Oops, Sorry: FBI E-Mail Snooping "A Technical Glitch"

Today's New York Times reports that the FBI's Engineering Research Facility (ERF) gained access to e-mail messages from an entire computer network rather than the single e-mail address approved by the secretive FISA court.

Under color of a "national security investigation" the incident was described as "a technical glitch" and "apparent miscommunication" with an unnamed internet provider.

Doubtless the guilty party is one of the telecom giants seeking retroactive immunity via BushCo's "Protect America Act" -- an onerous piece of corporatist flotsam solely designed to alleviate industry anxieties that outraged citizens would actually defend their rights through the courts.

Claiming that Bureau spies noticed a "surge" in the e-mail activity they were monitoring, the FBI alleges the provider "had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized."

Times' reporter Eric Lichtblau avers,

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government's wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

Nor would we expect there to be any "discussion," let alone a "fierce debate" in Congress when it comes to protecting Americans' fourth amendment rights. Treated as mere "technical glitches" best left to "experts," our masters demand we change the channel and move along.

But we will not "move along" as we reflect here on earlier examples of FBI "technical glitches" -- or worse -- that led directly to the 9/11 attacks; the alleged trigger for the imposition of the Bush crime family's police state agenda and the "retroactive immunity" granted their Saudi and capitalist paramours:

From the Center for Cooperative Research's Complete 9/11 Timeline:

January 15-Early February 2000: Suspected Advance Man Helps 9/11 Hijackers Settle in San Diego
  
Hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar arrive in Los Angeles and stay there for two weeks. Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected al-Qaeda advance man and possible Saudi agent, arrives in Los Angeles and visits the Saudi Consulate there. According to Newsweek, "Law-enforcement officials believe al-Bayoumi may [have] a closed-door meeting with Fahad al Thumairy, a member of the consulate's Islamic and Culture Affairs Section." [NEWSWEEK, 7/28/2003] (In March 2003, al Thumairy is stripped of his diplomatic visa and barred from entry to the US, reportedly because of suspected links to terrorism. [WASHINGTON POST, 11/23/2003]

The FBI's "best source" in San Diego says that al-Bayoumi "must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power." A former top FBI official working on the al-Bayoumi investigation claims: "We firmly believed that he had knowledge [of the 9/11 plot], and that his meeting with them that day was more than coincidence." [NEWSWEEK, 7/28/2003]

Former senator Bob Graham (D-FL), whose Congressional investigation was blocked by the Bush regime and the FBI to protect "ally" Saudi Arabia, informs us:

The FBI did not even canvass its own counterterrorism sources, among whom was the informant in San Diego who knew both of the men [Alhazmi and Almihdhar] and had housed one of them. Had the Bureau simply sent a directive to all its field offices, telling them to check the two names with their sources, it is quite possible they would have come across vital information and been able to interdict the attack. Thus was lost the twelfth such opportunity. (Intelligence Matters, New York: Random House, 2004, p. 75) [emphasis added]

Was an electronic "driftnet" necessary prior to 9/11? After all, a Bureau mole had penetrated the plot and yet, the FBI failed to act. Why?

Investigative journalists Greg Palast and David Pallister writing in The Guardian tell us:

FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.

FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with which they were linked.

The FBI file, marked Secret and coded 199, which means a case involving national security, records that Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Washington, had originally had a file opened on him "because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth -- a suspected terrorist organisation".

But the FBI files were closed in 1996 apparently before any conclusions could be reached on either the Bin Laden brothers or the organisation itself. High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis".

They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan.

"There were particular investigations that were effectively killed." ("FBI claims Bin Laden inquiry was frustrated. Officials told to 'back off' Saudis before September 11," The Guardian, November 7, 2001)

I could continue with this line of inquiry but I think my point is clear. There were political reasons why pre-9/11 investigations were halted at the highest levels and they had nothing to do with preparing the ground for any alleged "inside job."

For reasons of state (read: unlimited profits for the oil multinationals and preparations for the coming invasion of Iraq) the gangsters occupying the White House could care less whether or not the Afghan-Arab database al-Qaeda would attack the American people. Why would they?

Before 9/11, the U.S. and NATO were utilizing their intelligence assets in the Balkans, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Bosnian al-Mujahid Brigade, as well as criminal syndicates and dodgy charities funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- allied with al-Qaeda and international drug trafficking networks -- for offensive action against neighboring Macedonia.

Is it any different today? The national security state's "Protect America Act" is an oxymoronic exercise in deceit and mendacity by propaganda specialists well-schooled in the black arts of deception. Commenting on the "unintentional" error on the part of its internet spies, FBI spokesman Michael Kortan told The New York Times, "The system worked exactly the way it's designed."

I couldn't agree more.

A Valentine's Day Gift for Boeing

Forget chocolate hearts and cute cards, on February 14, the Bush regime handed aerospace giant, The Boeing Company, an even better gift when U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose, California dismissed a lawsuit brought by victims of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" torture program against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen International Trip Planning.

Citing public and confidential statements filed by CIA Director Michael Hayden alleging that "proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations," Ware dismissed the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Ware claimed that "at the core of plaintiffs' case against defendant Jeppesen are 'allegations' of covert U.S. military or CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals -- clearly a subject matter which is a state secret," the San Francisco Chronicle tells us.

