Turkish Forum

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  • MAKING AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES AFFORDABLE

    MAKING AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES AFFORDABLE

    It was reported on December 3, 2008 in the media that the costs of the universities have been rising at more than twice the rate as the cost of living. Thus, universities are no longer affordable. If nothing is done, the cost will be prohibitive, but still more people will apply and will keep them open. It is a supply and demand situation. A better idea is of course to analyze the various costs of learning, discard the unnecessary, and reduce the cost to an affordable level.

    I made my high school education in Turkey and my university education in Germany. My high school education was equivalent to the French high schools of 1930’s which were the best in Europe. With what I learned in h igh school, I got directly in Chemical Engineering at the Technical University in Darmstadt.

    Unfortunately the American High school is much weaker and a four-year college is needed to bring the high school graduate to a level at which he can be starting a professional studies. [See: Allan Bloom, “The Closing of the American mind”, Simon & Schuster, 1987]

    Thus, a first cost–cutting would be possible by strengthening the high school to the level of a European high school and thus, saving at least a few years. That would include a course in philosophy in 12th grade. That is perfectly possible. My grand-daughter Erin took university-level courses in high school and now has done the 4-year college in three years. But the highest gain would be obtained, when high school level courses would become strong enough not to need the 4-year college. At present rates, this would be a saving o about $120,000 per student. Youngsters would also eliminate four years from the duration of their education. They would start four years earlier in life.

    A big difference between a German University and an American one, is that in Germany the university is just a place of learning. The living is done outside and outside of the interest of the university. Students live in private homes., as a sort of guests.. Many families have extra rooms they can rent. If one is lucky, as I was, one can be treated almost like a family member.

    In American universities, learning and living are done in the same campus. Students, at least the first year, live in a new student society, where excessive drinking, hazing, and similar youthful acts are common. I propose to get rid of the campus living , primarily to cut costs. The together-living during the first year has also some advantages. One makes friends, just like in a boarding school or in the army. Eating together in the same cafeterias or restaurants will do just as well and Campus living can be eliminated. I understand that fraternities and sororities are not in the University budget.

    Information coming from one nearby university indicates that fighting the energy waste might tremendously reduce operating costs. As example, the elimination of cafeteria trays is mentioned. The washing of the trays is eliminated which is an energy-intensive operation. Also, without trays, students do not take things they are not going to eat and food waste is reduced.

    At Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, PA., some of my friends professors were experimenting with a new idea. They thought that, in stead of teaching the students by many second-class teachers, it is better to teach them by videos, or DVD’s, of the best professors and have an assistant present to answer questions. This too would save considerable money and besides, improve the teaching. Universities would then retain only a few of the very best professors. Those DVD’s would have to be often up-dated.

    Of course teaching methods can be improved to cut costs. I remember one Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering in the U.S. who spent his time in class in developing and integrating complex differential equations. Since he was not teaching mathematics, he could have given us prints that show how the integration is done, and he could have taught the chemical engineering facts that he was supposed to teach during that time. If he would do that, he would need to teach a one hour a week course, in stead of three. Of course there are all sorts of other ways to cut costs by planning the lectures intelligently.

    One of the heavy expenses of an American University are its sports teams and a high salaried coach in every sport. I propose to form an outside sports club and get the sports out of the university budget. Students who are interested in sports will become members of the Club. I was told that Football is a generator of income. I still think that show-sports should be divorced from the university.

    These are some of the cost cutting ways that came to my mind. I am sure there are others too. I will conclude that it is perfectly feasible to make the universities affordable.

    T H E  O R HAN  T A R H A N  L E T T E R

    (Issued twice a month by M. Orhan Tarhan and distributed free by e-mail ).

    Article No: 142 December 15 , 2008

    ……………………………………………………………………………………………..

    To Readers’ Attention: Any one who wishes to receive THE ORHAN TARHAN LETTER should sent an e-mail to orhant@verizon.net with his/her full name, e-mail address , and PLEASE phone number, in case there is an interruption caused by the server, or in case of e-mail address change. It is free. Comments are welcome. These LETTERs are also published in AmericanChronicle.com

  • Poor Richard’s Report

    Poor Richard’s Report

    Turkey: Air Force Bombs Suspected Kurdish Militant Camps In Iraq
    December 16, 2008Turkish air force jets on Dec. 16 bombed suspected Kurdish insurgent hideouts in the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq, The Associated Press reported, citing the Turkish military. No report has come out on whether there were casualties in the attack.

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  • Foreign Currency Mechanism in Azerbaijan

    Foreign Currency Mechanism in Azerbaijan

    Trade banks started to work by permission of Russian Gosbank in 1991. They had been founded by state organs. As field of activity, giving credits to industry, special sector and small enterprises. In this area Azakbank and Ilkbank were famous. Important point is that these banks had a speciality as authority to foreign currency regulations.

