Edmonds case may reveal Plame's crucial CIA role

[RPankn]

Ex-FBI translator's case may reveal Plame's crucial CIA role
By Mike Mejia
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Dec 16, 2005, 00:52

For over a year, speculation has run rampant in the U.S. media and in the blogosphere about the CIA leak investigation being conducted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The thought-provoking questions asked by journalists and bloggers alike are many and varied: Who, in addition to Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, was involved in leaking the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media in order to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, for his refutation of President Bush's Niger uranium claim? What was the role of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) in peddling Plame's name to the media? Who forged the Niger uranium documents? What secrets lay inside the eight redacted pages of material in Circuit Judge David Tatel's decision to overide his finding of a reporters' federal shield privilege "[w]ere the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security"? Was Plame's role at the CIA as a weapons of mass destruction expert critical, as old CIA hands like Larry Johnson contend, or was she just a paper pusher, as the pro-Bush crowd proclaims?

Although many of these questions about the Fitzgerald investigation have yet to be answered, a pair of little noticed but explosive articles authored by Christopher Deliso of antiwar.com, "Plame, Pakistan a Nuclear Turkey and the Necons" and "Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame", go a long way to solving the mystery of Valerie Plame's mission at the agency and may henceforth reveal what likely lies in those mysterious eight redacted pages of Tatel's.

According to Deliso's two sources, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, the outing of Valerie Plame may have severely damaged a CIA operation to monitor a nuclear black market faciliated by the shadowy but well-connected Washington lobby group, the American Turkish Council (ATC). (Those familiar with the Sibel Edmonds case will know the ATC is the very same organization that the former FBI translator heard on wiretaps in connection with various alleged illegal activities, some connected to 9/11.) From Edmonds, Deliso obtained the following admission: "Plame's undercover job involved the organizations [the FBI had been investigating], the ATC (American-Turkish Council) and the ATA (American-Turkish Association) . . . the Brewster Jennings network was very active in Turkey and with the Turkish community in the U.S. during the late 1990s, 2000, and 2001 . . . in places like Chicago, Boston, and Paterson, N.J."

Such a stunning statement by the former FBI contract linguist could be dismissed by those not familiar with the whistleblower's well-established credibility were it not for the fact that Edmonds is, at least in part, corroborated by Ambassador Joseph Wilson himself. In his book the Politics of Truth, Wilson recounts on page 240 that he first met Valerie Plame in 1997, at a reception at the home of the Turkish ambassador which Wilson attended to receive an award from -- you guessed it -- the American Turkish Council. Wilson, of course, never explains in his book what brought Valerie Plame to attend this ATC-sponsored event, but since it is public information that Plame was an undercover CIA operative at the time, the simplest explanation is the most likely one: she was there as part of her Brewster Jennings & Associates cover. Although U.S. law prohibits the CIA from conducting espionage operations against U.S. citizens on American soil, nothing would have prohibited Plame from attending such an event in Washington.

These revelations about Plame's surveillance of the American Turkish Council are significant because the ATC is connected to powerful neocons like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (and, to be fair, to powerful anti-Iraq War activists like Brent Scowcroft and Joe Wilson.) And Edmonds implies that at least some on the ATC neocon side of this scandal are heavily involved in the nuclear black market: Feith and Perle, along with former Ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman, are fingered by Edmonds as figures of interest. [It's like a Likud reunion!]

One only has to recall that Perle and Feith are close allies of Scooter Libby, one of the original leakers of Plame's identity to the media, to conclude that Libby may have had more than one motive in seeing Plame's career and the whole Brewster Jennings operation destroyed. While several Beltway journalists, including the liberal Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, have tried to virtually chase Patrick Fitzgerald out of town by peddling the GOP storyline that going after the Plame leaker(s) amounts to "criminalizing politics," this new evidence suggests that the leak may not have been done in the spirit of good, old fashioned Washington hardball after all: A good case could now be made that outing Plame was an intentional act pepetrated to protect real criminal activity. Casting the investigation in such a light may show that a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act could still be in play.

However much antiwar advocates might wish it, though, we should not expect any of these links between the Sibel Edmonds and Valerie Plame cases to come out in Fitzgerald's court filings any time soon. Ms. Edmonds testimony in her own civil lawsuits has been quashed by the Supreme Court, effectively making anything Edmonds knows a "state secret". And Fitzgerald, as an employee of the U.S. Justice Department, is unlikely to reveal the trail of nuclear secrets that leads from the U.S. through Turkey to Pakistan.

However, there is still hope in getting the truth of the Plame-Edmonds matter out to the public at-large and that hope lies with the alternative media outlets. Besides, Deliso, a recent interview of Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna may indicate at least one other journalist is following the same Brewster Jennings trail. Alexandrovna appears to be looking closely at Plamegate figure Marc Grossman, whom Edmonds claims is "very important" in her own case.

Regardless of what transpires over the next few months in the twin sagas of the CIA agent and the FBI translator, it now appears that those who have called the Plame affair "Treasongate" may have been more right then they knew. While U.S. troops are bogged down in Iraq, a country that had no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to terrorism, some of the very architects of that same illegal war may be implicated in the leaking of U.S. nuclear technology for personal profit. If such shenanigans do not qualify as treason what does?


onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_340.shtml

[RPankn]

November 21, 2005

Plame, Pakistan, a Nuclear Turkey, and the Neocons

by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com

While it's well known that the war party's fateful "outing" of CIA agent Valerie Plame was partly revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson, for his 2003 New York Times article, it may have also been motivated by a desire to neutralize Plame's investigations into rogue nuclear trafficking. The long and storied history of indiscretions of powerful neocons in and around the Bush administration gives us reason to consider this possibility.

Plame at the CIA: Background

Within the CIA, Valerie Plame was an NOC (non-official cover) agent, meaning that she had "little or no protection from the U.S. government if she got caught." Far from being a "bit player," as neocons once belittled her, Plame was operating undercover and working to counter the spread of the world's most dangerous materials. And, while the front company by which she was ostensibly employed as an energy consultant, Brewster Jennings & Associates, may indeed have been little more than a "telephone and post office box" in Boston, Plame and her colleagues were using this ruse as a means of getting important information and undertaking delicate missions abroad.

