It would appear that the True Believers of the Democratic Party are a entering the State of Denial over the “relationship” of Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky with a female Turkish spy.

In spite of the congresswoman’s claims that she has not been involved with the Turks, we know that in 2001, which is included in the time frame of wiretaps that Sibel Edmonds translated, Mehmet Celebi, of Hillary Clinton fame, donated $350 to Jan Schakowsky. Celebi was a fundraiser for another Chicago politician, Rahm Emanuel. Later, Celebi became a bundler for Hillary Clinton, raising $100,000 for her presidential campaign. She finally had to dump Celebi because of his role as producer of the Turkish film “Kurtlar Vadisi Irak“.

Celebi held high-level positions within the Chicago-based Turkish American Cultural Association (TACA) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA). Both organizations had been “targets of an FBI counter-intelligence operation investigating the corruption and bribery of high-level US officials from 1997 onward.” Furthermore, the Celebi family in Turkey has been involved in arms- and narcotics-dealing and Mehmet Celebi admits to having:

” . . . worked in management capacity at some of the world’s largest financial institutions and has provided financial guidance to many high-net worth individuals and celebrities as well as corporations. He has been consulting some of the largest corporations in Turkey on mergers and acquisitions in addition to international funds wishing to invest in Turkey and the region.”

While Celebi was moving and shaking for the Democratic Party in Chicago, Schakowsky’s husband, Robert Creamer, a political consultant, was under investigation for bank fraud. The investigation was ongoing in 1998, which was well within the timeframe of the FBI wiretaps from Chicago that Sibel Edmonds translated. It may very well be that Turkish agents targeted Schakowsky in order to obtain favors from her husband. As Sibel stated in The American Conservative interview:

They needed Schakowsky and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois.

Chicago has its connection to Susurluk, too. Abdullah Catli, a state assassin and narcotics trafficker, had long been a member of the Gray Wolves and was wanted by Interpol in the 1990s. Catli helped fellow Gray Wolf Mehmet Ali Agca escape from a Turkish military prison in 1979, just after Agca assassinated a newspaper editor but a few short years before he carried out the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.

In 1989, Abdullah Catli, under the name Mehmet Ozbay, showed up at the Turkish consulate in Chicago to request a new passport. He showed up at the Chicago consulate for a second time in 1994 to pick up a new passport and request a new Turkish identity card. In 1995 he showed up a third time to request an extension of his required military service. It would also appear that Catli, as Ozbay, married an American, obtained a green card, and went on Interpol’s wanted list during the time that he was in the US.

More interesting is that he was also reported to have been issued an American passport under the name Michael Nicholsan.

Therefore, it’s pretty well established that one of Turkey’s most notorious state assassins and narcotics traffickers lived close enough to Chicago to be compelled to use Chicago’s Turkish consulate to obtain official documents.

In Vanity Fair’s 2005 piece on the Sibel Edmonds case, the magazine clearly established the fact that the FBI named Chicago as the epicenter of Turkish corruption operations targeting US officials.

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?

Inquiring minds want to know.

But could there really be any problem here with Fethullah Gulen? He represents the Islamist trend in Turkey which has generally been at odds with the Nationalists, especially with the ultra-nationalists known as Gray Wolves, right? That’s the simplistic explanation; the reality is far more complicated and would take us from Susurluk and Chicago to Ergenekon.

Mizgin’s Desk Reports:

Does anyone remember the Rendon Group? If not, let me refresh your memory.

The Rendon Group is a public relations firm that has specialized in creating propaganda for various US military interventions over the last few decades in places as varied as Panama, Haiti, Colombia, Zimbabwe, and Puerto Rico. Most recently, the Rendon group helped the US government to win hearts and minds for the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Because it has worked with the US government for a long period of time, it has been willing to justify US military actions for both Democratic and Republican administrations, although the Rendon Group’s founder, John Rendon, got his start in the propaganda business back in the 1970s as a campaign consultant for the Democratic Party.