Despite massive documentary evidence, and the CIA's own admission of the program's existence in public testimony before Congress, once again, Bush consigliere's have resorted to the so-called "state secrets privilege" to deny victims of a U.S. Government program to "disappear" and torture alleged "terrorists" recourse to compensation under U.S. law.

Ben Wizner, the ACLU attorney representing the plaintiffs said he expects to appeal Ware's ruling. In a press release Wizner declared:

The court's decision allows the government to engage in torture, declare it a state secret, and thereby escape any legal scrutiny for its actions. Government officials are quite willing to discuss the CIA's detention and interrogation of other prisoners, most notably the six Guantánamo detainees charged this week with capital murder. Apparently, the government believes such activities are state secrets only when that claim will help the administration avoid accountability for illegal programs, but not when it will help seek the death penalty for alleged terrorists. Depriving torture victims of their day in court to prevent disclosure of information that the entire world already knows only compounds the brutal treatment our clients endured.

The ruling is more extraordinary, if you'll pardon the pun, given the fact that top managers of Jeppesen, a dodgy outfit headquartered in the San Jose Silicon Valley, boasted of the company's role in CIA black operations. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Sean Belcher, a technical writer newly hired by the firm in 2006 said,

...he attended a breakfast for new employees on Aug. 11, 2006, and heard a welcoming speech from Bob Overby, a company director. While describing Jeppesen's work, Belcher said, Overby told the employees, "We do all the extraordinary rendition flights." Later, he said, Overby added that these were "the torture flights," and explained, "Let's face it, some of these flights end up this way."

Belcher also quoted Overby as saying that the flights paid well and that the government spared no expense. Belcher said he quit his job five days later.

"The government spared no expense," words that should be carved in stone. Given the nature of the firm's criminal activities, its involvement in organizing CIA "ghost flights" -- kidnapping, illegal detention, torture -- a damning admission such as this by a company director should land Mr. Overby and the rest of Jeppesen's corporate pirates in a federal penitentiary if America were a normal country, which of course it isn't.

As the CIA's booking agent, Jeppesen, working with tiny charter airlines that are no more than Company cut-outs handle the logistical and navigational details for the torture flights, designing flight plans, obtaining flight clearance to fly over other countries, ground-crew arrangements, even hotel reservations for the pilots and the other facilitators of human rights abuse. As Boeing says on its website, "From Aachen to Zhengzhou, King Airs to 747s, Jeppesen has done it all."

On its website, Jeppesen International, in an Orwellian burst of chutzpah, declares:

Trust. The key ingredient in any International Trip Planning relationship. Just like the trust pilots place in Jeppesen's Worldwide Instrument Charting, you can count on caring, professional people who work with you personally to ensure your needs are met.

How were Khaled al-Masri's "needs met" by such "caring, professional people"?

Writing in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer tells us:

Masri, who is a Muslim, was arrested at the border while crossing from Serbia into Macedonia by bus. He has alleged in court papers that Macedonian authorities turned him over to a C.I.A. rendition team. Then, he said, masked figures stripped him naked, shackled him, and led him onto a Boeing 737 business jet. Flight plans prepared by Jeppesen show that from Skopje, Macedonia, the 737 flew to Baghdad, where it had military clearance to land, and then on to Kabul. On board, Masri has said, he was chained to the floor and injected with sedatives. After landing, he was put in the trunk of a car and driven to a building where he was placed in a dank cell. He spent the next four months there, under interrogation.

Jeppesen International Trip Planning: a "full-service" company for our post-9/11 world where neither laws nor human rights pose any obstacle to the naked exercise of state power.

U.S. Troops Raid Baghdad Headquarters of Iraq's Democratic, Secular Opposition

New York's World War 4 Report informs us that on February 12, U.S. occupation forces raided the headquarters of the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC), a democratic, secular alternative to the U.S. occupation and reactionary fundamentalist trends in that war-scarred nation.

Spearheaded by the radical Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and other left forces, the IFC was founded in 2005 by trade unions, women's organizations, neighborhood assemblies and student groups around two non-negotiable demands: an end to the American occupation and a secular state for Iraq.

Since its launch, the IFC has earned support and respect from workers, trade unionists, women and secular Iraqis in general; no small feat in a region riven by sectarian hatreds fanned by "Coalition" occupiers, al-Qaeda killers and Sunni and Shia death squads linked to the puppet government.

Needless to say, the IFC's great "crime" in Washington's view, is the group's determined struggle against all moves by the Bush regime and giant oil multinationals to "privatize" (steal) Iraq's vast petroleum reserves.

The IFC's Anti-Oil Law Front joined with leaders of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU) and staged a mass demonstration in Basra that brought thousands of oil workers and citizens onto the streets last July 16, with simultaneous protests in Amara and Nassiryya. IFOU president Hassan Jumaa, a member of the IFC's central council, announced that the union will shut down the pipeline leading from southern oil fields if the law is "approved" (rubber-stamped). Despite threats against anti-privatization activists and the murder of union militants, the law remains stalled in Iraq's puppet parliament.

But fighting against well-heeled resource thieves and their Bushist minions isn't the IFC's only front.