Bob Novak's revelation of July 2003 thus did not just affect Plame. It affected all of us. Former CIA chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis Vince Cannistraro stated in October 2003 that since not only Plame but other agents were run through this front company, the leak had put them all in danger – and disrupted the international network of contacts the agents had carefully developed over the years. It severely impeded long-standing CIA investigations into one of the world's most serious issues.

The leak had wider effects, therefore, than just ruining one woman's career. It had serious national security implications, which have astonishingly enough been ignored by red-blooded backers of Washington's war party. The question thus becomes: who in the government would have stood to gain by ruining a CIA investigation into rogue nuclear trafficking, and in what ways?

Convergences Arise

An article published in Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, entitled "She Came to Turkey Too," cites an anonymous American intelligence expert who verifies that Plame's job involved "the 'top secret' part of nuclear weapons proliferation." The source also claims that it had brought her to Turkey several times, for follow-up visits with persons of interest:

"

lame and other employees of Brewster & Jennings, the CIA's fake energy consulting firm, used to visit the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA, located in Vienna] frequently. They used to attend the meetings and undertake deliberate operations to get 'targeted names' on their side.

"Plame and other 'energy consultants' used to continue with follow-up meetings for those persons whom they had contacted in Vienna, in Istanbul. … Plame met with foreign dignitaries who are in charge of nuclear weapons in their countries and scientists in Turkey, where she has visited several times as an 'energy consultant.'"

Independently of this, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds told me recently that "Plame's undercover job involved the organizations [the FBI had been investigating], the ATC (American-Turkish Council) and the ATA (American-Turkish Association)."

Further, she adds, "the Brewster Jennings network was very active in Turkey and with the Turkish community in the U.S. during the late 1990s, 2000, and 2001 … in places like Chicago, Boston, and Paterson, N.J." These disclosures make it clear that nuclear trafficking was one of the widespread illegal activities enjoyed by government officials, foreign agents, rogue businessmen, and terrorists under surveillance prior to and during Ms. Edmonds' time at the FBI.

Case Studies in Nuclear Smuggling

In May 2004, an intricate multinational scheme for smuggling in nuclear parts was documented by the L.A. Times. The case, which began with an anonymous tip from someone in South Africa in July 2003, "offers a rare glimpse into what authorities say is an international bazaar teeming with entrepreneurs, transporters, scientists, manufacturers, government agents, organized-crime syndicates, and, perhaps, terrorists."

The case centered around an Israeli, Asher Karni, who was caught trying to sell 200 triggered spark gaps that can be used for medical purposes – as well as for nuclear weapons – to Humayun Khan, a Pakistani with military and radical Islamist links, whose father had been a supplier to Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission in the 1970s. The Pakistani government was thus suspected to be the final recipient.

Some two months before the L.A. Times piece, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh had provided detailed information on Pakistan's "nuclear godfather," A.Q. Khan (no relation to Humayun Khan), who had been forced to admit to a long career of black-market nuclear trafficking that helped arm various volatile states. The revelations came when Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi voluntarily gave up his nuclear program, ushering in UN inspectors and casting light on the complex and far-flung network of dealers, suppliers, and clients from Malaysia to Dubai. [What a coincedence it's everywhere al-CIA/Mossad-a operates.] This in turn implicated Khan, who was pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, despite being regarded as a hero for his role in developing the bomb. Official Washington said little about the pardon, though the investigations picked up. For successive American administrations that had held up Pakistan as a stellar ally, the disclosure was an embarrassment, to say the least.

The Karni-Humayun Khan transaction was allowed to continue so that investigators could trace the whole operation. Karni first requested the spark gaps from a Massachusetts company, Perkin-Elmer Optoelectronics, but a company official told him that he first "needed to submit required U.S. certificates detailing what the switches would be used for, and promising not to send them to blacklisted countries such as Pakistan or use them in nuclear-related applications."

Deciding not to fill out the forms, Karni instead contacted Zeki Bilmen, a Turkish Jew and head of Giza Technologies in Secaucus, N.J. Bilmen secured the shipment by giving Perkin-Elmer certificates stating that the switches would be used in a South African hospital. However, authorities became suspicious when Perkin-Elmer told them a typical hospital would only request five or six such devices, not 200. What followed was a textbook case of rerouted shipments, front companies, and multiple handoffs in numerous countries before it finally finished in Pakistan.

Bilmen's company also described the spark gaps as "'electrical splices and couplings for switchings," something for which no export license would be required. However, an affidavit filed by Special Agent James R. Brigham of the Commerce Department's Office of Export Enforcement pointedly noted that "providing such false or misleading information is a violation of federal law."

What is more, court records cited by the L.A. Times show that this was not the first time this threesome had worked together: in one of the several "suspicious deals" mentioned, "Karni bought for Khan a type of sophisticated oscilloscope often used in nuclear weapons and military programs, also through Giza."

Protections and Paradoxes

Despite these red flags, Zeki Bilmen was not implicated; with more success than the other two characters involved, he portrayed himself as a naïvely innocent victim of circumstances. "It's beyond logical explanation," said Sibel Edmonds back in August. "Maybe it was decided in high places that no one would touch him."

According to her, Giza's business in New Jersey, staffed by Jewish Turks, was not affected by the controversy:

"[T]hey have many shipments going out, coming in, all day long. To places like Dubai, Spain, South Africa, Turkey. They have branches in all these places. Yep, they're sailing along very smoothly."

Giza Technologies' Web site states that the company is characterized "by the speed and dexterity by the way it locates hard-to-find products and the flexibility and efficiency of the service that it gives its customers." The company's main European branch is located in Madrid, Spain, and it claims to have worked in an (unspecified) capacity on various European defense projects such as the Eurofighter, F-100 Frigate, and Leopard tank.

From the Hersh piece, one also gets the sense that the worst proliferators are getting off with a slap on the wrist. A former Pakistani government official, Husain Haqqani, quipped that with the A.Q. Khan case "it is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It's a state policy." This might explain the American reticence to put an end to the unsavory activities by embarrassing key ally Pakistan. One mystified international counter-proliferation official asked Hersh, "Why hasn't A. Q. Khan been taken out by Israel or the United States?" [Duh...because the U.S. and Israel are part of it.]