    Azerbaijan declared Manat as national monetary in 1994 and founded Baku Interbanks Foreign Currency Market to regulate foreign currency activities in country. Azerbaijan decided to increase flow of Manat activities. Early time government used ruble as minor rate by giving them from Russian Central Bank. But this function as 4 billiard Ruble was inefficient to pay salaries and fees. So government decided to create a mechanism for regulating Manat and foreign currency. Firstly Manat had been published as 1, 10 and 250 Manat banknotes and gave to common market with ruble.

    In that time official foreign currency values was determined accordingly values of Moscow Interbank. But market foreign currency values was determined by Azerbaijan International Bank. So there are two value lines in market.

    Additionally, trade firms decided values according to their agreements.

    On the other hand, fourth value borned in foreign exchange in free market.

    National Bank of Azerbaijan defined rates of authoritative banks to declare Manat and ruble exchange rate. So 16 monetary values of other countries had been agreed as convertible by International Bank. (Turkish Lira, American Dolar, German Mark, Norway Cron…)

    According to decides of Baku Interbanks Foreign Currency, International Bank and other banks which have a right to determine foreign currency are in common market. Law regulated that any external body can not decide and activite in foreign currency. So illegal and other mix functions came to an end.

    Since 1995 these banks can determine rate of foreign currency. Main actor National Bank declares buy and sell of foreign currency on second day of every week. Also National Bank keeps stability every year according to situations of state.

    National Bank have an obligation as save and administration of foreign currency reserves of state. In a time, functions of National Bank and International Bank united to stabilize Manat. But after law declared a point as all corporations should give % 30 profits which are gaining foreign currency to Interbanks Foreign Currency. So National Bank is a unique unit to save and stabilize foreign currency reserves.

    National Bank can give a right to some special banks for foreign currency transaction. These banks can activite in transfer of foreign currency.

    Mehmet Fatih ÖZTARSU

    Qafqaz University – Interes Club

  • Iraq presents a lesson from history

    Iraq presents a lesson from history

    As Britain prepares to pull its troops out of Iraq, former BBC Baghdad correspondent Andrew North looks back to a previous military campaign and considers whether history is destined to repeat itself?

    As the insurgency spread, the letters from the British diplomat in Baghdad grew bleaker.

    “We are in the thick of violent agitation and we feel anxious? the underlying thought is out with the infidel.”

    And then: “The country between Diwaniyah and Samawah is abandoned to disorder. We haven’t troops enough to tackle it at present.”

    A month later: “There’s no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here.”

    In fact, this insurgency was in 1920, the uprising against the British occupation of what was then still Mesopotamia.

    The diplomat was Gertrude Bell, an energetic and passionate Arab expert who literally drew Iraq’s borders. “I had a well spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,” she wrote in late 1921.

    ‘Mass of roses’

    But read her letters and diaries and you can easily imagine she’s describing events since 2003, as American and British forces lost control of the country they had invaded.

    The latest unhappy chapter in Britain’s involvement in Iraq is approaching its end, with the government likely to announce soon a plan to withdraw most of its forces over the course of next year.

    There are plenty of parallels with 90 years ago, says Toby Dodge, the widely-respected Iraq expert at London University’s Queen Mary College, but “in the run-up to the invasion, both in Downing Street and the Foreign Office, there was no sense of history whatsoever”.

    The hundreds of letters Bell wrote to her parents during her time in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, complete with requests for supplies of “crinkly hairpins”, are available to anyone via the internet.

    Born in County Durham, her papers are now held by Newcastle University’s Robinson library, which has been putting them online, together with her many photos.

    It is a record of a unique person, who also managed to find time to be an enthusiastic Alpine mountaineer and accomplished archaeologist, her first passion.

    But it was the creation of Iraq that would consume her most.

    There was a sense of elation when Britain took Baghdad from the Ottoman Turks in the spring of 1917 and a belief in the inherent rightness of the cause – much like the mood in the White House and Downing Street in April 2003 after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

    “Baghdad is a mass of roses and congratulations,” Bell wrote, shortly after taking up her post as Oriental Secretary in the occupation administration. “They are genuinely delighted at being free of the Turks.”

    ‘Full-blown jihad’

    A few weeks before, the British commander Lt Gen Sir Stanley Maude had promised the people of Baghdad that: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

    Fluent in Arabic, Bell threw herself into her task of setting up a pro-British Arab government and was soon the main link to the country’s new politicians.

    Her instinct was to give the Arabs more independence than London wanted. For several years things proceeded peacefully. The slower communications of that time meant any dissension took longer to spread. Iraqi insurgents today have mobile phones. But dissension there was.

