Turkish Forum

Tag: Wikileaks

  • First the Leaks, Then the Dark Theories

    First the Leaks, Then the Dark Theories

    By MARC CHAMPION

    ISTANBUL—In Turkey and beyond, the release of U.S. diplomatic cables on website WikiLeaks has sparked a round of conspiracy theories.

    Turkish leaders appear convinced that state actors, in particular the U.S. itself or Israel—rather than Julian Assange of WikiLeaks—are behind the release of U.S. State Department cables, whose contents have embarrassed leaders around the globe.

    The skepticism about WikiLeaks’ independence is widespread and appears to be rooted in sheer disbelief that the world’s most powerful nation can’t stop its secrets from spilling onto the Internet. That sentiment pairs with a willingness to believe the worst of Israel. Neither is limited to Turkey.

    “Undoubtedly, the Western governments and the Zionist regime were involved,” said Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad earlier this week.

    A Timeline of WikiLeaks

    Key releases, legal battles and other significant moments in the history of the website and its founder, Julian Assange.

    View Interactive

    Highlights from Leaked U.S. Cables

    Read quotes from some of the leaked documents.

    More photos and interactive graphics

    Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered up on CNN’s Larry King Live that “experts” believe WikiLeaks is being deliberately “inflated” by others, to be used for political purposes at a later date.

    “Assange clearly has very well-informed high-level protectors who aren’t for the first time ‘leaking’ strictly secret documents to him by the ton. There is no doubt that these protectors have their own, far from altruistic, goals,” wrote the official Rossiskaya Gazeta on Thursday, surmising that U.S. officials were trying to revive a “rusted-through American bureaucratic machine.”

    “It could be Barack Obama himself,” the newspaper said.

    “No one in the United States government with a brain in their head wanted to see this happen,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. “This is a crime, not grand strategy. We will work through it, but it has done substantial damage.”

    Turkish conspiracy theorists have long speculated that Israel is seeking to get rid of an Islamic-leaning Turkish government that has turned sharply against its former ally. The alleged Israeli goal, these people say, is to replace the Justice and Development party’s rule with a more friendly Turkish regime.

    The WikiLeaks documents include reports of widespread corruption among government ministers, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family, which opposition leaders have sought to highlight, triggering a furious response from the prime minister.

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul started the ball rolling earlier this week, when he said of the cable leakage: “I think it has a system. It seems that it has an aim.”

    Huseyin Celik, spokesman for the Justice and Development party, or AKP, said Wednesday that Israel was behind the document release. The evidence, he told reporters, was that “Israel is very pleased” and was so quick to say it had nothing to fear.

    “How did they know that?” Mr. Celik asked, adding that “the main goal of these leaks was to weaken the Turkish government.”

    The Israeli Embassy in Ankara issued a statement Thursday denying any role in the WikiLeaks release of some 250,000 documents.

    Some Turkish newspaper columnists see more complex forces at work. It’s a plot by a global “deep state,” a kind of rogue organization within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that aims to weaken President Barack Obama, reshape the geopolitical playing field in Europe and the Middle East and whip Turkey into line, according to a Thursday column by Samill Tayyar of the religious conservative Star newspaper.

    Comments from newspaper readers suggest the conspiracy theories are widely believed. “This has been prepared by the U.S. and Israel, it is one way to start the World War III from the Middle East by setting the Muslim countries against each other,” said one reader of Hurriyet, the daily paper of Turkey’s secularist establishment.

    Not everyone is buying it, though. “Turkish AKP Party Members reveal: ‘Israel is responsible for the extinction of the Dinosaurs,’” commented one reader on Mr. Celik’s claims, on Hurriyet’s English-language newspaper site.

    On Thursday, after returning from meeting other leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Kazakhstan, Mr. Gul appeared to have changed his tune.

    “I don’t believe much in these conspiracy theories,” he said on Turkey’s NTV television. “All of the documents have not been released yet, as far as I know, so maybe some will come out [about Israel] later.”

    —Gregory L. White in Moscow contributed to this article.

    Write to Marc Champion at [email protected]

    via First the Leaks, Then the Dark Theories – WSJ.com.

  • Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks and the End of U.S. ‘Diplomacy’

    Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks and the End of U.S. ‘Diplomacy’

    By Amy Goodman

    WikiLeaks is again publishing a trove of documents, in this case classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The whistle-blower website will gradually be releasing more than 250,000 of these documents in the coming months so that they can be analyzed and gain the attention they deserve. The cables are internal, written communications among U.S. embassies around the world and also to the U.S. State Department. WikiLeaks described the leak as “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain [giving] an unprecedented insight into U.S. government foreign activities.”

