Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg: Bush Likely to Attack Iran, Impeachment a Must By Sari Gelzer

Posted on February 14, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Dandelion Salad

By Sari Gelzer
TruthOut.org
February 7, 2008

The American public and media have not picked up on the urgency surrounding a pending war with Iran.
Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower, fears that before the Bush administration leaves office, it will try to attack Iran.

Indeed, Ellsberg’s argument gained merit as George W. Bush increased his rhetoric against Iran when he delivered his final State of the Union Address. Bush accused Iran of training militia extremists in Iraq and emphasized the United States will confront its enemies.

In a wide-ranging interview with Truthout, Ellsberg uses insight from his experience as a Pentagon analyst under the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations to discuss Bush’s plans to begin a war with Iran, the role of the press to give whistleblowers exposure and how American democracy can be restored.

Due to Ellsberg’s experience working within the government, I wanted his insight into how the Bush administration is attempting to begin a war with Iran.

When I highlighted his experience working for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1965 to draft a speech with the goal of rationalizing and gaining public support for the Vietnam War, Ellsberg gave a very long sigh.

“That was not my finest hour that I look back on. That was something that I am ashamed of,” he tells me with a heavy heart.

Ellsberg wishes he had spoken out against the Vietnam War sooner. As a civilian working for the government, he says his oath was always to the Constitution, and he violated that oath until the day he decided to leak the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to reveal the war was unlawful.

Ellsberg now spends his time ardently encouraging and supporting whistleblowers to come forward when they see constitutional violations. He emphasizes the importance of documents as evidence and of timeliness so that lies are exposed before an actual war occurs.

Pending war with Iran or Gulf of Tonkin deja vu

The recent announcement in December by the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) revealed, counter to the president’s claims, that Iran did not have an active nuclear program. This was unexpected, says Ellsberg.

The administration had said, weeks before this release, it had no intention of putting out NIE summaries, Ellsberg says. However, the information was released because, according to newspaper reports, there was a threat of leaks:

“As one news story put it, intelligence officials were lined up to go to jail if the administration did not release those findings,” says Ellsberg, emphasizing his creed in the need to take risks for the sake of revealing truth.

“I wish I could say it made an attack on Iran zero, and it hasn’t, but it has reduced it and confirms, in my opinion, the power of being willing to risk prosecution, willing to give up your career, your clearance, which these people would have done if they’d put that information out — and the mere threat was enough to get it out in this case,” emphasizes Ellsberg.

Ellsberg says Bush will simply find a different pretext from the nuclear program.

“After all, it was about a year ago that he really stopped pressing the nuclear program as the main reason to start attacking Iran and start talking about what they were doing against U.S. forces in Iraq,” says Ellsberg, who claims people in the military have recently undercut this statement by saying there is no evidence of Iran’s involvement against U.S. forces in Iraq.

Bush could also use an incident that is blamed on Iran as a means to begin a war with them.

Early this year, Ellsberg experienced deja vu when the White House and a complicit media portrayed an incident in the Strait of Hormuz that deeply paralleled the Tonkin Gulf incident of 1964.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was an alleged attack by North Vietnamese ships upon American boats. As a result of this alleged aggression, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave former President Johnson the permission to expand the Vietnam War.

The recent incident involving Iran alleged serious threats were being made to U.S. ships by Iranian speedboats. Within days of the events in the Straight of Hormuz, information revealed the details of the entire event had been fabricated. Ellsberg sees promise in the quickness of this revelation because, in contrast, it was only in 2005 and 2008 that the inaccuracies and deceptions of the Gulf of Tonkin incident were revealed by the declassification of National Security Administration reports.

Ellsberg is worried Congress has not put forth an effort to demand it be informed before an attack on Iran should occur. Currently, there is a Senate resolution to demand Congress be consulted in the event of plans to attack Iran, but it has not gotten out of committee.

Instead, the Senate has virtually endorsed the president’s power to begin a war with Iran, says Ellsberg, with the passage of legislation last September declaring that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a terrorist organization.

“To say that the Revolutionary Guards in Iran are a terrorist organization … is very close to saying that the president is able to attack them at his discretion. Now to give this president that discretion is inexcusable, outrageous,” says Ellsberg.

