US Soldiers MASS SUICIDE in Iraq

Soldier Suicides at Record Level

Increase Linked to Long Wars, Lack of Army Resources

By Dana Priest -- Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, January 31, 2008; A01

Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside, a psychiatric outpatient at Walter Reed Army
Medical Center who was waiting for the Army to decide whether to
court-martial her for endangering another soldier and turning a gun on
herself last year in Iraq, attempted to kill herself Monday evening. In so
doing, the 25-year-old Army reservist joined a record number of soldiers
who have committed or tried to commit suicide after serving in Iraq or
Afghanistan.

"I'm very disappointed with the Army," Whiteside wrote in a note before
swallowing dozens of antidepressants and other pills. "Hopefully this will
help other soldiers." She was taken to the emergency room early Tuesday.
Whiteside, who is now in stable physical condition, learned yesterday that
the charges against her had been dismissed.

Whiteside's personal tragedy is part of an alarming phenomenon in the
Army's ranks: Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their
highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according
to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121
soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006.

At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted
injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last
year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide,
compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical
Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan.

The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of
post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated. Many Army posts
still do not offer enough individual counseling and some soldiers
suffering psychological problems complain that they are stigmatized by
commanders. Over the past year, four high-level commissions have
recommended reforms and Congress has given the military hundreds of
millions of dollars to improve its mental health care, but critics charge
that significant progress has not been made.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed severe stress on the
Army, caused in part by repeated and lengthened deployments. Historically,
suicide rates tend to decrease when soldiers are in conflicts overseas,
but that trend has reversed in recent years. From a suicide rate of 9.8
per 100,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 -- the lowest rate on record --
the Army reached an all-time high of 17.5 suicides per 100,000 active-duty
soldiers in 2006.

Last year, twice as many soldier suicides occurred in the United States
than in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist and author of
the study, said that suicides and attempted suicides "are continuing to
rise despite a lot of things we're doing now and have been doing." Ritchie
added: "We need to improve training and education. We need to improve our
capacity to provide behavioral health care."

Ritchie's team conducted more than 200 interviews in the United States and
overseas, and found that the common factors in suicides and attempted
suicides include failed personal relationships; legal, financial or
occupational problems; and the frequency and length of overseas
deployments. She said the Army must do a better job of making sure that
soldiers in distress receive mental health services. "We need to know what
to do when we're concerned about one of our fellows."

The study, which the Army's top personnel chief ordered six months ago,
acknowledges that the Army still does not know how to adequately assess,
monitor and treat soldiers with psychological problems. In fact, it says
that "the current Army Suicide Prevention Program was not originally
designed for a combat/deployment environment."

Staff Sgt. Gladys Santos, an Army medic who attempted suicide after three
tours in Iraq, said the Army urgently needs to hire more psychiatrists and
psychologists who have an understanding of war. "They gave me an 800
number to call if I needed help," she said. "When I come to feeling
overwhelmed, I don't care about the 800 number. I want a one-on-one talk
with a trained psychiatrist who's either been to war or understands war."

Santos, who is being treated at Walter Reed, said the only effective
therapy she has received there in the past year have been the one-on-one
sessions with her psychiatrist, not the group sessions in which soldiers
are told "Don't hit your wife, don't hit your kids," or the other groups
where they play bingo or learn how to properly set a table.

Over the past year, the Army has reinvigorated its efforts to understand
mental health issues and has instituted new assessment surveys and new
online videos and questionnaires to help soldiers recognize problems and
become more resilient, Ritchie said. It has also hired more mental health
providers. The plan calls for attaching more chaplains to deployed units
and assigning "battle buddies" to improve peer support and monitoring.

Increasing suicides raise "real questions about whether you can have an
Army this size with multiple deployments," said David Rudd, a former Army
psychologist and chairman of the psychology department at Texas Tech
University.

On Monday night, as President Bush delivered his State of the Union
address and asked Congress to "improve the system of care for our wounded
warriors and help them build lives of hope and promise and dignity,"
Whiteside was dozing off from the effects of her drug overdose. Her case
highlights the Army's continuing struggles to remove the stigma
surrounding mental illness and to make it easier for soldiers and officers
to seek psychological help.

Whiteside, the subject of a Post article in December, was a high-achieving
University of Virginia graduate, and she earned top scores from her Army
raters. But as a medic in charge of a small prison team in Iraq, she was
repeatedly harassed by one of her commanders, which disturbed her greatly,
according to an Army investigation.

On Jan. 1, 2007, weary from helping to quell riots in the prison after the
execution of Saddam Hussein, Whiteside had a mental breakdown, according
to an Army sanity board investigation. She pointed a gun at a superior,
fired two shots into the ceiling and then turned the weapon on herself,
piercing several organs. She has been at Walter Reed ever since.

Whiteside's two immediate commanders brought charges against her, but Maj.
Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the only physician in her chain of command and
then the commander of Walter Reed, recommended that the charges be
dropped, citing her "demonstrably severe depression" and "7 years of
credible and honorable service."

The case hinged in part on whether her mental illness prompted her
actions, as Walter Reed psychiatrists testified last month, or whether it
was "an excuse" for her actions, as her company commander wrote when he
proffered the original charges in April. Those charges included assault on
a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless
endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a threat
and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to avoid
service.

An Army hearing officer cited "Army values" and the need to do "what is
right, legally and morally" when he recommended last month that Whiteside
not face court-martial or other administration punishment, but that she be
discharged and receive the medical benefits "she will desperately need for
the remainder of her life." Whiteside decided to speak publicly about her
case only after a soldier she had befriended at the hospital's psychiatric
ward hanged herself after she was discharged without benefits.

But the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which has ultimate
legal jurisdiction over the case, declined for weeks to tell Whiteside
whether others in her chain of command have concurred or differed with the
hearing officer, said Matthew MacLean, Whiteside's civilian attorney and a
former military lawyer.

MacLean and Whiteside's father, Thomas Whiteside, said the uncertainty
took its toll on the young officer's mental state. "I've never seen
anything like this. It's just so far off the page," said Thomas Whiteside,
his voice cracking with emotion. "I told her, 'If you check out of here,
you're not going to be able to help other soldiers.' "

Whiteside recently had begun to take prerequisite classes for a nursing
degree, and her mental stability seemed to be improving, her father said.
Then late last week, she told him she was having trouble sleeping, with a
possible court-martial weighing on her. On Monday night, she asked her
father to take her back to her room at Walter Reed so she could study.

She swallowed her pills there. A soldier and his wife, who live next door,
came to her room and, after a while, noticed that she was becoming groggy,
Thomas Whiteside said. When they returned later and she would not open the
door, they called hospital authorities.

Yesterday, after having spent two nights in the intensive care unit, he
said, his daughter was transferred to the psychiatric ward.

Whiteside left two notes, one titled "Business," in which her top concern
was the fate of her dog. "Appointment for the Vetenarian is in my blue
book. Additional paperwork on Chewy is in the closet at the apartment in a
folder." On her second note, she penned a postscript: "Sorry to do this to
my family + friends. I love you."

Staff writer Anne Hull contributed to this report.

Western Mole Abbas - Rafah border crossing

Is Mahmoud Abbas Israel's lawyer?

by Khalid Amayreh -- January 31, 2008 -- Palestinian Information Center

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has vehemently rejected Hamas
demands that only Palestinian and Egyptian authorities be allowed to run
the Rafah border crossing.

"We will not accept any new conditions; they (Hamas) have to go back to
the old border-crossing agreement. We are more interested in the
Palestinian people's interests than Hamas is. If Hamas is really for them
as well, let them comply with this agreement."

Well, does Abbas really know what he is talking about? Indeed, as the Arab
proverb goes, if he knows, it is a real calamity, and if he doesn?t, it is
even a greater calamity.?

I am saying this because the old agreement governing operations at the
Rafah Border-Crossing enables Israel, the country that has been trying to
decimate 1.5 million Gazans by way of starving them, to have the final say
as to when the border terminal may be opened and when it will be closed.

We all remember how thousands of Palestinians, including students,
patients, pilgrims and other travelers, were left stranded on the Egyptian
side of the border for weeks and months because an Israeli officer on the
Israeli side of the border decided to keep these helpless victims hostage
to his whims and cannibalistic instincts.

In fact, this wicked sadism, which Mr. Abbas is defending doggedly now,
was responsible for the death of dozens of Palestinians who were left
stranded in the desert, as if they were animals, not human beings. Go back
to relevant reports describing the plight of stranded Gazans and you will
understand what I am talking about.

How did Israel manage to keep the border-crossing closed most of the days
of the year? Well, it was very simple. According to the ?wonderful?
agreement Abbas is now demanding that Hamas accept unconditionally, the
Rafah border terminal can?t be operational unless in the presence of EU
monitors. But the monitors themselves, who hail from several EU countries
and some of them may well be working for the Israeli Intelligence, are
based in the small Israeli kibbutz of Kerem Shalom, a few miles away from
the border terminal. And according to the infamous agreement, they can?t
have a free access to the border terminal unless they receive beforehand a
daily permit from the Israeli army.

For its part, the Israeli army, acting on instructions from the
government, would simply and routinely declare the only road from Kerem
Shalom to the Rafah border terminal a closed military zone in order to
keep the border-crossing closed. Of course, the army would concoct
?security reasons? to justify the virtually perpetual closure, but
everyone , including the Israelis themselves, know quite well that genuine
security considerations have very little to do with the Israeli measures
and that the real motive is to punish and torment the Palestinians.

As mentioned, this flagrant abuse of authority was not done one day or two
days or even ten days per month. This was the norm, the modus operandi,
and the border crossing was kept closed 26 or even 29 days per month,
causing tremendous suffering to the Palestinians.

It was a deliberate and calculated process intended to torment, savage,
brutalize and humiliate the people of Gaza, and it was all done under the
rubric of an ?international agreement.?

The EU leadership and member-states knew well what was going on at Kerem
Shalom. But they were too morally dishonest and too subservient to Israel
and the United States to show any meaningful objection to Israel?s
systematic persecution of a helpless people whose men, women and children
are clinging to life just as many of the Jewish inmates at Ghetto Warsaw
did nearly 67 years ago.

So, I would like to ask Abbas and his aides and hangers-on who talk too
much and make so much noise, claiming to serve the vital interests of the
Palestinian people:

How do you think that re-allowing Israel to control the Rafah border-
crossing would serve the interests of the Palestinian people? Are you
drunk? Are you stupid? Are blind? Are you ignorant?

Besides, why do you think that Israel should be involved in running the
Rafah border- crossing in the first place? Isn?t the border crossing an
exclusively Egyptian-Palestinian crossing? Didn?t Israel declare that it
ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip? Has not the Zionist regime been
saying ad nauseam that it is no longer responsible for Gaza? If so, why do
you insist that the slave master remain the ultimate decision-maker, the
ultimate boss? This is sickening, to say the least and it shows a kind of
umbilical subservience on your part to the nefarious occupiers.

I realize that there are problems between Fatah and Hamas. However,
betraying the Palestinian people and undermining their vital interests for
the purpose of weakening Hamas and appeasing Israel and pleasing
Washington borders on treason, pure and simple.

What else can be said of and about clinging to an unconscionable agreement
that allows the evil occupiers to imprison, torment and humiliate us with
impunity?because the ?agreement? says so.

Well, the agreement may go to hell along with those who signed it.

In short, Hamas is right a hundred per cent. The Rafah border crossing
must be jointly run exclusively by the Palestinian and Egyptian
authorities. And the Ramallah regime may, if it wants, take part in
managing the border terminal, as part of an overall reconciliation process
between Gaza and Ramallah.

However, brining Israel into the picture is unacceptable. The people of
Gaza have suffered more than enough at the hands of Israel. Their murderer
and tormentor must never be allowed to be jailer as well.

Is Abbas going to understand this? I doubt it.
--

USA owns world - you break it you own it

Who Owns the World?

The United States acts as if it owns the world. This might seem counter-intuitive. After all, more and more foreign entities are lapping up bargain properties in our "homeland." And aside from U.S. military bases -- a not inconsiderable amount of territory --- the United States is not land-grabbing the way imperial Rome or London did. But since when was ownership all about possessing the deed to the property? Bullies can own the neighborhood, even if they're only renting a room in one of the houses. It has a lot to do with attitude. And the Bush administration has attitude up the wazoo.

Both sides of the political spectrum agree about world ownership. The left despairs of the U.S. government's attitude. The radical right believes that the United States should own the world and snarls with perfect DeNiro intonation: "what are you going to do about it, huh?" The "moderate middle" pretends that the United States abides by international law, indeed that we are largely responsible for the dispersion of wealth, political power, and transparency throughout the world. There might have been some excesses during the Bush years, the moderates caution, but the Dems will put everything back to rights, a notoriously dubious proposition.

So, do we or don't we own the world? Let's go through these four key elements of ownership and see if they apply to Uncle Sam.

You Break It, You Own It: If a retail outlet filled in for a turn as president of the UN Security Council, imagine the bill that would be sent to the U.S. Treasury: There would the full costs of Iraq. There would be Afghanistan. There would be the economies we broke through odious debt. There would a large chunk of the ice cap. Ah, it's a long list. But, as always happens, when the bill eventually does come due, those responsible will be beyond the reach of the repo men. And America will rely on the same argument that it now dismisses from the poorest countries in the world: "hey, but we didn't run up the tab!"

You Have Exclusive Access: Russia occupies Afghanistan and the United States goes ballistic. The same with Vietnam invading Cambodia. And now the Bush administration accuses Iran of sending its troops to Iraq. "I saw recently in the Christian Science Monitor, something like 'New Study of Foreign Fighters in Iraq,'" Noam Chomsky says in an FPIF interview with Michael Shank. "Who are the foreign fighters in Iraq? Some guy who came in from Saudi Arabia. How about the 160,000 American troops? Well, they're not foreign fighters in Iraq because we own the world; therefore we can't be foreign fighters anywhere. Like, if the United States invades Canada, we won't be foreign. And if anybody resists it, they're enemy combatants, we send them to Guantanamo."

You Extract Rent: How is it exactly that the United States, the world's largest debtor nation, doesn't have to submit to an IMF stabilization program or answer to the requirements of its mainly Asian creditors? Because the U.S. dollar is used for most of the world's financial transactions and remains the reserve currency of choice. Wikipedia, however, tells me that there are now more euros in circulation in the world than dollars. That's perhaps one reason why Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen began to demand payment in euros last year. But as long as the U.S. military throws its weight around and adopts an imperial attitude, America thinks it can postpone the inevitable knock on the door. And in the meantime, Americans will continue to live on the "rental income" that the rest of the world pays us.

You Call the Shots: Let's see, who would be a good candidate to head up the World Bank? What about Robert McNamara, who basically came out and admitted to being a war criminal in The Fog of War? Or how about Paul Wolfowitz, who we can only hope will one day have to submit to the questions of filmmaker Errol Morris (or better yet, the judges at the Hague)? After the Wolfowitz debacle, you'd think that the world would rise up in revolt and say, "Let's put the 'world' back into the World Bank." Instead, the United States gets to choose again and selects former deputy U.S. secretary of state Robert Zoellick. He's not the worst of the Bush team. But if he has a choice between taking a call from Condi or Lula, which do you think he'll take?

According to these four criteria, the United States certainly acts like it owns the place. We don't have to send out proconsuls or viceroys to administer our properties around the world to qualify as owners (and sometimes the heads of the various regional U.S. military commands act a lot like proconsuls!). The Bush administration's attitude toward global power is not all that different from how its operatives worked to consolidate presidential power. As David Addington, Vice President Cheney's counsel from 2001 to 2005 explains the strategy: "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

We're seeing signs of this larger force emerge here in the United States. When will it emerge globally?

Emerging Counterforce

Conn Hallinan says now.

"Rather than the 'American Century' the Bush administration neo-conservatives predicted, it is increasingly a world where regional alliances and trade associations in Europe and South America have risen to challenge Washington's once undisputed domination," the FPIF columnist writes in Challenging a Unipolar World.

Hallinan finds signs all over the world. "When Argentina thumbed its nose at the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, it had the powerful Mercosur trade association to back it up," he argues. "When the United States tried to muscle Europe into ending agricultural subsidies (while keeping its own) the European Union refused to back down. And now India, China, and Russia are drifting toward a partnership - alliance is too strong a word - that could transform global relations and shift the power axis from Washington to New Delhi, Beijing, and Moscow."

In many ways, democratic movements around the world also serve as a counterforce to U.S. domination. The United States, despite its rhetoric of "democracy promotion," maintains power and influence in key regions through its alliances with autocratic states, particularly in the Middle East. Pro-democracy movements in these countries challenge U.S. power.

"The United States has done for the cause of democracy what the Soviet Union did for the cause of socialism," writes FPIF Middle East editor Stephen Zunes in Nonviolent Action and Pro-Democracy Struggles. "Not only has the Bush administration given democracy a bad name in much of the world, but its high-profile and highly suspect 'democracy promotion' agenda has provided repressive regimes and their apologists an excuse to label any popular pro-democracy movement that challenges them as foreign agents, even when led by independent grassroots nonviolent activists."

Zunes defends the work of grassroots U.S. activists who have promoted genuine democracy and nonviolent strategies overseas. FPIF contributor Yossef Ben-Meir makes a similar case for economic development: it should take place at a local level. But here's his twist. Supporting grassroots economic development actually strengthens national sovereignty.

"Participatory decentralized development helps build national sovereignty by empowering local communities to manage their own development," Ben-Meir writes in Sovereignty through Decentralization. "The institutions and people of a country identify more closely with the national level when it functions as a contributor to local fulfillment. National sovereignty is thereby reinforced by the integration (practically seen through mutually beneficial partnerships) of institutions that function within that country."

Of Dams and Super Bowls

Mozambique recently reclaimed a last bit of imperial property from the Portuguese: the Cahora Bassa dam. FPIF contributor Alec Dubro thinks Mozambique got a white elephant.

"The Cahora Bassa does bring in money, but it's extremely costly environmentally, and it's uncertain whether the country will actually make money on the operation," he writes in Mozambique's Soggy Inheritance. And the dam is proving ineffectual during the recent flooding to hit the country. "As the United Nations World Food Program begins airlifting emergency supplies to flood victims, the Cahora Bassa is providing little in the way of flood control."

Elsewhere in Africa, Bridgestone Firestone is still running the world's largest rubber plantation in Liberia with child labor. But the workers are fighting back.

"Former child laborers used on Firestone's rubber plantation in Liberia have joined together in a 2005 class action lawsuit filed against the company in the U.S. District Court in the Southern district of Indiana, Indianapolis division," writes FPIF contributor Jamie Menutis in Super Bowl of Shame. "The lawsuit remains in discovery phase. With virtually no coverage in the mainstream press, its progress is being kept largely out of the public eye."

It's not like the tire company doesn't have enough money to pay a living wage. Bridgestone Firestone is paying an estimated $10 million to sponsor the halftime show at this year's Super Bowl.

Which brings us to one last indicator that the United States thinks it owns the world: sports. In the World Cup, soccer teams from around the world compete to take home the trophy. And in the World Series? Only teams from North America. Enough said.

Links

Michael Shank, "Chomsky on World Ownership," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4920); The United States thinks it owns the world, says Noam Chomsky, and that explains so much of its foreign policy.

David Cole, "The Man Behind the Torture," The New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20858

Conn Hallinan, "Challenging a Unipolar World," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4904); The United States is still the big dog on the block, but it can no longer just bark to get its way.

Stephen Zunes, "Nonviolent Action and Pro-Democracy Struggles," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4923); The United States is not behind the democratic revolutions against dictators. Popular movements are.

Yossef Ben-Meir, "Sovereignty through Decentralization," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4924); To bring development, reconciliation, and stability to conflict areas, it's better to think local.

Alec Dubro, "Mozambique's Soggy Inheritance," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4922); Mozambique once opposed the Cahora Bassa dam. It should have maintained its opposition.

Jamie Menutis, "Super Bowl of Shame," Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4925); Instead of splurging on sponsoring the Super Bowl halftime show, Bridgestone Firestone should start paying its Liberian rubber workers a living wage.

from
World Beat -- by JOHN FEFFER -- Monday, January 28, 2008 -- Vol. 3, No. 4
http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/4927

also see

http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2007/08/usa-privatized-intelligence.html

http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2008/01/usa-extremist-beliefs-subjugation-law.html

http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2007/07/us-coup-detat-1933.html

http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2006/10/cheney-speech-decoded-uncle-richards.html

http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2006/10/usa-turning-its-back-on-enlightenment.html

http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2007/07/israel-attacks-usa-no-problem.html

http://tangibleinfo.blogspot.com/2007/07/usa-and-nazi-industry.html

http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2006/08/empire-war-and-propaganda-pilger.html

911 - strategy of tension - Gladio - Tell

Gladio, Turkish Counter-Guerilla and Ergenekon, a devilish trio
KRISTINA KAMP İSTANBUL -- 01.02.2008

In August 1990 Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti openly admitted for the first time what had long been denied: the existence of a secret army inside the Italian Secret Service (SIFAR) codenamed “Gladio,” Latin for “double-edged sword.”

Moreover, Andreotti also claimed that a network of secret, unofficial armies controlled by NATO and the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been set up all across Europe. The British secret service, MI6, as Andreotti revealed, was also involved.

Up until today, a full investigation into these secret NATO armies, some of which also seem to have been linked to terrorism and crime, has not been carried out -- and Swiss historian and security expert Daniele Ganser says this is neglect with serious consequences. “Ergenekon could be an outcome of the old Turkish Counter-Guerilla,” he says. In an exclusive interview with Today’s Zaman, he explains the structure of these secret armies, what the “tension strategy” was during the Cold War and what it could be today.

“What we can definitely prove nowadays is the existence of these secret armies. And we have a good amount of knowledge on how they were structured,” Ganser says.

Facing an increase in the popularity and strength of communist and socialist parties in some countries, like Italy and France, worries emerged in Washington and London that these countries’ inner security could no longer be ensured. Secret, unofficial armies were then set up, Ganser says and adds: “NATO was simply afraid of being weakened from within.”

Secret armies all across Europe

The network of secret armies, he says, spread across Western Europe in its entirety, including Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Greece -- and Turkey.

According to Ganser, in the event of a Soviet invasion, these secret, anti-communist soldiers would have operated behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging occupying forces’ supply lines and production centers.

The strategic planning came from London and Washington. NATO assumed the general coordination of all such behind-the-scenes organizations on an international level under the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), linked to NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), which is always commanded by an American general, Ganser asserts, adding, “It is absolutely obvious that there were these meetings, even if NATO refuses to comment on Gladio today.”

The secret armies were trained by British and US special forces. To ensure their anti-communist commitment, some members of the secret armies were recruited from the extreme-right margins of society. In Germany, former Nazis were active in the unofficial armies. The codenames for the armies varied from country to country; “Absalon” in Denmark, “Gladio” in Italy, “P26” in Switzerland, “ROC” in Norway and “SDRA8” in Belgium.

Gladio-like structures in Turkey

In Turkey a secret army was set up and codenamed “Counter-Guerrilla.” “Today we definitely know about its existence,” says Ganser.

Gen. Kemal Yılmaz, the chief of the special forces in Turkey at the time, officially confirmed on Dec. 3, 1990 the existence of Counter-Guerilla. He explained that the “stay-behind” army was under the command of the Turkish Special Forces and had the task “to organize resistance in the event of a communist occupation.”