    She had misjudged the power of the leaders of the Shia majority, particularly their clerics.

    “There they sit in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity,” she wrote dismissively to her mother in early 1920, “and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can’t see through it – nor can they.”

    By that summer, they were leading an uprising against the British, who found themselves insufficiently equipped to handle it.

    “We are now in the middle of a full-blown jihad,” she confessed to her mother a few weeks later.

    Burning villages

    As things fell apart, anger and opposition to the Iraq venture grew in London. But Bell didn’t shirk the blame. “The underlying truth of all criticism is? that we had promised self-governing institutions and not only made no step towards them but were busily setting up something entirely different.”

    Her letters capture too the contradictions of being an occupying power, however good it believes its intentions to be. “It’s difficult to be burning villages at one end of the country by means of a British army and assuring people at the other end that we really have handed over responsibility to native ministers,” she said in November 1920.

    A new government was created though, in spite of the insurgency – as in Iraq today. It did meet one of London’s goals – it was pro-British and in 1921, Iraq officially became a nation state.

    But nearly 10,000 Iraqis had died in the process. And that government – with the imported King Feisal I at its head – was inherently unstable, led by the minority Sunnis, with the Shia majority excluded – the model by which Iraq would subsequently be governed by Saddam Hussein.

    The Shias have today reversed that perceived injustice – as they dominate the current government – although through an arguably more open process than in the 1920s.

    But their experience under the British is etched into their collective soul in a way that will condition Iraqi politics for many years yet. The other day in Baghdad, I was talking to a senior Shia figure who referred simply to “1920” as he explained his political outlook. And now it is the Sunnis who feel disenfranchised.

    Sleeping tablets

    Gertrude Bell died in the Iraqi capital in 1926 after taking an overdose of sleeping tablets. The last few years of her life she had returned to her original love of archaeology – setting up a museum that still stands – after falling out of favour in the colonial administration.

    Many older Iraqis still talk affectionately of the woman they called “Miss Bell”, despite her controversial record.

    She’s buried in a small date-palm fringed Christian cemetery in central Baghdad.

    The sprightly caretaker started working there in 1955, in the time of the last British-backed king, Feisal II, surviving the coups, dictatorships and chaos that have followed.

    Fighting has often engulfed the area around the graveyard in recent years. The British and Americans should have learnt “from the experience of others, like Miss Bell, and the lessons from history,” says caretaker Ali Mansour. “Iraq has always been a difficult country.”

    With the reduced levels of violence, there is a view in the outside world that Iraq is now somehow fixed.

    But attacks still claim 10-20 lives every day. And Toby Dodge sees many similarities between the “unstable, unrepresentative” state the British left behind in the early 20th century and what has emerged today.

    “The Americans as far as we know will leave Iraq in 2011 with an unstable state and an unpopular ruling elite using a great deal of violence to stay in power,” he says.

    What would Gertrude Bell have made of all of this? She did foresee the outline of things to come. In late 1921, the increasingly powerful Americans were manoeuvring to sign their own treaty with the new Iraqi state: “Oil is the trouble, of course,” she spat. “Detestable stuff!”

    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7774888.stm

    Published: 2008/12/10 12:34:59 GMT

    ) BBC MMVIII

  • A ‘rabbi’ in the underground

    A ‘rabbi’ in the underground

    By Zvi Bar’el

    Daniel Levi, Daniel Guney or Tuncay Guney? Who is this person whom the prosecution in Turkey last week said it wanted to summon to interrogate? According to reports in the Turkish newspaper Milliyet, he is a Mossad agent who was a member of the right-wing nationalist underground known as Ergenekon. It is alleged that Ergenekon planned to topple the pro-Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    Another Turkish newspaper, Yeni Safak, reported that documents were found in Guney’s apartment that allegedly link members of Israel’s business community with important Turkish figures also involved in the Ergenekon affair.

    According to other reports in the Turkish press, Guney was an agent of the Turkish intelligence service who penetrated both the ranks of the Turkish police’s intelligence service and the Ergenekon organization so as to expose the identity of its members. In 2004, Guney was smuggled out of Turkey and clandestinely sent to the United States; he subsequently moved to Canada, where his name appears in the membership list of Congregation Beit Yaakov as Daniel T. Guney.

    An attempt to obtain Guney’s reaction proved fruitless; however, last week, the 36-year-old Guney spoke with Turkish journalists and reacted to the accusations: “I have never been an intelligence agent, and I was given the name ‘Silk’ not because I was an agent but because I was the subject of intelligence surveillance.” That is not what the National Intelligence Organization, for which Guney apparently worked, is saying; it denies that he was one of its agents and that he penetrated both the ranks of the Turkish police’s intelligence service and Turkey’s counterterrorism unit. The latter agency was a division of the National Intelligence Organization but was dismantled in the wake of allegations that it was involved in criminal activities and even played a role in the assassination of political opponents.