With a budding theocracy backed-up by U.S. firepower, dozens, if not hundreds of women have turned up dead in Iraqi morgues or ditches, the IFC has launched a broad campaign against so-called "honor killings" and the thugs and gangsters who murder women under color of sharia law.

As a civil resistance group, the IFC has not taken up arms against U.S. occupying troops and believe instead, that a broad, democratic movement against the occupation is first and foremost, the political task of Iraqi's themselves.

They are not pacifists however, and have fielded an armed Safety Force that maintain strict "no go" areas in mixed Shia-Sunni Baghdad neighborhoods where Islamist militias and shadowy death squads are stopped from plying their awful trade. Believing firmly in the maxim that "the best defense is self-defense," the Safety Force has branched out into new sectors of the sprawling city.

According to Bill Weinberg,

The Safety Force is increasingly made up of trade unionists, a growing pillar of support for the IFC. In November 2006, the General Federation of Trade Unions-Iraq (GFTU-I) merged with the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI), already an IFC member organization. Workers from both groups have volunteered for the SF.

Needless to say, because of their socialist principles and an uncompromising willingness to defend themselves against Baghdad's gruesome killerati, the IFC have been targeted by American "liberators" and their quisling allies in the Iraqi Army and police. Weinberg writes,

July 4, 2007 saw the Fred Hampton-style execution of the leader of a popular citizen's self-defense force in Baghdad. According to the Iraq Freedom Congress, the group Abdelhussein Saddam was associated with, a unit of US Special Forces troops and Iraqi National Guards raided his home in Baghdad's Alattiba neighborhood at 3:00 AM, throwing grenades in before them--and opening fire without warning at him and his young daughter. The attackers took Saddam, leaving the girl bleeding on the floor. Two days later, his body was found in the morgue at Yarmouk Hospital.

Abdelhussein had been the leader of the Safety Force, a civil patrol organized by the IFC civil resistance coalition to protect their communities. Like many IFC leaders, he had been an opponent of the Saddam Hussein regime, and was imprisoned for two years in the '90s. Head of the Safety Force since late last year, his death went unnoted by the world media.

Unfortunately his death, with a few notable exceptions was also largely ignored by the international left.

In the latest assault, Amjad Al-Jawhary, spokesperson for the Iraq Freedom Congress Media Centre tells us, occupying troops,

...made another attempt to eliminate the voice of freedom from Iraq by raiding the IFC headquarters in Baghdad today at 2:00 AM, when they forced themselves in, verbally and physically assaulted the guards and stood them out in the rain for several hours.

It is understood from the many previous incidents that these attempts are not to look for weapons or investigations regarding terrorist activities; but in fact they are to intimidate and eliminate any voice that objects the occupation and its puppets.

Ever since the formation of IFC, which has been always the voice of liberty in Iraq, the establishment of its Safety Force that was able to prevent crimes in the area where it operates, and the launch of the satellite TV [station], the occupying troops has never been at ease.

Nor will Washington ever be at ease when working people and just plain folks are determined to end the occupation, reclaiming both their country and their lives.

Isn't there a lesson here?

Deep State, Corporate Crime

Revelations in The Sunday Times by former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, that a covert network of nuclear proliferators and U.S. officials in league with "disgraced" Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, the American Turkish Council (ATC) and neoconservative hawks embedded within the Pentagon and State Department, have been shunned by the American media.

Ms. Edmonds' intriguing tale of reckless criminality exposed a daisy-chain of corruption linking American militarists, corporate lobbyists and influence-peddlers to what Turks call derin devlet, the deep state, a confluence of ultranationalist generals, businessmen, heroin kingpins, violent neofascists and state-connected Islamist terror gangs, some of whom may have been involved in planning the 9/11 attacks.

On January 22, according to the Brussels-based information clearing house, Info-Turk, 33 members of the ultra-right Ergenekon syndicate, including two retired generals, were taken into custody. The suspects were charged with organizing a clandestine group preparing to launch a violent campaign they hoped would precipitate a coup d'etat against the center-right government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Ergenekon, a shadowy nationalist front with ideological ties to the Nazi-inspired National Action Party (MHP) and drug trafficking Grey Wolves, are opposed to European Union-linked neoliberal "reforms" and the AKP's tentative Islamist social policies.

Prosecutors alleged that the organization planned a bombing campaign and series of attacks aimed at assassinating prominent writers, journalists and Kurdish dissidents. The 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the murder of two Italian priests, and three Protestant missionaries have already been sourced to Ergenekon. By the time the conspirators were run to ground the next phase of the plot was in motion: a wave of strategic violence meant to sow chaos and terror.

Cold War Origins

Turks who experienced first hand rightist attacks and massacres during the 1970s are well-aware such brutal assaults, in concert with Turkish army crackdowns aided and abetted by CIA "technical assistance," often paved the way for military takeovers such as those in 1971 and 1980.

Yet most Americans are oblivious to the fact that the origins of Turkey's deep state have their roots in U.S. Cold War policies. Once the Third Reich was crushed, the victorious allies "rehabilitated" extreme nationalists, racists and outright Nazis for use as intelligence assets and ideological shock troops for America's shadow war against the Soviet Union. The forerunners of Turkey's violence-prone rightist gangs and murder squads can be situated, precisely, within the milieu of Operation Gladio, a European-wide network of CIA-trained paramilitary groups licensed to block the left, at whatever cost, from coming to power.

