When it comes to elections and political fundraising there are certain magic words, sentences and phrases. Of course I am not talking about ‘increasing employment’ or ‘creating jobs.’ Those lines are used later- after the competition is almost ended, and the deal becomes pretty much a slam dunk. No. I am talking about the real political ‘magic words.’ As you know, as soon as they utter those magic words and make those pledges the money magically starts flowing into their campaign sack. And by that I don’t mean peanuts. I don’t mean humble individual contributions by voting citizens. I am talking about ‘serious money;’ magically serious, that is. I am talking millions; not in Lira or Peso, but in US dollars. You get it; no?

Okay. Mitt Romney just started using some of those magic words- magical lines. Let me give you an example, sure to bring some of those mega magical dollars into his camp.

On his website Mitt Romney suggests that the victim of Russian aggression would be, improbably, Central Asia. A Romney administration’s policies, he writes, would:

Deter Russian ambitions to its south by enhancing diplomatic ties, increasing military training and assistance, and negotiating trade pacts and educational exchanges with Central Asian states.

Magical indeed. You don’t have to read in between the lines. Just read the lines and you’ll see the mega dollar signs in the eyes of … who? Okay, let’s play it dumb and slow in case there are some MSM readers are among us reading this post. We want them to get it to. Special treatment.

So, Romney says he will ‘increase military training and assistance’ for all these Central Asia nations. Meaning:

We’ll give these Central Asian countries billions of dollars of our taxpayers’ money and ask these nations to turn around and hand those billions of dollars to our military industrial complex (MIC) and purchase their products: missile, guns, helicopters, F-16s, tanks …

We’ll give them training and a protection umbrella as in: We’ll establish more and bigger military bases in those countries, thus benefit our MIC by a few more billions of dollars.

We’ll negotiate (read pressure them into) better ‘deals’ aka ‘trade pacts’ with these countries. Basically we want to have our oil industry to get, control and manage all their oil-gas-mineral resources, rather than …let’s say China, or, Russia. Meaning, ongoing billions of dollars for our oil-energy and transportation giants…

We’ll have more ‘educational exchanges’ with these countries. Hmmmm, what kind of ‘education’ do we provide to that part of the world? Oh, right. We’ll put our NGOs in there and have them create and disseminate propaganda news/information created and dictated by our State Department and their master. We’ll control (aka ‘help them with’) their schools-universities by actually running their indoctrination process in conjunction with their (our) puppet dictator regimes. And of course we’ll have our CIA and extended operatives educate and train their governments and police forces in modern torture, rendition, secret assassination, censorship … practices.

Wow. Romney has mastered delivering all those promises with so few magical words! I see those dollar wheels turning manically in the eyes of MIC-OIL-Intelligence Industrial Complex. Don’t you?! Now, let’s sit back and watch those mega magical dollars flow into Romney’s already half-full campaign sack. Shall we?

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On December 8 several days after election results for Russia’s parliamentary elections were announced, showing a sharp drop in popularity for Prime Minister Putin’s United Russia party, Putin accused the United States and specifically Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fuelling the Russian opposition protesters and their election protests. Putin stated, “The (US) Secretary of State was quick to evaluate the elections, saying that they are unfair and unjust even before she received materials from the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (the OSCE international election monitors-w.e.) observers.”[1]

Putin went on to claim that Clinton’s premature comments were the necessary signal to the waiting opposition groups that the US Government would back their protests. Clinton’s comments, the seasoned Russian intelligence pro stated, became a “signal for our activists who began active work with the US Department of State.” [2]

Major western media chose either to downplay the Putin statement or to focus almost entirely on the claims of an emerging Russian opposition movement. A little research shows that, if anything, Putin was downplaying the degree of brazen US Government interference into the political processes of his country. In this case the country is not Tunisia or Yemen or even Egypt. It is the world’s second nuclear superpower, even if it might still be an economic lesser power. Hillary is playing with thermonuclear fire.

Democracy or something else?

No mistake, Putin is not a world champion practitioner of what most consider democracy. His announcement some months back that he and current President Medvedev had agreed to switch jobs after Russia’s March 4 Presidential vote struck even many Russians as crass power politics and backroom deal-making. That being said, what Washington is doing to interfere with that regime change is more than brazen and interventionist. The same Obama Administration which just signed into law measures effectively ripping to shreds the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution for American citizens[3] is posing as world supreme judge of others’ adherence to what they define as democracy.

 Let’s examine closely Putin’s charge of US interference in the election process. If we look, we find openly stated in their August 2011 Annual Report that a Washington-based NGO with the innocuous name, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is all over the place inside Russia.

The NED is financing an International Press Center in Moscow where some 80 international NGOs can hold press briefings on whatever they choose. They fund numerous “youth advocacy” and leadership workshops to “help youth engage in political activism.” In fact, officially they spent more than $2,783,000 in 2010 on dozens of such programs across Russia. Spending for 2011 won’t be published until later in 2012. [4]

The NED is also financing key parts of the Russian “independent” polling and election monitoring, a crucial part of being able to claim election fraud. They finance in part the Regional Civic Organization in Defense of Democratic Rights and Liberties “GOLOS.” According to the NED Annual Report the funds went “to carry out a detailed analysis of the autumn 2010 and spring 2011 election cycles in Russia, which will include press monitoring, monitoring of political agitation, activity of electoral commissions, and other aspects of the application of electoral legislation in the long-term run-up to the elections.”[5]

In September, 2011, a few weeks before the December elections the NED financed a Washington invitation-only conference featuring the Russian “independent” polling organization, the Levada Center. According to NED’s own website Levada, another recipient of NED money, [6] had done a series of opinion polls, a standard method used in the West to analyze the feelings of citizens. The polls profiled “the mood of the electorate in the run up to the Duma and presidential elections, perceptions of candidates and parties, and voter confidence in the system of ‘managed democracy’ that has been established over the last decade.”

 One of the featured speakers at that Washington conference was Vladimir Kara-Murza, member of the federal council of Solidarnost (“Solidarity”), Russia’s democratic opposition movement. He is also “advisor to Duma opposition leader Boris Nemtsov” according to NED. Another speaker came from the right-wing neo-conservative Hudson Institute. [7]

Nemtsov, one of the most prominent of the Putin opposition today is also co-chairman of Solidarnost, a name curiously enough imitated from the Cold War days when the CIA financed the Polish Solidarnosc workers’ opposition of Lech Walesa. More on Nemtsov later.

And on December 15, 2011, again in Washington, just as the series of US-supported protests were being launched against Putin, led by Solidarnost and other organizations, the NED held another conference titled, Youth Activism in Russia: Can a New Generation Make a Difference? The featured speaker was Tamirlan Kurbanov, who according to the NED, “most recently served as a program officer at the Moscow office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, where he was involved in developing and expanding the capacities of political and civic organizations; promoting citizen participation in public life, youth engagement in particular.” [8] The National Democratic Institute is an arm of the NED.

The shady history of NED

Helping youth engage in political activism is precisely what the same NED did in Egypt over the past several years in the lead up to the toppling of Mubarak. The same NED was instrumental by informed accounts in the US-backed “Color Revolutions” in 2003-2004 in Ukraine and Georgia that brought US-backed pro-NATO surrogates to power. The same NED has been active in promoting “human rights” in Myanmar, in Tibet, and China’s oil-rich Xinjiang province. [9] 

As careful analysts of the 2004 Ukraine “Orange revolution” and the numerous other US-financed color revolutions discovered, control of polling and ability to dominate international media perceptions, especially major TV such as CNN or BBC is an essential component of the Washington destabilization agenda. The Levada Center would likely be in a crucial position in this regard to issue polls showing discontent with the regime.

By their description, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a “private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, with funding from the US Congress, NED supports more than 1,000 projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.”[10]

It couldn’t sound more noble or high-minded. However, they prefer to leave out their own true history. In the early 1980’s CIA director Bill Casey convinced President Ronald Reagan to create a plausibly private NGO, the NED, to advance Washington’s global agenda via other means than direct CIA action. It was a part of the process of “privatizing” US intelligence to make their work more “effective.” Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[11] Interesting. The majority of funds for NED come from US taxpayers through Congress. It is in every way, shape and form a US Government intelligence community asset.

The NED was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto CIA, privatized so as to allow it more freedom of action. NED board members are typically drawn from the Pentagon and US intelligence community. It has included retired NATO General Wesley Clark, the man who led the US bombing of Serbia in 1999. Key figures linked to clandestine CIA actions who served on NED’s board have included Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros and Elliot Abrams. The Chairman of the NED Board of Directors in 2008 was Vin Weber, founder of the ultraconservative organization, Empower America, and campaign fundraiser for George W. Bush. Current NED chairman is John Bohn, former CEO of the controversial Moody’s rating agency which played a nefarious role in the still-unraveling US mortgage securities collapse. As well today’s NED board includes neo-conservative Bush-era ambassador to Iraq and to Afghanistan, Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad.[12]

Putin’s well-rehearsed opposition

It’s also instructive to look at the leading opposition figures who seem to have stepped forward in Russia in recent days. The current opposition “poster boy” favorite of Russian youth and especially western media is Russian blogger Alexei Navalny whose blog is titled LiveJournal. Navalny has featured prominently as a quasi-martyr of the protest movement after spending 15 days in Putin’s jail for partaking in a banned protest. At a large protest rally on Christmas Day December 25 in Moscow, Navalny, perhaps intoxicated by seeing too many romantic Sergei Eisenstein films of the 1917 Russian Revolution, told the crowd, “I see enough people here to take the Kremlin and the White House (Russia’s Presidential home-w.e.) right now…”[13]

Western establishment media is infatuated with Navalny. England’s BBC  described Navalny as “arguably the only major opposition figure to emerge in Russia in the past five years,” and US Time magazine called him “Russia’s Erin Brockovich,” a curious reference to the Hollywood film starring Julie Roberts as a trade union organizer. However, more relevant is the fact that Navalny went to the elite American East Coast Yale University, also home to the Bush family, where he was a “Yale World Fellow.” [14] 

The charismatic Navalny however is also or has been on the payroll of Washington’s regime-destabilizing National Endowment for Democracy (NED). According to a posting on Navalny’s own blog, LiveJournal, he was financed in 2007-2008 by the NED. His Washington NED contact person was Frank Conatser.[15] A facsimile of an email exchange between Navalny and Conatser fronm November 17, 2007 is partially reproduced here.

Along with Navalny, key actors in the anti-Putin protest movement are centered around Solidarnost which was created in December 2008 by Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Ryzhkov and others. Nemtsov is hardly one to protest corruption. According to Business Week Russia of September 23, 2007, Nemtsov introduced Russian banker Boris Brevnov to Gretchen Wilson, a US citizen and an employee of the International Finance Corporation, a financing arm of the World Bank. Wilson and Brevnov married. With the help of Nemtsov Wilson managed to privatize Balakhna Pulp and Paper mill at the giveaway price of just $7 million. The enterprise was sucked dry and then sold to the Wall Street-Swiss investment bank, CS First Boston bank. The annual turnover of the mill was reportedly $250 million. [17]

CS First Boston bank also paid for Nemtsov’s trips to the very expensive Davos World Economic Forum. When Nemtsov became a member of the cabinet, his protégé Brevnov was appointed the chairman of the Unified Energy System of Russia JSC. Two years later in 2009 Boris Nemtsov, today’s “Mr. anti-corruption,” used his influence reportedly to get Brevnov off the hook for charges of embezzling billions from assets of Unified Energy System. [18]

Nemtsov also took money from jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 1999 when the latter was using his billions to try to buy the Russian parliament or Duma. In 2004 Nemtsov met with exiled billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky in a secret gathering with other exiled Russian tycoons. When Nemtsov was detailed by Russian authorities for allegations of foreign funding of his new political party, “For Russia without Lawlessness and Corruption,”  US Senators John McCain and Joe Liberman and Mike Hammer of the Obama National Security Council came to support of Nemtsov. [19]

Nemtsov’s close crony, Vladimir Ryzhkov of Solidarnost is also closely tied to the Swiss Davos circles, even founding a Siberian Davos. According to Russian press accounts from April 2005, Ryzhkov formed a Committee 2008 in 2003 to “draw” funds of the imprisoned Khodorkovsky along with soliciting funds from fugitive oligarchs such as Boris Berezovsky and western foundations such as the Soros Foundation. The stated aim of the effort was to rally “democratic” forces against Putin. On May 23, 2011 Ryzhkov, Nemtzov and several others filed to register a new Party of Peoples’ Freedom to ostensibly field a presidential candidate against Putin in 2012.[20] 

Another prominent face in the recent anti-Putin rallies is former world chess champion turned right-wing politician, Garry Kasparov, another founder of Solidarnost. Kasparov was identified several years ago as being a board member of a Washington neo-conservative military think-tank. In April 2007, Kasparov admitted he was a board member of the National Security Advisory Council of Center for Security Policy, a “non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security.” Inside Russia Kasparov is more infamous for his earlier financial ties to Leonid Nevzlin, former Yukos vice-president and partner of Michael Khodorokvsky. Nevzlin fled to Israel on being charged in Russia on charges of murder and hiring contract killers to eliminate “objectionable people” while Yukos vice-president. ^[21]

In 2009 Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov met with no less than Barack Obama to discuss Russia’s opposition to Putin at the US President’s personal invitation at Washington’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. Nemtsov had called for Obama to meet with opposition forces in Russia: “If the White House agrees to Putin’s suggestion to speak only with pro-Putin organizations… this will mean that Putin has won, but not only that: Putin will become be assured that Obama is weak,” he said. During the same 2009 US trip Nemtsov was invited to speak at the New York Council on Foreign Relations, perhaps the most influential US foreign policy think-tank. Significantly, not only has the US State Department and US-backed political NGOs such as NED poured millions into building an anti-Putin coalition inside Russia. The President personally has intervened into the process.[22]

Ryzhkov, Nemtzov, Navalty and Putin’s former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin were all involved in organizing the December 25^th Moscow Christmas anti-Putin rally which drew an estimated 120,000.[23]

Why Putin?

The salient question is why Putin at this point? We need not look far for the answer. Washington and especially Barack Obama’s Administration don’t give a hoot about whether Russia is democratic or not. Their concern is the obstacle to Washington’s plans for Full Spectrum Dominance of the planet that a Putin Presidency will represent. According to the Russian Constitution, the President of the Russian Federation head of state, supreme commander-in-chief and holder of the highest office in the Russian Federation. He will take direct control of defense and foreign policy.

We must ask what policy? Clearly strong countermeasures against the blatant NATO encirclement of Russia with Washington’s dangerous ballistic missile installations around Russia will be high on Putin’s agenda. Hillary Clinton’s “reset” will be in the dustbin if it is not already. We can also expect a more aggressive use of Russia’s energy card with pipeline diplomacy to deepen economic ties between European NATO members such as Germany, France and Italy, ultimately weakening the EU support for aggressive NATO measures against Russia. We can expect a deepening of Russia’s turn towards Eurasia, especially with China, Iran and perhaps India to firm up the shaky spine of resistance to Washington’s New World Order plans.

It will take more than a few demonstrations in sub-freezing weather in Moscow and St. Petersburg by a gaggle of corrupt or shady opposition figures such as Nemtsov or  Kasparov to derail Russia. What is clear is that Washington is pushing on all fronts—Iran and Syria, where Russia has a vital naval port, on China, now on Russia, and on the Eurozone countries led by Germany. It has the smell of an end-game attempt by a declining superpower.

The United States today is a de facto bankrupt nuclear superpower.  The reserve currency role of the dollar is being challenged as never since Bretton Woods in 1944. That role along with maintaining the United States as the world’s unchallenged military power have been the basis of the American Century hegemony since 1945.

Weakening the role of the dollar in international trade and ultimately as reserve currency, China is now settling trade with Japan in bilateral currencies, side-stepping the dollar. Russia is implementing similar steps with her major trade partners. The primary reason Washington launched a full-scale currency war against the Euro in late 2009 was to preempt a growing threat that China and others would turn away from the dollar to the Euro as reserve currency. That is no small matter. In effect Washington finances its foreign wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere through the fact that China and other trade surplus nations invest their surplus trade dollars in US government Treasury debt. Were that to shift significantly, US interest rates would rise substantially and the financial pressures on Washington would become immense.

Faced with growing erosion of her unchallenged global status as sole superpower, Washington appears now to be turning increasingly to raw military force to hold that. For that to succeed Russia must be neutralized along with China and Iran. This will be the prime agenda of whoever is next US President.  

Endnotes:

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The Manas Air Base, situated near the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, has played a key role in the increasingly important Central Asian region since its inception. First opened in December 2001 to support the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Manas Air Base plays host to the US Ninth Air Force and serves primarily as a transit point for US goods and personnel coming and going from Afghanistan. As part of the so-called Northern Distribution Network, a key supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan that bypasses the now-blockaded Pakistani borders, Manas continues to be a strategically vital asset for the US. At the same time, the base has also been a point of contention with the locals for years, and the controversy doesn’t seem likely to die down any time soon.

As important as the base is to the Kyrgyz people, the true nature of Manas remains an open question. For years, it has been at the centre of a string of allegations revolving around drug-running, terrorism and stage-managed revolutions.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Air Base, and exploring its reported position as a center where the US conducts covert meetings and operations with various militant Islamic groups such as Pakistani Jundullah, its importance as a major transit point for Western controlled and routed Afghan heroin, the true nature of the Tulip Revolution, the incoming Kyrgyz president’s latest threats to close the base, and the nation’s position on a fault line in the tectonics of geopolitics.

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This is Part 6 of our interview series on the New World Order. You can listen to the previous interviews in this series here: Part I, Part II, Part III , Part IV, and Part 5.

Investigative journalist and NATO expert Rick Rozoff joins us to discuss the eighteen-year-old project of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Wolfowitz and their cabal to destroy the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States and create a chain of buffer states around Russia, enclosing it with NATO member states and partners. He provides us with analyses and implications of the invasion of Afghanistan by the U.S. and NATO, and the duo’s expansion into Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests converge. Mr. Rozoff talks about the Central Asia chessboard and how the region may be transformed into a battleground of conflicting 21st century geopolitical interests, the role of Islamic extremism and how it is used by the West on this grand chess board, Mujahideen and Al Qaeda’s partnership with US-NATO in the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia operations, the real mission of Afghanistan’s NATO-trained 7,000 troops as guardians of the oil and gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India- the TAPI pipeline & more!

Rick Rozoff is an investigative journalist based in Chicago and has been an active opponent of war, militarism and intervention for over 40 years. He manages the Stop NATO e-mail list , and is the editor of Stop NATO, a website on the threat of international militarization, especially on the globalization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Mr. Rozoff has a graduate degree in European literature.

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Geostrategy on the New Silk Road

Part of the so-called “New Silk Road” countries facilitating trade between East Asia and Western Europe, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are assuming a new role in international relations as they become more important in trans-continental trade and as their energy resources are opened up to foreign business interests. Chief amongst these emerging lynchpin countries is Kazakhstan, a nation whose international star is rising as it adds its recent chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the world’s largest regional security pact, to its growing list of organizational affiliations, including its seat at the UN, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as its partnership action plan with NATO.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting Kazakhstan, its vast untapped oil, gas and mineral reserves resources, the fierce competition between the US, China and Russia for access to its resources and transportation corridors, the tug-of-war of sorts that is happening as the country positions itself in an emerging power struggle between the East and West, and the role of Islamic radicalism as a proxy strike force to be funded, armed, trained, and used by the West for terrorizing the country should they stray too far from Washington’s agenda.

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Yesterday, in my brief commentary, Hail! NATO Expands Again!, I questioned NATO’s ever-expanding territories and global meddling sphere here at Boiling Frogs Post. Included in my commentary was NATO’s pursuit of resource-rich and strategically positioned  nations in Central Asia and the Caucasus for its new round of membership acquisition:

Due to the recent decision of the Pentagon to develop military cooperation with Azerbaijan by offering a 10 million dollar military support for the improvement of the Azeri military marine performances in the fight against terrorism, there are voices in Baku that support the interest of both parts in developing bilateral military cooperation till the level of Azerbaijan’s membership to the North Atlantic Alliance. In fact, there are estimates that this is likely to happen on medium term.

…

The following article appeared this morning on my ‘morning radar’:

Russia Says Georgia’s Entry to NATO Could Lead to War

Russia’s foreign minister has warned of a repetition of its 2008 war with Georgia if the South Caucasus state joins NATO.

Speaking at a news conference after the NATO-Russia Council in Brussels on Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he had warned NATO foreign ministers against “pushing the current Georgian regime towards a repetition of their August 2008 gamble.”

Georgia has been pursuing NATO membership but the five-day war in 2008 over Georgia’s breakaway territory of South Ossetia has made the alliance wary of taking it on.

Speaking during a visit to Georgia last month, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the country had “come a lot closer” to joining, but added that Tbilisi should pursue reforms.

“Further reforms will be Georgia’s ticket to membership and NATO is here to help,” Rasmussen told Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

…

Let’s watch these heated developments. Make sure you place this topic on your radar. Our media here is busy diverting attention, and will not give you the scoops on the troubling and escalating developments and tensions on this significant topic. So it is left up to you and me.

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What the heck is NATO? What’s it about? What’s it for? Not many people bother to ask any more. As with many New World organizations originally created under the guise of a temporary measure or a situation-based project or specific goal-oriented institution (think IMF, think World Bank), this one too has far exceeded its supposed originally intended mission, its sphere of control and operation, its size and budget, and basically everything it was marketed under when it was established. Also, as with all these institutions long-past and long-exceeding their originally marketed role, people cease to question or even critically think of the actual purpose, performance and results of supporting, keeping and funding this costly new world military body called NATO.

So, what was the ‘supposed’ role of this gigantic hawk of imperials’ tool originally? Check all the ‘legitimate’ reference bodies of literature, and what you get is what was marketed and sold over six decades ago:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO is an intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The NATO headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, and the organization constitutes a system of collective defense whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.

…

For its first few years, NATO was not much more than a political association. However, the Korean War galvanized the member states, and an integrated military structure was built up under the direction of two U.S. supreme commanders. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay, famously stated the organization’s goal was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”

…

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the organization became drawn into the Breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s which resulted in NATO’s first military operations in Bosnia from 1991 to 1995 and later Yugoslavia in 1999.

…

The September 2001 attacks signaled the only occasion in NATO’s history that Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty has been invoked and consequently the 11 September attacks were deemed to be an attack on all nineteen NATO members. After 11 September, troops were deployed to Afghanistan under the NATO-led ISAF and the organization continues to operate in a range of roles sending trainers to Iraq, assisting in counter-piracy operations and most recently enforced a NATO-led no-fly zone over Libya in 2011.

…

Okay, so after the fall of the Soviet Union the enemy went from Russia to the Serbs, and later, after 9/11, the enemy became Al Qaeda, aka terrorists, and went on to include ‘select’ dictators designated as ‘certain dictatorships.’ It went from defense to ethnic conflicts, from terrorism to reinterpreted and reinvented human rights causes.

How about the membership; the team? Well, right after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. promised the Russians that they will not expand beyond Germany:

In May 2008, Gorbachev repeated his view that such a commitment had been made, and that “the Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War”.^[23]

That promise lasted for a few years, and then without designating Russia as the enemy extraordinaire, NATO expanded and added: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. And a few years after Romania, NATO agreed to the accession of Croatia and Albania and invited them to join, and invited Ukraine and Georgia to become members. No one mentioned any specific threat or enemy. No one ‘really’ asked.

Lately NATO has been busy going after resource-rich nations in Central Asia and the Caucasus for its new round of membership acquisition:

Due to the recent decision of the Pentagon to develop military cooperation with Azerbaijan by offering a 10 million dollar military support for the improvement of the Azeri military marine performances in the fight against terrorism, there are voices in Baku that support the interest of both parts in developing bilateral military cooperation till the level of Azerbaijan’s membership to the North Atlantic Alliance. In fact, there are estimates that this is likely to happen on medium term.

Now we hear about NATO centers and offices in the oil-rich Middle East. Here is the latest on that front:

NATO to Open Centers in Kuwait & Other Gulf States

Brussels: Kuwait and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) are discussing plans to open a centre in Kuwait City, a Nato official has said.

The centre, the first of its kind in the Gulf, will help bolster relations and cooperation between the Gulf country and the international organization under the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI).

The initiative was launched at the Alliance’s Summit in the Turkish city in June 2004 to contribute to long-term global and regional security by offering Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries practical bilateral security cooperation with NATO.

…

So I’m asking again: What the heck is NATO? Why do we need NATO? What is it about? What is it for? What is it after? And why don’t most bother to examine this imperialistic war machine’s legitimacy to exist?

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Turkish claims earlier this year that three Chechen militants who were gunned down in Istanbul were in fact killed by Russian agents hardly made a ripple in the mainstream western media. Seen as a minor footnote to the ongoing Russian edition of the so-called Global War on Terrorism, it seemed like an interesting but isolated incident. Far from being unusual, however, what this incident points to is only the latest data point on a graph that demonstrates protection of Chechen terrorists from the capital of Turkey right into the heart of Europe.

What this case and many others points to is the fundamental hypocrisy underlying the US-led, NATO-enforced, Western-backed “war on terror” paradigm; just as the self-same Afghan mujahedeen could be called “freedom fighters” by one American president and “evildoers” by another, so, too, authorities can use the “freedom fighter” excuse to justify looking the other way when Islamic extremists from the Northern Caucasus set up bases in Europe. Upon closer examination, however, the West has not been involved in merely tacit support of the terrorists in the Caucasus, but in active funding, training and protection of these terrorists.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting the West’s continuous support and funding of terrorists in the Caucasus, Moscow’s evident conviction that the Chechen terror organizations are being protected and supported by the West, and exploring the likely reasons behind the puzzling relative silence from the Kremlin on these still-hidden realities and facts behind the terror in the Caucasus.

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Here is an exclusive interview I gave to James Corbett on my recent article, “US-NATO-Chechen Militia Joint Operations Base.” We discuss the American financing, funding and protection of Islamic terrorists in Central Asia, the history of Turkish links with the CIA, the heart of my whistleblower story and the State Secrets Privilege, and the real endgame for the competing world powers in the Caucasus.

You can listen to the interview here at Corbett Report.

As you know I am a big fan of my partner James Corbett and his brilliant work. If you are not familiar with him check out his website here for great podcast interviews, video reports and analyses. He now has an extensive collection of his interviews available on DVDs, and you can check them out and purchase them here.

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Most in the civilized world are blissfully unaware that we are marching ineluctably towards an increasingly likely pre-emptive nuclear war. No, it’s not at all about Iran and Israel. It’s about the decision of Washington and the Pentagon to push Moscow up against the wall with what is euphemistically called Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD).

On November 23, a normally low-keyed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told the world in clear terms that Russia was prepared to deploy its missiles on the border to the EU between Poland and Lithuania, and possibly in the south near Georgia and NATO member Turkey to counter the advanced construction process of the US ballistic missile defense shield: “The Russian Federation will deploy in the west and the south of the country modern weapons systems that could be used to destroy the European component of the US missile defense,” he announced on Russian television. “One of these steps could be the deployment of the Iskander missile systems in Kaliningrad.” [i] Those would be theatre ballistic missile systems. The latest version of Iskander, the Iskander-K, whose details remain top secret, reportedly has a range up to 2000 km and carries cruise missiles and a target accuracy to 7 meters or less.

Medvedev declared he has ordered the Russian defense ministry to “immediately” put radar systems in Kaliningrad that warn of incoming missile attacks on a state of combat readiness. He called for extending the targeting range of Russia’s strategic nuclear missile forces and re-equipping Russia’s nuclear arsenal with new warheads capable of piercing the US/NATO defense shield due to become operational in six years, by 2018. Medvedev also threatened to pull Russia out of the New START missile reduction treaty if the United States moves as announced. 

Medvedev then correctly pointed to the inevitable link between “defensive” missiles and “offensive” missiles: “Given the intrinsic link between strategic offensive and defensive arms, conditions for our withdrawal from the New Start treaty could also arise,” he said. [ii]

The Russian President didn’t mince words: “I have ordered the armed forces to develop measures to ensure, if necessary, that we can destroy the command and control systems” of the US shield, Medvedev said. “These measures are appropriate, effective and low-cost.” Russia has repeatedly warned that the US BMD global shield is designed to destabilize the nuclear balance and risks provoking a new arms race. The Russian President said that rather than take the Russian concerns seriously, Washington has instead been “accelerating” its BMD development.[iii]

It was not the first time Medvedev threatened to take countermeasures to the increasing Pentagon military encirclement pressure on Russia. Back in November 2008 as the US BMD threat was first made known to the world, Medvedev made a televised address to the Russian people in which he declared, “I would add something about what we have had to face in recent years: what is it? It is the construction of a global missile defense system, the installation of military bases around Russia, the unbridled expansion of NATO and other similar ‘presents’ for Russia ­ we therefore have every reason to believe that they are simply testing our strength.” [iv] That threat was dropped some months later when the Obama Administration offered the now-clearly deceptive olive branch of reversing the BMD decision to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russia is threatening to deploy its Iskander anti-BMD missiles in Kaliningrad

This time around Washington lost no time signaling it was in the developing game of thermonuclear chicken to stay. No more pretty words about “reset” in US-Russia relations. A spokesman for the Obama National Security Council declared, “we will not in any way limit or change our deployment plans for Europe.” The US Administration continues to insist on the implausible argument that the missile defense installations are aimed at a threat from a possible Iranian nuclear launch, something hardly credible. The real risk of Iranian nuclear missile attack on Europe given the reality of the global US as well as Israeli BMD installations and the reality of Iran’s nuclear delivery capabilities, is by best impartial accounts, near zero.

Two days earlier on November 21, Washington had thrown a small carrot to Moscow. US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher said that Washington was ready to provide information about the missile’s speed after it uses up all of its fuel. This information, referred to as burnout velocity (VBO), helps to determine how to target it.[v] That clearly was not seen as a serious concession by Moscow, which demands a full hands-on partnership with the US/NATO missile deployment to insure it will never be used against Russia. After all, given Washington’s track record of lies and broken promises, there is no guarantee the speeds would even be true.

