IN THE DARK: AMERICA'S DESCENT INTO A POLICE STATE

MANIPULATED AMERICA:  DIVIDED WE FALL

"From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back…A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey."…FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds in the American Conservative

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER

Top US officials are reported to have been selling US nuclear weapons secrets around the world as part of a spy ring which includes members of Congress from both parties.  These and other accusations are broadly substantiated, but only by the American Conservative and newspapers around the world, including significant revelations about a 9/11 coverup.  How can this be done in a "free country?"

Massive penetration of, not only Congress, but the Pentagon and State Department are outlined in detail, naming those involved and how it was done.  Foreign intelligence agencies from Israel, Turkey and Pakistan, regularly accessed highly classified information and sold it around the world, even to terrorist organizations.

If 9/11 was a terrorist attack, inside job or planned to drag the US into an endless war in the Middle East for some other purpose, the information needed to plan the attacks was sold or given away by high ranking Americans who were under investigation by the FBI until 2001.

That investigation was ended by the Bush Administration and buried using States Secret Privilege, leading to the biggest espionage disaster in American history. This doctrine, since 2001, has been used to end nearly every aspect of accountability in our government.  Any information can be withheld from Congessional investigations, such as with the 9/11 Commission and any whistleblower can be silenced, even those reporting threats to national security, as with Sibel Edmonds.  

 "John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”"

Since 2001 and continuing thru with President Obama, a regime of suppression and disinformation has taken over in Washington, totally unaccountable to Congress or the people.  With the destruction of any ability for a people to make an informed decision through state secrecy laws without oversight and limit, there can be no democratic rule.

What are the basic mechanisms to overthrow a democracy? 

If you control three institutions, you control a nation.  First is the press.  If you can manipulate the news, suppressing stories, stopping investigations and protecting "flawed" individuals while making the public look under their beds for imaginary enemies, your power is almost unlimited.

Second is government itself.  If you can control government by putting the real power in the hands of a few committee chairmen or key "deal makers" and can flood the system with dirty money, there will be no real investigations, only coverups and no real laws, only raids on the public treasury by the powerful while crumbs are passed out to others.

 Third is public opinion.  Turning an intelligent electorate into a howling mob requires an endless series of both outlandish conspiracies and real threats, the truth behind all being misdirected through a concerted effort to divide a populace and keep them at each other, even to the brink of civil war, all to protect the economic cabal growing fat off "terror war" and "deregulation," a buzzword for massive theft.

When former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, reported that Osama bin Laden was an active US asset up to the second the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, she was put under Patriot Act gag orders by Attorney General John Ashcroft that lasted for years.  Now that she is speaking, laying out facts supported by key FBI and CIA experts, nothing is hitting our papers.  How bad are the facts being kept from us?

"The 2008 Sunday Times series detailed Edmonds’ allegations that Bush’s Under Secretary of State Grossman — the third-highest ranking official in the State Department, after Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — worked closely with both the Turks and Israel in obtaining and selling U.S. nuclear weapons technology on the worldwide black market, and that he had even tipped off Turkish diplomatic colleagues about the true identify of then-covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings, several years before the operation was named publicly by columnist Robert Novak"

While we were pretending to use our Patriot Acts to defend America through torturing suspects to get the truth, we are learning that much more of that coerced testimony may have been gathered to support a wide coverup of government crimes, many at the highest level.  The American Conservative goes on:

These are some of the things Edmond has sworn to under oath, taken from an interview with former CIA official Philip Geraldi printed in the American Conservative:

PHILIP GIRALDI: We were very interested to learn of your four-hour deposition in the case involving allegations that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accepted money from the Turkish government in return for political favors. You provided many names and details for the first time on the record and swore an oath confirming that the deposition was true.

Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption. Let’s start with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department.

SIBEL EDMONDS: During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background, I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.

Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as “Susurluk” by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.

Another individual who was working for Grossman, Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, was also removed from Turkey and sent to Germany. After he and his Turkish wife Can returned to the U.S., he went to work for Douglas Feith and she was hired as an FBI Turkish translator. My complaints about her connection to Turkish lobbying groups led to my eventual firing.

Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England, Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service. To keep him from testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while “most wanted” by Interpol, he came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996.

GIRALDI: So Grossman at this point comes back to the United States. He’s rewarded with the third-highest position at the State Department, and he allegedly uses this position to do favors for “Turkish interests”—both for the Turkish government and for possible criminal interests. Sometimes, the two converge. The FBI is aware of his activities and is listening to his phone calls. When someone who is Turkish calls Grossman, the FBI monitors that individual’s phone calls, and when the Turk calls a friend who is a Pakistani or an Egyptian or a Saudi, they monitor all those contacts, widening the net.