    Critics argue, as they did with earlier leaks of secret documents regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, that lives will be lost as a result. Rather, lives might actually be saved, since the way that the U.S. conducts diplomacy is now getting more exposure than ever—as is the apparent ease with which the U.S. government lives up (or down) to the adage used by pioneering journalist I.F. Stone: “Governments lie.”

    Take the case of Khaled El-Masri. El-Masri was snatched in Macedonia as part of the CIA’s secret extraordinary rendition program, in which people are taken by the U.S. government and sent to other countries, where they can be subjected to torture. He was held and tortured in a secret prison in Afghanistan for months before being dropped by the CIA on an isolated road in Albania, even though the CIA had long established that it had grabbed the wrong man. El-Masri, a German citizen, sought justice through German courts, and it looked like 13 CIA agents might be charged. Then the U.S. Embassy in Berlin stepped in, threatening, according to one cable, that “issuance of international arrest warrants would have a negative impact on our bilateral relationship.” No charges were ever filed in Germany, suggesting the diplomatic threat worked. The 13 agents are, however, still facing charges in Spain, where prosecutors enjoy some freedom from political pressures.

    Or so we thought. In fact, Spain figures prominently in the leaked documents as well. Among the cables is one from May 14, 2007, authored by Eduardo Aguirre, a conservative Cuban-American banker appointed U.S. ambassador to Spain by George W. Bush. Aguirre wrote: “For our side, it will be important to continue to raise the Couso case, in which three U.S. servicemen face charges related to the 2003 death of Spanish cameraman Jose Couso during the battle for Baghdad.”

    Couso was a young cameraman with the Spanish TV network Telecinco. He was filming from the balcony of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. Army tank fired on the hotel packed with journalists, killing Couso and a Reuters cameraman. Ambassador Aguirre was trying to quash the lawsuit brought by the Couso family in Spain.

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    The U.S. ambassador was also pressuring the Spanish government to drop a precedent-setting case against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. In that same memo, Aguirre writes, “The Deputy Justice Minister also said the GOS [government of Spain] strongly opposes a case brought against former Secretary Rumsfeld and will work to get it dismissed. The judge involved in that case has told us he has already started the process of dismissing the case.”

    These revelations are rocking the Spanish government, as the cables clearly show U.S. attempts to disrupt the Spanish justice system.

    Ambassador Aguirre told Spain’s El Pais newspaper several years ago, “I am George Bush’s plumber, I will solve all the problems George gives me.”

    In another series of cables, the U.S. State Department instructs its staff around the world and at the U.N. to spy on people, and, remarkably, to collect biometric information on diplomats. The cable reads, “Data should include e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA and iris scans.”

    WikiLeaks is continuing its partnership with a global group of media outlets: Britain’s The Guardian, El Pais, The New York Times, German magazine Der Spiegel and France’s Le Monde. David Leigh, investigations editor of The Guardian, told me, “We haven’t seen anything yet,” with literally almost a quarter-million cables still not publicly revealed.

    A renowned political analyst and linguist, MIT professor Noam Chomsky helped Daniel Ellsberg, America’s premier whistle-blower, release the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. I asked Chomsky about the latest cables released by WikiLeaks. “What this reveals,” he reflected, “is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.”

    Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

    Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

    © 2010 Amy Goodman

    Distributed by King Features Syndicate

    via Amy Goodman: WikiLeaks and the End of U.S. ‘Diplomacy’ – Truthdig.

  • Erdogan Vents Fury at Cable Claims

    Erdogan Vents Fury at Cable Claims

    By MARC CHAMPION

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    ISTANBUL—Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey suggested Wednesday the U.S should punish diplomats who reported claims in leaked State Department cables that he and his family are corrupt, and said he planned to take legal action against them.

    In a sometimes furious televised address at the start of an investment conference in Ankara, Mr. Erdogan said, “My friends in the judiciary and we are working to do what is necessary about these diplomats. We spoke to the U.S. They did apologize, but it is not enough. The U.S. should do what is necessary about these diplomats.”

    “Those who smear us will be crushed under their accusations; they will end, disappear,” Mr. Erdogan said, adding that one person who previously claimed he made $1 billion in kickbacks while he was mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s was now awaiting trial as a member of an alleged terrorist organization. The group, known as Ergenekon, is accused of attempting to topple the government, among other crimes.

    “I don’t have a single kurus in Swiss banks. If you prove this, I will resign. But will you stay in your posts?” he said. A kurus is a hundredth of a Turkish lira.

    A senior aide to Mr. Erdogan clarified that lawyers from the justice ministry were examining the feasibility of suing under international, U.S. and Turkish law.

