US Cover up of Turkey's drug trafficking by the 911 commission
--Sibel Dinez Edmonds began working for the FBI shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Until the spring of 2002 she worked in the FBI's Washington field office translating top-secret documents pertaining to suspected terrorists.
Comment: It appears Sibel Edmonds has violated her gag order and in writting the following article.
WHERE IS ACCOUNTABILITY?
By Sibel Edmonds
June 21, 2005 --
Over four years ago, more than four months prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990 provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan.
.... The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington field office, by filing "302" forms, and the translator, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, translated and documented this information. No action was taken by Frields, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to keep quiet regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice inspector general... Mr. Sarshar reported this issue to the 9/11 Commission on Feb. 12, 2004
For almost four years since Sept. 11, officials refused to admit to having specific information regarding the terrorists' plans to attack the United States (from this source).
(1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities;
(2) the attack was going to involve airplanes;
(3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States; and
(4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.
In October 2001, approximately one month after the Sept. 11 attacks, an agent from one field office (city name omitted) re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington field office, so that it could be retranslated. This special agent, in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering the suspect under surveillance and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington field office and retranslated verbatim, the field agent's hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas (country name omitted). It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided *not* to send the retranslated information to the special agent who had requested it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original translation was accurate. . The FBI agent requesting the retranslation never received the accurate translation of that document. ...
I (Sibel Edmonds) provided this information to the 9/11 Commission on Feb. 13, 2004, and to the Department of Justice inspector general in May 2002.
To date, the public has not been told of intentional blocking of intelligence, and has not been told that certain information, despite its direct links to terrorist-related activities, is not given to or shared with counterterrorism units. This was the case prior to 9/11, and remained so after 9/11.
If counterintelligence receives information that contains money-laundering, illegal arms sales, and illegal drug trafficking directly linked to terrorist activities, and if that information involves certain nations or semi-legit organizations, that information is not shared with counterterrorism, regardless of the possible severe consequences. In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents cited "direct pressure by the State Department" and in other cases "sensitive diplomatic relations." I (Sibel Edmonds) provided the Department of Justice inspector general and the 9/11 Commission with detailed and specific information and evidence regarding this issue, the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this, and the names of certain U.S. officials involved in these transactions and activities.
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/?articleid=6382
Sibel Edmonds, 32, fluent in English, Farsi, Turkish and Azerbaijani--a former wiretap translator in the Washington field office, raised suspicions about a co-worker's connections to a group under surveillance.
Take the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator who worked with Edmonds.
The FBI has admitted that when Dickerson was hired the bureau didn't know that she had worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit.
They also didn't know she'd had a relationship with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of that investigation. According to Edmonds, Dickerson tried to recruit her into that organization, and insisted that Dickerson be the only one to translate the FBI's wiretaps of that Turkish official.
"She got very angry, and later she threatened me and my family's life," says Edmonds, when she decided not to go along with the plan. "She said 'Why would you want to place your life and your family's life in danger by translating these tapes'"
Edmonds says that when she reviewed Dickerson's translations of those tapes, she found that Dickerson had left out information crucial to the FBI's investigation - information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon.
"We came across at least 17, 18 translations, communications that were extremely important for the ongoing investigations of these individuals," says Edmonds. "She had marked it as 'not important to be translated.'"
She says she complained repeatedly to her bosses about what she'd found on the wiretaps and about Dickerson's conduct, but that nobody at the FBI wanted to hear about it. Not even the assistant special agent in charge.
"The usual pattern," says Sen. Grassely. "Let me tell you, first of all, the embarrassing information comes out, the FBI reaction is to sweep it under the rug, and then eventually they shoot the messenger."
Special agent John Roberts, a chief of the FBI's Internal Affairs Department, agrees. And while he is not permitted to discuss the Edmonds case, for the last 10 years he has been investigating misconduct by FBI employees. He says he is outraged by how little is ever done about it.
"I don't know of another person in the FBI who has done the internal investigations that I have and has seen what I have, and that knows what has occurred and what has been glossed over and what has, frankly, just disappeared, just vaporized, and no one disciplined for it," says Roberts.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060604J.shtml
Under pressure, FBI officials have investigated and verified the veracity of parts of Edmonds's story, according to documents and people familiar with an FBI briefing of congressional staff. Leahy and Grassley summoned the FBI to Capitol Hill on Monday for a private explanation, people familiar with the briefing said.