In Turkey, CIA-trained militants known as "counter-guerrillas" were drawn almost exclusively from a viper's nest of ultranationalist political parties, most notably the National Action Party (MHP) of Alpaslan Turkes, an admirer of Adolph Hitler. Viewed by Washington as a bulwark against the "communist menace," Turkes' MHP and the Grey Wolves formed the core of NATO's "stay behind" army.

Repression-Fueled Drug Trade

The Turkish military has been a veritable cash cow for U.S. multinational defense firms. According to the Federation of American Scientists arms sales to the Turkish Republic have amounted to more than $10 billion dollars.

While sums like this buy a lot of "juice" in Washington, the Pentagon's substantial aid for Turkey's murderous generals has meant that the amelioration of desperate economic and social conditions borne by Turkish working people is gridlocked, though it significantly contributed to the growth of the international narcotics trade.

As Peter Dale Scott notes,

Within the US governmental bureaucracy itself, intelligence agencies and special warfare elements have recurringly exploited, trained and even protected drug traffickers and their corrupt political allies to facilitate these [Gladio] types of anti-Communist and anti-subversive operations. ("Washington and the Politics of Drugs," Variant, Issue 11, Summer 2000)

Writing in Le monde diplomatique, on the havoc these policies wrecked in Turkey, Kendal Nezan observes:

In a report published on 28 January 1997, the Turkish government's chief inspector described how, in the juridical no-man's land of Kurdish south-eastern Turkey, the army's "special war" units were not just killing with impunity, but had also become involved in protection rackets, blackmail, rape and drug trafficking. The report also describes how the Turkish government handed over the security of a huge area -- around the towns of Siverek and Hilvan -- to the private army of tribal chief Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament close to the former prime minister, Tansu Çiller, who thus acquired the power of life and death over the area's inhabitants.

This warlord politician was, incidentally, the sole survivor of a road accident in November 1996 near Susurluk on the road from Izmir to Istanbul. He had been travelling together with a chief of police and a well-known far-right Turkish mafia boss, Abdullah Çatli, who had been implicated in the attempted assassination of the Pope, was sought by Interpol for drug trafficking, and was wanted by the Turkish state for the murder of seven left-wing militants. ("Turkey's Pivotal Role in the International Drug Trade," Le monde diplomatique, July 1998)

Çatli, a notorious member of the Grey Wolves and a close associate of the Italian fascist gangster, Stefano Delle Chiaie, Gladio's reputed operational chief in Italy, had deep connections to Turkish heroin smuggling networks and their godfather, Huseyin Baybasin. These are not mere "historical" anecdotes. Writing in The Guardian, Ian Cobain reveals,

Huseyin Baybasin never made any secret of the sort of man he was, nor about the way he made his fortune. He would chat happily to criminologists about his control over the river of opium which flows from Afghanistan, crossing his extended family's lands around the small town of Lice in south-east Turkey before being processed as heroin for markets in the west. It is one of the least-developed areas of Turkey and the Baybasin clan is enormous, straddling several international borders, and feared: many of its male members have long criminal records. ("Feared Clan who Made Themselves at Home in Britain, The Guardian, March 26, 2006)

Despite a long record as a major heroin kingpin, or perhaps because of it, Baybasin and his clan were allowed to settle in Britain where they continued running their trafficking empire while serving as informants for both MI5 and Customs & Excise, the British government branch investigating A.Q. Khan's illicit nuclear black market. With active deep state connections, Baybasin told The Guardian,

...he had received the assistance of Turkish embassies and consulates while moving huge consignments of drugs around Europe, and that Turkish army officers serving with Nato in Belgium were also involved. "The government kept all doors open for us," he said. "We could do as we pleased."

And Sibel Edmonds, describing the symbiotic relationship among terrorist groups, mafia gangs and international drug trafficking syndicates writes:

For al-Qaeda's network, Turkey is a haven for its sources of funding. Turkish networks, along with Russia's, are the main players in these fields; they purchase the opium from Afghanistan and transport it through several Turkic speaking Central Asian states into Turkey, where the raw opium is processed into popular byproducts; then the network transports the final product into Western European and American markets via their partner networks in Albania. The networks' banking arrangements in Turkey, Cyprus and Dubai are used to launder and recycle the proceeds, and various Turkish companies in Turkey and Central Asia are used to make this possible and seem legitimate. The al-Qaeda network also uses Turkey to obtain and transfer arms to its Central Asian bases, including Chechnya. ... The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks. ("The Hijacking of a Nation," Part 2, November 29, 2006)

Given the endemic levels of corruption intrinsic to the narcotics trade, and the multi-tiered, one might say byzantine, relationships amongst transnational mafia structures stretching across the Balkans, through South-Central Asia and the Middle East, it is reasonable to assume that Khan's nuclear smuggling ring made liberal use of these old-boy networks. With historic roots in the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), with documented linkages to Pakistan's nuclear program, atomic espionage, as with drug trafficking provides proof positive that crime pays. Nowhere is this more apparent than among procurement specialists at the Pentagon.