    Despite the denial, it seems apparent that the allegations are true; a Turkish court is now demanding that the National Intelligence Organization report to it on its links with this suspected agent, who is now being referred to as “the rabbi.” It is doubtful that Guney is actually a rabbi; the child of Jews of Egyptian origin, he worked as a journalist in Turkey. He subsequently began to deal in the sale of stolen cars and, between the time he was smuggled out of Turkey to the present day, he does not seem to have engaged in any academic program that might have included rabbinical studies. However, that has not stopped Turkish newspapers from labeling him as a Mossad agent-cum-rabbi who supposedly worked for Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization.

    The Ergenekon underground (the name is derived from Turkish mythology) was uncovered last year. According to the evidence of written material and tape transcripts, which are contained in a 2,500-page document, the underground included army officers, retired officers, journalists, writers, government employees and members of the Turkish business community – in short, a sort of secret shadow government. Its ideology was the restoration of the secular Turkey that was envisaged by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic and its first president. For the members of Ergenekon, Turkey became a theocratic state with the installation of the government of Erdogan and the party he heads, the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

    The fact that the affair exploded just before the Turkish Constitutional Court was about to decide whether the AKP regime should continue did arouse suspicions that the affair was being manipulated to defend the party; however, as the investigation progressed, it became increasingly evident that the underground is far more complex than was initially thought. Last month, 86 individuals suspected of membership in Ergenekon went on trial, and evidence is now emerging on the way Turkey’s counterterrorism unit and its National Intelligence Organization have been operating. (*

    In an interview with the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman, Ertugrul Guven, former deputy undersecretary of the National Intelligence Organization in the 1990s, states that the various branches of Turkey’s intelligence mechanism (there are at least five) did not coordinate the exchange of data between them and that, in point of fact, there was no mechanism for data exchange between the branches simply because of jealousy. “As a result, information-gathering in Turkey has a major Achilles’ heel,” explains Guven, who alleges that in the past, especially in the 1980s, Turkish diplomats were assassinated by Armenian terrorists, and that some foreign espionage agencies tended to ignore the actions of these terrorists. “Turkey,” he points out, “was forced to develop a policy for dealing with these attacks. This is perhaps the reason why the National Intelligence Organization used the services of individuals with strong nationalist feelings to thwart the assassination plots fomented by Armenian terrorists. However, these people continue to engage in illegal activities and adopted a Mafia-style modus operandi. They continue to use the name of the National Intelligence Organization, although their membership in that intelligence service ended when their mission was completed.”

    The uncovering of the operational methods of the National Intelligence Organization and the admission that it employed criminals do not constitute anything new for the majority of Turkey’s citizens. Over the past decade, the media has publicized criminal scandals involving members of Turkey’s police, army and intelligence services, and the various reports have created the feeling that two or even three parallel governments are operating in the country. Even today, when the wave of arrests attests to the scope of involvement in the Ergenekon affair, the prosecution in Turkey is finding it difficult to determine who are the organization’s leaders and whether there might not be another network or branch of Ergenekon that has yet to be uncovered. In the meantime, several political leaders who are members of the country’s nationalist parties have declared that they have begun the process of purging extreme nationalists from the ranks of their respective parties. Nonetheless, there is no guarantee that those who are leaving, or will leave, the official parties will not set up their own secret organization and continue their activities.

    Source:  Haaretz, 14 December 2008

  • Ergenekon agent spent time in northern New Jersey prior to 9/11

    Ergenekon agent spent time in northern New Jersey prior to 9/11

    By Wayne Madsen
    Online Journal Contributing Writer

    Dec 10, 2008, 00:22

    (WMR) — Tuncay Guney, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) agent who was a key player in the right-wing “Deep State” Ergenekon movement that attempted to overthrow the Turkish government, spent time in North Jersey in the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, according to a reliable source who spoke to WMR.

    Guney now claims to be a rabbi but his status as a rabbi has been rejected as a falsehood by Turkey’s Jewish community leaders. Guney is listed as a rabbi at Jacob House (“B’nai Yakov”) Jewish Community Center in Toronto but the Toronto Board of Rabbis and the Turkish Jewish Congregation have no records of a Rabbi Tuncay Guney or “Daniel Levi,” an alias used by Guney. It is believed that “Jacob House” is a front for intelligence operations and not an actual synagogue. Jacob House shares an address with the New York Institute, which also maintains an address in New Jersey.

