Turkish Forum

Tag: CIA

  • US intelligence rivalry flares over British connection

    US intelligence rivalry flares over British connection

    John Stokes

    spThe CIA station in London is at the center of a bitter fight between different branches of the US intelligence community in Washington DC.

    For years, the CIA has had the right to appoint the station chief who runs US intelligence operations in London and liaises with MI6 and GCHQ. Now, the National Security Agency is arguing that they and not the CIA should run intelligence operations in the UK because they have more people on the ground and the work they do has far greater value to both countries.

    NSA have found useful allies in both Admiral Denny Blair, the Director of National Intelligence and General Jim Jones, the National Security Adviser who have been very receptive to the argument that intelligence form should follow function and reflect the realities of the 21st century.

    Last month, Blair wrote a memo to US intelligence chiefs saying that in future the DNI would appoint Heads of Stations overseas. It was a clear directive from the man who runs all US intelligence and is appointed by the President and Congress to do so. However, Leon Panetta, who heads the CIA and is the former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, wrote his own letter to top CIA officials saying they could disregard Blair’s note.

    Panetta is a famous Washington bruiser and is well known for his take no prisoners style but such a confrontation has infuriated Blair who sees it as a direct challenge to his authority and battle has been joined. For once, Panetta may have misjudged the political winds as Congress is pushing hard for real intelligence reform and the CIA has fewer friends and less influence on Capitol Hill these days.

    It is no coincidence that those pushing for change in the Obama administration have a military background and that the NSA is run by one of their own, General Keith Alexander. It’s also true that for decades NSA has chafed under CIA’s apparent seniority and the two agencies have been arch rivals for generations. As recently as the Bush administration a major joint operation between CIA and NSA which all involved agreed was vital to the future of US security was stopped after a senior CIA official refused to implement the project which he thought gave unnecessary influence to NSA.

    The information revolution has placed further strains on the relationship. Twenty years ago, there was a clearer division of labour with NSA intercepting data on the move (email, faxes, phone calls) while the CIA targeted data at rest (documents, burglaring buildings). But recently the CIA has made a major push into the data gathering business arguing that the ones and zeros of the computer age are data and thus are fair game whether at rest or on the move.

    There are thousands of Americans based in Britain who work for NSA and work closely with GCHQ. By comparison, the CIA station, based in the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, is important but a mere shadow of the NSA’s presence. Reality on the ground suggests that NSA will win this fight.

    Spectator

    10th June 2009

  • Osama bin Elvis

    Osama bin Elvis

    Cover Story

    Where is Osama Bin Laden?

    By Angelo M. Codevilla from the March 2009 issue

    All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama bin Laden. But tell that to the CIA and all the other misconceptualizers of the War on Terror.

    Seven years after Osama bin Laden’s last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence for Elvis’s presence among us than for his. Hence there is reason to ask whether the paradigm of Osama bin Laden as terrorism’s deus ex machina and of al Qaeda as the prototype of terrorism may be an artifact of our Best and Brightest’s imagination, and whether investment in this paradigm has kept our national security establishment from thinking seriously about our troubles’ sources. So let us take a fresh look at the fundamentals.

    Dead or Alive?

    Negative evidence alone compels the conclusion that Osama is long since dead. Since October 2001, when Al Jazeera’s Tayseer Alouni interviewed him, no reputable person reports having seen him—not even after multiple-blind journeys through intermediaries. The audio and video tapes alleged to be Osama’s never convinced impartial observers. The guy just does not look like Osama. Some videos show him with a Semitic aquiline nose, while others show him with a shorter, broader one. Next to that, differences between colors and styles of beard are small stuff.

    Nor does the tapes’ Osama sound like Osama. In 2007 Switzerland’s Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which does computer voice recognition for bank security, compared the voices on 15 undisputed recordings of Osama with the voices on 15 subsequent ones attributed to Osama, to which they added two by native Arab speakers who had trained to imitate him and were reading his writings. All of the purported Osama recordings (with one falling into a gray area) differed clearly from one another as well as from the genuine ones. By contrast, the CIA found all the recordings authentic. It is hard to imagine what methodology might support this conclusion.

