THE TURKISH LOBBY, THE NEOCONS, AND THE CRUSADE TO FREE THE ERGENEKON TERRORISTS

"The enlargement of the Ergenekon investigation will improve the standards of our democracy. Not only the Ergenekon on the western side of the Euphrates River, but also the one on the eastern side should be investigated, and a real 'clean hands' operation should be started."
~ Ahmet Türk.

A very interesting video was brought to my attention by a reader in the comments section here.

Let's take a look:

Wayne Madsen makes some interesting speculations about Katil Erdoğan's visit to Washington last week, which ended up with the resignation of Turkey's ambassador to the US, Nabi Şensoy.

Madsen speculates that Obama spoke to Katil Erdoğan about the Ergenekon prosecutions with the intent of dropping them and freeing the Ergenekon terrorists. He points out that the paşas would like to see an end to the prosecutions. We know that the Ergenekon terrorists were actually sponsored by the US as part of the CIA's Gladio stay-behind program and that the charges they face today are minor in comparison to the terror they carried out against the Kurdish people in The Southeast--for which they are not being prosecuted.

Madsen mentions that Turkish lobby organizations in the US, like the American Turkish Council (ATC), have been trying to influence the US government into pressuring the AKP to drop the Ergenekon issue. Although I have not seen evidence of the ATC's overt involvement in this particular aspect of influence peddling, there is a Turkish organization that has been working on exactly this matter and it has a relationship with the ATC. That organization is the ARI Foundation.

As was brought up in comments in a post on Sibel Edmonds' website, the ARI Foundation hosted a seminar last month for the US Congress in which the members of the foundation urged Congress to "intervene urgently to stop the trial . . . " From VoltaireNet:

. . . [O]n 18 November 2009 a seminar was held at the U.S. Congress to deny the existence of Ergenekon, putting it down as a myth invented by the Erdogan Government to discredit Army Chief of Staff, General Mehmet Yaşar Büyükanıt, and the U.S.-friendly officers in his entourage, in the hope of imposing an Islamic state.

The participants stressed that the United States should intervene urgently to stop the trial, but should not do so openly since it would feed into the "conspiracy theories" purporting that NATO has set up a "Deep State" in Turkey which has manipulated or attempted to manipulate public institutions for decades.

The seminar was organised by the ARI Foundation, a low-profile think-tank bent on promoting relations between Washington and Ankara. Actually, ARI is a front for the Atlanticist-Israeli lobby. In accordance with Robert Strausz-Hupé’s policies, ARI is promoting a Tel-Aviv-Ankara axis under NATO auspices for the control of the Middle East.

The piece mentions the ARI Foundation's connections to the Israeli lobby, especially the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). WINEP was founded by former US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, who started his "public service" career as a research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC. Indyk also served as a founding director for WINEP.

Yurter Özcan, the president of the ARI Foundation, works with Turk neocon Soner Çağaptay, who is the director of WINEP's Turkish "Research" Program.

The first of ARI Foundation's symposia was presented in 2002 and featured Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. Other contributors to their symposia include AIPAC spy Steve Rosen, who now works with Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum.

Former Florida congressman Robert Wexler has also been involved with the ARI Foundation. Wexler is a co-founder of the Caucus on US-Turkish Relations who recently resigned his congressional seat to take a temporary job with a minor pro-Israeli think tank while he waits out the one-year ban that former congressmen must wait before taking up lucrative lobbying jobs. My money says that, as soon as Wexler passes the one-year mark, he'll slide right into a nice, cushy, lobbying job for the Turkish government.

Also involved with the ARI Foundation is Zeyno Baran, an Ergenekon defender at the very neoconservative Hudson Institute.

For tax purposes, the ARI Foundation lists Gunay Evinch (Günay Övunç) as it's contact person. Övunç is, of course, the current president of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA). The ARI Foundation has conducted anti-Armenian Genocide propaganda in conjunction with the ATAA, and you had better believe that if an organization or person is anti-Armenian Genocide, they're anti-Kurd as well.

Furthermore, those who've been moaning the most about the suffering paşas, current and retired, are the Israelis and neoconservatives. Here's a sample from a recent column in the Jerusalem Post:

TURKEY'S BREAK with the West; its decisive rupture with Israel and its opposition to the US in Iraq and Iran was predictable. Militant Islam of the AKP variety has been enjoying growing popularity and support throughout Turkey for many years. The endemic corruption of Turkey's traditional secular leaders increased the Islamists' popularity. Given this domestic Turkish reality, it is possible that Erdogan and his fellow Islamists' rise to power was simply a matter of time.