    The decision to seek legal action after first playing down the cables and attacking the credibility of WikiLeaks appears to have been triggered by domestic politics ahead of elections next June, and suggests the leaks could have continued fallout for U.S. diplomacy. Opposition party leaders are demanding that Mr. Erdogan and his government answer the claims of widespread government corruption in the cables.

    Among cables published so far regarding Turkey is one dated Dec. 30, 2004, from former U.S. ambassador Eric Edelman, in which he writes about widespread corruption, naming several ministers from the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

    “We have heard from two contacts that Erdogan has eight accounts in Swiss banks; his explanations that his wealth comes from the wedding presents guests gave his son and that a Turkish businessman is paying the educational expenses of all four Erdogan children in the U.S. purely altruistically are lame.”

    Mr. Edelman retired from the State Department last year and is now a nonresident scholar at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Contacted through a spokeswoman, he declined to comment on Mr. Erdogan’s remarks or on the WikiLeaks cables Wednesday.

    In another cable earlier in 2004, Mr. Edelman reported claims “that have never been proved” that Mr. Erdogan had made his fortune by accepting kickbacks as mayor of Istanbul and that he “directly” benefited from the privatization of the state oil-refinery company Tupras.

    An unsigned February 2002 cable report named Mr. Erdogan’s brother Mustafa and several close friends of the prime minister as beneficiaries in an Iranian natural-gas pipeline deal. The deal went to a joint venture in which the Turkish party would be a little-known company called Som Petrol.

    Mr. Erdogan on Wednesday also singled out a cable that accused his son-in-law Sadik Albayrak of embezzlement. “The man doesn’t know about anything else but writing; they made him a builder,” Mr. Erdogan said.

    Addressing opposition leaders, Mr. Erdogan said it wasn’t for him to disprove such claims, but for the people who made or repeated them to prove them. He accused the U.S. ambassador, apparently Mr. Edelman, of bearing a grudge and suggested there was jealousy involved at Turkey’s success in securing popularity and influence in the Middle East, Kosovo and other countries.

    “If you respect your country and yourself, you will not embrace smears thrown out by foreigners at the prime minister of this country,” Mr. Erdogan said. “An honorable media organization would stand up and ask… ‘Honorary Prime Minister, is there something like this. If there is, we will research it.’ But if you take action without asking, it would be immorality and worthlessness.”

    Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, responded swiftly on Wednesday. “If [Mr. Erdogan] is saying, ‘I cannot call the U.S. to account, thus I should be angry at the opposition party instead’, that is not right,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said. “This is a serious claim… It is said that he has eight different accounts in Swiss banks. Somebody has to answer this.”

    Write to Marc Champion at [email protected]

    via Erdogan Vents Fury at Cable Claims – WSJ.com.

  • 2010-11-29: Cablegate: Journalists in defence of WikiLeaks [Update 1]

    2010-11-29: Cablegate: Journalists in defence of WikiLeaks [Update 1]

    John Kampfner, The Independent / Index on Censorship: Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority

    “All governments have a legitimate right to protect national security. This should be a specific, and closely scrutinised, area of policy. Most of our secrecy rules are designed merely to protect politicians and officials from embarrassment. Documents are habitually over-classified for this purpose. The previous government made desperate attempts to stop legal evidence of its collusion in torture from reaching the public. Ministers argued, speciously, that this was to protect the “special intelligence relationship” with Washington. It will be intriguing to see how much information is allowed to be published when Sir Peter Gibson begins his official inquiry. Precedent suggests little grounds for optimism.

    As with all free speech, as with Wikileaks, context is key. It is vital to know when governments collude in torture or other illegal acts. It is important to know when they say one thing in private (about a particular world leader) and do quite another in public. It is perturbing to know that aid agencies may have been used by the military, particularly in Afghanistan, to help Nato forces to “win hearts and minds”.

    These questions, and more, are vital for the democratic debate. The answers inevitably cause embarrassment. That too is essential for a healthy civil society. Good journalists and editors should be capable of separating the awkward from the damaging.”
    Read more

    Simon Jenkins, The Guardian: The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment

    “The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.[…]

    Perhaps we can now see how catastrophe unfolds when there is time to avert it, rather than having to await a Chilcot report after the event. If that is not in the public’s interest, I fail to see what is.

    Clearly, it is for governments, not journalists, to protect public secrets. Were there some overriding national jeopardy in revealing them, greater restraint might be in order. There is no such overriding jeopardy, except from the policies themselves as revealed. Where it is doing the right thing, a great power should be robust against embarrassment.”
    Read more

    Marc Cooper, The Nation: Why Not WikiLeaks?