After the early October Brussels NATO defense ministers meeting, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in regard to the nominally NATO European Missile Defense Program, “We would expect it to be fully operational in 2018.” Spain just announced it plans to join the US-controlled missile program, joining Romania, Poland, the Netherlands and Turkey, which have already agreed to deploy key components of the future missile defense network on their territories.[vi]

The concerns of Russia are caused by the dramatic improvement of an entire system of missile defense by Washington, which is taking the form of a global BMD system encircling Russia on all sides.

Full Spectrum Dominance…

The last time Washington’s Missile Defense “Shield” made headlines was in September 2009 early in the Obama Administration when the US President offered to downgrade the provocative stationing of US special radar and anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. That was a clear tactic to prepare the way for what Hillary Clinton ludicrously called the “reset” in US-Russian relations from the tense Bush-Putin days. However the strategic goal of encircling the one nuclear potential opponent in the world with credible missile defense remained US strategy.

Barack Obama announced back then that the US was altering Bush Administration plans to station US anti-ballistic missiles in Poland and sophisticated radar in the Czech Republic. The news was greeted in Moscow as an important concession.[vii] Subsequent developments clearly show that far from ditching its plans for a missile shield that could cripple any potential Russian nuclear launch, the US was merely opting for a more effective global system, whose feasibility had been proven in the meantime.

To assuage the Poles, the Obama Administration also agreed to provide Poland with US Patriot missiles. Poland’s Foreign Minister then and now is Radek Sikorski. From 2002 to 2005 he was in Washington as a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a noted neo-conservative hawkish think-tank,  and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a project to bring as many former communist countries of eastern Europe into NATO as possible. Little wonder Moscow did not view US missiles in Poland as friendly, nor does it today.

In May 2011 the Obama Administration announced that the missiles it would now give Poland consisted of new Raytheon (RTN) SM-3 missile defense systems at the Redzikowo military base in Poland (see map), roughly 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, a unique piece of Russian real estate not connected to mainland Russia, but adjacent to the Baltic Sea and Lithuania. That puts US missiles closer to Russia than during the 1961 Cuba Missile Crisis when Washington placed ICBM’s at sites in Turkey aimed at key Soviet nuclear sites. [viii]

The new Raytheon SM-3 missile is part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System that will be aimed at intercepting short to intermediate range ballistic missiles. The SM-3 Kinetic Warhead intercepts incoming ballistic missiles outside the earth’s atmosphere. Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors developed the Aegis BMD Weapon System. The SM-3 comes from Raytheon Missile Systems.

The Polish SM-3 missile deployment is but one part of a global web encircling Russia’s nuclear capacities. One should not forget that official Pentagon military strategy is called Full Spectrum Dominance—control of pretty much the entire universe. This past September the US and Romania, another new NATO member, signed an agreement to deploy a US-controlled Missile Defense System on the Deveselu Air Base in Romania using the SM-3 missiles.

As well Washington has signed an agreement with NATO member Turkey to place a sophisticated missile tracking radar atop a high mountain in the Kuluncak district of Malatya province in south-eastern Turkey. Though the Pentagon insists its radar is pointed at Iran, a look at a map reveals how easily the focal direction could cover key Russian nuclear sites such as Stevastopol where the bulk of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet is stationed or to the vital Russian Krasnodar radar installation.[ix]

The Malataya radar will send data to US ships equipped with the Aegis combat system that will intercept “Iranian” ballistic missiles. According to Russian military experts, one of the main aims of that radar, which targets at a range up to 2000 kilometers, will also be the surveillance and control of the air space of the South Caucasus, part of Central Asia as well as the south of Russia, in particular tracking the experimental launches of the Russian missiles at their test ranges.[x]

Further, the US-controlled BMD deployment now also includes sea-based “Aegis” systems in the Black Sea near Russia’s Sevastopol Naval Base, as well as possible deployment of intermediate range missiles in Black Sea and Caspian region.[xi]

But the European BMS deployments of the US Pentagon are but a part of a huge global web. At the Fort Greeley Alaska Missile Field the US has installed BMD ground-based missile interceptors, as well as at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And the Pentagon just opened two missile sites at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii. To add to it, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force has joined formally with the US Missile Defense Agency to develop a system of so-called Aegis BMD deploying the SM-3 Raytheon missiles on Japanese naval ships. [xii]  That gives the US a Pacific platform from which it can hit both China and Russia’s Far East as well as the Korean Peninsula. These are all a pretty long and curious way to reach any Iranian threat.

Origins of US Missile Defense

The US program to build a global network of ‘defense’ against possible enemy ballistic missile attacks began back in March 23, 1983 when then-President Ronald Reagan proposed the program popularly known as Star Wars, formally called then the Strategic Defense Initiative.

In 1994 at a private dinner discussion with this author in Moscow, the former head of economic studies for the Soviet Union’s Institute of World Economy & International Relations, IMEMO, declared that it had been the huge financial demands required by Russia to keep pace with the multi-billion dollar US Star Wars effort that finally led to the economic collapse of the Warsaw Pact and to German reunification in 1990. With a losing war in Afghanistan, collapsing oil revenues caused by a 1986 US policy of flooding the world market with Saudi oil, the military economy of the USSR was unable to keep pace, short of risking massive civilian unrest across the Warsaw Pact nations.[xiii]

This time around the US BMD deployment is designed to bring Russia to her knees as well, only in the context of a US creation of what military strategists call “Nuclear Primacy.”

Nuclear Primacy: Thinking the Unthinkable

While the Soviet era armed forces have undergone a drastic shrinking down since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia has tenaciously held on to the core of its strategic nuclear deterrent. That is something that gives Washington pause when considering how to deal with Russia. The potential for Russia to deepen its military and economic cooperation with its Central Asian partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, above all with China, is something Washington has gone to great lengths to frustrate. Such a strategic cooperation is becoming increasingly a matter of life-or-death for both China and Russia. China’s nuclear arsenal is not yet strategic as is Russia’s.

What the Pentagon is going for is what it has dreamed of since the Soviets developed intercontinental ballistic missiles during the 1950’s. Weapons professionals term it Nuclear Primacy. Translated into layman’s language, Nuclear Primacy means that if one of two evenly-matched nuclear foes is able to deploy even a crude anti-ballistic missile defense system that can seriously damage the nuclear strike capacity of the other, while he launches a full-scale nuclear barrage against that foe, he has won the nuclear war.

The darker side of that military-strategic Nuclear Primacy coin is that the side without adequate offsetting BMD anti-missile defenses, as he watches his national security vanish with each new BMD missile and radar installation, is under growing pressure to launch a pre-emptive nuclear or other devastating strike before the window closes. That in simple words means that far from being “defensive” as Washington claims, BMD is offensive and destabilizing in the extreme. Moreover, those nations blissfully deluding themselves that by granting the Pentagon rights to install BMS infrastructure, that they are buying the security umbrella of the mighty United States Armed Forces, find that they have allowed their territory to become a potential nuclear field of battle in an ever more likely confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

Dr. Robert Bowman, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of the US Air Force and former head of President Reagan’s BMD effort of the 1980’s, then dubbed derisively “Star Wars,” noted the true nature of Washington’s current ballistic missile “defense” under what is today called the Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency:

Under Reagan and Bush I, it was the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO). Under Clinton, it became the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). Now Bush II has made it the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and given it the freedom from oversight and audit previously enjoyed only by the black programs. If Congress doesn’t act soon, this new independent agency may take their essentially unlimited budget and spend it outside of public and Congressional scrutiny on weapons that we won’t know anything about until they’re in space. In theory, then, the space warriors would rule the world, able to destroy any target on earth without warning. Will these new super weapons bring the American people security? Hardly.[xiv]

During the Cold War, the ability of both sides—the Warsaw Pact and NATO—to mutually annihilate one another, had led to a nuclear stalemate dubbed by military strategists, MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction. It was scary but, in a bizarre sense, more stable than what Washington now pursues relentlessly with its Ballistic Missile Defense in Europe, Asia and globally in unilateral pursuit of US nuclear primacy. MAD was based on the prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage for either side; it led to a world in which nuclear war had been ‘unthinkable.’ Now, the US was pursuing the possibility of nuclear war as ‘thinkable.’

 Lt. Colonel Bowman, in a telephone interview with this author called missile defense, “the missing link to a First Strike.” [xv]

The fact is that Washington hides behind a NATO facade with its deployment of the European BMD, while keeping absolute US control over it. Russia’s NATO envoy Dmitry Rogozin recently called the European portion of the US BMD a fig leaf for “a missile defense umbrella that says ‘Made in USA. European NATO members will have neither a button to push nor a finger to push it with.” [xvi]

That’s clearly why Russia continues to insist on guarantees – from the United States – that the shield is not directed against Russia. Worryingly enough, to date Washington has categorically refused that. Could it be that the dear souls in Washington entrusted with maintaining world peace have gone bonkers? In any case the fact that Washington continues to tear up solemn international arms treaties and illegally proceed to install its global missile shield is basis enough for those in Moscow, Beijing or elsewhere to regard US promises, even treaties as not worth the paper they were written on.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. He may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net where this article was originally published.

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Pipeline politics have entered the North American consciousness over the last several months, with the proposed Keystone Pipeline connecting the Alberta Oil Sands to the United States becoming a contentious political issue sparking a storm of protest from a concerned population.

Much less in the North American consciousness, however, are a series of pipeline projects both proposed and under construction that are set to change the face of Central Asia, and to rewire the political relations of Eurasia as a whole. The political implications of these project are enormous, if underappreciated, and the potential economic rewards for the players involved are enormous, a fact certainly not lost on the players involved.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, joined by our distinguished guests Pepe Escobar and William Engdahl, presenting the West’s scramble to secure pipeline concessions in the highly strategic Caspian basin region, the likely destabilization game in these key states in a campaign of terror that will be blamed on Islamic fundamentalists or other shadowy terror groups, and how this destabilization would benefit the very NATO countries with an interest in gaining control in the region.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here:

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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A year or so ago I wrote a couple of pieces on the WikiLeaks case explaining my reluctance to form and communicate a conclusive opinion or reaction on this confusing intrigue. I encourage you to read my only two responses to the case here and here. Today, a new article paired with another fairly recent development in the case and a not so recent disclosure by a former WikiLeaks insider prompted another long-withheld response from me. Let me begin with the curious article from today’s news via RT:

US Government Demands Wikileaks Destroy All Files About Them- Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has told a media summit that the US government has ordered Wikileaks to destroy all the material is has published on them and stop working with its sources in the government.

­“[When we released our documents] the Pentagon said we must destroy everything we published and were going to publish,” Assange said. ”And if we didn’t, we would be ‘compelled to do so,’” the summit’s website says. Assange made the allegation in the course of a speech made via Skype at the News 2011 Summit in Hong Kong.

…

Now let’s pair this up with two other developments in this case. I’ll start with the first one in December 2010.

Last December a former Wikileaks insider in one of its European branches contacted me with excitement and an anticipation inducing piece of information. According to this credible source the large cache of the State Department Cables contained explosive communication- discussions and reports that were directly related to my case which involved secret joint US-Turkey operations in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Balkans.

These cables, dated 1996 to 2002, were part of the case files I worked on during my work with the FBI. These FBI files and cases were later designated as ‘State Secrets Privilege,’ and with that came all the classification, gag orders and other retaliations in my case, spilling into congressional inquiries and active court cases. Basically everyone, every party, whether congressional offices or federal court judges, were slapped with a gag by the US government under the guise of ‘State Secrets’ only to cover up criminal black operations as part of hypocrisy-ridden US foreign policy in the target region.

The heads up by my Wikileaks source became a cause for my reserved optimistic anticipation of further vindication and truth-exposure in my long-buried and covered up ‘State Secrets’ case. That’s when I wrote this piece with the following excerpts on December 3, 2010:

Meanwhile, while I am restraining myself and being uncharacteristically patient, I am going to go on record and tell you what I expect to see if this whole deal proves to be completely genuine, and if the obtained files go as far as they say they go.

I prepared a long list of items (documented diplomatic correspondence) I know to be included in diplomatic communications which took place between the mid 90s and early 2000s. I know I have a fairly large credit due with Santa since I’ve never made a wish list for him; ever. He owes me. He knows it and I know it. While that justifies my very long list (now you know I am old!!) I am going to exercise a little bit of fairness and present my list in manageable quantities and intervals. I hope my Wikileaks Santa has ‘word/phrase search’ technology at his disposal, because that would make his task of sorting and finding my requested items a far easier task. Okay, here it goes Wikileaks Santa, my first list for you, may your immensely large goodies bag contain these items highly beneficial for not only me but many others here and abroad…

Well, months passed with nothing of importance being released by Wikileaks pertaining to Turkey-related cables. There were a couple of inconsequential cables here and there, but not a single cable from the most crucial target years, 1996-2001, or explosive communications pertaining to our evil-deeds conducted in that part of the world-Turkey, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Balkans, and joint operations and partnerships with our Bin Laden and Mujahedeen entourage, and later with Fethullah Gulen’s Islamist Army there.

The absence of those cables for month after month was extremely curious and highly troubling. Considering the known fact that the largest portion of Wikileaks’ cables was those from Turkey, why didn’t we have anything on Turkey, especially those covering the most crucial years-1996-2001? Well, I chose to remain silent, observe and wait. I did.

A few months ago, whether by design or slip up, the entire Wikileaks Cache was released to the public. Now, over a quarter million State Department Cables, with the largest percentage being from Turkey, was public and readily available to all. I frantically began the query, sorting through thousands of ‘Turkey Cables’ and looking for the ‘crucial dates.’  I had several other savvy researchers who had volunteered doing the same, so they began pouring over the cables. We looked. We read. We searched, and then we searched again. We found nothing. Zip zip zilch.

That was not all. Even more curiously, far more troubling, unprecedented with any other countries’ cables cache, was the entire missing block of years for Turkey related cables. No cables from 1996 to 2001. Nothing. The entire six-year period in one big block was missing. There was this glaring 6-year period. I mean nothing; whether classified or public, absolutely nothing. Had the State Department, the US Embassy, the Turkish government, US-Turkish businesses ceased all communications with each other for an entire 6+ -year period?

Troubled and bewildered by the void I contacted John Young of Crptome.Org, one of very few experts in this area whom I trust, to get his response. The following is the comment I received from Mr. Young on this never-touched aspect of Wikileaks’ coverage by the media:

Cables on the topics you seek may have been classified above Secret. This is the innocent explanation. A more sinister view would be that the collection was sifted either by the source (who may have been officially enlisted to execute the disclosure), by parties involved in the transmission from the source to the disclosure site(s), or by the disclosure site(s). Note that there may have been more than one disclosure site which received the cables as well as each offering differing cable collections. WL alone has made public disclosures but has stated that it carefully packaged releases among selected outlets and it is unknown what all those outlets may be beyond those publicized…

And here comes sound and astute observation and analysis by Mr. Young:

The so-called full release is suspect due to the ease with which authentication measures can be forged and faked. Beyond this sinister view, it would not be unusual in the black market for information to monetize such materials by offering the most valuable to the highest bidder, among them the US Government, its allies and opponents. Nor would forgeries be unexpected due to their prevalence in the black market by governments and NGOs. Authentication of the cables remains unresolved due to the seemingly inept way they have been handled (maybe a subterfuge), not only at the source but at the many-pronged outlets. Nor would disinformation about authentication be unexpected by those most adversely and beneficially affected. The cables of your interest are likely to be quite valuable due to the authentication you have publicly given them.

Today, a year since my first brief coverage of the Wikileaks’ saga, my questions still remain:

Was Wikileaks’ given a sanitized version of the cables by design by the US government?

I highly doubt that. Especially when you consider my intimate Wikileaks’ insider’s (who had seen the entire original cable cache) tip, that becomes highly unlikely. This credible source had confirmed the existence of a group of cables related to Turkey which were directly related to my case. And this source had zero incentive to make up something like that, and go to all the trouble of ‘cautiously’ contacting me.

Did Wikileaks put aside those cables, somewhere safe, as an insurance policy against further and grimmer US government action(s) against them?

Possibly. Is it highly likely? I don’t know.

Did the US government issue a bold and highly-threatening threat to WikiLeaks’ Assange against releasing ‘particular’ cables?

Again, I consider this highly unlikely, but not impossible. As we see in the article released today, Assange appears to be cocky and bold enough to go on record and report the alleged threats by the US government. Why would he not talk about or report specific warnings and threats against releasing specific cables?

My questions and wariness still remain. I would even say, with the latest developments I have more reservations, questions and wariness towards this entire case than I did a year ago. If it isn’t what is advertised, then what the heck is this case about? You tell me.

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The US media may be many awful things, but no one could ever accuse them of not being consistent- at least when it comes to certain subject areas; US-NATO-Chechen joint terrorism operations being one. The censorship of this topic goes to such extremes where even modified-sanitized-pasteurized versions of related events and facts are nowhere to be found in the US media. Let me list a few globally known and reported facts, then add a few twos and twos and twos together, and see whether you can find any traces of that in the US mainstream media:

Assassinations of Chechen Terrorist Leaders in Turkey

The following was reported by British paper Telegraph in September this year:

Kremlin hit squad ‘assassinate Chechen Islamist in Istanbul’

The triple murder was carried out by a lone gunman in less than thirty seconds using a 9mm pistol fitted with a silencer. It brought the number of Chechens assassinated in the Turkish city in the last four years to at least six. The gunman pumped eleven bullets into the three men in a busy Istanbul street before speeding off in a black getaway car.

One of the murdered men, 33-year-old Berg-Haj Musayev, was said to be close to Doku Umarov, an Islamist terrorist leader who is Russia’s most wanted man. The other two were said to be his bodyguards.

It was Umarov who claimed responsibility for the January suicide bombing of Moscow’s busy Domodedovo airport, an atrocity that left 37 people dead. Musayev’s widow Sehida said she was sure the Russian secret service was behind her husband’s murder, a view echoed by Murat Ozer, head of a Chechen Diaspora group in Istanbul.

…

I am going to provide you with several cases like this, and go back several years, but for now keep this article in mind, and ask yourself: How did these notorious Chechen terrorist masterminds and leaders end up in Turkey? Why did all these high-level terrorists choose Turkey? How could they be allowed by the Turkish government to operate and carry out their terror operations from Turkey as their HQ-base?

Keep those questions in mind as you proceed to the next case and facts. Now, a bit more on these assassinations from Spiegel:

Russia Hunts Down Chechen Terrorists Abroad

Russian intelligence agents appear to be systematically working off a hit list. When he came into power, Putin, who was president at the time, apparently decided to expand the death zone. “We will pursue the terrorists wherever they go. If we find them in the toilet, we’ll kill them in the outhouse,” the president vowed, and set his agents loose on Chechen rebels and terrorists abroad.

In February 2004, Russian agents with diplomatic passports blew up an SUV carrying Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen rebel commander, in Qatar, where he had been a guest of that country’s emir…

…

The attacks were carried out in Arab countries, Azerbaidjan in the southern Caucasus and, in particular, Turkey. In September 2008, the Chechen militant Gaji Edilsultanov was murdered in Istanbul in broad daylight. Three months later, his fellow militant Islam Zhanibekov was killed in an execution-style shooting in front of his wife and children. Russian special-forces units had targeted the Chechen because of his involvement in several terrorist attacks.

…

Late last week, there was speculation on Chechen underground websites, as well as in the Russian and Turkish media, that a so-called “Berlin group” may have been involved in the killings. Russian undercover operations have allegedly been directed from the German capital, of all places.

Officially, German authorities have no solid evidence that this is the case. However, they did not fail to notice that more than 1,200 Chechen exiles and Russian intelligence agents are now stalking each other in Berlin. The Germans have also noticed that Umarov’s following is growing. They report dubious flows of cash — including from young men who are leaving Germany to join the holy war in the Caucasus.

…

What I want you to specifically take with you from this second article is that: 1- The largest concentrations of these active Chechen terrorists are in (in order): Turkey- A NATO member, Azerbaijan (Almost a NATO Member), Germany (a NATO Member), followed by Dubai- one of the closest US Allies in the Arab States, and Qatar-another very close US ally and partner in the Arab states. 2- Amazingly these notorious ‘Islamist’ terrorists are not present in ‘Islamist’ nations designated as terrorist nations by the United States: Iran, Syria. Of course there are no Chechens terrorist groups in North Korea Please keep this ‘2’ together with the previous one, and we’ll move to the next area.

Chechen Terrorists Linked Closely with Turkey

Do you remember the Moscow Theater hostage Crisis in 2002? If not, you can quickly check it out here. The following report came out after the investigations and follow up:

Chechen terrorists linked with Turkey: Russia

There were earlier reports that Chechen terrorists had made telephone calls to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the hostage drama.

According to reports carried by the Itar-Tass on Tuesday, Russian security intelligence said that they had had indisputable proof that the Chechens had received support and encouragement from these three countries.

…

The head of Russia’s International Military Co-operation Department, General Anatoli Mazurkeviç, is to meet with a European Parliamentarian Council delegation later on Tuesday and complain of what Russia sees as a double standard in west on combating terrorism.

…

I am sure you have picked up on the commonality shared by the mentioned nations. The time frame: 2002, and the terrorist and terrorist supporting nations happen to be those outside our nation’s designated axis of evil. No Iraq, Iran or Syria. No Gaddafi-led Libya.

…

Let’s pause for a second and check out the Chechens’ American friends and advocates, and after that we’ll come back here. The following article appeared in the Guardian UK in 2004 [All emphasis mine]:

The Chechens American Friends

In the US, the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled “distinguished Americans” who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the “war on terror”.

They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be “a cakewalk”; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on NATO; Michael Ladeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.

…

… In August, the ACPC welcomed the award of political asylum in the US, and a US-government funded grant, to Ilyas Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a man Moscow describes as a terrorist. Coming from both political parties, the ACPC members represent the backbone of the US foreign policy establishment, and their views are indeed those of the US administration.

…

Okay. You should have several twos by now to add together later: Main Chechen terror base and HQ in NATO Member and one of the closest US allies in the Middle East Turkey + Network Extension in Germany (NATO), Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Two closest US Arab Allies and Pawns) + All the major PNAC –Neoconservative & the New World Order players and operators + the CIA.

Now, let’s head back where we left off with the Russia-Turkey angle, and take a look at a more specific player. Here is an article from 2008:

Turkish Building Company Denied Funding Chechen Militants

Moscow, April 23 (RIA Novosti) – Turkish building company ENKA Wednesday rejected claims, made in a documentary program broadcast Tuesday on Russia’s Channel One TV, that it had provided financing in the 1990s to Chechen militants.

“We state that all information regarding our company broadcast April 22 in the Plan Caucasus TV program on Channel One is totally groundless and untrue,” ENKA said. “We deny all such accusations.”

ENKA is one of Turkey’s largest construction companies working in Russia.

The claims were made against ENKA in the TV program by Sultan Kekhursayev, now living in Istanbul. He said he had been “[now dead Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar] Dudayev’s army brigadier general.”

Kekhursayev said large Turkish companies working in Russia, including ENKA, funded the seizure of Chechnya’s capital Grozny in the summer 1996, adding that they “had done much” to assist militants.

…

ENKA was in fact involved in funding Chechen terrorist groups and even more. However, the funding was channeled via ENKA; not sourced to it. ENKA was (and probably still is) one of many Turkish companies used by the US government, specifically the CIA and the State Department, catering to objectives set by American actors mentioned in this article.

How do I know this? Well, let’s say it is one of the main State Secrets that received a particular privilege with my case. No matter. I have enough public documents and information to make you privy to this State’s Secret.

ENKA, one of the largest building-construction companies in Turkey (also internationally) is one of the top players, top operatives, and top members of a gigantic Turkish-American Lobby organization called the American Turkish Council (ATC). You can check its top status here at the ATC site: Click here.

To get a real picture of ATC I encourage you to read the entries here. And the following are a few excerpts from the Vanity Fair article in 2005:

Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C… the wiretaps suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was being used as a front for criminal activity.

            …

Please check the date mentioned above in the article on ENKA’s involvement and financing of Chechen terrorism dating back to the 1990s. And here is an excerpt from the VF article provided to the reporter by another FBI-DOJ source:

One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s…Toward the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some of the thousands of calls that had been recorded by this operation, some dating back to 1997. 

I believe it would be needless to ask you to add more twos here: FBI wiretaps targeting ATC, ENKA- a major operative and player of ATC, the dates of these files going back to the mid 1990s, our major American neoconservative/NWO players (movers-shakers) supporting Chechen terrorism against Russia, and their support (financing, masterminding, training, etc.) being implemented, in addition to the CIA, by operatives and players in Turkey and NATO. I could talk about various ways of money funneling through middle-men to the hands of the terrorists. Instead of talking and writing about it for hours, I’ll provide you with one example involving companies like ENKA:

Did you know that the US Government has been paying ENKA hundreds of millions of dollars for building US Embassies?  You can check it out here at ENKA’s website: US Embassy in Guinea, in Cameroon, in Mali, in Bosnia, in Sarajevo …Now ask yourself: why in the world would our government hire a Turkish company to build embassies for it around the world? My short tenure with the FBI was a real eye-opener with operations like this. This is one way to add to our black budget for our CIA’s black operations. You see, they (the CIA, aka State Department) get middlemen companies such as ENKA (believe me ATC is full of such companies) to quote a price ten or a hundred times more than the actual price. Then, they don’t let any ‘real company’ bid. Then, they get it easily approved (State Department, Congress). A company like ENKA would take a nice profit out of that, and the rest would go to finance our illegal/black operations in, let’s say Central Asia or the Caucasus.

I can assure you, every single main player in our media has known all about this-with documents, credible witnesses, for Pete’s sake through other nations’ news reports! Yet, for all these years, they have played as they’ve told by their masters-those powers ruling from behind our visible government: they’ve been consistent in censoring and blacking out the facts in ‘Islamist Terrorism Made in the USA.’ Be my guest. Take this well-documented and sourced information, and comb through our mainstream media’s archives. See what you end up with…other than ‘zilch.’

We Americans, bogged down in a perpetual so-called ‘war on terror,’ waging illegal and unjustified wars globally in the name of that ‘war on terror’ and so-called ‘Islamist terrorists,’ happen to be the world’s biggest mastermind, creator, financier, and supporter of ‘Islamist Terror.’ We used this as our number one method, modus operandi, during the Cold War throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa and the rest of the Muslim world. We made and trained and employed Bin Laden. No, it should be plural. We trained and employed and supported many Bin Ladens around the world. Then, after the Cold War, we continued the trend throughout Central Asia, the Balkans, Caucasus, and Xinjiang. Today we still remain the world’s number one terrorist nation. Either through illegal and unjustified wars of aggression or those blamed on some ‘Islamist Extremists’ which happen to be directly masterminded, instigated, financed and supported by us.

# # # #

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When The Shanghai Five held its first presidential summit in China in 1996, this innocuous group hardly registered as a blip on the geopolitical radar. Within just five years, however, the loose-knit cooperative organization of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan was already attracting the attention of some of the premier globalist institutions as a potential opponent to Western imperial hegemony.

In 2001 the five countries convened their annual summit in Shanghai where they admitted the body’s sixth member, Uzbekistan, and signed the Declaration of Shanghai Cooperation Organization. And from these inauspicious beginnings emerged an economic, cultural and military alliance which is now threatening to become a serious contender for control over one of the most geostrategically important areas of the globe.

This region, which arch-globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to as “The Eurasian Balkans” in his infamous 1997 opus, The Grand Chessboard, encompass portions of Southeastern Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. Brzezinski admonished the global power players who constitute his real readership that “any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design.”

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett, presenting the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, its increasing role in the formation of economic, political and even military cooperation in the region, a new power bloc that is not within the purview of the NATO powers and threatens western sovereignty over this vastly important region, and the tension that is likely to increase, as both sides become more entrenched, and more desperate to attain control over the area.

Watch the Preview Here:

Watch the Full Video Report Here (Subscribers Only):

*The Transcript for this video is available at Corbett Report: Click Here

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On November 7 the first of two pipelines for Nord Stream, the huge Russian-German gas pipeline project, began delivery of gas. The event was no minor affair. German Chancellor Merkel and Russian President Medvedev along with the prime ministers of France and the Netherlands and the EU Energy Commissioner formally opened the first of two 1224-kilometre pipelines at Lubmin in northern Germany, beginning delivery of the first gas direct from Russia’s Yuzhno-Russkoye gas field in Siberia to Germany.

Nord Stream was not cheap. It cost a total of more than $12 billion for the complex 760 mile long undersea pipeline through the Baltic Sea from Vyborg near Russia’s St Petersburg to north eastern Germany. It was laid in remarkable time and with extraordinary environmental precautions to insure protection of sea life, a precondition set by several EU Baltic countries. When the second pipeline is finished in late 2012, Nord Stream will be able to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year, almost ten percent the entire EU annual gas consumption, or roughly one third the entire current gas consumption of China.

Nord Stream estimates it will provide enough energy to fuel 56 million West European households. With current EU political decisions over reducing CO² “carbon footprint” emissions, the Russian gas giant argues its natural gas gives 50% less CO² than rival coal plants at as much as 50% greater energy efficiency.

Even if Moscow is being more than somewhat opportunist and is not convinced about the shoddy science of global warming, Gazprom does not hesitate to use this as a shrewd political selling point. The EU is going for natural gas energy big time and Moscow intends to be a major, if not the major beneficiary of that push. In addition to delivering Siberian gas to Germany, Nord Stream will deliver to the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the Czech Republic.

Moscow appears to hold a winning hand in the one important non-military lever it has to tip the global geopolitical balance of power in its direction and away from Washington’s overwhelming dominance. Oil and natural gas are at the heart of the strategy. For some months Russian production of crude oil has surpassed Saudi Arabia’s to be the world’s largest oil producer with over 10.3 million barrels daily, nearly one million barrels more.[1] And in terms of known reserves of natural gas Russia is far away the world leader according to industry data.

Russian natural gas has increasingly been the foundation for a brilliant series of Russian energy geopolitical initiatives for several years. Gazprom, a closely-held state company, is the centerpiece of this energy strategy.