But even if the AKP's rise to power was eminently predictable, its ability to consolidate its control over just about every organ of governance in Turkey as well as what was once a thriving free press [Haha, good one! -- Mizgîn], and change completely Turkey's strategic posture in just seven years was far from inevitable. For these accomplishments the AKP owes a debt of gratitude to both the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as to the EU.

The Bush administration ignored the warnings of secular Turkish leaders in the country's media, military and diplomatic corps that Erdogan was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Rather than pay attention to his past attempts to undermine Turkey's secular, pro-Western character and treat him with a modicum of suspicion, after the AKP electoral victory in 2002 the Bush administration upheld the AKP and Erdogan as paragons of Islamist moderation and proof positive that the US and the West have no problem with political Islam.

[ . . . ]

In Turkey itself, the administration's enthusiastic embrace of the AKP meant that Erdogan encountered no Western opposition to his moves to end press freedom in Turkey; purge the Turkish military of its secular leaders and end its constitutional mandate to preserve Turkey's secular character [Turkey is not secular; read the constitution -- Mizgîn]; intimidate and disenfranchise secular business leaders and diplomats; and stack the Turkish courts with Islamists. That is, in the name of its support for its water-downed definition of democracy, the US facilitated Erdogan's subversion of all the Turkish institutions that enabled liberal norms to be maintained and kept Turkey in the Western alliance.

So, yeah, we all know that Turkey was an absolute paradise while under absolute paşa rule, but if the JPost writer wants to blame the Bush administration, she'd damn well better blame her neoconservative colleagues. Here's a blast from the past (circa 2004) from the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, published by Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum:

While Erdogan and other AKP leaders unabashedly affirm their private religious convictions, they advocate secularism in the conventional Western sense of the term. "Before anything else, I'm a Muslim . . . I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility, but I try now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep it private," Erdogan told the New York Times last year. "A political party cannot have a religion, only individuals can . . . religion is so supreme that it cannot be [politically] exploited or taken advantage of," he explained.[5]

[ . . .]

Ironically, the old line Kemalists, who for 80 years preached about the need to modernize and Westernize Turkey, have in many ways become the reactionaries in Turkey, while the "Islamists" have taken the lead in promoting Western-style reforms. In spite of the dismal electoral fortunes of nationalist political parties in 2002, the Kemalist elite continues to dominate not only Turkey's military, but also its civilian bureaucracy, judiciary, and media. The so-called "deep state" in Turkey has resisted many of the changes introduced by the AKP.

[ . . . ]

Turkey, a country of about 70 million Muslims, most of whom are religious, is ruled today by a conservative party with an Islamic pedigree and a humane, tolerant, and democratic track record. Can we generalize from the AKP's experience? Not without some care. Turkey is quite different from the rest of the Middle East, whether Arab or Persian. What works in Ankara will not necessarily work in Tehran, Damascus or Baghdad. Nonetheless, there are definitely lessons to be learned.

Read the whole thing because it contains an accurate description of how the Bush administration pushed aside long-time American allies in Turkey . . . you know, the paşas, in favor of Islamists. Then think about how the US has always chosen Islamist regimes over secular ones. Do the terms "Afghan mujahedin" or "Taliban" ring any bells? In 2004, it would appear that everything was sweetness and light, with the pro-Israeli neoconservatives praising AKP and Katil Erdoğan to the heavens. What a difference a few years makes among fascists! But for the pro-paşa, pro-Israeli neoconservative opinion on Ergenekon, check the AEI's Michael Rubin or the Middle East Forum or the columnist section of the Jerusalem Post, and all those who cooked up the Clean Break.

In any event, we can see that Madsen is totally correct when he emphasizes the links between the Turkish and Israeli lobbies, and it's extremely unfortunate that more people in media aren't talking about the fact.

Did Obama actually talk to Katil Erdoğan about releasing the Ergenekon terrorists? I doubt it. Obama and Erdoğan certainly had more pressing matters to talk about, like coordinating NATO's heroin industry in Afghanistan in order to keep Goldman Sachs alfoat. The US has backed the AKP and Fethullahçı from AKP's initial rise to power and Gülen's movement provides some inside access to The Grand Chessboard of Central Asia. Certainly Gülen was deeply involved with the Ergenekon terrorists but it no longer serves his purposes to have anything to do with them nor does he have any need to try to save them from prosecution. Besides, Gülen is a valuable asset to the US right these days.

