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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The attempts to resolve Turkey’s Kurdish problem have focused increasingly on Iraq. Turkey has stepped up its diplomatic contacts with both the Iraqi central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to boost its fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), based in Northern Iraq.
Turkish-Iraqi bilateral relations have been flourishing lately. Although the central government in Baghdad supported the Turkish air and ground offensive in the winter of 2007 to 2008, it could not pressure the KRG, which controls Northern Iraq, into limiting the activities of the PKK in the region (EDM, April 18). The officials in KRG were critical of Baghdad’s rapprochement with Turkey and condemned Iraqi President Celal Talabani’s visit to Turkey in March (Milliyet, March 7). This situation has changed; and a constructive dialogue is being held between Ankara, Baghdad, and the Kurdish capital of Erbil. During Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s trip to Baghdad in July, the parties signed an agreement to initiate high-level strategic cooperation (EDM, July 11). In anticipation of the American withdrawal from Iraq, Turkey met with the Iraqi central government and the United States to set up a trilateral security commission to coordinate activities against the PKK with the participation of the KRG (Terrorism Monitor, December 8).
For some time it has been expected that Turkish President Abdullah Gul would visit Iraq. Gul accepted an invitation from Talabani, but the exact date of the visit was not made public for security concerns. Following the terror attack last week, Talabani went to Kirkuk, where he met with representatives of the Iraqi Turkmen community. He announced that the conditions among the Turkmen would be improved, a move that should please Turkey. Talabani reportedly said that Gul’s visit might take place on December 20 and that the two of them might go to Kirkuk together. In the wake of the deadly terror attack, such a trip might be a demonstration of solidarity against terrorism (Cihan Haber Ajansi, December 12).
The Turkish President’s office confirmed that Gul would be visiting Baghdad soon, depending on the state of his health (he currently suffers from an ear infection that prevents him from flying). A trip to Kirkuk has not yet been confirmed, however. The Turkish daily Milliyet claimed that Turkish diplomats were displeased with Talabani’s statements (Milliyet, December 13). In October Talabani also invited Gul to participate in a ceremony for the opening of Erbil airport; the invitation was declined (www.cnnturk.com, October 13). Given the disputed status of Kirkuk and Turkey’s objections to the Kurdish stance on the status of these cities, the Turkish president might be hesitant to add Northern Iraq to his itinerary. For nationalist forces in Turkey, such a move could be construed as de facto Turkish recognition of the KRG’s right to statehood. As a matter of fact, in seeking the KRG’s cooperation against the PKK within the framework of the Turkish-American-Iraqi trilateral security commission, Turkey prefers to deal with the KRG as part of the Iraqi delegation.
The mechanism set up between Turkey and Iraq might be paying off. The Turkish daily Taraf, which is known for its pro-Kurdish position, ran a story about a new plan being worked out between Ankara, Baghdad, and Erbil. Citing Iraqi Kurdish sources, Taraf claimed that the two major parties in Iraqi Kurdistan—Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)—had decided to work against the PKK on a unified platform. They agreed to initiate a project to disarm PKK militants in Northern Iraq and return them to Turkey, under a plan to be supervised by the United Nations. As part of the plan, moreover, the PKK would be declared an illegal organization by the Iraqi Parliament, so that its activities inside the country could be curbed (Taraf, December 14). Given Taraf’s warm relations with the KRG, the report might indeed reflect the negotiations in progress among the parties. The report also notes that the KRG would seek to convince the PKK that maintaining that armed struggle harms Kurdish nationalist movement. The KRG has apparently not made any contacts with the PKK to seek its approval on this deal, however. It is unclear whether the KRG would go the extra mile to enforce such an arrangement, if the PKK resists.
At this juncture, another visit to Northern Iraq becomes important. A delegation from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) traveled to Northern Iraq from December 13 to 15 where they met KRG President Massoud Barzani in Erbil on December 13 and KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Idris Barzani (a nephew of the president) on December 14. On December 15 they will be in Suleymaniye to meet representatives of the PUK and in Baghdad to meet Talabani. Their discussions have included the latest developments on the Kurdish question, including the Turkish army’s recent cross-border strikes against the PKK camps and the diplomatic talks between Ankara and Erbil (www.cnnturk.com, December 14).
It is no secret that many of Turkey’s Kurdish nationalists look to the KRG as a source of inspiration and guidance, and they welcome normalization of Turkey’s relations with Northern Iraq. It remains to be seen whether the leaders of the Iraqi Kurds can use their leverage on the DTP to convince the PKK to comply with the new agreement.
https://jamestown.org/program/ankara-baghdad-and-erbil-reportedly-near-a-deal-to-deter-the-pkk-in-northern-iraq/
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!”
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).
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Source: onlinejournal.com, Dec 10, 2008
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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
Baku. Ramil Mammadli – APA. Iranian court accused Azerbaijani student of Peyami-Nur University of Erdebil Esger Ekberzadeh of Pan-Turkist activity and national discrimination and sentenced him to five years. World Azerbaijanis Congress told APA that under another decision of the court Ekberzadeh had been sent to Zahidan jail in the east of Iran. The hearing was closed. Ekberzadeh’s lawyer, human rights defenders and family members were not allowed to attend the hearing.