“But though we know a lot of things, many of this secret army’s activities and involvements remain in darkness,” Ganser says. How strongly NATO and US intelligence backed and supported the use of terror in the countries in order to discredit the political left during the Cold War remains a subject of ongoing research. “Nonetheless, it is certain that at least some massacres ... [and] military actions had been organized, promoted or supported by men inside state institutions,” Ganser states.

An “important source of evidence” supporting the theory that Counter-Guerrilla also engaged in torture, he points out, comes from Talat Turhan, a former Turkish general who said he had been tortured in a villa in Istanbul’s Erenköy district by a team led by retired officer Eyüp Ozalkus, chief of the National Intelligence Organization’s (MİT) interrogation team for the combat of communism. “They blindfolded me and bound my arms and feet. Then they told me that I was ‘in the hands of the Counter-Guerrilla unit operating under the high command of the army outside the Constitution and the law.’ They told me that they ‘considered me their prisoner of war’ and that I was ‘sentenced to death’,” Turhan later revealed.

However when Bülent Ecevit, after the Italian revelations of 1990, implied to the press that Counter-Guerrilla units might have been involved in domestic terror and announced he suspected Counter-Guerrilla involvement in the Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul in 1977 -- where half a million citizens had been fired upon by snipers during a protest rally on May 1, leaving 38 dead and hundreds injured -- acting Turkish Defense Minister Safa Giray snapped, “Ecevit had better keep his ... mouth shut!”

Terrorist attacks were backed by state authorities

“Terror is an unbelievably strong means to manipulate and frighten the population,” Ganser underlines. “The real victims of a terrorist attack are not those left dead -- the real victims are those people who are affected by becoming afraid. The public [will then] ... turn to the state to ask for greater security.” Several Italian sources have confirmed this, among them Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a convicted right-wing terrorist who himself took part in this so-called “tension strategy” in which terror was manipulated to influence the political climate. “This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened,” Vinciguerra says.

It can be the state itself or a private group of people who try to force the government to act according to their will, to legitimize a war, for example, Ganser explains, adding that he “could well imagine” that Ergenekon is a kind of successor organization of the Turkish Counter-Guerilla of those days. “We know that these groups recruited heavily among the Turkish Grey Wolves [a youth group linked to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP)],” he states. “As long as this original phenomenon is not fully examined, its subsequent structures will remain [a mystery], too.”

He also says he would “not be surprised” if some of the attacks allegedly perpetrated by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are later revealed to have been the work of some clandestine Turkish organizations to legitimize Turkish military intervention. “Terror is a very powerful weapon for constructing enemies,” Ganser emphasizes.

However, he says, these are assumptions that need further investigation and what is really missing to that end is a parliamentary fact-finding commission. “Neither journalists nor scientists can do this work properly; what is really needed is the state’s engagement in the investigations. It is the legislature that must investigate the executive, it’s the job of the parliamentarians to shed light on this,” he concludes, saying that examining these kinds of secret armies is therefore the natural first step in approaching the problem of the “deep state.”

Who is Daniele Ganser?

Swiss historian Daniele Ganser currently teaches in Basel University’s history department and in previous years researched foreign and security policy at the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s (ETH) Center for Security Studies and Military Academy. His important book “NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe” was recently translated into Turkish. www.danieleganser.ch

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Terrorists: Assassins Or Freedom Fighters?
By Gaither Stewart 27 January, 2008 Countercurrents.org

“When the oppressed man can find justice in no other way, then he calmly reaches up into the sky and pulls down his eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and, like the stars, imperishable. When no other means remains, then he must needs take up the sword.”
(Friedrich Schiller, William Tell)


Daggers flashing under moonlit Middle Eastern nights. Secret societies conspiring against religious oppressors. Justice! Assassins sent from paradisiacal gardens to roam over Arabian deserts to kill in the name of the Prophet. Revenge! The skill of the kill! The contagious frenzy of killing! Kill, kill, kill! Armageddon! Oh, the fear! The terror! Stop your evil ways or in the quiet of the night the Hashshashin will exact justice.

In the year 1090, followers of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam occupied the mountain fortress of Alamut in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea and 100 kilometers from today’s Tehran. Under their leader Hasan I Sabbah they quickly refined killing to an art. In the West the violent sect became known by the name of Hashshashin because of their fanatical dedication to their religion. Persecuted by the Sunni branch of Islam, the Assassins left their gardens to murder leaders of their oppressors. Perhaps the name Hashshashin derived from “hashish users,” the drug they ingested before their deadly attacks. When Marco Polo on his way to China he too visited the mountain fortress and called them Ashishin. Assassins!



The Hashshashin referred to themselves as Fedayeen, which means something quite different. The now familiar word means no less than “freedom fighters.” The term Fedayeen has been used by Arab militant groups throughout history: volunteers dedicated to causes in which the government fails to act. A lonely business from the start!



For our purposes here, the Assassins of then were associated with resistance against foreign occupation or tyranny. And as a rule resistance is not a joyful affair. The Fedayeen made of murder a meticulous system for killing targeted individuals in public, without however, as historians note, the loss of innocent life … and they never considered suicide.



I just read an article by T.E. Lawrence about British occupation of today’s Iraq and the resistance it caused, published in the London Sunday Times of August 2, 1920. The letter could have been written today. History repeating itself. The eternal return. Lawrence of Arabia accused the British government whose 92,000 soldiers in Iraq couldn’t control three million Arabs in “revolt” against the invader. He spoke of the British “assassination” of tens of thousands of Arabs sacrificed in the name of colonialism and the popular insurrection it had caused. Terrorism was never mentioned: only colonialist oppression and the popular insurrection of the Arabs.



A thousand years ago and one hundred years ago and again today, there has always been confusion between terrorism and resistance. As it was for mainstream Islam, it is a point of view for today’s US administration that sees terrorists under every rock, that blames every failure on largely unidentified terrorists, and justifies each of its own nefarious crimes on generic terrorism.

Since terrorism is most often a point of view, perhaps literature can actually deal better with that slippery terrain. Still, what Power so unceremoniously, so handily labels terrorism, has become fixed and omnipresent in our day-to-day lives. But since it is no joking matter either, we have to treat it seriously, severely … also somewhat terroristically.

As Schiller wrote in his 1804 play, William Tell, (written in the aftermath of the French Revolution to justify tyrannicide), that which for Power anywhere and at any time is terrorism, for the oppressed will always be resistance, revolt and rebellion. RESISTANCE! Neocon America instead simplifies a complex matter. It applies the label “terrorism” to any and every form of resistance to American imperialism abroad and today, at home, Power attaches the label to dissidents and anti-globalists and anti-war protesters and no-sayers under convenient provisions of the Patriot’s Act and other such illegal and anti-Constitutional legislation. Unfortunately, history is not an American forte.

In certain times and certain places genuine terrorism is so complex as to be an almost taboo subject. Paradoxically official USA stutters and stammers at finding a proper name for American rightwing militias, Christian fundamentalist subversives, abortion clinic bombers or Ku Klux Klan lynchers. For such groups, “terrorists” would work quite well. Yet, the streams and rivulets and byways of terrorism are so shady and labyrinthine, and government propaganda so intense, that the observer searching for truth tends to lose his way among definitions and distinctions and political correctness.

Such built-in complications are then intensified by the difficulty of recognizing “institutional terrorism”, i.e. terrorist acts organized by the state in order to justify harsh restrictive measures and laws, authoritarianism and in the most extreme cases, war. September 11 is the clearest example of institutional terrorism, though that historic date is far from the only one. We remember sinking of the US warship Maine in the Havana harbor that justified the Spanish-American War. What about Pearl Harbor to ignite World War II? And the Bay of Tonkin for Vietnam?

About Legitimate Resistance, the Strategy of Tension and Agents Provocateurs



The strategy of tension is an old story; yet, after all this time, agents provocateurs continue to be strange words to the untuned American ear. Italian “terrorism” of the 1970s and 80s, coming on the heels of the youth, student and worker uprisings in revolutionary 1968, illustrate the meanings quite well.

Terrorism is first of all defined as a method of political struggle based on the systematic use of violence—assassination, sabotage, kidnapping, and today human suicidal bombers—practiced by political extremists or by secret organizations of a nationalistic nature.

The second aspect of the definition is less recognized: terrorism—according to my encyclopedia—is also the instrument used by a political regime to grasp and to retain power.



A terrorist is thus a member of an organization that uses terrorism and who executes terrorist acts.
Or, he is a member of a regime whose existence is based on terror. Nazi Germany was a terrorist regime. Ditto Stalinist Russia. Resistance to them was sacred. Now we have the entire Neocon structure and strategy that has attacked aggressively the entire world in the name of US imperialism. By definition, it is a terrorist regime.



By extension, terrorist crimes are both those committed in revolt against a state to damage the collective and not specific individuals and they are violent acts against an oppressive regime.
Again by extension, terrorist crimes are likewise the criminal acts of an oppressive regime against the oppressed. This is the key: institutional terrorism is the catalyst for “insurgency” and “resistance” throughout the world today. The short geographical list is easy to pinpoint: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine.

Thus terrorism is the story of relationships between power/authority and its subjects, and between oppressors and oppressed. We are used to the words, power and authority, often used synonymously, as if they were equivalent. But that’s not the case at all. Power and authority are not the same thing, and the distinction between the two concepts is significant.
Power [pouvoir, potere, Macht] implies the faculty to act, and in our minds is related to force, coercion and violence, in the sense of “authoritarian.” That is why I like to capitalize the word Power used in that sense. When one hears the word “terrorism”, the responsibility of Power must always be in front of your eyes; otherwise you will miss the point.



Authority instead implies legitimacy, in the sense of “legitimate authority,” or the legitimate faculty to act or perform. The distinction is between legitimate authority on one hand and crude naked power on the other. Authority can be good or evil; naked Power will never be good. As we all know, authority too, like democracy itself, is a shaky business because the criteria for who establishes and who legitimizes authority, varies from time to time and place to place. Authority and democracy stand on the edge of an abyss, perpetually menaced by power, easily transformed into authoritarianism.



In the same way, opposition to legitimate authority and opposition to naked power/authoritarianism differ: democratic opposition to legitimate authority should suffice in a democratic setting. But when the democratic process is inhibited, more violent means become necessary. In an article “Is There A Good Terrorist” in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash cites Schiller’s for Power pertinent lines from Wilhelm Tell:
“When the oppressed man can find justice in no other way, then he calmly reaches up into the sky and pulls down his eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and, like the stars, imperishable. When no other means remains, then he must needs take up the sword.”

The reality is that you can feel horror at indiscriminate killing and bombs and kamikaze attacks and still hold to and even encourage the use of “legitimate terrorism”, that is, resistance and armed rebellion, against naked illegitimate Power. As Hezbollah learned easily in south Lebanon, armed resistance pays: it permitted the clearing of their land of Israeli occupiers. Resistance always pays!

Some years ago, at the end of a daylong interview with me in Paris—where he was a political refugee—the former Italian terrorist theoretician, Lanfranco Pace, defined himself as “living testimony to the limits of western democracy that is a precious possession that must be constantly enriched. Democracy,” he said, “is a mobile frontier. At times there is less of it, and one must fight for it.”



The result is that golden rule: what for the oppressed is resistance, resistance to naked power—as we see today at all latitudes peoples of the world oppressed by the tentacles of the global octopus-like market economy, by poverty and hopelessness—for the oppressor smacks of conspiracy and terrorism. Like Iraqis in 1920 and today, nationalistic Hungarians in 1956 considered themselves freedom fighters; for their Soviet oppressors they were terrorists in a conspiracy against the New Order. Like the Jewish Stern Gang in British occupied mandatory Palestine were terrorists for the occupiers, but for the Zionists were “Freedom Fighters For the Freedom of Israel.” Lack of true information still makes evaluation of the nature of Afghan resistance impossible but instinct suggests that also Taliban insurgents against the foreign invader consider themselves freedom fighters, Fedayeen, just as they were called when they were armed by the USA to fight against the Soviet invader.

Since oppression today is global, no one should be scandalized that resistance to that power is also global. It is no surprise that three-quarters of the world is up in arms against US power—either naked military power or disguised by the misnomer, globalization. A good rule is to substitute the word globalization with imperialism. It usually works.

The argument that problems of ethnic, religious, economic and political opposition have emerged precisely from the liberalization of political freedoms in third- and fourth-world countries brought by golden globalization rings hollow and hypocritical in the face of the testimony to the growing poverty of 4/5ths of that world. Wider political freedoms might create more spaces for rebellion and unleash wider resistance and violence, but evidently the near universal rebellion today is the effect of pervasive poverty and hopelessness, not of newly acquired freedoms.
Moreover, for the hungry the risks of rebellion and terrorism will always be thousands of times better than sitting in apathy and waiting.

The origins of modern terrorism are problematic. They have been since the French Revolution. As justified as the French were to rise up against oppressive aristocratic rule and ugly poverty, Robespierre was one of the first in the modern era to up continually the ante of revolutionary goals precisely in order to increase the obstacles to their achievement and to create the necessary tensions in order to justify crushing the enemies of his power. Robespierre’s terror was transformed into naked power at work against peoples’ natural tendency toward reaction. Throughout modern times his trick of tension strategy has been used over and over by authoritarian power—used to crush opposition.

Tension strategy is always and always a tactic of oppressors. It refers to first permitting, stimulating, organizing, or even committing terrorist acts, in order to turn around and crush all opposition to the regime.



The use of agents provocateurs is an old story with which Americans should familiarize themselves. Old as Adam! Go out into the world and sow discord! Make the people rise up, then crush them. On an international level we are familiar with the Gulf of Tonkin as first the provocation, then the subject of “false consciousness” inculcated in the American public, and the catalyst for the Vietnam War. In recent days, the US fleet, just barely in international waters along the coast of Iran, is playing the role of provocateurs to incite Iranians to react so as to undertake the stratospheric bombing the Neocons are itching for.

It’s an old story. Every place in the world peace movements are anti-government. Washington hates peace movements. Protesters are reviled as troublemakers, evildoers. Anyone against the war is a potential terrorist. Protest equals terrorism. The FBI infiltrates and tries to cripple the protest movement from within. It’s an old strategy—enticing protesters to criminal behavior—then arresting them. The agents provocateurs join the protesters and break store windows. It’s against the law to break store windows. So the cops beat up the demonstrators and arrest them. Sometimes agitators are police agents. They run wild in the streets. They pretend to be demonstrators. They attack the police and throw bombs. The infiltrators create tension between police and demonstrators. Anti-war marches become a kind of war. The government and its police and its press then blame the demonstrators for the violence. The best way to defame pacifists is to link them to terrorism. The public will call for law and order. And the government will crack down on all its political opponents … and go ahead with its wars.
(Extracted from the novel, Asheville, by Gaither Stewart)



In most circumstances, terrorism is too weak to overcome the power of the modern state/regime. Terrorists of Italy’s Red Brigades naively believed that the state had a heart that could be attacked. They lost. As a rule, terrorists lose. Most of the European terrorist organizations that mushroomed after the world-wide student protests of 1968 were defeated, though those based on nationalistic aspirations such as ETA in Spain and IRA in Ireland, that is, resistance movements, hang on and still today raise their heads from time to time. Now, US imperialism has created an entirely new field, a new wave, a new historical framework, for resistance: across most of Latin America, the entire Middle East and Asia from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Resistance has been born. And it will not be defeated by military force. It will not go away



In the 1970s and 80s European secret services infiltrated and crushed the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) in Italy, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in Germany, and Direct Action (Action Directe) in France. In the process and in application of the strategy of tension they exploited the same terrorist organizations, keeping them alive in name in order to blame them, in the name of freedom, for the limitations placed on personal liberties. Today the name Al Qaida, the real existence of which is dubious, is used precisely in the same manner. Al Qaida is omnipresent, forever available to be blamed for institutional terrorism in order to justify all the patriot acts and no-fly lists and house searches and arbitrary arrests and detentions and tortures and concentration camps.



BRIGATE ROSSE

Italy’s Red Brigades [Brigate Rosse-BR] formed Europe’s biggest, best-organized and most powerful “terrorist” organization. An elitist organization emerging from the 1968 protest movement, its rank and file came from the universities and factories. It comprised the most idealistic, the best part of the nation’s youth— la miglior gioventú, according to the title of a recent film depicting that generation sparked by resistance. The BR at one time claimed the admiration and moral support of millions of Italians.

Its organizational structure is of interest because the organizers of Al Qaida (Pakistani and US intelligence services) seem to have borrowed from it since US Special Forces just can’t seem to locate that bearded man in a cave or his cohort riding his mule over remote Afghan mountain paths. At the BR base was a brigade of up to five persons, who provided arms and logistics; the brigades formed poles, which in turn formed a city column. The columns made up fronts that directed national political operations, controlled by an eight-man strategic directorate. The supreme level was a 4-5 man executive committee that conducted international relations and made major decisions culminating in the abduction and eventual murder of ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
The co-founder of the Red Brigades, Alberto Franceschini, told me that the Brigadists never considered themselves terrorists. They “resisted” US power in Italy and the one-party system governing the nation. Franceschini pointed out that the chance of armed rebellion inevitably increases to the degree that political power is insufficient and incapable of mediation. The first, the real Red Brigades, were the resistance born on the Left. It aimed at splitting the big Italian Communist Party vertically, recruiting its left wing, and then overturning the authoritarian state. It aimed at revolution. Yet, when police finally decided to crack down, 5000 terrorists flowed into Italy’s jails, while 500 escaped abroad, the majority to France.




What does that very Italian story mean?

It means that Power wanted and needed the BR.



It means also that Power knew that the Resistance understood it.



No wonder that as time passed former leftwing terrorists came to call themselves “West European guerilla” to combat imperialist efforts to weld European countries into the homogeneous structure it has assumed today, integrated in the instrument of imperialist power, NATO.

On a practical level, the Europe’s terrorists-guerilla lost. That partially accounts for European military forces involved today in America’s madness in Afghanistan, where Italian soldiers have fallen and only yesterday two Dutch soldiers died for neocon illusions of grandeur.

I offer this brief look at the Red Brigades in order to show another example of tension strategy. Franceschini told me that police could have crushed them quickly; however, their existence was convenient to the corrupt, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet regime of Christian Democracy, and to its ally, the United States of America. Red terrorists everywhere were the excuse for reactionary anti-Communism during the Cold War in Europe, Asia, Africa and even more brutally in Latin America, in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina. Fantomatic red subversives, and, in the name of the defense of democracy, for a mass of anti-democratic emergency laws, high security prisons and questionable justice as has happened in the USA today. Terrorism was the excuse. Italy, in close collaboration with the CIA, became in fact a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and its government managed to keep a firm hand on the Italian Communist Party, Europe’s biggest CP. “Red” terrorism was the weapon with which authoritarian power held at bay the Communist Party, which by the 1980s had become in practice a social democratic force.



The real Red Brigades died in the late 1970s. After their Executive Committee and/or Strategic Directorate were infiltrated by Italian and American secret services, the Red Brigades became a riddle. After reporting for many years on European terrorism and after many meetings with terrorist leaders, my guess is that it became an empty name in the service of governments and secret services.



EPILOGUE: In this mid January, the Rome Daily, La Repubblica, got its hands on heretofore top secret documents of the British Foreign Office revealing that in 1976, the election year in which the Italian Communist Party (PCI) garnered 34% of the vote, NATO weighed a “coup d’état” in Rome to keep the Communists out of the government. One released document states verbally: “An authoritarian regime in Italy would be more acceptable than a government including Communists.”
According to the documentation the plan was eventually discarded for fear that the powerful workers movement in Italy would bring about a Civil War and/or fear of Soviet intervention. The coup didn’t happen, though US-backed Fascists made several weak attempts. The “Italian question” continued to be the subject of NATO, of frantic communications and secret high-level meetings. Because the NATO role was crucial in the Cold War, the mere thought of the Trojan Horse of Italian Communists in a member government made Washington shiver in horror.

Though the coup was ruled out, US subversive intervention in its vassal state of Italy were intensified. Terrorism was always a chief avenue for US control of Italy. After the real Brigadists were arrested the CIA infiltrated and turned some leaders of the second wave of Red Brigades. Fascist terrorists meanwhile bombed trains and assassinated NATO leaders; often the Left was blamed. The US meanwhile supported the organization of the secret Gladio army that would have been Italy’s military arm after the coup. Fascist militants described to me their military training camps in Sardinia and in the Abruzzi Mountains near Rome. New prisons were pinpointed while lists were drawn up of dangerous subversives to be arrested.



For NATO planners the recruitment of some BR leaders was the culmination of the refinement of the instruments of tension strategy. It was that late version of the Red Brigades, which in 1978 abducted and assassinated the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro whose strategic plan of so-called “historic compromise” foresaw Italian Communists in the national government. The Red Brigades took the full blame.



Today, G-8 leaders label anti-globals and peace protesters “terrorists” and “enemies of democracy” and call for emergency measures against them. They arrest anti-globals right in front of the White House. Anti-globals on the other hand consider themselves non-violent freedom fighters for a better world. As a rule, police and/or police-guided, infiltrated or stimulated “terrorists” such as the Black Bloc are the aggressors against the anti-global peace movements.
No sane person believes that terrorism can be eradicated with military might. It is now a truism that every bomb that falls in the poor world spawns another terrorist, many of whom, unlike the Assassins of a millennium earlier, are eager to strap explosives around their bodies and blow themselves to pieces on a crowded square, place, piazza, or Platz of the rich world against the naked power that impoverishes them. If one accepts with Schiller that the oppressed will reach to the heavens to grasp their rights and resist their oppressors, then the dire warnings from Washington of more and more terrorism ring grim.

While America-Empire allegedly searches for efficacious measures to combat terrorism, more sincere American leaders are advised to examine aspects of European experience as a guide to both what not to do, and to what can be effective. They should not be deluded: No security measures, no no-fly laws, Patriot Act measures, secret concentration camps and torture can eradicate what Power defines as terrorism and the oppressed define as resistance until America unites with the rest of the world.

Here is more info on the current events in Turkey, DEEP STATE as it becomes available!

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Insights of a Canadian Lawyer: Was 9/11 an Inside Job?

by Hal. C. Sisson, QC

In mid January 2008 united 9/11 Truth Movements across Canada, spearheaded by Victoria and Vancouver branches, sent a petition letter to the heads of all Canadian political parties and to every Member of Parliament. The letter requested two things:

a. A call for a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001 by an independent and impartial tribunal, plus

b. Open discussion in Parliament of, or a national referendum on, the proposed integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico into a North American Union, under the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement, (originally signed in 2005 in Waco Texas by then Prime Minister Paul Martin); an Agreement that has never been discussed outside of a cabal of senior government officials and military and corporate leaders.

The first request (a) follows in the wake of questioning in the Japanese Parliament (Diet) by Yukihisa Fujita of the Japan Democratic Party, as to the conspiracy theory of 9/11 presented by the U.S. Bush Administration. He asked just how terrorists could possibly have attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Six years ago the U.S. Administration and their intelligence agencies stated they would present convincing evidence that foreigners of a Muslim Arab persuasion were the perpetrators of the tragic crime of 9/11. This evidence has never yet been forthcoming. People ask why? Can’t the United States prove their allegations in court? And why does the FBI say they have no hard evidence of the involvement of Osama bin Laden?

