But her dashed-off remarks on the Sibel Edmonds case are particularly intriguing...
Of the more important groups, there is the American Turkish Council and of the more important companies, there is Northrop Grumman (not the entire company, but key individuals).Well...no. I don't. That's a frame and a canvas, and maybe a coat of gesso, but a picture it ain't.
I cannot emphasize enough the Gray (also can be Grey) Wolves or as they are otherwise known: "Bozkurtlar ." Ask what other neo-fascist organizations are similar to this one? For example, The Muslim Brotherhood.
I would also suggest that folks look up Yassin Al Kadi, as well as the scandal of BCCI: Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia... you get the picture.
So let's pick up a detail brush -- and let's start with Al Kadi.
Yassin Al Kadi, or al-Qadi (as always with Arabic names, transliterations abound) is a Saudi multimillionaire whose possible ties to terror are detailed in this Cooperative Research page. Specifically, he has been linked to an investment firm called BMI which has been tied in with an extremist network. Although Al-Qadi says that his involvement with BMI was minimal, and even though BMI went belly-up in 1999...Shortly after 9/11, the US will officially declare al-Qadi a terrorist financierDespite which:
Saudi multimillionaire Yassin al-Qadi will say in an interview shortly after 9/11, “I have also met with US Vice President and former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in Jeddah [Saudi Arabia] when he came for a lecture organized by the Dallah Group. I spoke to him for a long time and we still have cordial relations.”Al-Qadi also invested heavily in PTech, a firm already familiar to many of you, since it was accused of being a front for both Al Qaeda and a faction of American intelligence. The head of PTech, Oussama Ziade, confirmed that Al-Qadi spoke often -- and glowingly -- of his friendship with Dick Cheney.
There's much more, but it all comes down to this: Al-Qadi keeps denying having ties to terror, yet many continue to level that very accusation against him.
Al-Qadi admits to giving bin Laden money for his “humanitarian” work, but says this is different from bin Laden’s militant activities. Presented with this information, the US Treasury Department only says that the US “is pleased with and appreciates the actions taken by the Saudis” in the war on terror.So how does he figure into Sibel's tale, which centers on Turkey?
Perhaps this page, which features an Online Journal article by Devlin Buckley offers a few clues:
A court in Turkey has frozen the assets of Yasin al-Qadi [1] a one-time acquaintance of Vice President Dick Cheney [2] and reported “chief money launderer” of Osama bin Laden.
Turkish investigations into al-Qaeda have been obstructed to protect conflicts of interest, financial and otherwise, among al-Qadi and high-ranking Turkish officials, according to dissenting investigators and government officials.
Al-Qadi, as the Turkish Daily News notes, “has high-level support in Turkey, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan going on record as saying ‘I know Mr. Yasin, and I believe in him as I believe in myself,’ when speaking to NTV on July 11, 2006.”
“Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal accused Erdogan’s government of blocking an investigation into Qadi’s financial affairs, focusing on reported money transfers by Erdogan’s adviser Cuneyd Zapsi to Qadi in the 1990s when Zapsi and Qadi were business partners,” the Turkish Daily News notes.
Al-Qadi owned a Massachusetts-based technology firm and defense contractor known as Ptech, which, according to U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to 9/11 whistleblower Indira Singh, was a “CIA clandestine op on the level of Iran-Contra.”Ah. Drugs. Now we are (you should pardon the expression) talking Turkey. Which is to say: Now we are getting into Sibel Edmonds territory.
Moreover, according to Singh, a CBS affiliate in Boston “paid for private investigators to follow a couple of the Ptech people, and it did go to a mob-run warehouse area and the reports came back that basically it was a drop shipment place for drugs.”
Take it home, Sibel:
According to 9/11 whistleblower and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, state-sponsored Turkish networks make up the “main players” in Afghanistan’s illicit opium trade.
Such groups, according to Edmonds, “purchase the opium from Afghanistan and transport it through several Turkic speaking Central Asian states into Turkey, where the raw opium is processed into popular byproducts; then the network transports the final product into Western European and American markets via their partner networks in Albania.”
Coincidently, in December of last year, as reported by The American Monitor, al-Qadi’s assets were confiscated in Albania, where he reportedly assisted the CIA to funnel covert support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Such operations were reportedly financed using opium profits.
According to Edmonds, “The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks.”
“We know that Al Qaeda and Taliban’s main source of funding is the illegal sale of narcotics,” Edmonds notes, adding, “we know that Turkey is a major, if not the top, player in the transportation, processing, and distribution of all the narcotics derived from the Afghan poppies, and as a result, it is the major contributing country to Al Qaeda.”
6 comments:
I keep having the feeling that the Balkan wars of the 90's may be the key to understanding a lot of this stuff -- the drugs, the Turkish connection, the use by the US of al Qaeda or related assets as proxies, their Saudi backers...
Only trouble is, I don't know a tenth as much about the Balkans wars as I ought to.