There is a lot more information on the Rendon Group at Sourcewatch. James Bamford, whom many will remember as the first guest on The Boiling Frogs podcast interviews, wrote what may be the most definitive article explaining the raison d’etre for the Rendon Group. Bamford named John Rendon as “The Man Who Sold the War” to the American public for the Bush Administration. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, indeed, long before September 11, the Rendon Group created the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and appointed Ahmed Chalabi as the head of the organization. It created the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) and Radio Hurriah, both of which ineffectively broadcast propaganda against the Saddam regime in the early 1990s, first from Kuwait and later from Arbil in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region. In 1996, Saddam’s army invaded Arbil and killed the vast majority of Rendon’s IBC employees and some 100 INC members. What prompted the response by Saddam’s army had less to do with the content of Radio Hurriah’s propaganda, which was described as “poorly run” by one Iraqi Harvard graduate student, and more to do with the fact that the CIA had poured millions of dollars into the Rendon Group, which then funneled the money into the INC.

According to Bamford, while the CIA dumped money into the INC through the Rendon Group, Ahmed Chalabi dumped questionable “intelligence” information into the New York Times’ now discredited war drummer, Judith Miller. Bamford later wrote about Chalabi’s secret dealings with Iran, including the possible passing of NSA code-breaking information.

As a result of the Rendon Group’s deep and widespread involvement with those who want to maufacture consent for any goal of any American administration, it should come as no surprise that last week the Reuters and the Washington Post revealed news from the US military’s Stars and Stripes indicating that the Rendon Group has been hired by the Pentagon to vet journalists for embedded reporting from Afghanistan. From the Reuters article:

The U.S. military in Afghanistan defended itself Thursday against accusations that a company it employs was rating the work of reporters and suggesting ways to make their war coverage more positive.

Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for U.S. troops, said it had obtained documents prepared for the U.S. military by the Rendon Group, a Washington-based communications firm that graded journalists’ work as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative.”

The newspaper, partly funded by the Pentagon but editorially independent, said the journalists’ profiles included suggestions on how to “neutralise” negative stories and generate favourable coverage.

It published a pie chart which it said came from a Rendon report on the coverage of a reporter for an unidentified major U.S. newspaper until mid-May, judging it to be 83.33 percent neutral and 16.67 percent negative with respect to the military’s goals.

The U.S. military command in Afghanistan said the Rendon Group provided a range of services under a $1.5 million (921,330 pound) one-year contract, including analysis of news coverage — but it did not grade journalists.

Neither the Reuters report nor the Washington Post noted the Rendon Group’s previous propaganda work, particularly it’s long fiasco with planning regime change in Iraq. Unsurprisingly, National Public Radio, also failed to mention the Rendon Group’s history in a story it aired on its “All Things Considered” program on 27 August. It did include a quote from a press officer from the 101st Airborne Division, in which he admitted he relied on Rendon’s ratings:

Maj. Patrick Seiber, the press officer for the 101st Airborne Division, says that during his time in Afghanistan, he dealt with 62 different news agencies and 143 different reporters. He says he relied on the Rendon reports.

“Well, you got to have something, because we don’t have enough public affairs guys that can go through and do it our own self,” he says. “You got to know what you’re dealing with. Our soldiers are at risk. Information is also a risk.”

Seiber says he did pay some attention to negative ratings. If someone had many negative ratings, he says, he would want to know why.

“This didn’t happen that often,” he says. “Out of all those news agencies, I can only remember a couple of times there was somebody we didn’t take … because of their bent.”

Both times, he says, the news agencies sent a different reporter.

Seiber doesn’t know when the ratings started, but says Rendon has been doing the work for eight years.

So, they did use the Rendon Group’s “secret” profiles and they did deny reporters on the basis of their views. It must be problematic to have reporters who might not be willing to sell the Pentagon’s angle on a war to an American public that increasingly sees as “not worth fighting”.

One reporter working in Afghanistan managed to obtain a copy of his Rendon-generated dossier from a friend in the military. Here’s what he has to say:

Most reporters in Afghanistan know about these reports. I obtained a copy of my Rendon report about three months ago from a friend in the military and I’ve posted excerpts below. I don’t really think the reports are some kind of violation, in fact, I think the military is smart to look into the background’s of people who will be writing about them. Rating the coverage that reporters give the military–”positive,” “neutral,” “negative”–seems a bit silly and slightly Orwellian, but if thousands of reporters were covering my organization, I would want a simple shorthand to indentify them as well.

I do think the reports are creepy though. These guys have read almost everything I’ve written in the last few years, even interviews I’ve given to local news blogs. Reading this report is like perusing the diary of your stalker. Rendon also classifies certain publication as “left leaning” which I find odd.