On the other hand, millions of people around the world have amassed a great deal of solid evidence of incomplete investigation, missing evidence, unsubstantiated conclusions and outright lies as to the facts and the full story of 9/11. So much so that it is impossible not to conclude that at the very least the events were in some measure allowed to happen - the motive being the persuasion of the American public to condone the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq -- and is Iran next?

The Japanese queries were presented at about the same time as former Italian President Francesco Cossiga told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job and that all the intelligence services in America and Europe know it was an inside job of a false flag nature.

Who else is of the same opinion? Twenty-five former U.S. military officers have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. They are among the rapidly growing number of military and intelligence service veterans, scientists, lawyers, university professors, engineers and architects challenging the Bush government’s story. Former German Secretary of Defence Andreas von Bulow said, “The official story is so inadequate and far-fetched that there must be another one.”

Every action the U.S. government or its intelligence services take, good, bad or indifferent, is now prefaced by the words “since 9/11 we have to do this, we have to do that, we have to do the other” -- every atrocity anywhere in the middle east or in the world is immediately attributed to a vague group called al Qaeda and the concept of a perpetual but profitable to some ‘War on Terror’.

The Canadian Government can no longer deny that the official story told by the Bush Administration is complete nonsense. This discredited version of 9/11 events as promulgated by the Bush Administration is the justification for Canada’s bloody involvement. If Bush’s version of 9/11 is a lie, like his story on “weapons of mass destruction”, then Canada must ask why it should continue to sacrifice its sons and daughters and spend its resources in a distant country that never attacked or threatened Canada’s security.

Truthers think that the Canadian Parliament should seriously and openly discuss and investigate these matters before they continue their present course of action or run the risk of being drawn into wider conflicts in Iran and Pakistan That is why they are calling on the Canadian Government to launch its own independent investigation and Official Enquiry into 9/11

Addressing point (b) - the request that there be an open parliamentary discussion of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement (a grandiose extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)). The most recent meeting was August 20, 2007 when Stephen Harper, President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon went to Montebello, Quebec for a secret meeting of the SPP, more transparently described as the North American Union, part of the larger Globalization agenda called the New World Order. Many organizations including 9/11 Truth tried and are trying to inform Canadians what was and is being discussed in a veil of secrecy and a deafening wave of silence from the Canadian and American media. Big decisions at committee level are being made behind closed doors while publicly masking the true intention.

This writer proposes to use a cautionary tale to illustrate the approach that should be taken before entering any Agreement whose implementation involves the dismantling of Canadian sovereignty, and which seeks, in the words of MP Denise Savoie, ‘to merge our security policies and practices with those of the United States, leaving Canada with a government with less authority, less control over our natural resources and less autonomous and sustainable economic, social, cultural and environmental policies’.

Warning -- the anecdote I am about to relate contains a scene involving sex and therefore may not be acceptable to the sensibilities of those who wish to remain unaware that such an activity may be rampant in our society. Reader discretion is therefor strongly advised:

“Fast Eddy wanted desperately to have sex with this really cute, really hot girl in his office… but she was dating someone else. One day Eddie was so frustrated that he went to her and said, “I’ll give you $100 if you let me have sex with you…“

The girl looked at him, and then said, “NO!”

Eddie said, “I’ll be real fast. I’ll throw the money on the floor, you bend down and I’ll finish by the time you’ve picked it up.”

She thought for a moment and said that she would consult with her boyfriend… so she called him and explained the situation. Her boyfriend says, “Ask him for $200, and pick it up the money real fast. He won’t even be able to get his pants down.”

She agreed and accepts Fast Eddy’s proposal. Over half an hour goes by and the boyfriend is still waiting for his girlfriend’s call. Finally, after 45 minutes the boyfriend calls and asks, “What happened…?”

Still breathing hard, she managed to reply, “The bastard had all quarters!” …

The lesson to be learned here is one of business management, and certainly is one that should be adopted by the Canadian Parliament in relation to the SPP -- “Always consider a business proposition in its entirety before agreeing to it. Otherwise you are likely to get screwed!”

And if the Canadian public doesn’t want to be forever picking up Fast Eddy’s American quarters they had better figure out how to stop the SPP, now, before it is too late.

About the writer:

Hal Sisson, Q.C., R.C.A.F. armourer in World War II, is a reformed lawyer who practiced law in Peace River, Alberta for thirty-five years and has been resident in Victoria, B.C. since 1985. Author of ten published books including the best selling Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons (with his partner Justice Dwayne Rowe); and his latest Modus Operandi 9/11 that exposes the White House lies about 9/11, the machinations of the New World Order and the "War on Terror", and does so featuring salty humour in the form of a novel. International croquet and marble player and collector, his major hobby was stand-up comedy and writing and performing in Western Canada's longest running (25 years) burlesque revue, Sorry 'Bout That.
http://www.halsisson.ca/

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/01/26/02161.html

Turkey State Terrorism -- Gladio NATO

NEW YORK TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/world/europe/28turkey.html?ref=world

13 Arrested in Push to Stifle Turkish Ultranationalists Suspected in Political Killings

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: January 28, 2008

ISTANBUL — In one of the biggest operations against Turkish ultranationalists in decades, the authorities announced on Saturday night that they had arrested 13 people who were part of a criminal group that was suspected of carrying out political killings and having shadowy ties to the Turkish state.

Among those arrested were three retired military officers, as well as Kemal Kerincsiz, the neo-nationalist lawyer who filed dozens of legal cases against Turkish intellectuals, including Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, the state-run Anatolian News Agency reported. The men were detained Tuesday for questioning but were not formally arrested until Saturday.

One of those officers, Veli Kucuk, a former major general, was believed to have been plotting to kill Mr. Pamuk, Turkish newspapers reported, citing documents from the investigation. Mr. Kucuk is suspected of running a secret unit within police forces that carried out bombings and killings for which other groups were widely blamed. The arrests have riveted Turks, many of whom have long suspected underground links between political violence, such as the killings of members of ethnic and religious minority groups, and illegal groups within official state institutions like the military and the judiciary. But the connections have proved elusive, often because of insufficient evidence and suspiciously sloppy prosecutions.“Everyone suspected something fishy was happening,” said Ilter Turan, a professor of political science at Istanbul Bilgi University. “But the evidence was imperfect.”

“Then suddenly this thing got uncovered.”

The operation began last June, when a giant stockpile of explosives and munitions was found in Istanbul. That led investigators to the group whose members were among those arrested Saturday. The group’s members are xenophobic ultranationalists who are suspected of involvement in crimes, including the killings of three Christian missionaries in central Turkey last year and the killing of Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist.

In all, 28 people have been arrested since the operation began last June, according to the Anatolian News Agency.Mr. Kucuk, for example, called and harassed Mr. Dink in the months when Mr. Dink was on trial under a law used against many intellectuals that prohibits “insulting Turkishness,” an English-language daily newspaper, Today’s Zaman, reported. Mr. Kucuk was part of a posse of ultranationalists who jeered at Mr. Dink during the trial.

The paper quoted the journalist’s brother, Orhan Dink, speaking at the murder trial late last year, as saying that his brother “took the Kucuk group very seriously,” adding, “He knew that both Kerincsiz and Kucuk were extremely serious and dangerous.”

Turkish news reports say the group is believed to be similar to a cold war-era arrangement, under which Britain and the United States were reported to have encouraged secret paramilitary organizations of hard-line anti-Communists in Europe to counter a possible Soviet invasion. The reports draw parallels to recent history in Turkey, when the state tacitly supported paramilitary groups that were killing Kurdish leaders. Turkey began an open war with the militant fringe of its minority ethnic Kurdish population in the 1980s. The last time Turks were given a glimpse of their state’s involvement with organized crime was in 1996, when one of the country’s most senior police commanders was found with a wanted assassin after the Mercedes sedan in which they were riding crashed in the western town of Susurluk. The man with the police commander was believed to have masterminded the jailbreak of Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who shot Pope John Paul II. Both men were killed in the crash, and a subsequent investigation went cold, but the incident remains etched in Turkish memory.

It is unclear the extent to which the current group is connected to Turkey’s old guard of staunchly secular elite, who control the military, the judiciary and a large portion of the country’s bureaucracy. The two groups do share a similar chauvinistic vision for Turkey, that of a pure Turkic-Muslim nation, unspoiled by religious or ethnic minorities.

Another one of those arrested, Sevgi Erenerol, worked as the press and information officer for the Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate, a group whose sole purpose seems to have been harassing the Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey, the religious leadership of one of Turkey’s few Christian minorities.

It is unclear whether Turkish authorities will have more success prosecuting this group than they did in the past. Turkey’s governing party, a new class of observant Muslim politicians led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the midst of a power struggle with the old guard, a fight that might propel Mr. Erdogan to press as hard as possible for results. “The government does have a stake in seeing this through,” Mr. Turan said.

So, it seems, does Mr. Kerincsiz, who in an interview this month summed up the situation dramatically. “It’s a struggle for the future of Turkey,” he said.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.

‘State against deep state’

BTW the term DEEP STATE is also used by Peter Dale Scott... see below

This was the front-page headline of mainstream daily Sabah's Jan. 23 issue, covering a recent roundup of 33 people from retired generals to lawyers and journalists under an operation launched by the Istambul police against a far-right nationalist group accused of setting up a gang to commit mainly political crimes.

LALE SARIIBRAHIMOGLU loglu {at} todayszaman.com Politics

‘State against deep state’

This was the front-page headline of mainstream daily Sabah's Jan. 23 issue, covering a recent roundup of 33 people from retired generals to lawyers and journalists under an operation launched by the I.stanbul police against a far-right nationalist group accused of setting up a gang to commit mainly political crimes.

This gang, allegedly calling itself "Ergenekon," was first discovered several months ago when police raided a house filled with explosives in I.stanbul's Ümraniye district. At the time, several individuals were taken to jail, including a retired captain, Muzaffer Tekin, who allegedly has links to the murder of a Council of State judge in Ankara in 2006.

The latest operation, the result of eight months of work, included the detention of a retired general, a retired colonel and a journalist as well as a lawyer who brought charges of "insulting Turkishness" against novelist Orhan Pamuk, the 2007 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in I.stanbul and other regions following raids carried out at the break of dawn. Some of those taken into custody are suspected of involvement in the murder of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and other violent attacks.

The suspects are accused of many individual crimes, but what they have in common seems to be the links they have to clandestine gangs that function similarly to Operation Gladio -- a post-World War II NATO operation structured as "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and clandestine operations. In fact many analysts believe such networks of groups in Turkey today, sometimes referred to as the "deep state," are remnants of the Turkish leg of the actual Gladio. (Today's Zaman, Jan. 23, 2008).

Ret. Gen. Veli Küçük, among those detained in the latest operation, is an alleged founder of a clandestine unit in the Gendarmerie General Command who is also implicated in the infamous Susurluk gang scandal.

As a matter of fact, the existence of gangs in Turkey, which have recently mushroomed, has become public knowledge as a result of a famous car accident that took place on Nov. 3, 1996 in the Susurluk township of Turkey's Bal?kesir province.

This scandal has since then been known as "Susurluk" and is frequently referred to indicate the state's ongoing ineffectiveness in the fight against gangs.

Susurluk in fact revealed state-mafia ties, and the then government did admit to illegal ties between the state and the right-wing mafia.

The fatal traffic accident took place in Susurluk when a truck collided with a Mercedes. The occupants of the Mercedes were found to be the deputy of a political party and a security chief as well as a criminal-turned-state employee (Abdullah Çatl?) and his alleged lover, a blonde former beauty queen. The only passenger to survive the crash was Sedat Bucak, a Kurdish clan leader and a former politician.

According to an I.stanbul court verdict dated April 11, 2002 concerning Susurluk, former official of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MI.T) and former officer of the Turkish Armed Forces' (TSK) Special Operations Korkut Eken and former deputy head of the Police Special Operations Bureau I.brahim S,ahin were sentenced to six years in prison each for leading a criminal gang, and 12 other suspects to four years each for being members of the gang.

The court verdict on Susurluk held that the government had hired death squads to kill people seen as threats to national security while quoting the suspects as saying that they believed they had been acting in the name of the state. "The suspects' defense did not bear out the facts as reflected in their case files. For the Turkish Republic to entrust domestic and external security to murderers, drug smugglers and the owners of gambling joints is unforgivable and unacceptable behavior," stressed the same verdict.

But the court's verdict did not satisfy the public at the time over whether the Turkish state was determined to fight against the mafia. This suspicion has been backed by revelations made at the time by seven former senior generals including a former chief of general staff in support of Korkut Eken, who was put in jail before being released.

The common thread in all of these gangs from Susurluk to Atabeyler and Ergenekon are that they have an ultranationalist agenda, sometimes forming alliances with extreme leftists called the "K?z?lelma Coalition" (Red Apple coalition) and sometimes with extreme fundamentalists to undermine the state.

The current Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has also been criticized for not taking strong action against the acts of organized crime posing the most serious threat to Turkey's security.

However, the latest massive operations against the Ümraniye group have given some hope to the Turkish public that the current political leadership may this time be resolved to dig as deep as possible to bring to the surface the masterminds of organized crime.

The fact that the majority of Turkish papers carried the latest operations on their front pages, some of which urged the political leadership to take swift and determined action against the gangs while some Sabah daily branded the latest gang a "terror organization" with the headline "State against deep state," should further encourage decision makers to dig as deep as possible to bring to the surface and finally to justice the key players seeking to undermine the state hierarchy.

24.01.2008

---

News National -- Turkey determined to purge its Gladio

The suspects arrested in police raids as part of the Ergenekon operation Tuesday were taken to the hospital for a routine physical check-up on Wednesday.

The prime minister has said a police inquiry resulting in the arrest of dozens of people, including ex-army officers and lawyers, shows the determination of Turkey to bring an end to state and military-linked gangs.

The suspects have not been charged, but analysts agree that the 33 detained on Tuesday suspected of membership in a nationalist group, calling themselves Ergenekon, are part of a shadowy network that masterminded many attacks in Turkey.

The discovery is not the first of its kind. In the past two years, the country's security forces unearthed a number of clandestine gangs countrywide. These groups, known to the public by such names as Atabeyler, Sauna and Ümraniye, or Ergenekon -- the latest one to be brought to light -- have tried to create chaos in the country at crucial times such as last year's presidential election. However, despite the fact that all these organizations were uncovered, with many of their members being discovered, no significant punishment has yet been imposed on the members of these gangs.

These gangs are apparently linked to a clandestine phenomenon that functions similarly to Operation Gladio -- a post-World War II NATO operation structured as "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and clandestine operations. In fact, many analysts believe such networks of groups in Turkey today, sometimes referred to as the "deep state," are remnants of the Turkish leg of the actual Gladio.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdog(an on Wednesday praised the security forces for the recent operations, speaking to the members of the press after a meeting with the Turkish Tradesmen's and Artisans' Confederation (TESK). He said his government has been fighting gangs and organized crime with resolve. "This has been ongoing for four to five years. In addition to our security forces there is also a process that the judiciary has been conducting. This is something we are happy about. This last incident concerning such crimes has shown in the clearest way that the executive branch and the judiciary are working in a wonderful solidarity," he stated.

"All democrats in Turkey have been looking forward to this sort of action by the government ... Everybody is now hoping something will happen but people remain very suspicious," said Cengiz Aktar, a professor at I.stanbul's Bahçes,ehir University, to Reuters.

"This is a very important test for the government, they will be judged by this ... If these people [are guilty and] are convicted, it will be very good for Turkish democracy as well as for our efforts to join the European Union," Reuters quoted Aktar as saying.

Ergenekon members trying to take power in their own hands

Aykut Cengiz Engin, I.stanbul's chief prosecutor, in a written statement announced that earlier bans on reporting about the investigation remained in place. However, all Turkish newspapers, with the exception of a few ultra-nationalist ones, covered the operation nevertheless. "Never gone this deep before," read Yeni S,afak's headline yesterday. "The state takes on the deep state," Sabah said in one of its headlines. "A deep blow to a deep gang," said Star. "Operation against coup supporters," said Radikal, highlighting the military ties of the group.

The nationalist gang is suspected of involvement in a number of violent attacks, including the killing of an Italian priest in 2006, the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and the murder of three Christians in the city of Malatya last year.

The suspects were detained in I.stanbul and other regions in dawn raids Tuesday, the culmination of an eight-month operation, the police said. The police have been observing the actions of the suspects for over eight months as part of an investigation into a house full of explosives and ammunition found in I.stanbul's Ümraniye district eight months ago.

Meanwhile, four more people were taken into custody in the southeastern city of Diyarbak?r in the afternoon yesterday as part of the same operation. Among the four, at least two are members of the ultra-nationalist Association for the Union of Patriotic Forces (VKGB), whose leaders are already under arrest facing several charges for crimes from theft and felony to blackmail and extortion.

Engin's statement said until Tuesday's detentions, 15 people had been arrested as part of the Ümraniye operation, which was launched on June 12, when an arms depot was found in the district. He said all 15 were arrested facing charges of "establishing and running an armed terrorist organization," "membership in this organization," "conspiring to encourage military member for not obeying orders," "acquiring information on state security," "possession of a serious amount of dangerous guns and ammunition" and "being in possession of explosives."

The suspects of Ergenekon

Engin's statement also listed the names of the 33 people taken into custody. The suspects include Veli Küçük, a retired major general who is also the alleged founder of an illegal intelligence unit in the gendarmerie, the existence of which is denied by officials; the controversial ultranationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, who filed countless suits against Turkish writers and intellectuals who were at odds with Turkey's official policies; Fikret Karadag(, a retired army colonel; Sevgi Erenerol, the press spokesperson for a group called the Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate; Güler Kömürcü, a columnist for the Aks,am daily; and Sami Hos,tan, a key figure in an investigation launched after a car accident in 1996 near the small town of Susurluk that uncovered links between a police chief, a convicted fugitive who was an ultranationalist and a deputy. Ali Yasak, a well-known gangster linked to the figures in the Susurluk incident, was also detained in the operation. Fuat Turgut, the lawyer of a key suspect in the Hrant Dink murder, was also taken into custody. Police said Turgut, who was detained in another town on Tuesday, was brought to I.stanbul yesterday.

The chief prosecutor said earlier court orders on the Ümraniye probe have classified the case as "confidential" and issued a press ban on coverage of the investigation. He cited two different court's decisions from June 15 and June 21. He said care shown in regards to abiding by the confidentiality decision and the press ban on the investigation is "necessary for the proper conducting of the investigation."

Also on Wednesday, the police conducted searches at the office of attorney Kerinçsiz and the office of the Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate as well as at several other places related to the suspects.

The operation also revealed that the Ergenekon gang was preparing for attacks and assassinations directed at political figures. Documents obtained by the police during the raid confirm that in the past two years the group seriously considered assassinating Osman Baydemir, a member of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) who is currently mayor of the mainly Kurdish southeastern province Diyarbak?r.

DTP refuses state protection

Meanwhile, the recent operation showed that many DTP members who had been offered private bodyguards by the state, including former DTP leader Ahmet Türk, I.stanbul deputy Sebahat Tuncel and Diyarbak?r Mayor Baydemir, had refused 24-hour body guards assigned to them by the police force.

When asked about the situation, Türk said he was not worried. "I believe in fate." He noted that he was aware of assassination attempts against him, but said he was not afraid. On the recent operations, Türk said it was very important that members of the Ergenekon gang were captured, but he warned that the suspects could be "protected" by some powers, which is usually the case with criminals that have links to the military. "It is necessary for democracy and law that there is a crackdown on these organizations. I hope that all these organizations will be exposed with determination," Türk said.

24.01.2008 http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=132371&bolum=101



===================================================

Saturday, January 26, 2008 04:21

"Ergenekon operation" bring to light plot to assassinate Orhan Pamuk



More information is coming to light in the case involving the widespread, simultaneous arrest of 33 people in various locations across Turkey in what police are calling the "Ergenekon operation."

Among the arrested were some well known lawyers and former military officers, many of whom are thought to have been collaborating in an organization that aimed to assassinate such well known figures as Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize winning Turkish author, and others. Security officials say that taped telephone conversations between members of the illegal organization reveal that the group was trying to raise 2 million YTL in funds to carry off an assassination attempt against Pamuk. The investigation is contining, and the 33 members of the organization who have been arrested are currently being interrogated.


http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/8094741.asp?gid=74&sz=19536

==========================

Gladio (Italian, from Latin gladius, meaning sword) is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Italy after World War II, intended to counter communists coming to power. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organisations, Operation Gladio is the code name for all stay-behind organisations. Operating in all of NATO and even in some neutral countries or in Spain before its 1982 adhesion to NATO, Gladio was first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by the SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official withdrawal from NATO in 1966 — which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements. According to historian Daniele Ganser, one of the major researchers on the field, "Next to the CPC, a second secret army command center, labeled the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC), was set up in 1957 on the orders of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR). This military structure provided for significant US leverage over the secret stay-behind networks in Western Europe as the SACEUR, throughout NATO's history, has traditionally been a US General who reports to the Pentagon in Washington and is based in NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium. The ACC's duties included elaborating on the directives of the network, developing its clandestine capability, and organizing bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE. According to former CIA director William Colby, it was 'a major program'."^[1]

The role of the CIA in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to attacks perpetrated in Italy during the years of lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.^[2] The US State Department has denied involvement in terrorism and stated that some of the claims have been influenced by what it presents as a Soviet forgery, US Army Field Manual 30-31B.^[3]

Turkey

See also: Multi-Party Period of Republic of Turkey and Deep state

In Turkey, the stay-behind army was known as "Counter-Guerrilla". Related to the Millî İstihbarat Teşkilâtı (MIT), the Turkish intelligence agency, it engaged in domestic terror, supporting, as in Italy, a strategy of tension, which led to two military coups d'état in which it was directly involved. In 1971, after a military coup d'état carried on March 12, the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla engaged in domestic terror and killed hundreds. The overall death-toll of the terror of the 1970s is estimated at 5,000, with right-wing and terrorism responsible for the most part. According to statistics published by the British Searchlight magazine (n°47, May 1979, p.6), in 1978 there were 3,319 fascist attacks, in which 831 were killed and 3,121 wounded. In 1977, Counter-Guerrilla took part on the May 1, Taksim Square massacre, while left-wing newspaper editor Abdi İpekçi was murdered in 1979 by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Grey Wolves member who later tried to assassinate the Pope John Paul II in 1980. General Kenan Evren staged a military coup and seized power in 1980. The US-support of this coup was acknowledged by the CIA Ankara station chief Paul Henze. After the government was overthrown, Henze cabled Washington, saying, "our boys have done it". At the time there were some 1,700 Grey Wolves organizations in Turkey, with about 200,000 registered members and a million sympathisers. After being useful for the strategy of tension followed by Kenan Evren, the leader of the Counter-Guerrilla turned president outlawed the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Grey Wolves, its youth organization. The MHP had been founded in 1965 by Alparslan Türkeş, a member of the Counter-Guerrilla. Colonel Türkeş and other Grey Wolves were arrested. In its indictment of the MHP in May 1981, the Turkish military government charged 220 members of the MHP and its affiliates for 694 murders, according to Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead in The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York, 1986, quoted by Ganser). However, Grey Wolves' imprisoned members were offered release if they accepted to fight the Kurdish minority and the PKK,^[55] as well as the ASALA ("Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia"). They then went on to fight, with Counter-Guerrilla, Kurds, killing and torturing thousands in the 1980s, and also carrying false flag attacks in which the Counter-Guerrilla attacked villages, dressed up as PKK fighters, and raped and executed people randomly (Ganser, 2005).^[56] The fact that Counter-Guerrilla had engaged in torture was confirmed by Talat Turhan, a retired Turkish lieutenant colonel. According to a December 5, 1990 article by the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Counter-Guerrilla had their headquarters in the building of the US DIA military secret service.^[24] In addition, they carried out operations to assassinate the leader squad of ASALA, in which they succeeded.<- this is bullshit? they never killed the leadership

Former Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit recalled he had learned of the existence of Turkish "stay-behind" armies for the first time in 1974. At the time, the commander of the Turkish army, General Semih Sancar, had allegedly informed him the US had financed the unit since the immediate post-war years, as well as the MIT, the Turkish intelligence agency. Ecevit declared he suspected Counter-Guerrilla's involvement in the 1977 Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul, during which snipers opened fire on a protest rally of 500 000 citizens, organized by trade unions on May 1, killing 38 and injuring hundred. In 1976, a demonstration gathering 100 000 against the domestic terror, for which Counter-Guerrilla was largely responsible, had already took place. The next year, the demonstrators were met with bullets. According to Ecevit, the shooting lasted for twenty minutes, yet several thousand policemen on the scene did not intervene. This mode of operation recalls the June 20, 1973 Ezeiza massacre in Buenos Aires, when the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (aka Triple A), founded by José Lopez Rega (a P2 member), opened fire on the left-wing peronists... According to Kurtulus Turkish magazine (n°99, September 19, 1998 - quoted by Ganser, 2005), Turkish CIA agent Hiram Abas who "was closer than his own brother" to the CIA chief of station in Istanbul Duane 'Dewey' Clarridge (quotes from Clarridge's 1997 memoirs An Agent for All Seasons), was present on the May Day massacre. The Hotel International, from which the shots were fired, belonged to the ITT company, which had already been involved in financing the September 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and was on good terms with the CIA. Hiram Abas had been trained in the US in covert action operations and as an MIT agent first gained notoriety in Beirut, where he cooperated with the Mossad from 1968 to 1971 and carried out attacks, "targeting left-wing youths in the Palestinian camps and receiving bounty for the results he achieved in actions" (Kurtulus n°99). With MIT agent Mehmet Eymür, later promoted to direct the MIT's department for counter-espionage, Abas also participated in the Kizildere massacre of March 30, 1972, when they killed seven left-wing militants.