To counter the eastward march of NATO into countries of the former Warsaw Pact such as Poland, the Czech Republic or Romania and the various US attempts to lure Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both as President and more recently as Prime Minister, has used the economic lever of Gazprom. With its enormous gas resources Russia seeks to win stronger economic ties in Western Europe, thereby hopefully neutralizing somewhat the potential military strategic threat from the NATO encirclement. No country has been more the focus of this Russian pipeline diplomacy than former wartime foe Germany where Nord Stream lands.

The undersea route across the Baltic to Germany was chosen by a German-Russian consortium including Gazprom with 51% and the German chemicals group BASF Wintershall and E.ON Ruhrgas of Germany each today with 15.5% share, giving the German-Russian partners a dominating 82% control. Further adding to the political support from key EU countries, later they were joined by N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie and France’s GDF Suez which each own a 9% share.

The Baltic undersea route was chosen deliberately to avoid potential geopolitical disruptions such as occurred several years ago when a pro-NATO Ukrainian government blocked Russian gas deliveries to Western Europe to undercut Russian attempts to come closer to western Europe. Behind Ukraine was the long arm of Washington. [2]

Had Ukraine joined NATO as Washington urgently sought after Kiev’s 2004 “Orange Revolution” brought Washington’s man Viktor Yushchenko in as President, then Ukraine would have been in a strategic position to economically strangle Russia on command. Prior to opening of Nord Stream in November some 80% of all Russian gas exports to EU countries—mainly to Germany, Italy and France—were flowing across Ukrainian territory. Political instability and ongoing NATO meddling in Ukraine dictated the decision to build the new Nord Stream undersea route to Germany and other EU markets bypassing entirely Ukraine and Poland. Today some 40% of all state revenue in Russia comes from Russia’s oil and gas exports.[3]

South Stream vs. Nabucco

While few outside the energy industry and special political interest groups have paid much attention to it, at the same time Nord Stream was coming into play a ferocious geopolitical battle has also been raging over a second planned major Gazprom Russian gas pipeline project to EU countries called South Stream. South Stream gas pipeline will be laid on the Black Sea floor, pass through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia and on to west European markets from the southern part of the EU.

To politically counter the growing Russian energy ties to the EU, with strong Washington backing, the EU Commission proposed an alternative in 2002 called the Nabucco pipeline, curiously named after the Verdi opera. To date Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria have agreed “in principle” to build the 3,900 km Nabucco pipeline that theoretically would pump up to 31 billion cubic meters of gas annually from the Caspian and the Middle East across Turkey into western Europe. Nabucco partners to date include energy companies RWE of Germany; OMV of Austria; MOL of Hungary; Botas of Turkey; Bulgaria Energy Holding of Bulgaria; and Transgaz of Romania.

The problem is that the Nabucco partners have yet to secure gas anywhere to fill the pipeline. Moscow has deftly locked up the gas from the obvious supplier Azerbaijan, and surplus gas from former Soviet Republic Turkmenistan is also secured in deals with Gazprom, leaving only Iran as an option, something politically Washington is not ready to consider, to put it mildly.

Both Nord Stream and South Stream came into being when Ukraine’s previous Yushchenko regime, with reported strong US behind-the-scenes backing, twice disrupted transit gas flows to European markets beginning 2006. To assure stability of supplies, Moscow created both new pipeline projects to bypass Ukraine.[4]

The geopolitical problem for Washington and its allies in Brussels is the fact that its Nabucco project appears dead in the water before it even gets started. Not only has Gazprom locked up the major gas supply sources including Azerbaijan. Nabucco is also far more costly than its Russian rival.

Latest estimates put Nabucco’s ultimate construction cost at almost double that of South Stream. Tamás Fellegi, Hungarian National Development Minister, recently stated that the cost of Nabucco gas pipeline will exceed original plans by four times. “No one can predict the final cost of Nabucco, but according to optimistic estimates, its cost may reach 24-26 billion euro,” Fellegi said.[5]

In late October Gazprom made a major move to secure partners for its South Stream in a Moscow meeting with its largest consortium partner, Italy’s ENI. [6] Some days before in September, Gazprom secured the significant participation into South Stream of its major Nord Stream German partner, BASF Wintershall, a major blow to Nabucco hopes. They joined the major French energy company EDF to give the South Stream project major clout versus the floundering Nabucco.

Last April, Turkey, also at least on paper a key player in Nabucco, gave permission to Gazprom to begin offshore prospecting for the potential undersea route of South Stream, a first step to gain Turkish approval to begin construction in Turkish territorial waters on the Black Sea. Turkey is trying to play a new role as an energy crossroads between the EU and its neighbors. By giving Gazprom the green light to begin prospecting, Turkey’s Erdogan government clearly has decided not to put all its energy eggs into the NATO Nabucco basket.[7]

Possible routes for Gazprom’s South Stream Pipeline

Already Gazprom is the largest natural gas supplier to the EU. Gazprom with Nord Stream and other lines plans to increase its gas supply to Europe this year by 12% to 155 billion cubic meters. It now controls 25% of the total European gas market and aims to reach 30% with completion of South Stream and other projects.

Rainer Seele, chairman of Wintershall, suggested the geopolitical thinking behind the decision to join South Stream: “In the global race against Asian countries for raw materials, South Stream, like Nord Stream, will ensure access to energy resources which are vital to our economy.” [8]

But rather than Asia, the real focus of South Stream lies to the West. The ongoing battle between Russia’s South Stream and the Washington-backed Nabucco is intensely geopolitical. The winner will hold a major advantage in the future political terrain of Europe.

According to Andrei Polischuk, an energy analyst at the BKS Finance Group, Nabucco is in far the weaker position at present. “This project is facing several problems. One of them is how to fill it with gas and how to find a resource basis. The second is its growing cost. Earlier, the project was estimated at 8 billion US dollars, but at present, it has grown up to 12 to 15 billion US dollars.” says Polischuk. “All these projects have first and foremost a hidden political motive. By implementing them, Europe tries to lower its dependence on Russian gas.” [9]

Reinhard Mitschek, director of Nabucco Gas Pipeline International, recently admitted that Nabucco now has been pushed back until 2017, three years later than originally planned. The construction work won’t begin until at least 2013. He feebly admitted in a recent press conference when pressed on a date for gas deliveries, that gas would flow, “as soon as there are firm indications that gas supply commitments are in place.” [10]

EU Nacht und Nebel Raid on Gazprom

As if on cue, just days before the planned opening ceremony for Gazprom’s Nord Stream pipeline the EU launched an unprecedented “nacht und nebel” style raid on the offices of Gazprom and its EU partners covering ten countries.

In response to a complaint by the Washington-friendly government of Lithuania, on September 28 EU officials raided Gazprom and associated offices in central and eastern European states to investigate firms involved in the supply, transmission and storage of natural gas. The Commission claimed the raids were linked to “suspicions” about anti-competitive practices.

The raids were an unprecedented use of new EU “antitrust” weapons including the threat of fines up to 10% of a company’s global turnover. Following a Thatcherite “free market” model, the EU Commission has in recent years forced E.ON, RWE and ENI to open up or sell their energy pipelines to rivals. E.ON and GDF were also forced to dismantle their market-sharing deals.

The EU is working a so-called Third Energy Package, which imposes limits on ownership of EU pipeline infrastructure by gas suppliers and calls for the “unbundling” of over-concentrated ownership. Under the rules, Russia could be forced to sell off parts of its pipeline network in the EU, something Moscow is understandably not about to do. It could open a Pandora’s box of geopolitical interference with potential for anti-Russian companies to in effect sabotage the vital and growing Russian gas trade with the EU, a mainstay today of Russian state finances.

The Gazprom raids were explicitly political. The EU even admits it has little evidence: “We’re at the beginning of the investigation; we have our suspicions and we have to see whether these are confirmed on the basis of the evidence we find and our analysis,” Commission spokeswoman Amelia Torres told press in Brussels.[11]

According to Reuters, “A Commission official, who declined to be named, told Reuters the raids were part of the EU’s efforts to wean itself off reliance on Russian gas and concerns about Gazprom’s power as a state-controlled entity.” Gazprom itself clearly links the raids to their recent progress on South Stream: “My guess is that it comes as Russia is speeding up its projects, including the South Stream underwater link,” a Gazprom source said. [12]

Vladimir Feigin, a member of the Russian delegation discussing the issue with EU officials, charges the European Commission with taking a “dangerous path” with the raids. “It’s not a simple demonstration of muscles … There are lots of issues, which are highly politicized, including Gazprom’s long-term contracts,” he insisted. [13]

While free market game rules may sound attractive to market outsiders, for the future planning of Gazprom long-term fixed contracts are essential. As oil markets reveal in recent years, while prices sometimes fall, most often they are subject to manipulation by major Wall Street banks like JP MorganChase, Citigroup or Goldman Sachs, the gang that pushed oil prices above $147 a barrel in June 2008 at a time supply on the world market was in glut, making a literal killing in the process.[14]

In anticipation of the larger export market for its gas to Europe, Gazprom has been making huge infrastructure investments across Europe which could be wiped out by an adverse EU decision. It is in the process of doubling its underground storage capacities for gas. It already operates gas storage facilities in Austria and leases facilities in Britain, France and Germany to handle the planned new flow from Nord Stream and South Stream. As well, Gazprom has built a joint venture storage facility with Serbia to serve gas exports to Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Hungary. Feasibility studies are being done for similar joint storage projects in the Czech Republic, France, Romania, Belgium, Britain, Slovakia, Turkey and Greece. This, in addition to the major investment in the pipelines, makes it clear the EU raids are aimed at Moscow’s energy jugular.[15]

Were Moscow to succeed in completing South Stream and retain its integral control over the delivery pipeline infrastructure, it would represent nothing less than a major geopolitical defeat for Washington. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, Washington energy geopolitics in the Caspian region and across Eurasia into Russia have attempted to weaken if not permanently cripple the one major remaining geopolitical lever Moscow holds to counter Washington’s NATO encirclement strategy. Not letting itself be totally dependent on EU gas or oil revenues, Moscow has recently indicated it is greatly increasing its focus on building long-term energy partnerships with its eastern neighbors of Eurasia, most notably with China. The geopolitical implications for Washington of that shift will be examined in a subsequent article.

F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics in the New World Order. He may be contacted through his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net where this article was originally published.

Endnotes:

[1] News Wires, Russian Output Hits Post-Soviet Highs, 2 November 2011, accessed in http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article286798.ece.

[2] F. William Engdahl, Ukraine Geopolitics and the US-NATO Military Agenda: Tectonic Shift in Heartland Power–Part I, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18128.

[3] Friedbert Pflüger, Russia and Europe: Time to bury the hatchet-and embrace the market, 20 October, 2011, European Energy Review.

[4] RIA Novosti, Ukraine lost reputation of reliable gas transit country – Yanukovych, 19 October, 2011, accessed in http://en.ria.ru/world/20111019/167874442.html

[5] ABC.AZ, Nabucco project cost to exceed value of South Stream and make it world’s most expensive gas pipeline, 24 October 2011, http://abc.az/eng/news/main/58939.html

[6] ENI, Gazprom CEOs discuss South Stream Development, October 17, 2011, accessed in

www.offshoreenergy.com

[7] Newswires, Turkey gives offshore permit to Gazprom for South Stream project, 11 April, 2011.

[8] UPI, Wintershall joins South Stream consortium, September 16, 2011, accessed in

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2011/09/16/Wintershall-joins-South-Stream-consortium/UPI-92591316173513/#ixzz1dUq77i89.

[9] Moscow Times, Europe still wants to go around South Stream, September 30, 2011, accessed in http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/09/30/57380344.html.

[10] M K Bhadrakumar, Russia redrawing Europe energy map, Asia Times Online, May 12, 2011, accessed in http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/ME12Ag02.html.

[11] Reuters, EU raids Gazprom offices in anti-trust probe, 29 September 2011, accessed in http://www.euractiv.com/energy/eu-raids-gazprom-offices-anti-trust-probe-news-508007.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] F. William Engdahl, More on the real reason behind high oil prices: Part II, Global Research, May 21, 2008, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9042.

[15] M K Bhadrakumar, op. cit.

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Peter B Collins: Our guest today is Paul Thompson, he is the author of the Terror Timeline, he is an alumnus, a graduate of Stanford university, and he has been researching 9/11 and related issues for many years. Paul Thompson, welcome to the Boiling Frogs.

Paul Thomspon: Hey, thanks for having me.

PC: I just wanted to mention as we delve into the complex issues of the events of September 11, 2001, that there were 2 key bits that prompted me to become skeptical or curious, and follow your lead in many respects to question the official story and seek the truth about 9/11. The first was when a friend who was a medical doctor and a private pilot came to me and talked to me about the disconnect between the Federal Aviation Agency and NORAD on 9/11. We may get into those details but, suffice to say, it was a sad comedy of errors and it piqued my interest. But it wasn’t until I saw the timelines that were developed by people like you, and there was some others who did similar work, that really showed the glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and led to ask questions about the role of some of the individuals in the Bush administration, and the level of honesty, or of lack of it that we have had to encounter, including the way 9/11 Commission was used to “firm up”, the myth that had been launched right after the 9/11 attacks. Now, Paul Thompson, in recent weeks Richard Clarke, who was a key counterterrorism advisor to George W. Bush in the Bush White House, was the subject of an interview that was actually conducted a couple of years ago, but was broadcast on a public television station in Colorado. And it includes some very interesting new allegations from Clarke, essentially that he was kept in the dark on one specific piece of information regarding two of the individuals who were later alleged to have been hijackers on 9/11. Why don’t you recap for our listeners what Clarke said, and why it makes news about these issues.

PT: Well, I recommend people go check out the interview with Clarke for themselves. It’s at secrecykills.com, and it’s about 12 minutes long, so it’s not too much information to take in, and I think the whole thing was very interesting. But in short, he was the ‘counterterrorism czar’ at the time of 9/11 and for a few years before that, and that means he was the highest counterterrorism official in the United States. So he really was the top dog, and all information, all important information, was supposed to come through him, to get to his desk. And, so in this interview he says, ‘you know, there were these two hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar, and it looks now in retrospect, that for a long time, people in the CIA knew a lot about those guys, those two hijackers, and that information did not come across my desk.’ He says he was in contact with Tenet, talking to him on the phone, three, four times a day, any time there was any little bit of information, he would get a phone call from Tenet. He was receiving over 100 CIA reports a day and looking them over. There was a steady flow of information and it’s hard to think before 9/11, what would be a bigger red flag than having 2 known al-Qaeda operatives actually inside the United States? And for all of this time, nobody told him that, he claims. And so he’s quite shocked about this and quite dismayed, and he ends up coming up with a theory to explain why that happened.

PC: And his theory essentially is that the CIA was trying to work with these two Saudis, and convert them to CIA assets. And in order to ‘flip’ them, they kept this very tightly held. The other theory that surfaces for me though, Paul, is that as you mentioned Richard Clarke had served in the Clinton administration and was a holdover into the Bush White House, one of the few.

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: And my sense is that he was not entrusted with the darkest secrets of the Republican inner circle that arrived determined to attack Iraq and Afghanistan.

PT: Well, I think to some extent that’s true, he was certainly kind of demoted, allowed to keep his job but sort of not in the inner circle. He wasn’t meeting with the principals anymore, meaning cabinet-level people like he had been in the Clinton administration. But you have to remember also that George Tenet was a holdover from the Clinton administration and he

PC: Yep.

PT: he was the head of the CIA all the way back to 1997, and this is really a lot about Tenet and the CIA hiding this information. So, you’ve got two Clinton holdovers really, who are at the center of this.

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: And to some extent he was privy to some of this stuff that the Bush administration was doing. I had heard this interview with Richard Clarke and I was driving down the road, and I practically drove off the road I was so shocked, this was a few years ago, where he mentioned in an interview with NPR radio that around, I think it was around April, May 2001…basically, top Bush people were sitting around a table and discussing ways to have some kind of provocation to go to war with Iraq. And they were kind of brainstorming different ideas on ways to have a casus belli

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: you know, some sort of excuse for the war. They talked about things like flying an airplane over Iraq and making sure it got shot down by the Iraqi forces, so they could use that as an excuse. So that’s some pretty wild stuff that most of the American public has never heard about and people

PC: That particular idea that was floated by, apparently, George W. Bush was in a conversation with Tony Blair. And it was British, I believe, Sir David Manning, the British Ambassador to Washington who ultimately revealed that.

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: And it does show that they were looking for a pretext and possibly it wasn’t the first one that they had thought about or activated.

PT: Right.

PC: So Paul, as we heard this interview with Richard Clarke, many other questions come up because he does make a very precise allegation, which is, on September 4th of 2001, there was a principals meeting in the White House, and, he was not told, the principals were not told, that the CIA had informed the FBI about the presence in the united states of Alhazmi and Almidhar. And he says, ‘if they had told us, we would have found those assholes’, and he talks about what they would have done first to launching an investigation into malfeasance by the CIA for not sharing this information and secondly, that he said, ‘we would have put it out on the Associated Press and found those guys.’

PT: Mm-hmm. Well, I’d kind of like to go the whole way back to the beginning and talk about the whole story of these two guys. I think their story has not really been understood or appreciated by the American people as the importance that it really needs to have. But to just kind of mention just a little bit about what you were saying…that very day that that meeting happened, which was September 4th, one week before the 9/11 attacks; There’s a very strange mystery because there was, in the couple weeks right before 9/11 there was some information about these 2 hijackers that was finally given to the FBI after they had, the CIA, had known about these guys for 2 years.
And there was this very inexperienced FBI agent by the name of Robert Fuller, who was given the job of finding these two hijackers. The hijackers, these 2 guys, were not living under cover, using aliases, using all kinds of clever spy tactics…they were living completely openly in the United States. One of them even had his name in the San Diego phone book for crying out loud. They had bank accounts, they had credit cards, they had car registrations, they had traffic tickets…all down the line, everything in their own name. So, at that time, the United States had developed over the years a lot of databases. For instance, you can look up police database that would have anybody’s traffic tickets or arrests in there, and Alhazmi had actually been arrested a couple times for minor things. You can look up credit checks, you can look up the motor vehicle index, they have all these great, sort of private companies collecting incredible amounts of information about people, like Choicepoint was one of these. They had the hijackers’ names and addresses in that. So, he had all of these databases to look at, something like ten different databases, and he supposedly he didn’t find the names of these 2 hijackers in any of the databases which just doesn’t make any sense at all.

Immediately after 9/11, other people did checks and they found these names in pretty much all of these databases. And interestingly enough, we have a mention that says that he asked permission from someone else, from a higher up, to search the credit card database for the names of these 2 people and he was told that was not advisable, ‘not prudent, to do so at this time.’ So, you can see, there’s something very strange going on there, why on earth would they not want to be looking at databases to see if these people are in the United States. What would be the possible excuse to be telling this agent not to do that? So I would like to go all the way back to the beginning and kind of tell the whole story about these 2 hijackers.
PC: Well, go right ahead, we are all ears. So how far back would you like to go?

PT: I want to go all the way back. I think another really great, untold story, in which I have to sort of give the highlights of, is how much the United States intelligence community knew about al Quaeda before 9/11. I just want to mention something that I found, it was from a report, about 6 months after 9/11 that shows just how jaw dropping this was. And this was from a Washington Post article that talked about the capture of Abu Zubayda who supposedly is an al Quaeda big wig and he was arrested early in 2002. And I’ll quote from the article, “‘When agents found Zubaydas laptop computer’, a senior law enforcement source said, ‘They discovered that the vast majority of people he had been communicating with were being monitored under Visa warrants or international spying efforts.’ ‘Finally we got some comfort that surveillance efforts are working’, said a government official familiar with Zubaydas arrest.” So this is quite remarkable because there’s been a lot of controversy about Zubayda; was he really some important al Quaeda guy or not?

Some people think he was mentally ill. But there’s no doubt that he was sort of like a travel agent and he was in communication with a vast number of people. One of the people who said he was kind of crazy and not as important as people say, an FBI agent by the name of Dan Coleman, he said that even though he was crazy, he was constantly on the telephone talking to people all around the world. He was kind of being used, perhaps as someone who is expendable if they got caught, because he did have these mental issues. So, all around the world, all these al Quaeda operatives, we find that the vast majority of them were actually under surveillance at this time, just a short time after 9/11. So, to me, that’s a story that’s never been told, how is that al Quaeda has been able to operate as successfully as they were when they were being monitored so closely?
PC: Well, that’s a lingering question that we are going to have to deal with. So, take us back to Alhazmi and Almidhar first became evident, or, we first became aware of them as we look back forensically.

PT: Right, well, I think we have to go even further back than that. If you go all the way back to the early 1990′s, you have Osama bin Laden living in Sudan rather openly. And we know that way back then, the US intelligence community already started monitoring his satellite phone. In fact, according to one report, even way back then, they developed a technology that they got enough of his vocal recognition, so that if he called on any telephone, they would be able to go through their incredible NSA database and match that phone call with his voice. So he didn’t even have to be using his phone, any voice they’d be able to figure out that was an Osama bin Laden call.

So anyway, so he’s living there and around 2006 (1996?), this other al Quaeda operative, who’s a long time close personal friend of Osama bin Laden, starts this hub in Yemen, and this is going to play a very important role in the story of Alhazmi and Almidhar. And what was happening was that a lot of the countries where al Quaeda was operating like Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia, different countries, the governments there, they were trying to prevent phone calls being made by militants from one country to another. So for instance, Egypt didn’t allow anybody in Egypt to call Afghanistan. They would block all those calls that they could. There was a lot of these blockages, so what a lot of the al Quaeda operatives around the world did was they used this Yemen hub as basically an al Quaeda switchboard.
They would call that hub and say, ‘I’m looking for so-and-so somewhere, and my friend’s over in Europe’, and connect me with that person. So this was just of incredible importance, this hub. Osama bin Laden himself called the hub many, many times. And what happened was the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, they all realized the great importance of this hub. So much so, that they not only monitored phone calls from the hub, but they actually physically planted bugs inside the building, and they even had a satellite in the sky that was dedicated to the hub, that would take satellite photos of anybody coming and going from the building.
This goes way back to the 1990s when they were doing this. What they also did was they had a big map of the world that they put on the wall somewhere, some FBI agents, and every time there would be a call from that hub to somewhere in the world, they would put a pin in the location to where that call was going. And so over time, they were able to map al Quaedas operations all around the world.
So you can start to see why, from this Washington Post article, they were able to say that they had the vast majority of all al Quaeda operatives around the world under surveillance. It was mostly because of this hub.

So now lets get to the Alhazmi-Almidhar part of this. It turns out that the person who owned this building and ran that hub, was actually the father in law of Khalid Almidhar, one of the hijackers. And so, Khalid Almidhar lived in the hub, his wife lived in the hub. Of course he would be off doing various operations, but he would come back from time to time, visit his wife and his extended family which was all pretty much living in that hub. And everyone in that family was pretty much al Quaeda. One report says that practically half of all of the really dangerous operatives in Yemen were all related to this one family. So, this was just like a laser being shone on this hub, on these phone calls and people in the hub, it just couldn’t be any more important. And then, at the end of, well actually all through 1999, Khalid Almidhar was coming and going, NSA was recording phone calls, the fact that he was living there. They got his name, they got the name of his good friend Nawaf Alhazmi, and then it reached a climax at the end of 2009 (1999?) when there was a series of phone calls, basically another high ranking al Quaeda leader named Khalad bin Attash, called up at the hub, called Khalid Almidhar there, and said ‘there’s an important meeting coming up in Malaysia, we want you to attend’. And he said ‘OK’. And there was also a call to Nawaf Alhazmi saying the same thing, ‘Come to the meeting in Malaysia’, and there was a call also to Salem Alhazmi, Nawafs’ brother who’s another 9/11 hijacker. He was also told to come to the meeting. All of these calls are all being recorded by the NSA. And so, they realized with the other US intelligence agencies ‘something really important is happening in Malaysia. Let’s track these guys to the meeting, record the meeting, find out what’s going on there. And that’s exactly what they do. On the way to the meeting Khalid Almidhar stops by in Dubai in the middle east and his passport, his photograph, secretly, might have been by some local people there, might have been some people breaking into this hotel room and photographing it, but for whatever reason they got his passport and it revealed that he had a Visa to come to the United States; and this is huge. Can’t get any more important information than that, because they’ve never really had any solid link of al Quaeda doing something, planning some kind of attack in the United States. This was the first really big break. So, this brings us all the way up to the Malaysia Summit.
PC: And before we go there, Paul, can I just ask you a couple of things about this hub in Yemen? Because Michael Scheuer, who was heading the Alec station, that was the al Quaeda desk, and it was named for his son Alec. He told me, and I believe he also told James Bamford that he tried to get the NSA to share transcripts of these intercepted satellite phone calls that were coming into the hub in Sanaa, in Yemen

PT: Mm-hmm.

PC: and that the NSA refused. And apparently CIA was able to get one portion of the call. Let’s just say that it’s the part originating from Yemen going up to the bird. And he even made a transcript of the one side of the call that CIA was able to intercept, sent it over to NSA and said, ‘well now will you please give us the rest of it?’, and they declined. So some of this in fighting between intelligence agencies on the US side is of interest to me, because it once again suggests, as Richard Clarke has, that the top CIA officials were keeping some information about key al Quaeda operatives very, very tightly held.

PT: Right. Well, I’d say that, sort of the main explanation that people give when they talk about this kind of thing, is they talk about the infighting between these various agencies and, ‘isn’t a shame that there was so much infighting, and that’s really what prevented US intelligence from stopping the 9/11 attacks’, and certainly there was a tremendous amount of infighting that was going on. And what Richard Clarke said is that the infighting excuse is not enough; it wasn’t simply that FBI and CIA couldn’t play ball together and so forth, that there is such an egregious amount of hiding of information about these 2 hijackers that that alone doesn’t explain it. And I think that’s what I’m going to try to argue here, as we go along, is that yes there was this infighting but that alone does not explain what’s going on here. And certainly with the Yemen hub there’s a tremendous amount of hoarding of information. The NSA hardly shared anything that they were getting about this.

So, what’s interesting is that all 3 of those agencies, NSA, CIA, FBI, they realized how important this hub was, and they pretty much independently created their own ways of getting information about the hub so they wouldn’t have to rely on the other agencies. I think the CIA actually went so far as to build their own satellite antenna in the Indian ocean so that they could get the information from this hub. So, we follow that about not sharing of information, but we have to be mindful that in a way that doesn’t really apply to things, because they were gathering their own information independently of each other.
PC: Mm-hmm. And I think I may have misstated his name, it was Scheuer, Michael Scheuer. Ok, so with that said, continue your narrative and let’s go to Malaysia.

PT: I’d also like to point out that Scheuer, he left the CIA bin Laden Unit in the middle of 1999, so he is not really privy to what happens afterwards.

PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: Which is, we’re getting at the very end of ’99. So they’ve tracked these 2 people, Alhazmi and Almidhar, to the Malaysia summit. It’s not really clear if Salem Alhazmi ever attended or not, although he did go on to participate in the 9/11 attacks. Malaysia was a great place to meet because the Malaysian government, wanting to be friendly with middle eastern governments, didn’t even require a Visa from most countries to come to that country, so people could just drift in very easily. And what seems to have happened was it was kind of like an ‘al Quaeda all-star team’ arrived at this summit, and there’s some dispute over exactly who attended, and I think there’s been a deliberate obfuscation all the way until today about just who was at that meeting, but I believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “9/11 mastermind” was at that summit.

For instance, there’s a lot of newspaper reports to that effect, and recently I came across some Wikileaks documents that came out that indicated that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lived for a whole week with Alhazmi and Almidhar in Malaysia at that time, which would seem to confirm that he was there. Then you’ve got Hambali, who’s sort of al Quaedas biggest man in Southeast Asia. He worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on the Bojinka plot in 1995 which was kind of an early version of the 9/11 attacks which could have killed up to 4,000 people. Very major terrorist; he was known to be a major terrorist by the time of the summit. Then you’ve got Ramzi bin Alshibh; now he’s a very interesting case because he was a member of the Hamburg cell with Mohammed Atta, and some of the other 9/11 pilots who seem to have come to this summit. German intelligence says they have credit cards of him being in Malaysia at the time, there were photographs of him taken at the summit. So that’s a big ‘what if?’. How is it that he goes to the summit and that doesn’t somehow lead to the Hamburg cell in Germany being wrapped up? Because the summit is being very heavily monitored by intelligence agencies. We’ll get back to that. But anyways, so then you’ve got him, you’ve got Alhazmi and Almidhar, the host of the summit is a person named Yazid Sufaat, who’s seemingly head of al Quaedas biological weapons program; it’s being held in his apartment. You’ve got Khalad bin Attash who’s a major operational planner, you’ve got another guy al-Nashiri, major operational planner, about a dozen guys in all. Very, very important, I don’t think there was probably ever a time before 9/11 where there was such a collection of individuals outside of Afghanistan. It was just an unparalleled intelligence opportunity.

So all these guys are gathering at this apartment of Yazid Sufaat, and what the CIA did apparently was instead of monitoring these summit attendees themselves, they had the Malaysian Special Branch, their intelligence agency in Malaysia, do the monitoring. And so the Malaysian Special Branch took photographs, the first day they actually recorded a lot of video footage, but the story is they never got into the apartment where the summit was held. They never had any audio recordings, they were only taking pictures of these people as they wandered around town, they were staying at hotels, they were going to restaurants visiting internet cafes, so on and so on. But they never actually knew what going on in the summit. Now, I don’t know if I believe that, but be that as it may, they’ve got this recording of all this going on, and at the time it was considered so important that people at the cabinet-level in the United States were being updated on a daily basis. The head of the FBI, George Tenet, head of the CIA, the National Security Advisor; it doesn’t seem it actually got all the way up to the level of president Clinton, but certainly very top level people were being told on a daily basis as this summit went on. It was a 4 day meeting. Every day they would be getting updates on what was happening at that summit. And another very important point is that this is at the very time where fear about al Quaeda was hitting a peak, because this summit just happened a few days after January 1 2000, and there was a great fear that there would be millennium attacks, to be timed at the start of the new millennium. There had been an al Quaeda operative captured as he tried to enter the US in Seattle just a couple weeks before. And so there was this great fear that al Quaeda might be planning some attacks to happen very soon in the United States. So you have this incredible worry and focus and you have all these al Quaeda big wigs all meeting right there in Yemen (Malaysia?) So, you would think that after all that, 2 of the 9/11 hijackers attending, the 9/11 mastermind attending…how is it possible that they don’t just wrap up the whole 9/11 plot based on the surveillance of the summit? That’s one of the big mysteries that’s never been explained.
PC: And so, without asking you to form some hardened conclusion, as you recite these things, is it your suspicion that the Bush administration allowed it to happen, or was some way involved in orchestrating it with these characters that they certainly had under surveillance?