Most troubling by far is that when S&S [Stars and Stripes] asked the military about Rendon, they denied the existence of these reports. I’m holding one of these reports in my hand right now, trust me, it exists. I’ve also met people who work for The Rendon Group in Kabul. In conversations, they deny that there is any nefarious objective to what they do. “We just help the military figure out what embed is right for a particular reporter,” one Rendon employee told me over drinks. “If a reporter is classified as “negative” they are less likely to go where the action is and more likely to be covering a platoon that guards sandbags in Herat.”

Other reporters, like freelancer Nir Rosen, were less than enthusiastic about their dossiers:

Last week Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon is employing Rendon to profile reporters. I was shown a copy of the memorandum the Rendon group prepared about me. It is two and a half pages. A public affairs officer told me it was the most alarming report about a journalist that he had ever seen, and as a result I was grateful that Colonel Bill Hix was open minded enough to approve my embed despite the red flags raised about me.

“The purpose of this updated memo is to provide an assessment of freelance journalist Nir Rosen, and give a profile of his work, both through a summary of content and analysis of style, in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on embed mission in Afghanistan.”

In the background section the memorandum describes some of my past work, experience and skills. It also warned that “in late 2008 Rosen ‘embedded’ with the Taliban in several areas of Afghanistan. A lengthy report on his embedded experience appeared in Rolling Stone and was highly unfavorable to international efforts in Afghanistan.”

Despite denials from the military in both the Reuters and the Washington Post reports, it’s obvious that reporters and news corporations know that they are “rated” so that those providing reports that are most favorably viewed by the Rendon Group are assigned with units in the hottest areas. The “trustworthy” ones are given the plumb embeds, in other words. In fact, that’s exactly what Stars and Stripes reported on 29 August:

The secret profiles commissioned by the Pentagon to rate the work of journalists reporting from Afghanistan were used by military officials to deny disfavored reporters access to American fighting units or otherwise influence their coverage as recently as 2008, an Army official acknowledged Friday.

What’s more, the official said, Army public affairs officers used the analyses of reporters’ work to decide how to steer them away from potentially negative stories.

“If a reporter has been focused on nothing but negative topics, you’re not going to send him into a unit that’s not your best,” Maj. Patrick Seiber, spokesman for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, told Stars and Stripes. “There’s no win-win there for us. We’re not trying to control what they report, but we are trying to put our best foot forward.”

[ . . . ]

The revelations are the latest twist in the controversy over how the military is gathering and using reporter profiles compiled by The Rendon Group, a Washington, D.C. public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to rate journalists’ work.

[ . . . ]

Pentagon officials repeatedly denied this week that the Rendon profiles are being used to rate reporters or determine whether they will be granted permission to embed with U.S. units in Afghanistan.

“There is no policy that stipulates in any way that embedding should be based in any way on a person’s work,” Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters on Monday.

The only one who makes sense in this entire fiasco is Admiral Mullen:

Meanwhile, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Friday published an essay in a military journal that was sharply critical of the U.S. government’s attempts to use “strategic communications” to shape messages directed at the Muslim world.

“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Mullen wrote in the essay in Joint Force Quarterly.

“I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

It may be that Admiral Mullen’s words were heard loudly and clearly by the US military command in Afghanistan because on 31 August, Stars and Stripes reported that the contract with the Rendon Group in Afghanistan had been cancelled:

The U.S. military is canceling its contract with a controversial private firm that was producing background profiles of journalists seeking to cover the war that graded their past work as “positive,” “negative” or “neutral,” Stars and Stripes has learned.

[ . . . ]

“The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and mine alone. As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to US forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, in an e-mail sent Sunday to Stars and Stripes.

TIME reported that the effective date of the cancellation of the contract would be 1 September.

Given Rendon’s history with the Pentagon, particularly its assistance to Donald Rumsfeld’s Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), one has to wonder what it really means to cancel Rendon’s contract for the vetting of reporters in Afghanistan. The OSI was established in February of 2002, with Douglas Feith–whom a less diplomatic American general called “the f***ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth”–assuring the Defense Writers Group of this:

“First of all I want to clarify that when Defense Department officials speak to the public they tell the truth, and despite some of the reports about the Office of Strategic Influence that I’ve read over the last day or two, Defense Department officials don’t lie to the public. And we are confident that the truth serves our interests in the broadest sense of national security and specifically in this war.”

Oh, I know I believe him.

The fact is that Donald Rumsfeld merely killed the OSI in name only:

And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And “oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.

According to James Bamford, the job that the OSI was intended to do was eventually transferred to the Information Operations Task Force. Where will the Rendon Group’s work on “secret” profiling be transferred now?