Other massacres include the Bahçelievler Massacre (October 9, 1978 - 7 university students who were members of the Turkish Worker's Party were assassinated by far-right activists including Abdullah Çatlı and Haluk Kırcı), March 16 Massacre (March 16, 1978 - At the exit of the school, the police and fascists bombed and shot the leftist students in Beyazıt Square, killing 7 people), Kahramanmaraş Massacre (December 23-24, 1978 - 111 Alauoites were killed according to the official figures, the actual number was predicted to be much higher) and many more.

According to Le Monde diplomatique, Abdullah Çatlı, one of the leader of the Grey Wolves, "is reckoned to have been one of the main perpetrators of underground operations carried out by the Turkish branch of the Gladio organisation and had played a key role in the bloody events of the period 1976-1980 which paved the way for the military coup d’état of September 1980. As the young head of the far-right Grey Wolves militia, he had been accused, among other things, of the murder of seven left-wing students." He was seen in the company of Avanguardia Nazionale founder Stefano Delle Chiaie, while touring Latin America and on a visit to Miami in September 1982.^[57]

YouTube - "Gladio" (BBC, 1992)

I recently read an article on consortiumnews dot com about ...
Watch video - 3 min 17 sec -

========

http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/cointel1.htm

Even when the military forces of the host country are not
organized in accord with the United States military system,
the doctrine developed and tested by United States agencies
can prove useful in many of the world's nations. The Chiefs
of Mission and brigade commanders should encourage the
military chiefs of the host countries to adopt organizations
similar to those that have proven to be efficient in
countering guerrilla forces.

-- U.S. Army School of the Americas, _Operaciones de
Contraguerrilla_, Field Manual 31-16, Fort Gulick, Panama,
June 1968; cited in, Michael McClintock, _Instruments of
Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency,
Counterterrorism, 1940-1990_, 1992, Pantheon Press, New York

-----

. . . Generalized threats do not delineate behavior or
specify demands and consequences; these are left to the
imagination of the threatened individual. Uncertain threats
are used to create terror among the populace . . . The
threatener captures attention at a point when persons under
stress are desperately searching to eliminate uncertainty
and ambiguity. He may suggest escape routes and
alternatives, and make compliance demands which are readily
accepted in order to eliminate the uncertainty of the threat
and reduce terror.

-- Department of the Army, _Human Factors Considerations of
Undergrounds in Insurgencies_, Army Pamphlet 550-104,
Washington, D.C., GPO, September 1966; ibid.

-----

(SAN FRANCISCO) This "Special Edition" of Antifa Info-
Bulletin is courtesy of the Revolutionary People's Liberation
Front (DHKC), a radical socialist organization engaged in
militant struggle against Turkey's version of "genocidal
democracy." The article below is from the weekly newspaper of
the radical left, _Kurtulus_; AFIB will post the second part of
this important series tomorrow.

The use of fascist and/or far-right operatives to wage
counterrevolutionary warfare is standard U.S. doctrine.
Recruited from elements aligned with ideological fascism, wealthy
landowning and corporate elites, drug lords and various criminal
syndicates, "third force" operatives, acting in concert with
military and police bureaucracies, employ widespread terror as a
principle means to smash insurgent movements as well as the legal
left.

The historical origins of modern U.S. counterinsurgency
doctrine can be traced to the recruitment of ex-Nazis by the U.S.
intelligence and military apparatus at the end of World War II.
The initial counterinsurgency model and subsequent doctrinal
revisions were derived from _Nazi_ experiences in waging anti-
partisan warfare in France, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia and the
Soviet Union during the war and _American_ experiences battling
insurgents in the Philippines, Central America and the Caribbean.

On November 3, 1996 a car accident revealed the intimate
connections among fascist organizations such as the Turkish
Action Party (MHP), their terrorist arm, the Grey Wolves,
"mainstream" bourgeois" parties, state security agencies,
military intelligence and drug-trafficking mafiosi.

In light of recent revelations regarding the use of drug
traffickers and fascist operatives by the CIA as the agency waged
clandestine war against the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua,
the scandal rocking the Turkish state over similar revelations
should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, such
patterns of complicity among state security agencies, fascist
thugs and drug gangs is the _norm_ not the exception.

Similar to earlier models (Argentina, Chile, Greece, El
Salvador) the employment of strategic and tactical terror against
dissidents, "false flag" bombings and murders to discredit the
left, torture, "disappearances," Turkey's scorched earth campaign
in South Kurdistan, conform to standard doctrine taught by
imperialism at institutions such as the U.S. Army's School of the
Americas.

North America readers would be well-advised to re-examine
the FBI's domestic operations against radical organizations of
color (Black Panther Party, American Indian Movement, Puerto
Rican _independistas_) and radical leftist groups in terms of a
broader _counterinsurgency_ strategy pursued by the capitalist
state. After all, what was COINTELPRO, if not a "dirty war"
waged by the state against all who challenged the prerogatives of
imperialist empire -- at home and abroad?

-----

Date: Wed, 25 Dec 96 23:48 MET
From: DHKC Informationbureau Amsterdam


-----

taken from the revolutionary weekly from Turkey:

* KURTULUS *
_________________________________________________________________

THE NAME OF THE WAR AGAINST THE PEOPLE: THE CONTRA-GUERRILLA
_________________________________________________________________


Nothing has changed in the past decades. It has become a
regular item in the news reports. No day passes without it. We're
talking about the "traffic monster". Normally the news reader
says: "We have sad news for you again, the traffic monster
demanded another victim." Most of the times, the deceased are
unknown to us. But we damn the traffic monster: "God damn it, it
demands thousands of victims each year." It hurts, we are
saddened because most victims are part of us, part of the people.

The traffic accident on November 3 initially seemed like
just another accident. But the news programs opened with it, it
was not at the end as usual because the people involved were not
just people like that.

The accident occurred in Susurluk. Police chief Huseyin
Kocadag died when a brand new Mercedes crashed into a lorry,
member of parliament Sedat Bucak was seriously injured. There
were two more victims inside the car, one of them was a woman. At
first not much attention was paid to these two, because they were
not as known as the others. But this all changed within half an
hour. It was Abdullah Catli who changed everything and who
brought the naked truth into the open. It was the "state" who
crashed. The passengers in the car immediately became symbols,
the representatives of the present Turkish state, maintaining the
system and the ruling powers.

The discussions in the bourgeois media partly revealed the
truth about the filth the state is in, showing its decay,
revealing that it is the state itself which produces this filth.
The discussions about the drug trafficking, murders,
disappearances, the contacts between the Mafia, the police,
members of parliament and civic fascists revealed the existence
of "secret focal points" within the state, in other words: the
existence of the contra-guerrilla. The truth, spoken by
revolutionaries from several sides, is now apparent for the
people. Of course the discussions are just about a part of the
truth, and while the discussions go on, the state tries to
improve its image again.

The existence of the contra-guerrilla and its activities can
no longer be denied. But they try to pretend this organisation
and its activities are just about a tiny group within the state.
In this way they try to create a base for covering up this issue,
before it all escalates. All take part in this game, all
bourgeois parties, from the CHP till the DSP, to begin with Mesut
Yilmaz, presented as the most radical of the opposition.

At this point it is the task of the revolutionaries,
patriots and democrats to not allow that the truth, coming into
the open because of Susurluk, is covered up again. We must make
the people conscious about this case, leading them into the
direction of the struggle.


THE CENTRE OF THE CONTRA-GUERRILLA IS THE USA

The contra-guerrilla organisations in Europe, becoming
public in 1990, originate from the CIA and were planned "against
a communist government, against the danger of a communist
occupation".

The responsibles, who acknowledged the existence of the
contra-guerrilla organisations, said the secret organisations
were set up to fight behind the enemy lines like a guerrilla
force in case of such a threat, organising the people against the
enemy. The necessary weapons, ammunition and equipment were kept
in depots in several parts of the country. Contra-guerrilla
organisations were set up in all NATO-countries and also in
European countries which were no members of NATO. All these
organisations were joined under the name "Super-NATO" and a
central council was established. But why did imperialism, or the
USA, think this organisation necessary?

The USA, emerged from the 2nd Imperialist War of
distribution of 1939-1945 as the strongest state which gained the
most. The USA used this opportunity to impose itself as the world
police force of all imperialist systems. Its goal was achieving
world domination. "The communist danger" was supposed to be the
largest obstacle. They wanted to cut of the path for communism,
giving it not an inch of land. Therefore the strategy of the
"Cold War" was developed. Truman presented the framework of this
strategy in a speech before Congress on March 12, 1947, giving
the signal for the "Cold War". According to the decided
strategies, the "free" states were given economical as well as
military support and it was "not allowed that these states walk
into the trap of communism". But the USA declared as well that
the aid depended on "the enlargement of the human liberty and
democratic organisations and the securing of a liberal economy
and governments, parties and groups which oppose the plan of the
USA will be confronted with counter-measures by the USA." The USA
wanted, according to its strategy for achieving world domination,
to install collaborating governments in all countries. The
economical side of this strategy was to find accomplices which
were prepared to co-operate with the USA, controlling the economy
of these countries with the support of these collaborators. In
this way they wanted to decide the economies of the countries and
gaining influence upon the governments.


THE CIA, ORGANISER OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONTRA-GUERRILLA

In the military field a joint military organisation, NATO,
was formed "against the communist block". But this was not enough
for the USA and in the `50's they began to set up
contra-guerrilla organisations in all NATO-states, using the CIA
as a model. Not even the parliaments in these countries knew
anything about the existence of these organisations. These secret
contra-guerrilla organisations were not just set up against the
external threat of "a communist occupation", they were also
supposed to oppress all revolutionary and democratic movements
which opposed the interests of the USA. This means the contra-
guerrilla was supposed to fight the own people in the countries
where it was set up.

"Our security is not only threatened by open attacks.
Besides these open attacks there are even more dangerous threats
of another nature, not looking to be attacks. These dangers are
changes which are wanted in the interior of the countries. Such
masked attacks sometimes appear as civil wars, sometimes as a
revolutionary movement, and sometimes as a democratic or reform
movement. It's our goal to prevent these, and similar,
movements." (Report of the Rockefeller Foundation, American War
Doctrine, p. 297)

The CIA trained the members of several contra-guerrilla
organisation in training camps in the USA and other states. At
the International Police Academy, near Washington, contra-
guerrilla tactics of interrogation and torture are taught.
Seminars are held about the social problems in different
countries, about the destructivity and the agressivity of
communism, attacks with explosives are with the help of films,
near the Mexican border, in the vicinity of Matamaros, technics
of silently killing people, like stabbing and strangulation, are
taught under supervision of the Green Berets. At the US-base in
Panama, officers were trained how to conduct a military coup.
Until 1975, 30.000-40.000 people were trained here. In 1963
alone, 82 generals were trained. Around 1.400 officers were
trained there annually. The coup leaders of Chile and Argentina
followed courses there. The prime-minister of Mexico, Luis
Echeveria, was a CIA-agent at the same time. He is mentioned in
the CIA-archives under code-name Litempo-14. One of the former
government leaders in Costa Rica, Jose Figures, stated he had
served the CIA for 30 years, and the same was true for many
government leaders in Latin-America.


THE SOURCE OF THE NECESSARY PERSONNEL: OLD NAZI'S

Investigations have shown the CIA used wanted Nazi's and
fascists to set up the contra-guerrilla and to improve its
tactics. The expert of psychological warfare Henry Kissinger had
close relations with old Nazi's. He told them about his
experiences with the US-government and he made them a
proposition: "In Germany there is a great hate against the Soviet
Union, especially in Eastern Germany. However, this feeling is
expressed nowhere because there is no organisation, no focal
point. To steer this feeling, the Germans must be organised.
[...] When America does not use these groups, the communists will
use them."

The contra-guerrilla organisation, initially set up "against
the danger of a communist occupation" in reality served to give
the USA control over the countries in question and to hand them
over the neo-colonialised countries.


THE CONTRA-GUERRILLA IN THE NATO-COUNTRIES AND THE EUROPEAN
STATES

In 1990 the contra-guerrilla organisation, known as GLADIO,
was discovered. After this, all over Europe the existence of
contra-guerrilla organisations was revealed.


ITALY:

"To discover one is the only person, except for the members
of this organisation, who knows about the existence of Gladio,
and thinking about it that they could kill you any moment, is a
terrible feeling", said state prosecutor Felice Casson who
tracked Gladio.

After a long investigation the Italian Gladio was
discovered. A bomb attack near Triest in 1972 in which 3 people
were killed was brought to court in 1989 by state prosecutor
Felice Casson. The more his investigations progressed, the closer
he came to Gladio, but the solving of the case was prevented by
the secret service and prime minister Andreotti. Despite the
attempts to cover up the events, the state had top acknowledge
the existence of Gladio. The investigations revealed 622 members,
138 secret arms depots and a training camp in Sardinia. An arms
depot was discovered in Northern Italy in 1988, containing 127
weapons and explosives. This depot was controlled by the Italian
intelligence service SISMI.

State prosecutor Felice Casson concluded that Gladio was
founded in October 1956 by the USA and the Italian intelligence
service SISMI. Furthermore he discovered links between the
organisation and president Cossiga, the lodge P-2 and freemasons,
as well as prime minister Andreotti who was prosecuted in 1993
for his contacts with the Mafia.


DOCUMENTED ACTIONS BY GLADIO:

A car bomb attack on May 3, 1988, in Northern Italy which
killed 3 gendarmes. A bomb explosion in the station of Bologna in
1980, killing 33 people.* Four people were murdered in May 1973
by a bomb in front of the police station in Milano. This attack
was carried out by a certain Bertoli, a fascist who was trained
by Gladio.

After the discovery of Gladio, it became obvious the contra-
guerrilla had international dimensions. Contra-guerrilla
organisations were discovered in all NATO-countries and in some
non-NATO member countries as well. A Belgium government officials
stated the contra-guerrilla was founded in the `50s in 16 NATO-
countries, thus releasing an avalanche of revelations.


FRANCE:

The French contra-guerrilla organisation was called
"Windrose". Defence minister Jean Pierre Chevenement stated the
contra-guerrilla was founded in the `50s and that the
organisation had been dissolved by president Mitterand. However,
an Italian source revealed the French contra-guerrilla
organisation had been present at a meeting of representatives
from all contra-guerrilla organisations, the so-called "Super-
NATO" in Brussels as late as October 1990.


SPAIN:

The socialist government of Felipe Gonzales, coming to power
in 1984, at first denied the existence of a contra-guerrilla
organisation in Spain. But defence minister Narcis Serra ordered
a investigation committee, without participation of the military.
It was known that contra-guerrilla organisations existed during
the junta of Franco and that Franco participated in talks with
fascist politicians and European military leaders. A Italian
member of Gladio stated on television that Gladio, together with
Spanish contra-guerrilla's, had been trained on the Canary
Islands by the American army. Later there had been training
centres and contra-guerrilla sections in Spain itself as well,
supported by the Spanish military. The official denials were
exposed as lies.

The activities of the Spanish contra-guerrilla were even
more disclosed after a statement by a policeman in 1994. The
policeman stated the bookkeeper Galey, accused of being a member
of ETA, had never had any relations with ETA in the first place,
and that he had been kidnapped by the Spanish contra-guerrilla
organisation GAL. After these revelations, a new investigation
was ordered and a trial was opened. The investigation revealed
that between 1983 and 1987 at least 23 people, accused of being
ETA-members, had been kidnapped and murdered by the GAL.


BELGIUM:

The Belgium contra-guerrilla organisation "Glaive" was
established in 1949 in co-operation between England and a
subdivision of the Belgium military intelligence service SGR, the
SDRAB. The core of this contra-guerrilla organisation was
constituted by 8 officers in active duty and 10 pensioned
officers.


HOLLAND:

1990 the Dutch prime-minister Ruud Lubbers denied in a
written statement to parliament that a contra-guerrilla
organisation existed. This was a lie. Subsequent investigations
revealed the existence of the secret contra-guerrilla
organisation "Operaties en Inlichtingen" (Operations and
Intelligence). This organisation receives 1.5-3 million dollars
each year from a secret fund of the defence department. Several
secret arms depots were discovered like the one in Velp in 1983.


GREECE:

The Greek contra-guerrilla organisation is called
"Sheepskin". At first the Greek government denied the existence
of a contra-guerrilla organisation as well. Prime-minister
Papandreou did acknowledge the existence of the Greek contra-
guerrilla in a statement in October 1990, but he claimed to have
ordered its dissolvement after he had come to power in 1984.
Greece became NATO-member in 1952. That same year, the Greek
"Central Information Service KYB" was established. On March 25,
1955, the Greek chief of staff Davos and the CIA officer Trascott
signed the papers for the establishment of the Greek contra-
guerrilla organisation which was later known as "Sheepskin". The
document was counter-signed by the then prime-minister Papagos.
The organisation had 1.500 members, a number which could be
increased to 3.500 in case of emergency. There were 800 depots to
its disposal, filled with weapons, munition and explosives. On
April 21, 1967, KYB officers used a plan dating from 1950, drawn
up in case of a communist occupation, to carry out a military
coup. Within 20 minutes, the putchists controlled all major
objects. When the CIA, who backed the coup, convinced the junta
of the possibility of a similar coup to seize power on Cyprus,
the way was opened for a military intervention by Turkey on
Cyprus.


GERMANY:

The chief of the German contra-guerrilla organisation
"Antikommunistische Angriffstruppe" (Anti-communist Attack
Force), the retired general Reinhard Gehlen,+ was also chief of
the federal intelligence service BND from 1945-1968. The German
contra-guerrilla organisation is also known as "Gehlen-Bewegung"
(Gehlen Movement), "Stay Behind" and "Sword". The "Bund Deutscher
Jugend" (German Youth Federation), founded in 1950, is in the
same tradition. A former agent of this organisation, Dieter von
Glahn, stated for the press that the BDJ was one of the many
organisations which were financed by the CIA.

One of the organisations in Germany, set up by the CIA, was
"Peters Organisation", later known as "Technischer Dienst TD"
(Technical Service). The best agents of these organisations had
the disposal of high-tech radio equipment "Harbuna", manufactured
by AEG/TST, especially for BND-agents. Germany supplies the
contra-guerrilla organisations in other countries with "training
and requisites". Near Munich, the US 20. Special Forces had its
headquarters, and the "School for Counter-Insurgency" was
situated in Ober-Ammergau. Contra-guerrilla members from many
countries, not just from NATO-countries, were trained in camps in
Bayern/Bad Toelz and Schoengau.


SWITZERLAND:

The contra-guerrilla organisation in Switzerland was set up
in 1950 as "Geheime Abwehr Organisation" (Secret Resistence
Organisation). Investigations showed the organisation kept files
on about 1/6 of all Swiss, that is more than 900.000 Swiss. The
GAO belonged to the Intelligence and Counter-intelligence Service
(UNA), directed by the chiefs of staff. Although not a NATO-
country, the chiefs of the Swiss contra-guerrilla participated in
the meetings of "Super-NATO" in Belgium. An investigation by a
parliamentary committee revealed the existence of the
organisation "Project-26" (P-26), as well as several arms and
explosives depots in Switzerland. The members of P-26 were
trained in a country which name wasnot disclosed, and they
possessed radio equipment which was used by secret NATO
organisations and which the Swiss army did not dispose of. This
equipment was supplied by the German BND. Furthermore, a special
service ("Spez. D") was set up to facilitate the exchange of
information between Switzerland and NATO. This organisation had
links with the German organisation "Schwarze Hand" (Black Hand).


AUSTRIA:

In October 1950, the Austrian minister of the Interior,
Franz Olah, ordered an attack against a workers' strike in which
communist workers participated as well. After the strike was
crushed, the scabs were brought together in a organisation, the
"OeWSGV" (Austrian Defence Sports and Friendship Association).
Franz Olah described the organisation as a "special project"
which was to be activated in case a communist government was to
be formed. The OeWSGV was equipped with a central headquarters,
special radio equipment, as well as arms and explosives depots in
several places.


SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES:

The contra-guerrilla organisations in the Scandinavian
countries like Denmark, Norway and the non-NATO countries Sweden
and Finland were set up between 1951 and 1953 by William Colby
who later became director of the CIA.

William Colby wrote in his memoirs that he received support
of governments in Norway and Denmark to set up the contra-
guerrilla. In Sweden and Finland the contra-guerrilla was
organised in an illegal way with the help of right-wing parties.
In 1978, a large arms depot was discovered in Norway. The
government stated this depot was to be used in case of war. The
roots of the contra-guerrilla in Sweden can be traced back to the
"Sveaborg Brothers in Arms". The people who were contacted, all
belonged to independent contra-guerrilla groups.


WHY WAS THE CONTRA-GUERRILLA IN EUROPE DISSOLVED?