Gülen's disciples have followed his command to "work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state". The paşas no longer force out Islamists from the TSK's officer corps. Fethullahçı moles inside the Turkish general staff leaked the information about the coup attempts metnioned by Madsen. Gülen's star slowly rises while that of the paşas slowly sets, and who is hosting Gülen? Who is protecting him? Who was it that approved Katil Erdoğan as the leader of Turkey while Erdoğan was banned from holding political office?

Let the CIA worry when Tansu Çiller is arrested.

BARGAINING OVER THE OCCUPATION OF SOUTH KURDISTAN

“In this, our age of infamy
Man's choice is but to be
A tyrant, traitor, prisoner:
No other choice has he.”
~ Aleksandr Pushkin.

There was something very interesting in Phil Giraldi's interview with Sibel Edmonds regarding South Kurdistan. Here is Sibel speaking, with my emphasis:

The monitoring of the Turks [by the FBI] picked up contacts with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help.

Meanwhile Scowcroft, who was also the chairman of the American Turkish Council, Baker, Richard Armitage, and Grossman began negotiating separately for a possible Turkish protectorate. Nothing was decided, and then 9/11 took place.

Scowcroft was all for invading Iraq in 2001 and even wrote a paper for the Pentagon explaining why the Turkish northern front would be essential. I know Scowcroft came off as a hero to some for saying he was against the war, but he was very much for it until his client’s conditions were not met by the Bush administration.

What is happening here is that the neo-conservatives were discussing a Turkish occupation of South Kurdistan but it looks like they weren't able to swing the deal in the end. Brent Scowcroft, as the chairman of the American Turkish Council, was definitely working for Turkish interests during the period Sibel is talking about.

But when Turkey didn't get what it saw as it's portion of Iraq--the Kurdish region--Scowcroft opposed the war because his client opposed it.

Now, picture this: If there had been an American deployment from Turkey into the north of Iraq, the Americans would have kept moving toward the south while Turkish forces could have just walked in behind the Americans and parked themselves permanently in the autonomous Kurdish region.

Does that sound far-fetched? Read Sibel's words again. Sibel's words also tell me that the TBMM voted against a US deployment from Turkey and denied an American northern front not because it opposed the invasion or occupation or even the carving-up of Iraq, but the TBMM opposed an American deployment from Turkish soil because it was not going to be allowed to occupy South Kurdistan.

If Turkey had, in fact, ended up as occupiers of South Kurdistan, would it then consider Kerkuk to be a part of South Kurdistan? Would it then insist that Kerkuk be added to the Kurdish region?

Sibel also mentions that some of the individuals that the FBI knew to be spying for the Turks and the Israelis were working at the RAND Corporation, too. That brings up something else that was in the news recently:

“Under pressure from the military and nationalists, the government of Prime Minister Erdoğan might launch a large-scale, cross-border incursion into northern Iraq designed not only to weaken the PKK, the Kurdish insurgent group that has attacked Turkish forces, but also to hold and occupy KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) territory to put pressure on the KRG government to crack down on the PKK or to forestall a KRG annexation of Kirkuk.”

It may very well be that the occupation of South Kurdistan is still on the Turkish table but my money says that if such an invasion takes place, Turkey will insist upon the annexation of Kerkuk. After all, there are millions of brother Turkmen there to bring into Ağabey's ever-loving arms.

THE INTERVIEW IS AVAILABLE

"The original targets were intelligence officers under diplomatic cover in the Turkish Embassy and the Israeli Embassy. It was those contacts that led to the American Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations and then to AIPAC fronting for the Israelis. It moved forward from there."
~ Sibel Edmonds.

The Phil Giraldi interview with Sibel Edmonds is online:

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.

A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.

John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”

But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”

Read the entire interview at The American Conservative.

UPDATE: Sibel has a link to an interview with Philip Giraldi, who conducted the American Conservative interview, and Joe Lauria. This interview deals with the credibility question that certain factions have brought up with regard to Sibel's story. I don't have a problem with Sibel's credibility because I know how things work in Turkey and Sibel's story fits the pattern of behavior. In addition, Sibel's story has been out in the public realm for some time and those who have been named as evildoers by her in the past--like Dennis Hastert and Marc Grossman--have not brought any libel or other charges against her for the issues she's brought up. And the reason for that is that they don't dare.