In spite of the claim that the Rendon Group’s contract is now terminated, the mainstream media should be held accountable for what it failed to say in any of its reporting of Rendon’s recent activity in Afghanistan for the Pentagon, particularly when the general consumer of American media has a notoriously short memory. Why didn’t the mainstream media remind the American public of the Rendon Group’s shady dealings in the past, how it helped manufacture consent for unpopular wars, how it funneled money for CIA operations, and how it promoted an Iranian double-agent to a position to hand over NSA code-breaking information to Teheran, or how it was involved with the Office of Strategic Information? Were these facts overlooked because of amnesia on the part of the mainstream media? Or was this oversight a case of the mainstream media’s bootlicking of the propaganda firm that can veto any reporter?

It’s ironic that the one publication to publish the truth about the Rendon Group’s operations in Afghanistan is the one publication whose reporters are not vetted by Rendon–the Stars and Stripes.

Last week someone kindly brought to my attention the fact that Günay Hakkı Övünç (Evinch, according to his Americanized spelling) had become the president of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA). Rastî readers will remember Övünç in connection with an American-based Turkish mercenary company that has a training facility in Silopi. More on that from Yeni Özgür Politika:

On some 1,000 acres of land between Silopi and the Habur Border Crossing the Black Hawk Security Company is working feverishly using up to 20 trucks carrying sand, five heavy plant and various other vehicles to get the base finished. The company was reportedly structured according to a model used by the Special Forces. The Washington-based company is shaping its organizations in Turkey and Iraq in order to meet the requirements of a low intensity war. With a cadre comprised of retired soldiers and intelligence operatives taken from special units the company provides a broad spectrum of activities including armored convoy security, defense tactics, low intensity combat, counter-terrorism and intelligence, air operations and hostage rescue.

The company, which has named its site in Habur “Black Hawk 1 Headquarters,” will also have three other HQs in Zakho, Kirkuk and Baghdad.

The company will also have over 1,000 “retired” military personnel from the Turkish army attached to it. They will undergo a short refresher training course at the HQ in Silopi. At the Habur HQ, where some 300 service personnel will also be on duty, there will be a mobile hospital, a helipad, one casevac helicopter, one escort helicopter, and 300 vehicles including armed Hummers, and a truck park for 8,000 vehicles.

[ . . . ]

Günay Hakkı Övünç: Company partner and legal architect Günay Hakkı Övünç owns a law practice in Washington. Övünç, who for years has pursued law suits in the United States filed by the Turkish Embassy and the General Staff, is also the American-Turkısh Assembly’s deputy chairman in charge of Washington.

Also involved in Black Hawk Security, Inc. is the TSK’s retired Lieutenant General Köksal Karabay, who was in charge of Turkish special forces when American marines “bagged” them on 4 July, 2003.

YÖP asks some pertinent questions about the purpose of “Black Hawk 1 HQ” at the Habur border crossing:

The company will also have over 1,000 “retired” military personnel from the Turkish army attached to it. They will undergo a short refresher training course at the HQ in Silopi. At the Habur HQ, where some 300 service personnel will also be on duty, there will be a mobile hospital, a helipad, one casevac [medevac] helicopter, one escort helicopter, and 300 vehicles including armed Hummers, and a truck park for 8,000 vehicles.

[ . . . ]

There are many unanswered questions such as how did the partners meet one another, why did they take on this job, how did they get permission, what kind of relationship do they have with the US authorities, with whom do they share the intelligence they obtain, when the day comes how are they going to use “Turkish-Kurdish-Arab” and perhaps even American personnel, and are they simply going to be escorting trucks and nothing more? As part of an agreement made with this company the Koc Group and Milangaz Company send 1,600 tankers of LPG into Iraq every month. They send 200 tankers of aviation fuel ever day. They provide 70 percent of the United States requirement for diesel fuel via this crossing. When they talk about “security for Turkish trucks” they mean these tankers. However, this much military hardware and these names beg other questions.

Indeed.

Another interesting fact about Övünç is that he’s from Chicago. According to the Sibel Edmonds case, Turkish nationals were apparently deeply engaged in covert activity in two major American cities and one of those was Chicago:

It may be more than another embarrassing security scandal. 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. That inquiry found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American politicians in at least two major cities—Washington and Chicago. 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.