The FBI confirmed that Edmonds's co-worker had been part of an organization that was a target of top-secret surveillance and that the same co-worker had "unreported contacts" with a foreign government official subject to the surveillance, according to a letter from the two senators to the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. In addition, the linguist failed to translate two communications from the targeted foreign government official.
Edmonds would not identify the other translator, but The Post has learned from other sources that she is a 33-year-old U.S. citizen whose native country is home to the target group.
In December, Edmonds said the woman and her husband, a U.S. military officer, suggested during a hastily arranged visit to Edmonds's Northern Virginia home on a Sunday morning that Edmonds join the group.
Comment: Israeli connection: Larry Franklin is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. It is feared that his spying dates back to his time as the Air Force Attaché at the US embassy in Tel Aviv. Franklin investigation stems from a two-year FBI probe into who leaked top secret war plans for Iraq published by the New York Times on July 5, 2002. June 26, 2003 - FBI observes Franklin divulging secret information re: Iraq to AIPAC's Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman while having lunch. (http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2853235,00.html)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A7829-2002Jun18
As one step to gag her, the Justice Department refused to let her testify at a civil trial regarding 9/11, invoking the rarely-used "state secret" privilege. Meanwhile, the FBI refused to give Edmonds documents concerning herself, which she requested under FOIA (a court upheld the FBI's refusal). Then the FBI retroactively classified its congressional briefings about Edmonds, including any material resulting from those briefings.
This means that three letters written by Senators Leahy and Grassley are now classified. The first two have been pulled off the Senators' websites, although the third one inexplicably remains online. Edmonds and the Project on Government Oversight have launched separate lawsuits challenging this retroactive classification.
Later, Edmonds said, the woman approached her with a list dividing up individuals whose phone lines were being secretly tapped: Under the plan, the woman would translate conversations of her former co-workers in the target organization, and Edmonds would handle other phone calls. Edmonds said she refused and that the woman told her that her lack of cooperation could put her family in danger.http://www.thememoryhole.org/spy/edmonds.htm
Sibel Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she'd left work for the day.
Cover up of Turkey's drug trafficking by the 911 commission
President Clinton was promoting Turkey, one of the world's top drug transit points, as a model for Muslim-Western cooperation and a country necessary to reshape the Middle East. A grand design to reshape Central Asia and the Middle East with Turkey and Israel as pivot points was being pushed by the Clinton administration as a matter of national policy.
The historical record shows that the US "War on Drugs" and the nascent "War on Terror" kept colliding with not only within the US intelligence, policy and business apparatus, but also with European strategic and business interests. Turkey continues its push for entry into the European Union and the USA wants that to happen as the current meeting of NATO, and Bush's attendance under dangerous circumstances, in Turkey demonstrates. Turkey is one of the USA's and Europe's top arms buyers and is located near what could be some of the biggest oil and natural gas fields in the world.
It's worth noting that the one of the FBI's tasks is to counter industrial espionage and to engage in it. Where big arms sales pit the US against its European competitors—as is the case in Turkey (particularly starting in 1998)—the FBI is busy making sure the US gets the edge over its competition.
In 1998, the US Department of State (DOS) was finally forced to admit that Turkey was a major refining and transit point for the flow of heroin from Southwest Asia to Western Europe, with small quantities of the stuff finding its way to the streets of the USA. In that same year, Kendal Nezan, writing for Le Monde Diplomatique, reported that MIT and the Turkish National Police force were actively supporting the trade in illicit drugs not only for fun and profit, but out of desperation.
According to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey's heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 . . . Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the police and the army could possibly organize trafficking on such a scale. Drug barons have stated publicly, on Turkish television and in the West, that they have been working under the protection of the Turkish government and to its financial benefit. The traffickers themselves travel on diplomatic passports. The drugs are even transported by military helicopter from the Iranian border."
Nowhere is the pain of Turkey's role in the heroin trade felt more horribly than in the United Kingdom.
Both the DOS and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) described in detail the transit routes and countries involved in getting the goods to Turkey. Intelligence organizations here and abroad must have sanctioned the role that they, and Turkey and Afghanistan, played in the process. "Afghanistan is the original source of most of the opiates reaching Turkey. Afghan opiates, and also hashish, are stockpiled at storage and staging areas in Pakistan, from where a ton or larger quantities are smuggled by overland vehicles to Turkey via Iran. Multi-ton quantities of opiates and hashish also are moved to coastal areas of Pakistan and Iran, where the drugs are loaded on ships waiting off-shore, which then smuggle the contraband to points in Turkey along the Mediterranean, Aegean, and/or Marmara seas. Opiates and hashish also are smuggled overland from Afghanistan via Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to Turkey.