PT: Well, you know, I don’t like to speculate along those lines, I don’t even think speculation is necessary, because I think as we go into more details of this Malaysia summit and these hijackers and so forth, you can put forward 3 theories: you can say there was some sort of incompetence; people dropped the ball, that there was an al Quaeda operation going forward and the Bush administration let it happen, or that they actually helped make it happen. But I think the least worst of those would be the incompetence, obviously. When you really look at this, it would have to be such a level of incompetence where you just have this right in your face over and over and over again, that that would have to be criminal incompetence, which should lead to jail terms in my opinion.

So you’re kind of, those different theories, it’s almost a moot point where you’re kind of arguing just how long do these people go to jail, you know? I kind of put it, I like to think of it in terms of a bank robbery.

Where you can think, OK, you can have a person standing there as a security guard, and the bank robber runs down the street runs into the bank; so what is the security guards role? He could be working to help the person rob the bank, it could be part of the team, or, he could be just letting it happen because he wants to see that bank robbed. Or, he could be totally incompetent and do nothing while massive amount of time goes by, and the bank gets robbed. And that’s just as bad as the other two pretty much! I mean, wouldn’t that security guard be locked up for a long time if he just waited an hour knowing that the bank is being robbed and he didn’t do anything about it? Didn’t tell anybody about it? To me, it’s just as bad, really.
PC: Mm-hmm.

PT: So, I see it as kind of– you can’t really know, you can’t really go inside these people’s heads, we don’t have enough data to really know everything, but we know enough that I think if there were to be, to this to actually come to the US courts, that people would go to jail for something. Because there’s no good excuse for why these various attacks were allowed to go forward.

Sibel Edmonds: Well, actually it even gets more confusing and complex than that, and that’s the fact that both the CIA and the State Department, because a lot of these operatives at the CIA, they worked under State Department titles. And a study from 1995, 1996, these same actors were working with, back then they were not called al Quaeda, at least not by the FBIs’ definition or the wiretaps collected at the scene, –foreign targets of the State Department. But, the same actors that we are talking about, our government people within the State Department and the CIA, this is during the Clinton years, were working with these people in Chechnya, in the Balkans, in the central Asian Caucasus. And I’m talking about working together.

PT: Right, well

SE: OK, and so the question that comes up is, they are our partners, they were our partners, in the Balkans, you know, with the conflict in Bosnia, and also in Kosovo. They were our partners with what we did with Chechnya, with Russia. They were our partners with some of the assassinations and the plots they were carrying out in places like Azerbaijan. The same people, bin Laden, Zawahiri, even some of the actors involved in this
PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: And yet, we were also monitoring them as terrorists while we were actually working with them. That’s

PT: Yeah, it’s sort of crazy when you think about it. I mean, I think that if you really start looking at the Machiavellian workings of what the US government and other governments were doing, they kind of saw things in terms of “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”. Where you have terrorists who for whatever reason, these people are somehow doing our bidding, they are helping us out, they’re helping us achieve our goals, either wittingly or unwittingly.
A good example would be Chechnya, where, for a long time the US had a great quagmire in Viet Nam, and they liked to sort of think of Chechnya as Russia’s’ Viet Nam, and this is a big quagmire for them. They’ve got to be dealing with these Islamist militants and fighting there constantly, year after year, sapping their economy.
SE: Exactly.

PT: They’re a traditional enemy of the United States, so the more Chechnya can sap them, the more the American foreign policy experts and officials are saying, ‘hey this is a really good thing, so why would we want to stop any potential Islamist militant from going to Chechnya and fight there? Hey, instead of stopping them, let’s pretty much give them the plane tickets, have them go there, because that’s helping us out, right?’

SE: Exactly. Right.

PT: And so that’s not just with Chechnya, but that happened in a lot of other places around the world. So, you have this idea where one man’s terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, right? It’s all these labels you throw on these people, these very loaded words, I try not to use words like ‘terrorists’ if I can, because you never know exactly who really these people are, who they’re working for, really what’s going on there? It often turns out there’s double agents and all kinds of intrigue going on, like some sort of exciting spy novel. But anyways, you’ve got these good terrorists, you’ve got these bad terrorists, and it’s clear to me that there were a lot of people before 9/11 who were ‘good terrorists’ in the eyes of the United States because they were doing something that the United States thought was helpful.

In fact there’s a famous quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski, if I can get his name right, who’s the National Security Advisor way back under Carter, and he was asked in 1998 about starting the whole war in Afghanistan way back in the 1970s, because really, it looks now that the CIA kind of goaded the Soviets into attacking by putting some operatives in there, and kind of stirring people up and creating a lot of chaos. So he said, let’s see if I can find his quote here, what he said…I can’t find his exact quote offhand, but it was something to the effect of ‘what’s more important, defeating the Soviet Union or a few stirred up Muslims?’ So the idea is that in a very Machiavellian way, thinking that ‘I’m using these people to get at the Soviets and to achieve our foreign policy goals, so we certainly don’t want to stop these people, we actually want to help them, fund them, train them in some cases…
SE: Exactly.

PT: And we could go way back and look at a long history of US covert support for Islamist militants around the world.

SE: Right! And let’s say just in the 1990s, starting from the mid-1990s to 2000, and we are talking about during the Clinton administration, and we are talking about the 2 guys who are left over from that administration. We are talking about Tenet, and we are talking about Clarke. And Tenet and Clarke were also aware, not only aware, they were involved, both through the diplomatic; working through State Department, but also through these ‘black ops’ and operations in Central Asia and the Balkans. So we have those 2 guys involved in that.

PT: Mm-hmm, yea. These two people particular people, Alhazmi and Almidhar, they have a very long history of working with al Quaeda, and it goes all the way back to the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s,

SE: Exactly.

PT: it appears that they were involved n that. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also appears to have fought in Bosnia in the early 1990′s, and then it appears that later on that they made attempts at least and probably went to fight in Chechnya as well, these two: Alhazmi and Almidhar.

SE: Mm-hmm.

PT: So it could be that they might have had linkages you know, there’s a whole other story about US support working with al Qaeda

SE: They were not even called al Qaeda, at least not in the FBI. This is one of the things I kept emphasizing during my testimony with the 9/11 Commission. The Arabic unit that worked, and that includes the bombing in Nairobi, because some of the translators, with FBI agents actually went in there, I’m not going to get too deep into the details of those, but they did not even emphasize a title, the name al Qaeda.

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: So this is the interesting from the FBI side: you mean al Qaeda did not, even though we have this stuff, yea, al Quaeda came up again in 1997, FBI didn’t even have an al Quaeda unit. And these cases, the filings for these cases were not even under ‘al Quaeda.’

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: The al Quaeda became popular after 9/11.

PT: Right.

SE: Became a brand, it was not even being used as a title for this group, or these groups. And that’s another interesting point, at least for the FBI.

PT: Well, I don’t think the title is so important. Obviously bin Laden, he didn’t really like al Quaeda, he came up with some other long winded names for his group that he wanted to use, and eventually he kind of got, just had to acknowledge that the media was using around the world ‘al Quaeda’ so much,

SE: Exactly, US media made it like (inaudible)

PT: he said, ‘OK, we’re al Quaeda’, but that was pretty much after 9/11. It’s not really so much important what these people are called, is what they were doing and who they’re working with, in my opinion. And you can see these 2 hijackers in particular, have a long history going way back to the 1990s. I don’t want to get too much into the Bosnian conflict, but there’s good evidence the US was working hand in hand with Osama bin Laden and his supporters in Bosnia at that time. So these guys may well have had some sort of contacts with that, going way back. So when Richard Clarke in his interview says, ‘maybe they were trying to turn them’, maybe they thought that they’d already turned them, or maybe they thought that, ‘well these guys, we know them, we know all about them, these are great candidates to turn.’ I don’t know, we can just kind of speculate. (laughs) So anyways, to kind of get back to the thread of what happened at the Malaysia summit and so forth…So what’s really interesting is that, sort of the bombshell out of this, all of the summit stuff, was the fact that Khalid Almidhar had a Visa to come to the United States. And actually, Nawaf Alhazmi did too, but apparently they didn’t know about that right at that point in time. Even as the summit was going on, there were efforts to prevent the FBI from knowing about that.

SE: Before you go further, one question, because I don’t have that information. Do you know where the Visa was obtained, which embassy, where?

PT: I’m pretty sure it was in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, if I remember.

SE: OK, thank you.

PT: Which is kind of a whole other story, because that, at least historically had been used in the Afghan war to have the Mujahedeen who were fighting in Afghanistan, to get Visas for them to come to the Unites States to be secretly trained and supported over there. So, it’s, (laughs) the more you dig into this stuff, the more interesting it gets.

SE: Right, because I have a State Department whistleblower, he hasn’t been really that public and vocal, but he worked, he was actually in charge of the Visa office in Jeddah.

PT: Mm-hmm.

SE: Until, I believe 2000-2001, and he also went to the Commission and he spoke a little bit about this stuff. He still hasn’t gotten into the names, but he actually filed complaints about people who actually they knew were confirmed terrorists, candidates, lists. Because many of these CIA operatives worked through the embassy there in Jeddah. Every time they brought it up, they would be overridden by the CIA guys in the embassy of there in Jeddah.

PT: Right.

SE: That was why I was asking.

PT: Right, so anyway you get these hijackers at the summit, then the summit starts to break up, and these people start to be scattered to the four winds. At that time, it would make sense that, normally, the CIA would normally say, ‘OK, FBI, you’re interested in what’s going on in the United States. We have information that one of these people at the summit, Khalid Almidhar, he has a Visa to come to the United States. He’s almost certainly going to use it and probably be involved in some sort of attack there.’ They knew for instance, he was involved in the embassy bombings and some other big attacks already.

That does not happen. In fact, there is somebody who drafts a cable to be sent to the FBI saying just that, that he has this Visa. His superior over rid him and basically said, ‘you can’t send that cable, you’re not allowed to send it.’ He tried later, another week or two later again and told, ‘you’re not allowed to send it.’ That same superior who told him not to send the cable turned around and sent a cable within the CIA telling everybody that the FBI had been told. You can see right there, you really see some duplicity. It goes even further than just the FBI and the CIA not getting along. We have evidence, for instance, of the CIA branch in Thailand, because these guys Alhazmi and Almidhar, they went from the Malaysian meeting, they went to Thailand. The CIA branch in Malaysia kind of asked the Thai branch, ‘what’s going on with these guys? Do you know what happened to them there in Thailand?’ And the Thai branch said, ‘we’ll have to get back to you, we don’t know what’s going on.’ Where at that point we know that the Thai was aware about this US Visa. So even within the United States, within the CIA, one branch is lying to the other branch about what they knew about these 2 particular hijackers. It’s not just a FBI/CIA turf battle kind of thing that’s going on here.

So anyway, so after about a week after the summit, these 2 hijackers, they’re from Thailand, they get on a plane, and they fly to the United States, and they immediately start living in San Diego. And Nawaf Alhazmi at least, he spends the next 2 years, basically he never leaves the United States from that point on. He just lives openly in San Diego, he’s got his number in the phone book and everything. It would be so easy to find him. Khalid Almidhar after a while, he leaves, and he actually –because as I’ve said, his father-in-law was a person who runs that Yemen hub, he actually goes back to the Yemen hub where his wife is, and he lives there for at least a month. Now remember that that hub is so monitored, anybody coming and going their picture is taken, there’s bugs inside the house, there’s so much that has not been revealed. How is it possible for Khalid Almidhar to back to that hub and live there for an entire month? He thinks that he’s with fellow al Quaeda people that he can trust. Would he not be talking about his time in the United States and what he is doing there, and the whole 9/11 plot that he’s a part of, in this very building that is a focus point of US intelligence collection efforts? How is it possible that this 9/11 plot isn’t discovered? And then you’ve got the fact that Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, when they’re living in San Diego, they’re making calls back and forth to this hub all the time. And they’re making other calls around, but you know, at least those calls are being monitored and recorded by the NSA. Again, how is it possible that some people don’t say, ‘hey, these 2 people are living in the United States, and probably up to no good there.’
PC: And Paul, what was the source of the funding that paid for their housing, paid for their expenses, while they were living in San Diego?

PT: (laughs) Yea, again there are just so many threads to this. I think what happens is that it’s such a complicated story that people kind of lose the thread after a while, because there’s so many tangents and things. But, it turns out that while those 2 hijackers were living in San Diego, there seems to have been a lot of money coming through the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. into sort of the wife of a friend, and it seems to have increased right when the hijackers got there. A lot of people believe that that money was actually helping to pay their living expenses, and there’s a tremendous amount of other information about these hijackers having ties with the Saudis while they were there, and by Saudis I don’t just mean Saudi citizens, I mean Saudi intelligence agents. They went to the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles, you know, hooked up with people there, some of whom were very radical, militant minded themselves, who were working at that consulate.

There was one particular guy named Omar al-Bayoumi, who’s a very important figure, because he was living in San Diego, and he really seems to have been some sort of Saudi intelligence agent. He had no visible means of support, yet he had some ghost job with some Saudi government kind of related company, and he was being paid a tremendous amount of money for doing no work. And he had this habit of wandering around the mosques and places where Saudis were living in the United States congregate. You have the video camera and a microphone on the camera, and he’d just be recording people willy nilly, and talking into the microphone making his observations about all the things that he was recording. Everybody in town who was in that Saudi community had basically knew that he was a Saudi government agent, and his job pretty much –you would think that the Saudi government has always been very worried about radical Islamics who come along who want to overthrow the Saudi government.

People like Osama bin Laden, who’s said all kinds of things about how they want to overthrow the Saudi royalty. So, in sort of most towns, they would have somebody like Omar al-Bayoumi, who was keeping an eye to make sure that there weren’t anti-Saudi government insurrections going on amongst Saudi students who were scattered all over the world. So, this guy, and when you go back to the Richard Clarke interview, he puts forth the theory, and he says, ‘well maybe when Alhazmi and Almidhar were living in the United States, maybe the CIA kind of handed off surveillance of these 2 people to the Saudis, and so somebody like Omar al-Bayoumi running around with his video camera would be a likely person to be keeping close eyes on these guys.
He did have all kinds of ties with these 2 people, they even lived at his place for a couple weeks when they first got there. I’ve found that there’s good evidence that Alhazmi knew that al-Bayoumi was a Saudi intelligence agent and he disliked him and tried to stay away from him, and sort of was very wise to what this al-Bayoumi guy was doing. If the CIA was trusting monitoring these 2 incredibly important al Quaeda operatives to some guy who’s just wandering around openly known as a Saudi intelligence agent, walking around with a video camera all the time, I mean that just doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why would you do that? How could you learn any secrets about these people when you’re so openly advertising yourself as a Saudi intelligence agent?
PC: Well, and Paul, it begs the question about the role of Saudi Arabia and the royal family in funding al Quaeda, supporting their efforts. We know that the bulk of the alleged hijackers were Saudi citizens, and yet, the Bush administration gave Saudi Arabia a virtual complete pass

PT: Right.

PC: in any investigation into these events. We went into Afghanistan to distract people from Saudi Arabia.

PT: You know, there’s so many different threads in this story, and one thing that I’ve always been interested in is not only the possible whatever role the United States government and other western governments had in linkages with al Quaeda and so forth, but also, there were a lot of supporters of groups like al Quaeda in the Muslim world. People, even higher ups, billionaires in Saudi Arabia and other countries were very kind of ideological, same thinking as Osama bin Laden, and so they would be supporting these groups with a lot of money and other kinds of support. You see all along that Osama bin Laden would never have been able to keep up, even though he had some money from his inheritance from his big, rich family. It was estimated that al Quaeda cost about 30 million dollars to run every year. Not so much all these operatives running around, but sort of the training camps and there’s a whole sort of network you have to have, before you can even have any operative taking part in everything. You have to be recruiting people and so forth. So you sort of have this big operation that costs 30 million dollars a year, he would have run out of money pretty quickly. He had all these rich Sheiks living in the Middle East who were giving him a lot of money. So the question is, may have some of these Saudi contacts been aware of the 9/11 plot? May have they actually been funding some of the 9/11 hijackers? That’s a very interesting story, but I think it’s kind of a tangential story to the other story we’re talking about today, which is why doesn’t the CIA do something about these guys. What do they know about these guys and why don’t they do something about them?

One of the things about the Saudis is that the CIA knew way back that the Saudi intelligence agency had been very compromised by their support for al Quaeda. There was some people from another intelligence agency, I think the Jordanian intelligence agency one day went into the headquarters of the Saudi intelligence agency and looked around, and they saw on the computers a lot of the people actually had pictures of bin Laden as their screensavers on their computers because they were big supporters of bin Laden.
SE: Now here is another contradiction Paul, because all this time we keep hearing from the both from the media, but also from various supposed speeches by bin Laden, that he was actually a threat to the Saudi establishment, that he was absolutely feared and hated by the Saudis, and basically his number one goal was to basically get rid of the US bases from Saudi Arabia, and also the kingdom. So how do they work together? I mean you’re looking at two now almost contradictory concepts here in terms of the relationship between bin Laden and the Saudis.

PT: Well it’s so complicated, and it’s a very parallel situation in Pakistan, where you see tremendous support from Pakistan, even from the Pakistani intelligence agency to al Quaeda and related groups. And at the same time, these groups are often attacking Pakistani government buildings, and killing lots of people in Pakistan. In Saudi Arabia, it seems even royal members, high ranking members of the royal family are supporting bin Laden and al Quaeda, and Osama bin Laden’s saying, ‘down with the royal family.’ So I think a lot of this kind of ends up being intrigues and politics, where for instance you might have one faction of the Saudi royal family who thinks, ‘I would like to be king one day, and if I can use the fact that there are a huge number of people in Saudi Arabia who are supportive of bin Laden and bin Laden-type extremists, Wahabist religious beliefs, and ally with that whole faction, then that could help me get to power.’
And the same kind of thing happening in Pakistan, where you have various playing off against each other and using these militant groups as a way to get an edge. In fact, in Pakistan there are times where one faction would actually hire people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, his nephew for instance, to kill –there was an attempt where those guys tried to kill Benazir Bhutto back in the 1990s. So they’re very much involved in the intrigues and the politics of these countries which get very complicated, and people working sometimes at cross purposes, or trying to kill each other and so forth.
SE: That makes a lot of sense, especially with what you said with the divided kingdom, as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned. And I think one of the dividers there is the attitude or the stand when it comes to Israel, because where you have the old timers, you have the top layer, that actually behind the scenes, they do have good relationship with Israel. Then you have the segment there within the Saudi kingdom who are absolutely against Zionism and what’s happening in Israel. So that itself is just one other example of how divided they are within their own kingdom.

PT: Right. So to kind of keep trying make sure we stay on the focus of these Alhazmi and Almidhar characters…Richard Clarke, he’s saying that these guys may have been monitored by Saudi Arabia, but to get back to the point that I made a minute ago, that the CIA was so leery of the support that a lot of people in the Saudi intelligence agency had for al Quaeda, that they had put out a notice a couple years prior to all these events saying basically, ‘don’t trust the Saudi intelligence agency about anything having to do with bin Laden.’ So how could they then turn around and say, ‘oh, let’s just leave these 2, the first 2 al Quaeda people we ever really knew who were living in the United States, we’ll just trust the Saudi intelligence agency to keep an eye on them. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t buy Richard Clarkes’ theory there. So, if you don’t buy that theory, then that leaves a gaping hole. Well, who’s looking after these 2 people when they’re living for 2 years in the United States? Did they just drop the ball so badly that they just said, ‘oh, I wonder whatever happened to those guys.’ (laughs) No one checked on them for 2 years. I don’t buy that.

SE: Neither do I.

PC: Well, at this point, I’m going to pause here and conclude part 1 of our conversation with Paul Thompson, and this’ll make it easier for our listeners to listen to and absorb, and we will continue in part 2, which will be released in short order after part 1, so that you can get all this information and listen to them at your convenience.

This is Part 3 of our three-part one-of-a-kind interview series with author and researcher Paul Thompson. For additional background information please visit the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project at HistoryCommons.Org.

Paul Thompson joins us to discuss one of the most blacked-out and censored aspects of Al-Qaeda-CIA connections: The partnership and alliance between the CIA and Al Qaeda and their joint operations in Central Asia, Balkans and Caucasus throughout the 1990’s. Mr. Thompson talks about Al-Qaeda’s Balkans operations, running training camps, money-laundering, and drug running networks in the region, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and his residence in Bulgaria in order to help manage the Al Qaeda effort in nearby Bosnia, the Al Qaeda cells in Chechnya and Azerbaijan, BCCI and more!

Paul Thompson is the author of the Terror Timeline, a compilation of over 5,000 reports and articles concerning the September 11, 2001 attacks. His research in the field has garnered over 100 radio and TV interviews. Mr. Thompson holds a psychology degree from Stanford University obtained in 1990. For the complete 9/11 Timeline Investigative Project visit HistoryCommons.Org

Here is our guest Paul Thompson unplugged!

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 International Newsworthy

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 Video1: CIA Funding & Manipulation of the US Media

Video 2: We Are Mad As Hell & Can’t Take This Any More!

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Pepe Escobar returns to our show to discuss the ever-changing, constantly-shifting, and holes-filled script in the US raid that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. He reports on the news accounts on the Arab uprising in Egypt and the rarely reported realities of the Libya War, the conflicted responses of the United States to the uprising in Egypt and Libya versus those in other places such as Bahrain and Tunisia, and the hypocritical stand on Saudi Arabia. Mr. Escobar talks about the US assembly line of Boogiemen used as catalysts for conflicts and wars, the conflicting accounts on the Bin Laden Death Operation that have been completely censored by the US media and the official narrative as an elaborate PSYOP, the critical turning point in US-Pakistan relations and the China factor in the region, the Central and South Asia geopolitics factor, and more!

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He is an investigative journalist with three decades of experience in covering politics and conflicts around the globe. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering stories and cases from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Afghanistan and interviewed the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Masoud, a couple of weeks before his assassination. Mr. Escobar has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of three must-read books: Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge, and Obama Does Globalistan.

Here is our guest Pepe Escobar unplugged!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

It has been over two weeks since the orchestrated ever-changing Bin Laden Death. The question of what happened remains the same except it doesn’t seem to matter any longer. The US media is done after making their initial splash, and the majority is left with one conclusion: the SOB is dead, and who gives a da… how it happened. Whether Osama held an AK-47 while using some damsel in distress as a shield, whether there was a real fight or not, whether it was really Osama’s body in an organic edible shell we fed to the endangered sharks, whether the full credit goes to the CIA or the White House or the Pentagon …no longer seems to matter. Dizzy-fying confusion induced by dozens and dozens of lies and discrepancies and denials has given way to post-adrenaline-rush exhaustion. The question of what happened has been classified as moot and irrelevant. Right or wrong I’ll leave that question behind, at least for now, and instead, go back to focus on the more important question- the question of ‘why and why now.’

As I stated during the first few days of covering the Bin Laden Death Script, when it comes to DC dirty politics, when it comes to the new world order machine, and when it comes to US presidents, timing is everything and there are no such things as coincidences:

Considering the mainstream media’s sensationalism and propaganda tactics and their cemented role as an extension of the establishment, one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing. Only after that, after putting the pieces together instead of dumbly staring at the images spread before us by the media, we have a chance to get a grasp of the reality-facts; or at least a chance to come up with real questions.

In the past two weeks, after talking with many experts and sources, both nationally and internationally, Pakistan has been surfacing as the common thread holding the most rational explanation of ‘why and why now.’ Interestingly, I came across the following statement by Rep. Ron Paul during his interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

“The helicopters that landed in Abbottabad won’t be the last to put American troops on the ground in Pakistan, I see the whole thing as a mess, and I think that we are going to be in Pakistan. I think that’s the next occupation and I fear it. I think it’s ridiculous, and I think our foreign policy is such that we don’t need to be doing this.”

I was planning to write a comprehensive piece based on information and analyses I have gathered from my solid intelligence and Pentagon sources. However, after watching the interview with Ron Paul (And he has his credible sources), I decided to go ahead and write a fairly quick commentary on why the question of ‘why and why now’ keeps pointing to Pakistan as the next probable occupation target for our never-dying neocon objective-makers. Actually the following is more of significant developments and a timeline than a subjective interpretation or commentary. I am going to put them together and have us look at the pattern and where these points point to, and that’s exactly what I meant by “one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing.”

Let’s start with Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was launched in 1997 and became known for leading the public campaign to oust Saddam Hussein both before and after the September 11 attacks. As many of my highly aware readers know, those neocons, their objectives and activities, never go away. They may change names or change a few front faces, but like a leech they always hold on to the system; the system they help put in place in the first place:

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor – has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. “surge” in Afghanistan.But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.

…

So what’s their mission statement, and what have these neocons been cooking up with the new face, their new president, Obama? The following is from an article by Jim Lobe in 2009:

The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the U.S., including “rogue states,” “failed states,” “autocracies” and “terrorism”, but gives pride of place to the “challenges” posed by “rising and resurgent powers,” of which only China and Russia are named.

…FPI intends to make confrontation with China and Russia the centrepiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration, before 9/11, when Kristol’s Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking Washington for its alleged “appeasement” of Beijing… FPI has chosen to push for escalating the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. The organisation’s first event, to be held here Mar. 31, will be a conference entitled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success”.

…

For now, this is what I want you to take from the above on Obama’s Neoconistic objectives: fiercely counter China-Russia when it comes to establishing US hegemony, especially in Central and South Asia, with emphasis on Afghanistan. Next, let’s look at the strategic importance of the same region for China [All emphasis mine]:

In order for China to sustain its status as the emerging economic superpower, it must take all the necessary steps required in order to have sufficient energy resources for the near future. According to Pakistani think tank, BrassTacks, Chinese interests in the Indian Ocean became visible in 2002, when they invested heavily and began work on the Gwadar Port, located in Baluchestan, a province of Pakistan.

The Gwadar Port has its benefits for both Pakistan and China. According to Abdus Sattar Ghazali, executive editor for American Muslim Perspective, “The cost benefits to China of using Gwadar as the port for western China’s imports and exports are as evident as the long-term economic benefits to Pakistan of Gwadar becoming a port for Chinese goods.” Not only does Gwadar enable China to fulfill its energy needs, but it will also provide a strategic military footprint in the Arabian Sea, which has the United States worried.

…

Okay, now you have Obama’s Neoconistic objectives with China as its main target and competitor, and you have China competing for the same strategic area, Pakistan, to fulfill its energy needs and establish a strategic footprint in the Arabian Sea, and in the middle of it, the point where US-China strategic objectives intersect: Pakistan.

In order to halt this, the globalists need to block China’s access to the Arabian Sea by way of Gwadar. According to BrassTacks, to do this, “there needs to be a ‘new Pakistan’ as indicated in Operation Enduring Turmoil.” Operation Enduring Turmoil is PNAC’s plan to disassemble Pakistan into three parts. According to a “game plan” drawn out by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, in a 2006 article of the Armed Forces Journal, “Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren [and] would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining ‘natural’ Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.” With this done, what was once the NWFP, a province of Pakistan, is now part of Afghanistan, and what was once Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan, is now its own state, Free Baluchistan. This would force China to impossibly go through Afghanistan and Free Baluchistan in order to reach the Arabian Sea. Such an arrangement would cut China’s route to the Arabian Sea.

…

Now, please focus on our three main actors- China, US and in the middle, the strategically important Pakistan. Let’s use our common sense minus logic-clouding details, and consider what happens when the strategically crucial actor in the middle starts straying away from one main actor and moving toward the other.

This is from November, 2009:

China has sent out an interesting signal ahead of US president Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing by offering a set of advanced fighter jets to Pakistan. It has agreed to sell $1.4 billion worth of jets to Islamabad days ahead of the planned visit of the US president Barack Obama to Shanghai and Beijing on November 15-18.

The move is expected to jolt the US administration as it works on notes and talking points for Obama’s meetings with Chinese leaders. He is expected to discuss Beijing’s relationship with India and its role in internal conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Beijing is keen to reduce US influence on Pakistan, which will make it easier for it to deal with India, sources said. Washington’s recent decision to extend massive financial assistance to Islamabad is seen in some quarters as a policy setback for China.

…

A year later, in October 2010, the following interesting perspective on how things were heating up between the US and Pakistan is published by Margolis:

The neoconservative far right in Washington and its media allies again claim Pakistan is a grave threat to US interests and to Israel. Pakistan must be declawed and dismembered, insist the neocons. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is reportedly being targeted for seizure or elimination by US Special Forces. There is also talk in Washington of dividing Afghanistan into Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek mini-states, as the US has done in Iraq, and perhaps Pakistan, as well. Little states are easier to rule or intimidate than big ones. Many Pakistanis believe the United States is bent on dismembering their nation. Some polls show Pakistanis now regard the United States as a greater enemy than India.

…

It is important to remember how Obama passed AIPAC neocons’ test on Pakistan during his presidential campaign in 2007. Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government,”If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.

Now, let’s fast-forward to early April 2011:

Pakistan’s ambassador to China used a recent celebration of his country’s Republic Day to give a rhetoric-filled talk about Beijing-Islamabad relations. If March 23, 1940, was the day the Muslim League decided to establish Pakistan, then the anniversary would be a time to declare that relations with China will define the way forward. ‘We shall take our bilateral relations to new heights,’ Masood Khan proclaimed. [...] Pakistan has been moving into China’s sphere of influence for decades and the countries routinely refer to each other as ‘all-weather’ partners.

This year will mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. ‘Even when I was there in 1981, ’82, I could see Chinese military factories going up,’ says Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. Now, Pakistan represents a major market for China’s nuclear and military technology. According to SIPRI, a Swedish think tank, over 40 per cent of Chinese arms exports go to Pakistan—the largest share of any country China sells to.”