[ . . . ]

. . . in December 2001, Joel Robertz, an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent; all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in 1997. “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official who is familiar with the case file. “It became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on.”

I wonder how close a relationship there is between Övünç and another Turkish Chicagoan, Mehmet Çelebi, whose fundraising for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was eventually dropped faster than a hot potato.

We know that sometime in 2005 or, perhaps, very early 2006, Övünç was “summoned” to Iraq, in Övünç’s own words:

I was summoned to Baghdad. As I did not want to worry my wife, I told her I was going to Turkey for a conference on the Armenian matter – which was true. But, the complete truth was that after the conference I would continue to Iraq via Istanbul Atatürk International Airport, one of the safest routes to Baghdad for civilians. Passengers go through four levels of security checks, and the pretty woman sitting next to you in the plane might be a Turkish sky marshal who can break your neck faster than you can say, “Turkish Delight.”

So who “summoned” him and for what purpose? Inquiring minds want to know.

What may be even more scary is the ATAA’s president-elect, Ergün Kirlikovalı (Check the ATAA’s board of directors page for verification). He should be Övünç’s successor as president of the ATAA in the not-too-distant future. You can get an idea of some of the things Kirlikovalı believes in these comments to a Forbes opinion piece asking, “Should Turkey Apologize to the Armenians”.

Or check out a blog entry at the Orange County Weekly, which has a lot of interesting links to comments Kirlikovali is making all over the Internet . . . Like his psychotic babbling here or his anti-Mexican rant here.

Can someone explain to me how Kirlikovalı’s ranting squares with Övünç’s vision for the ATAA in a statement last month, in which he says, “ATAA is a proud interlocutor, as the voice of reason and credibility in Washington DC for nearly 500,000 Turkish and Turkic Americans nationwide”? And why is it that we should believe the psychotic ravings of the future president of the ATAA on his word alone?

Shielding our Multi-Daddy Statesmen & Generals

Some of you may be familiar with my past interviews, comments, or writings on the issue of ‘revolving doors.’ I started this blog by emphasizing the importance of separating ‘main causes’ from the multiple ‘symptoms’ we’ve been suffering from. Well, I consider the chronic revolving doors phenomena as one of those main causes leading to many of the ailments we suffer from today.

In November 2006 I wrote a two part series on this issue: ‘The Highjacking of a Nation. ‘In Part Two, ‘The Auctioning of Former Statesman & Dime a Dozen Generals’, I provided a few examples of how certain former statesmen and generals cash in on their connections and peddle their influence to the highest bidders turned clients. One of these cases involved General Joseph Ralston. He is the Vice Chairman of The Cohen Group. He serves on the board of Lockheed Martin, which paid the Cohen Group $550,000 in 2005, according to a Lockheed filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Ralston is also a member of the 2006 Advisory Board of the American Turkish Council (ATC), and one of Turkey’s top advocates and lobbyists.

In late summer of 2006, while serving as the Vice Chairman for the Cohen Group, while serving on Lockheed Martin’s Board, while sitting on the Advisory Board of the Turkish Lobby Group, ATC and lobbying for Turkey, this ‘Dime a Dozen’ General, was appointed to be US Special Envoy for Countering the Kurdistan Workers Party conflict with Turkey. Here is an excerpt from my piece:

“Our government sent this man, Ralston, as a special envoy to help resolve the highly critical Northern Iraq situation with possible dire consequences in the near future. Considering Ralston’s livelihood and his loyalties, as a member of the board of the directors of Lockheed Martin, as the vice chairman of a lobbying firm with foreign interests, as an advisor and board member for the most powerful Turkish Lobby group, ATC, who did this man represent while in Turkey as the special envoy? What interests did he really represent; Iraq’s situation, Lockheed’s livelihood, which depends on further conflicts and bloodshed; the corrupt and criminal government of Turkey and its representation via ATC; or, the furthering of the Cohen Group’s future pimping opportunities?”

Why am I revisiting Ralston and this major case of conflict of interest now? It is because I intend to re-illustrate it within the framework and as an example in the discussion we’ve been having on ‘Dissecting the MSM.’

While the implications of Ralston’s appointment caused a major stir within the Kurdish community and organizations, pointing to Ralston’s position with the Turkish lobby in the US, and within Turkey’s own communities and pointing to Ralston’s position with Lockheed Martin, our own media and watchdog organizations let this gargantuan conflict of interest pass under the radar.