    Also in 2007, Professor Bruce Lawrence, who heads Duke University’s religious studies program, argued in a book on Osama’s messages that their increasingly secular language is inconsistent with Osama’s Wahhabism. Lawrence noted as well that the Osama figure in the December 2001 video, which many have taken as his assumption of responsibility for 9/11, wears golden rings—decidedly un-Wahhabi. He also writes with the wrong hand. Lawrence concluded that the messages are fakes, and not very good ones. The CIA has judged them all good.

    Above all, whereas Elvis impersonators at least sing the King’s signature song, “You ain’t nutin’ but a hound dawg,” the words on the Osama tapes differ substantively from what the real Osama used to say—especially about the most important matter. On September 16, 2001, on Al Jazeera, Osama said of 9/11: “I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation.” Again, in the October interview with Tayseer Alouni, he limited his connection with 9/11 to ideology: “If they mean, or if you mean, that there is a link as a result of our incitement, then it is true. We incite…” But in the so-called “confession video” that the CIA found in December, the Osama figure acts like the chief conspirator. The fact that the video had been made for no self-evident purpose except perhaps to be found by the Americans should have raised suspicion. Its substance, the celebratory affirmation of a responsibility for 9/11 that Osama had denied, should also have weighed against the video’s authenticity. Why would he wait to indict himself until after U.S. forces and allies had secured Afghanistan? But the CIA acted as if it had caught Osama red-handed.

    The CIA should also have taken seriously the accounts of Osama’s death. On December 26, 2001, Fox News interviewed a Taliban source who claimed that he had attended Osama’s funeral, along with some 30 associates. The cause of death, he said, had been pulmonary infection. The New York Times on July 11, 2002, reported the consensus of a story widespread in Pakistan that Osama had succumbed the previous year to his long-standing nephritis. Then, Benazir Bhutto—as well connected as anyone with sources of information on the Afghan-Pakistani border—mentioned casually in a BBC interview that Osama had been murdered by his associates. Murder is as likely as natural death. Osama’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is said to have murdered his own predecessor, Abdullah Azzam, Osama’s original mentor. Also, because Osama’s capture by the Americans would have endangered everyone with whom he had ever associated, any and all intelligence services who had ever worked with him had an interest in his death.

    New Osama, Real Osama

    We do not know what happened to Osama. But whatever happened, the original one, the guy who looked and sounded like a spoiled Saudi kid turned ideologue, is no more. The one who exists in the tapes is different: he is the world’s terror master, endowed with inexplicable influence. In short, whoever is making the post-November 2001 Osama tapes is pretending to far greater power than Osama ever claimed, much less exercised.

    The real Osama bin Laden, like the real al Qaeda over which he presided, was never as important as reports from Arab (especially Saudi) intelligence services led the CIA to believe. Osama’s (late) role in Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet resistance was to bring in a little money. Arab fighters in general, and particularly the few Osama brought, fought rarely and badly. In war, one Afghan is worth many Arabs. In 1990 Osama told Saudi regent Abdullah that his mujahideen could stop Saddam’s invasion of the kingdom. When Abdullah waved him away in favor of a half-million U.S. troops, Osama turned dissident, enough to have to move to Sudan, where he stayed until 1996 hatching sterile anti-Saudi plots until forced to move his forlorn band to Afghanistan.

    There is a good reason why neither Osama nor al Qaeda appeared on U.S. intelligence screens until 1998. They had done nothing noteworthy. Since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, however, and especially after director of Central Intelligence George Tenet imputed responsibility for 9/11 to Osama “game, set, and match,” the CIA described him as terrorism’s prime mover. It refused to countenance the possibility that Osama’s associates might have been using him and his organization as a flag of convenience. As U.S. forces were taking over Afghanistan in 2001, the CIA was telling Time and Newsweek that it expected to find the high-tech headquarters from which Osama controlled terrorist activities in 50 countries. None existed. In November 2008, without factual basis and contrary to reason, the CIA continued to describe him and his organization as “the most clear and present danger to the United States.” It did not try to explain how this could be while, it said, Osama is “largely isolated from the day to day operations of the organization he nominally heads.” What organization?

