, Europe. In the same way we will lead the Caucasian people to freedom. A few days after my encounter with the Nizami Alem nationalists, they took me to a training camp here in Turkey, where they taught us to use weapons. Then I went to the front.

[ . . . ]

What I do know is that there were many ex-military men among them from the Turkish armed forces, who are close to the Nationalist movement, and maybe one or two agents from the Turkish secret service.

Yeah, "maybe one or two agents" from the Turkish government were involved with Nizam-i Alem, and their purpose was to keep the group's operations under control in Turkey, not to forbid it from operating. They thought they could keep Turkish Hezbollah under control, too, and where did that get them? Notice, in the complete interview, what the mujahedin said about who's running heroin and how well he digested the Turkish ultra-nationalist propaganda on the Kurdish struggle.

Nizam-i Alem, Atabeyler, MHP, Gray Wolves, ex-Turkish military . . . these are the threads of the Deep State. Whoever is pulling these threads is the one who ordered Hrant Dink's murder. Given the way political murders have always been handled in Turkey, we are not likely to learn who the puppet masters are. This is normal. Anyone remember Yesil?

In this case, for the murder of Hrant Dink, they have set the stage well. They have acquired a willing participant who is underage. He's a virgin, as far as his political affiliations go, meaning that he's clean; he isn't directly linked to the ultra-nationalist groups mentioned here. He had been taken by his handlers--Yasin Hayal?-- to Istanbul five times in the last fifteen days and was paid a sum of money by them. He does not change his clothes after committing the murder and confesses immediately. He knew he was meant to be the fall guy. I bet the police won't even bother to torture him.

He'll spend a couple of years in jail and then go free. Yasin Hayal and his other accomplices may do a few more years, and then they'll be free, too.

And so it always goes.