During the 27-month period from July 1, 1999, to September 30, 2001, over 56 metric tons of illicit acetic anhydride were seized in or destined for Turkey." Acetic anhydride is a precursor chemical which is used in the production of heroin.
The Ankara Pact
The Middle East Report concluded in 1998 that probably the greatest strategic move in the Clinton post-Cold War years is what could be called "The Ankara Pact"—an alliance between the US, Turkey, and Israel that essentially circumvents and bottles up the Arab countries. Earlier in 1997, Turkish Prime Minister Yilmaz visited with Bill Clinton to ensure him that Turkey would attempt to improve its human rights record by slaughtering fewer Kurds, but also mentioned that if the US pushed too hard on that subject or if the US Congress adopted an Armenian Genocide Resolution, Turkey might award a billion dollar contract for attack helicopters to the Europeans or maybe even Russia.
During this timeframe, and with approval from the USA, Turkey began to let contracts to Israel to upgrade its F-4, F-5 and F-16 aircraft. Pemra Hazbay, writing in the May 2004 issue of Peace Watch, reported that total Israeli arms sales to Turkey had exceeded $1 billion since 2000. "In December 1996, Israel won a deal worth $630 million to upgrade Turkey's fleet of fifty-four F-4 Phantom fighter jets. In 1998, Turkey awarded a $75 million contract to upgrade its fleet of 48 F-5 fighter jets to Israel Aircraft Industries' Lahav division, beating out strong French competition. In 2002, Turkey ratified its largest military deal with Israel, a $700 million contract for the renovation of Turkish tanks." But that pales in comparison to the $20 billion in US arms exports and military aid dealt to Turkey over the last 24 years.
The head of the Foreign Office's Turkey Department told an English journalist that the heroin trade was more important than billions of pounds worth off trade capacity and weapons selling. When he was also working for the Turkish Foreign Ministry. he said "50 billion dollars worth of foreign debt is nothing, it is two lorry loads of heroin . . . '"
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/062904Stanton/cioran123@yahoo.com.
Comment: You will recall my recent N&V story about how much the Isrelis were involved in the lies that got the US Congress to declare war against Iraq. The Trail of Disinformation leading up to the Iraq war and the Israeli connection
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
Comment: It appears Sibel Edmonds has violated her gag order and in writting the following article.
WHERE IS ACCOUNTABILITY?
By Sibel Edmonds
June 21, 2005 --
Over four years ago, more than four months prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990 provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan.
.... The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington field office, by filing "302" forms, and the translator, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, translated and documented this information. No action was taken by Frields, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to keep quiet regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice inspector general... Mr. Sarshar reported this issue to the 9/11 Commission on Feb. 12, 2004
For almost four years since Sept. 11, officials refused to admit to having specific information regarding the terrorists' plans to attack the United States (from this source).
(1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities;
(2) the attack was going to involve airplanes;
(3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States; and
(4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.
In October 2001, approximately one month after the Sept. 11 attacks, an agent from one field office (city name omitted) re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington field office, so that it could be retranslated. This special agent, in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering the suspect under surveillance and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington field office and retranslated verbatim, the field agent's hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas (country name omitted). It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided *not* to send the retranslated information to the special agent who had requested it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original translation was accurate. . The FBI agent requesting the retranslation never received the accurate translation of that document. ...
I (Sibel Edmonds) provided this information to the 9/11 Commission on Feb. 13, 2004, and to the Department of Justice inspector general in May 2002.
To date, the public has not been told of intentional blocking of intelligence, and has not been told that certain information, despite its direct links to terrorist-related activities, is not given to or shared with counterterrorism units. This was the case prior to 9/11, and remained so after 9/11.
If counterintelligence receives information that contains money-laundering, illegal arms sales, and illegal drug trafficking directly linked to terrorist activities, and if that information involves certain nations or semi-legit organizations, that information is not shared with counterterrorism, regardless of the possible severe consequences. In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents cited "direct pressure by the State Department" and in other cases "sensitive diplomatic relations." I (Sibel Edmonds) provided the Department of Justice inspector general and the 9/11 Commission with detailed and specific information and evidence regarding this issue, the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this, and the names of certain U.S. officials involved in these transactions and activities.
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/?articleid=6382
Sibel Edmonds, 32, fluent in English, Farsi, Turkish and Azerbaijani--a former wiretap translator in the Washington field office, raised suspicions about a co-worker's connections to a group under surveillance.
