FORMER FBI AGENT CONFIRMS INVESTIGATION ON MARC GROSSMAN

"I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this."
~ Marc Grossman, former US Ambassador to Turkey.

Those Rastî readers familiar with everything written here on The Cohen Group back in late 2006 when the Ralston conflict of interest was going on, will remember Marc Grossman.

Grossman was the US ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997 and was pulled from that position before the end of his tour because he was involved with the Susurluk scandal as mentioned in yesterday's post.

Today another round of artillery was fired in Grossman's direction, from Sibel Edmonds and a friend:

"I read the recent cover story by The American Conservative magazine. I applaud their courage in publishing this significant interview. I am fully aware of the FBI's decade-long investigation of the High-level State Department Official named in this article [Marc Grossman], which ultimately was buried and covered up. It is long past time to investigate this case and bring about accountability..."

There's more on that at The Brad Blog.

I don't know about you, but all this knowledge about Grossman, especially the Susurluk connection, really fills this description, from The Cohen Group website, with an enormous amount of irony:

Ambassador Grossman was U.S. Ambassador to Turkey 1994-1997. In Turkey, he promoted security cooperation, human rights and democracy and a vibrant U.S.-Turkish economic relationship. Ambassador Grossman had previously served as the embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission from 1989 to 1992.

He promoted human rights and democracy?? In a pig's eye.

There is a funny side to this if you know where to look. In Grossman's bio it says, "Ambassador Grossman had previously served as the embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission from 1989 to 1992." Joseph C. Wilson was one of Grossman's buddies at the State Department and served as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy, Baghdad, from 1988 to 1992--under US Ambassador April Glaspie. Both Grossman and Wilson served in comparable positions in two countries that border each other, during the same time frame. Their diplomatic paths had to have crossed during that time.

The funny part is that Wilson's wife is Valerie Plame, whose company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, was outed by Grossman to the Turks long before the news was ever splashed across headlines in the US. In other words, Grossman outed his pal's wife as CIA. For more on that, don't miss the interview with Phil Giraldi and Joe Lauria.

As The Brad Blog points out from The Times article--to which Joe Lauria contributed--on the sale of nuclear secrets, when contacted about the information that Sibel provided, this is what Grossman had to say:

“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.”

Doesn't he sound like Dennis Hastert? Like Jan Schakowsky??

And nobody's really brought up Grossman's connection to the most powerful "cemaat holding" in Turkey, which is able to compete with Sabancı and Koç . . . namely, Ihlas Holding.

I think it's time for heads to roll.

UPDATES AND THINGS TO WATCH

"The speaker does not have any connections to American Turkish interests."
~ Spokesman for Dennis Hastert, while Hastert served as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Let me list a few updates on the interview in American Conservative magazine with Sibel Edmonds:

1. Congressional Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) responds to Sibel's statements that she, Schakowsky, was trapped in a Turkish espionage honeypot operation. Additional update here.

Now when you read what Schakowsky's spokesman says in reply, bear in mind what Dennis Hastert's spokesman said in response to the 2005 Vanity Fair article on Sibel:

"This is all nonsense. It's not being reported by the mainstream press because there's no factual evidence. The reporter does not have a transcript of any wiretapped conversations that we know of and, even if we did, it's preposterous. The speaker does not have any connections to American Turkish interests."

Hastert joined Dickstein Shapiro in 2008, where he was going to provide "strategy advice" to D & S clients, among which is BOTAŞ. For more, see Luke Ryland's post on the matter. Hastert now works on a $35,000 per month contract through D & S for the TC.

2. Sibel's letter to the Congresswoman, in pursuit of the facts.

3. Connecting the Deep State's trail in the US, from Susurluk and Chicago to Ergenekon.

4. Be prepared for additional information on the role of former US ambassador to Turkey and former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (that would be the number 3 position in the US State Department), Marc Grossman, in connection with Sibel's story. As Sibel stated in the AmCon interview:

Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as “Susurluk” by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.

Grossman was pulled from Turkey "short of tour" because he was involved with Susurluk. The military representative in Grossman's embassy in Ankara was Douglas Dickerson, who worked as Grossman's weapons procurement guy. Kurds should know exactly what that means: early to mid-1990s, American weapons procurement for Turkey, slaughter of Kurds, Dirty War, extrajudicial murder, forced displacement, destruction of villages, torture, etc.

In 2005, Grossman abruptly and quietly left the number 3 position at State. Why?

5. The Schmidt v. Krikorian hearing with the Ohio Elections Commission is due to resume this week on 1 October and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we will witness a spectacular fireworks display.

