A Few Things That Never Added Up

Why is Osama bin Laden still breathing?  Ladies and Gentlemen, we may have found a clue.

Turkey’s secular establishment, including the Turkish military and intelligence services (MIT), as well as political parties associated with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, appear to have been more connected to the Turkish mafia than the Turkish Islamic Parties that Washington abhors. Furthermore, it appears from reading into some of Edmonds’ statements that the Turkish mafia was partnered with Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaeda network in the drug trade - meaning Turkey’s secular establishment was more connected to al Qaeda - pre/9-11 - than were the Islamists in Turkey.
(My emphasis - Mark)

Okay, I'm not speculating that bin Laden made it to Turkey and is hiding out in a Black Sea coffee house selling smack.  What I'm saying is that the Turkish drug trade keeps Osama supplied with batteries for his tape recorder and dialysis machine.  I'm also saying that this is old news to our intelligence community and political leadership who have done nothing to eradicate the fields in Afghanistan.

With the Turks about ready to exercise their inherent right of self defense against Kurdish separatist terrorists, much the same way Israel has chased after Hezbollah's cross-border attacks, I have to ask why would they be so steadfastly resistant to an independent Kurdistan sliced out of the Northern third of Iraq.  What's wrong with an independent Kurdistan?

You'd think our NATO ally would welcome a homeland for their belligerent minority to call their own, instead of trying to carve it out of southwest Turkey.  No one's been able to explain this away to my satisfaction.

There's more than meets the eye.  The lucrative opium trade feeds on the instability in the Kurdish region.  Just what do you think happens to all those Afghanistan poppies?

Edmonds, last August:

The American people have the right to know this. They are giving this grand illusion that there are some investigations, but there are none. You know, they are coming down on these charities as the finance of al-Qaeda. Well, if you were to talk about the financing of al-Qaeda, a very small percentage comes from these charity foundations. The vast majority of their financing comes from narcotics. Look, we had 4 to 6 percent of the narcotics coming from the East, coming from Pakistan, coming from Afghanistan via the Balkans to the United States. Today, three or four years after Sept. 11, that has reached over 15 percent. How is it getting here? Who are getting the proceedings from those big narcotics?
(My emphasis - again)

Another thing that bugs me, totally unrelated (until now), is why do absolutely discredited neo-cons like Richard Perle and Doug Feith still remain at large, holding distinguished fellowships at right wing think tanks?  Who would want to remain publicly affiliated with these crazed death dealers?

More to the point, other than the cover granted them by the GOP's hold on power in Washington, what or who is protecting them from being the natural scapegoats for our disastrous Iraqi quagmire.  The administration can't peg this nightmare on Powell, much too popular.  Tenant?  Bush hung a medal on the guy.

Why haven't they hung Perle and Feith out to dry, publicly humiliating them to absolve the rest of the cabal from all the blame?  What protects these two?  Lord knows that Cheney and the boys wouldn't hesitate to destroy them to preserve their illusion of infallibility.  Look what happened when Joe Wilson got too close to their little scam.

One reason could be that these guys know where too many skeletons are buried.  This story goes beyond Feith's henchman Larry Franklin giving US secrets to Israel.  If you haven't sat down to read Rolling Stones's outstanding expose´ of the clandestine dealings run out of Feith's Office of Special Plans in the Iraq war warm-up, do so as soon as you can.  Right now in fact . . . I'll wait.

Okay, Okay, here's the meat in the middle you might have overlooked:

Weeks later, in December, a plane carrying Ledeen traveled to Rome with two other members of Feith's secret Pentagon unit: Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen who has been called the "theoretician of the neocon movement." A specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and Farsi, Rhode had experience with shady exiles like Ghorbanifar: He was close to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi dissident whose discredited intelligence helped drive the Bush administration to invade Baghdad. According to UPI, Rhode himself was later observed by CIA operatives passing "mind-boggling" intelligence to Israel, including sensitive information about U.S. military deployments in Iraq.

Completing the rogues' gallery that assembled in Rome that day was the man who helped Ledeen arrange the meeting: Nicolò Pollari, the director of Italy's military intelligence. Only two months earlier, Pollari had informed the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had obtained uranium from West Africa—a key piece of false intelligence that Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Now if you're following along, you should be asking yourself, "What the hell does all this stuff about catching a Defense Department official giving sensitive information to an Israeli advocacy group have to do with Turkey?"

Glad you asked.  AIPAC, the powerful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee has also been instrumental in forging a close alliance between the Israel, the US and Turkey.  Feith and Perle have been up to their eyeballs in these deals since the Reagan Administration.

Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked as foreign registered lobbyists for Turkey back in the late 1980's and into the 1990's. They "quietly and deftly kept the {American] arms sluice to Turkey open" said Vest. Feith had hired former executive director of AIPAC, Morris Amitay, to assist in the task. The new Feith and Perle, Solarz and Livingston, have picked up where the largely disgraced Perle and Feith left off. One thing is for certain though; during Feith's reign over The Policy Organization, the ATC and AIPAC had their operative well-placed and, perhaps, under control.

Naturally this special relationship benefits not just the interest of Turkey, Israel and the United States, but the real winners in all this are "some of the largest U.S. weapons companies- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Textron, Raytheon, Sikorsky/United Technologies" who all have a stake in the two most powerful regional powers cooperating militarily with the world's biggest arms supplier -- us.

Turkish drug lords!  What about those Turkish drug lords?

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar. In fact the neocons seem to have a deep and abiding interest in Turkey, which, under other circumstances, might be difficult to explain. Doug Feith’s International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey, with Richard Perle taking $48,000 annually as a consultant. Other noted neoconservatives linked to Turkey are former State Department number three, Marc Grossman, current Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, Paul Wolfowitz and former congressman Stephen Solarz. The money involved does not appear to come from the Turkish government, and FBI investigators are trying to determine its source and how it is distributed. Some of it may come from criminal activity, possibly drug trafficking, but much more might come from arms dealing.

This really is where Sibel Edmonds' story begins.  Vanity Fair did a great job detailing what happened (and more importantly, what hasn't happened) when she reported on some obviously nefarious dealings a colleague was involved in.  The headline-making smoking gun from the article was that Dennis Hastert might have been on the payroll of some shady characters in the power centers of the Turkish government.

This might explain why is Dennis Hastert the Speaker of the House?  Just how did this guy get the job?  Before he was elevated to Speaker, I'd never heard of the guy.  He kinda has a Tip O'Neil bearing, but none of the charisma.  Lord knows his leadership skills are nowhere near his predecessor Newt Gingrich, and he's been completely ineffectual since Tom DeLay's departure. Just how connected is this guy?

Very well connected indeed, it would seem.  According to the Vanity Fair piece, at the same time that the GOP money man, Tom DeLay, reported completely unitemized donations to his campaign coffers of $99,000, Hastert took in almost half a million bucks from persons unknown.  The timing of his good fortune coincided with his removing legislation from the House Floor that the Turks wanted buried.

At the time, he explained his decision by saying that he had received a letter from President Clinton arguing that the genocide resolution, if passed, would harm U.S. interests. Again, the reported content of the Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign. Nevertheless, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000.

Mike Mejia's article , reprinted at Larry Johnson's No Quarter, might just hold the answer to all of my seemingly unrelated quandaries, and ties them up in a neat little bow.  The documentary will be coming soon to a theater near you!  (As soon as it finishes it's European run this fall.)