The scandalous developments, suddenly becoming visible, and
the existence of secret organisations for some 40 years, revealed
at roughly the same time in all European countries and NATO-
countries, except Turkey, as well as the fact that this happened
immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, show this
has not been a natural development. The European countries did no
longer need these organisations, set up against the "communist
threat" after the Soviet Union split up. There is no longer a
threat that Europe will be occupied by the Soviet Union. In their
view the danger of a revolution does no exist, at least not for
the near future. And even if such a threat would exist, without
support by the Soviet Union, such a threat could easily be
suppressed. The organisations, costing billions of dollars each
year, became too much of a burden for the European imperialists,
and they wanted to get rid of this burden. By keeping the
contra-guerrilla organisations a secret, they proved that these
organisations carried out illegal actions, massacres and
provocations. Were similar organisations set up after these were
dissolved? That is not known. But it would be easy to imagine how
these organisations would look like and what kind of activities
they would carry out.


THE EXISTENCE OF THE CONTRA-GUERRILLA IN TURKEY HAS ALWAYS BEEN
DENIED

The contra-guerrilla first let itself be known during the
May 12-Junta during the tortures in the Ziverbey villa. The
torturers sometimes openly admitted to the tortured to belong to
the contra-guerrilla. The discussions about whether or not such
an organisation existed, started in those days, some 25 years
ago. The discussions kept on. Something else did never end: the
denials of the existence of the contra-guerrilla by all
subsequent governments. It would probably be natural for the
military and the police in a country to deny the existence of a
contra-guerrilla, but it is not for a delegate, chosen into
parliament to represent the people.

Some remain silent because they never opposed it, some
because they co-operated with them, or they supported them, and
some remained silent when the people were murdered under torture,
just not to harm the state. They kept silent, and they
participated in all the crimes against the people.

The revelation of the existence of the contra-guerrilla
organisations and similar organisations in the European countries
caused a closer look at the contra-guerrilla in Turkey as well.
The statement by the prime minister of Luxemburg, Jacques Santes
on November 13, 1990: "The secret organisation in Turkey is
called contra-guerrilla", forced the then officials to react.

Demirel, in those days in the opposition, stated:


There is no room for such kind of organisations in a state
of law. It has become a task of parliament to combat these
secret organisations which constitute a threat to the
people. The Turkish state can not step to the Turkish people
with a murderous image. Where are the state prosecutors?


The SODEP (Social-democratic Party) chairman, Erdal Inonu,
in the opposition benches as well:


We expect a solution in this case about the contra-
guerrilla, but we're not in the government now.

Three years later. Demirel and Inonu are now part of the
same government coalition, and they speak about the contra-
guerrilla quite differently.

Demirel:

Discussions about the contra-guerrilla just whips up things.
An ideology which tries to harm the state, which hides
behind these events, must be finished.

Inonu:

The discussions about the contra-guerrilla endanger our
government coalition.

[End, Part 1]

-----

* REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE'S LIBERATION FRONT (DHKC) *

Classwar in Turkey and Kurdistan:
http://www.ozgurluk.org
Turkey a Contra-guerrilla State:
http://www.ozgurluk.org/contrind.html
Mailinglist Mirror:
http://www.ozgurluk.org/ml.html
KURTULUS HAFTALIK SIYASI GAZETE:
http://www.kurtulus.com

-----

AFIB EDITOR'S NOTES:

* The August 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station killed
85 people and injured more than 200. Subsequent investigations
revealed that the probable architect of the deadly attack was
Stefano Delle Chiaie, a neofascist terrorist with ties to the
Italian state security bureau, SISMI, and a network of
international fascist operatives. Included among the latter
were: Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans linked to the Comando
de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas (CORU); Aginter Press;
the French Secret Army Organization (OAS); the Chilean Patria y
Libertad (PL); the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance ("Triple A")
and Nazi groups in the USA, Austria and Germany. At least some
of Delle Chiaie's financial support came from Licio Gelli's
(fascist) Masonic lodge, P-2 or "Propaganda Due," an
international banking/financial empire mired in scandal. Through
his connections to the Italian state and the CIA, Delle Chiaie
was the quintessential "plausibly deniable" operative. The
founder of the neofascist terror group, Avanguardia Nazionale,
Delle Chiaie however, was not a "loose cannon." "The Rose of the
Winds," "Plan Solo", and similar operations, were an inextricable
component of the CIA, SISMI and fascism's "Strategy of Tension."
Because of the size and strength of Italy's Communist Party (PCI)
and the autonomous radical left, the "strategy of tension" became
a cornerstone of a plan to provoke a coup d'etat in Italy along
the lines of the military takeover by Greece's fascist Colonel's
in 1967. The _fascist_ component of "Super-NATO" operations in
Italy, as throughout the rest of world, was a critical element of
imperialism's "roll-back" strategy to destroy the USSR, and the
organized left. Terrorist bombings, assassinations, frame-ups of
leftists, as well as "disappearances" were initiated by SISMI's
"Gladio" operatives. After the CIA-orchestrated 1973 coup by
General Pinochet against the reformist Allende government in
Chile, Delle Chiaie and other "Gladio" operatives, became key
components of the Chilean dictatorship's "Operation Condor" -- an
international "third force" that linked fascist terrorists in the
USA, Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe to the security
bureau's of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil. In
Turkey, the fascist National Action Party (MHP) and their
operational arm, the Grey Wolves, are an essential component of
Turkey's ongoing "dirty war" against the left in South Kurdistan
and throughout the country. But the MHP and the Gray Wolves, as
with other "Super-NATO" (fascist) operatives, have a dual
strategy: collaborate with the state when it is in their
interests to do so, especially when such collaboration leads to
the liquidation of the left and, advance a political agenda for
the creation of a fascist state. The role of the CIA in Turkey's
"Contra-guerrilla" operations against Kurdish liberation forces
and the Turkish radical left and trade unions, are not
aberrations; indeed, the creation of a counterinsurgency "third
force," is _central_ to imperialism's waging of "dirty war"
throughout the world.

For further background on "Gladio," "Super-NATO" and Delle
Chiaie, see:

Stuart Christie, _Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black
Terrorist_, 1984, Anarchy/Refract, London

Statewatch, _Operation Gladio_,
http://www.poptel.org.uk/htbin/dbsearch -- type "Operation
Gladio" at the search menu prompt

Serdar Celik, "Turkey's Killing Machine: The Contra-Guerrilla
Force," _Kurdistan Report #17_, February/March 1994, available
from Arm The Spirit,
WWW: gopher://locust.cic.net:70/11/Politics/Arm.The.Spirit

Arthur E. Rowse, "Gladio: The Secret U.S. War to Subvert Italian
Democracy," _Covert Action Quarterly_, Washington, D.C., Number
49, Summer 1994

John Dinges and Saul Landau, _Assassination On Embassy Row_,
1980, Pantheon Books, New York

William Blum, _Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II_, 1995, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine

Martin Edward Andersen, _Dossier Secreto: Argentina's
Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War"_, 1993, Westview
Press, Boulder, Colorado

Stella Calloni, "The Horror Archives of Operation Condor,"
_Covert Action Quarterly_, Washington, D.C., Number 50, Fall 1994

-----

+ General Reinhard Gehlen was the head of the Wehrmacht's
Military Intelligence on the Eastern Front. Recruited by the
U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS -- forerunner of the CIA),
Gehlen and other Nazis (including SS General Karl Wolff and SS
_Sturmbannfuhrer_ Otto Skorzeny, dubbed "Hitler's favorite
commando" by the Nazi press) were instrumental in setting-up the
CIA's "stay behind" networks throughout Europe. During this
critical period at the dawn of the Cold War (1945-1953) tens of
thousands of Nazi war criminals and their fascist collaborators
were spirited out of Europe along "ratlines" financed, staffed
and created by the Vatican's Confraternity of San Girolamo. The
brainchild of the OSS and British MI5-MI6, the leadership of Nazi
organizations, including Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Joseph
Mengele, Ante Pavelic's Croatian Ustashi movement, the fascist
"Slovene Home Guard," the infamous Ukrainian SS Galician
Division, the fascist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), and General
Vlasov's army of Russian (Nazi) collaborator's, among others,
became the nucleus of a world-wide anticommunist "third force."
Gehlen's network became the basis for the creation of "Super-
NATO" network throughout Europe.

For further background on Gehlen, "Super-NATO" and the links
among Nazis' and Western intelligence agencies, see:

Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, _Inside the League: The
Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American
Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League_,
1986, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York

Christopher Simpson, _Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis
and Its Effects on the Cold War, 1988, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New
York

-- _The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the
Twentieth Century_, 1995, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine

Mark Aarons and John Loftus, _Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The
Nazis and Soviet Intelligence_, 1991, St. Martin's Press, New
York

Peter Dale Scott, "How Allen Dulles and the SS preserved Each
Other," _Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB)_, Washington,
D.C., Number 25, Winter 1986

Kai Hermann, "Klaus Barbie's Bolivian Coup," CAIB, see above

Francoise Hervet, "Knights of Malta Examined," CAIB, see above

* * * * *
or by gopher --> gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:7021/11/europe

Turkey, terror bombs, the CIA and Mossad

Operation Gladio involved “the strategy of tension”. The strategy involved getting right-wing terrorists to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe and in Turkey. Operation Gladio was reportedly organised by Nato and the CIA.

http://www.stopthenato.org/m/zit/id_ses/2337520f9/id_p/10/opt/read_e/id_s/433.html

"The CONTRA-GUERRILLAS, which were the GLADIO organisation in Turkey, were set up from the 1950s onwards and played a significant part in fascist governments during the modern history of Turkey, irrespective of whether these had a veneer of parliamentary democracy or were an overt military junta."

http://www.spitfirelist.com/f059.html

"Utilizing the fascist and ultra-nationalist National Action Party and its youth wing, the Gray Wolves, the Turkish "Stay Behind" also resulted in the type of right-wing terror program and destabilization effort that it did in Italy."

~~~~~~~~

When the Islamist prime minister Necemettin Erbakan took power in 1996, the Turkish military, quickly eased him out of power.

In elections for the Turkish parliament on November 3, 2002, a new party formed out of a banned Islamic movement - the Justice and Development Party (AKP) - won 35 percent of the popular vote and 363 of the 550 seats.

This may have worried the Pentagon, Israel, the Turkish military and the Turkish drugs industry.

~~~~~~~~

http://www.hr-action.org/archive1/990225tjp1.html

According to a report in The Jerusalem Post, intelligence cooperation between the Mossad and the Turkish security service, MIT, "was enshrined in a 12-clause agreement that was signed during a 1993 visit to Israel by then-Turkish foreign minister Hikmat Chetin".

Soon after, according to the London-based newsletter Foreign Report, a large Mossad operation was established in Turkey, with Mossad agents based in both Istanbul and Ankara.

~~~~~~~~

Turkish Top Military Brass meets Wolfowitz
one day before Istanbul Attacks

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ANA311A.html

The two Istanbul attacks respectively on the HSBC in the financial district and on the British Consulate were, according to media reports "timed to coincide with President George Bush's state visit to London."

The attacks took place one day following the completion of the annual Turkish-US Joint Defense Group meeting (17-19 November 2003).

The British Consul General Roger Short, was killed by the bomb as he was entering the consulate building. Press reports confirmed that he had cancelled an appointment at the last minute and "if he had gone to his appointment, he would have been alive"

The attacks create conditions for Turkey's participation in the war on terrorism.

The attacks serve to strengthen the Anglo-American military axis and the legitimacy of Bush's "War on terrorism."

The Istanbul bombings also serve to uphold the shaky legitimacy of Prime Minister Tony Blair in the face of mounting political opposition to Britain's' participation in the US led war.

Michel Chossudovsky, 11/21/03

~~~~~~~~

http://www.mediareviewnet.com/Zionist%20intelligence%20engineered%20Istanbul%20blasts.htm

"A Turkish daily close to the ruling justice and development party quoted Turkish intelligence sources as saying that the Mossad had established the organization that launched the two attacks on 15th November, 2003."

~~~~~~~~

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/062904Stanton/062904stanton.html

Turkey is a major refining and transit point for the flow of heroin from Southwest Asia to Western Europe.

Kendal Nezan, writing for Le Monde Diplomatique, has reported that MIT and the Turkish National Police force were actively supporting the trade in illicit drugs not only for fun and profit, but out of desperation.

"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. According to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey's heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 . . . Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the police and the army could possibly organize trafficking on such a scale. Drug barons 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. The traffickers themselves travel on diplomatic passports. The drugs are even transported by military helicopter from the Iranian border."