THE DEEP STATE AND CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN

"It is puzzling to observe that in reporting this major artery (Turkey) of terrorists’ funding, the U.S. mainstream media and political machine do not dare to go beyond the poppy fields of Afghanistan and the fairly insignificant low level Afghan warlords overseeing the crops."
~ Sibel Edmonds.

Sibel Edmonds has a new interview at Electric Politics (Run time 1 hour, 16 mins.) in which she talks about Turkey's involvement in the drug industry. The interview ranges into other issues, too, including the Deep State in the US. A few notes that I picked up while listening:


1. At the end of the 1990s, 40% of Turkey's GDP was based on heroin.

2. First Merchant Bank has been involved in laundering heroin money for Turkey, among others. Süleyman Demirel's brother, Murat, was involved among the higher-ups at First Merchant. Everyone should remember that Süleyman Demirel was Turkey's president during the Susurluk days.

3. AIPAC set up the ATC and convicted spy for Israel Larry Franklin was very much involved in the ATC's early meetings.

4. The Turkish Deep State lobby in the US uses smaller organizations, like ATAA and TACA to spread its interests.

5. The president of one of those "cultural" associations donated $100,000 to Secretary of State Clinton's failed presidential campaign.

6. The FBI has tried to take action against the American criminals/spies/foreign agents involved in the Deep State but have been prevented from doing so by both the Pentagon and the State Department. Remember the neocons and other Israeli agents, like Grossman, Feith, Perle, Larry Franklin, etc., who used to be directing policy at both of those agencies.

7. Prior to the November 2006 midterm elections, Congressman Waxman and his office wanted a public investigation into Sibel's case and those of other whistleblowers but claimed the big, bad Republicans were tying their hands on the matter. After the Democrats took a congressional majority in November 2006, Waxman and his office blew off Sibel.

8. It's quite possible that Nancy Pelosi and the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) "persuaded" Waxman to not insist on a public hearing for Sibel.

9. The Democrats dumped Sibel after she spoke to them in a SCIF because, through her information, at least three Democratic politicians could be further investigated, leading to prosecutions, for Deep State criminal activity.

10. Certain members of the current US administration could be further investigated, leading to prosecutions, for Deep State criminal activity.

11. Sibel was asked if there would ever be a time when her story could be told fully. She answers that maybe when everyone involved in her story is dead, it might be possible to tell it. Mizgîn adds that she hopes this happens very soon.


In connection with Sibel's case, let me point out that the current administration, the Obama administration, is not only supporting the Bush administration's hyper-application of the bullshit state secrets privilege, but it's surpassing the Bush administration's hyper-application of the privilege that is used to protect those involved in Deep State criminal activity, espionage, and treason. Not only that, the Obama administration is going above and beyond the call of duty by introducing a new blanket of protection called "sovereign immunity". More from Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

But late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government's first response to EFF's lawsuit (.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush's NSA program. But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the "state secrets" privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications.

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.

For more on the continuation of Deep State fascism, see the more recent posts by Greenwald, here and here.

Change you can believe in!

Not mentioned in the interview, but relevant, is the fact that in order to win Turkish support for Danish PM Rasmussen's appointment as Secretary General of NATO, NATO will appoint a special envoy for Afghanistan from the ranks of Turkish diplomats. This was one of the conditions Katil Erdoğan insisted on. How very, very convenient for the Turkish heroin industry. I'm sure this will help boost Turkey's economy, and continue to bail out the banker vermin, during the global economic crisis.

Let me also point out that neither Sibel nor her interviewer at Electric Politics, who had purposely searched for information on Turkey's heroin industry, mention the PKK once. And that's because there is nothing to mention, contrary to a long-standing and massive propaganda effort on the part of the Ankara regime.

A PAGE FROM SUSURLUK: DRUG MONEY IS BAILING OUT THE BANKS

"For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power. Those with direct knowledge have been prevented from making this information available and public by various gag orders and invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. Why?"
~ Sibel Edmonds.

Well, well, well . . . it looks like drug money is being used to bail out banks in the global financial crisis, from Reuters:

The United Nations' crime and drug watchdog has indications that money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis, its head was quoted as saying on Sunday.

Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in an interview released by Austrian weekly Profil that drug money often became the only available capital when the crisis spiralled out of control last year.

"In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital," Costa was quoted as saying by Profil. "In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found evidence that "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," Costa was quoted as saying. There were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way."

Profil said Costa declined to identify countries or banks which may have received drug money and gave no indication how much cash might be involved. He only said Austria was not on top of his list, Profil said.

Why does this make me think "Susurluk"?