Spies Like Us

Melek Can Dickerson, a Turkish national employed by the FBI in its translation division, is married to U.S. Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, formerly a military attaché in the Turkish capital of Ankara. As a weapons procurement specialist, Dickerson purchased arms for various Central Asian and Middle Eastern governments, including Turkey.

Melek Dickerson has been accused by Edmonds of mistranslating conversations relating to an FBI counterintelligence operation targeting members of the American Turkish Council, as well as corrupt Defense and State Department officials. Melek Can's translation work, as revealed by The Sunday Times, was a centerpiece of the Bureau's probe of the Turkish branch of the Khan nuclear black market, al-Qaeda and related drug trafficking syndicates.

Melek Can, a former ATC intern, maintained an on-going relationship with at least two of the surveillance targets; a fact she failed to disclose to Bureau superiors. Instead, she marked translations as "not pertinent" despite their significance to the FBI's nuclear espionage investigation. According to Vanity Fair the Dickersons' attempted to recruit Edmonds and her husband, Matthew, into the network:

Douglas asked if she and Matthew were involved with the local Turkish community, and whether they were members of two of its organized groups--the American-Turkish Council (ATC) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA). 'He said the ATC was a good organization to belong to,' Matthew says. 'It could help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which was just what he and his wife planned to do. I said I was aware of the organization, but I thought you had to be in a relevant business in order to join. ... 'Then he pointed at Sibel and said, "All you have to do is tell them who you work for and what you do and you will get in very quickly".' (David Rose, "An Inconvenient Patriot," Vanity Fair, September 2005)

While Sibel Edmonds was fired by the Bureau for uncovering a serious security breech at the agency, the Dickersons were allowed to quietly leave the country. According to security analyst John Stanton,

In 2002, Dickerson and his spouse Melek Can left the country for Belgium and a quiet post with NATO after Edmonds' exposed them as Turkish operatives or, perhaps, US counterintelligence operatives. Dickerson and his wife's activities remain a mystery. According to various reports, they were once stationed in Ankara, Turkey in the 1990s, and had contact with Douglas Feith and Marc Grossman. ("Sibel Edmonds Vindicated? FBI Reveals Investigation Continues," Cryptome.org, 24 October 2006)

And according to The Sunday Times, we now know that Marc Grossman may very well have been the State Department official who blew Valerie Plame's cover while taking down CIA front-company Brewster Jennings Associates during the CIA's parallel investigation of the Khan network.

Which brings us to the American Turkish Council's locus within the deep state.

Like AIPAC ... only on Steroids

The American Turkish Council was created in 1994 as the U.S. counterpart of the Turkish-U.S. Business Council (DEIK), described as a "bilateral business council" that aims to foster commercial relations between the United States and Turkey. Modeled after the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), ATC initially grew out of the "consolidation of the Turkish desk of the U.S. Chamber [of Commerce] with the American Friends of Turkey."

According to the ATC's website, the group describes itself as,

...dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations. Guided by member interests, ATC strives to enhance the growing ties between the United States and Turkey by initiating and facilitating efforts to increase investment and trade between the two countries.

Quite an understatement to say the least!

According to its 2007 annual report, ATC board members include retired USAF Lt. General Brent Scowcroft, the board chairman and former national security adviser for George H. W. Bush; Executive Vice Chairman, George Perlman of Lockheed Martin; retired Ambassador John H. Holmes, ATC's President & CEO; John T. McAndrew of The Boeing Company; John R. Miller of Raytheon; Alan Colegrove of Northrop-Grumman Corporation; Richard K. Douglas of General Electric; retired U.S. Army M. General Elmer D. Pendleton, ATC's Senior Military Advisor; retired Turkish Vice Admiral Biren of Alarko Holding; Gregory Sauders of BP; Diana Sedney, Chevron; Ozer Baysal of Pfizer; Mitchell Haddad of Sikorsky Aircraft; and Selig A. Taubenblatt of Bechtel.

In other words, ATC's board is a veritable who's-who of the military-industrial-security complex!

"Juice" in Washington of course, isn't free and the American Turkish Council is no exception. The organization subdivides levels of influence according to a tried-and-true American method: cold hard cash: Golden Horn Members ($11,000 per year); Bosphorus Members ($4,000 per year); Marmara Members ($1,500 per year); Aegean Members (no fee listed).

But there's another side to ATC, one you won't find on their website. Retired USAF General Joseph W. Ralston, a member of both ATC's Advisory Board and the high-powered Washington lobbying firm, The Cohen Group, leveraged his position to obtain appointment as a Special Envoy countering "PKK terrorism." According to UK researcher Desmond Fernandes,

It seems reasonable to conclude that a new intensified phase of joint US-Turkey psychological warfare operations is under way. The US Embassy in Ankara, for instance, recently confirmed that General Joseph W Ralston (USAF, retired) had been appointed as Special Envoy for Countering the PKK with responsibility for coordinating US engagement with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to eliminate the PKK and other terrorist groups operating in northern Iraq and across the Turkey-Iraq border. "This appointment underscores the commitment of the United States to work with Turkey and Iraq to eliminate terrorism in all its forms".