An American intelligence officer "with years of experience in nonproliferation issues" could only lament to Hersh that "we had every opportunity to put a stop to the A.Q. Khan network 15 years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the '80s. It's the second generation now." [Let's see, 2004 - 15 = 1989. The time GHW Bush was president, Cheney was defense secretary and James Baker was Secretary of State.]

Back to the Future

In the present context, nothing illustrates the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same better than this comprehensive 1993 report from the New Yorker's archive. Seymour Hersh chronicled how a desire to maintain certain foreign relations and prolong the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, as well as to cash in on lucrative military deals, inspired the Reagan and Bush I regimes to help Pakistan develop its nuclear arsenal – something that brought the volatile Southeast Asian state to the brink of Armageddon with neighboring adversary India in 1990. The Pakistanis, led by the aforementioned A.Q. Khan and radical Islamist generals, were able to develop a nuclear program "with the aid of many millions of dollars' worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside the United States."

As with the situation today, the State Department back then efficiently neutralized the many incriminating intelligence reports that revealed the clandestine role of prominent individuals and government officials in the whole sordid affair. Just as with the whistleblower cases of the past few years, the Pakistan imbroglio had its own hardworking and talented young agent to sacrifice: Richard M. Barlow, an expert on Pakistani nuclear proliferation issues. As with Sibel Edmonds a generation later, he stumbled upon hugely significant information while "rummaging" through a forgotten backlog of data. And, as with Edmonds, Barlow was harassed and then fired for refusing to shut up when he spoke up about clear evidence of wrongdoing. Hersh recounted events thus:

"[E]ven as Barlow began his digging, some senior State Department officials were worried that too much investigation would create what Barlow called 'embarrassment for Pakistan and trigger the Solarz Amendment, which would cut off all aid.' Protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy."

The State Department, deemed "easily the most corrupt" of major government agencies by Edmonds, was again the target in another of Barlow's investigations, which involved "possibly illegal State Department approval of licenses to the Pakistani Embassy in Washington for equipment whose export had previously been denied – for nuclear-proliferation reasons – by the Commerce Department."

The realities of then and now collide unhappily yet again with the ultimate example of What It's All About. When Barlow discovered that the government "was once again distorting intelligence on Pakistan's nuclear capability," he prepared a comprehensive study for the benefit of "Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and other senior officials." Barlow's report, which was backed up by a similar one from the Defense Intelligence Agency, proved that Pakistan was retrofitting its American F-16 fighter jets to carry nuclear warheads.

This revelation presented a "big problem" for Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the boys, because it imperiled the $1.6 billion they expected to rake in from the sale of 60 more F-16 fighters and subsequent acceleration of the India-Pakistan arms race. When Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Hughes stood before Congress on Aug. 2, 1989, and claimed that the planes could not be modified to carry nuclear missiles, Barlow immediately protested to his superiors that this was a lie, and was just as immediately terminated. The deal, like all the others before and after it, went ahead.

Humorously enough, when Khan finally admitted his black-market role in 2004, Cheney purported to be "shocked." For this act, he could have taken home the Oscar.

The Turkish-Pakistani Connection

Turkey has long been known as a vital transit and assembly point for contraband nuclear materials. It has been aiding the nuclear aspirations of Pakistan, in particular, since a military coup in 1980. A report from back in 2000 recalled that:

"[T]urkey has already been implicated in nuclear arms aid to Pakistan. An earlier attempt to build an Argentinean-designed reactor was likely aimed at plutonium production for nuclear weapons. Evidence of nuclear smuggling based in Turkey, and Turkey's push for its own nuclear fuel capability and indigenous reactor design, all pointed to possible nuclear weapons development. The support of prominent Turkish citizens for nuclear weapons development has leant credence to this evidence."

Over the past 20 years, various Turkish and Pakistani governments, as well as sections of the military, have looked kindly on the idea of creating Islamic nuclear states. The countries were specifically linked in the A.Q. Khan network; this July 2004 summary gives detailed information:

"[W]orkshops in Turkey made the centrifuge motor and frequency converters used to drive the motor and spin the rotor to high speeds. These workshops imported subcomponents from Europe and elsewhere, and they assembled these centrifuge items in Turkey. Under false end-user certificates, these components were shipped to Dubai for repackaging and shipment to Libya."

Today, it is not known whether Turkey possesses nuclear weapons. But remember, the crucial part of the above-cited 2000 report is:

"[E]vidence of nuclear smuggling based in Turkey, and Turkey's push for its own nuclear fuel capability and indigenous reactor design, all pointed to possible nuclear weapons development. The support of prominent Turkish citizens for nuclear weapons development has leant credence to this evidence."

Total trafficking levels are hard to adduce, though it's clear that more supplies get through than are caught. From 1993-1999 alone, there were 18 high-profile incidents of nuclear trafficking involving Turkey – the sort of cases that Valerie Plame's unit sought to investigate. As this report details, "these cases include nuclear material seized in Turkey, nuclear material interdicted en route to Turkey, and seizure of nuclear material smuggled by Turkish nationals." In most of the cases, the nuclear materials originated in unstable former Soviet states such as Georgia, Romania, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia itself. [I'm sure this is just another coincedence.] Among the destination states, Libya and Iran jump out. In addition to Turks, detained smugglers included nationals of Azerbaijan, Russia, Georgia, Romania, as well as a Kazakh army colonel and suspected Iranian secret service agents.

A couple of years later, on Sept. 10, 2001, the N.Y. Times reported that "in the last eight years, there have been 104 attempts to smuggle nuclear material into Turkey, according to an internal report by the Turkish Atomic Energy Authority."

An Unpredictable Future

As Seymour Hersh related in his 1993 article, Pakistani leaders were smart enough to know that the U.S. was just using them for their proximity to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. They knew that when the Russians withdrew, the U.S. would have no further need for them – and would be less enthusiastic about letting the country go nuclear. However, by the time the Soviets pulled out, the damage had long been done. After all, A.Q. Khan had been boasting since the mid-1980s that his country had the bomb.

An even more frightening prospect is a nuclear Turkey. The country has been militarily subsidized even more than Pakistan; mass military aid and technology transfer were justified first of all by Turkey's status as a key Cold War ally and thereafter as a bulwark of secular Islam, holding the wall against Syria, Iran, and Iraq.