In a report published on 28 January 1997, the Turkish government’s chief inspector described how, in the juridical no-man’s land of Kurdish south-eastern Turkey, the army’s "special war" units were not just killing with impunity, but had also become involved in protection rackets, blackmail, rape and drug trafficking (1). The report also describes how the Turkish government handed over the security of a huge area - around the towns of Siverek and Hilvan - to the private army of tribal chief Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament close to the former prime minister, Tansu Çiller, who thus acquired the power of life and death over the area’s inhabitants.

This warlord politician was, incidentally, the sole survivor of a road accident in November 1996 near Susurluk on the road from Izmir to Istanbul (2). He had been travelling together with a chief of police and a well-known far-right Turkish mafia boss, Abdullah Çatli, who had been implicated in the attempted assassination of the Pope, was sought by Interpol for drug trafficking, and was wanted by the Turkish state for the murder of seven left-wing militants.

[ . . . ]

After the Gulf War in 1991, Turkey found itself deprived of the all-important Iraqi market and, since it lacked significant oil reserves of its own, it decided to make up for the loss by turning more massively to drugs. The trafficking increased in intensity with the arrival of the "hawks" in power, after the death in suspicious circumstances of President Turgut Özal in April 1993. According to the minister of interior, the war in Kurdistan had cost the Turkish exchequer upwards of $12.5 billion (7). Whereas, according to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 (8).

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

And only criminal networks working in close cooperation with governments could possibly be controlling drug-trafficking profits in order to bail out their own, worthless banks, headed and run by a pack of greedy parasites known collectively as CEOs.

Tansu Çiller was well-known for publicly broadcasting her claim that Turkey lost billions during the Gulf War:

Well, what we--we were never asked whether the United States should be bombing North Iraq, but our concern was the following. We have a neighborhood. That neighborhood is Syria and Iran and Iraq, and North of us is Russia, and West of us Greece, and each time a crisis occurs, everybody goes back home and forgets about it, but we are left with the neighborhood. And it has cost us $27 billion during the last five years, and our allies don't turn around and recognize the need for that compensation.

Hence the need for the Çiller government to become an even bigger player in the international drug trade. It has been this "black money" that has helped to keep Turkey afloat ever since.

According to the minister of interior, the war in Kurdistan had cost the Turkish exchequer upwards of $12.5 billion (7). Whereas, according to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 (8).

The Italians investigated and exposed part of the narco-trafficking beast that Abdullah Çatlı was involved in:

Catli's thugs crisscrossed the infamous smugglers' route passing through Bulgaria. Those routes were the ones favored by smugglers who reportedly carried NATO military equipment to the Middle East and returned with loads of heroin.

Judge Carlo Palermo, an Italian magistrate based in Trento, discovered these smuggling operations while investigating arms-and-drug trafficking from Eastern Europe to Sicily.

Judge Palermo disclosed that large quantities of sophisticated NATO weaponry -- including machine guns, Leopard tanks and U.S.-built Cobra assault helicopters -- were smuggled from Western Europe to countries in the Middle East during the 1970s and early 1980s.

According to Palermo's investigation, the weapon delivers were often made in exchange for consignments of heroin that filtered back, courtesy of the Grey Wolves and other smugglers, through Bulgaria to northern Italy.

And the Vatican was involved (and probably still is):

Italian magistrates described the network they had uncovered as the "world's biggest illegal arms trafficking organization." They linked it to Middle Eastern drug empires and to prestigious banking circles in Italy and Europe.

At the center of this operation, it appeared, was an obscure import-export firm in Milan called Stibam International Transport. The head of Stibam, a Syrian businessman named Henri Arsan, also functioned as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, according to several Italian news outlets.

With satellite offices in New York, London, Zurich, and Sofia, Bulgaria, Stibam officials recycled their profits through Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank which had close ties to the Vatican until its sensational collapse in 1982.

The collapse of Banco Ambrosiano came on the heels of the still unsolved death of its furtive president, Roberto Calvi, whose body was found hanging underneath Blackfriar's Bridge in London in June 1982. While running Ambrosiano, Calvi, nicknamed "God's banker," served as adviser to the Vatican's extensive fiscal portfolio.

At the same time in the mid- and late 1970s, Calvi's bank handled most of Stibam's foreign currency transactions and owned the building that housed Stibam's Milanese headquarters.

In effect, the Vatican Bank -- by virtue of its interlocking relationship with Banco Ambrosiano -- was fronting for a gigantic contraband operation that specialized in guns and heroin.