If, as we are now informed, the Bush administration, in its wisdom, is committed to destroying the PKK additional questions arise. Will there be, as many Kurdish and human rights analysts contend, a resurgence of false flag operations? Will initiatives that seek to resolve the Kurdish question through military/paramilitary means, rather than through peaceful dialogue, be intensified? Will there be a resurgence of anti-terrorist abductions, disappearances, massacres, and torture sessions for Kurdish civilians, intellectuals, schoolchildren, students, journalists, politicians, lawyers and other perceived pro-Kurdish supporters in Turkey and northern Iraq? ("Turkey's US-backed War on Terror: A Cause for Concern?", Variant, Issue 27, Winter 2006)

We now have answers to Fernandes' rhetorical questions as January's take-down of Ergenekon coup plotters demonstrate. The appointment of ATC-linked General Ralston followed on the heels of Pentagon increasing "assistance" to the Turkish military via the U.S. International Military Training (IMET) courses conducted in 2001-2006. Congress has continued to approve IMET funding to the present day. Additionally, the Bush regime has approved Turkey as a recipient of the U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program in 2005, with current funding levels continuing apace.

One might reasonably ask: what role do ATC's high-powered advisors, coming from a host of U.S. multinational defense and security firms play in Washington's procurement largess, not to mention their role in squashing Sibel Edmonds' explosive revelations?

But we better move fast if answers are to be had. The Bush administration is seeking to legalize the secretive nuclear trade with Turkey. Perhaps because of on-going disclosures in The Sunday Times, Bush cronies would be handed retroactive immunity for their role in trading nuclear secrets for profit. January 22, ironically the same day the Ergenekon bust went down, the Bush Administration quietly announced that the president wants Congress to approve the sale of nuclear technology to Turkey.

According to the January 22 White House press release,

The Agreement was signed on July 26, 2000, and President Clinton approved and authorized execution and made the determinations required by section 123 b. of the Act (Presidential Determination 2000 26, 65 FR 44403 (July 18, 2000)). However, immediately after signature, U.S. agencies received information that called into question the conclusions that had been drawn in the required NPAS and the original classified annex, specifically, information implicating Turkish private entities in certain activities directly relating to nuclear proliferation. [emphasis added]

This, after all, is what lies at the heart of Sibel Edmonds' revelations that "private entities" were planting moles at U.S. nuclear installations, stealing deadly atomic secrets and then selling them to A.Q. Khan's proliferation network with hefty profits all around. Edmonds further avers that "several arms of the government were shielding what was going on" to protect neocon war criminals and Bush-Cheney corporate bag-men. After all is said and done, are these the debauched "state secrets" Sibel Edmonds is constrained from disclosing under threat of a prison term by the iniquitous Bush gang?

It seems clear, in order to get to the bottom of this black hole of corporate malfeasance and criminal complicity with Turkey's repressive generals and neofascist gangsters, the U.S. Congress needs to launch an investigation with subpoenas liberally delivered to all parties concerned, beginning with Brent Scowcroft and Marc Grossman.

But as in Ankara, Washington's derin devlet masters are impervious to quaint notions of public accountability.

InfraGard: The FBI's "New Patriotic Alliance" with Corporate Criminals

In the old days, before a band of radical citizens raided the Media, PA offices of the FBI and exposed the Bureau's COINTELPRO operations against the left, federal gumshoes "partnered" with a host of "patriotic" groups and vigilante outfits to keep the rabble in line.

With quaint monikers such as the American Defense Society, American Protective League, American Vigilant Intelligence Foundation and the Legion of Justice--fascist before the word was coined by that old corporatist himself, Benito Mussolini--spying, provocation and, when necessary, extreme violence, were the handmaids of the "100% Americanism" touted by the Bureau's cross-dressing Director and his acolytes.

Though times have changed, some verities are eternal. "Since the business of government is business," it stands to reason that the FBI and their hapless competitors over at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), would modernize the state's collaboration with our masters: an updated "public-private partnership" for the 21st century clampdown.

Enter InfraGard, a spiffy brand for a fully operational network of private "security" specialists and "select" citizens keen on defending the "homeland."

In an exclusive piece in The Progressive magazine, Matthew Rothschild drops a dime on this sinister crew. Boasting some 23,000 members nationwide, including some "350 of our nation's Fortune 500," Rothschild writes,

The members of this rapidly growing group ... receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does--and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to "shoot to kill" in the event of martial law.

Among the perks available to this exclusive club of corporate grifters, InfraGard members, "Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more." According to its website InfraGard,

is a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) program that began in the Cleveland Field Office in 1996. It was a local effort to gain support from the information technology industry and academia for the FBI's investigative efforts in the cyber arena. The program expanded to other FBI Field Offices, and in 1998 the FBI assigned national program responsibility for InfraGard to the former National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and to the Cyber Division in 2003. InfraGard and the FBI have developed a relationship of trust and credibility in the exchange of information concerning various terrorism, intelligence, criminal, and security matters [emphasis added].

One might reasonably ask: whose security and what matters are being attended to here?