    “I don’t know about you… but I want to read more, not less, about this. Indeed, an editorial in Monday’s Guardian reads in part: “ Before US government officials point accusing fingers at others, they might first have the humility to reflect on their own role in scattering ‘secrets’ around a global intranet.”

    If we had less government lying and secrecy during the run up to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, there might be a few more million living and breathing. I think that sort of benefit outweighs the quirks of Wikileaks.”
    Read more

    Nick Davies, The Guardian

    Nick Davies posted the following messages on Twitter:

    “US warned that today’s Wikileaks stories would risk “countless lives”.https://www.ft.com/content/4a5fae60-faac-11df-b576-00144feab49a. That was a lie.” (link)

    “Wikileaks stories are all tales we would have published before – if official secrecy had not concealed them.” (link)

    Brad Friedman, independent journalist: In Wake of WikiLeaks Cable Release, JFK, Ellsberg’s Remarks on ‘Secrecy’, ‘Covert Ops’ Worth Noting

    “As this information becomes public, and as the U.S. Government continues to scramble to mitigate what the White House is calling today a “reckless and dangerous” leak, condemning it “in the strongest terms” as an alleged threat to national security, it’s worth keeping in mind, for valuable perspective, what the 1970s legendary “Pentagon Papers” whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg wrote in an op/ed for The BRAD BLOG in early 2008…

    ‘Many, if not most, covert operations deserve to be disclosed by a free press. They are often covert not only because they are illegal but because they are wildly ill-conceived and reckless. “Sensitive” and “covert” are often synonyms for “half-assed,” “idiotic,” and “dangerous to national security,” as well as “criminal.”‘[…]

    It would seem this “democracy”, at least, has, in fact, “matched” exactly that conspiracy described as abhorrent by JFK. And we have all, collectively, allowed it to happen — whether we had ever hoped or wished to.”
    Read more

    Ian Dunt, Politics.co.uk: The hypocrisy of the media attack on Wikileaks

    “The traditional media has become so toothless it is reduced to attacking Wikileaks for doing its job properly.[…]

    In every case, the western media reacted by, yes, covering the story, but pushing the narrative of an irresponsible outlet beset by anti-Americanism to the fore. Of course, no-one was calling Assange irresponsible when Wikileaks released “Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances”, which won the 2009 Amnesty International UK New Media Award.[…]

    It’s an indictment of the British media that its response to these leaks is one of condemnation rather than troubled inner scrutiny. Its general outlook is so conservative, its relationship with the establishment so cushy and its interests so scurrilous that it now condemns those who do their jobs properly. But perhaps there’s something else. Wikileaks represents merely the birth-pangs of a new media, one that cuts out the middle man to reveal the documents in full. Perhaps the media feels things moving away from it, to a world of citizen journalists and information freedom.

    That’s an eventuality which would be far less likely if the traditional media did its constitutional duty and held the powerful to account.”
    Read more

    Javier Moreno, director of El País

    “Let us say, as modestly as we can, that Wikileaks has allowed us to do great journalism. Journalism that changes history is needed by the citizens more than ever in a world where states and politicians are increasingly trying to hide information from their societies.”

    Read more

  • WikiLeaks: Heated debate in Germany over nuclear weapons on its soil

    WikiLeaks: Heated debate in Germany over nuclear weapons on its soil

    Washington (CNN) — A proposal to reduce nuclear weapons highlighted the debate within the German government about when and how to get rid of nuclear weapons on its soil, a new WikiLeaks document shows.

    Its release also reveals the presence of nuclear weapons in several European countries and Turkey, information not normally released by NATO.

    During a meeting with two U.S. diplomats, German National Security Adviser Christoph Heusgen expressed his reservations about the German government coalition’s proposal to remove all tactical nuclear weapons from Germany, according to a November 2009 U.S. State Department cable published by WikiLeaks.

    In February, five countries — Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Norway — sent a joint letter to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, signed by their respective foreign ministers, calling for a debate about NATO’s nuclear policy.

    German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has called for the removal of all nuclear weapons from German soil. However, Heusgen distanced the German government from the proposal they had signed onto, claiming that “this had been forced upon them by FM Westerwelle,” the cable said.

    Heusgen told the U.S. diplomats that “from his perspective, it made no sense to unilaterally withdraw ‘the 20’ tactical nuclear weapons still in Germany while Russia maintains ‘thousands’ of them. It would only be worth it if both sides drew down,” the U.S. cable said.