Also involved with Çatlı and the Gray Wolves was the CIA. But all of this is old news and very familiar to those who know about Susurluk. It's also well-known that narcotics were transported through Turkey with official escorts, meaning the Ankara regime was helping to protect the transports. Perhaps not so well-known are the links from Susurluk and Turkey's financing of itself with drug profits to today's news that the narcotics industry is acting as a life preserver for the world's banks. Sibel Edmonds shows us those links:

Taking Turkey as the focal point and with a start date of 1998, it is easy to speculate why Sibel Edmonds indicated that there was a convergence of US and foreign counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism and US national security and economic interests all of which were too preoccupied to surface critical information warning Americans of the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, who would have believed drug runners operating in Central Asia? And besides, President Clinton was promoting Turkey, one of the world’s top drug transit points, as a model for Muslim-Western cooperation and a country necessary to reshape the Middle East.

The FBI’s Office of International Operations, in conjunction with the CIA and the US State Department counter-narcotics section, the United Kingdom’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, Pakistan’s ISI, the US DEA, Turkey’s MIT, and the governments and intelligence agencies of dozens of nations, were in one way or another involved in the illicit drug trade either trying to stop it or benefit from it. What can be surmised from the public record is that from 1998 to September 10, 2001, the War on Drugs kept bumping into the nascent War on Terror and new directions in US foreign policy.

More, from Sibel herself:

Curiously enough, despite these highly publicized reports and acknowledgements of Turkey’s role in these activities, Turkey continues to receive billions of dollars of aid and assistance annually from the United States. With its highly placed co-conspirators and connections within the Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Congress, Turkey never has to fear potential sanctions or meaningful scrutiny; just like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The criminal Turkish networks continue their global criminal activities right under the nose of their protector, the United States, and neither the catastrophe falling upon the U.S. on September Eleven, nor their direct and indirect role and ties to this terrorist attack, diminish their role and participation in the shady worlds of narcotics, money laundering and illegal arms transfer.

The ‘respectable’ Turkish companies established and operate bases in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and other similar former soviet states. Many of these front companies, disguised under construction and tourism entities, have received millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. government, allocated to them by the U.S. congress, to establish and operate criminal networks throughout the region; among their networking partners are Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Albanian Mafia. While the U.S. government painted Islamic charity organizations as the main financial source for Al Qaeda terrorists, it was hard at work trying to cover up the terrorists’ main financial source: narcotics and illegal arms sales. Why?


For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power. Those with direct knowledge have been prevented from making this information available and public by various gag orders and invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. Why?

Is this due to the fact that the existence and survival of many U.S. allies; Turkey, almost all Central Asian nations, and after the September Eleven attack, Afghanistan; greatly depend on cultivating, processing, transporting, and distributing these illegal substances? Is it caused by the fact that a major source of income for those who procure U.S. weapons and technology, our military industrial complex’s bread and butter, is being generated from this illegal production and illegal dealings? Or, is it the fear of exposing our own financial institutions, lobbying firms, and certain elected and appointed officials, as beneficiaries?

The need for the profits of the narcotics industry is another reason for the war in the Balkans. While the American investment banks were beginning their meltdown, Turkish heroin was moving through Albania.

Now it's all spun wildly out of control and narco-profits are no longer enough to keep The System running. That's why, in the US at least, trillions of tax dollars are going to the Wall Street parasites. It seems to me that the The System is going to need a hell of a lot more addicts in order to save itself.

OPPRESSED AND OPPRESSORS: THE ERGENEKON DOG AND PONY SHOW

"From the beginning of their first term the AKP, starting from their leader to the lowest-ranking party member, created and shared a mythology of being oppressed."
~ Ece Temelkuran.

It looks like Leyla Zana may be going to prison for ten years. From the BBC:

A Turkish court has sentenced a Kurdish politician to 10 years in prison for spreading propaganda for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The court ruled that Leyla Zana had violated the penal code and the anti-terror law in nine different speeches.

Ms Zana, 47, has already spent 10 years in prison for links to the PKK, though that conviction was later overturned.

Ms Zana was not in court, and this latest conviction will not be imposed until her appeal has been heard.

Her lawyer called the sentence an "unfortunate" decision in a country working to join the European Union, and said her client's words were well within the bounds of free speech.

The prosecution sought a sixty year conviction for Leyla's crimethink. She had spoken out in London earlier this year when she spoke in London. Hevallo also had an eyewitness report on Leyla's speech in the UK parliament.

The next step will be to hear the outcome of the appeals process. I wonder if all the world's liberals will be concerned with the case of this Sakharov prize winner this time around? I'm inclined to doubt it. Our only friends are the mountains.

Of course, Leyla's conviction, and all similar prosecutions, expose clearly the weakness of the Ankara regime, which functions out of terror that truth will be spoken and heard.