INTERVIEW WITH MURAT KARAYILAN

"An approach like 'I will not recognize your will, I will solve it my way, I will even talk to some sections of the society but I will not speak to you' will not bring complete solution. Kurdish question and the PKK problem are like nail and tissue, bound together. Separating them will not develop a solution."
~ Murat Karayılan.

Zerkesorg has just finished posting a three-part interview with the leader of the KCK Executive Council, Murat Karayılan. It's fitting that this interview comes now, just a few days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of PKK's first armed attacks against the Ankara regime, and right before we are due to hear from Öcalan.

You can find the interview here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Let's do a little comparison and contrast between Murat Karayılan and the Chief of the Turkish General Staff, İlker Başbuğ.

From Part 1 of the interview, compare:

Stopping the operations is at the top of requests made by various factions. In fact, stopping the operations [against the PKK] is seen as the first and important condition toward solution [to the Kurdish Question]. We ask about operations and he [Murat Karayilan] says 'there are still operations conducted but not as much as before'. He adds, "which means the state can stop the operations completely and turn the no-attack [from the PKK] period into no-conflict phase. Together we can develop a phase for complete cease fire where everyone stays put at their locations. We demonstrate, with all our might, our will for developing this phase". Then he says environment for dialogue can be created.

Contrast:

The Turkish Army is determined to wipe out the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the military’s Chief of General Staff, Ilker Basbug, said on Monday.

“This problem can only be solved with the collective efforts of all nations and in particular allied nations,” said Basbug at the start of the two-day Silk Road 2009 General/Admiral seminar. “We believe that countries need to merge their positions and politics and adopt a common stance,”

“Our aim while fighting terrorism is to end all hopes of the terrorists and their supporters. We believe that alongside the fight against terrorism, state actions in the economic, socio-cultural, security, propaganda and international relations fields form a whole and complement each other,” said Basbug.

From Part 2 of the interview with Murat Karayılan, compare:

He reminds us the decision to pull outside Turkey in 1999. He himself announced to the PKK forces the decision to mocve them outside the borders of Turkey. He spoke to the forces for one hour. We ask him about his emotions during that talk. "If I put it honestly, I wasn't very hopeful. But our leader had asked. I was seeing it as a risky move but I was thinking it needed to be done. I remember it as a sad speech."

He tells about over 300 guerrillas were ambushed and killed while retreating to outside Turkey's borders. He talks about the traps, mass executions and massacres on the road [committed by the Turkish forces]. "But we still didn't change our mind and stood by our decision" he says.

He he asks a question and answers himself: "We didn't move for five years. Was any step taken? No! Was this period utilized? No! Now a lot people say that period was not utilized properly. We acted responsibly but the [Turkish] authorities of the time didn't act responsibly. The importance of our decision to retreat to outside Turkey's borders is being understood better today."

Contrast:

Gen. İlker Başbuğ said in Washington that Turkey's fight against the PKK will continue until the terrorist group is eliminated.

Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ vowed on Monday to continue the ongoing fight against terrorist attacks by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) until the organization is completely eliminated, while also underlining the need for “winning hearts and minds,” along with the fight against the terrorist organization.

From Part 3, compare:

[Karayılan] stresses that they [the PKK] have been acting extremely responsibly and they would try their best to open the doors for any positive development. He wants to make sure what he says is not misunderstood: "Why am I saying these? We have to be realistic. If we are really going to discuss the solution, we have to consider these facts."

He says that wrong information is being distributed about their situation. Their persistence on solution [to Kurdish question] is being interpreted differently and that it's not realistic to interpret their persistence as they are losing strength. "We are not desperate. But we are saying now that let's stop the violence. This is a societal problem and it can be solved with dialogue, with modern methods. The role of violence in solving societal problems is over now. Now the problem is in a form that can be solved through dialogue and democratic means. This is our strategy."