Also from ‘Hijacking of a Nation: Part Two’

“Why in the world did no one within the U.S. mainstream media give even the slightest coverage of this conflict of interest? Why haven’t we heard anyone asking Ralston the most important question, in dire need of an answer: ‘Who’s your daddy Ralston; boy?’ Ralston’s position is no different than what is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: “A person conceived and born out of wedlock.” With the possibility of any one of four daddies, and without the benefit of a DNA test, how do we go about determining Ralston’s real daddy?”

Ken Silverstein of Harper Magazine wrote a piece on this in November of 2006, titled ‘Lost in the Valley of the Wolves’. He touched the most important aspects of this case:

“…But it appears that Ralston is representing the interests of the shareholders of Lockheed Martin rather than the interests of the American people.”

“Then came the mid-September announcement (just weeks after Ralston’s appointment) that Turkeywould be purchasing thirty new F-16’s from Lockheed Martin. Weeks later, the Turkish government ruled out purchasing any Eurofighter Typhoon warplanes. This leaves only one option—Lockheed Martin’s new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. A deal between Lockheed and Turkey would be worth as much as $10 billion.”

… and he asked the ‘real question’ any MSM reporter with even a half of a brain should have asked:

“Did Special Envoy Ralston lobby on behalf of Lockheed Martin during his encounters with Turkish officials? It seems likely. Ralston sits on the Board of Directorsof Lockheed Martin and serves as vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a lobbying firm that has represented Lockheed since 2004. On August 11 of this year, seventeen days before he was named Special Envoy, Ralston was appointed to The Cohen Group team that lobbies for Lockheed.”

…and he emphasized the unmentionable as far as the US MSM is concerned, the Turkish Lobby:

“As Kurdish activist and blogger Mizgin Yilmaz has explained in detail , Ralston has close ties to Turkey through his military service and through his seat on the advisory board of the American Turkish Council. Lockheed Martin is a leading member and financial sponsor of this council, which “is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology and cultural relations.””

…and he concluded it with a punch absent in the work (stenography) of all other MSM players:

“It’s hard to understand how the Bush Administration could appoint a special envoy with so many conflicts of interest, but Lockheed’s corporate slogan says it all: “We never forget who we’re working for.” Neither, it seems, does General Ralston.”

Aside from Harper’s Silverstein, one other publication, the Boston Globe, did an excellent hard-hitting report on this. Kevin McKiernan begins the piece with a great punch line:

“MOST PEOPLE would agree that it’s bad ethics for government officials to invest in companies that they regulate. But what about a US special envoy to a Middle East trouble spot who happens to be a director of an arms company selling weapons to one of the parties in the conflict?”

Here is more from McKiernan’s report:

“The problem is that General Ralston is on the board of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms maker, which just last month finalized a $2.9 billion sale for advanced F-16 fighters that may well be used in the Kurdish region (the State Department acknowledges that F-16 s were involved in human rights abuses in Turkey in the 1990s). This gives the ex-general the appearance of holding a financial interest in his shuttle diplomacy.”

“General Ralston is on the board of the American Turkish Council, the powerful Capitol Hill lobby, and he is vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a corporation founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, with close ties to the Turkish military. Unfortunately, Ralston carries too much baggage to be special envoy, and he should step down before he alienates the Kurds of Iraq, the best — and perhaps only — friend the US government has in the country.”

And even a punchier finale:

“Our new man in Ankara will be seen as an arms merchant in diplomat’s clothing. He should be replaced.”

Now, here is a list of links to some of the major news coverage involving Ralston’s bastardization of military honor:

McClatchy

CBS News

CNN

New York Times

NPR

Time Magazine

I can go on and list more, but I’m sure you get the picture. They all went with the transcript faxed to them by the State Department like good little stenographers! Didn’t they have access to Ralston’s background, which is listed even in Wikipedia and his employer’s, Cohen Group, website? Surely they did! Weren’t they given reports and tips by those who’ve been acting as watchdogs on this case? Surely they were!

Here is a statement from ‘Mizgin’ who not only followed the case from the beginning as it was unfolding, but took it upon herself to contact these MSM reporters, supplying them with all the background on Four-Daddy General Ralston, and underlining all the issues of ‘conflicts of interests’:

At the end of September 2006, a friend in the UK who writes the Hevallo blog had sent me a link to an article in the Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram on the sale of F-16s to Turkey. At the same time, Turkey was considering a purchase of the new Lockheed Martin F-35 but was not scheduled to make a decision on this purchase until the end of 2006. This news came almost one month after former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Joseph Ralston was named by the State Department as the “special envoy” to “coordinate” the PKK for Turkey.