Speaking of liberals, there's a very good article at Counterpunch from a Turkish Leftist, female political columnist. Thanks to the Vineyardsaker for sending the link. From the heart of the article:

A friend from the socialist left stopped me on the street the other day. His voice was anxious: “You know what, maybe you should not write about Ergenekon for a while”. He paused and sulked: “I think the way you do on this issue but you know… They made two little boxes: a Kemalist box and a liberal one. Even if you don’t fit to either of the boxes they break your arms or legs and make you fit one of them at the end. They don’t open a third box for you. This is a dangerous political climate and we are all going to be wasted in the end”.

He is right. If you ask questions about the indictment, or even if you express your concern about the seriousness of the case, there you go into the Kemalist box. If you clap your hands whenever you hear the name of the Ergenekon case, then you can be considered a democrat and can inhabit the same box as those I mentioned above. In that box the concept of democracy is reduced to freedom of faith, and its links to social justice or equality have been cut mercilessly. That is why in Turkey at the moment, if you are coming from the left, in order to be recognized as ‘not a fascist’ you are obliged to bow your head before right-wing perceptions of democracy. Even though it was the left that has been the ultimate victim of the deep state, they are for the time being the ones accused of being the deep state itself. This discourse or political climate has such a strong character that even the most intelligent and experienced spin doctors on the left have been stammering since last January about the Ergenekon case. Meanwhile the right-wing democrats, the liberals, are making noise saying that this time the gang was caught before it managed to carry out the coup. Thank god, the AKP government at the last minute busted them in the very act!

This reduction of politics to barren dualities didn’t actually start with the Ergenekon case; on the contrary, it had already been creating an intellectual industry with interesting products since the political polarization deepened with the start of the AKP’s second term. On almost every news channel there are talk-shows featuring a pro-AKP liberal democrat and an anti-AKP democrat. Since their controversies are the product on sale, these programs are visually exaggerated as well. In one of them, before the show begins they show two tigers attacking each other and in another program one, side has a black, the other a white background. The AKP, beyond its other achievements, gave Turkey this amazing present: intellectual and political discussions are now made in little boxes between black-and-white tigers!

I urge a close reading of the entire piece, particularly for the history that is recounted and the role of the Islamists in that history, particularly the fact that the Fethullahcı were founded in the wake of the 12 September coup. Not coincidentally, that was the same timeframe that saw the implementation of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and Turkish Hezbollah.

Finally, check Hevallo's recent post on defense lobby conflicts of interest in the UK. What a shock--they are linked to Lockheed Martin! Or, maybe not so shocking.

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.

DEEP STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE

"On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, Judge Reggie Walton made a decision and ruled on my case. Under his ruling, I, an American citizen, am not entitled to pursue my 1st and 5th Amendment rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States. The vague reasoning cited, without any explanation, is to protect 'certain diplomatic relations for national security.'"
~ Sibel Edmonds.

Earlier this week, Sibel Edmonds' organization, the National Security Whistleblower's Coalition, issued a press release describing another FBI agent's corroboration of Edmonds' own claims "of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities."

If you are a Kurd from Turkey, you won't need more corroboration of Ms. Edmonds allegations; history alone will testify to the veracity of her story, and by "history" I mean Susurluk.


For those who don't know--or don't remember--the Susurluk incident occured on November 3, 1996, when a Mercedes-Benz crashed into a truck on a highway in Susurluk, Turkey. All but one of the passengers in the Mercedes died at the scene, but they were no ordinary passengers. Sedat Bucak, the only survivor, was a Kurdish feudal landlord in the pay of the Turkish state, with thousands of village guards under his command, as well as being a former True Path Party (DYP) Member of Parliament. Coincidentally, Tansu Ciller was not only the leader of DYP at the time, but also Turkey's Prime Minister.

But Sedat Bucak was a relative small fry. The stunning discovery in the crushed Mercedes, and the thing that turned a traffic accident into a national scandal, was the body of Abdullah Catli, in the car with his former beauty queen-turned-Turkish mafia hitwoman mistress, a former Istanbul police chief and the erstwhile DYP parliamentarian, Bucak. Abdullah Catli was on the lam from police--from Interpol, to be exact--had been a convicted international drug-trafficker, and was head of the notorious Turkish fascist organization, the Gray Wolves. The Susurluk Affair briefly pulled back the curtain to reveal Turkish government and military involvement with the international drug trade and other Turkish mafia activities, Gladio operations, the dirty war in Turkish-occupied Kurdistan, and numerous extrajudicial murders. From Covert Action Quarterly:

"It all started in early 1992," believes Ismet Berkan, senior Ankara correspondent for the national daily Radikal. "That year, the Turkish armed forces high command underwent a dramatic shift in its counterinsurgency strategy in the combat against [the] rebel Kurdish guerrilla PKK."