While "infrastructure protection" sounds innocuous enough, do safeguards "meet[ing] the challenges America face in protecting against criminal, terrorist, and intelligence threats," mean curtailing a citizens' right to know when one of InfraGard's tony "partners" cut safety corners down at the local petrochemical plant or introduce silent and sinister cyber-monitoring tools on the latest version of a popular web browser? Phyllis Schneck, chairwoman of the board of directors of the group's National Members Alliance and vice president of research integration at Secure Computing, told Rothschild "People are happy to be in the know."

Make that some people.

In November 2001, InfraGard members were apprized of a vague "terrorist" threat (one of an endless stream as the Bush regime cranked-up its fear factory into full-production mode) to California bridges and other critical infrastructure. Rothschild reports,

The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.

"He said his brother talked to him before the FBI," recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis's press secretary at the time. "And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, 'I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn't the public know?'"

Indeed, but perhaps the governor, whose post would soon be "terminated" by Rovian agents of "new thinking," hadn't gotten the message: this was America's Year Zero, when "everything changed"...except the Bushist grab for loot and power.

If this isn't troubling enough, it gets worse...much worse. An InfraGard whistleblower who had attended a "partnership for protection" meeting told Rothschild,

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.


But that's not all.

"Then they said when--not if--martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says. ... "I have nothing to gain by telling you this, and everything to lose," he adds. "I'm so nervous about this, and I'm not someone who gets nervous."

But as Jeff Wells over at Rigorous Intuition, writing on the "new reality" of an America in terminal mode cautions, "The harder truth may be that this is our destination. And they're not coming for us; they're here already, and they've always had us."

InfraGard: like new pod people, they're here already...

U.S. Militarism & the Drug Trade: the Afghan Dossier

In The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, whose 1972 edition the CIA tried to suppress, Alfred W. McCoy writes,

Although the drug pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth in global heroin supply could be traced, in large part, to two key aspects of U.S. policy: the failure of the DEA's interdiction efforts and the CIA's covert operations. By attacking heroin trafficking in separate sectors of Asia's extended opium zone in isolation, the DEA simply diverted heroin exports from America to Europe and shifted opium production from southern Asia to Southeast Asia and back again--raising both global consumption and production with each move. Moreover, the increasing opium harvest in Burma and Afghanistan, America's major suppliers were largely the product of CIA covert operations. [Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991 edition, p. 440]

Fast-forward 30 years. Writing in today's Guardian, Patrick Wintour informs us:

Afghanistan's opium economy will take up to 20 years to eradicate and require a £1bn investment from world leaders, according to a government study published yesterday. ... Its conclusions came as the UN produced fresh figures on the opium trade. The UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) believes this year's crop will be similar to, or slightly lower than, last year's record harvest. ... In 2007 Afghanistan had more land growing drugs than Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.

This is the sad face of the "new" Afghanistan, "liberated" from the ISI-linked Taliban and hailed by the toxic Bush regime as the first "success" of its ballyhooed (and malign) "war on terror." Preoccupied with stoning uppity women, applying sharia "law" (fully the "moral equivalent" of Blackwater Christian Crusaders), censoring journalists or padding Dubai bank accounts with assets looted from the Afghan people, the puppet Karzai regime -- like the Taliban before it, and now -- have a limitless source of "product" on hand to fuel their rapacious appetite for boodle.

UNODC's chief, Antonio Maria Costa, commenting on the report warns, "Europe and other major heroin markets should brace themselves for the health and security consequences."

These consequences won't be long in coming.

The 102-page précis, compiled by the Department of International Development and the World Bank (dubious sources, to be sure), suggest what is needed to stem the flow of illicit drugs from the world's number one narco state are not more guns -- or U.S. Apache helicopter gunships -- but a concerted effort to rebuild Afghanistan's shattered economy.

But the likelihood of this happening any time soon, given America's propensity for shady alliances with far-right drug- and warlords, say in Colombia or Kosovo just for kicks, is virtually nil.

One might reasonably ask, what has become of the billions of dollars in "development" aid doled out by U.S., Asian and European taxpayers?

According to Anthony Fontenot and Ajmal Maiwandi, just about what one would expect from an American military and CIA "liberation" racket:

Amid the ruined mud-bricked buildings of a city that has been devastated by war and neglect, divided into sinister, heavily fortified, military compounds, and occupied by armed local and foreign mercenaries, stand randomly dispersed extravaganzas of glass-and-tile palaces: symbols of the plunder that currently provides the economic base for the "reborn" Kabul. One result of the so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan is that vast amounts of money are now pouring into luxury real estate. ["Capitol of Chaos: The New Afghanistan of Warlords and Infidels," in Evil Paradises, New York: The New Press, 2007, p. 69]

Yes, "luxury real estate." As if Kabul were a deranged subdivision in southern California, Afghan warlords and the local equivalent of the "Real Housewives of Orange County" loll in sumptuary excess. No matter that the masses of impoverished Afghan farmers and proletarians literally starve to death, their assets (such as they are in a society devastated by decades of war fought on behalf of foreign masters) expropriated by criminal gangs dressed to kill in Armani suits.