Take the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator who worked with Edmonds.
The FBI has admitted that when Dickerson was hired the bureau didn't know that she had worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit.
They also didn't know she'd had a relationship with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of that investigation. According to Edmonds, Dickerson tried to recruit her into that organization, and insisted that Dickerson be the only one to translate the FBI's wiretaps of that Turkish official.
"She got very angry, and later she threatened me and my family's life," says Edmonds, when she decided not to go along with the plan. "She said 'Why would you want to place your life and your family's life in danger by translating these tapes'"
Edmonds says that when she reviewed Dickerson's translations of those tapes, she found that Dickerson had left out information crucial to the FBI's investigation - information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon.
"We came across at least 17, 18 translations, communications that were extremely important for the ongoing investigations of these individuals," says Edmonds. "She had marked it as 'not important to be translated.'"
She says she complained repeatedly to her bosses about what she'd found on the wiretaps and about Dickerson's conduct, but that nobody at the FBI wanted to hear about it. Not even the assistant special agent in charge.
"The usual pattern," says Sen. Grassely. "Let me tell you, first of all, the embarrassing information comes out, the FBI reaction is to sweep it under the rug, and then eventually they shoot the messenger."
Special agent John Roberts, a chief of the FBI's Internal Affairs Department, agrees. And while he is not permitted to discuss the Edmonds case, for the last 10 years he has been investigating misconduct by FBI employees. He says he is outraged by how little is ever done about it.
"I don't know of another person in the FBI who has done the internal investigations that I have and has seen what I have, and that knows what has occurred and what has been glossed over and what has, frankly, just disappeared, just vaporized, and no one disciplined for it," says Roberts.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060604J.shtml
Under pressure, FBI officials have investigated and verified the veracity of parts of Edmonds's story, according to documents and people familiar with an FBI briefing of congressional staff. Leahy and Grassley summoned the FBI to Capitol Hill on Monday for a private explanation, people familiar with the briefing said.
The FBI confirmed that Edmonds's co-worker had been part of an organization that was a target of top-secret surveillance and that the same co-worker had "unreported contacts" with a foreign government official subject to the surveillance, according to a letter from the two senators to the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. In addition, the linguist failed to translate two communications from the targeted foreign government official.
Edmonds would not identify the other translator, but The Post has learned from other sources that she is a 33-year-old U.S. citizen whose native country is home to the target group.
In December, Edmonds said the woman and her husband, a U.S. military officer, suggested during a hastily arranged visit to Edmonds's Northern Virginia home on a Sunday morning that Edmonds join the group.
Comment: Israeli connection: Larry Franklin is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. It is feared that his spying dates back to his time as the Air Force Attaché at the US embassy in Tel Aviv. Franklin investigation stems from a two-year FBI probe into who leaked top secret war plans for Iraq published by the New York Times on July 5, 2002. June 26, 2003 - FBI observes Franklin divulging secret information re: Iraq to AIPAC's Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman while having lunch. (http://www.marinij.com/Stories/0,1413,234~24410~2853235,00.html)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A7829-2002Jun18
As one step to gag her, the Justice Department refused to let her testify at a civil trial regarding 9/11, invoking the rarely-used "state secret" privilege. Meanwhile, the FBI refused to give Edmonds documents concerning herself, which she requested under FOIA (a court upheld the FBI's refusal). Then the FBI retroactively classified its congressional briefings about Edmonds, including any material resulting from those briefings.
This means that three letters written by Senators Leahy and Grassley are now classified. The first two have been pulled off the Senators' websites, although the third one inexplicably remains online. Edmonds and the Project on Government Oversight have launched separate lawsuits challenging this retroactive classification.
Later, Edmonds said, the woman approached her with a list dividing up individuals whose phone lines were being secretly tapped: Under the plan, the woman would translate conversations of her former co-workers in the target organization, and Edmonds would handle other phone calls. Edmonds said she refused and that the woman told her that her lack of cooperation could put her family in danger.http://www.thememoryhole.org/spy/edmonds.htm
Sibel Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she'd left work for the day.
Cover up of Turkey's drug trafficking by the 911 commission
President Clinton was promoting Turkey, one of the world's top drug transit points, as a model for Muslim-Western cooperation and a country necessary to reshape the Middle East. A grand design to reshape Central Asia and the Middle East with Turkey and Israel as pivot points was being pushed by the Clinton administration as a matter of national policy.