~~~~~~~

The Middle East Report concluded in 1998 that probably the greatest strategic move in the Clinton post-Cold War years is what could be called "The Ankara Pact"—an alliance between the US, Turkey, and Israel that essentially circumvents and bottles up the Arab countries.

~~~~~~~~~

Earlier in 1998, Israeli, Turkish and American military forces engaged in exercises in the Mediterranean, according to Reuters and Agencie France Press. "'[These exercises] signal to the radical states in the region that there is a strong alliance between Israel, Turkey and the United States which they must fear."

Reports also indicated that the CIA and Pentagon intelligence organizations had regularly chaired meetings of Turkish and Israeli officers in Tel Aviv for years.

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Pamuk's assassination plan made at a cafe


The Ergenekon terrorist organization proposed 1 million YTL to Erol Ö., whose wife had left him and who was living in a casting agency. The assassination plan was detailed at a cafe in Beyoðlu. It was claimed that recently Erol Ö. had said; "you will see I will have a lot of money soon." Erol Ö. was meeting with the organization's managers at a cafe house and his computer password was 'big price for big job'. It was also stated that the assassination plans for Fethullah Gülen, PM Recep Tayyip Erdoðan and Fehmi Koru were not yet finished.

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Jan 27 2008

Turkey foils plot to kill novelist

Global (HAHA!! NOTHING in the censored Western Media!!!) By Agencies

The group allegedly plotted to kill Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, above [EPA]Authorities in Turkey have charged 13 people over an alleged plot to kill Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, as well as Kurdish activists.

Members of the group, who Turkey's Anatolia news agency said have been jailed awaiting trial on Saturday, included a retired Turkish general and a high-profile lawyer.

The group, known as Ergenekon, had allegedly been plotting a series of bomb attacks and assassinations, according to Turkish media.

Kemal Kerencsiz, a lawyer known for prosecuting writers and journalists under Turkey's article 301 which makes it a crime to insult "Turkishness", was among those facing charges of inciting armed revolt, according to CNN Turk.

The EU, which Turkey is seeking to join, has called Article 301 an impediment to free speech and Turkish officials recently made moves to amend the law.

Veli Kucuk, a retired general, Zekeriya Ozturk, a retired major were also among the group, the private broadcaster said.

Officials have declined to comment on the Ergenekon case, which began with the seizure of explosives and weapons at a house in Umraniye, Istanbul, last summer.

Turkish newspapers said this week the group had been planning to kill Pamuk, author of "Snow" and "My Name is Red", as well as several Kurdish politicians.

The newspapers also said the group was preparing a series of bomb attacks ahead of a coup in 2009 against the Turkish government.

Police are also reportedly investigating whether the suspects were involved in several politically motivated attacks, including the murders of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist killed last year, and Andrea Santoro, an Italian Catholic priest.



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“JFK, 9/11 and War"

By Dr. Peter Dale Scott

In American history there are two types of event: ordinary events which the information systems of the country can understand and establish. There are also deep events, or meta-events, which the mainstream information systems of the country cannot digest. I mean by a “deep event” an event in which it is clear from the outset that there are aspects which will not be dealt with in the mainstream media, and will be studied only by those so-called “conspiracy theorists” who specialize in deep history.

The events I shall discuss today exhibit continuities with each other and with other deep events, notably the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. But the three I shall discuss today – the JFK assassination, the initial Watergate break-ins, and 9/11 – are outstanding in this respect: that while they were attributed to insignificant and very marginal people, they had momentous impact, far more than most daily events by more important people, in redirecting American history. ¹

If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media. Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and now 9/11. All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.

When I talk of a deep state, this term (as opposed to others, like deep politics), is not my own invention. It is a translation of the Turkish gizli devlet, or derin devlet, a term used to describe the networks revealed by the so-called Susurluk incident of 1996, when the victims traveling together in what became a deadly car crash were identified as "an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli.” The giveaway was that “Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol's wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself.” ² He was carrying narcotics with him at the time of the crash. ³

The study of these deep events has slowly become more respectable in the almost half-century since the JFK assassination. A major reason has been the emergence of the Internet and other forms of new media, where the same deep events tend to get far more extensive treatment. ⁴ If the new media come in time to prevail over the priorities of the old, it is possible that we will see a paradigm shift with respect to what is appropriate for serious public discourse.

What I have learned over the years is that it is helpful to look at all these deep events together. This is true for both external reasons (how the nation and its media handle deep history) and for internal reasons (the content of deep events themselves).

JFK and 9/ll: Similarities

I gave a talk in November 2006 which by June 2007 had been seen on line by over 20,000 people. I wish to enlarge three of the comparisons I made, while beginning with five new ones.

1) Stock market speculation:

By this I am not referring to the dip and recovery that followed both events, which is common after any unsettling news. ⁵ I am referring to the dealings in special stocks which suggested, in both cases, prior knowledge of what was to come.

In early November 1963, David Harold (“Dry Hole”) Byrd and his investment partner, James Ling, bought $2 million worth of stock (132,600 shares) in Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), Ling’s defense company. Then in January 1964 LTV received the first defense contract from the Pentagon – for a fighter plane to be used in the escalating war in Vietnam. I have calculated that this $2.5 million insiders’ purchase was worth $26 million by the end of 1967. Moreover the prescient purchase was about one hundred times the size of any other insider purchase in aerospace issues in the same period. ⁶

This does not prove that Byrd and Ling were directly involved in the Kennedy assassination, but it is likely that Byrd may have had inklings of what was going to happen. For Byrd owned the Texas School Book Depository building, where Oswald had been hired as an employee in October 1963. I have hypothesized that Oswald thought he was there on a surveillance assignment, to report on a fellow worker was under investigation by the Dallas Police. Byrd may have been privy to this arrangement, and have suspected more.

This is comparable to the notorious “puts” purchased in advance in 2001, in the stock of United Airlines and American Airlines. ⁷ Here too the advance purchases suggest special knowledge, but here too the purchasers and the perpetrators may not have been the same, especially if we imagine that intelligence agencies had prior indications of the event about to occur.

2) A number of senior officers were out of the country, including the Secretary of State

On November 22, 1963, six out of ten cabinet members were on their way to Japan, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary W.W. Wirtz. ⁸

On September 11, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CJCS Henry Shelton were traveling outside the country, while Attorney General John Ashcroft was also traveling. ⁹ Powell and Shelton were leading opponents of the Iraq War, and were eventually ousted, along with Ashcroft.

3) Prior investigations of the eventual suspects were impeded:

Oswald, who had been on the FBI’s Watch List since his travel to the Soviet Union in 1959, was inexplicably taken off watch list on October 9, 1963, just after his arrest in New Orleans and his alleged trip to Mexico City had made him a candidate for increased surveillance. ¹⁰ October 9, the day before the CIA reported to the FBI on Oswald in Mexico City, was the day CIA HQ itself received the news.

This is comparable to the obstruction by the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) at FBI Headquarters of the Minneapolis FBI’s efforts to interview the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, especially after Moussaoui’s arrest on August 15, 2001. ¹¹ Moussaoui knew most of the other nineteen alleged hijackers, and an interview of him, if not have impeded, could have led to the detention of the nineteen. A Minnesota Special Agent, Harry Samit, later testified that he wrote FBI headquarters about seventy memos on Moussaoui between August 16 and September 11, all to no avail. ¹²

Similarly the CIA failed to tell the FBI that two of the terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were in the United States. ¹³ The blocking of the Moussaoui investigation, and the withholding of the CIA’s information, have both been blamed on Janet Reno’s so-called Wall memorandum of 1995. But the Wall memo was renewed on August 6, 2001, by Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson. ¹⁴

Another example of such obstruction was the curtailment of the Army intelligence investigation of al-Qaeda through its Able Danger program. According to Paul Thompson’s Terror Timeline, military lawyers on three occasions forced members of Able Danger to cancel scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute. Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer later complained that “critical counterterrorism information [was] never passed from SOCOM [Special Operations Command] to the FBI before 9/11; this information included the original data regarding Atta and the terrorist cells in New York and the DC area.” Rep. Curt Weldon (R), who in 2005 helped bring to light the existence of the program, commented, “Obviously, if we had taken out that cell, 9/11 would not have occurred.” ¹⁵

Students of the John F. Kennedy assassination have speculated that Oswald’s name, with or without his knowledge and/or participation, was being used by the CIA in Mexico as part of a complex operation against Fidel Castro. ¹⁶ If true, the removal of his name from the FBI watch list would not be absurd, but understandable, to prevent an accidental law enforcement interruption of a CIA operation.

In like manner the obstructions of the FBI’s RFU would be understandable if Atta and Moussaoui or their names were being used as part of a contemporary intelligence operation. In this case what looks outwardly like senseless and incoherent behavior would actually be the result of FBI-CIA coordination. ¹⁷

A superficial distinction between the relevant events of 1963 and 2001 actually reinforces this possibility. Marvin Gheesling, the FBI Supervisor responsible for removing the stop on Oswald’s name, was later censured by Hoover for his action. Dave Frasca, the RFU chief who stopped the Minneapolis office from pursuing a criminal warrant against Moussaoui, was later promoted. ¹⁸ The difference is attributable to Hoover’s personal hostility to the CIA and his irritation with members of William C. Sullivan’s Intelligence Division of FBI (which included Gheesling) who were too cooperative with it.

4) Commission recommendations to increase power of intelligence agencies, or deep state

It is worth pointing out that the Commission Reports prepared with respect to both JFK and 9/11 were tightly controlled and produced the same recommendation: that the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies should be increased. This was quite paradoxical in the case of the Warren Report, which concluded both that Oswald was a loner and that the CIA should have greater powers to conduct surveillance of organized groups. It was hardly less paradoxical in the case of the 9/11 Report, which concluded its survey of repeated intelligence failures and Pakistani intrigues with recommendations for increased intelligence budgets and maintenance of current aid to Pakistan. (In June 2007 Ahmed Rashid blamed the current Pakistani political crisis on the “bad deal” and “blind bargain” that Washington had made with Musharraf after 9/11.) ¹⁹

A truly independent investigation of each event could, and indeed should, have been highly embarrassing to the CIA. Even in 2007 the CIA is still in non-compliance with the Assassination Records Review Act, and withholding documents with respect to an officer, George Joannides, who supervised the Cuban Revolutionary Student Directorate, or DRE, which had recurring contacts with Lee Harvey Oswald. The CIA shared nothing with the Warren Commission about its contacts with the DRE (which may have involved Oswald). Nor did the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) learn anything of significance in 1978, when the CIA assigned Joannides to be its Principal Coordinating Officer working with the House Committee.

Similarly in 2001 the 9/11 Commission learned nothing about why, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) were aloft in a National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), or so-called “Doomsday Plane.” ²⁰ Neither in 1964 nor in 2003 was there any chance for such revelations. In 1964 the work of the Warren Commission was carefully constrained by former CIA Director Allen Dulles (who had been fired by President Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco). ²¹ In 2003 the work of the 9/11 Commission, and later the writing of the 9/11 Report, were tightly controlled by Philip Zelikow, who prior to becoming the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission had been appointed by President George W. Bush to PFIAB.

5) Paper trails laid by the designated suspects to facilitate their identification:

In both JFK and 9/11, the designated suspects – Oswald and the hijackers – made their detection easy by implausibly laying paper trails leading to themselves. Oswald is supposed in March 1963 to have purchased by mail order, using the name A. Hidell, the notorious Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, when in Dallas he could have bought a rifle anonymously by walking a few blocks to a gun shop. ²² In August he asked to be interviewed by an FBI agent, to whom he showed a Fair Play for Cuba Committee card with the name A.J. Hidell, which he had already shown to a New Orleans police lieutenant. The information was transmitted to the local Office of Naval Intelligence and to the 112th Army Military Intelligence Group. “On November 22, the 112th MIG file was instrumental, perhaps crucial, in clinching the superficial case against Oswald as an assassin.” ²³

Oswald’s self-incrimination via paper trail was more than matched in 1972 by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. The whole unraveling of the Watergate story by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was steered by the abundant evidence, including cashiers’ checks and easily traceable mint sequential hundred dollar bills, which Hunt had arranged for prior to the break-in. ²⁴ In case this was not enough, the burglars took the photographs they made of documents copied to a commercial photographer in Miami, who promptly notified the FBI. ²⁵

This irrational self-incrimination via paper trail was again repeated in 2001 by Mohamed Atta, the principal alleged hijacker. In 2006, “a former FBI agent [Warren Flagg] and a former federal prosecutor … told Newsday that one bag found in Boston contained far more than what the commission report cited, including the names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections.” The former prosecutor added, "These guys left behind a paper trail…. They had bank accounts. They rented cars. They had to show what they were doing in the United States.” ²⁶

Atta’s trove of information allegedly “provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.” ²⁷

The belated appearance in 2006 of the Flagg story has caused some to question it. However, other official allegations point precisely to other instances of paper trails left by the hijackers. According to the 9/11 Commission Report (532n188), the FBI found an Express Mail receipt in Nawaf al-Hazmi’s car at Dulles Airport, which led to a package addressed to Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. As if this was not enough, Atta also is said to have left a FedEx waybill for another package which, the federal indictment of Moussaoui strongly implied, was collected by al-Hawsawi. ²⁸ The details are given in Newsweek, November 19, 2001:

The paper trail [Newsweek’s term] that first led investigators into Ahmed's shadowy financial world began at the bottom of a motel trash can. On the night of Sept. 10, Atta hunkered down in room 233 at the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine. The next morning he would take a flight to Boston's Logan airport. At the motel, Atta tore up a FedEx Air Waybill and threw it away. Days later, federal agents searching the motel found the receipt, from a package mailed in Florida, where Atta and several other hijackers had lived until days before the bombing. It was addressed to `Almohtaram,’ Arabic for `The Respected One’ -- the honorific the terrorists gave to Ahmed. Investigators believe they sealed the connection when they got hold of the video of Ahmed picking up the package.

Thus the paper trails laid by both Oswald and Atta were crucial to a similarity I first discussed in my earlier paper: the speedy identification of the alleged (or designated) culprits.

6 ) Instant Identification of the Culprits

In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, the Dallas police put out on the police network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – five foot ten – 165 pounds, ^29] which exactly matched what was in his FBI file, and in CIA documents about him. ³⁰

One problem was that this didn’t match the actual height and weight of the man picked up and charged, which was five foot nine and 140 pounds. ³¹ The 5’10” measurement was also suspect because it was attributed to Howard Brennan, who saw someone in the sixth floor window, but only from the waist up. Brennan subsequently failed to pick out Oswald in a police line-up. ³² So there is a question where the police were able to get that exact measurement of 5’ 10”, 165 pounds. It appears someone had already determined that Oswald would be the designated culprit, before the police found him in the Texas Theater.

Meanwhile on 9/11 the FBI already had a list of alleged hijackers by 9:59 am on September 11, which was when the second tower collapsed. ³³ 9:59 AM was at least four minutes before Flight United 93 had hit the ground.

Even within the bureaucracy there were suspicions that the FBI was drawing on pre-9/11 files for its identifications.

"I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming," a former FBI official with extensive counter-terrorism experience has since said. "Within 24 hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and somebody was sitting on it." ³⁴

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of the Pentagon Able Danger had a similar reaction:

We were amazed at how quickly the FBI produced the name and pictures of all 19 hijackers. But then again, we were surprised at how quickly they’d made the arrests after the first World Trade Center bombing. Only later did we find out that the FBI had been watching some of these people for months prior to both incidents.” ³⁵

It was in this context of suspicion that Warren Flagg came forward in 2006 with the explanation of Atta’s paper trail:

"How do you think the government was able to identify all 19 hijackers almost immediately after the attacks?" Flagg asked. "They were identified through those papers in the luggage. And that's how it was known so soon that al-Qaida was behind the hijackings.” ³⁶

It is of course possible that an instantaneous investigation of Atta’s effects would explain how the FBI could tell Richard Clarke that they had a list of suspected hijackers by 9:59 AM on September 11. But this would imply that the FBI had the names of all nineteen hijackers by then, including the four on Flight 93 which had not yet crashed.

7) Drug-Traffickers and Deep Events, from the JFK Assassination to 9/11

Pulling back now and looking at the four biggest “deep events” of the last four decades – the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-ins, Contragate, and now 9/11 – we see that their common denominator is drug-trafficking. Why is this? In the first three the deep state worked with assets outside civil society and beyond the rule of law. This is an important hypothesis, so I will repeat it: In the first three deep events, JFK, the Watergate break-ins, and Contragate, the deep state worked with assets outside civil society and beyond the rule of law.

I want to suggest that in 9/11 the same thing happened again. The pattern moreover is that exhibited by the gizli devlet or deep state in Turkey, where a Parliamentary Investigation into the Susurluk Report concluded that the deep state had used the drug-trafficking Grey Wolves and fomented conflicts in the 1970s between the Turkish right and left. ³⁷ The alliance between the deep state and drug traffickers has surfaced in other countries as well, including France, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Pakistan, Taiwan, and Japan.

Before I deal with the four American deep events, let me stress that, at the time of the previous events, their drug connections were vigorously denied. But they have since become clear. I will give a few examples. The Warren Report argued that Jack Ruby “was not involved with Chicago’s criminal element.” ³⁸ But in 1979 the House Assassinations Committee assembled a report of over 1000 pages on his organized crime connections. It heard from a close Ruby associate, Lewis McWillie, that in 1959 the two men had visited the Trescornia camp in Cuba, and the “primary reason” for the visit was to meet Giuseppe deGeorge, one of the two top heroin couriers between Europe and Cuba. ³⁹

In Deep Politics, and especially my recently reissued book Deep Politics Two, I discuss the importance of the drug traffic, as a unifying factor in the JFK case. It is a key, I have argued, to Jack Ruby’s special status with the Dallas Police Department. ⁴⁰ When we look at those who in Mexico manipulated false Oswald story -- to suggest that Oswald had been talking about assassination there -- we again run into people with drug backgrounds. ⁴¹ A key example is Gilberto Alvarado, a Nicaraguan, whose story about Oswald and assassination was so serious that we know FBI Director Hoover discussed it on November 29 with Lyndon Johnson. ⁴² We now know that Alvarado, the source," reported "directly to General Gustavo Montiel, Chief of the Intelligence Service of the Nicaraguan Army." ⁴³ Montiel was later denounced as a principal in a "massive car theft ring" run by Norwin Meneses, described in other CIA cables as "the kingpin of narcotics traffickers in Nicaragua." ⁴⁴

I have just finished a draft essay on Watergate, in which I argue that the Watergate burglars assembled by Howard Hunt, all but one Cubans, included at least two men with drug connections, and that they were being used under White House direction to restructure the drug traffic by eliminating, possibly even assassinating, old-time drug-traffickers who formed part of the so-called “French connection.” According to Edward J. Epstein, Hunt contacted a number of Cuban exiles and explained “that he had been authorized by the White House to recruit Cuban exiles into `hit teams’ which would be used ostensibly to assassinate narcotics dealers.” ⁴⁵ Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, after his arrest, said that in 1971 he too had joined Hunt in investigating the drug traffic that was entering the U.S. from Mexico, Paraguay, and Panama. ⁴⁶ Sturgis claimed “that he undertook several missions for Hunt involving tracking narcotics, and he assumed that this was the nucleus of a new supranational police force that would be expanded after Nixon’s reelection.” ⁴⁷

Then in the 1980s we encounter the involvement in drug-trafficking of some of the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, and more importantly of those who were supplying them with arms. This was emphatically denied at the time, and the two AP reporters who first broke the story both lost their jobs. But after two full-length books on the topic (Cocaine Politics, by myself and Jonathan Marshall, and Dark Alliance, by Gary Webb, the CIA Inspector-General was commissioned to investigate the matter. As the House Intelligence Committee later reported, “Volume II of the CIA IG report explains in detail the knowledge the CIA had that some contras had been, were alleged to be or were in fact involved or somehow associated with drug trafficking or drug traffickers.” ⁴⁸

We need to stand back and consider the implications of this recurring phenomenon. In deep events the drug connection is at first vociferously denied; then it is belatedly admitted, but only after reporting journalists like Gary Webb have been driven from the journalistic profession. As a result, the role of drug-trafficking in deep events is like the elephant in the American political living room, rarely captured on film, and even more rarely discussed in polite discourse.

If 9/11 is similar to these preceding events, and I believe it is, we have to face the possibility that forces within the American deep state were again allied with drug traffickers. In this case the traffickers would be al Qaeda. And as the Toronto Star speculated in 2001, the alliance was not restricted to the deep state and al Qaeda, but also included elements from the financial overworld:

Earlier this month, the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, reported that FBI agents had been told by the Bush administration to back off investigating members of the bin Laden clan living in the U.S. In September, the Wall Street Journal documented the lucrative business connections between the bin Laden family and senior U.S. Republicans, including the president’s father, George Bush Sr.

What are we to make of all this? One possible conclusion is that the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because bin Laden, himself, had powerful protectors in both Washington and Saudi Arabia. ⁴⁹

In The Road to 9/11 I suggest that those protectors included U.S. oil companies eager to invest in Central Asia.

Drugs and Al Qaeda

How important were drugs in the financing al Qaeda? On this important question the British and American government have different positions. The 9/11 Commission Report, released in July 2004, went out of its way to say that While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking. ⁵⁰

I submit that this claim will look extraordinary in ten years time. The British Parliament was told on October 4, 2001, that “al Qaeda’s activity includes substantial exploitation of the drug trade from Afghanistan.” ⁵¹ Only two weeks later, on August 2, 2004, Time magazine ran a major story about Haji Juma Khan …the kingpin of a heroin-trafficking enterprise that is a principal source of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists. According to a Western antinarcotics official, since slipping out of Afghanistan after U.S. forces released him, Khan has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe, and in turn is using the drug revenues to purchase weapons and explosives.

This was after US Central Command reported that in December 2003 a dhow (an Arab sailing vessel) was intercepted near the Strait of Hormuz, carrying almost two tons of hashish valued at up to $10 million. There were "clear ties" between the shipment and al-Qaeda, the Centcom statement said.” ⁵² A few days later, on New Year's Eve, a U.S. Navy vessel in the Arabian Sea “stopped a small fishing boat that was carrying no fish. After a search, [said] a Western antinarcotics official, `they found several al-Qaeda guys sitting on a bale of drugs.’" ⁵³

The drug-trafficking Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, like al Qaeda a by-product of CIA-ISI plotting in the 1980s, ⁵⁴ is said to have come “under the influence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda” after 1998. ⁵⁵ And Ralf Mutschke, Assistant Director of Interpol, told the US Congress that “according to some estimations IMU may be responsible for 70 % of the total amount of heroin and opium transiting through the area [of Central Asia].” ⁵⁶ While such quantitative estimates remain uncertain, it is known that the IMU set up heroin labs in territories under its control. ⁵⁷

In The Road to 9/11 I describe how in Azerbaijan, under oil company cover, veterans of CIA operations in Laos, like Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was “picking up hundreds of Mujahideen mercenaries from Afghanistan.” ⁵⁸ The Arab Afghans’Azeri operations were financed with Afghan heroin.

Loretta Napoleoni has argued that there is an Islamist drug route of al Qaeda allies across North Central Asia, reaching from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan through Azerbaijan and Chechnya to Kosovo. ⁵⁹ This leads us to the paradoxical fact that in 1998 Clinton came to the support of the al Qaeda-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). He did so even though “In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA … as an international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like Osama bin Laden.” ⁶⁰

Soon Mother Jones reported that in the six months since Washington enthroned the Kosovo Liberation Army in that Yugoslav province, KLA-associated drug traffickers have cemented their influence and used their new status to increase heroin trafficking and forge links with other nationalist rebel groups and drug cartels…. According to recent DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost 20 percent of the smack seized in this country -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is distributed by Kosovar Albanians. ⁶¹

It is now clear that the U.S. interventions in both Azerbaijan and Kosovo have beneficial for U.S. oil pipeline projects. BBC News announced in December 2004 that the $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a huge new US army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. ⁶²

This leads in turn to the allegations of Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American former FBI translator, who has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order, ⁶³ but whose allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:

Al Qaeda, she's been saying to congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the 'Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe's heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century.

In other words, the US is in effect, …permitting, or 'not acting against,' a heroin trade - which not only corrupts our cities and our city politics, AND our congress, as Sibel makes very specific - but is financing the terrorist organization that constitutes a genuine threat to us. And this seems to be a fact that is accepted by our top leaders, according to Sibel, for various geopolitical reasons, and for corrupt reasons as well. Sometimes things are simpler than they might appear - and they involve envelopes of cash. Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money. ⁶⁴

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds’ charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was revealed that Edmonds had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected US officials, and about “what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes.” ⁶⁵

Once again, as in past deep events, Sibel Edmonds’ charges have been predictably ignored by the traditional media. ⁶⁶ When I drew attention to her claims last November, I added that “I consider a top priority of the new Democratic Congress should be to give her charges a proper investigation for the first time. These charges are not just pertinent to 9/11 alone, but to the whole fabric of how this country is run.” A massive campaign to have Congressman Henry Waxman hold Hearings on them has however proven totally unproductive. His office has not even answered any of the deluge of emails he has received.

Edmonds has been corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland, who after Susurluk went public with revelations about state corruption, later explained his role in his book Trial by Fire: “I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England.” But as he adds: “I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.” Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for NATO in Belgium. ⁶⁷

Sibel Edmonds is not alone in alleging a 9/11-drugs connection. ⁶⁸ There was also another witness, Indira Singh, who said publicly when speaking about 9/11: “I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.” ⁶⁹

One thing we can say with confidence: the flow of Afghan heroin west through Turkey is a problem that can be traced back to the CIA’s complex involvement with a) Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, b) with the drug-linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and c) with Islamist Afghan mujahedeen like the drug-trafficker Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the 1980s. ⁷⁰

In fact the web of influence in America Edmonds describes corresponds closely to BCCI’s influence in the 1980s, when the head of BCCI used to boast to the leader of Pakistan about BCCI’s role in getting aid for Pakistan approved by the US Congress. ⁷¹

The ISI and its assets continued to be implicated in drug trafficking after the shutdown of BCCI in July 1991.

In an unusually frank interview in September 1994 – which he later denied – the former Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, disclosed that General Aslam Beg, the army chief of staff, and the ISI boss [from 1990 to 1992], Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani, had [in early 1991] proposed raising money for covert foreign operations through large-scale drug deals….The ISI’s involvement in the Sikh separatist movement was recognized in a 1993 CIA report on Pakistan’s drug trade, which stated the heroin was being used to fund its purchases of arms.” ⁷²