Fontenot and Maiwandi report:

As in many parts of the world dominated by chaos and the naked struggle for power, the eccentric Afghan aesthetic forged by businessmen, militia commanders, drug barons, and warlords represents the first signs of an emerging postwar order and pathology. ... a collage of generic international products fused with kitsch samplings of Afghan vernacular architecture and textile patterns, all of which reflect the schizophrenic psyche of a war-torn society. [op. cit. p. 75]

Such is the terminal logic of U.S. militarism, where CIA "specialists" and corporate mercenaries are the shock troops of a predatory capitalism gone wild. Like marauding Borg threatening to "assimilate" the entire planet to a cultural wasteland of shopping malls, the international drug traffic fuels an endless cycle of violence, where, in the immortal words of robber-baroness Leona Helmsley, "the little people" always pay the price.

Of Wolves and Sheep: The CIA and the International Drug Trade

Researchers have long argued that the proliferation of international narcotics trafficking is in direct proportion to worldwide U.S. military and intelligence operations. Endless resource wars are launched to benefit U.S. corporate overlords and guide U.S. foreign and domestic policy; all the rest are fulsome words to placate the rubes.

The latest in a deepening series of scandals, as attentive readers are aware, involves the disclosure by Mexican authorities and independent investigators in the U.S., that two CIA and Department of Homeland Security-linked jetliners busted in Mexico with multi-ton loads of cocaine may very well be the tip of a dark iceberg of official corruption, the corrosive heart of a system in need of one.

According to Daniel Hopsicker at MadCowMorningNews,

The first, a DC9 airliner (N900SA) busted carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, had been painted to impersonate aircraft from the Dept. of Homeland Security.

The Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) caught in September with at least 4 tons (estimates vary) had been used in the CIA's extraordinary rendition operation for several years, and, prior to that, as first reported by Narco News, by both the CIA and DEA in operations in Colombia during the 1990's.

Bill Conroy, reporting for The Narco News Bulletin tells us that,

Given these realities, attorney Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with U.S. Customs, ICE's predecessor agency, speculates that the Mayan Express operation is not controlled by ICE at all, but is, in fact, a CIA-run operation using ICE as a cover. He adds that the CIA has agents operating inside many federal law enforcement agencies utilizing what is known as an "official cover."

Among the many reasons why this is the case, Douglas Valentine, an investigator who has written the definitive history of the CIA's Southeast Asia death squad operation, The Phoenix Program, argues in CounterPunch that,

The DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed by America's intelligence agencies. The reason is simple enough: the US Government has been protecting its drug smuggling allies, especially in organized crime, since trafficking was first criminalized in 1914. Since then drug law enforcement has been a function of national security in its broadest sense; not just protecting our aristocracy from foreign enemies, but preserving the Establishment's racial, religious and class prerogatives.

In The Strength of the Wolf, Valentine traces the origins of federal efforts to stem the flow of illicit narcotics, situating repressive drugs policy within the context of state efforts to clamp down on what are perceived to be "dangerous" social elements: the poor, minorities and others viewed as threats to the established order. Federal efforts were never conceived as a means to eradicate the narcotics trade but rather, to manage it, particularly when organized crime assets centered with the deep state were concerned.

According to this reading, drug syndicates, from the Corsican-controlled heroin rackets of the 1940s and 1950s, the Nationalist Chinese bandit armies of Chiang Kai-shek who ran the Golden Triangle opium trade, the Afghan mujaheddin and their Pakistani masters in the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), through the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels who supplied the Nicaraguan Contras with drugs that sparked the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, down to today, are viewed as crucial allies.

According to former DEA agent Celerino Castillo,

In Central America, the Contras' drug connection was no secret. The Salvadoran military knew. The U.S. Embassy knew. DEA knew. The CIA knew: "with respect to (drug trafficking by) the Resistance Forces...it is not a couple of people. It a lot of people," the CIA's Central American Task Force chief would tell Congressmen a month after [Oliver] North's testimony. ... And there were indications North knew. (Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras & the Drug War, London: Sundial, 1994, p. 22)

Dubious intelligence assets such as these have one thing in common, however: like their CIA handlers and the political minders who "guide" the ship of state, they champion a far-right ideological perspective that holds no quarter with quaint notions of a "preferential option for the poor." Whether they are Corsican or Sicilian mafiosi, Cuban counter-revolutionaries, Turkish Grey Wolves, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian sicarios or bin Laden's medieval-minded killers, fascism is their preferred methodology and terror their weapon of choice.

Why do anti-narcotics operations get sidetracked? Valentine explains:

The glitch in the system is that while investigating traffickers, federal drug agents are always unearthing the Establishment's ties to organized crime and its proxy drug syndicates. US intelligence and security agencies recognized this problem early in the early 1920s and to protect their Establishment patrons (and foreign and domestic drug smuggling allies fighting communists), they dealt with the problem by suborning well-placed drug law enforcement managers and agents.

In a new book to be published later this year, The Strength of the Pack, Valentine proposes to document how "the CIA infiltrated the DEA and how, under CIA direction, the war on drugs became a template for the war on terror."

An how has the new "war on drugs" panned out, you might ask?

With ever-greater quantities of heroin flowing out of Afghanistan and a burgeoning new opium trade in Iraq.

Business has never been better...

(Full Disclosure: As editor of the 2002 book, Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, I included Douglas Valentine's article, "Homeland Insecurity: Phoenix, CHAOS, and the Politics of Terror in America," in that volume.)