    Guney was arrested by Istanbul’s Anti-Smuggling and Organized Crime Department on March 8, 2001, after a police search of his home turned up two guns, fake license plates, a number of Turkish identity cards, over a hundred fake diplomas, and other Ergenekon evidence. The head of the Istanbul police unit, Adil Serdar Saçan, suspected Guney was a key player in Ergenekon. However, Sacan was, himself, later arrested and charged with being a member of Ergenekon. However, WMR has learned from its Turkish sources that Sacan is honest and was set up in an attempt to tarnish his image after he discovered an Israeli connection to the powerful Ergenekon movement.

    As a member of the Turkish police JITEM unit, Guney reportedly spied, under cover as a journalist, on Iraqi Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Talabani is now the President of Iraq.

    After Guney’s release on bail on March 9, 2001, Şenkal Atasagun, MIT’s undersecretary, asked the CIA to exfiltrate Guney to the United States. Guney was flown on Turkish Airlines to New York. Guney eventually ended up, according to our sources, living in North Jersey and making a living pumping gas.

    Guney lived in the “973” area code zone, an area that encompasses East Rutherford and Fairlawn, towns that were centers of activity for Israeli Mossad Urban Moving System operatives who were spotted celebrating the 9/11 attacks from at least two locations — Liberty State Park in Jersey City and an apartment complex on the Jersey Palisades above Weehawken, the headquarters of Urban Moving Systems. The FBI and CIA later identified Dominick Suter, the manager of Urban Moving Systems, as a Mossad intelligence officer. Five Urban Moving Systems employees were arrested in their van in East Rutherford during the afternoon of September 11, 2001, after they were seen traveling toward the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan. Their Urban Moving Systems van tested positive for the presence of explosives. Suter fled the United States and the five Israelis, some of whom were identified as Mossad in an FBI/CIA database, were released after a few months in jail after heavy pressure was applied on the U.S. government by Israel.

    Guney is also suspected of acting as an agent for Mossad, as well as the CIA. His presence in North Jersey, a “hot zone” for Israeli intelligence before and during the 9/11 attacks, points to a possible Turkish connection to the attacks.

    On August 7, 2005, WMR reported on details of the apprehension of the Israelis for their false flag actions: “Jersey City was a major base of operations for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The Ryder van used in that attack was rented from a Jersey City rental agency . . . there was a call placed to the Jersey City Police Department that claimed ‘Palestinians’ in Arab clothes were seen celebrating the attacks. Although the Jersey City Police discovered their 911 system tapes on September 11, 2001 disappeared from their servers and achives after ISI [of Mount Laurel, NJ] took over the contract, some tapes implicating “Arabs” found their way into the hands of WNBC-TV in New York in June 2002. WNBC played transcripts of 911 calls from the Jersey City Police:

    Dispatcher: Jersey City police.
    Caller: Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building.
    Caller: There’s a minivan heading toward the Holland tunnel, I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniform.
    Dispatcher: He has what?
    Caller: He’s dressed like an Arab.

    “It is clear that the Jersey City Police Department’s 911 call tapes were manipulated to delete any calls that might implicate the Israelis. The one call provided to WNBC was clearly an attempt at a ‘false flag” operation implicating ‘Palestinians’ wearing ‘sheik uniforms’ as the culprits in at least one of the white vans driven by Israeli ‘movers’ on the morning of September 11. After the van was traced to the Israeli moving company, the BOLO [Be On Look Out for message] went out for the arrest of the vehicle’s driver and passengers. An East Rutherford policeman directing traffic away from the closed Lincoln Tunnel on Route 3 East noticed the van was driving slowly on the service road towards the tunnel. The tag of the vehicle was only off by one letter from what was contained in the BOLO (JRJ 13Y) and the front New Jersey plate had been removed. It is very possible that to confuse the police, the Israelis were using NJ plate JRJ 13Y as the rear tag on two white vans – the one sighted in Liberty State Park and the other in Maria’s apartment building parking lot. In fact, local police reported a number of white van sightings during September 11, with a number of them phoned into the police. Maria told ABC News she phoned tag number JRJ 13Y to the Jersey City Police after seeing the Israelis driving in a white van celebrating the first plane’s impact, while Liberty State Park witnesses said the same tag number — JRJ 13Y — had been passed to the police and FBI after a white van with ‘celebrating Arabs’ had been chased from the park by the park’s chief ranger after the first plane impact.[11] It was clear that officials of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton, which has authority over the state’s parks, ordered Liberty State Park officials not to talk to the media about September 11 and the Israeli van.”

    The man who then New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey placed in charge of his liaison to New Jersey’s security and law enforcement agencies, Golan Cipel, later was allegedly identified by U.S. intelligence as a gay “honey trap” Mossad officer tasked with entrapping and blackmailing McGreevey. McGreevey resigned as governor after details of the homosexual affair became public.