The Democratic Congress should be having open hearings on Iran, says Ellsberg, as well as on how we got into the war against Iraq and regarding Guantanamo. But the Democratic chairmen are not holding such hearings.

The American public, and media in general, have not picked up on the urgency surrounding a pending war with Iran, Ellsberg says. For over two years, Sy Hersh and others have been writing detailed articles stating operational plans against Iran are being updated to the minute, so that within hours or a day they can be implemented.

The problem with these articles, says Ellsberg, is not that Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, lacks credibility, it’s that his sources are not willing to go beyond their anonymity. Ellsberg emphasizes the sources in Sy Hersh’s reports, and others within the government, must reveal documents, risk their career and testify before Congress if they wish to profoundly alter the course of a pending war with Iran.

Gateway for whistleblowers: the press

Whistleblowers depend strongly on the press to relay their information to the American public, who will then be able to exert pressure in politics. When I ask Ellsberg if he believes the press is doing a good job of this, he gives me the most matter-of-fact answer of the evening: “No.”

In October of 2004, whistleblowers gave the New York Times knowledge of an illegal and unconstitutional domestic spying program that was being carried out by the U.S. government. The newspaper waited a year to reveal this information.

This was not just any year, says Ellsberg. The Times held this information at the request of the White House until after the 2004 election, avoiding the possible impact it could have had in swaying voters.

The New York Times, says Ellsberg, was pressured to publish the article because its internal reporter, James Risen, was going to release a book regarding the Times‘ decision to remain silent at the White House’s request.

The New York Times received a Pulitzer Prize for releasing this story. Ellsberg says he believes not only reporters but whistleblowers who reveal important information should also receive a prize in recognition of their public service. This is not a retroactive attempt on his part, he says, to receive an award.

Ellsberg smiles. “In my case my prize was the indictment,” which he says he has taken to be as great an honor as he needs in life.

The press in America, says Ellsberg, is currently avoiding the story of an explosive whistleblower by the name of Sibel Edmonds. A former FBI translator of Turkish and Persian, he says she has been attempting to speak before Congress for five years.

Early last month, Sibel Edmonds appeared on the front page of the London Sunday Times to reveal information she learned as an FBI employee. Ellsberg describes her claims that the U.S. government is giving nuclear materials, equipment and expertise to countries, including Turkey, which in turn sell them to other countries, including Pakistan. In effect, says Ellsberg, criminal bribery is occurring.

Ellsberg says Edmonds is also revealing the U.S. government is allowing a drug trade that finances terrorist operations, such as al-Qaeda, to continue. Ellsberg describes her revelations further, saying the U.S. government is turning a blind eye to the drug trade of U.S. allies such as Turkey and Pakistan, as well as countries such as Uzbekistan, where the United States wants to gain military base rights.

These allegations are only part of the knowledge Edmonds wishes to share before Congress, and she awaits the chance to do so, claiming she knows people in the FBI, CIA and NSA who will corroborate her statements, says Ellsberg.

This is in direct parallel, says Ellsberg, to what happened to Catherine Gunn, a British whistleblower whose actions, he believes, were more important than the release of the Pentagon Papers, because she provided information early enough to have prevented the Iraq war.

Gunn, who worked as an employee for British Intelligence, Government Communication Headquarters, revealed a document showing the United States was “tapping the U.N. Security Council members in order to influence their votes in support of an aggressive war, which was about to take place,” says Ellsberg.

This was front-page news, not only in London, says Ellsberg, but all over the world, except the United States, where it did not appear for about 11 months. Ellsberg says it was reasonable to believe Gunn could have stopped the war, and he believes she prevented a U.N. Security Council vote in support of the war.

“The same thing is happening to Sibel Edmonds as we speak,” says Ellsberg, intensely.

How to restore American democracy

As the days of Bush’s final term in office dwindle, Ellsberg emphasizes that, no matter how much time is left, impeachment is one thing that must happen for the sake of preserving American democracy.

Impeachment proceedings are essential, says Ellsberg, “both for the information that it will produce and above all to make it clear that Congress perceives the illegal and unconstitutional acts taken by this administration to be high crimes and misdemeanors, and for the deterrent effect that they will have on future presidents.”