Contrast:

Basbug said: "We would say that in 2009 we are having a chance with which we could achieve more concrete results in the fight against the terror organisation. What is this chance? You may call it the elimination of the terrorist organisation... or destruction... or weakening... we have now a chance. And we say, let's use this chance..We have seized the opportunity. The terror organisation is in a very difficult situation. We must profit from this opportunity." Basbug gave the following answer concerning the search for a dialogue: "The state won't establish a relation with a terror organisation, it won't have any discussions and there will be no dialogue. Sometimes it is being misunderstood, as if the state will have a meeting with the terror organisation, this is not true. This would be the biggest mistake in the struggle against the terror. The state does neither respect the terror organisation nor have any relation to it."

Thus it remains crystal clear where the violence is coming from. As Karayılan remarked in Part 1, "[The] Kurdish question is not a problem that formed yesterday. It's not a problem created by the birth of the PKK either. [The] Existence of this problem has given birth to the PKK." Additionally, PKK is not a separate issue from that of the Kurdish question.

A few other of Karayılan's points should be noted: First, Karayılan recalls the massacres of guerrillas by TSK when PKK moved outside of Turkey's borders in 1999. That's some history to learn, if you don't know it.

Secondly, there is no trust of the state on the part of PKK, so there need to be concrete steps taken toward a peaceful solution and no one should insist on immediate disarmament or movement of PKK outside of the region it inhabits now. Either insistence would be seen by the PKK as a first step toward Başbuğ's much recently touted annihilation.

Thirdly, everyone should remember that after the retreat from the borders in 1999, the KDP, PUK, and "international forces" worked as the proxies of the Ankara regime and also attempted the annihilation of the PKK. This point reinforces my belief that neither the US nor the KRG need to have any part in "solving" the Kurdish situation in Turkey. As Karayılan notes in Part 3, Kurds in Turkey have elected representatives so there's no need for two-timing outside meddlers.

Fourthly, for all the retards who still don't get it on the phony "separatism" charge, Karayılan says that even if independence were offered, PKK would not want it and he explains why.

I highly recommend a read of all three parts of the interview in preparation for Öcalan's Road Map.

On another subject, please check out the new podcast at Sibel Edmonds' place. This one features the CIA's former chief of base in Istanbul, Philip Giraldi. There's a lot of interesting stuff there about Turkish spies, Israeli spies, espionage tactics, the police state, and much more.

THE CORRUPTION CONTINUES

"Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer."
~ John F. Kennedy.

Sibel Edmonds has an opinion piece just out about the Jane Harman/AIPAC/Israeli spies scandal which I first mentioned in this post. There's an update on Hypocrite Harman's weekend activities at Glenn Greenwald's blog:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of the most shameless and absurd spectacles to appear in Washington in some time: the self-righteous, self-obsessed rage expressed by Blue Dog Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) -- leading defender of Bush's illegal domestic eavesdropping programs -- upon learning that one of her conversations had been legally eavesdropped upon as part of a criminal investigation into the actions of a suspected Israeli agent. Over the weekend, Harman (along with half of the U.S. Congress) appeared at the AIPAC conference and continued her new anti-eavesdropping crusade, actually vowing to lead an investigation into potential eavesdropping abuses to assure that it would never happen again. Atrios notes just some of the points that makes her behavior incomparably shameless.

What would have been the result if Hypocrite Harman's Israeli agent had been able to lean on Nancy Pelosi in order to get Pelosi to name Harman as head of the House Intelligence Committee? How about this:

Just imagine if Harman had obtained either senior intelligence position that she sought. She would have had access to every sort of top secret intelligence possessed by the US government and would have been in a good position to influence policy. From the Israeli perspective, she would have been their spy, a highly placed agent of influence who could also provide every bit of sensitive intelligence in the CIA cupboard.

Now this story has gone basically nowhere in the bullshit American media. Kind of like how the espionage trial of AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman has gone nowhere in the bullshit American justice system. And, now that I think about it, that's exactly how the Turkish bribery scandal of Dennis Hastert went--nowhere. But Hastert did have a happy ending since he's now an official lobbyist for the Ankara regime, with a contract valued at $35,000 per month for Hastert to secure Turkey's interests in the US Congress.

If there were such a thing as justice, the Congressional criminals like Hastert and Harman would get their comeuppance in a court of law. Their shame would be front page news and the first story up on the evening news. But those of us familiar with Susurluk know that there is no justice and the criminals always move on to greener pastures.

It would appear that I'm not the only one who thinks this way because the deliberate downplay of these kinds of scandals in the bullshit American media and the lack of any kind of dispensation of justice from the bullshit American legal system and the protection of criminals in high office is what, it seems to me, bothers Sibel Edmonds, too. And make no mistake about it, this whole rotten System is a bipartisan effort.