Esger Ekberzadeh was imprisoned for four months in 2006 for participation in the pickets against publication of caricatures insulting Azerbaijanis in the “Iran” newspaper. He was fined of 600,000 tomans for spreading leaflets calling to pickets.
Iraq Turkmen Participated in Turkic Forum in United Kingdom
By Mofak Salman Kerkuklu
On the 6th of December, the Turkmens of Iraq have participated in the Turkic forum in United Kingdom that was held at the Azerbaijani House, London, United Kingdom.
The event was commenced with an introduction, networking and refreshments of Turkish food and Turkish cuisine and then the opening speech was started by Dr. Ali Tekin Atalar the Chairman of Azerbaijan House in UK by welcoming the Turkish participants from different countries to the Azerbaijan House and congratulating all the participant for their dedication and enthusiasm that have shown by making the effort to attend this most important meeting.
After that, Dr. Ali Atalar started by given a brief an introduction about the Azerbaijan House in the UK. The Azerbaijani centre was officially opened its doors on the 14th of November with the aim of severing the Azerbaijani community that are living in UK. The Azerbaijani House has been established by the initiative of individual intellectuals, professionals and student living in UK. The organisation and Turkic Forum are strictly non political non profit making organisation and aiming to serve as a community centre, promoting culture activities and friendship between Azerbaijanis and host community.
Azerbaijan Hose aims to become a registered charity at the earliest time possible. Dr. Ali Atalar also kindly stated looking forward to the support of Azerbaijani members and friends towards achieving this goal. Moreover, he revealed that Azeri people feel privileged by being able to tackle the initiative and establish this centre which can be considered as a first permanent home that has been established by a Turkic community in the UK.
He sincerely hoped that this will motivate Azeri’s friends and brothers from the Turkic communities to establish similar centres. If more cultural centres are established by the Turkic community it would lead without doubt to a stronger community link and as a result of this a better service could be provided to our community. In addition to, in recent years huge numbers of Turkic speaking people getting together in London have been organizing cultural events and looking for opportunities to meet and interact with each other and members to enhance the Turkic cultural from different groups.
Furthermore he stated that he had many wonderful groups of people, Turkmens from Kerkuk, Tatars from Kazan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmen from Turkmenistan, Uzbek, Bulgarian Turks, Kazakhs, Uigurs and many more. All groups are very enthusiastic and anxious to meet regularly, support each other and express their culture. Finally he has expressed his gratitude and thanks to Mr Şener Sağlam, the President of the Federation of Turkish Associations UK. Who is one of the most active members in organizing this event in London, being one of the most diverse and multicultural cities in the world which is home to a huge variety of ethnic communities. Within this hustle and bustle these communities attempt to represent their culture and traditions and act as a platform to lobby for their respective countries of origin while trying to overcome many difficulties and problems this great city brings.
Turkish Cypriot and Azerbaijani communities have identified needs amongst the various Turkic communities for raising cultural awareness and cultivating friendship and solidarity between different Turkic groups living in Britain. Our aim is to build a strong community in the UK by working on specific projects such as creating media organisations, opening cultural centres and libraries, organising various events, meetings and forums so that common cultural traditions and languages can be shared and celebrated.
It is a fact that a strong and organised community can contribute far more to society in Britain and as a result gain more support from local authorities and government. It would therefore make sense to unite our strength and abilities, to share our experiences and knowledge, to work together on various opportunities and thus obtain more successful results.
When we take into account that there are many other Turkic communities like Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmens from Turkmeneli, Turkmen from Turkmenistan, Kyrgyz but a few, we can identify a huge potential. If we can succeed in bringing together all these related groups into one big and powerful Turkic family then whenever necessary we can move and act together as one and be far more effective in achieving our aims within the UK.
It is for this reason that we have come together to organize the “Cultural Forum of Turkic Communities in Britain” as the first step. We wish to meet and share ideas so as to find ways to direct our activities and that will lead us to become one of the most influential communities in Britain. Moreover, Mr Levent Hassan highly contributed in the translation into English language and the discussion that was held during the event in order to facilitate the understanding the meaning of the discussion to participatents who did not speak the Turkish language.
Moreover, Mr Altan Ataturk, the representative of the Republic of South Azerbaijan gave an introduction Azeri population and he had revealed the suffering and oppression of the Azeri on the hand of the Iranian government and also explained the culture and language similarity between the Azeri population in the Republic of South Azerbaijan and other Turkic Estates.
The meeting also has covered the discussion of the election of management committee, representative’s committees, Auit committee and Nevruz celebration committee. The Turkic Forum event was extremely fruitful and beneficial for all the participants and considered as a stepping stone for bring all Turkic spoken people together and working as team under one umbrella. The goal and the objective of the Turkic forum can be fully utilized for lobbying for the cultural and political right for Turkic people whom are residents in the United Kingdom.
The established Turkic forum would greatly enhance the integration of the Turkish into the British society especially by contributing with a rich Turkish culture from various Turkic countries.
Mofak Salman Kerkuklu
ireland