    Ergenekon has been accused of carrying out terrorist attacks and assassinations in Turkey as “false flag” operations to discredit, undermine, and eventually overthrow Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Former FBI Turkish and Persian translator Sibel Edmonds told the Sunday Times of London earlier this year that her translations of wiretaps of Turkish, Iranian, Israeli, and American individuals pointed to Turkish training for the 9/11 hijack ring. Edmonds said that an “Al Qaeda” leader, a Syrian named Louai al-Sakka, had trained 9/11 hijackers at a military base in Turkey, under the watchful eyes of the Turkish military, which we now know was riddled with Ergenekon agents up and down the chain-of-command, four star generals to non-commissioned officers. Al-Sakka was convicted in 2007 for his role in a series of 2003 bombings in Istanbul that targeted the British Consulate, two HSBC bank branches, and two synagogues and his now serving a life prison sentence. The Turkish ring may have been involved or known about several beheadings of Western prisoners in Iraq that were blamed on “Al Qaeda.”

    Philip Giraldi, a former CIA station chief in Istanbul, wrote the following in the Dallas Morning News: “Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to warrant official investigation.”

    Coupling the Turkish official investigation of Ergenekon with Edmonds’ information, there is more than a smoking gun pointing to 9/11 as a “false flag” operation involving Turkish, Israeli, and U.S. intelligence operatives. The Saudi and Pakistani financial connection to the 9/11 hijackers and the “false flag” operation has already been well-documented.

    It is time for the incoming Obama administration to seriously consider appointing a new 9/11 commission, sans enablers and possible conspirators in the 9/11 false flag attack on the United States. Thousands of pages of documents are now available in Turkey, the United States, Britain, India, France, and other countries that will prove that 9/11 involved a network much larger than a former CIA asset hiding in an Afghan cave, Osama Bin Laden, and 19 ne’er-do-well “hijackers,” some of whom were more interested in going to strip joints and bars in the days before they decided to take express flights to “heaven” to spend eternity with Allah.

    Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

    Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com

    Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

    Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
    Email Online Journal Editor

    Source: onlinejournal.com, Dec 10, 2008

    [2]

    Mossad implicated in a coup plot in Turkey, a NATO country; CIA fingerprints also found on attempt

    By Wayne Madsen
    Online Journal Contributing Writer

    Dec 4, 2008, 00:20

    (WMR) — Fresh from revelations, reported by WMR, that Israel’s Mossad and Chabad House-based criminal syndicates were targets in a criminal gangland retribution attack by a notorious Muslim gang in Mumbai, comes word that Mossad has, once again, been implicated in an intelligence and criminal network, this time in Turkey.

    What makes this latest example of Israel’s failure to stem the criminal activities of its intelligence service and criminal syndicates worse is that Turkey, unlike Israel, is a NATO ally of the United States and, therefore, the United States is bound by treaty to protect NATO allies from aggression by non-NATO states, including Israel.

    The Turkish and other Middle East media are reporting that the Mossad has been fingered in connection with a right-wing Turkish criminal and intelligence gang, known as Ergenekon, that stands accused of attempting to overthrow Turkey’s democratically-elected Justice and Development (AKP) Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul. Several Turkish papers have named a Turkish rabbi, Tuncay Guney, aka Daniel T. Guney and Daniel Levi and code-named “Ipek” or “Silk,” as having served as a double agent for the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) tasked with infiltrating the shadowy but powerful “state within a state” group Ergenekon. Guney had been arrested by Turkish authorities in 2001 for distributing fake drivers’ licenses and phony license plates for luxury cars. A document recently uncovered by the Turkish press revealed that Guney had also infiltrated a police intelligence unit (JITEM) working with Ergenekon to destabilize Turkey. Guney was exfiltrated to the United States and he now heads up the B’nai Yaakov Synagogue and Community Center in Toronto, Canada. Guney has denied that he has been an agent for Israel, Turkey or the United States but the MIT has confirmed the document identifying Guney as an agent for MIT is authentic.

    The Turkish daily Hurriyet has reported that Guney served in MIT’s Counter-terrorism Unit (CTU) and in the MIT unit that monitors Iran. Hurriyet also reported that Guney had developed a contact at the Iranian consulate in Istanbul, Muhsin Karger, the consulate’s political affairs undersecretary.

    Guney also has claimed to be a journalist and it is also alleged that he was a member of the PKK. Silvyo Ovaydo, the leader of the Turkish Jewish community, called Guney a fraudulent rabbi and said he was not even registered as a rabbi at the B’nai Yaakov synagogue in Toronto. Guney is said to have once worked for Islamist media organizations in Turkey but suddenly converted to Judaism and became an “instant rabbi” in Toronto.