However, the very same American leaders who have been arming Turkey and allowing, in some cases even profiting from, nuclear smuggling there have also ruined the delicate balance of regional power with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought the world far closer to nuclear confrontations.

In the former case, they put huge strain on the "pro-Western" Musharraf government, strengthening the hand of fundamentalist Islamists in both the mosque and in the armed forces. Musharraf has survived multiple assassination attempts, but there is no guarantee that he will enjoy lucky escapes forever. If he goes, what then? Any coup by a populist, fundamentalist-based leader would instantly put both Pakistan and India on high alert, taking us back to previous near-apocalyptic nuclear showdowns. Mired in numerous other bloody commitments of its own making, there's no certainty that the U.S. could finesse the situation as it did in 1990. [Or maybe this is what certain people, who seem to make their livings off the government dole, want to happen.]

While Turkey is much less likely to fall victim to an Islamist coup, preserved as it is by a strongly secular military, it could easily grow more isolationist. Major changes have occurred since the invasion of Iraq that have manifested themselves in a demoted role for Turkey in U.S. foreign policy considerations, a shifting relationship between it and Europe, a return to Islamic roots, and the revival of armed Kurdish insurrectionists in the southeast.

With 2002's war planning, the neocons decided that it was not enough to merely keep Turkey on as the dependable bulwark of the West's hinterland; instead, they chose to take the bull by the horns and seize the whole neighborhood for themselves. After the Iraq invasion gave the U.S. troops a huge and probably permanent regional military presence and the capabilities to easily strike Iran and Syria, Turkey's strategic importance has been downgraded. At the same time, the revival of Kurdish terrorism in Turkey, inspired by the "liberation" next door in Iraq, has left many Turks feeling angry and apprehensive that the U.S. no longer has its best interests in mind. They also sympathize on religious grounds with fellow Muslims who are being injured and killed every day in Iraq.

The way Turkey's other external relationships are handled in the coming months will also play a role in deciding the direction of future trends. The European Union recently began candidacy negotiations with Turkey, something about which large sections of the European public have deep misgivings. It's hard to see how they will become more eager to welcome Turkey aboard after having seen the rioting of Muslim immigrants that swept France and neighboring countries in recent weeks.

The issue of the EU is controversial not only in Europe, however; nationalist and religious-minded Turks do not want to make the sometimes humiliating concessions and "reforms" Brussels is requesting of them. That the Iraq war added to the volatility of the Middle East, rather than to its stabilization, goes without saying. But Turkey's sudden drop in the estimation of U.S. policy planners and its arm's-length treatment from the EU can only increase feelings of frustration and alienation among the general populace, strengthening the religious-based parties and go-it-alone nationalist sentiment alike.

Proud Turkey has always wanted to be seen as an important country. Were it to declare itself a nuclear one, it would become, for a time at least, the most important country in the world. The entire balance of power in Europe and the Middle East would be radically altered overnight, and the overall side results would not at all be positive for Turkey or anyone else – except of course for those cashing in on illicit nuclear sales. Nevertheless, the country is probably technologically capable by now. A new question that has thus arisen, as articulated recently by Turkish scholar Mehmet Kalyoncu on Balkanalysis.com, is the following: "If the U.S. and the EU do not approve of Turkey having nuclear weapons, what do they have to offer Turkey instead?"

This is a startling question that no one hopes will be asked. If it is, it certainly won't come as a surprise to those neocons of long experience who have gotten rich by helping Pakistan (and perhaps soon Turkey) realize nuclear ambitions – making the world a safer place for all of us in the process.


antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=8091

[RPankn]

November 24, 2005

Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame

by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com

From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.

Aside from the high-visibility officials involved or presumably involved in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame – Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. – we also have a generous sprinkling of neocons who, while somewhat less well known, have played a crucial role in not only the Plame outing but in policy-crafting and, perhaps, criminal activities as well.

The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon. [I'm sure it's just a coincedence some of the same players are also entangled in the AIPAC spy case.]

John Bolton's Attack Dogs

While he has always been an outspoken opponent of arms control of all kinds, John Bolton was assigned to precisely that brief by the Bush administration in May 2001. Now his brief has been changed to acting UN ambassador, though he has in the past called for the cessation of the world body. At least he's consistent in his perversity.

On Oct. 27, on the eve of the Libby indictment, Richard Sale reported that according to "several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials," Libby was told of Plame's CIA identity via a phone call that "definitely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department."

More specifically, says Sale, Bolton assistants David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz were part of the relay team responsible for leaking Plame's identity to Libby and then to Novak and Miller. "These same sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC)." Gary Leupp's Nigergate timeline of Nov. 9, 2005, gives further details on their involvement.

David Wurmser: A Blowhard Empowered

Bolton's attack dogs come from the very heart of the neocon establishment. It was Wurmser, after all, who largely wrote the now-infamous 1996 policy paper urging an invasion of Iraq for the sake of Israel: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." Among the signers were Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Another was Wurmser's wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East studies at the neocon-friendly Hudson Institute.

Out of power but continuing to skulk around the AEI with his neocon comrades, Wurmser handed out yet more free advice in a similar study published in 2000 by neocon Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon; it "advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon":

"The study, 'Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?' called for the United States to force Syria from Lebanon and to disarm it of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. It also argued that 'Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals' and criticized the United States for engaging rather than confronting the regime. Among the documents signers were several soon-to-be Bush administration figures, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, and Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Other signers included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney."

When the neocons started feeling their oats with the return to power of a Republican administration later that year, hawks like Wurmser were locked and loaded to put these ideas into practice. With 9/11 came their ultimate opportunity. As Raw Story reports:

"hortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."

Wurmser's two-man "cell" was officially known as the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, and was based in "a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon." In order to expedite Wurmser's "research," Feith and Rhode had to perform some "softening-up" operations on the professional intelligence community. A Jan. 26, 2004, report from Mother Jones explains their methods like this:

"ccording to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be 'pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,' says a former analyst. 'They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there.'

Frederick Fleitz: Dual-Use Technology Personified

For his part, Fleitz was an old confidante of Bolton's and "on loan" to his office from the CIA. A State Department intelligence analyst on WMD, Greg Thielman, told Seymour Hersh in 2003 that Bolton "surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly." Bolton affirmed for Hersh that he had demanded and received "direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous administrations, such data had been made available to undersecretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specific secured offices of the INR [the State Department intelligence branch]."