Obviously Obama’s day in day out bombing of Pakistan, his ‘let’s drone the hell out of them’ policy, had backfired, producing the opposite effect for his Neoconistic global hegemony objectives. Now, things begin to really heat up; this is from April 17, 2011:

President Obama’s rhetoric in Delhi had no substance except to rile the Pakistanis. The Delhi card didn’t quite work. The Chinese Premier visited Islamabad and pledged $20 billion in investment in Pakistan during the next five years. How about them apples? The Pakistani retort is what it has always been we need “Friends Not Masters”.

Britain as a colonial power practiced “Divide and rule” pitting religious and ethnic differences in the Middle East to rule continents. Bhutto famously theorized that the post-colonial powers were working on a “unite and rule” strategy forcing Pakistan to work with India against China.

“The idea of becoming subservient to India is abhorrent and that of cooperation with India, with the object of promoting tension with China, equally repugnant.” Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

…

Most Pakistanis don’t want closer relations with Washington–they want to build closer relations with Beijing, and work on creating the Muslim Union (similar to the European Union) in Central Asia. Links with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey are key to the future of Pakistan.

Islamabad is moving ever closer to China, both militarily and economically– and that’s a fact Jack.

…

By mid April things start going downhill; very fast.

The transactional relationship between Washington and Islamabad is coming to an end. While US-Pakistani transactional relations are fraying at both ends, the opposite is true of Sino-Pakistani relations.

Pakistan supported China when she was recognized only by Albania, and built the bridge to the USA. This fact cannot be forgotten by the Chinese who mention it in every summit and mentioned it in this summit also

…

There is renewed energy to pace up the development of Gwadar Port to provide China a shorter route and easy excess to world markets to dispatch its goods to Europe and America.

“The Gwadar port project will transform Pakistan’s Navy into a force that can rival regional navies. The government of Pakistan has designated the port area as a “sensitive defense zone.” The Gwadar port will rank among the world’s largest deep-sea ports. The port provides China a strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Located at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and about 460 kms from Karachi, Gwadar has had immense Geostrategic significance on many accounts. The continued unstable regional environment in the Persian Gulf in particular as a result of the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf war and the emergence of the new Central Asian States has added to this importance. Considering the Geo-economic imperative of the regional changes, the ADB’s Ports Master Plan studies considered an alternate to the Persian Gulf Ports to capture the transit trade of the Central Asian Republic (CAR) as well as the trans-shipment trade of the region.

…

And finally, on April 27, according to my sources, the following catalyst prompts the Obama team to execute the Kill Osama Bin Laden Script. This is the pivotal point in the Bin Laden Death Operation Script as a catalyst for the soon to come Pakistan Occupation:

Pakistan is lobbying Afghan President Hamid Karzai against building a long-term strategic partnership with the United States, and urging him instead to look to Pakistan and its ally, China, for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, according to Afghan officials.

…

Washington”s relations with Pakistan have reached their lowest point in years following a series of missteps on both sides, and Pakistani officials say that they no longer have an incentive to follow the American lead in their own backyard, the report added.

“Pakistan is sole guarantor of its own interest,” said a senior Pakistani official, adding: “We”re not looking for anyone else to protect us, especially the US. If they”re leaving, they”re leaving and they should go.”

…

The next day, on April 28, , a senior Pakistani government official said that the Export-Import Bank of China will loan Pakistan $1.7 billion to develop a city-wide train system in the eastern city of Lahore.

Since the holes-filled and never-explained ‘kill or capture’ operation, the presidential PR machine, the US media and their extension guised under ‘alternative’ have been beating the war drums. After all, as with any wars of ours, public opinion must be shaped, and public backing must be garnered. This is one of the latest reflecting just that: 

After the killing of Usama bin Laden in Pakistan, few American voters believe that country is an ally of the United States in the war against terrorism. Moreover, most doubt Pakistan is worthy of continued U.S. foreign aid.

That’s according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday.

Nearly three out of four voters — 73 percent — say the United States should stop sending foreign aid until Pakistan demonstrates a deeper commitment to the war against terrorism. Some 19 percent would continue to provide funding.

…

With the discovery that bin Laden apparently had been living in Pakistan for years, the consensus is Pakistan is not a friend (74 percent). A small 16 percent minority of voters views Pakistan as a strong U.S. ally in the war against terrorism.

…

You must be thinking: Pakistan must have tons in their own dossier to expose US government duplicities, lies, and nefarious activities. So why have they been relatively silent in all this? Why don’t they open the flood gate on ‘facts’ surrounding Bin Laden, his supposed role in 9/11, his supposed journey since 9/11, and his supposed death recently? And I have an answer for that: neither party has played all their cards yet. Just take a look at how Gates has been playing both sides carefully while measuring the outcome of various factors in play:

Gates reiterated the accusation that elements within the Pakistani government knew about the location of Osama bin Laden and were keeping that information from the United States. Bin Laden was killed in a US raid earlier this month.

At the same time, Gates echoed comments by other officials, conceding that the US has absolutely no evidence to that effect and that it is “pure supposition on our part.” The repeated accusations, despite being based on “pure supposition” have done major damage to US-Pakistan ties, and have spawned calls from Congress to suspend all aid to Pakistan to punish them.

Gates, who attended the conference with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, also said that the US raid that killed bin Laden had “humiliated” the Pakistani government, and that they had “paid a price” for bin Laden’s presence. Mullen added that the US ability to attack Pakistan with impunity was “a humbling experience” for the Pakistani military.

…

The White House neocons are in the midst of age-old diplomatic games, bluffing, and hedging their bets. They have the ‘foreign & military aid’ card. They have the ‘ISI dirt files’ card. They have the ‘ultimate China leaning’ card. And of course, they have the ‘mighty power of preemptive occupation war’ card which is always blessed and supported by NATO and overlooked by their butlers in the UN.

China has its own set of cards; whether it is their biggest market for dumping goods, or carrying the US debt, or who knows what else. For now they are using the ‘talk’ card with no real strings attached:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao assured his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani of China’s “all-weather friendship” on Wednesday, during a visit that sharply contrasted with anger between Washington and Islamabad.

“I wish to stress here that no matter what changes might take place in the international landscape, China and Pakistan will remain forever good neighbours, good friends, good partners and good brothers,” Wen told Gilani at the start of a meeting in central Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Suffice it to say that not all cards have been placed on the table. As the famous Kenny Rogers’ Gambler lyrics go:

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

As for us the people, we’ll be sitting and waiting for the three parties to conclude this stage of their global hegemony game. We’ll be reading and watching and listening to their PR machine in the media give us one concocted fantasy after another. As in all other wars of ours we will have zero to say, zilch to gain, and plenty to lose. They have the cards, and we are the piled up tokens on the table.

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Dr. Aland Mizell joins us to discuss the controversial Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen and his rapidly expanding cult globally and here in the United States. He provides us with a rarely discussed biography of Gulen and his movement, the cult’s objective of reviving the Ottoman Empire’s glory and Gulen Missionaries expansion into Central Asia and further around the world. He talks about Imam Gulen’s charter school empire in the United States, operated under absolute secrecy, the Turkish Missionaries’ Lobbyists targeting US federal and state governments, Gulen’s CIA connections and historical joint operations, the connection between Gülen and the Unification church- aka the Moon-cult, the oath of secrecy taken by all Gulen cult members, and more. Also, in the second half of our show we are joined by Bill Thacket, a parent of one of Gulen Charter Schools’ former students.

Aland Mizell earned his master’s degrees in political science and public administration and a doctorate in political science with an emphasis on politics and religion. Having lived and worked at an educational institution in Central Asia for nearly a decade he brings experiential evidence to his studies and initiatives. He reads and speaks several languages, adding to the breadth of his three-decades of research on Islam with a focus on the Gulen movement. He is the founder of Minority Care International (MCI), a nongovernmental organization with the mission of assisting deprived minorities, and serves as its president and CEO. Dr. Mizell is a frequent contributor to Kurdish Media, speaking on behalf of the Kurds, as well as presenting to the Kurdish American Youth Organization on the importance of education. For select samples of Dr. Mizell’s articles click here, here, and here.

Here is our guest Dr. Aland Mizell unplugged!

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Here at Boiling Frogs Post we have been covering the infamous Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen, his $25 Billion network and CIA guardians, his more than 1000 Madrasas in the Balkans, Central Asia, Caucasus and elsewhere, his Charter School Empire here in our backyard, and of course, as always, the incredible blackout and selective coverage by the US mainstream media when it comes to this controversial operator. Maybe all that work was not totally futile after all. In the past few weeks, thanks to relentless and collective efforts by a group of concerned American teachers-activists, Imam Gulen has been receiving some deservedly eye-brow rising media coverage. Obviously, more than a few eyebrows must have been risen, since in a desperate attempt for damage control one of Fethullah Gulen’s main foundations has reached out and hired (make that bought out) George Bush’ queen of PR, his former campaign manager, and the former Undersecretary of State, Karen Hughes. The buyout terms must have been very steep since both parties, Gulen’s Cosmo-Hughes, have been mum about it when questioned:

The largest of the Texas charter operators, Cosmos Foundation, Inc., has hired no less than Karen Hughes of PR heavyweights Burson-Marsteller to — uh, what’s the word I’m looking for — help Cosmos pass the school construction bond bills. Other than the fact that Karen Hughes has declined to state how much cash she’s receiving for her, uh, help with the bond bills…

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Here is Karen Hughes in action, paving the way to her lucrative lobbying and PR position with Imam Gulen’s Charter School operations:

Here is a clip from one recent exposé on Gulen’s Charter School Empire:

There is not much information or details on the federal investigations of Gulen’s charter schools other than that the investigations are being coordinated by prosecutors in Pennsylvania where Gulen resides in his private castle, guarded by more than 50 Turkish security guards:

…but federal agencies – including the FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education – are investigating whether some charter school employees are kicking back part of their salaries to a Muslim movement founded by Gulen known as Hizmet, or Service, according to knowledgeable sources.

Unlike in Turkey, where Gulen’s followers have been accused of pushing for an authoritarian Islamic state, there is no indication the American charter network has a religious agenda in the classroom.

Religious scholars consider the Gulen strain of Islam moderate, and the investigation has no link to terrorism. Rather, it is focused on whether hundreds of Turkish teachers, administrators, and other staffers employed under the H1B visa program are misusing taxpayer money.

Federal officials declined to comment on the nationwide inquiry, which is being coordinated by prosecutors in Pennsylvania’s Middle District in Scranton. A former leader of the parents’ group at the State College school confirmed that federal authorities had interviewed her.

Bekir Aksoy, who acts as Gulen’s spokesman, said Friday that he knew nothing about charter schools or an investigation.

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Recently released Wikileaks cables contain some details on US unease over Gulen’s operations:

Classified documents recently released by WikiLeaks recount U.S. officials’ growing concern over large numbers of Turkish men seeking visas to work at American charter schools founded by followers of Fethullah Gulen, a powerful Turkish Muslim political figure who lives in the Poconos.

“Gulen supporters account for an increasing proportion of [the] . . . nonimmigrant visa applicant pool,” a consular official in Istanbul, Turkey, wrote in 2006, according to one of the documents posted by WikiLeaks two weeks ago.

“Consular officials have noticed that most of these applicants share a common characteristic: They are generally evasive about their purpose of travel to the United States.”

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One destination for visa holders is the Truebright Science Academy, a charter school founded in North Philadelphia by followers of Gulen.An analysis of H1-B visas conducted for The Inquirer showed that the number granted for Gulen charter schools has grown substantially since that 2006 report. More than 2,500 have been issued since 2007.

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The acting chief executive at Truebright, Tansu Cidav, has declined to discuss the school’s operation.

Turkish staffers at Truebright are paid more than their American counterparts, state pension records show. In the last school year, a Turkish math teacher who was not certified and spoke little English was paid $54,000; a certified American science teacher was paid $40,200.

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The common theme of Gulen’s US network in dealing with the recent inquiries and investigations seems to be: ‘No comments.’ They have refused to acknowledge or respond to all inquiries, even those on the minutest details of their American tax payers’ funded operations.

You know where I stand when it comes to partisanship and all the evils associated with it, right? Well, one of the very rare (if not only) positives that comes out of partisanship (sometimes) is the drive to bring out the ‘real’ dirt when it is associated with the other side-party. Unfortunately, this won’t be the case with Gulen’s operations. The pocketing of Karen Hughes for damage control and to further their nefarious activities will not become a ‘cause’ for the blind followers of the opposite party-the Democrats. Gulen’s operatives have been playing cleverly and safely (just like the MIC and the like): They have been pocketing and playing figureheads from both parties,

It’s very difficult to believe that any politician from the Chicago area would have nothing to do with the Turkish community there. For Jan Schakowsky to deny any relationship would be utter foolishness, of course, because she’s been very much involved lately with the Fethullah Gulen movement through the Chicago-based Niagara Foundation, whose honorary president is none other than Hocaefendi himself. This year Schakowsky wrote a Letter of Recognition for the Niagara Foundations 2009 “Peace and Dialogue Awards”. And Schakowsky did the same in 2008 and in 2007.

Naturally, these facts raise questions. How intimately does Representative Schakowsky know the Niagara Foundation in order for her to show such consistent and strong support? What benefits does the Niagara Foundation provide Schakowsky and the City of Chicago? Since the Chicago City Council backs and promotes the Niagara Foundation, what is the foundation’s real connection to Mayor Daly and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, both of whom are involved in major, ongoing corruption cases?

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Those of you who are new to this website, you may want to check out our coverage of Gulen’s operations here at Boiling Frogs Post in order to get a better view of recent developments. At the time, I received more than my fair share of ‘anonymous’ attacks and criticism for my coverage of Gulen Operations while the mainstream media was busy hushing the issue, sanitizing Gulen’s history-present, and censoring documented evidence. I wish I could say I feel a bit better seeing the recent small scale of media attention-interest, but I cannot. The latest coverage does not even begin to touch the buried explosive facts…but I will be cautiously optimistic. Here are a few select articles and analyses written and published by Boiling Frogs Post on Imam Gulen:

Did You Know: The King of Madrasas Now Operates over 100 Charter Schools in US?

Turkish Intel Chief Exposes CIA Operations via Islamic Group in Central Asia

Additional Omitted Points in CIA-Gulen Coverage & A Note From ‘The Insider’

The Sanitized Gulen Coverage Continues

This is it for now on the latest Gulen coverage. We were covering Gulen’s operations and related topics when it was unpopular, and we will pursue it after it ceases to be semi-popular. Please support Boiling Frogs Post and allow us bring to you what others won’t.

Last week I wrote about the Washington Post’s incomplete and one-sided coverage of the recently published memoir by former Turkish Intelligence Chief Osman Nuri Gundes exposing CIA Operations via an Islamic Group in Central Asia. Since then I have gone over the same book’s review and coverage by the Turkish mainstream media, and I have interviewed reporters and sources in Turkey who have read the book, followed the coverage, and or are intimately familiar with the topic. With that I now have several additional points on this exposé which further illustrate the journalistically mind-boggling piece marketed by the Post. Writing my previous piece cost me an associate whom I like and respect. It shouldn’t have. I still believe this was a case of institution-Government-editors vs. the journalist, with the former winning. I am not going to weigh my writing, modify my facts, alter the truth, tweak, and censor based on worries of losing a source, or a friend, or even readership. With that said I’ll briefly list my points gathered from documented facts and interviews, and sources familiar with Gundes’ recent book and Gulen.
 
Extensive Coverage in the Turkish Mainstream Media

As one might expect, the Turkish mainstream media (all major newspapers, magazines, radio & TV channels) extensively (and very intensely) covered the recent publication of Gundes’ book. The following are the main points on former Turkish Intel Chief Gundes’ CIA-Gulen allegations which were documented and reported by every single media outlet in Turkey (since mid December), including this one written by one of the most prominent journalists at Milliyet:
 
1-     In Central Asia, within Gulen’s Islamic schools, the CIA operatives worked under the guise of ‘American Teachers teaching English.’

Okay, the Washington Post article, going through the exact same publications/articles forgot to add these crucial details, which would have paved the way for journalistic investigation(s) leading to either confirmation or denial. The following is the only detail the article provided:

In the 1990s, Gundes alleges, the movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone

In this case, as others had done already, the existence of mysterious American teachers teaching English in Gulen’s schools in Central Asia has already been confirmed.

2-     The American Teachers working at Gulen’s Islamic Schools in Central Asia possessed US Diplomatic Passports.

I contacted my source, formerly with the State Department, and he confirmed issuing diplomatic status for at least 50 Americans to teach in former Soviet republics. When I asked him whether they were employed by the State Department, he said: ‘Not officially.’ I asked him whether they were connected to the CIA, and he responded, ‘I wouldn’t know.’ I inquired about the direct foreign employer(s) of these American teachers, and this was his response: ‘Private Turkish companies in education fields and several NGOs in Turkey.’ This particular source was retired in 2004.

Again, the Washington Post article conveniently omitted this particular detail. Publishing this detail would have required seeking comments from the State Department: “Have you issued diplomatic passports to American teachers in XYZ countries.” Of course, no such inquiry was ever made by the Post.

3-     Gundes provided details of a high-level official meeting attended by MIT officials, one of Gulen’s education foundation directors, the Minister of Turkish Education Ministry Department and other high-level bureaucrats, an official from the Prime Minister’s Office, and several owners of Gulen private schools. The location for this briefing where CIA operative teachers with US Diplomatic passports were discussed was at ‘Ogretmen Evi’ and the host was the Director of Foreign Study Program at the Turkish Education Ministry. The meeting was ‘recorded,’ and an official report was prepared. The report included the following details:

1. One of the attending Gulen school owners owned and operated 18 schools for Gulen in Uzbekistan. The CIA operation disguised under ‘Teaching English’ at these 18 schools in Uzbekistan consisted of 70 CIA operatives, operating under a project named ‘Friendship Bridge’ (Operation Code Name). The operatives also submitted reports to a certain arm of the Pentagon.

 

2. The same operation (name not mentioned) had 60 American-CIA operatives as English teachers in Kyrgyzstan; again carrying US Diplomatic Passports.

 

3. The meeting (briefing) and analyses were later included in an official government report (Turkish Government) on Gulen’s operations which was ‘published.’

 
Again, the Turkish media quotes and covers these detailed allegations. None of these details, and what’s alleged as evidence by Gundes, were covered by the Post. After all, how difficult would it be to follow up and check out these American ‘teachers’ with Diplomatic Passports in the named countries? Make some use of the  Post’s foreign correspondents and partners stationed/anchored  there? No; the  Post would not dare open that can of worms. So what do they do instead: Take out all the details, get lies as quotes from the implicated CIA source, and say, ‘hmmmmm, see, nothing there.’

This is consistent with Gulen’s own media networks’, such as Today’s Zaman’s, no-denial denial operation mode. Remember, these are the same groups who deny Gulen’s 100+ charter school operations in the United States (See here), and this, despite all the documentation and hundreds of witnesses’, including former and present Americans teachers who have worked at these charter schools. Today’s Zaman, one of Gulen’s propaganda machine arms, desperately denies Gunes’ exposé, and in doing so in such desperation, it ends up with a jumble of no-denial denial (see here).

Another point worth mentioning: You’d think with all the court documents and previous reports on FBI-DOJ and the Homeland Security Department vehemently opposing Gulen’s residency request in court(s), the Washington Post would contact their plentiful DOJ-FBI-DHS sources and ask for statements; right? Well, they didn’t. In the Gulen court case we had the CIA pushing big time for Gulen’s residency request, and DOJ-FBI-DHS opposing it. Why? Why did the FBI-DOJ-DHS oppose Gulen in court? I’d say this much-First Hand information, in this case: Based on FBI-DHS joint investigations of Gulen (White Collar Crime) and the involved files, they had plenty of reasons to oppose.

Finally, as a side note, the Post, at least Mr. Stein, was very familiar with my statements regarding Gulen-CIA-Central Asia operations; including the interview I gave to the American Conservative Magazine’s Phil Giraldi. Had Mr. Stein bothered to contact me he would have gotten what the Washington Post wished not to get.

I am going to end this post with a short piece provided to our BFP readers in the US by one of my sources in Turkey who has gone through Gunes’ book, and is a journalist with inside information and unique access to those closely involved in Gulen related investigations-operations:

Fethullah Gülen & the Origin of the Turkish Deep State

By ‘The Insider from Turkey’

Those who think the Turkish/Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen was introduced to the CIA after he had left Turkey and established himself in Pennsylvania are missing the point. Same with those who are under the impression that the Gülen movement is primarily of a religious nature.

The first contacts of Gülen with the CIA go back to way before, we learn from the recently published book The witness of takeovers and anarchy by Osman Nuri Gündes, a former operative of the Turkish intelligence outfit MIT. In the eighties Gülen associated himself with fierce anticommunist circles in Turkey supported by the joint CIA and the secretive stay behind network, Gladio. We are talking about the same Gladio which was responsible for a series of far right terrorist attacks in Turkey and who composed the overture of the bloody 1980 takeover.

According to Osman Nuri Gündes, Gülen began his own anticommunist organization in the city of Erzurum. He also mentions Gülen with respect to Radio Free Europe, a CIA propaganda project against the Soviet-Union where previous CIA station chief Paul Henze was working as well. Henze has been described as one of the dark forces behind the takeover in 1980. Gülen’s main contact in the CIA however, was Morton Abramowitz, who was stationed in Turkey as a CIA employee before he came there as US ambassador. As mentioned previously on this website, Abramowitz later came to defend Gülen when he ended up having trouble with the US immigration service. 

So, once upon a time Gülen was very close to structures in Turkey of which the remnants can still be recognized in Ergenekon, the network that targeted not only Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK-party government, but also the Gülen-movement. This is due to the fact that the previous anticommunist network in Turkey turned away from the CIA in post-Cold War days, while Gülen and his supporters in the Turkish government remained loyal to it.

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A belated happy new year to all our readers and friends here at Boiling Frogs Post. As you can tell I am just coming up for air. The holiday season happens to be the busiest time for my part-time work which involves a retail business, and my full-time motherhood task which has gotten at least three-fold harder during this not-so-terrible-twos stage. You see I say harder, but I’ll never call it ‘terrible’ because despite the tasking aspect it still remains the best and most rewarding role I’ve ever had; ever. My daughter is now 2.5 years old, and I’m happy to report: she is outspoken, highly opinionated, and on her way to becoming a real activist. She is already stopping those engaged in littering in their tracks for an earful lecture, and orders them to stop, ‘Go home, time out, and take bath!’ I am sharing a few of her recent pictures here. Many of you know all about my ‘no venture into my private life’ over here at BFP…except for an occasional relevant experience(s), or, like these here and the ones from last year to mark a new year at Boiling Frogs Post. Again, Happy New Year.

For the past two months I’ve been collecting and saving lots of articles to share with you here at BFP. The collection kept getting larger, the list of links grew longer, and I kept falling behind and unable to post regular BFP Round Ups. Some of those articles were time sensitive so they got discarded as ‘stale and no longer relevant’. Some are still sitting on the list waiting for the addition of my comments and analyses. And here are a few important and interesting ones from the past few weeks without much need for added sound bites:

Obama’s Whistleblower-Hunt: Whistleblowers Long for Bush-Cheney Era Leniency?

You thought the Bush-Cheney administration was bad? Think again; especially if you happen to be a whistleblower. Despite its awful record, the current administration witch-hunt like pursuit of whistleblowers and truth-tellers has many whistleblowers and truth-telling advocates longing for the Bush era climate. After all, everything is relevant, right? There was the bad, now it is the worse, or probably worst ever. Despite all the threats and muscle-flexing not a single whistleblower, including myself, got arrested or even pursued criminally under the previous regime. With Obama the era of threats has changed into an era of Punishment-Imprisonment and in some cases even torture. Here is one of the latest:

Former CIA officer indicted for leaks to reporter 
Peter Haldis, RCFP

A former CIA officer was indicted last month for allegedly providing a New York Times reporter with classified information. He is the latest in a string of leakers prosecuted by the Obama administration.

Jeffrey Sterling, 43, of O’Fallon, Mo., was indicted on 10 counts, including six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of obstruction of justice. He was arrested Thursday in St. Louis.Sterling was indicted Dec. 22, 2010, and the indictment was unsealed Thursday.

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Sterling is the fifth leaker to be prosecuted by the Obama administration. The others include: former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who allegedly sent classified information to an unknown newspaper reporter; Stephen Kim, a former Department of State analyst who allegedly leaked an intelligence report to an unidentified reporter; Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private alleged to have leaked classified information to Wikileaks; and Shamai Leibowitz, a former FBI linguist who was convicted in May 2010 of charges related to the leaking of classified information to an unidentified blogger and sentenced to 20 months in prison.

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 ‘Rent-A-Generals’ Consulting Firms: An Industry in Its Own

Last month I came across the following coverage at War Is Business by Corey Pein. This Monday Peter and I will be interviewing Mr. Pein, meanwhile if you haven’t seen this great website check it out now, and put it in your ‘Favorite’ list of websites. I am really looking forward to this interview, too many topics of interest to cover!

‘Rent-A-Generals’ & ‘the Militarization of Economy’ 
By Corey Pein, War Is Business

This man is William B Burdeshaw, a retired US Army Brigadier General and founder of what the Boston Globe, in its must-read investigation of rampant corruption in Pentagon procurement, calls “one of the oldest ‘rent-a-general’ consulting firms” in the country.

His company, Burdeshaw Associates Ltd, is essentially a fixer for corporations looking to land military contracts. The firm is apparently so good at this, its influential “associates”—mostly retired, high-ranking officers—can sell the Pentagon things it didn’t even know it needed.

Read Globe reporter Bryan Bender describe how Burdeshaw cleverly wrung $109 million from the Pentagon for the firm’s client, Northrop Grumman, which wanted to build a remote-controlled helicopter called the Fire Scout.

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The Army wouldn’t comment. Northrop Grumman wouldn’t comment. Burdeshaw’s chief executive, retired Army General William Hartzog, wouldn’t comment. Bender did a remarkable job of putting this story together despite such obstacles.

Clearly, no one gained from this episode—except Northrop Grumman, the third-largest US military contractor, and Burdeshaw Associates. The firm’s eponym seems to be doing well for himself. Burdeshaw and his wife, Monica, own a massive $2 million home near the Potomac River in Maryland. Give the size of his firm, his personal wealth is likely many times that amount.

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In its conclusion, Bender explains the growing demand for rent-a-generals as a consequence of “the increasing importance of the military to America’s industrial base.” Retired Army General and former Presidential candidate Wesley Clark calls it “the militarization of the economy.”

Too see what the militarization of the economy looks like, visit a discount grocer in any American city and count how many people pay with food stamps. Then ponder William Burdeshaw’s mansion.

Too see the effects of a simultaneous process—the commodification of the military—look no farther than Afghanistan, where contractors outnumber uniformed soldiers.

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Read the rest of this well-done coverage here.

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A Great Example of Intentionally Awful Journalism by New York Times … Again

The following story, titled ‘Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him’ by the New York Times is another perfect example of purposefully awful journalism. For some reason we get to see this trend ‘awfully’ a lot in Times’ coverage of Afghan Heroin related topics (which they rarely cover). When you are reading it think of a badly made B grade movie by a bunch of amateurs (but in this case switch the amateurs with pretenders); think about some of those home-made films where bits and pieces are copied and pasted into a hodgepodge of a documentary with no beginning (it starts in the middle omitting the intro/history) ending with a never-kept promise of ‘to be continued;’ think about a bunch of main actors being taken out with their empty spots still hanging in the picture like big gaping holes, and think about sci-fi elements such as real-life people mixed with fiction characters making it neither a documentary nor a fiction film. Okay?

Now, why am I covering this intentionally awful junk? 1- The topic itself is EXTREMELY important; 2- The main character is a crucial key to many censored facts regarding our ‘real’ activities and operations; 3- Turkey is mentioned is passing (must be a major unintended slip by the Times’ stenographers); 4- Our readers here know how to read in between the lineJ So here it is [Emphasis in Bold are mine]:

Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him
By James Risen, New York Times

When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons.

But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States.

At the height of his power, Mr. Juma Khan was secretly flown to Washington for a series of clandestine meetings with C.I.A. and D.E.A. officials in 2006. Even then, the United States was receiving reports that he was on his way to becoming Afghanistan’s most important narcotics trafficker by taking over the drug operations of his rivals and paying off Taliban leaders and corrupt politicians in President Hamid Karzai’s government.

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By 2004, Mr. Juma Khan had gained control over routes from southern Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Makran Coast, where heroin is loaded onto freighters for the trip to the Middle East, as well as overland routes through western Afghanistan to Iran and Turkey. To keep his routes open and the drugs flowing, he lavished bribes on all the warring factions, from the Taliban to the Pakistani intelligence service to the Karzai government, according to current and former American officials.

The scale of his drug organization grew to stunning levels, according to the federal indictment against him. It was in both the wholesale and the retail drug businesses, providing raw materials for other drug organizations while also processing finished drugs on its own.

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While the C.I.A. wanted information about the Taliban, the drug agency had its own agenda for the Washington meetings — information about other Afghan traffickers Mr. Juma Khan worked with, as well as contacts on the supply lines through Turkey and Europe.

One reason the Americans could justify bringing Mr. Juma Khan to Washington was that they claimed to have no solid evidence that he was smuggling drugs into the United States, and there were no criminal charges pending against him in this country.

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The following is a decent piece by Spiegel on the US courtship of Azerbaijan’s corrupt regime:

The US Befriends Azerbaijan’s Corrupt Elite

By Gregor Peter Schmitz, Spiegel

Azerbaijan is rife with corruption and comparisons to European feudalism in the Middle Ages are hardly a stretch. But with vast reserves of oil and natural gas at stake, the US is willing to risk the embarrassment that comes with courting the country.

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Azerbaijan, which lies in the Caspian basin and has a population of 9 million, is one of the US’s strategic energy partners, despite being located within Russia’s sphere of influence. The country boasts proven energy reserves of roughly 7 billion barrels of oil and 1.3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Millions of barrels of these natural resources flow to the West each year via a pipeline connecting the Azerbaijani capital with Ceyhan, a Turkish port on the Mediterranean Sea.