    At the heart of the Ergenekon story lies Mossad and its reported attempts to turn Turkey into another Lebanon or West Bank/Gaza, a country wracked by internal strife and constant warfare that would usher into power a strong right-wing military dictatorship. In the trial of one of the accused murderers of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the lawyer for one of the accused murderers asked another accused murderer, Erhan Tuncel, a one-time police informer like Guney, if he had an Israeli girlfriend. Tuncel refused to answer the question, citing an invasion of his privacy. However, it was clear that what the lawyer was driving at was a Mossad connection to the murder of Dink, a murder that was being pinned on Turkish anti-Armenian nationalists by the corporate and heavyily Israeli Lobby-influenced media in the West.

    When 89 suspects were named in a 2,455-page indictment by a criminal court in Istanbul last July, many retired Turkish army officers, the neocon network, especially in Washington, which is their major citadel, along with Jerusalem and London, began to throw cold water and the term “conspiracy theory” around charges in the Turkish indictment that Ergenekon played a major role in the formation of several Turkish terrorist groups to disrupt Turkish politics, including the illegal Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Turkish Hizbollah (Party of God), the Marxist-Leninist People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C), and the little-known Islamic Great East Raiders Front (IBDA-C). The neocon Jamestown Foundation in Washington called the indictment’s links between Turkish military elements and radical terrorists a “conspiracy theory.” Organizations like Jamestown have no other choice. If it were also proven, as it was in Turkey, that various terrorist groups like “Al Qaeda,” “Deccan Mujaheddin,” and others exist courtesy of the nurturing and support by American, Israeli, and other Western military-intelligence structures, groups like Jamestown would lose their reasons for existence — to make propaganda and receive funding in order to keep the terrorist bogeymen, the actual “Emmanuel Godsteins,” alive.

    Guney is reported to be the 86th suspect in the indictment of Ergenekon. Guney is believed to have revealed the initial detailed information on the existence of Ergenekon in order to avoid being charged in the case.

    The involvement of extreme right-wing Turkish military and intelligence officials and Turkish organized crime networks, with Mossad and, possibly, CIA agents acting in concert with a suspected CIA-funded Turkish Islamic charismatic madrassa and Islamic centers’ chief named Fethullah Gulen — whose activities parallel pan-Turkic/Eurasianist (re: George Soros) goals of Ergenekon — is similar to the scenario now playing out in India where a little known group called “Deccan Mujaheddin” may have been created as a ruse by Indian right-wing military and intelligence officers, allied with Mossad and CIA agents, to sow discord in India and bring about a right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena Hindu government.

    Gulen owns a number of media and business interests in Turkey and runs Islamic centers throughout central Asia and even in Russia.

    In polls, some one-third of the Turkish public believe Islamist Nurcu sect charismatic leader Grand Hodja Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, is part of a movement that aims to seize control of the Turkish state and a little over a third believe that Gulen is funded by “international powers.” After he was acquitted in Turkey of attempting to overthrow the secular state with his religious organization, Gulen was first denied a Permanent Resident Card or “Green Card” to remain in the United States by the U.S. Distrrict Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania but then an appeals court granted Gulen a Green Card. In October of this year, a federal appellate court found that U.S. immigration authorities improperly rejected Gulen’s request for a Green Card. The appeals court ruled that Gulen was “an alien of extraordinary ability,” a decision that saw approval of Gulen’s residency status. Observers of the case suspect the CIA intervened with the court on Gulen’s behalf. Gulen’s support for the AKP government may be an insurance policy by the CIA to maintain a close relationship with the “Islamist tendency” AKP government in Ankara. The Bush administration, after seven years of trying to deport Gulen to Turkey, suddenly dropped its opposition to his permanent residency status.

    The public prosecutor in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) case against Gulen’s permanent residency status argued in filed documents that Gulen’s movement was financially supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Turkish government, and the “Central Intelligence Agency.” The deposition stated that some Ankara businessmen donated up to 70 percent of their income to Gulen’s movement.

    If Gulen’s operations are funded by the CIA that means the “Agency” may be linked to Ergenekon. With the U.S. having a mutual defense treaty with Turkey’s recognized government that puts the CIA potentially in violation of U.S. law. And Israel’s connections with Ergenekon means that the United States is bound by treaty to protect its ally Turkey from Israeli covert or overt aggression.

    There is an element of “McCarthyism” in the Ergenekon case. Some well-meaning officials have been subjected to being tainted by the broad brush of being associated with Ergenekon. One is Asil Serdar Sacan, the former head of the Istanbul organized crime department, who was the first to confiscate documents on Ergenekon in 2001 and broadened his investigation to include both Ergenekon and the Gulen organization. Sacan, who investigated the murder of Turkey’s “King of Casinos” Omer Lutfu Topol, successfully beat attempts to smear him, being acquitted of 36 criminal charges brought against him and being reinstated six times to his police position. Sacan is currently in jail as an Ergenekon suspect but his only “crime” appears to have exposed Guney as a possible triple agent for the MIT, Mossad, and CIA. In 2001, Guney was spirited out of Turkey thanks to an agreement between MIT’s undersecretary Senkal Atasagun and the CIA. Guney was given a 10-year U.S. visa thanks to the CIA’s intervention.