That Bolton's boys would betray Valerie Plame should come as no surprise, considering their consistently vicious previous tactics with intelligence officers who resisted their orders to make the intelligence fit their case. In April 2005, the New York Times reported on several antagonistic e-mails sent during 2002 by Fleitz to Christian Westermann, "the State Department's top expert on biological weapons," who also worked under Thielman.

Apparently, John Bolton could not tolerate the "wimpy" language that the INR recommended he use in a speech about Cuba. The always bellicose Bolton sought to accuse Cuba of developing biological weapons – a prospect even more fanciful than Iraq's alleged ambitions in the field. In any case, the war of attrition had its effect on Westermann, who on Sept. 23, 2002, wrote a high-ranking INR official, Thomas Fingar, stating that the incessant attacks from Bolton/Fleitz were "affecting my work, my health, and [my] dedication to public service."

Westermann, a career naval officer, was moved in 2000 to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation. In 2005, he testified in a Senate hearing that "Mr. Bolton was very unhappy that a working level analyst [i.e., himself] had the temerity to alter language that he wanted to say." Regarding Fleitz, Westermann revealed that "Fred was a conduit for Mr. Bolton to receive other information [from the CIA] … there were times that material flowed from other agencies to Undersecretary Bolton not through INR." Frank affirmations of Bolton's abusive nature while in the State Department were made at his April 2005 UN confirmation hearings by Carl W. Ford Jr., Westermann's ultimate boss at the INR.

Marc Grossman: A Dark Horse Candidate?

It's clear that Cheney assistant Libby thought to ask John Bolton about the identity of the CIA's "secret envoy" to Niger (i.e., Wilson) because he recognized that the WMD-focused brief of Bolton and Fleitz meant they had a good chance of finding out who was behind Joe Wilson's trip to Africa. They also shared Libby's neocon ideology. In short, they were people he could count on.

But why, then, did Libby also ask a non-WMD specialist like Marc Grossman? How was he in a position to help, and why did Libby believe he could be trusted with the mission?

Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important."

She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see. According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.

Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

At the same time, Pakistan was actively seeking to become a nuclear power following another humiliating military defeat at the hands of India in 1971. This pursuit necessarily involved clandestine, black-market transactions, and it in fact led Pakistan to spawn the world's biggest eventual nuclear proliferator – A.Q. Khan, father of the country's nuclear program and supplier to numerous sketchy regimes and underworld characters. The U.S., as Seymour Hersh recounted in 1993, looked the other way as Pakistan developed nuclear technologies throughout the 1980s: "protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy."

Grossman's professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.

A Pakistani article published on Sept. 10, 2001, claimed that Ahmed's

"most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. U.S. sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed 'matters of mutual interests.' What those matters could be is a matter of pure conjecture. One can safely guess that the discussions must have centered around Afghanistan, relations with India and China, disarmament of civilian outfits, country's nuclear and missiles program, and, of course, Osama bin Laden."

Following a three-year stint in the private office of NATO Secretary General Lord Carrington in Brussels, Grossman went on to become deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Turkey from 1989-1992. Two years later, he was appointed ambassador, representing U.S. political, commercial, and military interests in Turkey until June 1997. In this position, he would have been well informed of everything in these realms, and worked with leading lobbyists from both America and Turkey, as well as the firms they represented. A comprehensive study shows the staggering scope of American military aid to Turkey during the period in question. This largesse depended and continues to depend on the good offices of influential governmental and near-governmental officials and businessmen.

Examples abound: let's take the other two doubly implicated characters by Sibel Edmonds, Doug Feith and Richard Perle. In 1989, "Feith registered International Advisors Inc. (IAI) as a foreign agent representing the government of Turkey," wrote James Zogby, four months before 9/11. "One of the stated purposes of the work of IAI was to 'promote the objective of U.S.-Turkish defense industrial cooperation.'" In fact, in the ensuing years, the firm – its highest paid "external" consultant being one Richard Perle – was compensated for lobbying services for Turkey at a rate of $600,000 a year. Zogby cites a Wall Street Journal story from the time of IAI's inception stating that Perle "among other things supervised U.S. military assistance to Turkey during his recent seven-year hitch in the Pentagon."

Interestingly enough, at the same time Feith and Perle were greasing Turkish palms and Grossman was presiding over in Ankara, the CIA's Brewster-Jennings network and Valerie Plame were focusing on nuclear proliferation in Turkey. This scrutiny led them to trace private citizens in America as well as lobby groups like the American-Turkish Council – which is precisely where Plame met future husband Joseph Wilson, while "on duty" at a 1997 reception held by then-Turkish ambassador to the U.S. Nuzhet Kandemir.

The FBI also got involved on the domestic front, as the Edmonds case affirms. And there was discussion between successive Turkish and Pakistani governments, during the 1980s and 1990, regarding the idea of making both nuclear-armed Islamic states. At least as far as we know, only the latter has so far succeeded.

After leaving Turkey in 1997, Grossman was promoted by President Clinton to become assistant secretary of state for European affairs (1997-2000), where he helped expedite NATO's illegal war against Yugoslavia. Under George W. Bush, he would become undersecretary of state for political affairs. As the administration was pushing for war in early 2003, Grossman became a mouthpiece for neocon policy. In a March 3, 2003, interview for Dutch television, he made a statement that could have come out of some PNAC policy papers: "[T]he time has come now to make a stand against this kind of connection between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. And we think Iraq is a place to make that stand first … the great threat today is the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."

In June 2005, Grossman left the public sector and became vice chairman at all-powerful lobbying firm The Cohen Group, run by an old Kosovo War colleague, former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen. Actually, as the Washington Post put it,

"Cohen Group folks don't officially lobby but, according to the group, provide clients 'the insights and intelligence needed to better understand and shape the business, political, legal, regulatory and media environments in which they operate.' The consulting shop has a 'strategic partnership' with DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, which has a lobbying component."

The Cohen Group, along with major Turkish lobbyist The Livingston Group, is a paying sponsor of the American-Turkish Council. Marc Grossman looks set for a long and comfortable second career well out of the public eye; no doubt, he will cash in handsomely by leveraging for Cohen clients the formidable influence he has gained through a long career of State Department postings under five different presidential administrations.