EDMONDS: Correct.

GIRALDI: And Grossman received money as a result. In one case, you said that a State Department colleague went to pick up a bag of money…

EDMONDS: $14,000

GIRALDI: What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense installations as has been reported? It’s also been reported that he was the conduit to a group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as “agents of influence.”

EDMONDS: Yes, that’s correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation. The top person obtaining classified information was Congressman Tom Lantos. A Lantos associate, Alan Makovsky worked very closely with Dr. Sabri Sayari in Georgetown University, who is widely believed to be a Turkish spy. Lantos would give Makovsky highly classified policy-related documents obtained during defense briefings for passage to Israel because Makovsky was also working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

GIRALDI: Makovsky is now working for the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, a pro-Israeli think tank.

EDMONDS: Yes. Lantos was at the time probably the most outspoken supporter of Israel in Congress. AIPAC would take out the information from Lantos that was relevant to Israel, and they would give the rest of it to their Turkish associates. The Turks would go through the leftovers, take what they wanted, and then try to sell the rest. If there were something relevant to Pakistan, they would contact the ISI officer at the embassy and say, “We’ve got this and this, let’s sit down and talk.” And then they would sell it to the Pakistanis.

GIRALDI: ISI—Pakistani intelligence—has been linked to the Pakistani nuclear proliferation program as well as to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

So the FBI was monitoring these connections going from a congressman to a congressman’s assistant to a foreign individual who is connected with intelligence to other intelligence people who are located at different embassies in Washington. And all of this information is in an FBI file somewhere?

EDMONDS: Two sets of FBI files, but the AIPAC-related files and the Turkish files ended up converging in one. The FBI agents believed that they were looking at the same operation. It didn’t start with AIPAC originally. It started with the Israeli Embassy. The original targets were intelligence officers under diplomatic cover in the Turkish Embassy and the Israeli Embassy. It was those contacts that led to the American Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations and then to AIPAC fronting for the Israelis. It moved forward from there.

GIRALDI: So the FBI was monitoring people from the Israeli Embassy and the Turkish Embassy and one, might presume, the Pakistani Embassy as well?

EDMONDS: They were the secondary target. They got leftovers from the Turks and Israelis. The FBI would intercept communications to try to identify who the diplomatic target’s intelligence chief was, but then, in addition to that, there are individuals there, maybe the military attaché, who had their own contacts who were operating independently of others in the embassy.

GIRALDI: So the network starts with a person like Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies?

EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.

GIRALDI: So they had access to their personnel files and also their security files and were illegally accessing this kind of information to give to foreign agents who exploited the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information?

EDMONDS: Yes. Some of those individuals on the list were also working for the RAND Corporation. RAND ended up becoming one of the prime targets for these foreign agents.

GIRALDI: RAND does highly classified research for the U.S. government. So they were setting up these people for recruitment as agents or as agents of influence?

EDMONDS: Yes, and the RAND sources would be paid peanuts compared to what the information was worth when it was sold if it was not immediately useful for Turkey or Israel. They also had sources who were working in some midwestern Air Force bases. The sources would provide the information on CD’s and DVD’s. In one case, for example, a Turkish military attaché got the disc and discovered that it was something really important, so he offered it to the Pakistani ISI person at the embassy, but the price was too high. Then a Turkish contact in Chicago said he knew two Saudi businessmen in Detroit who would be very interested in this information, and they would pay the price. So the Turkish military attaché flew to Detroit with his assistant to make the sale.

GIRALDI: We know Grossman was receiving money for services.

EDMONDS: Yes. Sometimes he would give money to the people who were working with him, identified in phone calls on a first-name basis, whether it’s a John or a Joe. He also took care of some other people, including his contact at the New York Times. Grossman would brag, “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.”

GIRALDI: Did Feith and Perle receive any money that you know of?

EDMONDS: No.

GIRALDI: So they were doing favors for other reasons. Both Feith and Perle were lobbyists for Turkey and also were involved with Israel on defense contracts, including some for Northrop Grumman, which Feith represented in Israel.

EDMONDS: They had arrangements with various companies, some of them members of the American Turkish Council. They had arrangements with Kissinger’s group, with Northrop Grumman, with former secretary of state James Baker’s group, and also with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help.

Meanwhile Scowcroft, who was also the chairman of the American Turkish Council, Baker, Richard Armitage, and Grossman began negotiating separately for a possible Turkish protectorate. Nothing was decided, and then 9/11 took place.