Prominent in ISI’s covert foreign operations at this time were the Arab Afghan terrorists supporting the drug trafficker Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, of whom I am about to say much more.

If the parallels with previous deep events hold true, then 9/11 will prove to be a collaboration between elements in the deep state and outside drug traffickers – in this case elements of al Qaeda. Such a thought is unthinkable if we know only what is in the mainstream media. It looks less unlikely when we look at past U.S. alliances with al-Qaeda-trained Islamists in Azerbaijan and Kosovo. And it seems even less unlikely when we examine the extraordinary case of Ali Mohamed, a top-level CIA asset who became the chief al Qaeda adviser on how to hijack airplanes. ⁷³

8) Double Agents: Oswald and Ali Mohamed

As I have argued elsewhere, Ali Mohamed was a double agent, just as, I suggested 15 years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald was a double agent. (In my Watergate article I argue that Howard Hunt also was a double agent, working both for Nixon and somebody else. But I don’t have time to go into that here.)

In Deep Politics I explored at some length the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was a possible “double agent…trying to infiltrate the Dallas Cuban refugee group.” ⁷⁴ I went on in Deep Politics (written in 1992) to make observations about Oswald as a double agent, observations that I now consider applicable to 9/11:

The preceding chapter considered the possibility that Oswald was associated with anti-Kennedy Cubans in order to investigate them on behalf of a federal agency. But we saw it alleged that Oswald was a double agent collaborating with some of these groups, either (as I suspect) because he or his handlers shared their goals [that is, anti-Kennedy goals], or possibly because he or his handlers had been “turned” by those they were supposed to investigate. Such a possibility was particularly likely with targets, like Alpha 66, about which the government itself was conflicted, of two minds. ⁷⁵

It is necessary to recall that Alpha 66 in early 1963 conducted a series of raids, not just against Cuba, but against Soviet ships in Cuba. It was obviously trying to shipwreck the US-Soviet understanding on Cuba, thus to torpedo the whole Kennedy policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Unambiguously the raids met with the total disapproval of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department (which cracked down on them and made a public announcement that they had to cease). At the same time there continued to be support for Alpha 66 from the CIA. ⁷⁶

Double agents frequently become the stars both of the groups they penetrate and the government agencies to whom they report. Recently I have written about an analogous figure in al Qaeda: Ali Mohamed, who was Washington’s double agent inside al-Qaeda, and also a chief 9/11 plotter. ⁷⁷ Triple Cross, a new book by Peter Lance, confirms that Ali Mohamed, one of al-Qaeda’s top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes, was an informant for the FBI, an asset of the CIA, and for four years a member of the US Army. ⁷⁸ This special status explains why one of his protégés, El Sayyid Nosair, was able to commit the first al Qaeda crime in America, back in 1990, be caught along with his co-conspirators, and yet be dismissed by the police and FBI as (and these are actual quotes) a “lone deranged gunman” who “acted alone.”⁷⁹

In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination. ⁸⁰ Three years later, in 1993, Mohamed was actually detained in Canada by the RCMP. But he gave the RCMP the telephone number of his FBI handler in San Francisco, and after a brief call the RCMP released him. ⁸¹ This enabled Mohamed to fly later in the year to Nairobi, and begin to organize the eventual al Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Africa.

Mohamed’s trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main American recruiting center for the Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the “Services Center” network that after the Afghan war became known as al Qaeda. ⁸² The Al-Kifah Center was headed in 1990 by the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed had been admitted to the United States, despite being on a State Department Watch List. ⁸³ As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh “issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews.” ⁸⁴

Ali Mohamed was training these Islamists to fight in Afghanistan. However the Soviets had totally withdrawn from Afghanistan by February 1989, and all of this training was going on in late 1989, at a time when the U.S. government, to paraphrase what was just said about 1963, was of two minds about what to do in Afghanistan.

The CIA were backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a major heroin trafficker with his own heroin labs, to get rid of the secular, anti-Islamist government in Kabul, which the Russians left behind. ⁸⁵

Meanwhile a State Department official, Edmund McWilliams, objected that “Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar were dangerous allies,” and that the United States was making an important mistake by endorsing ISI’s puppet Afghan interim government. ⁸⁶ But Ali Mohamed’s training, both in Afghanistan and later around New York, was precisely designed to strengthen the Arab Afghans in Brooklyn who were allied with Hekmatyar. ⁸⁷

Mohamed Ali’s trainees became involved in terrorist activities in other parts of the world. One of them, Anas al-Liby, became a leader in a plot against Libyan president Mu’ammar Qadaffi. Anas al-Liby was later given political asylum in Great Britain, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al Qaeda operative. ⁸⁸ As the French authors Brisard and Dasquié point out, Qadaffii’s Libya in 1998 was the first government to ask Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden. They argue that Osama and al Qaeda elements were collaborating with the British MI-5 in an anti-Gaddafi assassination plot. ⁸⁹

Another of Ali Mohamed’s trainees, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, accepted money from the Saudi Embassy in Washington to recruit Muslim warriors for Bosnia. ⁹⁰ He was also allowed to go to Fort Belvoir, where an Army major gave him a list of Muslims in the US Army whom he could recruit. ⁹¹ Fort Belvoir was the site of the Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), whose Information Dominance Center was “full of army intelligence `geeks’” targeting Islamic jihadists. ⁹²

Hampton-El’s recruiting for Bosnia was part of a larger operation. Numbers of Arab Afghans were trained for Bosnia, and later for the Kosovo Liberation Army, by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top associate of Osama bin Laden in al Qaeda, and also a close ally of his fellow Egyptian, Ali Mohamed. ⁹³ (Ali Mohamed had sworn allegiance to al-Zawahiri in 1984 while still in Egypt, and he twice arranged for al-Zawahiri to come to stay with him in California for fund-raising purposes.) ⁹⁴

Meanwhile US intelligence veterans like Richard Secord helped bring Arab Afghans recruited by Hekmatyar to Azerbaijan, in order to consolidate a pro-western government there. ⁹⁵ And in 1998 the US began bombing Kosovo in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army, some of whose cadres were both trained and supported in the field by al Qaeda’s “Arab Afghans.” ⁹⁶

So Ali Mohammad’s activities intersected with US covert operations, and this fact appears to have earned him protection. ⁹⁷ Jack Blum, former special investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commented that one of the big problems here is that many suspects in the [1993] World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahedeen. And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war. ⁹⁸

What agency would have been interested in protecting Mohamed? The CIA claimed to have ceased using him as an operative back in 1984. ⁹⁹ Yet in 1988 Ali Mohamed flew from Fort Bragg to Afghanistan and fought there, while he was on the US Army payroll. His commanding officer didn’t like it, but Mohammad was apparently being directed by another agency. ¹⁰⁰ Ten years later, in 1998, a confidential CIA internal survey concluded that it was “partly culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, carried out by some of Ali Mohamed’s trainees. ¹⁰¹

After a plea bargain, Ali Mohamed eventually pleaded guilty in 2000 to having organized the bombings of US embassies in Africa, but as of 2006 he had still not yet been sentenced. ¹⁰²

The Cover-Up Modus Operandi: He “Acted Alone”

Unambiguously Mohamed’s trainees became involved, almost immediately, in terrorism on US soil. In November 1990, three of Mohamed’s trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair’s apartment. They found much more:

There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals [supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked “Top Secret for Training,” along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square – and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to “destroy the edifices of capitalism.” ¹⁰³

All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in the late 1980s at a rifle range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance in the fall of 1989. ¹⁰⁴ The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict, and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed.

Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a “lone deranged gunman.” ¹⁰⁵ Some time later, he actually told the pressthat “There was nothing [at Nosair’s house] that would stir your imagination…..Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone.” ¹⁰⁶

Borelli was not acting alone in this matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they too believed “that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.” “The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an F.B.I. agent said.” ¹⁰⁷

The initial reaction of the NYPD had been that Nosair was part of a conspiracy. ¹⁰⁸ This impression was strengthened when a detective discovered that Borelli’s car had been moved after Nosair was arrested. As a result, according to the District Attorney prosecutor on the case, William Greenbaum, “We sensed a much bigger conspiracy, and we were sure that more than one person was involved.” ¹⁰⁹

How then to explain the ultimate assurances that Nosair was a lone assassin? John Miller, who went on to be the assistant director of public affairs for the FBI, ¹¹⁰ blamed the culture of the NYPD: “The prevailing theory in the NYPD was, `Don’t make waves.’…So in the Nosair case, when Chief Borelli turned a blind eye to the obvious, he was merely remaining true to the culture of the NYPD.” ¹¹¹ Miller’s unlikely explanation suppressed the relevant fact that the FBI, and eventually the District Attorney’s office which prosecuted the case, turned a blind eye to the obvious as well.

In the light of those 47 boxes of incriminating evidence, it is more likely that the US law enforcement system has a cover-up modus operandi or MO for dealing with a suspect who is marginally attached to intelligence operations, covert operations, even controversial operations which are opposed by other elements of the US government. ¹¹² It is to tell the public (as they did earlier in the case of Oswald) that the suspect “acted alone.”

In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting Nosair’s two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both of them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 Report, summarizing the convictions of Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and the blind Sheikh for the WTC bombing and New York landmarks plots, called it “this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort.” ¹¹³ It said nothing about the suppressed evidence found in Nosair’s house, including “maps and drawings of New York City landmarks,” which if pursued should have prevented both plots from developing.

And proper surveillance of this circle might have led investigators to the developing 9/11 plot as well. “Lance pinpoints how, in 1991, the FBI, knowing of a New Jersey mail box store with direct links to al-Qaida, failed to keep it under watch. Just six years later, two of the 9/11 hijackers got their fake IDs at the same location.” ¹¹⁴

The Repeated Modus Operandi for Cover-up

There is a repeated cover-up MO here which is observed in both the JFK assassination and the two WTC attacks. These deep events were not properly solved, because the designated principals in them could not be properly investigated. The pre-selected candidates were ones about whom the truth did not emerge, because of the candidates’ controversial involvement in previous covered-up operations. This ensured that an institutional cover-up, already in place, was extended to cover the new crime, even though it was a major one.

Oswald was one such pre-selected candidate. Those conspiratorially involved with Ali Mohamed and with 9/11 would also seem to fit the same description. That is what struck me most when I went back to compare the two meta-events: the killings of Kennedy and of Meir Kahane. Both Oswald and Nosair were quickly declared “lone” assassins, to protect someone or something else.

(Another man about whom the whole truth never emerged was Howard Hunt in Watergate, of whom President said to his aide Haldeman, “Hunt…will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things.” ¹¹⁵ This became the key to the cover-up that eventually cost Nixon his presidency. Fear of the Hunt “scab” apparently induced both Nixon and Helms to collude in ordering the FBI to suspend its interviews.) ¹¹⁶

I should make clear that with respect to 9/11, I have certain knowledge of only one fact: that there has been and continues to be a massive cover-up. I have not yet properly integrated the earlier cover-up in 1990 of Nosair’s associates, including Ali Mohamed, into my theory of what happened in 2001. I do however believe that the earlier cover-up is relevant to the later one, as exemplified by the strange treatment of the first WTC attack in the 9/11 Commission Report.

The similarity between the cover-up of Oswald in 1963 and Nosair in 1990 is striking. In both cases the truth about the predesignated culprit was unpursuable, because he was part of an operation too embarrassing to disclose. In the case of the Ali Mohamed trainees, this is a major scandal. These people could have been stopped back in 1990, before they attacked the World Trade Center. And they weren’t.

I conclude from this that it is a matter of paramount importance to learn more about these meta-events and their cover-ups. Because when we can understand what has happened before, we will be more able to deal with such a meta-event when it happens again. As I have said so many times, to understand any of these events in real depth, you have to look at what is on-going in all of them.

The traditional media seem determined, predictably, not to help in this matter. In November 2006, six weeks after Lance’s Triple Cross was released, Lexis Nexis recorded only one post-publication reference to it or to Ali Mohamed -- the Toronto Sun of 11/19/06. ¹¹⁷ But there is no lack of interest on the Internet, where at the same time there were 43,600 hits on Triple Cross.) ¹¹⁸

The gravity of the Ali Mohamed matter is compounded by the context of the drug traffic. To get to the level where we can cope and deal with these recurring problems in our country, we will have to understand the continuity, and deal with it every time it surfaces.

Conclusions

Some of the similarities noted here are probably extrinsic to the events described. But others point to a strong common denominator between JFK and 9/11. We can mention in particular the following features of a common modus operandi:

1) The prior designation of a suspect or suspects. These had a past intelligence involvement, which obstructed proper investigation of them, and of the deep events attributed to them. In both cases the suspects either were or involved double agents, with life stories or legends on two different levels.

2) The laying of a paper trail. This was strong enough to ensure that investigation would lead promptly to the designated suspects.

3) The immediate attribution of the deep event to the designated suspects.

4) The announcement that the suspect or suspects acted alone, even when there was clear evidence to show this was not true. ¹¹⁹

5) Both deep events involved experienced criminals, drawn from the world of organized drug trafficking.

JFK and 9/11 as Gateways to Already-Intended Wars

As I prepared this list of similarities for a June 2007 lecture in Vancouver, I had to recognize in myself a profound resistance to acknowledging this pattern. I didn’t want to accept this indication that there might be a hidden force intervening to affect our history at least twice over a forty-year period.

So after the lecture I laid this paper to one side. I shared it only with a few intimate correspondents for their opinions, hoping that they would persuade me to discount the pattern.

And then, six weeks later, it struck me that I had suppressed, even to myself, what should have been for me the most obvious and relevant similarities of all between JFK and 9/11:

6) Both events opened the path to major wars (Vietnam in 1964-65, Afghanistan followed by Iraq in 2001), upon which a small but powerful group were already intent. In the case of Vietnam, so-called OPLAN 34A plans for escalating the war against North Vietnam were already approved at a DOD/CIA Conference in Honolulu on November 20, 1963, even though Kennedy had never seen these plans and would in all probability (I believe) not have approved them.¹²⁰ (The 34A Operations led in August 1964 to the first bombing of North Vietnam with U.S. planes, something which “President Kennedy for two and one-half years had resisted.”¹²¹ In October 1963 Kennedy had set in motion plans to withdraw the bulk of U.S troops from Vietnam by late 1965.)¹²² Right after 9/11, a former Pakistani diplomat, Niaz Naik, told the BBC that senior American officials had told him in mid-July 2001 that military action against Afghanistan was likely to go ahead “before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”¹²³

If this founding similarity is recognized, two more follow quickly:

7) Both wars were followed by explosive increases in opium and heroin production. Thanks to the Vietnam War, opium production in the Golden Triangle expanded from about 80 tons in the early 1950s, to 300-400 tons in 1963, to a peak of 1,200 tons a year. ¹²⁴ The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, accomplished with the aid of professional drug traffickers, has seen an increase in Afghan opium production from 3,276 metric tonnes of opium in 2000, and 185 tonnes in 2001 (the year of the Taliban prohibition) to a new record high of 6,610 metric tonnes in 2006, a 43 percent increase over 2005. ¹²⁵ As a result Afghanistan’s share of global opium production increased from 70 percent in 2000 to 82 percent in 2006. ¹²⁶ U.N. figures to be released in September 2007 are expected to show that Afghanistan now accounts for 95 percent of the world's crop. ¹²⁷

8) Both wars served the interests of international oil companies, and prior to the relevant deep events had been actively lobbied for by them. Before 1963 one of the most active lobbyists for U.S. military engagement in Southeast Asia had been William Henderson, adviser on International Affairs to Socony Mobil and an officer of American Friends of Vietnam. ¹²⁸ The threats delivered to the Taliban before 9/11 were in support of Unocal’s desire to build oil and gas pipelines through the country from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. ¹²⁹

Elsewhere I have looked at these recurring overlapping patterns of drugs, oil, and war, in a book of the same name. It is a tribute to force of psychological denial that, even having written about them previously, I so long repressed their relevance to the subject now being discussed: why certain events in the assassination of John F. Kennedy replicated themselves in the events of 9/11.

Thinking in this way about the Vietnam War made me realize that the pattern of recurrence outlined in this chapter was not (as I first thought) a total novelty for me. It was similar to examples of unexplained recurrences that I had written about in The War Conspiracy, and that had contributed to the initiation and escalation of the Vietnam War. For example the falsified accounts of the spurious second Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964 shared many features with the falsified accounts about North Korea’s seizure in 1968 of spy ship Pueblo. (Both incidents involved vessels on electronic intelligence or ELINT missions; both incidents involved manipulation of evidence from alleged intercepts of enemy cable traffic, etc., etc.)¹³⁰

And then I realized that I had looked at a similar pattern of recurrence in my book Drugs, Oil, and War, when I asked the uncomfortable question (which I did not pursue): “Did successive crises in the illicit drug traffic induce some drug-trafficking U.S. interest groups and allies to press successfully for U.S. involvement in an Asian war?”¹³¹

I invite readers to consider and investigate all these patterns, whose import I do not claim to fully understand. However, as I also said in Vancouver in June 2007, our country faces the risk of another 9/11 incident, followed by another military engagement that Cheney has lobbied for: in Iran.

Footnotes:
1 In this paper the term “Watergate” will refer to the initial Watergate break-ins only, to the exclusion of all the other dirty tricks that were ultimately traced to the Nixon House.

2 Adrian Gatton, “The Susurluk Legacy,” http:// adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html. Both Catli and the terrorist Grey Wolves network from which he emerged had global intelligence connections. In 1978 “Catli linked up with notorious Italian right-wing terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and together they traveled to Latin America and the United States” (Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe [London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2005], 237-38.

3 Martin A. Lee, “On the Trail of Turkey's Terrorist Grey Wolves,” ConsortiumNews, 1997, http:// www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story33.html.

4 Even the vocabularies of the old and new media diverge. A Lexis Nexis search in December 2006 for the word “parapolitics” in major newspapers yielded five entries, only two of them from the United States. The same search on Google yielded 86,100 hits. Meanings of “parapolitics”: 1) “A system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished” (Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy [New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972], 171). 2) The intellectual study of parapolitical interactions between public states and other forms of organized violence. See Robert Cribb and Peter Dale Scott, “Introduction,” in Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (eds.), Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (London: Pluto, 2007).

5 The dip and recovery of the stock market on November 22, 1963 were given prominent attention in Lincoln Lawrence, Were We Controlled.

6 Petr Dale Scott, “The Dallas Conspiracy” (unpublished ms., 1973), Ch. III, 36. Cf. Joan Mellen, “The Kennedy Assassination and the Current Political Moment,” http:// www.joanmellen.net/truth-2.html.

7 Paul Thompson, Terror Timeline, ; http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/ timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&before_9/ 11=insiderTrading.

8 "We believe it was by design," J. Gary Shaw writes in his book Cover-Up, "that Secretary of State (Dean) Rusk, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Labor Secretary W.W. Wirtz, as well as other administration officials like White House Press Secretary (Pierre) Salinger, were trapped in an airplane over the Pacific Ocean at such a critical time." 1 (The other two Cabinet members aboard were Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges and Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. (http:// four.fsphost.com/crevmore/acretoky.htm)

9 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 400.

10 FBI HQ Supervisor W. Marvin Gheesling was censured and transferred to Detroit “for removing stop on Oswald in Ident on 10/9/63” (NARA RIF #124-10371-10033; FBI file 62-117290-Admin Folder-V3, Response to SSC re Gayle Memo 9/30/64, 21, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/ viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=300123). Cf. John Newman, “Oswald and the Mexico City Tapes,” JFK Lancer Conference, Dallas, November 19, 1999, 3, http:// www.jfklancer.com/backes/newman/newman_3.html: “Now, the day before the Mexico City story hits the FBI they cancel the flash on Oswald. This is an example of what I'm talking about, dimming the switches.”

11 For details see Terrorist Timeline under “Maltbie,” http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/ entity.jsp?entity=michael_maltbie: “RFU chief Dave Frasca stops the Minneapolis office from pursuing a criminal warrant (see August 21, 2001); When French authorities discover that Moussaoui is connected to the Chechen rebels, RFU agent Mike Maltbie insists that the FBI representative in Paris go through all telephone directories in France to see how many Zacarias Moussaouis live there (see August 22, 2001); When RFU agent Rita Flack, who is working on the Moussaoui case, reads the Phoenix memo suggesting that bin Laden is sending pilots to the US for training, she apparently does not tell her colleagues about it, even though it was addressed to several of them including Frasca (see July 10, 2001 and August 22, 2001); The RFU does not provide the relevant documentation to attorneys consulted about the request. In particular, Flack does not tell them about the Phoenix memo, even though one of the attorneys will later say she asked Flack if anyone is sending radical Islamists to the US to learn to fly (see August 22-28, 2001).”

12 Newsday, March 21, 2006, http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny- mous214670355mar21,0,2844591.story.

13 9/11 Commission Report, 269-72; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 339-44.

14 Thompson, Terror Timeline, 101.

15 http:// www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1299surprisingpresence; citing Shaffer testimoiny to US Congress, 2/15/2006. Government Security News, August 2005.

16 E.g., Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993), esp. 141-42; John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 318-419; Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), 531-46.

17 Particularly suggestive in this respect is RFU Agent Michael Maltbie’s weakening of a proposed FISA application by editing it and removing a statement by a CIA officer that Chechen rebel leader Ibn Khattab was closely connected to Osama bin Laden (“Michael Maltbie,” Terror Timeline, August 28, 2001, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/ entity.jsp?entity=michael_maltbie.

18 Coleen Rowley Report, 5; quoted in Steve Moore, “The FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit in Washington D.C.,” Global Research, August 18, 2002, http:// www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO208B.html.

19 Ahmed Rashid, “America's Bad Deal With Musharraf, Going Down in Flames,” Washington Post, June 17, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2007/06/15/AR2007061502073.html: “The roots of the crisis go back to the blind bargain Washington made after 9/11 with the regime that had heretofore been the Taliban's main patron: ignoring Musharraf's despotism in return for his promises to crack down on al-Qaeda and cut the Taliban loose. Today, despite $10 billion in U.S. aid to Pakistan since 2001, that bargain is in tatters; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda's senior leadership has set up another haven inside Pakistan's chaotic border regions.”

20 Mark H. Gaffney, “The 911 Mystery Plane,” http://www.rense.com/ general76/missing.htm; citing U.S. Department of Defense, News Transcript, "Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the Washington Post," January 9, 2002, posted at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/ t02052002_t0109wp.html; Joe Dejka, "Inside STRATCOM on September 11: Offutt exercise took real-life twist," Omaha World-Herald, February 27, 2002.

21 Assistant Attorney-General Nicholas Katzenbach later testified that he was “astounded” that Dulles did not at least share with the other commissioners what he knew about the CIA’s involvement in relevant assassination plots at the time (Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Richard Todd/Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 552; citing House Select Committee on Assassinations, Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Vol. 3, 699-71.

22 Scott, Deep Politics, 249.

23 Scott, Deep Politics, 258.

24 Emery, Watergate, 111-12. In addition Hunt deposited photographic evidence of the Fielding break-in at CIA headquarters, which surely can have served no other purpose than to leave an incriminating trail.

25 Haldeman, The Ends of Power, 30.

26 Newsday, April 17, 2006, http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny- uslugg0417,0,3743892.story?coll=ny-homepage-bigpix2005.

27 Newsday, April 17, 2006. The belated airing of the Flagg story in 2006 has aroused suspicions that it was invented to allay the many earlier questions raised about how the FBI learned the names of the alleged hijackers so quickly (see next section). FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Commonwealth Club of California on April 19, 2002 that "The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper – either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere – that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot” (http:// www.fbi.gov/pressrel/speeches/speech041902.htm). But CNN had reported on September 28, 2001, that “among [Atta’s] belongings they also found the names and phone numbers of possible associates;” (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/28/ ltm.01.html); and that this “information compliments the release of photos of the suspected hijackers” (http:// edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/28/ltm.15.html). I am grateful to Jon Gold for bringing these matters to my attention.

28 United States of America vs. Zacarias Moussaoui, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, www.usdoj.gov/ ag/moussaouiindictment.htm, items 88, 92.

29 WR 5, 17 WH 397 (Transcript of Dallas Police Channel One, before 12:45 PM, 11/22/63).

30 E.g. CIA Cable 74830 of 10 Oct 63 to Mexico City, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/ archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=30335&relPageId=2; reproduced in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512.

31 Manning Clements FBI FD-302 of 11/23/63; in Warren Report, 614.

32 WR 5. Brennan subsequently failed to pick out Oswald in a police line-up (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact [Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2006], 10-13, 78n).

33 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 13-14.

34 William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” New American, 3/11/02, http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2002/03-11- 2002/vo18no05_didweknow.htm.

35 Peter Lance, Triple Cross (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006), 383.

36 Newsday, April 17, 2006.

37 Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (HRFT): Annual Report 1997; Martin A. Lee, “On the Trail of Turkey's Terrorist Grey Wolves,” ConsortiumNews, 1997, http:// www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story33.html.

38 Warren Report, 785.

39 Scott, Deep Politics, 180-81

40 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 70-71, 132, 136-38.

41 Scott, Deep Politics Two, 130-36.

42 Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 53. In a memorandum of the same day Hoover noted that it was Johnson, not Hoover, who initiated the call (3 AH 476). The call logs of the LBJ Library (available on its website) indicate that the call was from Hoover to Johnson.

43 Attachment to CIA Memo of 12 December 1963 from DDP to FBI, "Mexican Interrogation of Gilberto Alvarado;" NARA #104-10018-10043.

44 Webb, Dark Alliance, 55-56 (Montiel); Scott, Drugs, Contras, and the CIA, 15 ("kingpin”).

45 Epstein, Agency of Fear, 205.

46 Scott, Hoch, Stetler, The Assassinations, 402.

47 Epstein, Agency of Fear, 205n

48 House Select Committee on Intelligence on Report of CIA Inspector-General Frederick Heitz, quoted in Robert Parry, “CIA Admits Tolerating Contra- Cocaine Trafficking in 1980s,” ConsortiumNews.com, June 8, 2000, http:// www.consortiumnews.com/2000/060800a.html.

49 Toronto Star, November 27, 2001; quoted with discussion in Scott, The Road to 9/11, 176.

50 9/11 Report, 171. I find this statement one-sided and misleading, but less so than the opposite claim of Yossef Bodansky: “The annual income of the Taliban from the drug trade is estimated at $8 billion. Bin Laden administers and manages these funds – laundering them through the Russian mafia… (Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America [New York: Random House/Prima, 2001], 315).

51 "Evidence Presented to the British Parliament, 4th October 2001," Los Angeles Times, 10/4/01. Cf. e.g. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/30/01; Asia Times, 12/8/01; New York Times, 10/4/01, 10/11/01; San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01. For further documentation, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 32, 36.

52 US `seizes al-Qaeda drugs ship'," BBC News, 12/19/03.

53 Time, August 2, 2004.

54 Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 287: “There is no question that the Casey-ISI actions aided the growth of a significant network of right-wing Islamist extremists [including] the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.”

55 Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Columbia UP, 2002), 170. Cf. New York Times, 5/3/01: “There are sketchy but widely circulated stories that the [IMU] militants are trained by the Taliban and receive money from drug traffickers and from Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi accused of leading an international terrorist group.” Cf. Guardian, 5/17/05 “Both the US and Britain link the IMU to al-Qaida, and the Afghan heroin trade.”