Grossman as a Key Source in the Plame Leak

Unless, of course, he finds himself tangled up in Plamegate or other related scandals that have as yet not been divulged. Gary Leupp recounts that on May 29, 2003, in addition to Bolton, Libby asked Marc Grossman for information on news reports "about [the] CIA's secret envoy to Africa in 2002." Grossman then requested a classified memo from INR boss Carl Ford (the boss of both Westermann and Fleitz), "and later orally brief[ed] Libby on its contents."

On July 21, 2005, the Washington Post stated that the memo had been written on June 10, 2003, "by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) … for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa."

A subsequent Washington Post article of Oct. 17 pointed out that at the time, Grossman had actually assumed the role of acting secretary of state "since Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage were out of the country."

Yes indeed, while the cat is away, the mice will play…

The article also stated that Grossman "wanted the letter (classified 'secret') as background for a meeting at the White House where the discussion was focused on then growing criticism of Bush's inclusion in his January State of the Union speech of the allegation that Hussein had been seeking uranium from Niger." Grossman seems to have been regarded as suitable by Cheney et al. for finding out what the war party wanted to know about Joe Wilson.

The Grossman memo laid out the reasons why the State Department's INR had found the Niger intel not credible. It also described "a meeting at the CIA in February 2002, attended by another INR analyst [emphasis mine], where Plame introduced her husband as the person who was to go to Niger."

The article continues:

"Attached to the letter were the notes from the INR analyst who had attended the session, but they were written well after the event occurred and contained mistakes about who was there and what was said, according to a former intelligence official who reviewed the document in the summer of 2003.

"Grossman has refused to answer questions about the letter, and it is not clear whether he talked about it at the White House meeting he was said to have attended, according to the former State official."

Who could have been the "other INR analyst" sent to the CIA meeting? And was it the same analyst responsible for drafting the memo in the first place? Could the analyst have been Fleitz, the CIA officer "on loan" to Bolton's office in the State Department, but still working for the CIA at the same time? Indeed, how many other people would have had the freedom and relevant security clearances to go back and forth between the two agencies, let alone have direct access to the White House?

These disclosures indicate two things: one, that a covert channel of information through the CIA, State Department, and White House existed; and two, that Grossman definitely was involved throughout, probably enlisting the help of Fleitz and/or Wurmser in expediting the process.

From this it seems pretty clear that Grossman's mission was a key part of the neocon offensives against the intelligence community, as with the Bolton/Fleitz harassment of analysts like Christian Westermann. And, like all career diplomats serving under multiple administrations, Grossman's ideological sympathies were clearly flexible enough for the job.

Eric Edelman: A Witness, or More?

Another low-profile neocon associate who has been swept up in the Plamegate controversy is Eric Edelman, a former Cheney staffer, the previous ambassador to Turkey, and current replacement for Douglas Feith as undersecretary of defense for policy. However, as with John Bolton's appointment to the UN, Edelman was installed via a White House recess appointment.

According to the NY Times on Nov. 5, Edelman has been identified as the "then-principle deputy" of Lewis Libby in the weeks leading up to the outing of Plame, as named in the Fitzgerald indictment. Edelman and his boss spoke on the phone "on or about June 19, 2003, before Mr. Wilson's name became public."

It says that Mr. Edelman asked Mr. Libby in June 2003 whether information about Mr. Wilson's trip could be disclosed to the press to rebut allegations that Vice President Cheney had called for the trip. Reads the indictment:

"LIBBY spoke by telephone with his then Principal Deputy and discussed the article [in The New Republic]. That official asked LIBBY whether information about Wilson's trip could be shared with the press to rebut the allegations that the VP had sent Wilson. LIBBY responded that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure phone line."

What is interesting here, aside from the cloak-and-dagger, almost Franklinesque flair of Libby, is that Edelman was no longer even supposed to be employed with him at the time: as the NYT reminds, "Mr. Edelman ceased work for Mr. Libby on June 6, 2003, to begin language training in preparation for a posting as ambassador to Turkey."

Perhaps the need for a recess appointment had to do with Edelman's dangerous failure at his previous place of employment. A 2003 article from Turkish columnist Ali Aslan remarked on how strongly Edelman, in his new role as ambassador, was disliked by Turks. During his two-year tenure in Ankara, Edelman became a lightning rod for criticism as a meddlesome, bullying diplomat who disrespected Turkish sovereignty on a number of levels. The local media laid into him on numerous occasions. Columnist Ibrahim Karagul writing in "the Islamist daily Yeni Safak, known as the unofficial mouthpiece of the Justice and Development Party (AKP)," said, "if we want to address the reasons for anti-Americanism, Edelman must be issue one. As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral relations will last." Milliyet writer Can Dsündar added, "f Turkey today is the leader in the race of 'America-hating countries,' Edelman is a major part of it." Yeni Safak's Ahmet Kekeç, reciting a litany of abuses and revenge tactics Edelman used against the newspaper, closed by simply stating, "Edelman must go."

And go he did – straight back into the arms of Dick Cheney and the war party, which he had already served on two occasions, first during the reign of Bush I, and again between 2001-2003 as a special assistant to Cheney. In the first period, he worked under Paul Wolfowitz in the creation of a Defense Policy Guidance that "stipulated that the U.S. should wage preventive war to maintain unchallenged U.S. military supremacy." The second time around, in the run-up to the Iraq war, Edelman played a vital role, along with Lewis Libby, Doug Feith, and other prominent neocons, in crafting the bogus rationale for war in Iraq that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In August 2005, President Bush "used a constitutional power to bypass the Senate" in confirming Edelman as the new undersecretary of defense for policy, replacing Douglas Feith.