In addition to impeachment hearings, Ellsberg says Congress must reverse the laws that have “outrageously” passed under “intimidation” by Bush. These include say Ellsberg: “The Patriot Act; the Military Commissions Act, which among other things essentially denies habeas corpus; the signing statements, which essentially give the president the power to ignore constraints on torture; and they could change the so-called Protect America Act which legalized much of the unconstitutional surveillance that the NSA was doing without Congress even knowing what they were legalizing.”

For those things that Congress cannot overturn, Ellsberg suggests hearings by Congress to show, for example, that “not only was torture illegal, it should continue to be illegal because it hurts our national security.”

None of these changes will happen without an active American movement, says Ellsberg, which must demand Congress members uphold their oath to support the Constitution rather than their political career.

Looking at the current primaries and the future presidential election, Ellsberg says the American public must create priorities that are different from those offered by the current candidates.

The changes that need to occur are drastic, and given the stakes, Ellsberg believes the American public should be willing to invest its time so that the crisis we currently find ourselves in can be met with strong action:

“If enough people simply look clearly at what we are doing in our course towards an abyss right now, they do have the power with the remaining democracy we have still in this country to turn it around.”

h/t: CURRENT EVENTS BLOG: Society, Media, & Justice
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

see

How The Pentagon Planted a False Hormuz Story by Gareth Porter

Is Bush preparing the world for another USS Liberty? by Trevor Murphy

The American Media’s Complicit Failure to Investigate & Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case By Daniel Ellsberg

A Pre-election Attack on Iran Remains a Possibility By Leon Hadar

Interview: Seymour Hersh By Sarah Brown

A Strike in the Dark - What did Israel bomb in Syria? by Seymour M. Hersh

Seymour Hersh: What did Israel bomb in Syria? (video)

repost: Who the heck is Sibel Edmonds and Why should I CARE??

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

In yesterday's post "Dan Ellsberg: Sibel Edmonds case "Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers" I briefly discussed the fact that the corporate media has so far refused to take up the offer from former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds to tell us everything that she knows about treason at the highest level of the US Govt.

The post was very popular but there was some dissatisfaction amongst some commentors - most of which centered around two general issues:
1. 'Why doesn't she just talk already?'
2. 'I don't know what the underlying issues are in this case.'
(and yes, there were other discussions about tactics etc)

The thing is, Sibel has been talking, and she has tried just about every avenue available to her, and we do have a pretty good idea what the underlying issues are in her case.

*****

'Why doesn't she just talk already?'
Sibel has tried every available channel to pursue her claims legitimately - including internal FBI processes, Congress, the courts, the 911 Commission and the media. She went as high as FBI Director Robert Mueller in the FBI - and the internal FBI report said that she was "100% right." In Congress, Sibel went to Waxman, Leahy and Grassley - all of whom have been supporters. Sibel went to the courts and was gagged via the State Secrets Privilege from having the courts hear her case. And she has tried various avenues in the media to get her story out.

The MSM has generally been terrible in covering Sibel's story, but she has given a hundred interviews and published dozens of articles.

So to those of you who ask 'Why doesn't she speak already?' I can tell you that she already has. I have covered this story closely for years and I pick a number out of the air estimate that I already know, from the public record, 75% of what she has to say. Sibel's case involves illegal weapons sales, money laundering, drug trafficking, nuclear black market, terrorism and the corruption of the US Govt.

Sibel has already named names (though not all) - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Cohen, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston and others - and she has also named the countries involved: Turkey, Israel, Pakistan, the other 'Stans - and of course the US.

The crimes in Sibel's story range from the micro level (espionage at the FBI translation unit) to the macro level (e.g. supplying Pakistan's nuclear program, blackmail/bribery of members of congress, covering up 9/11, and various other military-industrial-complex related corruption.)

We know all this despite the gag orders and the invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. So to those who ask 'Why doesn't she just speak out?' - well, she already has spoken out, deftly dancing around all those efforts to silence her. As Sibel repeatedly points out, no one in the MSM has even dared to ask why her case has been cloaked in the State Secrets Privilege (SSP). We know why the SSP was invoked in the NSA spying scandal, and we know why it was invoked in the El-Masri case, and we know why it was invoked in the Maher Arar case - but no-one in the MSM has really asked why it was invoked in Sibel's case. It was invoked to hide criminality at the highest levels of the US Govt. Sibel rightly calls it "Treason."