What I do know is that in 1992, the George H.W. Bush administration decided to support the Bosnian "jihad" and that there was an attempt to get pro-Israeli factions in the US behind it. (Abdurahman Alamoudi and Khaled Saffuri were involved with the Bush lobbying effort -- they were later connected with Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff on similar efforts on behalf of Kosovo in the late 90's -- and Alamoudi has more recently been accused of being a fundraiser for al Qaeda.)
The Clinton administration continued the Bush policy on Bosnia, leading up to the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Feith and Perle were involved by that point, being behind something called the Bosnian Defense Fund, set up at Riggs Bank. Some of those funds allegedly went to support al Qaeda units operating in Bosnia. This is also where al-Qadi, apparently ties in, although it's not clear to me just how.
My notes indicate that the drug trade was being used to finance the Bosnian Muslim Army in the early 90's (as well as the Kosovo Liberation Army a few years later), and that after the Bosnian War ended in 1995, many of the jihadis turned into ordinary drug mafiosi. (The same interests were also involved in arms-running and the sex trade, and the involvement of Dyncorp in child prostitution in Bosnia may have something to do with it as well.)
Chechnya and the powerful Chechen Mafia were also deeply tied in with the drug trade which ran through Turkey and the Balkans -- that being the primary route by which Afghan heroin moves into Europe. And Chechnya was yet another area where the US, the Neocons, al Qaeda, and the drug smugglers all seemed to be on the same side, getting their whacks in against Russia.
In fact, the real key to much of this may be that even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia (and with it Serbia) continued to be regarded as the real enemy and was the focus of many of these seemingly whacky US policies.
Beyond that, I don't know. But it's clearly this 90's stuff that we really need to be looking at, both to understand what was going on with Turkey, the drug trade, and al Qaeda, and also to identify what Sibel may have been seeing in those intercepts from the late 90's.
Al Qadi's assets were also confiscated in Albania. He also comes up with Indira Singh (1 2), Ptech and the FAA failures on 911.
starroute comments:
"I keep having the feeling that the Balkan wars of the 90's may be the key to understanding a lot of this stuff -- the drugs, the Turkish connection, the use by the US of al Qaeda or related assets as proxies, their Saudi backers..."
Michel Chossudovsky has written extensively on this issue. In "Kosovo 'Freedom Fighters' Financed by Organized Crime" (Covert Action Quarterly, Spring-Summer 1999, No. 67) Chossudovsky informs us:
"The supply routes for arming KLA 'freedom fighters' are the rugged mountainous borders of Albania with Kosovo and Macedonia. Albania is also the hub of the Balkans drug route which supplies Western Europe with grade four heroin. Seventy five percent of the heroin entering Western Europe is from Turkey. And a large part of drug shipments originating in Turkey transits through the Balkans."
...
"In order to thrive, the criminal syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish state are said to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans 'cooperating closely with other groups with which they have political or religious ties,' including criminal groups in Albania and Kosovo. In this new global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment."
The self-same pattern replicated itself earlier in Afghanistan via the CIA's sister organization, the Pakistani ISI. Check out Alfred W. McCoy's "The Politics of Heroin," for relevant documentation.
Aren't just such "powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime" who "cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment," precisely the corporate/criminal milieu that Sibel Edmonds is describing?
Turkish political commentators and analysts describe the phenomenon as the "deep state," the intersection of corporate interests, criminal syndicates, the military/intelligence services and far-right parties (MHP, Grey Wolves) -- secular and Islamist. Can you say ATC!
And, I'll editoralize: these are precisely the connections the 9/11 nutters don't want any of us to see!
I'll editorialize as well, Tom. The Ptech- Indira Singh stuff is relevant mostly because it points to CIA links to Ptech and names other interesting people like Yacub Mirza. As I recall Flight 11 was still being reported as showing up on FAA radar 20 minutes after it actually crashed, the war games had previously involved "injects" of simulated data onto FAA radar screens, and it is almost certain that such injects occurred on 9/11. We have the Cheney-Minetta-Flight 77 radar thing as well. Taken as a whole it is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about the FAA radar on 911 and the war games in a context where the software was supplied by a company with dubious terrorist financing and links to US intelligence. None of which detracts from the primacy of Al Qadi's drug links. The mindless 911 "nutters" criticism always struck me as self-indulgent crap. Some people focus on other issues -- so what?
Dear anon44
There are 9/11 nutters. My comments were not directed against researchers exploring the covert or "deep state" connections amongst the 9/11 terrorists and corporate/political power centers they serve. Ptech certainly falls under that purview.
However, you'd have to agree there are scads of individuals within the so-called "Truth Movement" all too willing to accept any crap that comes along -- holograms surrounding missiles striking the Towers (that my dear anon44 is the latest from "ex" MI5 spook and current "Messiah" David Shayler), and the anti-Semitic drivel spewed forth by neo-Nazis). That's what I mean by "9/11 nutters." No more, no less. Hope that clears things up.
I'm having a bad day, Tom. Clarification accepted.
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