According to the above RightWeb article, "replacing Douglas Feith with Edelman allows the radicals running U.S. foreign policy to leave behind the controversies building around Feith and get a relatively clean start with a new undersecretary of defense for planning." However, that "relatively clean start" now seems in danger of being sullied by Edelman's as yet unknown role in L'Affaire Plame.


antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=8137

[RPankn]

Brent Scowcroft Talks Turkey
Sibel Edmonds Fights Fascism

by John Stanton
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 18, 2005

The Sibel Edmonds v. Department of Justice saga continues as the year 2005 draws to a close. The only breaking news to come from the ongoing drama is the implication, published in Vanity Fair, that Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of US Representatives, was the recipient of campaign contributions and assorted bribes from the Turkish-American community. That another US politician is on the take comes as no surprise. But more on that later. Sibel’s story may have quietly died from the suffocating oppression of the US government had it not been for very recent revelations that the US sanctions and operates interrogation/torture facilities in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s New Europe (Poland, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.). While the buzz is all around the Plame-Wilson-Libby-Woodward-Rove-Hadley affair, and the lies that got the US into Iraq again, the real news is that military and non-military torture chambers stretching from Mexico to Asia have become standard operating procedure for the US. Further, the response of official Washington to the torture expose was not disgust, but a call to prosecute the whistleblower that leaked the awful news.

Within the remarkable public revelation from the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch, is the imprimatur of Rumsfeld and Cheney -- the two crusty Nixon Administration buddies -- and perhaps the most ruthless and dangerous Americans ever to hold office in the corporate/government world. They and their disciples share the view that “conduct unbecoming” does not exist. No law, no boundary, no moral code, no amount of lives or an outdated parchments like the US Constitution and Bill of Rights will be a barrier as they push forward their foreign and domestic agenda for some of the US population, Turkey and Israel. They hide behind the veil of “the national security of the United States of America” and label Top Secret/Special Compartmentalized Information the data that would implicate them, not save a US soldier in a Humvee, or they slap a State’s Secret order on the likes of Sibel Edmonds mainly to protect balance sheets and business deals.

Me Ne Frego!

There is a name for this kind of government-corporation and the society it creates and it is Fascism, pure and simple. There just isn’t any other way to describe people like Rumsfeld or Cheney. To that we must add the name Brent Scowcroft. US. Wikipedia reports that fascism’s appearance in Italy in the 1920’s (rooted in the term fascio from the 1800’s) marked a new political and economic system that combined corporatism and nationalism in a state designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system. Dissent was discouraged, political discourse of the time was highly inflammatory, and the society overly militaristic. Under Mussolini’s dictatorship, from roughly 1925-1945, the effectiveness of its parliamentary system was virtually abolished though its forms were publicly preserved. The opposition was ferried to remote islands far from Italy proper where they would be tortured and sometimes killed. Mussolini was an active proponent of preemption. In 1923, he bombed Corfu and later established a puppet regime in Albania (according to the FBI in 2003, the Albanian Mafia is the most feared) .

Rumsfeld and Cheney have been able to push their fascist doctrine into mainstream America and into every decision making element in the US government. Their spokesman and head buffoon is George Bush II, who recently stated on his trip to Asia that criticism of his War in Iraq was irresponsible and unpatriotic, and is also on the record saying “we do not torture”. One sure sign of fascism is when the elected chief speaks to his minions almost entirely from the safe confines of a US military base. These strangely American fascists have adopted the motto of the Mussolini’s Black Shirts who were the enforcement arm of his government. “Me Ne Frego,” or I do not give a d**n, they’d say as they went about brutalizing dissenters, union bosses, journalists, et al. It’s the kind of attitude that produces “freedom is messy”, “bring ‘em on” and “people are fungible.”

Italian Fascism was based on state control of financial/commercial interests and public thought. American Fascism has done the reverse, outsourcing its mandate, protecting and defending the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, to corporations and powerful ideological domestic and foreign interests. These groups make the key decisions on US domestic and foreign policy. The actors in the stage production called “the three branches of US government,” give the public audience a sense that they are somehow involved in staging the production.

Fascists don’t see a distinction between legitimate and semi-legitimate organizations. Front companies, informants, pundits, mafias, consultants, retired generals, drug dealers and junkies, arms traders, spies, assassins, associations, politicians, lobbyists, judges are all just tools to advance the national and foreign interests.

It’s this kind of madness that Sibel Edmonds and those like her are fighting against. They are trying smash the mirrors and blow away the smoke that clouds the minds of so many who refuse to acknowledge that the US is rapidly becoming a reflection of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. [Rapidly becoming? We're already there: they've already won the psychological war.]

How Wars are Conducted

A little known news piece by Bill Conroy of narconews.com takes us to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. There we get a glimpse into how US officials conduct themselves in the War on Drugs and, in all likelihood, the War on Terror. According to Conroy, from 2003-2004 twelve people were brutally tortured and murdered in what came to be known as the House of Death case. Agents from the US Department of Homeland Security-Immigration and Customs Service (ICE) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) were attempting to capture Heriberto Santillan Tabares, apparently a top dog in Vincente Carrillo Fuente’s Juarez drug operation. The US agents successfully dropped an informant into Tabares’ operation. Problem was that the informant ended up gleefully taking part in the torture and murder of all twelve people. The bigger problem was that the then Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, the head of the DEA, and the US government prosecutor wanted to maintain the informant’s undercover status and his fine torture and murder credentials so that they could bag Tabares and, later, other drug dealers. Former DEA agent Sandalio Gonzalez was appalled at this activity and sent an internal letter to Department of Justice officials. Their immediate response was to drum him out of the DEA, according to Conroy.

The head of the DEA said that Gonzalez’s action was “inexcusable” and in testimony lets on that incompetence and inter-agency squabbling was the real issue, not the fact that twelve apparently innocent people were murdered with the approval of the US government. Tandy stated that “there was a substantial issue between DEA and ICE over the use of the informant…And the jeopardy that DEA agents and others had been placed in as a result of ICE’s handling of an informant that the DEA had previously blackballed…It was such a sensitive issue that…I went personally to brief the Attorney General…”

This bit of news leads us to Rumsfeld’s Death Star in Arlington, Virginia -- the Pentagon -- and there into the offices of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Known simply as The Policy Organization, it is the former home of the notorious neo-con Douglas Feith. But that’s not the interesting part. Under organizational titles like Policy, International Security, Homeland Defense, and Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, exist operational elements like Counternarcotics, Detainees, Combating Terrorism, Homeland Security Integration, Stability Operations and the Defense Policy Board. Its leaderships boasts Kissinger and Cheney protégés, stridently pro-Israel and Turkey supporters, and a former US Phoenix Project operative.