    U.S. Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Philip H. Gordon responded by noting the importance of considering the potential consequences of a German proposal before moving forward. The cable continues, “a withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Germany and perhaps from Belgium and the Netherlands could make it very difficult politically for Turkey to maintain its own stockpile, even though it was still convinced of the need to do so.”

    Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, says the cable shows the intense deliberations going on in the German political process.

    “The new in that is that it shows the battle going on inside the German government between the foreign minister and other elements of the government on this issue of how to push this issue of tactical nuclear weapons within the alliance.”

    The Nuclear Threat Initiative defines tactical or nonstrategic nuclear weapons as “short-range weapons” which can include land-based missiles with a range of less than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles) and air- and sea-launched weapons with a range of less than 600 kilometers (about 370 miles). According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the United States has 500 tactical nuclear weapons in its arsenal, of which approximately 200 are deployed in Europe.

    The cable does not identify the origin of the nuclear weapons in any of the four countries, but the United States or NATO have military bases in all of them. According to Kristensen, these weapons are American. He points out that the British do not have tactical nuclear weapons, and the French keep their tactical nuclear weapons on their home soil.

    “We don’t comment on the placements of nuclear weapons,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu told CNN. “As a matter of policy, we don’t comment on leaked confidential documents of any sort. We think diplomats should be able to talk to each other in confidence, because otherwise there is a risk that tensions can get out of control.”

    As for Heusgen’s reference to “the 20” weapons on his country’s soil, Kristensen says it is not clear whether he is actually confirming that amount of weapons, or if he is using the estimate in a report written by Kristensen in 2005, which was picked up by German media and government officials as part of the debate. “Very few people in the German government know the exact number of weapons, and it’s not clear to me that the national security adviser would know.”

    On the coupling of German and Russian denuclearization proposed by Heusgen, Kristensen says that would make very little sense. “It would be very strange to see formal linking of very small number of weapons in Germany with the large inventory of tactical nuclear weapons Russia has in general. It’s apples and oranges. Russian tactical nuclear weapons, their location and their mission is not linked to whether there are nuclear weapons in Germany.”

    Kristensen estimates that Belgium, Netherlands and Germany each have between 10 and 20 tactical nuclear weapons on their soil, and there are 60 to 70 in Turkey.

    via WikiLeaks: Heated debate in Germany over nuclear weapons on its soil – CNN.com.

  • Turkey’s prime minister will sue over diplomat’s remarks

    Turkey’s prime minister will sue over diplomat’s remarks

    (CNN) — As the fallout continues from the release of thousands of diplomatic cables on the WikiLeaks website, Turkey’s prime minister is threatening to file a lawsuit over comments made about him in one of the messages by the U.S. ambassador to his country.

    Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he plans to sue over remarks from then-Ambassador Eric Edelman in 2004 suggesting that the prime minister concealed his wealth in Swiss bank accounts. Visibly angry, Erdogan told an audience in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday that he wanted the U.S. administration to take action against the diplomats who had “slandered” him.

    “The United States should ask its diplomats to make an explanation because no diplomat can accuse a country with slanders and misinterpretations,” he said.

    “This is the United States’ problem, not ours… Those who have slandered us will be crushed under these claims, will be finished and will disappear,” Erdogan said later, according to Turkish media reports.

    In a cable dated December 12, 2004, the U.S. ambassador in Ankara at the time wrote a less-than-flattering profile of Erdogan, who had recently become prime minister amid anxiety among Western governments about his “Islamist tendencies.”

    The note sent to Washington by Edelman said the new prime minister’s “hunger for power reveals itself in a sharp authoritarian style and deep distrust of others.” Erdogan’s advisors were characterized as “sycophantic (but contemptuous)” in the missive. The cable also spoke of the prime minister’s “susceptibility to Islamist theories.”

    “He indulges in pronounced pro-Sunni prejudices and in emotional reactions that prevent the development of coherent, practical domestic or foreign policies,” the cable added.

    CNN calls to Edelman for comment were not immediately returned.

    The cable then discussed the alleged bank accounts. While apparently offering no evidence they existed, it continued: “We have heard from two contacts that Erdogan has eight accounts in Swiss banks; his explanations that his wealth comes from the wedding presents guests gave his son and that a Turkish businessman is paying the educational expenses of all four Erdogan children in the U.S. purely altruistically are lame.”

    Erdogan vowed to resign if it could be shown he had bank accounts in Switzerland.

    “I don’t have a God’s penny in Swiss banks to prove. Now, I am telling the leader of the opposition and others, if such a thing would be proven, I would not stay in this position, I would not remain a parliamentarian.”

    via Turkey’s prime minister will sue over diplomat’s remarks – CNN.com.