    Axiom and Opposite

    Why such a focus on an organization that was never large, most of whose known associates have long since been killed or captured, and whose assets the CIA does not even try to catalogue? The CIA’s official explanation, that al Qaeda has “metastasized” by spreading its expertise, is an empty metaphor. But pursuant to it, the U.S. government accepted the self-designation as “al Qaeda” of persons fighting for Sunni-Baathist interests in Iraq, and has pinned the label gratuitously on sundry high-profile terrorists while acknowledging that their connection to Osama and Co. may be emotional at most. But why such gymnastics in the face of Osama’s incontrovertible irrelevance? Because focusing on Osama and al Qaeda affirms a CIA axiom dating from the Cold War, an axiom challenged during the Reagan years but that has been U.S. policy since 1993, namely: terrorism is the work of “rogue individuals and groups” that operate despite state authority. According to this axiom, the likes of Osama run rings around the intelligence services of Arab states—just like the Cold War terrorists who came through Eastern Europe to bomb in Germany and Italy and to shoot Pope John Paul II supposedly acted despite Bulgarian intelligence, despite East Germany’s Stasi, despite the KGB. This axiom is dear to many in the U.S. government because it leads logically to working with the countries whence terrorists come rather than to treating them as enemies.

    But what if terrorism were (as Thomas Friedman put it) “what states want to happen or let happen”? What if, in the real world, infiltrators from intelligence services—the professionals—use the amateur terrorists rather than the other way around? What is the logical consequence of noting the fact that the terrorist groups that make a difference on planet Earth—such as Hamas and Hezbollah, the PLO, Colombia’s FARC—are extensions of, respectively, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and Venezuela? It is the negation of the U.S. government’s favorite axiom. It means that when George W. Bush spoke, and when Barack Obama speaks, of America being “at war” against “extremism” or “extremists” they are either being stupid or acting stupid to avoid dealing with the nasty fact that many governments wage indirect warfare.

    In short, insisting on Osama’s supposed mastery of al Qaeda, and on equating terrorism with al Qaeda, is official U.S. policy because it forecloses questions about the role of states, and makes it possible to indict as warmongers whoever raises such questions. Osama’s de facto irrelevance for seven years, however, has undermined that policy’s intellectual legitimacy. How much longer can presidents or directors of the CIA wave the spectra of Osama and al Qaeda before people laugh at them?

    An Intellectual House of Cards

    Questioning osama’s relevance to today’s terrorism leads naturally to asking how relevant he ever was, and who might be more relevant. That in turn quickly shows how flimsy are the factual foundations on which rest the U.S. government’s axioms about the “war on terror.” Consider: We know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) planned and carried out 9/11. But there is no independent support for KSM’s claim that he acted at Osama’s direction and under his supervision. On the contrary, we know for sure that the expertise and the financing for 9/11 came from KSM’s own group (the U.S. government has accepted but to my knowledge not verified that the group’s core is a biological family of Baluchs). This group carried out the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa and every other act for which al Qaeda became known. The KSM group included the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings Abdul Rahman Yasin, who came from, returned to, and vanished in Iraq, as well as Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bombing, who came to the U.S. from Iraq on an Iraqi passport and was known to his New York collaborators as “Rashid the Iraqi.” This group had planned the bombing of U.S. airliners over the Pacific in 1995. The core members are non-Arabs. They had no history of religiosity (and the religiosity they now display is unconvincing). They were not creatures of Osama. Only in 1996 did the group come to Osama’s no-account band, and make it count.

    In life, as in math, you must judge the function |of a factor in any equation by factoring it out and seeing if the equation still works. Factor out Osama. Chances are, 9/11 still happens. Factor out al Qaeda too. Maybe 9/11 still happens. The other bombing plots sure happened without it. But if you factor out the KSM group, surely there is no 9/11, and without the KSM group, there is no way al Qaeda would have become a household word.