I (mostly) won't deal with the 'tactics' issue in this post. Many of you think that Sibel's offer (which was clumsily characterized as 'unedited' - but her actual offer is "I'll tell you the story so long as you don't leave the important pieces on the cutting room floor") to tell her story to a broadcast network is destined to fail. That might very well be true, but it certainly wasn't designed to fail, it is a legitimate attempt to get some accountability - as was/is her offer to appear, under oath, in Congress.

Importantly, Sibel would much prefer to appear in Congress than in the media. She'd prefer to be under oath, she'd like to be able to subpoena the documents that prove her case, and she'd like to be able to subpoena the other FBI agents who were working the cases that she was working on (all of whom would apparently be willing to testify.)

If you are interested in learning more about Sibel's case, I recommend that you start with Phil Girladi's piece in American Conservative which Sibel says "sums up the case very well, considering the length... as far as published articles go, this one nails it 100%." Then there is the Vanity Fair article "An Inconvenient Patriot." I strongly recommend Sibel's Hijacking of a Nation - parts one and two, and Sibel's Open Letter to the 911 Commission.

Those of you who would prefer video versions, see particularly "Sibel Edmonds. Everybody Knows," and "Sibel Edmonds. Investigations Thwarted" and any of my other videos here.

All of this has been a long introduction to a repost of my "What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?" It isn't great, or complete, but here it is:

**************

As part of our campaign this week to call for hearings into Sibel Edmonds case, below the fold is a short-as-possible piece which hopes to answer the burning question in Sibel's case: What the heck is her case about?

For a longer version, see my recent interview with Scott Horton

Please call the offices of Congressmen Waxman - (202) 225-3976 - and Conyers - (202) 225-5126 - demanding open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case and the State Secrets Privilege.

-----------

Sibel Edmonds' case is about the intersection of illegal arms trafficking, heroin trafficking, money laundering, terrorist activities and the corruption of many "highly-recognizable, highly-known names" in and around the US government. Sibel says that the people involved will go straight to prison if we can get hearings into her case. Richard Perle, in prison. Douglas Feith, in prison. Dennis Hastert, in prison. Marc Grossman, in prison.

According to Sibel, the best place to begin trying to understand the case is a recent article by Phil Giraldi in the American Conservative. Sibel says “Giraldi has it 100% right; this I consider the most accurate summary of my case.”

Giraldi writes:

"Sibel Edmonds... could provide a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time. On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection.
[]
Turkey benefits from the relationship by securing general benevolence and increased aid from the US Congress - as well as access to otherwise unattainable military technology. The Turkish General Staff has a particular interest because much of the military spending is channeled through companies in which the generals have a financial stake, making for a very cozy and comfortable business arrangement. The commercial interest has also fostered close political ties, with the American Turkish Council, American Turkish Cultural Alliance and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations all developing warm relationships with AIPAC and other Jewish and Israel advocacy groups throughout the US.

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar."

Giraldi goes on to list some neocons who are "linked to Turkey" - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, and Stephen Solarz - and he suggests that they "enrich themselves" via drug trafficking and arms dealing.

The American Turkish Council (ATC)
The main Turkish lobbying group in the US is an organization called the American Turkish Council (ATC) - one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country. The ATC is heavily stacked with former government officials - statesmen, lobbyists and 'dime a dozen generals' - lobbyists and representatives of the military-industrial-complex (MIC). Brent Scowcroft is the chairman, and heavy hitters from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and other 'defense' contractors populate the board.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Turkey is a major recipient of US military aid - running to the billions of dollars - with much of it financed by the US taxpayer. Giraldi suggests in his article that this largesse appears to be the result of bribes paid to congressmen - a suggestion that shouldn't surprise anyone - but there's much more to the story than the usual Iron Triangle / Revolving Door story that we're all familiar with.

In a 10-page article in Vanity Fair on Sibel's case, the ATC is described as "a front for criminal activity" involving "large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder." We'll discuss the drug side of the story shortly, but let's first take a quick look at the military technology element - not only are the MIC contractors bribing congress to ensure that military aid flows to Turkey (and Israel), the Turks and the Israelis are also illegally selling that technology to the highest bidder - which inevitably includes America's enemies, States, and terrorist groups.