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The “Great Game” is what the 19th century battle between the British and the Russians over Central Asian influence was called. These days, the Americans are also on the frontlines of this battle — and the potential rewards are much larger. Unfortunately, as the State Department’s classified documents make clear, the price that American diplomats have to pay is also much greater.

Like the other oil-producing countries around the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan is an embarrassing partner to have. The country’s corrupt institutions are unable to deal with the oil boom and the billions of dollars it brings into the county, while the average annual growth rate of almost 15 percent is a much higher priority than enforcing and improving law and order. Independent media outlets are restricted, and dissidents are violently suppressed. Shortly before his death, Heydar Aliyev, the dictator who ruled Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003, naturally handed over power to his son Ilham, who does things exactly the way his father did.

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While a few Azerbaijani clans are getting richer and richer, thanks to all the dollars pouring into the country, the rest of the population is barely scraping by. Over 40 percent of the country’s inhabitants are living in poverty; the average monthly income is just €24. As Lala Shevkat, the leader of the Liberal Party of Azerbaijan, says: “Oil is our tragedy.”The Americans, however, have not let such problems frighten them away. On the contrary, they are even pushing for greater cooperation on security. Following the visit of an American envoy to Baku, one diplomat noted with satisfaction that he “underscored to President Aliyev the value that the US government attached to the relationship with Azerbaijan.”

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The following two pieces are related to our continuing ‘Police State’ series:

Terrorist watch list: One tip now enough to put name in database, officials say
By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post

A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart an attack in the United States.

The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government’s system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab’s father had told U.S. officials of his son’s radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person’s name on the watch list.

Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list.

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But civil liberties groups argue that the government’s new criteria, which went into effect over the summer, have made it even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in the nation’s security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel.

“They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they’re on,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Officials insist they have been vigilant about keeping law-abiding people off the master list. The new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent larger than last year. The vast majority are non-U.S. citizens.

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A Nation of Paranoids?

Florida Professor Arrested for Having a “Suspicious” Bagel on a Plane
By Todd Wright, NBC-Miami

A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.

That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.

Ognjen Milatovic, 35, was flying from Boston to Washington D.C. on US Airways when he was escorted off the plane for disorderly conduct following the incident.

Monday’s incident is another example of other passengers essentially becoming the authority on terrorist activity on planes.

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Yesterday Washington Post’s Jeff Stein published a very interesting but incomplete story regarding a recently published memoir by former Turkish Intelligence Chief Osman Nuri Gundes. Here is the title of his post: Islamic group is CIA front, ex-Turkish Intel chief says. For those of you familiar with my case and what I’ve been covering here at Boiling Frogs Post this exposé is ‘old news’ but nonetheless a vindication. As for those who are first-timers here or not that familiar with my case, this is an opportunity for a bit of background and to learn a few important points and facts that you won’t be getting from this ‘half-picture’ presented by the Washington Post.

In his memoir Gundes claims that Fethullah Gulen’s worldwide Islamic movement based in Pennsylvania has been providing cover for the CIA since the mid-1990s, and that in the 90s, the movement “sheltered 130 CIA agents” at its schools in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan alone.

Now, as I’ve done before, I am going to praise Jeff Stain, whom I know and like, for his solid journalistic talent and background and give him a few credits for actually covering this story (it is one of those ‘thou shall not cover’ areas in an agreement between the US mainstream media and the US government), before I bash the piece, its half-a..  coverage, incomplete background, and it’s incredibly lenient treatment of a shady-dubious-charlatan, a major player in this operation yet a major denier when confronted by Stein; Graham Fuller. Again, as before, I am going to blame it on the unfortunate situation of ‘having to sell your journalistic soul to earn your living.’

Let’s start with Gulen. The only background provided on Gulen is the following with only one link which takes you to Gulen’s marketing site:

…an influential former Turkish imam by the name of Fethullah Gulen, has 600 schools and 4 million followers around the world.

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The imam left Turkey in 1998 and settled in Saylorsburg, Pa., where the movement is headquartered. According to Intelligence Online, he obtained a residence permit only in 2008 with the help of Fuller and George Fidas, whom it described as head of the agency’s outreach to universities.

There is no mention of Gulen’s decade-long ‘wanted’ status in Turkey (until recently), no mention of the ban on Gulen and his Madrasas in several Central Asian countries, no mention of various investigations of Gulen by other western countries, no mention of the unknown sources of his billions of dollars…As we all know except for a very few, and by that I mean a number in 100s if that, no one in this country has ever heard of this guy with his billions, with his castle in Pennsylvania, his hundreds of Madrasas, now hundreds of US charter schools, his dubious businesses….Yet, for an article as serious as this (Madrasas and mosques as CIA operation centers in Central Asia), the central figure in the story has been given one sentence; no history, no relevant facts…

Those of you who have not read our previous commentaries and updates on this topic can check them out here,  here, here, and here, and below is a list of a few Gulen related facts totally (mysteriously?) absent from Washington Post piece:

-In 1999 Gulen defected to the US shortly before his scandalous speech, where he is heard calling on his supporters to “work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state”, became public. Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence for Gülen for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state”. Mr. Gulen has not left the United States since.

-The Netherlands has taken major steps to cut funding to all Gülen associated organizations and is investigating his operations. The Turkish Fethullah Gülen movement is really an Islamic fundamentalist group, claims Rotterdam council member Anita Fähmel (Leefbaar Rotterdam) on the basis of her own study of the Turkish movement.

-The Russian government has banned all Gülen schools and the activities of the Nur sect in Russia. Over 20 Turkish followers of Gulen were deported from Russia in 2002-2004.

-In 1999 Uzbekistan closed all Gulen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested eight journalists who were graduates of Gulen schools, and found them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in an extremist organization.

-In Turkmenistan, government authorities have placed Gulen’s schools under close scrutiny and have ordered them to scrap the history of religion from curriculums.

Now, back to the story and its other major short coming:

Apparently Mr. Stein was not able to reach Gulen for comment, so he moved on to his CIA sources with ‘long ties to  Central Asia.’ First he quotes his first source, Former CIA operative Robert Baer, chief of the agency’s Central Asia and Caucasus operations from 1995 through 1997, who called the allegations bogus. However, Mr. Baer added: “It’s possible that the CIA turned around this ship after I left.”

I don’t have a problem with Baer’s response. Based on what I personally know, US Islamization Operations in Central Asia via Gulen started in late 1997, early 1998. That brings me to what truly set me off, Stein’s second source and actually a character who is pointed to by the new memoir’s author – Graham Fuller:

Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of “The Future of Political Islam,” threw cold water on Gundes’s allegations about Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

“I think the story of 130 CIA agents in Gulen schools in Central Asia is pretty wild,” Fuller said by e-mail.

“I should hasten to add that I left CIA in 1987 — nearly 25 years ago — and I have absolutely no concrete personal knowledge whatsoever about this. But my instincts tell me the claim is highly improbable.”

Next, Jeff Stein very gently confronts Fuller with the fact that according to the memoir and related media coverage Gulen obtained his US residence permit with his (Fuller’s) help, and Fuller denies it and says that’s ‘wrong,’:

“What I did do,” Fuller explained, “was write a letter to the FBI in early 2006 …at a time when Gulen’s enemies were pressing for his extradition to Turkey from the U.S. In the post 9/11 environment, they began spreading the word that he was a dangerous radical. In my statement to the FBI I offered my views…that I did not believe he posed a security threat of any kind to the U.S. I still believe that today, as do a large body of scholars on contemporary Islam.”
…

First of all, there have been tens if not hundreds of articles establishing Graham Fuller as one of Gulen’s official references to the court for his residency, you can view some of these here, here, here. This quote comes from Foreign Policy Journal:

Fethullah Gulen became a green card holder despite serious opposition from FBI and from Homeland Security Department. Former CIA officers (formally and informally) such as Graham Fuller and Morton Abromovitz were some of the prominent references in Gulen’s green card application.

Next is the question of why. Why and in what capacity has Fuller been this active, this supportive, of Gulen? I am talking about this voluntary ‘I wrote a letter to the FBI on Gulen’ line:

…was write a letter to the FBI in early 2006 …at a time when Gulen’s enemies were pressing for his extradition to Turkey from the U.S. In the post 9/11 environment, they began spreading the word that he was a dangerous radical. In my statement to the FBI I offered my views…that I did not believe he posed a security threat of any kind to the U.S. I still believe that today, as do a large body of scholars on contemporary Islam.

And Stein let that slide?! I’d quickly ask: ‘how often do you write to the FBI on people you think have been unfairly targeted or treated by them?!’

Last but not least on Graham Fuller is my own on-the-record, more accurately, on-the-album, naming of individuals implicated (criminally) in my case, thus protected via invocation of the State Secrets Privilege:

Coinciding with the publication of the first article in a series in Britain’s Sunday Times covering some of her allegations, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds posts a gallery of 18 photos of people and three images of question marks on her website, justacitizen.com The 21 images are divided into three groups, and the page is titled “State Secrets Privilege Gallery.”… “The third group includes people who all appear to work at think tanks—primarily WINEP, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy”: Graham E. Fuller—RAND Corporation, David Makovsky—WINEP, Alan Makovsky—WINEP, ? (box with question mark), ? (box with question mark), Yusuf Turani (president-in-exile, Turkestan), Professor Sabri Sayari (Georgetown, WINEP), and Mehmet Eymur (former head of the Turkish intelligence agency MIT).

…

I am going to leave you with the following excerpts from my interview with Phil Giraldi for the Am Con Magazine in 2009, on Gulen, CIA Central Asia operations & the use of Islam and Mujahideen there-1997-2001, [All emphasis mine]:

GIRALDI: You also have information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asia and Bosnia. You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…

EDMONDS: I don’t know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s group, Fethullah Gülen.

GIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint Special Operations Command or CIA.

EDMONDS: Maybe in a lot of cases when they said State Department, they meant CIA?

GIRALDI: When they said State Department, they probably meant CIA.

EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.

There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.

GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?

EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium on NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.

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I just finished reading an interesting article at Asia Times on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is characterized by some as Central Asia’s most aggressive militant group. The main focus of the article is placed on the status, recent expansion and transformation of IMU: The IMU is no longer a small band of militants focused on taking down the Uzbek regime and replacing it with an Islamic state. Today, it has a much wider reach and more ambitious goals, and has underlined its revival with attacks that suggest a presence across a wide swathe of South and Central Asia.

Considering my own focus, which I am sure many of you are pretty familiar with by now, the following bits and pieces, none of which happen to receive any elaboration or even a slight explanation by the author, deserve the real attention:

The IMU or its affiliates have been named in connection with a number of recent attacks at home and abroad. One, the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), has been blamed for attacks in Uzbekistan in May 2009 and made headlines around the world this fall after Western intelligence determined they were planning Mumbai-style attacks on European soil… The IJU, considered a more radical affiliate of the IMU, attracts recruits from Germany’s burgeoning Turkish Diaspora and Turkic nations, leading observers to suggest that it is driven by pan-Turkic aims.

…

And this:

“The most essential things that need to be addressed are the control of the movement of militants and the control of their finances,” Babar says. “What finances them? We believe that the drug trade is financing them…

As you can see in the article the Central Asian context-states-players are: Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan-Tajikistan along Afghanistan’s northern borders, and with that we are back to my previous coverage of the trio in terms of unwritten and unspoken US foreign policies:

Things certainly haven’t been looking up for our MIC, Oil, and related mega companies in that part of the world. And this kind of situation puts our ‘real’ foreign policy makers in their ‘enemies-of-our-enemies’ are needed mode. And when that happens the rest will follow: contracts for our good ole Mujahideen friends, convenient terrorism related incidents and pipeline sabotages right and left, a more aggressive control of the opium trade to finance unwritten-unspoken foreign policy practices …

…

I suggest you read the recent article by Asia Times, and please keep in mind the cases of Mysterious Helicopter Activities in Northern Afghanistan and BF Post’s coverage  here and here. Because when it comes to answering the ‘real’ questions, the questions of funding and sponsorship, we need context, historical records, and a bit of critical thinking, and that my friends, has been largely missing in this article and similar media coverage. And finally, keep an eye on the upcoming Wikileaks’ cables for 1996-2001 Central Asia & Caucasus related goodies…that is, if they are included, or, if they are not among ‘insurance files,’ or, if the internet is not filtered & controlled by then, or…

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I have been waiting. I have been searching and reading. I have been waiting impatiently while searching and reading the initial pile of recently released Wikileaks’ documents, specifically those pertaining to Turkey. I have received many e-mails asking me impatiently to comment and provide my analyses on this latest international exposé. I am being impatiently patient in doing so, and here is a brief explanation as to why:

There’s so much I don’t know. I don’t know how real this entire deal actually is. If truly ‘real,’ I don’t know how far and deep the involved documents actually go. Many of my trusted friends tell me it is indeed real. A few trusted friends and advisors are ringing cautionary bells. I am truly pro transparency, and considering the abusive nature and use of secrecy and classification, I am mostly pro leak when the information in question involves criminal deeds and intentions.

During the previous release (Afghan Files), in my gut I was a bit bothered by the direction of some of these released documents – pointing towards Iran – which was generously milked by the US mainstream media. But then again, that was only based on some gut feeling, and I didn’t want to pour out analyses and opinion solely based on ‘some gut feeling.’ So far, some of the first cache of the recently released documents is strongly pointing towards Iran, and that too is bothering the heck out of me. But again, in my gut, and that alone is not sufficient to make me sit and analyze and interpret. So this is why I’ve been impatiently patient, waiting for more. Meanwhile, while I am restraining myself and being uncharacteristically patient, I am going to go on record and tell you what I expect to see if this whole deal proves to be completely genuine, and if the obtained files go as far as they say they go.

I prepared a long list of items (documented diplomatic correspondence) I know to be included in diplomatic communications which took place between the mid 90s and early 2000s. I know I have a fairly large credit due with Santa since I’ve never made a wish list for him; ever. He owes me. He knows it and I know it. While that justifies my very long list (now you know I am old!!) I am going to exercise a little bit of fairness and present my list in manageable quantities and intervals. I hope my Wikileaks Santa has ‘word/phrase search’ technology at his disposal, because that would make his task of sorting and finding my requested items a far easier task. Okay, here it goes Wikileaks Santa, my first list for you, may your immensely large goodies bag contain these items highly beneficial for not only me but many others here and abroad:

1- 1994-1996: Communication pertaining to joint US-Turkey operations against former Azerbaijani president Heydar Aliyev, including at least one ‘mock’ assassination attempt in Azerbaijan.

2- 1994-1997: Communication between the US State Department, US Embassy in Ankara, and Turkish Prime Minister’s office pertaining to using the Azerbaijan president’s family members’ (including his son Ilham Aliyev) casino debts accumulated in Turkey as means to blackmail on the Pipeline project and Russia’s pending proposal.

3- 1994-1995: Communication pertaining to US-Turkey coordination on transferring several groups of Mujahideen from Pakistan-Afghanistan-Saudi Arabia to Bosnia via Turkey using Turkish special military planes into Turkey, and after granting Mujahideen Turkish passports, via NATO planes from Turkey to several Balkan countries, including Romania.

4- 1994-1997: Communication pertaining to US involvement in Turkish casino expansions in Azerbaijan and free-ownership (partnership) being granted to key Azeri political figures and their family members for future ‘leverage’.

5- 1994-1997: Communication pertaining to US ‘off the book’ money transfers to Turkish paramilitary members and the president of Kazakhstan using several accounts in Cyprus’ First Merchant Bank.

6- 1994-1997: Communication pertaining to US ‘off the book’ wire transfers through Cyprus’ First Merchant Bank to two Chechen leaders with Turkish citizenship for prearranged arm procurement deals via front dealers in Dubai.

7- 1995-1997: Communication pertaining to US negotiation with two top Turkish casino owners for casino projects to be established in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan with Cyprus’ First Merchant Bank acting as the primary banking conduit; the bank’s primary role: conduit for payments obtained for US weapons’ shipment transfer to ‘black-listed’ recipients via False End User Certificates

8- 1995: Communications pertaining to special requests by the US Embassy in Ankara for the immediate release of Yasar OZ, who was detained by DEA in New Jersey on heroin importing and distribution charges. Per US State Department order Yasar OZ was immediately released and his file became classified.

9- 1996-1997: Communication pertaining to ‘evacuating’ (pulling out) then US Ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman, due to a ‘secret’ warrant by the Susurluk commission seeking his testimony on involvement with illegal Turkish paramilitary operations targeting the Caucasus and Central Asia.

10- 1997-1998: Communication pertaining to a ‘special request’ for urgently granting US residency to Turkish paramilitary director Mehmet Eymur, who directed several criminal operations, including assassination plots against foreign leaders, as part of joint US- ‘Special’ NATO operations in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

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The Controversial Muslim preacher has now extended his tentacles into schools in the United States, where he controls and operates more than 100 charter schools within a calculatively set up maze of dubious NGOs. Fethullah Gulen, whose organizations’ net worth is estimated to be somewhere between $22 billion and $50 billion, owns and operates over three hundred Madrasas around the world, including Pakistan, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. While Gulen’s suspicious and secretive Madrasas have been shut down and or restrained in countries such as Russia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, based on these governments’ justified suspicions that his schools had more than just education on their agendas, his rapidly and secretively expanding charter school empire here in the US has gone quite unnoticed and unacknowledged.

In less than a decade Gulen’s Islamic network in the US has established over 100 publicly funded charter schools in 25 states. What makes this eyebrow raising phenomenon a very disturbing case is the fact that despite official documents and publicly available data Fethullah Gulen is going out of his way to deny his connections to these schools. The question is why? Here are a few excerpts from a USA Today article in August 2010:

The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade.But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.

…

Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” Gülen is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.

…

…lawmakers, researchers and parents are beginning to put the schools under the microscope for hiring practices — they import hundreds of teachers from Turkey each year — and for steps they take to keep their academic profile high.

The schools’ unacknowledged ties to Gülen, they say, mock public schools’ spirit of transparency.
…

My regular visitors are familiar with my on and off coverage of Fethullah Gulen and his movement. Others who have not read our previous commentaries and updates on this topic can check them out here, here, and here . I can sit and write volumes on Gulen’s history and his ‘real’ operations, but I am going to limit the length of this piece and provide you with a list of significant facts and background relevant to this particular post without going into other details:

-In 1999 Gulen defected to the US shortly before his scandalous speech, where he is heard calling on his supporters to “work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state”, became public. Turkish prosecutors demanded a ten-year sentence for Gülen for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state”. Mr. Gulen has not left the United States since.

-The Netherlands has taken major steps to cut funding to all Gülen associated organizations and is investigating his operations. The Turkish Fethullah Gülen movement is really an Islamic fundamentalist group, claims Rotterdam council member Anita Fähmel (Leefbaar Rotterdam) on the basis of her own study of the Turkish movement.

-The Russian government has banned all Gülen schools and the activities of the Nur sect in Russia. Over 20 Turkish followers of Gulen were deported from Russia in 2002-2004.

-In 1999 Uzbekistan closed all Gulen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested eight journalists who were graduates of Gulen schools, and found them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in an extremist organization.

-In Turkmenistan, government authorities have placed Gulen’s schools under close scrutiny and have ordered them to scrap the history of religion from curriculums.

Okay, let’s recap and pay attention to the absurdity:
 
Here is a Turkish Muslim preacher who fled Turkey after his alleged intentions to replace the secular government with one based on Sharia laws were exposed. He comes to the US, settles here, and starts taking advantage of our vastly and overly used nonprofit laws to build his network of dubious NGOs. Meanwhile he continues to expand his network of Madrasas and related businesses overseas-Central Asia, Caucasus, Balkans, etc.

 After years of investigating him the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, due to his guardian angels in the State Department and the CIA, are prevented from bringing an indictment against him, so they try to kick him out of the US. But once again Gulen’s CIA angels step in and portray Gulen as a scholar, despite the fact that Fethullah Gulen doesn’t even have a high-school diploma and never went beyond the  5^th grade. Among his angels who vouched for him were Graham Fuller, George Fidas, and Morton Abramowitz.

With his proven immunity Gulen accelerates his operations in the US, and now with a minimum $20 billion worth of operations and front organization he is the largest US charter school operator. Not only that, while American teachers are finding it much harder to obtain jobs, Gulen’s network, thanks to their closeted State Department ties, have been securing US work visas for Turkish and Turkic Republic citizens over there to come and teach at their charter schools here in the US. Some very interesting documented data on Gulen-based work visas provided to the Turkic individuals overseas here.

And here comes the most important question: Why is Gulen trying so very hard to deny his intimate ties to his organizations’ US charter school empire?

Interestingly, Gulen and his entourage have been gloating about these US charter schools as their territory and a major accomplishment, but not here; not in the US.  There are dozens of articles in the Turkish media such as this and this one.

Several dozen American teachers from Gulen’s charter schools have formed a coalition to expose the organizations’ documented ties to Gulen and other nefarious activities. A few groups have set up websites to provide information and exposés on this issue, since the mainstream media hasn’t been giving it deserved coverage. Examples can be found here and here.

I’ve been in touch with several teachers, some of whom have resigned from their positions to pursue and expose these long-censored operations. These teachers were willing to give up their income and go through incredible economic hardship during these hard times in order to warn the American public, and those who have so far gullibly entrusted their children to Gulen’s agenda that is being systematically implemented through his new charter schools empire. I am sure they will add their input to this article in our ‘comments’ section, and I am thankful to them for all the documents and sources they’ve been providing me.  We’ll continue our coverage of this case, so stay tuned.

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The other day our friend Metem brought to my attention a story that had made it to the Project Censored list, ‘US Funds & Supports Taliban.’ Here are two excerpts from the introduction which are related to our coverage of the mysterious helicopter activities in northern Afghanistan.

In a continuous flow of money, American tax dollars end up paying members of the Taliban and funding a volatile environment in Afghanistan. Private contractors pay insurgents with the hope of attaining the very safety they are contracted to provide. Concurrently, US soldiers pay at checkpoints run by suspected insurgents in order to get safe passage. In some cases, Afghan companies run by former Taliban members, like President Hamid Karzai’s cousin, are protecting the passage of American soldiers. The funding of the insurgents, along with rumors of American helicopters ferrying Taliban members in Afghanistan, has led to widespread distrust of American forces. In the meantime, the US taxpayer’s dollar continues to fund insurgents to protect American troops so they can fight insurgents.

Ahmad Rate Popal is a grand example of how those who controlled Afghanistan under Taliban rule are still controlling Afghanistan today and being paid by US tax dollars. Popal, who served as interpreter at one of the ruling Taliban’s last press conferences, is greatly increasing his wealth through the US war in Afghanistan. In 1988, he was charged with conspiring to import heroin into the United States. He was released from prison in 1997. Popal’s cousin is Afghanistan’s President Karzai. Popal and his brother Rashid (who pleaded guilty in 1996 to a separate heroin charge) control the Watan Group in Afghanistan, which is a consortium engaged in many different fields of business. One of Watan’s enterprises is to protect convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies. Popal is one example of the virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers in Afghanistan joining hands with former Taliban members and mujahideen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

…

Okay, that’s what the article is about but it isn’t what got my attention. Here is what I’m getting at:

An example of these contracts are those granted to the NCL Holdings in Afghanistan run by Hamed Wardak, the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak. NCL is a small firm that was awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite the fact that the firm only operates in Afghanistan, Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, due to his connections there.

On NCL’s advisory board is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer who in 2009 was introduced by Senator John Kerry as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” Bearden is an incredible asset to a small defense contracting firm. Wardak was able to get a contract for Host Nation Trucking despite having no apparent trucking experience. The contract is aimed at handling the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to bases and remote outposts throughout Afghanistan. At first the contract was small, but very quickly it expanded by 600 percent, making it a gargantuan contract worth $360 million. NCL had struck pure contracting gold. These profits, which only go to a very select and well-connected portion of the Afghan people, build a large amount of distrust from Afghan citizens toward American troops and those connected to them.

…

And, this is the part where Project Censored for whatever reason didn’t go one step further:

Since our initial search of corporate media coverage on this issue in February 2010, finding zero coverage at that time, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have covered part of the story on their front pages. Both mentioned President Hamid Karzai’s cousin, and both acknowledged that in all likelihood money is making its way to the Taliban. Neither paper mentioned the US connection, Milton Bearden. The Washington Post covered the story on March 29, 2010, and mentioned the Nation magazine article. The New York Times story came out on June 6, 2010, acknowledging the corruption, but included the news that President Obama was addressing the issue with President Karzai. That the two stories came out two months apart, and that the US links are left out, led to the decision at Project Censored to keep this important story in the top censored stories list for the year.

…

Way back when, I wrote a couple of pieces on a few of these personalities that have been totally, and intentionally, overlooked by the mainstream media and  the like. Do you remember our piece on General Wardak, his son Hamed Wardak, ex CIA operative with a fairly dubious history, and an ex- congressman in the ‘laundering’ business? Let me refresh your memory:

As the bodies in Afghanistan are piling up and the number of wounded keeps escalating, while Washington is buzzing with the long-known but selectively-buried corrupt and criminal past and present of our installed government officials there, some are cashing in on both sides, and some are paving the way to the next pot(s) of gold reserved for carpetbaggers and war-profiteers in every war or conflict. In this game there always are a few known names and faces who are publicized and who draw the spotlight, and there are those who enjoy operating and profiting quietly without drawing deserved attention and needed scrutiny. That’s how Washington’s war and conflict machine works, and that’s’ the way our foreign policy decisions are influenced and made. I am going to introduce one such character as an introduction to my upcoming longer story on this same topic. Ladies and gentlemen please meet our Neocon Ex Congressman, Don Ritter, and be informed of his new lucrative ‘Laundering Business’ in Afghanistan.

…

Let’s go back to Mr. Ritter’s entrepreneurial ventures in Afghanistan. His self aggrandizing website has this to say:

“Don is the U.S. investor and Chairman of the U.S. – Afghan company that built and operates the most modern laundry and dry cleaning plant in the region to serve the population of Kabul and execute military and government contracts. He is also currently engaged in building a mountain lodge tourism industry in the Panjshir Valley, a mini-mill for steel products for the Afghan construction boom in Herat, a business development services company in Kabul and an Afghan-American prime contractor to compete for large construction contracts.”

For the real juice on Mr. Ritter’s business dealings, my highly informed sources point me to Afghanistan’s current Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak. The Afghan diaspora in DC name Wardak as one of the key figures in the highly lucrative Poppy & heroin market; albeit in hushed voices. I can’t fathom the feasibility and profitability of a laundry and dry-cleaning business in Afghanistan owned and operated by a Neocon former congressman. What is Mr. Ritter ‘laundering?’

…

Please do me a favor and read the brief piece here

After that piece I wrote a much longer related piece (okay, much much longer; the usual ‘Sibel length’!) which introduced you further to General Wardak, his son-Hamed Wardak, and Ex CIA operative, Milton Bearden. Again, a few excerpts follow:

Once upon a time there was man named Milton Bearden, commonly referred to as Milt. He spent his early years in the state of Washington where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. After a few years with the US Air Force he joined the CIA in 1964.

Milt was CIA’s chosen man for their operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, from 1986 to 1989, when our country was supporting the Mujahideen, he was one of their main men on the ground, working with this coalition of the Taliban, the Saudis and their main man Bin Laden, and the Pakistani ISI. The Director of the CIA, William Casey, was the one who appointed Milt Bearden for this task. Here is Milt’s own words describing his importance in a not very unusual ex-CIA conceited manner:

…

Milt’s cushy CIA retirement and all those glowing medals must not have been enough, for he then engaged in frenzied marketing and self promotion to get himself entrenched in almost all major US networks and newspapers as a consultant, writer, advisor, and of course as a trusted source – a CIA source to provide quotes and information for scripts at the snap of a finger. He coauthored a book with New York Times reporter James Risen called The Main Enemy. Whether this kind of business arrangement, where a commonly used source partners up with a reporter, presents a conflict of interest or even could be called incestuous, is everyone else’s call.

Most interestingly Mr. Bearden seemed to have lured in the American mainstream media by presenting himself as an outspoken critique of the Bush White House Intelligence policies after the September 11 terrorists’ attack. He suddenly became a major spokesperson on ‘how we created this monster called Osama Bin Laden,’ and the nasty radical Taliban. And the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of him. Ironically, he happened to be the man after William Casey and Neocons’ Jeane Kirkpatrick’s own hearts in creating the Bin Laden monster, bolstering the radical Taliban brand of Islamism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and kosherizing all dirty deeds as means to justify the end(s). He didn’t get those medals or promotions for nothing!

…

Our General Wardak disappeared from the Afghan scene at the beginning of the civil war in the 1990s. He brought his family to the United States where he settled comfortably with enough wealth from undetermined sources, and he enrolled his son, Hamed, in Georgetown University.

…

The Karzai brothers took a great interest in Wardak Junior, and he enjoyed the benefits of the Karzais’ flashy and high-flying friends. After the September 11 Terror Attacks, the Karzais made Hamed the Vice President of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, which was founded by Mahmood Karzai. As I mentioned briefly in my piece, our Neocon Ex-Congressman Don Ritter happens to be the co-founder of this organization. Hamed was also appointed to an advisor’s post with President Karzai’s first Finance Minister, Ashraf Ghani. No small accomplishment for the barely 30 year old Hamed!

…

Hamed Wardak’s most productive venture in tapping into the US Defense Sector Pot(s) of Gold began with joining a Washington DC contracting firm, Technologists Inc., founded by Aziz Azimi, who happened to be a very close buddy of Qayum Karzai. Here is a further detail on this by e-Ariana:

“Hamed Wardak’s new alliances proved extraordinarily advantageous as George W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” particularly with Khalilzad and Strmecki enjoying direct access to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office.”

Do you want to check out the kind of contracts, the kind of millions, we are talking about with Technologists Inc.? Here is one for you:

Technologists, Inc., Rosslyn, Va., was awarded on Jan. 5, 2009, a $96,090,519 firm fixed price contract for the construction of an Afghanistan National Police National Training Center. Work will be performed in Maydan Wardak, Afghanistan, and is expected to be completed by Mar. 31, 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Web bids were solicited on Oct. 1, 2008, and 13 bids were received. U.S. Army Engineer District, Afghanistan, is the contracting activity (W917PM-09-C-0005).