Scowcroft was all for invading Iraq in 2001 and even wrote a paper for the Pentagon explaining why the Turkish northern front would be essential. I know Scowcroft came off as a hero to some for saying he was against the war, but he was very much for it until his client’s conditions were not met by the Bush administration.

GIRALDI: Armitage was deputy secretary of state at the time Scowcroft and Baker were running their own consulting firms that were doing business with Turkey. Grossman had just become undersecretary, third in the State hierarchy behind Armitage.

You’ve previouly alluded to efforts by Grossman, as well as high-ranking officials at the Pentagon, to place Ph.D. students. Can you describe that in more detail?

EDMONDS: The seeding operation started before Marc Grossman arrived at the State Department. The Turkish agents had a network of Turkish professors in various universities with access to government information. Their top source was a Turkish-born professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was useful because MIT would place a bunch of Ph.D. or graduate-level students in various nuclear facilities like Sandia or Los Alamos, and some of them were able to work for the Air Force. He would provide the list of Ph.D. students who should get these positions. In some cases, the Turkish military attaché would ask that certain students be placed in important positions. And they were not necessarily all Turkish, but the ones they selected had struck deals with the Turkish agents to provide information in return for money. If for some reason they had difficulty getting a secuity clearance, Grossman would ensure that the State Department would arrange to clear them.

In exchange for the information that these students would provide, they would be paid $4,000 or $5,000. And the information that was sold to the two Saudis in Detroit went for something like $350,000 or $400,000.

GIRALDI: This corruption wasn’t confined to the State Department and the Pentagon—it infected Congress as well. You’ve named people like former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, now a registered agent of the Turkish government. In your deposition, you describe the process of breaking foreign-originated contributions into small units, $200 or less, so that the source didn’t have to be reported. Was this the primary means of influencing congressmen, or did foreign agents exploit vulnerabilities to get what they wanted using something like blackmail?

EDMONDS: In early 1997, because of the information that the FBI was getting on the Turkish diplomatic community, the Justice Department had already started to investigate several Republican congressmen. The number-one congressman involved with the Turkish community, both in terms of providing information and doing favors, was Bob Livingston. Number-two after him was Dan Burton, and then he became number-one until Hastert became the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, was briefed on the investigations, and since they were Republicans, she authorized that they be continued.

Well, as the FBI developed more information, Tom Lantos was added to this list, and then they got a lot on Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and Marc Grossman. At this point, the Justice Department said they wanted the FBI to only focus on Congress, leaving the executive branch people out of it. But the FBI agents involved wanted to continue pursuing Perle and Feith because the Israeli Embassy was also connected. Then the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, and everything was placed on the back burner.

But some of the agents continued to investigate the congressional connection. In 1999, they wiretapped the congressmen directly. (Prior to that point they were getting all their information secondhand through FISA, as their primary targets were foreigners.) The questionably legal wiretap gave the perfect excuse to the Justice Department. As soon as they found out, they refused permission to monitor the congressmen and Grossman as primary targets. But the inquiry was kept alive in Chicago because the FBI office there was pursuing its own investigation. The epicenter of a lot of the foreign espionage activity was Chicago.

GIRALDI: So the investigation stopped in Washington, but continued in Chicago?

EDMONDS: Yes, and in 2000, another representative was added to the list, Jan Schakowsky, the Democratic congresswoman from Illinois. Turkish agents started gathering information on her, and they found out that she was bisexual. So a Turkish agent struck up a relationship with her. When Jan Schakowsky’s mother died, the Turkish woman went to the funeral, hoping to exploit her vulnerability. They later were intimate in Schakowsky’s townhouse, which had been set up with recording devices and hidden cameras. They needed Schakowsky and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois. They already had Hastert, the mayor, and several other Illinois state senators involved. I don’t know if Congresswoman Schakowsky ever was actually blackmailed or did anything for the Turkish woman.

GIRALDI: So we have a pattern of corruption starting with government officials providing information to foreigners and helping them make contact with other Americans who had valuable information. Some of these officials, like Marc Grossman, were receiving money directly. Others were receiving business favors: Pentagon associates like Doug Feith and Richard Perle had interests in Israel and Turkey. The stolen information was being sold, and the money that was being generated was used to corrupt certain congressmen to influence policy and provide still more information—in many cases information related to nuclear technology.

EDMONDS: As well as weapons technology, conventional weapons technology, and Pentagon policy-related information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GIRALDI: And, of course, none of this has been investigated. What do you think the chances are that the Obama administration will try to end this criminal activity?