56 "The Threat Posed by the Convergence of Organized Crime, Drugs Trafficking and Terrorism,” Written Testimony of Ralf Mutschke, Assistant Director, Criminal Intelligence Directorate, International Criminal Police Organization – Interpol General Secretariat, before a hearing of the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime, December 13, 2000, http:// judiciary.house.gov/Legacy/muts1213.htm. Rashid quotes from the last sentence.

57 Wall Street Journal, 5/3/01.

58 Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272-75. Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. The mujahedin were recruited in Afghanistan by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading recipient of CIA assistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and most recently a leader of the al Qaeda-Taliban resistance to the US and its client there, Hamid Karzai. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20.

59 Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 90-97: “[IMU leader] Namangiani’s networks in Tajikistan and in Central Asia were used to smuggle opium from Afghanistan. It was partly thanks to Namangiani’s contacts in Chechnya that heroin reached Europe” (91)….. “It was thanks to the mediation of Chechen criminal groups that the KLA and the Albanian mafia managed to gain control of the transit of heroin in the Balkans” (96). Napoleoni does not mention Azerbaijan, which however lies between Uzbekistan and Chechnya.

60 “KLA Funding Tied To Heroin Profits,” Washington Times, 5/3/99.

61 Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2001. I have written elsewhere of how what I called a meta-group affiliated with Adnan Khashoggi took advantage of the NATO bombing of Kosovo to consolidate the Kosovar drug route via Abkhazia (and Turkey). See "The Far West Drug Meta-Group -- Part 1." Article for Nexus: New Times Magazine, 13.3, June-July 2006, 25-31, 82, http:/ /www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/DrugMetaGroup1.html. This version is without footnotes; go to "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11" (Lobster, 10/29/05, http:// lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/global-drug.htm, for a footnoted version. In February 2006 a member of the meta-group confirmed part of my hypothesis: namely, that the so-called “Pristina dash” of Russian troops to seize Kosovo’s main airport had been prepared for by his meta-group colleague Vladimir Filin (Anton Surikov, Pravda-info, 2/8/06, http:// forum.msk.ru/material/power/7495.html; cf. http:// www.left.ru/burtsev/ops/prishtina.phtml).

62 BBC News, 12/28/04. Those who charged that such a pipeline was projected were initially mocked but gradually vindicated (Guardian, 1/15/01; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 34).

63 On October 18, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security.

64 Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06, http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/ ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html.

65 Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, “As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations.” It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep Politics, e.g. 292.

66 In December 2006 a Lexis Nexis search of major newspapers for “Sibel Edmonds” and “drug” produced no relevant results. A similar search on Google yielded 99,100.

67 “The Susurluk Legacy,” By Adrian Gatton, Druglink Magazine, Nov/Dec 2006, http://adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html

68 The most sensational charge of a direct 9/11-drug connection is made by Daniel Hopsicker in his self-published book Welcome to Terrorland. “Hopsicker is still researching the three Huffman-trained 9/11 pilots, who he says had financial, drug-trafficking and military intelligence ties to the U.S. government. He is developing suspicions that Atta and the entire school were involved with Osama bin Laden in heroin trafficking. Hopsicker reports that on July 25, 2000, the DEA in Orlando discovered more than 30 pounds of heroin inside a Learjet owned by Wally Hilliard, owner of Huffman Aviation. Earlier that month, on July 3, Atta and Marwan Al-Shehri had started flight lessons at Huffman. Hopsicker claims it's not a coincidence that Atta was allegedly importing heroin with Hilliard's help, selling Afghanistan's notorious opium and heroin to finance the Taliban. Hilliard would not be interviewed for this story. `The apparatus that Osama bin Laden set into place along with the CIA back in the '80s, still exists,’ Hopsicker says. `The FBI is protecting an operation set in place back in the '80s...a money-laundering device to funnel money to the Afghan Mujahedeen and to flood this country with heroin’” (Sander Hicks, Long Island Press, 2/26/04, http:// www.911citizenswatch.org/ modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=82). Hopsicker’s charges are reported, but only minimally corroborated, in Sander Hicks, The Big Wedding (Vox Pop #2, 2005), 31-39. Most other researchers, myself included, are looking for more independent corroboration.

69 Indira Singh testimony, 9/11 Citizen’s Commission, 128, http:// www.justicefor911.org/September-Hearings.doc. Indira Singh was a one-time senior employee of J.P. Morgan, who was fired after she shared her concerns about an Arab-financed contracting firm with her bank and the FBI.

70 Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 27-58.

71 Peter Truell, and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 132.

72 Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 149-50; Washington Post, 9/12/94. A13.

73 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 150-58, etc.

74 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 252; quoting Lucille Connell, 26 WH 738.

75 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 257.

76 Hinckle and Turner, Deadly Deceits, 173-76. Cf. Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, 177-78.

77 Peter Dale Scott, "The Background of 9/11: Drugs, Oil, and US Covert Operations," in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (eds.), 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2006), 73-78. For updates, see my website at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q.html.

78 Lance, Triple Cross, xxvii, etc.

79 Newsday, 11/8/90; quoted in Peter Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, (New York: Regan Books/ Harper Collins, 2003), New York Times, 12/16/90.

80 Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 29-37.

81 Lance, Triple Cross, 123-25.

82 Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2005), 278; John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 87-88; Lance, 1000 Years for Revenge, 29-31; Independent, 11/1/98.

83 Rahman was issued two visas, one of them “by a CIA officer working undercover in the consular section of the American embassy in Sudan” (Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden [New York: Free Press, 2001], 67). FBI consultant Paul Williams writes that Ali Mohamed “settled in America on a visa program controlled by the CIA” (Paul L. Williams, Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror [[Upper Saddle River, NJ]: Alpha/ Pearson Education, 2002], 117). Others allegedly admitted, despite being on the State Department watch list, were Mohamed Atta and possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism [Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005], 205, 46).

84 Wright, The Looming Tower, 177.

85 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 195. In retrospect, the decision to back Hekmatyar against Najibullah appears to have been disastrous. As Ahmed Rashid predicted accurately in 1990, “If Afghanistan fragments into warlordism, the West can expect a flood of cheap heroin that will be impossible to stop …Afghanistan's President Najibullah has skillfully played on Western fears of a drugs epidemic by repeatedly offering co-operation with the DEA and other anti- narcotic agencies, but the West, which still insists on his downfall, has refused. If President [George Herbert] Bush and Margaret Thatcher continue to reject a peace process, they must prepare for an invasion of Afghan-grown heroin in Washington and London” (Ahmed Rashid, “Afghanistan heroin set to flood West,” Independent (London), 3/25/90: “In early 1988 the State Department negotiators had been preparing to accept an end to CIA assistance.” They then reversed themselves and held out for a matching of Soviet and CIA support to the two factions. Apparently the policy shift was motivated by an unscripted remark by Reagan to a television interviewer (Coll, Ghost Wars, 176-77).

86 Coll, Ghost Wars, 196; cf. 197-202; Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 251. McWilliams’ argument found support among mid-level State Department officials in Washington; “Still, the more State Department officials mouthed the McWilliams line, the more Langley argued the contrary” (Coll, Ghost Wars, 197).

87 Cf. Lance, Triple Cross, 20, 66.

88 Lance, Triple Cross, 104-05. In May 2000 al-Liby’s house in Britain was raided; and the police discovered an al Qaeda terror manual which was largely written and translated by Ali Mohamed.

89 Brisard and Dasquié, Forbidden Truth, 97-102, 155-59. A leader in the plot was Anas al-Liby, who was later given political asylum in Great Britain, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al Qaeda operative. He was trained in terrorism by the triple agent Ali Mohamed, while Mohamed was still on the payroll of the U.S. Army (Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How Bin Laden's Chief Security Adviser Penetrated the CIA, the FBI, and the Green Berets [New York: Regan, 2006], 104; see also Chapter IX).

90 United States v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman et al., Federal Court, SDNY, 15629-30, 15634-35, 15654, 15667-68, 15671, 15673; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad, 72-74; J.M. Berger, “Al Qaeda Recruited U.S. Servicemen: Testimony Links Plot To Saudi Gov't,” Intelwire.com, http:// intelwire.egoplex.com/hamptonel010604.html.

91 United States v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman et al., Federal Court, SDNY, 15629-30, 15634-35, 15654, 15667-68, 15671, 15673; Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad, 72-74; J.M. Berger, “Al Qaeda Recruited U.S. Servicemen: Testimony Links Plot To Saudi Gov't,” Intelwire.com, http:// intelwire.egoplex.com/hamptonel010604.html. In my talk, I said erroneously that Hampton-El was recruiting for Afghanistan.

92 Lance, Triple Cross, 331.

93 Marcia Christoff Kurop, “Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links,” Wall Street Journal, 11/1/01: “For the past 10 years…Ayman al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps [and] weapons of mass destruction factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia.”

94 Lance, Triple Cross, 11, 194-98.

95 Peter Dale Scott, “The Background of 9/11: Drugs, Oil, and U.S. Covert Operations,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (eds.), 9/11 & American Empire, 75-76.

96 Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Roseville: Prima, 2001), 298, 397-98.

97 Cf. Robert Friedman, Village Voice, 3/30/93: “In the aftermath of the bombing, many are wondering why there wasn't a comprehensive, wide-ranging investigation of Meir Kahane's murder. One possible explanation is offered by a counterterrorism expert for the FBI. At a meeting in a Denny's coffee shop in Los Angeles a week after the Kahane assassination, the 20-year veteran field agent met with one of his top undercover operatives, a burly 33-year-old FBI contract employee who had been a premier bomber for a domestic terrorist group before being `turned’ and becoming a government informant. `Why aren't we going after the sheikh [Abdel Rahman]?’ demanded the undercover man. `It's hands-off,’ answered the agent. `Why?’ asked the operative. `It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he's still in the country,’ replied the agent, visibly upset. `He's here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA [National Security Agency], and the CIA.’"

98 Robert I. Friedman, Village Voice, 3/30/93.

99 Lance, Triple Cross, 16.

100 Lance, Triple Cross, 43: “Ali Mohamed defied his commanding officer and prepared to go [to Afghanistan] anyway. At that point, it seems clear that he was serving two sets of masters at Bragg.”

101 Andrew Marshall, Independent, 11/1/98.

102 Lance, Triple Cross, 3, 7. The CIA has shown through the years the lengths it will go to, to prevent having its sometime assets testify in open court. Cf. Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Contras and the CIA: Government Policies and the Cocaine Economy. An Analysis of Media and Government Response to the Gary Webb Stories in the San Jose Mercury News (1996-2000) (Los Angeles: From the Wilderness Publications, 2000), 39-40, etc.

103 Lance, 1000 Years, 34.

104 Lance, 1000 Years, 31; Peter Lance, Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding about the War on Terror (New York: Regan Books/ HarperCollins, 2004), 25.

105 Newsday, 11/8/90; quoted in Lance, 1000 Years, 35.

106 New York Times, 11/8/90; Robert I. Friedman, Village Voice, 3/30/93.

107 New York Times, 12/16/90.

108 “Nosair, the NYPD had already learned, had apparently not acted alone…Lieutenant Eddie Norris…seemed to be looking at a conspiracy involving three and possibly more assassins.” (John Miller and Michael Stone, with Chris Mitchell, The Cell [New York: Hyperion, 2003), 43].

109 Lance, Triple Cross, 59.

110 Lance, Triple Cross, 115.

111 Miller et al., The Cell, 44-45.

112 John Miller, who went on to be the assistant director of public affairs for the FBI (Lance, Triple Cross, 115), blames the culture of the NYPD: “The prevailing theory in the NYPD was, `Don’t make waves.’…So in the Nosair case, when Chief Borelli turned a blind eye to the obvious, he was merely remaining true to the culture of the NYPD” (The Cell, 44-45.) Miller’s unlikely explanation suppresses the relevant fact that the FBI turned a blind eye to the obvious as well.

113 9/11 Report, 72.

114 Toronto Sun, 11/19/06.

115 Haldeman, The Ends of Power, 33.

116 Emery. Watergate, 193. Helms testified under oath that he had no knowledge of any CIA exposure by Hunt’s activities. Yet unmistakably he sent a memo to Vernon Walters, the CIA Deputy Director, repeating that the FBI should “confine themselves to the persons already arrested or directly under suspicion and…desist from expanding this investigation.”

117 The New York Times (8/28/06) did cover, albeit disparagingly, an earlier National Geographic TV special in August 2006, which drew selectively from Lance’s work.

118 The silence of the US press about Triple Cross was broken very slightly on 12/19/06, with the following bland reference in the New York Times in the wake of the firing by News Corp of the book’s publisher, Judith Regan: “Peter Lance, the author of '`Triple Cross,'’ an investigative work about the F.B.I. and the terror network of Osama Bin Laden, said Ms. Regan abandoned his book, released in late November, when the media storm erupted over the O. J. Simpson project, even canceling a scheduled interview with him on her own radio program.”

119 In the case of 9/11, the restriction was not confined to the nineteen hijackers, but to al Qaeda as an organization.

120 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972), 53-55, 66, 162-63.

121 Kaiser, American Tragedy, 211.

122 See Scott, Deep Politics, 24-37; "Exit Strategy: In 1963, Kennedy ordered a Complete Withdrawal from Vietnam," by James K. Galbraith (Boston Review, Oct.-Nov. 2003).

123 BBC News, September 18, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550366.stm. Naik accurately predicted to BBC not only the timing of the October U.S. attack, but its source in Tajikistan. Cf. Abid Ullah Jan, Afghanistan: The Genesis of the Final Crusade (BookSurge Publishing, 2007), 27; John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2003), 109; Richard D. Mahoney, Getting Away with Murder (Arcade, 2004), 176.

124 Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40; citing McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 162, 286-87.

125 International Herald Tribune, July 17, 2007, http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/18/asia/AS-GEN- Afghanistan.php.

126 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, The Opium Economy in Afghanistan: An International Problem, 2003, http://www.unodc.org/pdf/publications/ afg_opium_economy_www.pdf; World Drug Report, 2007, 195, http://www.unodc.org/pdf/research/ wdr07/WDR_2007_3.1.1_afghanistan.pdf.

127 Matthew Lee, “Another record poppy crop in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, August 4, 2007, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070804/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/ us_afghanistan.

128 Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40, 100.

129 Scott, Road to 9/11, 166-67.

130 Scott, War Conspiracy, 51-78, 111-50. There are other instances of such recurrences in the book, some of them multiple recurrences.
Some commentators have seen in the Ergenekon case the workings of a "deep state", a phrase that refers to nationalist elements in the security forces and state bureaucracy.

Police have been observing Ergenekon, which is named after a valley in Turkish nationalist mythology, for several years and have compiled a 7,000-page dossier on the group and its activities, Turkish newspapers reported.
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19755&Itemid=1

---

Meanwhile in Turkey
... they caught the real false flag state terrorists and arrested them, and what's more, it actually made it into the local press. But WE IN THE WEST MUST NOT BE INFORMED, because it clearly shows how 911 and other "muslim terror" is actually a Western Intelligence operation and an INSIDE JOB.

Look, not a single western newspaper reports it
http://news.google.com/news?q=ergenekon

Here is more info, as it becomes available!

Don't forget, Turkey is a WESTERN ALLY it was set up to have Western Structures in SECURITY.

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Earlier in 1998, Israeli, Turkish and American military forces engaged in exercises in the Mediterranean, according to Reuters and Agencie France Press. "'[These exercises] signal to the radical states in the region that there is a strong alliance between Israel, Turkey and the United States which they must fear."
Reports also indicated that the CIA and Pentagon intelligence organizations had regularly chaired meetings of Turkish and Israeli officers in Tel Aviv for years.

---

Deep State

Derin devlet (literally meaning Deep state in Turkish), is believed by many to be an influential and informal anti-democratic coalition within the Turkish political system, composed of high-level elements within the Turkish military, security and intelligence services, the judicial branch, and important commanders of organized crime. The ideology of the "deep state" is seen by leftists as being anti-worker or ultra-nationalist; by Islamists as being anti-Islamic and secularist; and by ethnic Kurds as being anti-Kurdish.

The theory of the "deep state" has been widespread in Turkey since the early 1970s. At the beginning the discussion on a secret formation within the State focused on the term Counter-Guerrilla (in Turkish: kontr-gerilla). Drawing on the analogy with Italy, the name Gladio is sometimes used as well.


Many authors believe in an organized and institutionalized form of the deep state and have pointed at the Özel Harp Dairesi (ÖHD - Special Warfare Department). This unit formed in 1952 as Seferberlik Taktik Kurulu (STK - Tactical Mobilisation Group) operates under the authority of the President of General Staff and is also known by other titles such as the Özel Kuvvetler Komutanligi (Special Forces Command) or Harekat Dairesi (Operations Department). The notion of deep state is similar to that of a "state within the state".

For those who believe in its existence, the political agenda of the deep state involves an allegiance to nationalism, corporatism, and state interests. Violence and other means of pressure have historically been employed in a largely covert manner to manipulate political and economic elites and ensure specific interests are met within the seemingly democratic framework of the political landscape.

Does this seem familiar?

I suggest we can learn a lot from Turkish reports.

Here is more info, as it becomes available!


Also check:

http://images.google.com/images?q=%22deep+state

9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns in America’s Deep Events

"If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media. Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and now 9/11. All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.

Bush and Cheney have maneuvered America into a war on terrorism. That war threatens to become a permanent justification for curtailing the U.S. constitution’s elaborate checks and balances, and its guarantees of America’s traditional liberties.

Dilip Hiro observed in 2002 that America’s unilateralist war on terror is nothing less than a formula for permanent mobilization for permanent war:

'Now, by continuing to turn a deaf ear to the plea of the Arab and Muslim leaders, starting with President Mubarak, a loyal ally of Washington, and ending with the ICO [Islamic Conference Organization, an institution for cooperation between Muslim states, headquartered in Saudi Arabia] in April 2001, to convene an international conference under the UN auspices to formulate “a joint organized response of the international community to terrorism in all its forms and manifestations,” the Bush administration is failing to live up to the expectations of people around the world that America, the sole superpower, would spearhead a multilateral campaign against the scourge of terrorism based upon a commonly agreed platform, and stop indulging in unilateralist interpretations and actions to fight terror, which would set it on an inexorable course of war without end.'

This course seems likely to endure, until America’s approach to terrorism is radically redefined by popular demand. And the surest way to liberate ourselves from the siege mentality underlying it will be to finally understand the conspiracies that have brought us here." - Professor Peter Dale Scott, Univ. of CA, Berkeley

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/


Read His Full Paper Here
http://journalof911studies.com/volume/2007/ProfScottJFK,911,andWar.pdf


Listen to Peter Dale Scott on Guns & Butter
http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=22699

from here:
http://nutritionalplastic.blogs.com/endosymbiont/2007/11/911-jfk-and-war.html


July 31, 2006
Below the Fold: Deep States and the American Coup

Michael Blim

In Turkey, they call it "the deep state." Inside their state, Turks believe, is another state composed of key people spread throughout its military and civil administrations that conspire to move Turkish society in directions they prefer, regardless of what the nation or its politicians want. If the deep state considers that Kurds once more pose a threat to Turkish sovereignty, a Kurdish independence sympathizer is killed and his bookstore blown up, as happened in November, 2005. Though persons attached to the state police intelligence division are discovered involved and likely responsible for the attack, the indictment is quashed and prosecutor is sacked. On May 18, a judge against state employment or university enrollment for Muslim women wearing headscarves is shot down in his courtroom. His murderer, though portrayed as a right wing Islamist crazy, is also shown to have had cell phone contacts at the time of the assassination with a low level military official. The military orders a "spontaneous" demonstration of tens of thousands that reaffirms the secular nature of the Turkish state before the Ankara grave of Kemal Attaturk. Provocations, it seems, make for great marches, and for well-aimed warning shots across the bow of the current Islamist government that very much wants women to be able to wear headscarves.

The deep state, then, is not exactly a complete second state. It does not collect taxes, control borders, educate children, and so on. It is a network of well connected persons whose organization acts as a parasite on the official state. The deep state borrows its host’s powers from time to time to redirect both the official state and nation toward courses of action the deep state favors. Precisely because it is not the surface state of post offices and public works, its workings are only partially visible. This murkiness provides it with plausible deniability both as an organization and with respect to its actions. Sometimes a deep state gets lucky when one of its own takes over the official state by election or by coup. Other times, the deep state so batters or usurps state power that it succeeds in what Andrew Bacevich calls a "creeping" coup.

With September 11, the American deep state took over, and the coup galloped rather than creeped. Bacevich writes about the post-September 11 Congressional resolution: "The notorious Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 was a straitjacket compared to this spacious grant of authority." (London Review of Books, June 8, 2006, 3) The American deep state, that is the organizational network created inside the state among cold warriors located in successive Republican White Houses and the Defense Department since Nixon’s reign, and whose most visible present figures are Cheney and Rumsfeld, received its mandate. State violence in all its forms was their weapon, and they could now use it with impunity. The virtually unlimited war-making powers of an American president were their cover, much as European tyrants long ago used the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Congress and the Judiciary supinely gave up what little of the Magna Charta remained the American constitution.

Still, there were things that a deep state, even in charge and legitimate, chose to hide. Wholesale wiretapping, torture of combatants and suspects, secret torture camps, domestic spying are (thus far) among them. Like war crimes, our deep states apparently realize that it is best to keep one’s plausible deniability in some sensitive areas.

What of other deep state shadow worlds? Is Pakistan’s deep state responsible for the Mumbai bombings, just as it has been so assiduous in creating paramilitary groups in Kashmir and friendly neighbors out of the Taliban in Afghanistan? Is its president, General Musharraf, the successful head of the deep state, or its oft-embarrassed creature? (It begs credulity to think of Musharraf in this context as a victim.) While American deep staters fume, they seem unsure of the state(s) to which Musharraf is a part, or they know and are either powerless or pleased.

In Italy, a deep state thrived throughout the postwar period, abetting the Mafia, suborning bomb-throwing neofascists, and punishing native Communists. For a long while, it seemed institutionally unable to cope successfully with the leftist terrorism. Many people then and now have wondered whether the deep state was using left terrorism as a weapon against the communists themselves (by the eighties, they were its primary victims), and as part of a campaign to turn the country further to the right. American involvement helped the development of the deep state along. The US CIA during the Cold War had organized and bankrolled its own version of a Masonic lodge called Gladio through which key politicians, generals, state bureaucrats and business people stood ready to step in to stop a left-wing takeover and to cover up American breaches of Italian sovereignty. Another self-described Masonic lodge, the P-2, bankrolled by influence-peddlers and most likely the Mafia, struggled to erect a deep state of a more domestic, entrepreneurial sort, though the membership list often overlapped that of Gladio. The P-2 list, however, added a key Vatican banker and illustrious Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian premier, monopolist media magnate, and one-time Mafia money launderer. P-2 was exposed and discredited, and the Gladio story surfaced after the Berlin Wall fall as just another tale of how the cold war had created deep states in many sensitive political outposts of the American empire. Along with the fall of the Italian postwar political elite in the beginning of the nineties, the Italian deep state seemed done for, though ordinary Italians found it hard to shuck the impression that nothing in their country’s political life is what it seems.

But America’s worldwide war against terrorism had need of one once more and began in Italy under Berlusconi to create one, this time based largely (as is known so far) in the intelligence services. The deputy head of the Italian CIA was arrested several weeks ago for helping the US CIA kidnap and deport a certain Abu Omar from a Milan street to an Egyptian jail for torture and possible private execution. Italian magistrates are now trying to figure out how far the conspiracy goes, but no one would be surprised if Berlusconi, America’s self-proclaimed best European friend, were finally shown to be cognizant of the plot.

Omar’s kidnap by the CIA was one of scores conducted throughout Europe. The European Parliament has traced over 1000 secret, unauthorized flights flown by the CIA in European Union territory over the past five years. The purpose of the flights was to kidnap EU citizens or residents like Omar and to deliver them to secret locations worldwide for "rendition," torture under an Orwellian tag.

So our deep state meets their deep state(s). The tracks between us and them, as in the Cold War, are becoming deep furrows once more. The American war on terror, and the legitimization of our deep state’s coup, have quickened the pace of illegal, undemocratic acts by it among many and fostered the growth or revitalization of deep states around the world.

And finally we return to the Turks, for whom we might thank for the highly ingenious concept of the deep state. In thanks, we might warn them that they had better watch out. For some time, relations between the US deep state and the Turkish deep state were quite cordial. The Turks were the right kind of Muslims (secular), and their military was determined to keep Islamists from weakening Attaturk-inspired secular state. Its military and ours have had strong links since World War II, and our government, overtly but often deep state-wise covertly has supported several Turkish military coups. The Turks gave Americans air bases for no-fly Kurdish zones after the first Iraq War. Turkish generals had developed strong ties with the Israeli military, and had stood against Turkish Islamic movements seeking a more religiously friendly domestic politics.

But the Turkish state refused to open up or permit a northern front against Iraq in the 2003 war, a source of lasting pique among American deep staters. A recent blog reported that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld expressed concern that Turkey was moving toward Islamic fundamentalism. Policy institutes close to the Defense department, it was said, were sounding an alarm that current Islamist premier Recep Erdogan was using the EU admission process to both weaken the deep state-involved military and to make Turkey more Islamic at home and abroad.

One wonders what might happen if Turkish internal tensions increase. Now that America is a unitary state and the deep state is in charge, Turkish politicians probably shouldn’t expect the usual American split-the-difference advice, consisting of the ambassador that supports the government, and the Pentagon general that supports the coup. America now speaks with one voice, and the Turks among others should beware.

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/07/below_the_fold.html

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Ergenekon legend

/From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article describes the Turkish myth Ergenekon

Ergenekon (origin of the word is unknown) is a legend of the disintegration and reconstruction of the
GREATER TURKISH EMPIRE

It is commonly known as the origin myth of the Turkish tribes and the states Turkish existing today.

The legend is named after the legendary valley in which the fleeing Gökturksfound refuge.

The Ergenekon begins with the flight of the surviving Gökturks (also called Kökturks),
after the collapse of its once mighty empire, the devastating defeats against the Chinese Empire
and other (non-Turkish) strains have caused

The people fleeing the Göktürks leads to a difficult mountain area in the center it is a
tremendous find fertile valley. They first decide, in this valley to stay and weld iron through their
entire possessions the only access to the valley.
Here, in silence in front of their enemies, the clan begin again and to come back to strength.
After several generations, they are so numerous that the valley is overpopulated,
so they decide to melt down the iron gate, in order to re-forge weapons.
However, the population travels the labyrinth of passes, valleys and gorges suspended by
their forefathers once travelled through.

Because of this generation remained -- nobody is knows the way through the mountains, until a gray wolf
mother (the Emblem of Göktürks) leads them from the mountains.

Back on the steppes the Göktürks regain significance after numerous campaigns

Although they do not succeed to unite fully, they establish major empires.

Today's meaning of the Ergenekons


All current Turkic states and tribes, which could preserve their identity, trace their origins to the fragmentation of
Gök türks
To what extent is the historically sound, however, is unclear because of this phase only Chinese texts are known.


So they opened the first Central Asia Summit of the Turkish republics
after the collapse of the Soviet Union
in that the singly occurring heads of state with a small hammer on a piece of iron hit,
as a symbol of the iron gate that Göktürks are being patronized
and had to be in order world events to be able to enter again.


Great importance gained by the Ergenekon right movement in the 40 years of modern Turkey.

The at that time already forgotten legend, became the cornerstone of the right-wing ideologies,
which in this legend a parable for the present situation of Turkey and their plans for
their future looked.