So began the Dirty War against the Kurdish people in Turkey's long-repressed "Southeast," which resulted in the forced removal of millions of Kurds from their traditional lands, the destruction of their homes, villages, livestock, and real property. Kurdish politicians, activists, journalists, and ordinary people were subjected to detention and arrest, always accompanied by horrific acts of torture on the part of Turkish security forces, as well as the "disappearance" or extrajudicial murder of thousands of others. It was Turkish state assassins, like Abdullah Catli, who carried out the "disappearances" and murders, and it was employees of the American military and US State Department, like Douglas Dickerson and Marc Grossman, who armed them.


Ankara enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Washington in what has become knows as the "Dirty War," by supplying the weapons and military training that facilitated the gross human rights abuses perpetrated against Kurds by Turkish security forces. Although many Americans seem to welcome a Democratic-dominated Congress after seven years of the Bush administration, it was the Clinton administration that hypocritically called for arms control even as it assisted with the slaughter of Kurds in Southeast Turkey, as reported by Frida Berrigan of the Arms Control Resource Center of the World Policy Institute, in 2000:

During the first five years of the Clinton administration the U.S. sold nearly $5 billion worth of weaponry to Turkey, with more than $1 billion in 1997 alone. Turkey has used these weapons in an aggressive and disproportionately armed civil war against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, which is seeking recognition for Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish minority.

Berrigan goes on to quote a 1995 Human Rights Watch report, "Weapons Transfers and Violations of the Laws of War in Turkey," a damning indictment of the severe abuses of Turkish security forces with the assistance of US arms sales:

This report documents the Turkish security forces' violations of the laws of war and of human rights, and their reliance on U.S. and NATO-supplied weapons in doing so. Drawing on investigations of twenty-nine incidents that occurred between 1992 and 1995, the report links specific weapons systems to individual incidents of Turkish violations. Supplemented by interviews with former Turkish soldiers, U.S. officials and defense experts, the report concludes that U.S. weapons, as well as those supplied by other NATO members, are regularly used by Turkey to commit severe human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war in the southeast.

The most egregious examples of Turkey's reliance on U.S. weaponry in committing abuses are its use of U.S.-supplied fighter-bombers to attack civilian villages and its use of U.S.-supplied helicopters in support of a wide range of abusive practices, including the punitive destruction of villages, extrajudicial executions, torture, and indiscriminate fire.

In spite of the extensive documentation contained in the 1995 HRW report, business was still booming in 1999, as a joint report of the World Policy Insitute and the Federation of American Scientists indicated.

In addition to violations of the laws of war, US-backing of the Turkish government's Dirty War against the Kurds facilitated Turkey's role in the international drug trade, as Kendal Nezan reported in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998:

After the Gulf War in 1991, Turkey found itself deprived of the all-important Iraqi market and, since it lacked significant oil reserves of its own, it decided to make up for the loss by turning more massively to drugs. The trafficking increased in intensity with the arrival of the "hawks" in power, after the death in suspicious circumstances of President Turgut Özal in April 1993. According to the minister of interior, the war in Kurdistan had cost the Turkish exchequer upwards of $12.5 billion (7). Whereas, according to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 (8).

Here again, the principal players in the Susurluk Affair were involved; however, it's quite likely that they were not alone, but had American counterparts, as mentioned in the Vanity Fair story about Sibel Edmonds:

In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.

It is here that we pick up the threads of Susurluk that reach deeply into the bureaucratic and lobbyist milieu of Washington DC.

In 2004, in an interview with Christopher Deliso, former FBI translator and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds spoke of her encounter with Douglas and Melek Can Dickerson and their attempts to recruit her into the American Turkish Council. Douglas Dickerson was an US Air Force officer who had been stationed in Turkey sometime between 1991 and 1995, where he met and married MIT agent Melek Can Dickerson. Major Dickerson was in charge of weapons procurement for, among other countries, Turkey.

In 2006 more information surfaced on Dickerson, who "worked in the embassy's military attaché office and was responsible for logistics matters with the Turkish military." Furthermore:

In 1996, the Defense Department's Inspector General's office launched an investigation of a U.S. military officer at the Ankara embassy who was caught receiving a bribe from MIT agents. Shortly after the investigation started, Dickerson was transferred to a U.S. Air Force base in Germany.

Turkish MIT was heavily involved with the people who died in the car crash in Susurluk in the same year, namely MIT's counter-"terror" chief Mehmet Eymur, and Interior Minister Mehmet Agar (DYP).