Sibel's case also involves the nuclear black market - some Turkish members of the ATC have supplied Pakistan's A.Q. Khan network with hardware, as have American companies that Sibel overheard on the wiretaps. Perhaps even more disturbing, as reported in Vanity Fair, other wiretaps indicate that "Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons." Daniel Ellsberg says that, according to Sibel, bribes were paid to people at the State Department to facilitate this activity.

These are extraordinary claims, of course, and we have a lot of evidence to support the claims - including, but not limited to, the fact that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, had been conducting a counter-intelligence operation against the ATC for years.

One very interesting aspect of Sibel's case that has not really gained traction is that while the ATC is understood to be the key focus of her case, it appears that AIPAC is equally involved. In a terrific 2005 interview with Chris Deliso, Sibel said:

Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one... But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it... You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people.

And she went a little bit further in a great interview with David Swanson this week:

"AIPAC helped form the American Turkish Council - look at the board members, look at the people. You will see the same people involved in both fronts, because it is the same operation."

Reading between the lines (in a number of different places), it appears that Sibel was actively involved in 'the AIPAC investigation' as well as the investigation into the ATC. As she says, both the ATC and AIPAC are both 'fronts' for the 'same (criminal) operation.'



Drug Trafficking.
As I document in "Sibel Edmonds & the Neocons' Turkish Gravy-Train," Afghanistan supplies almost 90% of the world's heroin, and most of that goes straight to Turkey where it is processed, packaged, warehoused, and then re-exported to other countries for final consumption. Turkey supplies approximately 80% of Europe's heroin, and 15% of heroin in the US - worth approximately $40 billion at street prices.

Turkey is widely acknowledged to be controlled by a "Deep State." In 1996, a deadly car crash at a place called Susurluk blew this out into the open. In the car were four people who probably shouldn't have been in the car together:

"an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli... Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself.
[]
The Susurluk Incident became Turkey’s Watergate, exposing the deep links between the Turkish state, terrorists and drug traffickers. It revealed what Turks call the Gizli Devlet, or Deep State – the politicians, military officers and intelligence officials who worked with drug bosses to move drugs from Afghanistan into Europe."

Sibel spells it out:

"The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks."

As I outlined in the curiously-titled "Sibel Edmonds: America's Watergate," Sibel's case demonstrates that Turkey's Deep State 'owns' large parts of the American establishment, to the point where it appears that there also is a 'Deep State' in the US as well. ATC/AIPAC appear to be headquarters for this Deep State in the US, a cozy club where drug dealers, weapons traffickers and past-and-present government officials coexist. Happily!

And if that's not bad enough, we also know that:

"Heroin trafficking is also the main source of funding for the al-Qaeda terrorists. A Time Magazine article in August 2004 reported that al-Qaeda has established a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, and in turn is using the drug revenues to purchase weapons and explosives. The article states: “...al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are increasingly financing operations with opium sales. Anti-drug officials in Afghanistan have no hard figures on how much al-Qaeda and the Taliban are earning from drugs, but conservative estimates run into tens of millions of dollars.”

That is, our Turkish Deep State friends, the people we are directly providing with weapons, are outsourcing some of their distribution activities to al-Qaeda and the Taliban (and, while we're at it, to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA.))

When we are discussing issues such as al-Qaeda smuggling heroin through Afghanistan and the other 'Stans, sometimes it can seem remote and distant, so let's come back to something more concrete. In Adrian Gatton's terrific recent article, The Susurluk Legacy, he quotes Huseyin Baybasin, a Turkish heroin kingpin who is now in jail in Holland:

“I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England... I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.”

Gatton also describes how anyone in the UK government who dared speak about the issue were immediately rebuked by the Foreign Office (the UK equivalent of the State Department.)

The parallels with Sibel's case couldn't be clearer. As 60 Minutes first reported (youtube) in 2002, and Vanity Fair later reported, the Turkish Embassy was directing a lot of the heroin trafficking activity - in conjunction with people at the ATC.

"Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C.
[]
In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled hearing... Many (calls) involved an F.B.I. target at (Chicago's) large Turkish Consulate... Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes."