That’s right. Just one of these contracts is worth nearly $100 million for connected Afghan carpetbaggers cashing in on wars suffered by ordinary American tax payers and US soldiers.

…

Here is one of our characters who hasn’t made an appearance for several pages: Milt Bearden, the EX-CIA Rambo in Afghanistan in the 80s, the US media darling on Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taliban…you name it, the shrewd self promoter with books and movies:

Milt Bearden must have been pretty familiar with our General Wardak since he was on the ground in Afghanistan serving his masters at the CIA and the Whitehouse, including the great advocator of ‘use any means,’ our Godmother of Neocons, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Operation Cyclone must certainly have brought him in contact with involved Taliban Generals, including our General, Osama Bin Laden, and other key ISI operators, and his dealings must certainly have included the major heroin operations tapped into to further fund these ‘freedom fighters.’ In fact, our Spook dealt extensively with Hekmatyar, who is considered one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Heroin Operator in Afghanistan – which supplies 90% of the world’s Heroin:

“One U.S. official who had considerable dealings with Mr. Hekmatyar was Milt Bearden, who during the Soviet occupation ran the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s covert program in Afghanistan. He says Mr. Hekmatyar struck him as “quirky and paranoid.””

Thus, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that our Ex-Spook took an interest in our General’s son, and translated this interest into a close business partnership when our young and chubby Hamed Wardak got closer and closer to big Pots of Gold in Washington DC and his father made it to the Defense Minister position in Afghanistan.

…

After Hamed Wardak left Technologists Inc. to go further in tapping the US Defense Contractor Gold Pots, and to set up various other front businesses in Afghanistan, many of which happen to be in security sectors, he formed a new front organization, Campaign for a US-Afghan Partnership. Guess who he appointed as the top man for the Board of this ambigious organization? That’s right, none other than our ex-spook, media supplier, Milton Bearden. Check out his glowing background listed on Hamed Wardak’s organization’s website: click here. What exactly this organization does, no one really knows, which should go as another credit to our Mr. Bearden’s CIA background in keeping things convoluted and secretive.

Rumors from the Ex-CIA community in the DC area point to another highly lucrative Wardak company paid by US tax payers, NCL, in Kabul, and hint that their buddy Milt may have been playing a major role there. Because of Mr. Bearden’s cozy relationships no one in the media has been looking for these deeper engagements and lucrative partnerships between him and Hamed Wardak.

…

You can read the entire piece on Bearden-Wardak and more here. Come on Project Censored! Why not talk about this ex spook’s intimate relationship with the New York Times?! Not only has he been their revered source, but he is the partner of their top reporter. How could James Risen partner up with him (financially, in the publicity arena…), and still he and others use Bearden as their valued source and in many cases as their only source?! As for The Washington Post: this would fall within the coverage area of our infamous Walter Pincus. Yes, I’m talking about the long ago exposed Pincus from Operation Mockingbird, and the father of Pincus Junior who happens to be an attorney for the infamous Black Water (aka XE and several other nicknames).

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Operation Tajikistan

Last week I wrote a piece on the latest developments in Central Asia and the Caucasus which briefly covered the  Mysterious Helicopter Activities in Northern Afghanistan. Using a tad of common sense we checked out the strategically important neighbors in this region where these officially denied (vehemently, that is) mysterious activities took place, and one of the three countries of interest was Tajikistan. Here are a few related articles dealing with our topic and Tajikistan.

Also last week Asia Times ran the following convoluted piece on Tajikistan. The piece is filled with speculations, interpretations, and even wild guesses:

Tajikistan struggles to quell militants

As Tajik government forces continue a security sweep to crush armed groups in the eastern mountains after losing 25 soldiers in an ambush, analysts are divided on the reasons for this resurgence in militant activity.

Enquiries by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) indicate that the resistance is coming from local paramilitary forces led by guerrilla leaders from Tajikistan’s 1992-97 civil war.

Claims by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, IMU, a militant group allied with the Taliban, that it was behind the attack are probably not entirely accurate but may contain a grain of truth, as the IMU has contacts with the Tajik groups and may have sent emissaries to encourage them to rise up.

…

And here is another opinion:

The Tajik Defense Ministry and the State Committee for National Security said the latest ambush was the work of a militant group led by Mirzohoja Ahmadov – a former police officer – also including the warlords Mullo Abdullo and Alloviddin Davlatov. This group, they added, had been recruiting young men for terrorist training.

…

And here is another:

The story got more complicated when the IMU, believed to be based in Pakistan and Afghanistan, announced that it had carried out the attack.

This claim was made in a video recording sent to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tajik service showing a man who identified himself as Abdufattoh Ahmadi, an IMU spokesman. In the recording, he said the attack was retaliation for Tajik government policies

such as closing mosques…

There are several other guesses and interpretations, and you can read them all here

And the following piece was written last year dealing with the same topic but a bit more ‘pure’ than the one above:

Chasing Phantoms in the Tajik Mountains

Speculation is rife that Islamic militants are once again active in the eastern mountains of Tajikistan. No one in government will confirm media reports that the military units deployed in force in the region are hunting a warlord from the 1992-97 civil war known as Mullo Abdullo, who has allegedly spent the last few years with Taleban allies in Afghanistan and more recently Pakistan.

The official version is that police are conducting a major sweep to stop the trade in opium and its derivative heroin in the Rasht valley, which cuts through inaccessible mountains and was a stronghold of opposition support throughout the civil war. According to interior ministry spokesman Mahmadullo Asadulloev, “The objective of this operation, which will continue until the end of November, is to tackle opium poppy cultivation and combat drug traffickers in the valley, 150 to 200 kilometers east of Dushanbe.”

CLASHES WITH “MUJAHEDIN”

For weeks, there was circumstantial evidence that the authorities were doing more than that – the sheer scale of the operation, reports that three policemen died in a firefight, and separately, the arrests of several former associates of the guerrilla leader now living in other parts of Tajikistan.

IWPR has spoken to a serviceman in an elite interior ministry unit that was among the first to be sent in, around May 21.

Now back in the capital Dushanbe after his unit was rotated out and replaced with fresh troops, he confirmed the government forces were in action against armed men. Officially, he said, they were indeed part of the Opium-2009 operation, but in fact their task was to patrol mountain tracks paths to intercept militants or as he called them, “mujahedin”.

This man said troops were deployed after the authorities got wind that a group of Islamic militants had infiltrated the area from Afghanistan, with which Tajikistan shares a long and in places porous border.

…

Analysts in Tajikistan are now trying to figure out whether the armed men who have been sighted really are grouped around Mullo Abdullo, and if so, what they are up to in the Rasht valley.

Political expert Parviz Mullojonov explains how hard it is to establish facts out of the various reports and rumours.“The only things the majority of sources agree on are first, that a group led by Mullo Abdullo has appeared in the region from neighbouring Afghanistan,” he told IWPR. “Secondly, that the government’s opium operation is in some way connected with the appearance of this group of militants.”

One possibility, Mullojonov believes, is that Central Asian militants allied with the Taleban are finding life increasingly uncomfortable in Pakistan. The Taleban in Waziristan, where the IMU is also present, are under pressure from the Pakistani military and United States drone aircraft attacks.“It is more than likely that under these circumstances, a number of groups will be forced to return to Central Asia and become more active in the region – even they are not ready for large-scale operations,” said Mullojonov.

…

Jakypbek Azizov, who heads the ministry’s public security department, told a press conference that the forces had been sent in because of a “complex situation in border areas”, which was a consequence of developments in Afghanistan and the possibility that militants had infiltrated neighbouring states. It was unclear whether he was referring to Uzbekistan or Tajikistan.

…

Okay, since everyone is speculating we should go ahead and add ours into this pot. You firstJ

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Pepe Escobar on China’s Pipelineistan War

My favorite journalist, Pepe Escobar, had an excellent comprehensive piece on the China-Turkmenistan deal. I strongly encourage you to read it. Here are selected excerpts from the article titled China’s Pipelineistan War:

Future historians may well agree that the 21st century Silk Road first opened for business on Dec. 14, 2009. That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Turkmenistan’s president, from bragging, “This project has not only commercial or economic value. It is also political. China, through its wise and farsighted policy, has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”

The bottom line is that, by 2013, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong will be cruising to ever more dizzying economic heights courtesy of natural gas supplied by the 1,833-kilometer-long Central Asia Pipeline, then projected to be operating at full capacity. And to think that, in a few more years, China’s big cities will undoubtedly also be getting a taste of Iraq’s fabulous, barely tapped oil reserves, conservatively estimated at 115 billion barrels, but possibly closer to 143 billion barrels, which would put it ahead of Iran. When the Bush administration’s armchair generals launched their Global War on Terror, this was not exactly what they had in mind.

China’s economy is thirsty, and so it’s drinking deeper and planning deeper yet. It craves Iraq’s oil and Turkmenistan’s natural gas, as well as oil from Kazakhstan. Yet instead of spending more than a trillion dollars on an illegal war in Iraq or setting up military bases all over the Greater Middle East and Central Asia, China used its state oil companies to get some of the energy it needed simply by bidding for it in a perfectly legal Iraqi oil auction.

…

Chinese companies have invested a staggering $120 billion in Iran’s energy sector over the past five years. Already Iran is China’s number two oil supplier, accounting for up to 14 percent of its imports; and the Chinese energy giant Sinopec has committed an additional $6.5 billion to building oil refineries there. Due to harsh U.N.-imposed and American sanctions and years of economic mismanagement, however, the country lacks the high-tech know-how to provide for itself, and its industrial structure is in a shambles. The head of the National Iranian Oil Company, Ahmad Ghalebani, has publicly admitted that machinery and parts used in Iran’s oil production still have to be imported from China.

…

I’ll end with Pepe’s last paragraph…

For the moment, Beijing’s strategic priority has been to carefully develop a remarkably diverse set of energy-suppliers – a flow of energy that covers Russia, the South China Sea, Central Asia, the East China Sea, the Middle East, Africa, and South America. (China’s forays into Africa and South America will be dealt with in a future installment of our TomDispatch tour of the globe’s energy hotspots.) If China has so far proven masterly in the way it has played its cards in its Pipelineistan “war”, the U.S. hand – bypass Russia, elbow out China, isolate Iran – may soon be called for what it is: a bluff.

…

…and encourage you again to go and read the entire informative piece here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading and talking about the latest developments in Central Asia and the Caucasus. I am planning to post a few updates on the status of the score board in this region (pipeline rivalries, military base ‘erection’ scores- and what-not). Meanwhile, as I am dealing with all this I keep ending up with riddle-like situations. And instead of trying to solve or get out of these riddles, I’m going to give up and instead share one of them with you, my blogosphere friends.

Our enemies’ enemies are our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies are the enemies of our enemies, so that makes them what? Friends? Enemies? It depends? Both? And what would all this make our ‘real’ foreign policy makers? Enemies? Friends? Both? What?

Seriously! Think about it.

By now we all know, or should know, about our government and mainstream media’s past almost romantic relationship with the Mujahideen, Taliban-al Qaeda, during the 80s. Back then, in the 80s, they were fighting the Soviets, they were the enemies of our enemies, thus, our beloved friends, our trusted, financed and backed allies. Here are a few excerpts from what I wrote and quoted on this topic a while back:

Now let’s go back and search U.S. press coverage of Afghanistan’s ‘Freedom Fighters’ during the 80s and try to find any coverage related to these U.S. backed and supported operations’ intersection with the global narcotics trade. Are there any? I’m afraid we know the answer to this question. Here is further coverage based on the report by FAIR:

“The press coverage of this era was overwhelmingly positive, even glowing, with regard to the guerrillas’ conduct in Afghanistan. Their unsavory features were downplayed or omitted altogether…Virtually all papers favored some amount of U.S. military support; and there was near unanimous agreement that the guerrillas were “heroic,” “courageous” and above all “freedom fighters.“”

“According to the L.A. Times (6/23/86): “The Afghan guerrillas have earned the admiration of the American people for their courageous struggle…. The rebels deserve unstinting American political support and, within the limits of prudence, military hardware.“”

And here the axis of U.S. Government-U.S. Press- and the information spin or black-out:

“Another problem was direct manipulation of reporting by the U.S. government, which was supporting the Mujahiddin guerrillas during both the Carter and Reagan administrations. (Indeed, we now know that U.S. aid to the Mujahiddin was secretly begun in July 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded–International Politics, 6/00.) This press manipulation began early in the conflict. In January 1980, the New York Times (1/26/80) reported that the State Department had “relaxed” its accuracy code for reporting information on Afghanistan. As a result, the Carter administration generated “accounts suggesting Soviet actions for which the administration itself has no solid foundation.“”

During the 80s our ‘real’ foreign policymakers couldn’t care less about adjectives such as extremists, terrorists, fanatics, anti-west…They were the beloved enemies of our enemies, and we’d do anything to support and use them. And this wasn’t necessarily about we the people of the US or our benefits or our best interests. After all, in the end the American people were the ones to pay the price for those unholy alliances where we selected, trained and backed the evildoer Bin Laden, our enemies’ enemy, thus, our beloved friend:

Our enemies’ enemies were our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies were the enemies of our enemies back then, so that made them our beloved friends.

Now, you may say, ‘that was a long time ago, it had to do with the Cold War, and it is simply not fair to criticize and judge based on this particular example…’And, I’d say, okay. Let’s fast forward. Let’s look at what we did with these same groups, in the 90s, after the wall came down and the Soviet empire collapsed.

The problem is this: without the Cold War excuse our foreign policymakers had a real hard time justifying our joint operations and terrorism schemes in the resource-rich ex Soviet states with these same groups, so they made sure they kept these policies unwritten and unspoken, and considering their grip on the mainstream media, largely unreported. Now what would your response be if I were to say, on the record, and if required, under oath:

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single uprising and terrorism related scheme in Xinxiang (aka East Turkistan and Uyghurstan)

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned and carried out at least two assassination schemes against pro Russia officials in Azerbaijan

…

Those of you who are truly familiar with our real history and foreign policy making past would yawn, and say, ‘but of course. That has been our modus operandi for many decades.’ Unfortunately, the great majority would either be shocked if open minded, or shake their head in disbelief and write it off as another ‘conspiracy theory;’ well, thanks to our mainstream media.

You may remember one of these foreign policy makers from my State Secrets Privilege Gallery and my under oath testimony in the Krikorian case. Here is a quote from Graham A. Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence:

‘The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.’

And this goes to the heart of our ‘real’ foreign policy practices showing our ‘real’ stand on Taliban years after the end of the Cold War and the first World Trade Center bombing:

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher – former White House Special Assistant to President Reagan and now Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee – declared that ‘this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power’. The assumption is that ‘the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan’. US companies involved in the project included UNOCAL and ENRON. As early as May 1996, UNOCAL had officially announced plans to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through western Afghanistan.

And Chechens are good friends since they are the enemies of our enemy, Russia:

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden funded Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab to the tune of several millions of dollars per month, sidelining the moderate Chechen majority. US intelligence remained deeply involved until the end of the decade. According to Yossef Bodanksy, then-Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in ‘yet another anti-Russian jihad, ‘seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces’. US Government officials participated in ‘a formal meeting in Azerbaijan’ in December 1999 ‘in which specific programmes for the training and equipping of mujahidin from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon’, culminating in ‘Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US “private security companies”… to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing jihad for a long time.’ The US saw the sponsorship of ‘Islamist jihad in the Caucasus’ as a way to ‘deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism’.

…

Okay, so the partnership and joint operations between our operatives and the Mujahideen (including the Taliban & al Qaeda) continued after the Cold War, and even after the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, and the 1998 Embassy Bombings. On one hand we were declaring these people as our enemies, on the other hand, in Central Asia-Caucaus-Balkans and Xinxiang, they were the enemies of our enemies , thus our good partners and dear old friends. Except, by this time, the majority of us had stopped considering the Russians and Chinese enemies, instead they were viewed as mere competitors. And with that, the riddle slightly changes here:

Our competitors’ enemies were our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies were willing to become the enemies of our competitors, so that made them our dear friends.

You’d think after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks our foreign policy makers would seriously rethink their past M.O. and cease certain friendships and unholy alliances, despite the severe monetary consequences for a handful in the oil and MIC industries. But no. That doesn’t appear to be the case. And, as always, you won’t get the ‘real’ stories on this from the MSM. Here is a recent example:

Persistent accounts of western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taleban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

“Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taleban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams,” he said. “They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army.”

This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taleban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces. The local talk is of the insurgency being consciously moved north, with international troops ferrying fighters in from the volatile south, to create mayhem in a new location.Helicopters are almost exclusively the domain of foreign forces in Afghanistan – the international military controls the air space, and has a virtual monopoly on aircraft. So when Afghans see choppers, they think foreign military.

“Our fight against the Taleban is nonsense,” said the soldier from Shahin Corps. “Our foreigner ‘friends’ are friendlier to the opposition.”

…

Let’s take a look at certain important northern neighbors in Afghanistan where our ‘real’ policymakers have been facing…hmmm… frustration, thus, in need of friends to get back at those who’ve been causing this…hmmmmm… frustration:

Previously close to Washington (which gave Uzbekistan half a billion dollars in aid in 2004, about a quarter of its military budget), the government of Uzbekistan has recently restricted American military use of the airbase at Karshi-Khanabad for air operations in neighboring Afghanistan.

The relationship between Uzbekistan and the United States began to deteriorate after the so-called “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine (and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan). When the U.S. joined in a call for an independent international investigation of the bloody events at Andijon, the relationship took an additional nosedive, and President Islam Karimov changed the political alignment of the country to bring it closer to Russia and China, countries which chose not to criticise Uzbekistan’s leaders for their alleged human rights violations.

In late July 2005, the government of Uzbekistan ordered the United States to vacate an air base in Karshi-Kanabad (near Uzbekistan’s border with Afghanistan) within 180 days. Karimov had offered use of the base to the U.S. shortly after 9/11. It is also believed by some Uzbeks that the protests in Andijan were brought about by the U.K. and U.S. influences in the area of Andijan. This is another reason for the hostility between Uzbekistan and the West.

…

And this to sweeten the deal, or is it turning it into a rather strong vinegar, at least for the ones who count in making and implementing our unwritten and unspoken foreign policy practices:

The leaders of Uzbekistan and China on Wednesday said they had signed deals aimed at increasing cooperation on energy and regional security. Speaking ahead of an annual meeting of the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tashkent, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Uzbek President Islam Karimov pledged closer ties, particularly on nuclear fuel.

“One of the question we discussed was that of long-term and stable cooperation in the field of … uranium. It’s necessary to work in such a way to develop natural uranium and uranium fields,” Hu told reporters.

Although the leaders said they had signed a number of agreements regarding the purchase of energy from Uzbekistan, including uranium and natural gas, they declined to provide specifics details on the deals.

…

Okay, so you get the general picture on Uzbekistan. Right?

Next, let’s take a quick look at Turkmenistan:

Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world to Russia, Iran and the United States in natural gas reserves. The Turkmenistan Natural Gas Company (Türkmengaz), under the auspices of the Ministry of Oil and Gas, controls gas extraction in the country. Gas production is the most dynamic and promising sector of the national economy. Turkmenistan’s gas reserves are estimated at 3.5-6.7 mcubic meters and its prospecting potential at up to 21 trillion cubic meters. In 2010 Ashgabat started a policy of diversifying export routes for its raw materials.

China is set to become the largest buyer of gas from Turkmenistan over the coming years as a pipeline linking the two countries, through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, reaches full capacity. In addition to supplying Russia, China and Iran, Ashgabat took concrete measures to accelerate progress in the construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and India pipeline (TAPI). Turkmenistan has previously estimated the cost of the project at $3.3 billion. On May 21st, president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov unexpectedly signed a decree stating that companies from Turkmenistan will build an internal East-West gas pipeline allowing the transfer of gas from the biggest deposits in Turkmenistan (Dowlatabad and Yolotan) to the Caspian coast. The East-West pipeline is planned to be around 1000 km long and have a carrying capacity of 30 bn m³ annually, at a cost of between one and one and a half billion US dollars.

…

And, this is the latest to truly pi.. off our ‘real’ foreign policy beneficiaries:

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has announced the discovery of yet another gas field on the right bank of the Amu Darya River in Turkmenistan, holding in excess of 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas.

Separately, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow inaugurated a new compressor station at the Bagtiyarlyk fields, estimated by Chinese engineers to hold 1.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

These fields feed the Turkmenistan-China pipeline, which traverses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and was opened in December 2009 with a projected capacity of 40 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) by 2015, with some of that volume being consumed in southern Kazakhstan. (See Gas pipeline gigantism, Asia Times Online, July 17, 2008.)

In June this year, Ashgabad and Beijing agreed to increase Turkmen exports to China above the agreed level; the new compressor station will eventually raise the existing capacity to 22 bcm/y from the 6 bcm/y estimate of Chinese consumption of Turkmenistan-sourced gas for 2010.

…

And here, a brief snapshot of where Tajikistan stands:

Tajikistan is ready to further improve its cooperation in various fields with China, and make joint efforts to ensure the continued success of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), President Emomali Rakhmonov said in a recent interview with Chinese media.

The establishment of a friendly relationship with China was one of the great achievements that Tajikistan had made since its independence nearly 15 years ago, he said in his interview shortly ahead of the summit of the SCO heads of state to be held in Shanghai.

…

He mentioned in particular the opening of the Karasu pass on the Tajik-Chinese border.

“It is an important event in the history of the Tajik-Chinese relations, since it was the first time that the two countries were linked by motor traffic,” Rakhmonov said.

Trade between the two countries was developing rapidly and China’s influence on the Tajik economy was also growing, he said.

The president expressed satisfaction with the Tajik-Chinese trade volume which was increasing every year. In 2005, bilateral trade between the two countries had doubled from the previous year, he said.

…

And finally, if you’ve been following the recent turmoil and elections in Kyrgyzstan, you’d know that things haven’t been looking up for US business and bases over there:

In a surprise result which underscores what remains an extremely divided electorate in Kyrgyzstan, the parliamentary vote has led to the victory of the nationalist Fatherland Party (Ata-Jurt) and a very unclear road to a coalition government.

…

A Fatherland dominated government might bode ill for the Obama Administration’s designs on keeping a military base in Kyrgyzstan, as the party has spoken out against extending the US lease on the base past 2011.

…

Things certainly haven’t been looking up for our MIC, Oil, and related mega companies in that part of the world. And this kind of situation puts our ‘real’ foreign policy makers in their ‘enemies-of-our-enemies’ are needed mode. And when that happens the rest will follow: contracts for our good ole  Mujahideen friends, convenient terrorism related incidents and pipeline sabotages right and left, a more aggressive control of the opium trade to finance unwritten-unspoken foreign policy practices …

In the coming days I’ll be posting more updates and brief (not like this one!) commentaries and analysis on this topic, meanwhile, let’s round up our confusing but pretty much on target foreign policy riddle for the post 9/11 decade:

Our competitors’ enemies are our friends. Our nation’s government designated terrorist enemies are willing to become our competitors’ enemies, and that makes them our foreign policymakers’ convenient good friends while they remain our nation’s enemies. And that, my friend, makes our real foreign policy makers our (?)…

I’ll leave the solving and perfection of the above riddle to you. Please keep them coming.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

This post is similar to what I usually publish under my ‘Weekly Round Up’ series, only with a caveat: the time period covers more than a week, make that more than a month. I’ve been saving links and articles of interest, either those I’ve been coming across or ones sent by my loyal friends with good noses, and meaning to publish them as ‘weekly round ups.’ Then of course, due to ‘this or that,’ those ‘round up’ points ended up piling up week after week. Where did they get piled up? As ‘saved’ e-mails in my e-mail box and marked as ‘unread.’ Why that way? Because that’s one of my ‘supposed’ motivating strategies to prevent ‘delays & procrastination;’ seeing these piled up e-mails in my box every day, usually several times a day, bugs me big time…

Well, obviously, and for truly justifiable reason(s), that so-called strategy/method didn’t work, and I ended up with over one hundred e-mails of this particular category sitting in my mail box, glaring at me. Last night I decided I couldn’t take it any longer. After putting my daughter in bed for the evening, I sat behind my PC, scrolled down to the bottom of my e-mail box where the oldest e-mails sit, clicked and read. I eliminated (deleted) many due to the time-sensitive nature of those articles/analysis/editorials, and saved (technically ‘re-saved’) those timeless and or worthy-of-listing ones. And, at 10:30 p.m., began typing away!

I hope ‘some’ of you will find ‘some’ of this information worthy or useful; I did. Maybe we’ll get a chance to discuss these in the comments section… Oh, also, I am going to preempt a few finicky readers: I am mostly listing the links & the headlines/titles rather than adding my usual fairly long commentaries to each and every one of the links, because I don’t have the time; hope you understand. And finally, I am looking forward to tomorrow morning, when I’ll check my mail box and won’t see those glaring ‘months’ old e-mails;-) So here we go!

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Last year I did a piece on Vietnam & Agent Orange. The following is another awful footprint left by one of our many wars, reminding us once again of our established record as the number one nation in using WMD (and going for ‘preemptive wars’!)…Truly sad; truly sad.

New case for US reparations in Laos
Melody Kemp, Asia Times

Laos carries the tragic distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in the history of modern warfare. Thirty-five years after the United States wound up its so-called “secret war” against communist guerillas, the impact of its unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to take a heavy human and economic toll.

A new report published jointly by UXO Lao and the Lao National Regulatory Authority (NRA) has shed more light on the damage caused by the US’s UXOs. The research surveyed 94% of Lao households and concluded that an estimated 20,000 people had died from UXOs since the conflict ended after the communist takeover in 1975.

…

COPE’s research shows that the US government, corporations and private foundations have given over $39.5 million for UXO clean-up since 1993 – a trifling sum compared with the billions it has allocated for its new generation of wars. A US Senate committee recently recommended committing $7 million for UXO clearance in Laos in 2011 and $3.5 for similar activities in Vietnam. The US Congress allocated about $5 million and the US State Department $1.9 million for UXO clearance in Laos this year.

The US war in Laos was shrouded in intrigue and disinformation. An Australian-made film entitled Bomb Harvest contains footage of a US government spokesperson saying that internationally accepted rules of engagement were suspended during the campaign in Laos. Legally, that means there are still unresolved questions over who should bear primary responsibility, the US government
or the private companies who produced the weapons, for UXO victims and other legacies of the war in Laos.

As warfare is increasingly outsourced to private companies, questions are emerging about the legal liability of private companies that supply and profit from war. From a common law perspective, US negligence and injury in Laos are easy to prove, say international lawyers. However, the tenets of war reparations have been generally designed so that the vanquished are economically punished for both their aggression and loss

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Laos, which had an estimated one ton of ordnance per capita rained on it by US bombers, has more recently emerged as a global icon for the movement against cluster bombs. It is estimated by the US State Department’s Walk the Earth With Safety bureau that about 30% of those bombs did not explode on contact with the ground. Canisters dropped from US B-52s could have carried up to 600 cluster bomb units and distributed them over a wide terrain on impact.

A new research report entitled National Survey of UXO Victims and Accidents reveals that, apart from cluster munitions, land mines, artillery shells and other US ordnance also continue to cause significant casualties decades after the end of the war. Indeed, many areas of the country where injuries have recently occurred were not adjacent to known combat zones.

During the conflict, the largest numbers of bombing-related fatalities came among soldiers. Nowadays, it’s farmers, fisherfolk, foresters and women and children foraging for food in UXO-contaminated areas. That is, those being killed now by what is known to be US ordnance are civilians merely trying to make a living. Many of those killed and injured, such as the five children killed in southern Champassak province in February this year, were not even alive during the war.

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Military adventurism for less ideological reasons, including access to and control over natural resources, has changed the face of modern warfare. However, some wonder whether reformed reparation laws that forced state aggressors and the private companies that supply them with weaponry to pay for all injuries and assistance to non-combatants would reduce the risk of future armed conflicts.

Vietnam tried for years to win US compensation for its victims of US chemical warfare, including the US’s use of the defoliant Agent Orange, but ultimately failed to secure a US court decision in its favor. Laos has not collected comprehensive data on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants on its southern territories, but the recent $300 million deal Vietnamese stakeholders reached with the US panel could change that.

Meanwhile, signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions are scheduled to meet in Vientiane in early November. The US is notably not a signatory to the munitions-curbing treaty, but 107 other nations are, 40 of which have formally ratified the agreement. The convention took effect on August 1, 2010, and the meeting in Laos will be the first since its enactment.

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I encourage you to read the rest here. And below are two clips I filmed while in Vietnam: First, Victims of Agent Orange, and the second, an interview I conducted (with Le Ly Heyslip) while in Vietnam on Agent Orange:

The Latest ‘Pitch & Tone’ on Central Asia

The following links are on one of the most important topics unknown to and or ignored by the majority here in the States: Central Asia & the Caucasus. I picked the following three since they reflect the latest ‘trend’ and the ‘advertised tone’ by the Obama-Hillary Clinton Administration. The first analysis/report was published by the Council on Foreign Relations, so it’s independence and purity should be pretty self explanatory. The following two pieces by the same author, published by Asia Times, are a bit hard to judge; as far as intentions & interests are concerned… Okay, take a look at them and you’ll see what I mean.

Reimagining Eurasia
Samuel Charap and Alexandros Petersen,  Foreign Affairs

As Kyrgyzstan descended into chaos after President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in April 2010, most observers were focused on the fate of the key U.S. airbase there. They feared that Moscow had orchestrated the unrest as revenge for Bakiyev reneging on his alleged promise to shut down the base and would now demand that the new government follow through on that pledge. But instead of indulging in geopolitical gamesmanship as usual, Russia and the United States actually worked together, pursuing back-channel talks that facilitated Bakiyev’s safe escape into exile. Periodic consultations since April have thus far managed to prevent conflict between the Cold War adversaries in the one country where both have military outposts. This marked a tectonic shift in the geopolitics of Eurasia. For the first time in over a decade, what Russia calls its “near abroad” was a locus of cooperation, not confrontation, between Russia and the United States.