Dickerson worked under the direction of American Deep Stater, Marc Grossman, who served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Ankara from 1989 to 1992, and then as ambassador to Turkey from 1994 to 1997. According to the same 2006 report, Grossman became a person of interest "to counter-intelligence agents since his stint as U.S. ambassador in Ankara." Was he also investigated, along with Dickerson, for his involvement with MIT? Was he also taking bribes from MIT? For what reason? Why did Grossman resign from the State Department at the beginning of 2005 when he held the third-ranking position in the department after an apparently successful 29-year career? How much Kurdish blood is on Marc Grossman's hands?

Undoubtedly Grossman was involved with the very same weapons transfers that HRW condemned in 1995. The fact that Grossman is now a vice-chairman of The Cohen Group, a lobby firm for the war industry headed by former Clinton-appointed defense secretary, William Cohen, indicates that he is cashing in on old relationships built during his Ankara days.

Interestingly enough, the other vice-chairman of The Cohen Group, former NATO commander, Joseph Ralston, was a member of the American Turkish Council's Advisory Board for 2006; is a member of the Board of Directors of Lockheed Martin, for whom he also lobbies; and was appointed at the end of August, 2006, as the US "special envoy" to "coordinate the PKK" for Turkey. Choosing to reject PKK's offer of a political solution for the Kurdish situation, and choosing to reject a PKK unilateral ceasefire, it would appear that the only thing Ralston has been successful with coordinating has been some $13 billion in Lockheed Martin contracts with the Turkish general staff.

All of this history, this unfinished business of Susurluk and the spread of the Deep State to the US, fits seamlessly with the allegations made by Sibel Edmonds and discussed by her in Part 1 and Part 2 of "Highjacking of a Nation." Of course, it has not been simply one nation that has been highjacked, but three: the American nation, the Turkish nation, and the Kurdish nation. Of these three, it has been the Kurdish nation that has paid the highest price so far. For that reason, it serves the interests of the Kurdish nation to support American demands for open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case. For more on that, including up-to-the-minute updates, check Lukery's new blog, Let Sibel Edmonds Speak.

For more information, Lukery's still running the Kill The Messenger blog and, his always fascinating political blog, WotIsItGood4--now coming at you in the new, improved, industrial-strength Blogger.

With its cast of characters and real-life international intrigue; with subsequent wars and rumors of wars, the Susurluk Affair and intervening decade would appear to be made-in-Hollywood material. For Americans in particular it's unfortunate that the story is not acted out on the big screen because, at the time, the Susurluk scandal threatened to expose the corruption of the Turkish government. Today, it should serve to expose-and put an end to--the same corruption on American shores.

If Sibel Edmonds--or ordinary Kurds--tell about the reality which is the Deep State, the threat it poses in the current global political climate, and how it came to be such a threat in the first place, Americans won't believe it.

But let Oliver Stone tell them; then they'll believe.

MISSING POLITICIANS, STATE'S ASSASSINS, AND RESPONSIBILITY

"A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder."
~ Friedrich Durenmatt.

Remember over the weekend, how everyone suddenly became brothers over Hrant Dink's murder? Well, I guess no one passed the word to any of Turkey's bigshot politicians, because not a single one of them bothered to show up at Dink's funeral yesterday. Take a look at TDN:

As tens of thousands of people in the streets and millions in their homes were bidding farewell to murdered journalist Hrant Dink, nearly all of the country's leading politicians were conspicuous only for their absence.

Who had better things to do? Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who doesn't "do" funerals on some kind of principle known only to him. Besides, he had better things to do with the Polish president and the Parliament speaker of Turkish-occupied Cyprus. Who else was missing? Parliament speaker Bulent Arinc, Prime Minister Erdogan, and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. Apparently they did send the Interior Minister, and that must have served a two-fold purpose: to make sure no more Deep State assassins showed up to further damage Turkey's international image by blowing away a few more "undesirables," and to take notes on anyone displaying too much "brotherhood," so that they could receive a discreet warning later. . . like a bullet in the mail from a non-existent return address.

It's kind of odd, isn't it? In the US, the Department of the Interior is in charge of stuff like national parks, water resources, rocks, trees; while in Turkey, the Interior Ministry is in charge of stuff like the state's assassins. Does anyone remember Yesil aka Ahmet Demir aka Mahmut Yildirim or Abdullah Catli? They are (or were, in the case of Catli) notorious state assassins. Who was in charge of them? Well, at the time of Susurluk, when we came closest to getting a glimpse of where all the tentacles of the Deep State might lead, Mehmet Agar was in charge of them. He was the Interior Minister in Ciller's government.

Check out this headline: "Hrant's funeral brought Armenian and Turkish officials together". Then TNA goes on to mention absolutely nothing about any officials other than the Armenian Patriarch of Turkey. For that thoroughly deceptive headline, TNA gets the gold star for today's biggest media prevarication.