And just as the UK Foreign Office silenced anyone in the UK who tried to speak out, Sibel says:

The Department of State is easily the most corrupted of the major government agencies.
[]
In some cases where the FBI stumbles upon evidence of high-level officials being involved in drug-smuggling, they're even prevented from sharing it with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. The Department of State just comes in and says, "Leave it."

Elsewhere, Sibel says:

"For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power. Those with direct knowledge have been prevented from making this information available and public by various gag orders and invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. Why?"

Pay attention here, because the ATC is where the worlds of the MIC and the heroin trafficking collide. One of the key Turkish interfaces at the ATC is the Turkish Generals - people that Giraldi says own a stake in the companies through which the military spending is channeled. As described earlier, these exact same people, the Turkish Deep State, also control much of the global heroin market. In between the MIC and the heroin traffickers - are the "neoconservatives (who) distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time."

One of the difficulties in trying to unravel the Sibel Edmonds case is that we aren't sure where one case ends and another begins. We know that some of the wiretaps were from the ATC, and some from the Turkish embassy in DC, and some from the embassy in Chicago. We also know that many of the wiretaps involve conversations between the embassies and the ATC.
Some of the wiretaps relate to drug trafficking, some relate to the nuclear black market and other weapons trafficking, and some refer to terrorist activity - including 9/11.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, when she says:

You have the same players when you look into these activities at high-levels you come across the same players, they are the same people.

Those 'same people' - at least on the American side - according to Giraldi, appear to be Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, and Stephen Solarz. It appears that we can also add William Cohen and Joseph Ralston - and Dennis Hastert - to that roster, and I'm sure there are a few more that haven't yet been publicly identified.

If what Sibel says is true, and her claims are all backed by documents and wiretaps, and also backed up by other agents who have filed similar complaints, and are ready and willing to testify. All of these people should be in jail. For a long, long time.

Congress must hold hearings to get to the bottom of these crimes. If you agree, please call Congress, today, and demand public, open hearings.
**************

You know what to do

EMAIL: 60m@cbsnews.com
PHONE: (212) 975-3247

ABC email contacts

MSNBC & NBC Contacts

BBC America contact page

Posted by lukery at 11/21/2007 12:19:00 AM 0 comments

> PENTAGON INSIDER HAS DIRE WARNING <

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, offered insights into the looming attack on Iran and the loss of liberty in the United States at a recent American University symposium. What follow are his comments from that speech. They have been edited only for space.

By Daniel Ellsberg

Let me simplify . . . and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9-11. That’s the next coup that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution . . . what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world—in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.

All these violations were impeachable had they been found out at the time but in nearly every case the violations were not found out until [the president was] out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.

That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable. They weren’t found out in time. But I think it was not their intention, in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.

It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 1970s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but [they] have believed in executive government, single-branch government under an executive president—elected or not—with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.

When I say this, I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country—but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country [and the Framers of the Constitution] thought.

They believe we need a different kind of government now, an executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with ‘signing statements.’

Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says: ‘I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.’

It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the executive branch, essentially of the president—a concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.”

Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right. It’s not just ‘our way of doing things’— it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody, including Americans.

On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.

That brings me to the second point. This executive branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition [even] from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran, which, even by imperialist standards, [violates] standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the executive branch but most of the leaders in Congress.

The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …

But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.

Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t; it doesn’t even make it unlikely.

That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—and the public and the media, we have freed the White House — the president and the vice president—from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.

And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.

And the question is what then, can we do about this?

We are heading toward an insane operation. It is not certain. [But it] is likely.… I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.

What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran, is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.

And . . . we will not succeed in moving Congress, probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.

However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small, perhaps—anyway not large—possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.

* * *

Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.

Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9-11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little.

We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, ‘traitor,’ ‘weak on terrorism’—names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.

How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.

I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath of office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the armed services.

And that oath is not to a commander in chief, which is not [even] mentioned. It is not to a Fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.

I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath, which I eventually came to do.

I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada—who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war—is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously [the matter of] upholding his oath.

The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. [All the personnel] under him who understand what is going on — and there are myriad — are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.

On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate—and frankly of the Republicans —that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.

I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.
Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.”

Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?

I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read [about] in The Washington Post who threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution.

I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from madmen in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.

And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves —they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relations with the president to the slightest degree.

That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.”

(Issue #47, November 19, 2007)