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This shift has opened a window of opportunity to fundamentally rethink U.S. foreign policy in Eurasia — a term used here to refer to the countries of the greater Black Sea region and Central Asia — a strategically situated area with massive natural resource wealth and great economic potential. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has formulated its approach to countries as diverse as Azerbaijan and Ukraine through a Russia-centric lens; U.S. policy toward the region as a whole became a function of its plans for dealing with Moscow. Although Washington focused on ensuring Eurasian states’ independence in the 1990s, the past decade saw U.S. policy toward these countries devolve, becoming mired in outright U.S-Russia strategic competition. Although that competitive dynamic has diminished significantly over the past year and a half, its legacy still defines Washington’s engagement with the states of the region.U.S. policymakers must abandon the tired Russia-centric tack and develop new individualized approaches to the states of the greater Black Sea region and Central Asia. By treating each country based on its merits, as opposed to approaching the region as a set of contested territories, Washington can serve long-term U.S. interests and avoid re-creating a nineteenth-century-style Great Game.

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You can read the rest here

Russia and US march in post-Soviet step
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times

An unprecedented military parade in Red Square in Moscow on Sunday, when servicemen from the major North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries will march alongside Russian soldiers, will be a commemorative event marking the 65th anniversary of Victory Day in World War II. Arguably, it is not a parade of NATO troops but rather of Russia’s erstwhile allies in the coalition against Adolf Hitler.

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You can read the rest of this fairly brief, and equally light-weight on the analysis-front, piece here.  I think Bhadrakumar misses on several extremely important points, what I call ‘reality check,’ but what do you think?

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Here is another piece by the same author, Bhadrakumar. This one is a bit better, relatively speaking, that is

A Kosovo on the Central Asian steppes
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times

A robust geopolitical thrust by the United States aimed at creating a role for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in resolving conflicts in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan promises to rewrite the great game rivalries in Central Asia in anticipation of an Afghan settlement. The US initiative poses political challenges to Russia, which is a member of the 56-member OSCE, and China, which is not. The security vehicles piloted by each the respective two regional powers – the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – are being outmaneuvered by the US.

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Paradoxically, Russia and China could seize the initiative if the OSCE plan to stabilize the situation in Kyrgyzstan somehow crash-lands and ethnic tensions, violence and anarchy ensue. But that would be a dubious blessing as Russia and China too are stakeholders in regional stability in their own ways.

‘B team’ for the Afghan war
The unkindest cut of all is that it is Kazakhstan, which both Moscow and Beijing counted to be their most sober and thoughtful regional partner, which is heading the OSCE chariot. As Kazakh President Nurusultan Nazarbayev firmly asserted, “There is no doubt a new OSCE strategy on Afghanistan is necessary.”

The US is delighted, and as a quid pro quo, Washington has accommodated the Kazakh leaderships’ desire to chair an OSCE summit meeting within the year in Astana and thereby claim a legacy on the world stage. The last time the OSCE held a summit meeting was in 1999. This is also the 35th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act..

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Again, I don’t consider the piece heavy-weight by any means, and in fact that’s exactly why I am listing it here…It may open up a few of our readers whom I know to be very savvy in this area;-) Now, the following piece seems to have somel dose of realism:

Bad Blood in Baku
Thomas Goltz, FP

If I were still a journalist, I would have had juicy scoop last Saturday when I learned of the imminent but still unannounced arrival in Azerbaijan of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates had been tasked with hitting the reset button — there are a lot of those in the former Soviet Union these days — on Washington’s increasingly problematic relationship with Baku.

I learned of the emergency visit when an old friend of mine called to say he knew I was in the Azerbaijani capital, and that his former boss, a U.S. intelligence officer, wanted to buy me a few beers and chat about my nearly 20-year hobby of reading tea leaves and goat entrails in the Land of Az.

“The American chargé d’affaires told me not to talk to you, but he is State Department and I am not,” the official said — I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but closely — putting initial pleasantries out of the way. “I am here to set up the Gates visit tomorrow. We finally decided to give the Azerbaijanis something before this thing deteriorates any further.” Then he sort of smirked while saying the following: “We frankly don’t care about human rights or democracy-building, or Israel and Turkey, or peace in Karabakh or Georgia, or even Azerbaijani energy. There is only one thing we really care about right now, and that is Afghanistan.”

I was not surprised, but had to ask: “Afghanistan,” he said, and then repeated the word

Azerbaijan’s role in that war is fairly well known: The country has donated a symbolic company of 90 soldiers (which has suffered no casualties to date) and shared intelligence with the United States. But Azerbaijan’s main contribution to the U.S.-led war effort has been geographic: The country’s location in the Caucasus is a gateway between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and Baku has provided a vital transportation alternative by opening its air, rail, and seaport space to NATO.

There has been no murmur of a threat to close or restrict the Azerbaijan corridor, but even the remote possibility that the Azerbaijanis would do so has apparently worried Pentagon contingency planners — enough so that a decision was made to show Baku some respect, in the form of a personal letter from President Barack Obama to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Delivering the missive was the purpose of Gates’s visit, and news of the surprise stop-off was regarded as important enough that the usual Associated Press and Reuters stories about the visit and the letter were soon splashed across the front pages of most international and virtually all American newspapers — even small ones, such as my local rag in Bozeman, Montana.

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All right, let’s not violate the ‘quote’ limits, at least not too much; here is the link.
 
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The Fear Mongering & Opportunist 9/11 Commissioner, Phony Reports & More

Here is another from last May. I was away, travelling, so I don’t know if this piece of nothing coming from a less-than-nothing weasel was ever publicized by the media that is good at publishing nothing noteworthy or truth-worthy… 

Former Gov. Tom Kean says U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks since 9/11

The United States is more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than any time since the 2001 assault on the World Trade Center, according to the chairman of the 9/11 commission.”This is the most dangerous time I’ve seen since 9/11,” former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean said. “Al Qaeda is constantly learning our weaknesses, and the U.S. intelligence community is dysfunctional.

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Both Friedberg, who was deputy national security adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Kean also agreed the new face of terrorism is increasingly “home-grown.” Faisal Shahzad, for example, is a naturalized citizen allegedly responsible for last month’s abortive attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square.”Thank God no one was hurt, but terrorists have learned that they don’t have to be successful to disrupt our lives and our economy,” Kean said. “So now they’re looking to recruit home-grown (American) operatives who can move around at will under the radar of our intelligence community.”

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Who really cares about what this omission-er guy says? Is there anyone left out there who doesn’t recognize this guy as a phony little fear-mongering joker badly in need of some publicity? Please tell me he was totally ignored by our phony-loving MSM on this particular case! Did they put his face on MSNBC/CBS for this? Again, I was gone, and (maybe blissfully!) missed the coverage (or lack of) of stooges like Kane/Hamilton…

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Speaking of commissioners, ‘ommosioners,’ and laughable reports, here is a good one:

Bhutto probe: More than enough blame
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times

Pakistan has suspended eight police officials following the release of a United Nations report into the assassination of former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, but no action has been taken against any members of the military or intelligence agencies, even though the report implicates the military in the events surrounding Bhutto’s death on December 27, 2007.

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Bhutto’s assassination after leaving a campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi two weeks before general elections has been the subject of intense controversy, and while the report does not give any definitive answers it is most likely to intensify divisions between the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the military establishment, both of which are tainted by the report.
Current officials, the report says, were less than helpful. “The investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials, which impeded the search for the truth,” Heraldo Munoz, chair of the Bhutto Commission of Inquiry and permanent representative of Chile to the UN, said. “These officials, in part fearing intelligence agencies’ involvement, were unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken,” he said.

The commission’s report, based on interviews with 250 people in and outside Pakistan as well as other evidence, says the official investigation focused on “low-level operatives and placed little or no focus on investigating those further up the hierarchy in the planning, financing and execution of the assassination”.

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Read the rest here. Doesn’t it sound like our very own investigations here?! You know, BCCI, Iran Contra, 9/11 …Please bring in your own reasoned theories, speculations, interpretation, or just plain good ole comments…

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You’d think this latest on Dr. Kelly’s highly suspicious ‘suicide’ would make it to the front pages, and stay there. Well, not surprisingly it is not the case…I wonder what kind of a ‘commission & commissioners’ will be ‘set up’ by the Brits to handle this latest…of course, with another phony report attached at the end of it…

British Medical Experts Seek Full Inquest on Iraq Inspector Kelly’s Death
Thomas Penny & Chris Peterson, Bloomberg

A group of U.K. doctors and lawyers called for a full inquest into the death of David Kelly, the government scientist who was the source of a story saying the official dossier justifying the Iraq war had been “sexed up.”

Kelly, a former weapons inspector working for the defense ministry, was found dead in a wood near his home in southern England in 2003 after he was revealed as the origin of a BBC report about the way information about Iraqi arms had been used to make the case for the U.S.-led invasion that toppled President Saddam Hussein.

The group, including two former coroners and an intensive care specialist, said in a letter published by the Times of London newspaper today that, based on the evidence currently in the public domain, it was “extremely unlikely” that Kelly had bled to death after slitting his wrist.

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The letter-writers, who include former coroners Michael Powers and Margaret Bloom, as well as Julian Bion, a professor of intensive-care treatment, said it was “extremely unlikely from a medical perspective” that Kelly’s severed ulnar artery would have bled enough to be the primary cause of death.

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I think this is a good place for the next link dealing with another repeating joke: The State Department’s ever-alteration of terror list!
State Department to Leave Chechen Rebel Group off Terror List
Josh Rogin, The Cable

The State Department’s update of its annual list of official terrorist groups is imminent, but the group that just attacked Moscow won’t be on the list.

The Caucasus Emirate, which has been waging a jihad against the Russian government, is led by Doku Umarov, who calls himself the “emir of the North Caucasus.” He was previously President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, but dissolved that Republic and established the Emirate in its place in 2007 in order to impose sharia law in his territory.

Umarov declared all the way back in 2007 that his group was expanding its struggle to wage war against the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. Last month, he released a video claiming credit for the suicide attacks in Moscow in March that resulted in the deaths of 39 people.

But apparently, the State Department chose not to include Caucasus Emirate in the newest update to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, according to Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-FL, who is calling on the State Department to add the group for the sake of national security and U.S. -Russia relations.

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Foreign Lobbies & Serving Elected Officials: Jane Schmidt Story

We’ve been talking about the speedy transitions of former elected officials from public office to foreign lobby firms as foreign agents… Well, this particular ‘representative’ is in a real hurry! She ain’t waiting! Why would she? Who’s watching? Who is reporting? With no worries she’s been doing lap dances for the foreign lobby, and yes, she’s been getting paid…

Who’s paying Schmidt lawyers?
Malia Rulon, Enquirer

Rep. Jean Schmidt isn’t Turkish, and there aren’t many Turks in her southern Ohio district, but the Miami Township Republican is deeply invested in a legal battle stemming from the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. And that battle could land her in a heap of trouble. At issue is whether Schmidt accepted what foes estimate to be at least $200,000 worth of free representation from a Turkish legal group so she could file two cases against former opponent David Krikorian, who is of Armenian descent.

Schmidt spokesman Bruce Pfaff told The Enquirer that the Schmidt campaign hired the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund to represent her in both cases against Krikorian. Pfaff said she is in the process of setting up a legal expense fund to pay the organization’s fees.

Krikorian, who ran unsuccessfully as an independent in 2008 and as a Democrat in this year’s primary, has filed a complaint over this issue with the Office of Congressional Ethics, which forwards complaints of merit to the official House ethics committee for further action. Investigations aren’t typically made public unless a sanction is made. Krikorian’s complaint is dated July 13.

He alleges that Schmidt, or her campaign, accepted free legal services from TALDF, which would be a violation of campaign finance laws or House gift rules, or both. If it turns out she violated campaign finance laws or House rules, she could face a fine, a reprimand, or much more – such as an ethics investigation.

Haven’t gotten the bill yet

Since her first case filed with the Ohio Elections Commission in May 2009, Schmidt’s campaign finance reports have not indicated any payment or debt for legal services, or any in-kind gifts from TALDF for the work. A separate lawsuit was filed against Krikorian this past June. Again, no payments were listed in her latest campaign finance report, which covers activity until June 30.
Schmidt spokesman Pfaff said that’s because the cases are still going on. He turned down a request to speak to the congresswoman directly.

“I don’t believe that there has been a bill for their services to this point,” he said, adding that the lawyers are waiting for the legal expense fund to be set up before submitting a bill. But statements made under oath in August 2009 by Bruce Fein, who handles cases for TALDF and is representing Schmidt, and former Schmidt chief of staff Barry Bennett seem to contradict this. They suggest the TALDF would pay the legal bills for Schmidt’s case. When asked whether TALDF had charged the Schmidt campaign any money for representation, Fein said: “The answer is no. We stated that we would do this and we would not charge them legal fees.”

Krikorian’s lawyer asked Bennett, “And there’s no ethics issue associated with Turkish American Legal Defense Funds paying for Ms. Schmidt’s legal fees?” Bennett replied: “No, not that I’m aware of.” These statements were made in depositions taken for the Ohio Elections Commission case. They were submitted to the Office of Congressional Ethics as part of Krikorian’s request for a formal investigation.

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In May 2009, right after filing the Ohio Elections Commission complaint against Krikorian, she traveled to Turkey, courtesy of the Turkish Coalition of America. The following month, an editorial she wrote was published in Today’s Zaman, a Turkish newspaper.
In Congress, she has praised the founding of Turkey on the House floor, opposed legislation recognizing the Armenian genocide, and joined the Caucus on U.S.-Turkish Relations. She has also marched as grand marshal in a Turkish Day Parade, lunched with a group of Turks at Cafe Istanbul in Newport, and raised thousands in campaign contributions from Turkish Americans.
According to the last census, there are just 3,159 Turks in Ohio, including 297 in the 2nd Congressional District.

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And here is an update on our Bryza story:

Controversy Continues Over Obama’s Pick for Ambassador to Azerbaijan
Richard Solash, RFERL.Org

At a July 22 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bryza said the criticism was to be expected given the high tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan. “Being criticized or being thought of as being closer to one side or the other is part of the game,” he said.
But at the request of Senator Barbara Boxer (Democrat, California), who represents the largest Armenian-American constituency in the country, the committee’s vote on Bryza’s nomination was put on hold. Boxer and her legislative colleagues are far away from Washington at the moment, so they’re unlikely to have picked up a copy of the August 23 “Washington Examiner,” a conservative-leaning D.C. daily.

In a guest opinion-page column that day, former Republican Senator Conrad Burns came to Bryza’s defense. Burns wrote: “It appears this opposition [to Bryza's nomination] is based upon senators responding to special interest groups whose sole purpose is to oppose all things related to Azerbaijan.” The apparent reference was to efforts by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), an influential Armenian lobbying group, to stop Bryza’s confirmation.
…

And here is the juicy part:

After the column was published, the ANCA contacted the newspaper to point out a detail in Burns’ background that wasn’t mentioned in the piece: the senator himself can be linked, albeit in a roundabout way, to the family of President Aliyev.
The former senator is a senior adviser to the Gage Company, a Washington-based lobbying firm. The CEO of Gage is Leo Giacometto, a former political aide to Burns. In addition to being CEO of Gage, Giacometto sits on the board of a company called Silk Way Holding.

As revealed in an investigative report by RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service earlier this month, Silk Way Holding — which owns more than a dozen aviation industry companies in Azerbaijan — is partially owned by Arzu Aliyeva, the 21-year-old daughter of President Aliyev.

“It came, sadly, as no surprise at all that the people defending Bryza are exactly the people who are close to the Aliyev regime,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee, who added that he used the information uncovered by RFE/RL to connect the dots.
But it was apparently a surprise to the editorial-page editor of “The Washington Examiner,” who published Burns’ piece.

Two days after the piece appeared, Mark Tapscott wrote a special column that said, “Burns’ relationship to a special interest that may benefit by the Bryza appointment should have been revealed by Burns’ spokesman when the [editorial] was first proposed. When ‘The Examiner’ pointed this out to the spokesman after becoming aware of it, Gage Vice President Ryan Thomas offered no explanation or apology.”

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You can read the rest here

Speaking of Turkey, Fethullah Gulen is Back in the News

Objectives of charter schools with Turkish ties questioned
Greg Toppo, USA Today

They have generic, forward-sounding names like Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science and Beehive Science & Technology Academy. Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns.

The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade. But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.

Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and “contemporary Islam’s Billy Graham,” Fethullah Gülen has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society. Followers of the so-called Gülen Movement operate an “education, media and business network” in more than 100 countries, says University of Oregon sociologist Joshua Hendrick.

Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” Gülen is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.

…

Utah’s State Charter School Board launched an investigation last year after American teachers complained that Turkish colleagues got hiring and promotion preferences. The charter school board looked into Beehive’s ties to Islam and found them “circumstantial,” but a financial probe found that the school was $337,000 in the red — and that Accord officials had loaned it thousands. The board last April revoked its charter, but in June voted to keep the school open on probation.

Dunnigan, the state lawmaker who requested the legislative audit, says the financial details, such as personal loans and public funds spent recruiting overseas faculty, are what concern him. “When they’re in such financial difficulty, should they spend $53,000 to bring these people over from another country?”

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Those of you who’ve been following our Gulen discussion will find this very interesting. Read the rest here

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Israel’s Success Recipe: Covert Operations to Pocket the US Media & Publication Industries

Here is a very important release with an attached report on Israel’s covert operations targeting the US media. Many thanks to Metem (as always;-) for bringing it to my attention:

Declassified Senate Investigation Files Reveal Clandestine Israeli PR Campaign in America
PRNewswire-USNewswire

Declassified files from a Senate investigation into Israeli-funded covert public relations and lobbying activity in the United States were released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on July 23rd, 2010. The subpoenaed documents reveal Israel’s clandestine programs for “cultivation of editors,” the “stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines” as well as U.S. reporting about sensitive subjects such as the Dimona nuclear weapons facility.

Documents are now available for download from http://IRmep.org/ila/azc include:

Dimona (excerpt): “The nuclear reactor story inspired comment from many sources; editorial writers, columnists, science writers and cartoonists. Most of the press seemed finally to accept the thesis that the reactor was being built for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.” http://www.irmep.org/11-121960AZC.pdf

Content placement and promotion (excerpt): “The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories… Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America…Our Committee is now planning articles for the women’s magazines for the trade and business publications.” http://www.irmep.org/09101961AZC.pdf

Pressure campaigns (excerpt): “It can be said that the press of the nation…has by and large shown sympathy and understanding of Israel’s position. There are, of course, exceptions, notably the Scripps-Howard chain where we still need to achieve a ‘break-through,’ the Pulliam chain (where some progress has been made) and some locally-owned papers.” http://www.irmep.org/11-121960AZC.pdf

Magazine Committee achievements (excerpt): “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines….” http://www.IRmep.org/10301962_AZC.pdf

According to Grant F. Smith, director of IRmep, “It is frightening how easily some in the American news media surrendered to a foreign public relations campaign that spent the 2010 equivalent of $36 million over two years. Time has proven most of the planted content to be misleading, if not dangerous. These historical documents hold many important lessons for Americans who have long needed—but rarely received—straight reporting on key Middle East issues.”

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper. It retains 1%-3% of the most important documents of business conducted by the United States Federal government. The Israel Lobby Archive, http://IRmep.org/ila is a unit of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington.

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I agree with Metem ‘And this is especially timely given the recent purchase of Newsweek by Jane Harman’s husband.’ Let’s repeat the golden quote in this release by Grant Smith:

“It is frightening how easily some in the American news media surrendered to a foreign public relations campaign that spent the 2010 equivalent of $36 million over two years. Time has proven most of the planted content to be misleading, if not dangerous. These historical documents hold many important lessons for Americans who have long needed—but rarely received—straight reporting on key Middle East issues.”

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And finally, here is an interesting observation on the latest Wikileaks story sent to me by Linda (Linda, thank you for all your e-mails with great links). As you may already know I have refrained from making comments on this case, but I think this particular article is harmless enough to take a chance on…:

Wikileaks: that sinking feeling
Mark Pesce, ABC

Reading a recent lengthy and detailed Sydney Morning Herald article
detailing the latest charges against Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange, I can only nod my head knowingly. This was always going to be the way things worked out. From the time last year when we all became aware of Assange, I felt a twinge of fear, an inner voice saying Something isn’t right here. It took me a few weeks to articulate that feeling into a real, grounded rationale for my dread.

Long ago, before I moved to Australia, before I’d done any of the work that I’m known for within the technology community, I had some peripheral contact with the ‘hacker’ world (In this usage, ‘hacker’ means folks who break into computers, not the folks who stay up all night programming them in weird and wonderful ways).

One of the things I learned very early on was a simple rule of thumb to separate the accomplished from the n00bs and fools: only a n00b would brag about their exploits. Only a n00b would tell others that he’d broken the law. Those who do crimes keep silent about their darker doings. Those who wannabe, they’re loud about it.

When Assange suddenly became the public face for the increasingly fascinating Wikileaks, it confused me on several levels.

…

You can find the rest here

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Tom Engelhardt discusses his latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, Washington’s ongoing commitment to military bases to extend its empire, and the US empire’s deep historical roots that precede the former administration and strongly continue today into the Presidency of Obama. He talks about Central Asia & the goal to dominate the future’s main energy sources in this region, and expands upon an interesting title for one the chapters in the book- “garrisoning of the planet.”

Tom Engelhardt is a founder of Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last three decades, as an editor in book publishing. For 15 years, he was Senior Editor at Pantheon Books where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as co-founder and co-editor of Metropolitan’s The American Empire Project.

Here is our guest Tom Engelhardt unplugged!

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It seems that Afghanistan is a never ending font of surprises. For decades U.S. officials took the position that Afghanistan held nothing of value for the United States, especially in the form of vital strategic resources. That assumption was a major reason for America’s consistently dismissive attitude towards Afghanistan up until the Soviet invasion of 1979 and why the U.S. was content to turn the country over to Pakistan and Saudi Arabian interests following the Soviet departure. Then on June 13, 2010 the New York Times in a front-page story reported how a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists had suddenly discovered a vast treasure of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth worth nearly $1 trillion dollars.

But the story of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth isn’t a new one nor did the Pentagon just “discover” it. According to a Reuters report of March 16, 2009, over a year ago, Afghanistan’s minister of mines Mohammed Ibrahim Adel cited U.S. Geological Survey Data in declaring that “In the field of minerals, Afghanistan is the richest country in the region, much more, hundreds of times more.”

Even the New York Times’ story admits that the survey information, on which the Pentagon assessment was based, came from data collected by Soviet mining experts nearly 30 years ago. American geologists became aware of it in 2004, but the data languished until 2009.

But the most revealing quote in the Pentagon report wasn’t so much that Afghanistan did indeed contain a vast wealth of minerals or even that the U.S. had carelessly overlooked a vast source of wealth for an impoverished nation. No. The key to understanding the report was framed by the reference that “Afghanistan could become the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’” and Saudi Arabia is where the real story behind the headlines begins. 

This is not the first time that Saudi Arabia has been used to as a model for Afghanistan’s future. One might go so far as to say today’s Afghanistan and its Taliban scourge already bears the stamp of being made in Saudi Arabia.

According to author, Gerald Posner in his book, Secrets of the Kingdom, the anti-Soviet Afghan war was as much a godsend for the Saudi Royal family as it was for the Afghan Islamists. “Some prominent Saudi officials, like Prince Bandar, as well as his father, defense minister Prince Sultan, saw the Soviet aggression as a chance to form a closer bond with Washington. It was a rare chance, they argued to other Saudi ministers, to replace Israel as America’s strategic partner in the Middle East. And as far as the Americans were concerned, the Saudis had suddenly become a cash cow.”

The term “Taliban” and the movement itself were unheard of in Afghanistan until 1994. Prior to the Soviet invasion, the Taliban mentality and the madrassa structure did not exist. As an invention of Pakistan’s military intelligence with outside help, the Taliban were not recruited from inside Afghanistan but from Pakistani madrassas. This process was funded, not by Afghans, but by the Saudis and other Arab countries who continue to seek the long term goal of a political and religious transformation of South Asia combined with the dissolution of Afghanistan as a nation state.

The Taliban version of Deobandi Islam practiced in Pakistan and the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia were both alien to Afghan practice. Suicide bombings did not exist in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation nor even when the Taliban took control in 1996. The Afghan people never willingly embraced extremist Islam. These ideas were forced upon them under circumstances beyond their control.

From the very beginning, the United States really had no conception of what to do in Afghanistan except to follow the lead of the Saudis, with some American diplomats benignly visualizing that a Taliban victory would simply turn Afghanistan into a miniature Saudi Arabia. In his book, Taliban, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid quotes one diplomat as saying, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

The Obama administration has nothing good to report to the American people on Afghanistan. New revelations of the hopelessness of government corruption arrive daily. Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai is in open confrontation with Washington on dozens of issues. Not only is reconstruction dead and the war failing, but so far, General McChrystal’s application of Counter Insurgency (COIN) has failed miserably. The heralded U.S. assault on Marja and the establishment of government control has come to a dead stop. According to the Washington Post, the failure at Marja has now caused the summer assault on Kandahar to be postponed indefinitely and threatens the Obama administration’s plans for a July 2011 drawdown of U.S. troops.  

So, without a legitimate rationale for staying in Afghanistan and no conceivable way of justifying countless more billions of dollars or American lives – Washington has finally admitted that the country is not only important, but is vital to the future of America’s strategic mineral interests. But even now as the Obama administration dredges up a new reason for staying in Afghanistan past the 2011 deadline, it appears that the old motivation of transforming Afghanistan into a Central Asian Saudi Arabia remains the real motivation underlying America’s war.

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Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011. 

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The region today delineated as both Afghanistan and Pakistan has known many borders over the millennia, yet none have been more artificial or contentious than the one today separating Pakistan from Afghanistan known as the Durand line but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line. A funny thing happened to the United States when the Obama administration decided to cross Zero line and bring the Afghan war into Pakistan. Instead of resolution, after nearly two years into the administration’s AfPak strategy, it would seem the gap between reality and the Washington beltway has only widened.

Instead of moving into a new future that defused India and Pakistan’s nuclear rivalry and promised “a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people,” the U.S. is falling back on its old cold war relationships that created the problem in the first place. But as the costs of maintaining an archaic cold war posture mount, the world’s economy crumbles and the contradictions tear the war’s flimsy logic to shreds, it’s clear that, the U.S. is facing a bigger enemy than it ever imagined.

Before the Obama administration even set foot in office it promised to shift its attention, time, money and energy away from Iraq towards Afghanistan. The president’s AfPak policy was intended to correct the mistakes of the past while addressing the war in a more realistic fashion that focused as much on the actions of Pakistan’s military as it did the actions of the Afghan government.

The Obama administration’s decision to actively address Pakistan’s behavior emerged only after Washington’s military/intelligence community reluctantly accepted proof that Pakistan’s ISI was aiding Taliban actors such as Malawi Jalaluddin Haqqani. It also emerged after solid evidence suggested that Pakistan itself was on the verge of caving in to their own Taliban extremists, known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP .

Despite being the single largest focus of the American military, much of what the United States does in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains a military secret. A report issued by the Center For Strategic and International Studies by Anthony H. Cordesman in September 2008, declared alarmingly. “No country or international organization provides useful unclassified overview data on the developments in the fighting [in Afghanistan] in anything like the depth that the US Department of Defense provides in its quarterly reports on the Iraq war. The [limited] reporting that is available also decouples the fighting in Afghanistan from that in Pakistan. Accordingly, public official reporting on the growing intensity of the war since 2006 ignores one of the most critical aspects of the conflict.”

Evidence of the strain facing America’s cold war-trained bureaucrats now appears regularly as the contradictions deepen. Defense Secretary Robert Gates crossed his own personal zero line in an address to the National Defense University in February when he criticized Europe’s growing anti-war sentiment as a dangerous threat to peace. The Obama administration rails at the Karzai government’s corruption but denies it the guidance and expertise necessary to make it effective at governance. The U.S. then diverts power and money to regional tribal leaders whom many fear (including U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry) will simply become a new class of warlord, once the U.S. departs.

Since January 2009, U.S. Predator Drone strikes are reported to have killed at least 529 people in the tribal areas of Pakistan of whom 20 percent may have been civilians. Considered to be a clear violation of international law by American legal scholars, the cross border strikes inflame Pakistani opinion against the U.S. Yet, the Pentagon praises their new anti-terror weapon while at the same time continuing to deny that the program even exists.

As the Obama administration struggles to reconcile Washington’s special interests with those posed by Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Russia, it should be remembered that the Soviet Union faced a similar challenge in Afghanistan. But in the end the biggest enemy the Soviets faced was not the Stinger missiles or the disunited Mujahideen Jihadis. The Soviet Union’s biggest enemy was the archaic cold war structure of the Soviet system itself, and that is a lesson that Washington refuses to accept.

The United States has fought on both the Pakistani and Afghan sides of the Durand line. In the 1980s it fought on the side of extremist-political Islam. Since September 11, 2001 it has fought against it. But the border separating the two seemingly incompatible behaviors remains largely a dark mystery. It is therefore appropriate to think of Zero line as the vanishing point for the American empire, the point beyond which its power and influence disappears; the line where 60 year’s worth of American policy in Eurasia confronts itself and ceases to exist. The Durand line separating the two countries is visible on a map. Zero line is not.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing ZeroThe AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Today marks the end of week 1 of our online fundraising campaign. I am thankful to those of you who have kindly donated and helped with getting the word out. We have had contributions from 235 of you; thank you! We still have a long way to go to reach the first benchmark of 1000. As you can see I am counting the number of supporters rather than the dollar amount. For me, that is far more important, and that’s why no amount is considered too small; your willingness to support this site is what really counts. So please, let’s unite on this and take the countdown journey together. We need your help to get the word out and invite others to join this campaign. How hard is it to bring together 1000 or so members of the irate minority club?  We can do it!
 

Other Updates

Peter and I are scheduled to interview three exciting guests: Activist and the founder of Cryptome.Org, John Young, author and activist Naomi Wolf, and the Director of Project Censored, Peter Phillips.

Here is the latest from Jamiol’s World:
 

German company accused of drug smuggling in Afghanistan
Nancy Isenson, APN/AFP