And this is where the guidelines for the Wars on Terror, Drugs, and Weapons of Mass Destruction are developed and implemented in the field, more than likely by former special operations operatives under contract. The Policy Organization has no problem dealing with psychopathic killers, buying and selling drugs, dropping white phosphorous on women and children, using the global black-market to help a “critical” country upgrade its nuclear capability, or selling out the American people for the sake of profit. The lives of 12 or 1.2 million human beings are inconsequential—nothing more than expendable extras in the big show. “Sensitive” matters must be classified or not discussed at all.

Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman (Cheney’s pick) runs The Policy Organization. Not surprisingly, he’s the former Ambassador to Turkey.

Gobble, Gobble

“Turkey’s long term commitment to the principles of democracy and their commitment to undertaking the reforms Europe demanded before even the first round of accession negotiations -- have produced economic opportunity, stable political institutions, and the peaceful rule of law. Turkey is proof that our strategy of spreading democracy in the Islamic world can work,” said Edelman. Lofty and duplicitous words that are not to be believed. For the real story, listen to Brent Scowcroft. As head of the American Turkish Council, he speaks on behalf of US corporations and the Turkish government.

In September 2005, Scowcroft sent a letter to Hastert that stated, according to the Armenian National Committee of America “even discussion of the Armenian Genocide on the floor of the US House of Representatives would be counter-productive to the interests of the United States.” Indeed, the letter states in no uncertain terms that Turkey is at the “center of American’s current and long term interests…The genocide resolutions encourage those who would pull Turkey away from the West. The careless use of genocide language provides and (sic) excuse to do so, delivering a direct blow to American interests in the region…I strongly urge you to oppose floor deliberation…of this highly sensitive issue.”

It should be an eye-opener when former US general and presidential advisor -- now the spokesman for US businesses and the Turkish government -- asks the “people’s house” to remain silent on a matter, thoroughly documented in American and British newspapers of the day, that involved the systematic slaughter of 1.2 million Armenians. If the issue is that important-after all, we’re not talking about a puny drug war -- then it is likely that Scowcroft told his Turkish Council members to fill the campaign coffers of the Speaker, former majority leader Tom DeLay, and current majority leader Roy Blount. And Scowcroft may have suggested to the Turkish government that it contract with former US congressmen Stephen Solarz and Robert Livingston (members of the ATC) to lobby on behalf of the Turkish government in the US House and Senate. The Turkish newspaper Sabah reported that Hastert was pressured by AIPAC to defeat another House resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide back in the year 2000. Trade associations in Washington, DC frequently unite on issues and, so it seems, Scowcroft’s ATC and AIPAC worked together to get rid of the Armenian matter.

Intrepid reporter Jason Vest writing in The Nation in 2002, noted that Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked as foreign registered lobbyists for Turkey back in the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s. They “quietly and deftly kept the [American] arms sluice to Turkey open” said Vest. Feith had hired former executive director of AIPAC, Morris Amitay, to assist in the task. The new Feith and Perle, Solarz and Livingston, have picked up where the largely disgraced Perle and Feith left off. One thing is for certain though; during Feith’s reign over The Policy Organization, the ATC and AIPAC had their operative well-placed and, perhaps, under control.

Black Market Bingo

The ATC and the Turkish Consulate in Chicago had been under the watchful eye of the FBI since the late 1990’s and one suspects it still is. But that’s about it since FBI field agents were told/are told to follow but not arrest suspected Turkish operatives. The ATC was/is also being monitored by the CIA. For example, Valerie Plame had attended a number of functions at the ATC and took several trips to Turkey. The newspaper Hurriyet confirmed that she was hunting for WMD’s, more likely their components, in a country well-known for its expertise in pushing products through the black market. This brings us to some excerpts from the PBS program Frontline:

Oscilloscopes and oscillators manufactured by Tektronix (equipment used to build missiles and nuclear weapons); and triggered spark gaps manufactured by PerkinElmer (small cylindrical devices that can be used to spark nuclear explosions). Asher Karni [Israeli businessman in South Africa] writes Zeki Bilmen [Turkish businessman] of Giza Technologies, a New Jersey-based company that, according to its Web site, provides "procurement services for state of the art electronic, electro-mechanical and mechanical components, systems, and other products related to the Electronics Manufacturing Sector." Karni asks Bilmen for an update on the EG&G order [triggered spark gaps]. Bilmen replies that the Tektronix equipment has arrived in New Jersey, but that he will wait until additional equipment arrives to ship them on, and that EG&G order has been processed. Bilmen adds in a separate email: "One Good News regarding the EG&G order [the triggered spark gaps]. NO EXPORT LICENSE REQUIRED to South Africa. I thought you might want to know."

These excerpts are from transactional e-mails made between Karni, Bilmen and Humayun Kahn, a Pakistan operative for the Pakistani military. They are meant to illustrate the ease with which these products traverse the globe and that, in all likelihood, are allowed to until a really big fish can be caught. Turkey’s role in the illicit nuclear transactions and selling off classified US military data to the highest bidder have been frequently reported. As far back as 1981, the US quietly complained to the Turkish ambassador about the sale of nuclear triggering devices to Pakistan. They would ultimately be used to launch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Of course there is another country that operates the same way -- Israel.

Shining Beacon of Democracy?

Would it be a surprise that The Policy Organization, the Attorney General and assorted US government operatives tracking these activities would turn a blind eye to Turkey and Israel’s trade in these types of goods? No. Why? Again, if Turkey and Israel are so “d**n” critical to the USA’s interests, then they can operate around the globe with impunity, protected by names like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Hastert, Scowcroft, Edelman, Bush and, once upon a time, Doug Feith.

Meanwhile, back in Turkey, the Turkish Press reported in August of 2005 that the military there continues its top officer purges of Islamists, or those with questionable religious connections, from the Army and Navy. That has been done with the approval of Recip Tayip Erdogan who back in 1997 was banned from politics for being overly Islamist. Turkey’s atrocious treatment of its Kurdish population and it’s threat to invade Kurdistan -- now located in Northern Iraq, go unnoticed in the US. Turkey has purchased 30 “Cobra-type” armored vehicles from Otokor, a unit of Koc Holdings to bolster its fight against a growing domestic Kurdish insurgency. And the Turkish military-industrial complex has expanded by 30 percent since 2004.

John Stanton is a Virginia Based writer specializing in political & national security matters. He is the author of America 2004: A Power But Not Super. Reach him at: [e-mail].


www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Stanton1118.htm