    In fact, Ergenekon and its “deep state” players in Turkey and Shiv Sena and its extremist Hindu “deep state” allies in India, backed by elements of Mossad and the CIA, appears to be a replay of the CIA’s secret “Gladio” network in Europe that placed weapons caches in the hands of fascists and neo-Nazis groups to take up arms in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

    The use of “false flag” terrorist attacks in Western Europe by Gladio units were blamed on Communists in an effort to forestall Communist-Socialist coalition governments in Western Europe, particularly in Italy and France.

    Similarly, Ergenekon stands accused of inciting conflicts between Turks and Kurds to create anarchy in the country with the aim of having Ergenekon seizing control of the Turkish government and re-cementing close ties with the United States and Israel.

    In 2004, Ergenekon attempted three military coups against the AKP government. They were code-named Eldiven (The Glove”), Sarikiz (“The Blond Girl”), and Ayisigi (“Moonlight’).

    Ergenekon has been cagily kept off the newspaper pages and TV news screens in the United States. To investigate Ergenekon and Gulen in Turkey is to peel away at an onion that could expose some other “unpleasantness” for certain quarters.

    On January 10, 2007, WMR reported: “According to Federal law enforcement sources, two influential businessmen — Turkish Sunni Muslim Fetullahci charismatic leader Fetullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania after being acquitted in Turkey in 2006 of plotting against the secular republic, and Saudi BMI Islamic investment chief investor Yasin Qadi, a major investor in Turkey who was named in October 2001 by President Bush as a Special Designated Global Terrorist — were both involved with the CIA in the late 1990s in funneling weapons and other support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an Albanian terrorist group operating in the former Yugoslavia. The KLA was allied with the Clinton administration and supported by leading neocons such as Richard Perle, whose lobbying firm, International Advisers, Inc., counts Turkey as its major client. Gulen’s books have been translated into Albanian. BMI’s founder, Soliman Biheiri, also helped to start PTech, a Braintree, Massachusetts-based firm that had active software contracts with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Pentagon on 9/11. PTech’s offices were raided by federal authorities in December 2002 after it came under suspicion for terrorist financing. Qadi is suspected of using a series of northern Virginia-based businesses and charities to fund ‘Al Qaeda’ activities in Bosnia. Osama Bin Laden was granted a special passport by the Bosnian government in 1993. Qadi was reportedly a business partner of Turkish businessman Cuneyd Zapsu, an adviser to the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Reconciliation Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP).”

    The dramatic revelations about Ergenekon coming out of Turkey also points to the reasons why the neocons in Washington were keen to stymie the work of FBI Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds and the CIA’s non-official cover agent Valerie Plame Wilson, both of whom had smuggling and other activities in Turkey high on their priority lists. On January 18, 2008, WMR reported: “WMR has learned that former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson, whose covert status was leaked by the Bush White House, and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who was focused on a major covert network involving Turkish, Israeli, and key members of the Bush administration and Republican Party and weapons and drug smuggling, were essentially looking at the same network. The nexus of Turkey with both the covert CIA Brewster Jennings and Associates operations and the Turkish-Israeli network of influence active within the Defense and State Departments, is the key factor in understanding the complicated counter-espionage operation conducted by both the FBI and CIA.” It now appears that the Washington-connected criminal network being looked at by Edmonds and Plame was, in fact, closely linked to the Ergenekon network in Turkey.

    WMR’s January 18, 2008 report continued: “Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was also, according to our sources, well aware of the massive conspiracy to cover-up the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction components from former Soviet Central Asian states, as well as Ukraine, Moldova, and Ukraine, to the international weapons bazaar. The Abdul Qadeer Khan (A Q Khan) network based in Pakistan was a major beneficiary of the weapons smuggling operation that used Turkey as a pass-through. Rather than expand his investigation, Fitzgerald demurred on looking at the activities of the American Turkish Council, Turkey’s influential lobbying group in Washington, and its parallel symbiotic organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Turkey and Israel are close military and intelligence partners.”

    Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has called on President-elect Barack Obama to reappoint Fitzgerald as U.S. Attorney for Northern Ilinois. If Obama does so, it means that the network being investigated by Edmonds and Plame, one that stretches to Ergenekon and the Gulen network in Turkey, has its hooks deep into the future Obama administration.

    Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

    Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com

    Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

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    Source: onlinejournal.com, Dec 4, 2008