More from the Feeding-the-Monster Department: The Association of Literary Translators in Turkey has issued a statement on the question of responsibility of the murder of Hrant Dink:

The greatest share of responsibility rests on all institutions of state which still regard ideas and the expressions of ideas as “dangerous”, and which have long accustomed to exercising “violence” through judicial threats towards any writer, caricaturist, thinker, journalist, publisher, translator, NGO activist or whoever questions the state’s own “official” views on anything. The responsibility rests on the state’s legislative, executive and judiciary constituents and within its parliament and within its opposition. The very of act judging someone merely because he or she argued for or against an opinion is itself an act of violence that encourages some “civil” know-it-alls to exercise violence and literal “terror” on any intellectual saying something contrary to the received wisdom.

The second big responsibility lies within the mainstream media that does not fulfill its duty of monitoring the administrators of the state on behalf of the public or its duty of making visible the systematic pressures and violations of rights which hover above all freedoms in general and above the freedom of expression in particular, and thereby cautioning the public of these misdemeanors. Instead, this mainstream media has done everything to the best of its abilities in order to justify the pressure exerted on those using their inalienable rights, and now it is shedding crocodile tears. The media see the demands for freedom and rights merely as “impositions from the EU”. They fail to stress that freedoms as such are necessary to ensure our own right to live in decency regardless of EU membership. Responsibility also goes to any faction that readily labels anybody attempting to open up any kind of debate on the EU, or discuss issues concerning Kurds and Armenians as “sellout puppets”, “traitors”, “instruments of imperialists”, or “agents” and then terrorize them. All of them are responsible for the enormous psychological torture and threats to which Hrant Dink has recently been subjected to, and as a result of which he described his predicament as "the dove skittishness of my soul." Indeed, we are all responsible, for we were unable to support him sufficiently to help him speak freely without fearing for his life.

A brilliant piece of writing, especially since many translators have also been charged under Article 301. The ones that come to mind immediately on that score are Fatih Tas, his publishing house, Aram, along with a number of Aram's editors and translators. In particular is their work on Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and John Tirman's Spoils of War, but these are not the only ones to find themselves charged with "insulting Turkishness" or some other Article 301-sanctioned stupidity.

A third suspect has been picked up in connection with the murder, a guy going by the name of Erhan T. Again from TDN:

Investigating a third layer of involvement in the Hrant Dink murder, a new brother, Elazığ-born Erhan T. was arrested in Trabzon two days ago and brought to Istanbul yesterday, daily Hürriyet reported. By snatching Erhan T. the police reached the third circle of the investigation, it was reported. Together with suspected murderer Ogün Samast and Yasin Hayal - the brother who had given the gun to Samast according to his police confession - Erhan T. is thought to be the third person of the link.

[ . . . ]

Police sources said that Erhan T. is also suspected to be behind the murder of Italian Priest Santoro in Trabzon in 2004. Police are investigating the similarities between the Dink case and the Santoro murder, they said.

According to TDN, Yasin Hayal was the snitch that led Turkish police to pick up Erhan T. Additionally, people are starting to notice that Hayal did less than a year's time for bombing a McDonald's in Trabzon a couple of years ago. On the surface it may look inconsistent that someone carrying out a terrorist act is given a sentence of less than a year by a state that prides itself on its gung-ho attitude to the global War on Terror, Inc., but this kind of thing is not a serious crime in Turkey, even if you do threaten to blow up a Russian embassy or few banks once you get out of the big house. A serious crime in Turkey consists of writing things like, oh, I don't know . . . "The Armenians were genocided," or "Kurds suffer repression."

In the same report, long-time Deep State murderer Veli Kucuk is turning a bit Erdogan-ish, by threatening to sue anyone--particularly Dink's lawyer, Erdal Dogan--who claims that Kucuk threatened Dink. How are we supposed to read that with a straight face when we know it's coming from the same guy who invented his own "state secrets' privilege," thereby disregarding the Susurluk trial altogether. If anyone else, in any other place but Turkey, decided to dis a court on so much as a traffic violation, they'd be held in contempt by the presiding judge, fined, and probably spend at least a few nights in jail. Not so in Turkey, at least not with the Deep State's murderers, that is.

Equally amusing and enlightening is what the lawyer, Dogan, says: "Dink had been receiving threats for two-and-a-half years. The name that worried him most was Veli Küçük. But this is not an an aspersion (misleading charge meant to harm his reputation)."

Geeeeeezzz . . . I didn't think it was possible to harm the reputation of a bastard like Kucuk. Maybe that's what Dogan meant.

Hehehe . . . funny how close in sound the name Küçük is to the word kûçik, but I'm not going to press that issue too much; it's an insult to dogs.