Since the PKK was preparing to declare a 1 October 2006 unilateral ceasefire, and since I was working on an English translation of Ocalan’s statement regarding the ceasefire, I didn’t have time to immediately investigate the F-16 story and the connection to Ralston. However, by 1 October, I had completed some initial investigation and noted the conflict of interest that Ralston’s appointment created.

In researching Ralston’s background, I found that he was working for The Cohen Group, a lobbying firm founded by former Defense Secretary William Cohen, and that Ralston was one of two vice-chairmen for The Cohen Group. The other was Marc Grossman. I had come across a Washington Post article from May 2006 on Cohen and his firm which was written by David Hilzenrath. The article described the revolving-door syndrome between government and private business. In writing the article, I thought Hilzenrath would have the background to see that there was an obvious conflict of interest with Ralston’s appointment and his connection to a private company that was listed with the US Senate, in accordance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, as a lobbyist hired to sell Lockheed Martin tactical fighter aircraft. In fact, Ralston was listed as a lobbyist with the Senate for this very purpose at least as late as 31 July 2006.

I contacted Hilzenrath with the information I had managed to search out within a couple of days and suggested that he write something about the appointment since he had written about the people involved with The Cohen Group. He was interested initially and asked for a phone number where he could contact me. I gave him a “throw-away” number where he could reach me, but never heard from him again.

In the meantime and out of frustration with trying to get the mainstream media interested in an appointment that was obviously very wrong, I wrote an article myself with was first published on KurdishInfo and then on KurdishMedia. Hevallo managed to get the article published in the UK’s Socialist Worker. A friend from Diyarbakir translated the article into Turkish and I sent it to Ozgur Gundem, where it was published. I also posted the Turkish version on Istanbul Indymedia. Another friend persuaded the Kurdish National Congress of North America to call for Ralston’s resignation as “special envoy.”

Before the end of October 2006, Ralston had secured Turkey’s purchase of F-35 aircraft for $10 billion and the official announcement of the purchase came in December 2006. This meant that within a matter of a few weeks, Ralston had squeezed some $13 billion out of the Turkish Defense Ministry.

From the UK, Hevallo had contacted a reporter for the LA Times, Kim Murphy, after she wrote a piece on Ralston and the Kurdish situation while she had been in Iraq. This also looked promising as Murphy appeared interested initially. Hevallo sent her the information that we had collected on Ralston and the Lockheed deals with Turkey and she was going to present the information to her editor in Washington DC. From that point on the information was buried and we heard nothing else from Murphy or the LA Times.

Did the reporters themselves make the decision to sit on the information about this conflict of interest or did they, honestly, pass it to their editors, who made the final decisions? I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t matter because our experience proves that somewhere along the line, someone in the mainstream media is going to sit on this kind of information to keep it from the public.

Considering that most of Turkey’s purchases of military hardware during the Clinton administration were subsidized by up to 80% by the US taxpayer, Americans themselves should have an interest in what happens when retired generals-turned lobbyists are appointed to handle situations that deal in matters of life and death.

There were those whom we contacted who did take up the pen to write about the Ralston problem and I am grateful to them for their help. Among those were Ken Silverstein at Harper’s; Kevin McKiernan, a longtime advocate for the Kurdish people, writing in the Boston Globe; Chris Deliso, who included information about Lockheed Martin’s public relations firm, Public Strategies, Inc., who took a great interest in the things I was writing about Ralston and Lockheed–hence the need for “throw-away” phone numbers when you have to deal with these bloodsuckers; and Luke Ryland, who managed to link the Ralston conflict of interest with the Sibel Edmonds case. For all of these, I have nothing but praise and the greatest thanks

So what did they do instead? They all went by the transcript faxed and or e-mailed to them by the State Department like good little stenographers! That’s exactly what they did, and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing when it comes to shielding our multi-daddy Statesmen & Generals.

Is Ralston an isolated case? Of course not! There is an extensive list of these multi-daddy ex government officials who double or maybe even triple dip. Here, check out a few of these dime-a-dozen public servants turned foreign lobbyists:

Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert: Here, here, and here.

Former Undersecretary of State & Ambassador to Turkey Marc Grossman: Here, here, and here.

Retired General Brent Scowcroft: Here, here, here, and here.