The historical record shows that the US "War on Drugs" and the nascent "War on Terror" kept colliding with not only within the US intelligence, policy and business apparatus, but also with European strategic and business interests. Turkey continues its push for entry into the European Union and the USA wants that to happen as the current meeting of NATO, and Bush's attendance under dangerous circumstances, in Turkey demonstrates. Turkey is one of the USA's and Europe's top arms buyers and is located near what could be some of the biggest oil and natural gas fields in the world.
It's worth noting that the one of the FBI's tasks is to counter industrial espionage and to engage in it. Where big arms sales pit the US against its European competitors—as is the case in Turkey (particularly starting in 1998)—the FBI is busy making sure the US gets the edge over its competition.
In 1998, the US Department of State (DOS) was finally forced to admit that Turkey was a major refining and transit point for the flow of heroin from Southwest Asia to Western Europe, with small quantities of the stuff finding its way to the streets of the USA. In that same year, Kendal Nezan, writing for Le Monde Diplomatique, reported that MIT and the Turkish National Police force were actively supporting the trade in illicit drugs not only for fun and profit, but out of desperation.
According to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey's heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996 . . . Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the police and the army could possibly organize trafficking on such a scale. Drug barons have stated publicly, on Turkish television and in the West, that they have been working under the protection of the Turkish government and to its financial benefit. The traffickers themselves travel on diplomatic passports. The drugs are even transported by military helicopter from the Iranian border."
Nowhere is the pain of Turkey's role in the heroin trade felt more horribly than in the United Kingdom.
Both the DOS and the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) described in detail the transit routes and countries involved in getting the goods to Turkey. Intelligence organizations here and abroad must have sanctioned the role that they, and Turkey and Afghanistan, played in the process. "Afghanistan is the original source of most of the opiates reaching Turkey. Afghan opiates, and also hashish, are stockpiled at storage and staging areas in Pakistan, from where a ton or larger quantities are smuggled by overland vehicles to Turkey via Iran. Multi-ton quantities of opiates and hashish also are moved to coastal areas of Pakistan and Iran, where the drugs are loaded on ships waiting off-shore, which then smuggle the contraband to points in Turkey along the Mediterranean, Aegean, and/or Marmara seas. Opiates and hashish also are smuggled overland from Afghanistan via Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to Turkey.
During the 27-month period from July 1, 1999, to September 30, 2001, over 56 metric tons of illicit acetic anhydride were seized in or destined for Turkey." Acetic anhydride is a precursor chemical which is used in the production of heroin.
The Ankara Pact
The Middle East Report concluded in 1998 that probably the greatest strategic move in the Clinton post-Cold War years is what could be called "The Ankara Pact"—an alliance between the US, Turkey, and Israel that essentially circumvents and bottles up the Arab countries. Earlier in 1997, Turkish Prime Minister Yilmaz visited with Bill Clinton to ensure him that Turkey would attempt to improve its human rights record by slaughtering fewer Kurds, but also mentioned that if the US pushed too hard on that subject or if the US Congress adopted an Armenian Genocide Resolution, Turkey might award a billion dollar contract for attack helicopters to the Europeans or maybe even Russia.
During this timeframe, and with approval from the USA, Turkey began to let contracts to Israel to upgrade its F-4, F-5 and F-16 aircraft. Pemra Hazbay, writing in the May 2004 issue of Peace Watch, reported that total Israeli arms sales to Turkey had exceeded $1 billion since 2000. "In December 1996, Israel won a deal worth $630 million to upgrade Turkey's fleet of fifty-four F-4 Phantom fighter jets. In 1998, Turkey awarded a $75 million contract to upgrade its fleet of 48 F-5 fighter jets to Israel Aircraft Industries' Lahav division, beating out strong French competition. In 2002, Turkey ratified its largest military deal with Israel, a $700 million contract for the renovation of Turkish tanks." But that pales in comparison to the $20 billion in US arms exports and military aid dealt to Turkey over the last 24 years.
The head of the Foreign Office's Turkey Department told an English journalist that the heroin trade was more important than billions of pounds worth off trade capacity and weapons selling. When he was also working for the Turkish Foreign Ministry. he said "50 billion dollars worth of foreign debt is nothing, it is two lorry loads of heroin . . . '"
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/062904Stanton/cioran123@yahoo.com.
Comment: You will recall my recent N&V story about how much the Isrelis were involved in the lies that got the US Congress to declare war against Iraq. The Trail of Disinformation leading up to the Iraq war and the Israeli connection
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
posted by T. Scott Brineman at 7:27 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home