    Who, precisely, are KSM and his reputed nephews? That is an interesting question to which we do not know the answer, and are not about to find out. Ramzi Yousef was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing after a trial that focused on his guilt and that abstracted from his associations. Were our military tribunal to accede to KSM’s plea of guilty, he would avoid any trial at all. Moreover, the sort of trial that would take place before the tribunal would focus on proving guilt rather than on getting at the whole truth. It would not feature the cross-examination of witnesses, the substantive proving and impeachment of evidence, and the exploration of alternative explanations of events. But real trials try all sides. Do we need such things given that KSM confessed? Yes. There is no excuse for confusing confessions with truth, especially confessions in which the prisoners confirm our agencies’ prejudices.

    The excuse for limiting the public scrutiny of evidence is the alleged need to protect intelligence sources. But my experience, as well as that of others who have been in a position to probe such claims, is that almost invariably they protect our intelligence agencies’ incompetence and bureaucratic interests. Anyhow, the public’s interest in understanding what it’s up against should override all others.

    Understanding the Past, Dealing With the Future

    Focusing on Osama bin Elvis is dangerous to America’s security precisely because it continues to substitute in our collective mind the soft myth that terrorism is the work of romantic rogues for the hard reality that it can happen only because certain states want it to happen or let it happen. KSM and company may not have started their careers as agents of Iraqi intelligence, or they may have quit the Iraqis and worked for others, or maybe they just worked for themselves. But surely they were a body unto themselves. As such they fit Osama’s description of those responsible for 9/11 as “individuals with their own motivation” far better than they fit the CIA’s description of them as Osama’s tools.

    More important, focusing on Osama and al Qaeda distorts our understanding of what is happening in Afghanistan. The latter-day Taliban are fielding forces better paid and armed than any in the region except America’s. Does anyone suggest seriously that Osama or al-Zawahiri are providing the equipment, the money, or the moral incentives? Such amounts of money can come only from the super wealthy of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The equipment can come only through dealers who work at the sufferance of states, and can reach the front only through Pakistan by leave of Pakistani authorities. Moreover, the moral incentives for large-scale fighting in Pushtunistan can come only as part of the politics of Pushtun identity. Hence sending troops to Afghanistan to fight Pushtuns financed by Saudis, supported by Pakistanis, and disposing of equipment purchased throughout the world, with the objective of “building an Afghan nation” capable of preventing Osama and al Qaeda from messing up the world from their mountain caves, is an errand built on intellectual self-indulgence.

    Intellectual Authority

    The CIA had as much basis for deeming Osama the world’s terror master “game, set, and match” in 2001 as it had in 2003 for verifying as a “slam dunk” the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and as it had in 2007 for determining that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program. Mutatis mutandis, it was on such bases that the CIA determined in 1962 that the Soviets would not put missiles in Cuba; that the CIA was certain from 1963 to 1978 that the USSR would not build the first strike missile force that it was building before its very eyes; that the CIA convinced Bush 41 that the Soviet Union was not falling apart and that he should help hold it together; that the CIA assured the U.S. government in 1990 that Iraq would not invade Kuwait, and in 1996 that neither India nor Pakistan would test nuclear weapons. In these and countless other instances, the CIA has provided the US government and the media with authoritative bases for denying realities over which America was tripping.

    The force of the CIA’s judgments, its authority, has always come from the congruence between its prejudices and those of America’s ruling class. When you tell people what they want to hear, you don’t have to be too careful about premises, facts, and conclusions. Our problem, in short, is not the CIA’s mentality so much as the unwillingness of persons in government and the “attentive public” to exercise intellectual due diligence about international affairs. Osama bin Laden’s role may be as good a place as any to start.

    Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a senior editor of The American Spectator, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 presidential transition report on intelligence. He is the author of The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility.

    Source:  The American Spectator, March 2009

  • 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