EDMONDS: Well, even during Obama’s presidential campaign, I did not buy into his slogan of “change” being promoted by the media and, unfortunately, by the naïve blogosphere. First of all, Obama’s record as a senator, short as it was, spoke clearly. For all those changes that he was promising, he had done nothing. In fact, he had taken the opposite position, whether it was regarding the NSA’s wiretapping or the issue of national-security whistleblowers. We whistleblowers had written to his Senate office. He never responded, even though he was on the relevant committees. (end)

Our questions regarding Edmonds and the extent of what her charges mean are several:

1. How can an FBI investigation of this scope be ended so quickly without any information reaching the public?  We have come to believe that everything is leaked?  How is such control maintained? 
2. When a story like this is broken, why is there no followup investigation by the FBI, Congress or any attempt by investigative reporters, outside a few, to tell the American people the truth?
3. Why has President Obama kept the same repressive and illegal policies in place that were used by the Bush administration?

We are well beyond conspiracy theory.  With the ability of our government to silence this story, which undermines the official versions of nearly everything from 9/11 to the most basic aspects of our national security, can any version of anything, investigated or not, commissions or not, ever be taken as more than part of the real conspiracy behind the conspiracies?

We have long accepted that our government was for sale to the highest bidder and that our press sold its soul after 9/11 for the privilege of being fed lies and continual access to more of the same.  Anyone breaking with the crowd was cut off, denied access and pushed out.

A government operating in secret is, in itself, a conspiracy.  Everyone working to stifle open government, end challenges to government power and continue down this path is a part of this conspiracy.  They are working against, not only the idea of democracy, but against the lives of everyone living in America.  This has left Americans subject to war for profit, rigged elections, economic slavery at the hands of financial pirates and the Obama administrations willingness to continue Bush era policies to impoverish working Americans.

The saddest part of this is the willingness of millions of Americans to join in to silence any movement for a free government.  Under the guise of patriotism, extremist groups, funded and organized, sometimes publicly, sometimes secretly, by special interest and supported by massive press organizations, some under foreign control,

Groups clamoring for "freedom," sometimes armed, are working feverishly on behalf of war profiteers, foreign spy agencies and criminal elements in our power elite.  Why is suppressing the truth about 9/11 a way of making us free?  Why is challenging the oil and defense cartels considered fascism? 

The real goal is power, economic power.  Stealing oil, running drugs and looting our defense budget is only part of it.  With continual talk about conspiracies, Zionists, Socialists and endless cabals running a secret government, the real power, the multinational corporations and banking consortiums that control the Federal Reserve system, set oil and commodity prices, manipulate currencies set the course of human history, all unseen, have been around for decades.

Governments come and go, elections, real or rigged, assassinations, coups, none of it means much.  Even the most secure democracy can be taken down by a handful of dedicated men, be they terrorists, spies or foreign agents.  9/11 proved that.

If only the intelligent can see and understand the danger, then the real cabal attacks the intelligent as "liberal" and "weak."

If the patriotic and brave become a danger, send them to war or give them an imaginary enemy, fill the news with warnings and alerts. 

If an investigation starts, channel it into a pet "paid off" Congressman or two and feed it lies.  Lying is now an honorable part of our national secuity effort.

If someone stands up, what happens?  With Edmonds, John Ashcroft issued executive orders to have her silenced.  Others are called "truthers" as a way of discrediting them.  How have we sunk to the point where asking for the truth can discredit someone?

If a story threatens to break, debunkers, agents of the cabal, jump on it immediately.  They come in two flavors:

1. Debunkers present wild and implausible explanations attacking eye witness testimony, science and even video evidence using sarcasm and backed by powerful organizations.  Debunkers need prove nothing, only claim, with no accountability, that they have "debunked."
2. Debunkers also join any investigation but lead it to the "Twilight Zone."  Every legitimate story is dumped on the door of "Zionists" or space aliens by this type of debunker.  They take plausible attacks on government lies and poison them with insane speculation in order to discredit anyone asking for a legitimate investigation.

 Today, as usual, America is divided and moving toward a period of domestic discord and even home grow terrorism.  Our military forces have become a prime recruiting ground for the corporate cabal.  Every group that is easily influenced and easily misinformed, military, police, gun owners or those in isolated rural areas, are subject to wild stories of race war, imaginary Communist takeovers or worldwide Jewish conspriacies.

Whatever is blown up, a nuclear plant, a famous bridge or monument, the result will be the same:

• More oppressive laws
• More defense spending
• More taxes or more debt
• More dead American soldiers
• More high prices for gas
• More and more pundits on TV crying about socialism

It doesn’t take a genius to understand any of this.  We love watching movies and TV shows about government conspiracies idential to the one we really seem to have.  Where is the line?  How much has to be lies before we have become the thing we fear most of all, a police state?

Would we even know?

Senior Editor, Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.