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman (D-CA) by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in the integrity of Congress. But the story is almost dead - ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media's insistence on burying 'real' issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation's continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the 'thank you' should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late Congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

Ironically but understandably, the Harman case has become one of rare unequivocal bipartisanship, when no one from either side of the partisan isle utters a word. How many House or Senate Republicans have you heard screaming, or even better, calling for an investigation? The right wing remains silent. Some may have their hand, directly or indirectly, in the same AIPAC cookie jar. Others may still feel the heavy baggage of their own party's tainted colleagues; after all, they have had their share of Abramoffs, Hasterts and the like, silently lurking in the background, albeit dimmer every day. Some on the left, after an initial silence that easily could have been mistaken for shock, are jumping from one foot to the other, like a cat on a hot tin roof, making one excuse after another; playing the 'victims of Executive Branch eavesdropping' card, the same very 'evil doing' they happened to support vehemently. Some have been dialing their trusted guardian angels within the mainstream media and certain fairly visible alternative outlets. They need no longer worry, since these guardian angels seem to have blacked out the story, and have done so without the apparent need for much arm twisting...

[ . . . ]

How does it work? How do these people escape the consequences of accountability? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against Congressional representatives, as if the days of J. Edgar Hoover were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when Congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties. Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of Congress watch out for each other? Or, is it a combination of the above? Regardless, we see this 'all for one, one for all' kind of solidarity in Congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

[ . . . ]

Despite a certain degree of exposure, cases such as Harman's and Hastert's, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end. Criminal conduct, by powerful foreign entities, against our national interest, is given a pass, as was recently proven by the abandonment of the AIPAC spy case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media seem now to have been almost universally accepted as a fact of life.

Read the whole thing here and prepare to be disgusted.

For more disgust, take a look at a recent post on Zerkesorg, which outlines the Ankara regime's efforts to remove the wildly popular Osman Baydemir from his mayoral seat. A sample, from the MGK meeting in January 2006--months before the Amed Serhildan:

Commanders of the armed forces request that Mayor of Diyarbakir [Amed] be removed from his post:

All units of government must show their decisiveness about terrorism. We have two expectations. The first one is that the mayor of Diyarbakir is committing a crime. Conditions for his removal [Mr. Baydemir][from his post] by the Ministry of Internal Affairs have ripened. This request is not out of legal norms. If tolerance continues, the terrorist organization will bring its activities all the way to the cities. Our second expectation is that the village guards [korucular] are targets of sympathizers of the terrorist organization; we benefit from their contribution to the security forces. There are two problems regarding these issues. First: we cannot make up for the loss of village guards. We want the declaration and action plan of 2000 to be reviewed. The second [problem regarding village guards] is with softening down the volunteered village guard system.

Azadîxwaz has a translation of something from columnist Etyen Mahçupyan on trusting the Turkish state . . . or not:

The ones who are talking about PKK’s disarmament are acting as if they are not aware of the history of the Republic of Turkey in the minds/memories of the Kurds. PKK could seriously lay down the arms, and they could genuinely want this, too… But it will not lay down arms as far as possible, because the Kurdish society does not trust the state. There is no guarantee that a more tyrannical regime will not be imposed upon the Kurds under the disguise of politicization of the PKK and there isn’t any state authority that can guarantee this. Because history has proven that these kinds of guarantees are (never) executed.

[ . . . ]

Nowadays, you could explain to the Kurds what a “right” decision it would be if the PKK laid down the arms. As a matter of fact that is how they think, too. They know that peace can only be achieved in an environment where there are no weapons. But they also know the history of this region and they don’t trust the state. That is issue…

Not only regarding disarmament, but this is exactly the same kind of argument that goes through my head whenever I hear someone talk about the "repentance" law or the granting of a general amnesty. What in the hell do those things really mean and why should we trust such schemes?

Something to keep an eye on . . . earlier today the news broke in English-language media that 44 people had been killed during a wedding in Mardin province. You can get the basic rundown from The Times. Early reports have mentioned that this attack might be the result of a blood feud between korucu families. However, the gunmen were described as masked and armed with "assault rifles" and grenades. Certainly it could be the result of a blood feud gone very bad but it's also highly possible that it's a state operation, since the Ankara regime has specialized for decades in the massacre of unarmed civilians.