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Sibel Edmonds has a new blog up and running, 123 Real Change. Congratulations.

The first post is an introduction to the blog, the second post updates and clarifies some points from the recent op-ed, In Congress We Trust…Not. Sibel writes:

"There are those who argued that it wasn’t fair to ‘write off’ President Obama’s change so soon, about 100 days or so into his presidency.

I understand their point, and I must say I envy their purity and optimism, but I differ. In fact, I can turn that ‘only 100 days’ logic and make the opposite point. If in a hundred days, give or take, he’s done so much to either continue (stay) or expand upon the previous administration’s abuses, how much more damage is he going to do in ‘(4 X 365)-100’ days?! I am talking about Obama not only continuing but actually expanding upon the State Secrets Privilege to gag and bury information; completely forgoing accountability on torture - first starting with the torturers, then the previous White House cabal, and now extending it to those who drafted it; sustaining the illegal NSA wiretapping; deciding to bring back the Bush style military commission…just don’t get me started on this. Currently I am working on my next piece, exactly on this particular point, so, more on this, soon."

Indeed.

The third and most recent post, Dissecting the US Mainstream Media, lists 6 of "the usual theories we hear out there on the mainstream media’s current state," and Sibel is asking for reader contributions/comments as to which mix of those theories describes the problems with the corporate media. In the coming days Sibel will publish a multi-part essay on the problems with the media and wants to incorporate some thoughts from her readers.


Sibel is a great writer, and has lots of experience with the dysfunctionality of Congress, the Executive Branch, the Judiciary and the media. I'm sure that 123 Real Change will be a great blog.

Larry Franklin to report to prison

Josh Gerstein @ Politico:

What was more interesting is that (Judge T.S. Ellis III) said he is expecting some kind of action from the government regarding Larry Franklin, a Pentagon analyst who pled guilty early on in the case.

Ellis sentenced Franklin in 2006 to more than 12 years in prison for disclosing classified information to Rosen, Weissman and others. However, Franklin agreed to cooperate with the government and never reported to jail.

"It is further ordered that the government is directed to advise the Court, by 5:00 p.m., Thursday May 14, 2009, regarding when it contemplates filing an appropriate motion with respect to defendant Franklin," Ellis's new order says.

Lawyers involved in the case expected Franklin to seek a reduction in his sentence once the trial against Rosen and Weissman was complete. Now that the trial will never happen, it's an open question of how much of a sentence reduction Franklin will get. Presumably, it's not his fault the case was abandoned. In any event, Ellis will have to rule on any sentence reduction. The judge may have to make a hypothetical judgment about how much Franklin's testimony may have helped in a trial that will never take place.

(h/t RP)

As I asked last week, what happens to any of the other information he told the FBI since his guilty plea?

sibel and scott again. Congress is a failed channel for whistleblowers.

There is a new Sibel Edmonds - Scott Horton interview at Antiwar Radio. Audio here, transcript here. The interviews with Scott have typically been the most informative interviews that Sibel has given.

Sibel contributes a wealth of valuable 'process' information for those who are trying to understand the Harman / AIPAC / Goss story, as well as those of you still trying to get your head around Sibel's case. I recommend that you read the whole thing.

I also want to highlight one particular issue that Sibel raises, namely that her organization, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), received important information about certain abuses of power by the Executive Branch, and the NSWBC attempted to assist these whistleblowers by helping them air their particular issues within the relevant channels available to whistleblowers - specifically, Congress:

"And it was not only for the reasons such as my own personal case with the State Secrets Privilege etc, but what really got me extremely upset (about the latest Harman stories) was the fact that in 2005 and 2006, my organization took several whistleblowers from the NSA and the Justice Department to certain offices in Congress including Harman's office and Pelosi's office, and now we are sitting here, feeling like fools."

Basically, these whistleblowers risked their careers so that Harman and others could feather their own political nests with the information provided to them by legitimate whistleblowers. It's no wonder that the entire US political system is broken.

Happy mother's day.

Who is protecting Afghanistan's Heroin production?

Peter Dale Scott has a typically solid article at Global Research (reference links at the original).

In 2007, Afghanistan supplied 93% of the world's opium, according to the U.S. State Department. Illicit poppy production, meanwhile, brings $4 billion into Afghanistan,[12] or more than half the country’s total economy of $7.5 billion, according to the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC).[13] It also represents about half of the economy of Pakistan, and of the ISI in particular.[14]

Destroying the labs has always been an obvious option, but for years America refused to do so for political reasons. In 2001 the Taliban and bin Laden were estimated by the CIA to be earning up to 10 per cent of Afghanistan’s drug revenues, then estimated at between 6.5 and 10 billion U.S. dollars a year.[15] This income of perhaps $1 billion was less than that earned by Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI, parts of which had become the key to the drug trade in Central Asia. The UN Drug Control Program (UNDCP) estimated in 1999 that the ISI made around $2.5 billion annually from the sale of illegal drugs.[16]

At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, "The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies."[17] Rashid was "told by UNODC officials that the Americans knew far more about the drug labs than they claimed to know, and the failure to bomb them was a major setback to the counter-narcotics effort."[18] James Risen reports that the ongoing refusal to pursue the targeted drug labs came from neocons at the top of America’s national security bureaucracy, including Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, and their patron Donald Rumsfeld.[19]

Prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, most of these labs were in Turkey, but production has mostly moved to Afghanistan - although they are still controlled by the same networks.

As Sibel frequently points out, the 'face' of the heroin industry is always the Afghan poppy farmers, and the policy dispute is always described as 'To eradicate or not eradicate,' and whether Afghani farmers have any better options for feeding their families, and whether poppy destruction will drive farmers into the protective arms of the Taliban etc. When the issue is framed like that, 'reasonable people' can disagree about the correct approach. The next level of the discussion, infrequently discussed, is whether or not to target the production facilities, the drug labs and the warehouses. Even here, Peter Dale Scott, quoting Ahmed Rashid, only refers to the 2001 situation when the Northern Alliance was still in business.

I can't remember a single story in the eight years since the invasion of an attack - air or ground - on one of these drug labs or warehouses - so whatever arguments Feith, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad and Rumsfeld were relying on back then are now presumably inoperative. (see my "Sibel Edmonds & the Neocons' Turkish Gravy-Train" for more.) And, of course, those guys have all been out of the US government for years, so there are presumably others who have taken their place in who are following the same policy. Who? And Why?

But there is another important element - beyond the options of going after the poppy farmers and the drug labs - that is almost never discussed (putting aside for current purposes Sibel's emphasis on the fact that there are a group of people who manage this $50 billion industry and the necessary money-laundering etc.) That is, now that these drug labs are located within Afghanistan, a country occupied by the US/NATO, these labs need so-called 'precursor chemicals' to produce heroin - and lots of them, tanker loads.

A July 2008 AP report, carried by Boston Globe, and not many others, quotes Christina Oguz, country representative for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, saying that only 1% of these precursor chemicals are ever seized - even though these chemicals are all imported by the tanker-load, and have no 'dual-use' justification. Reading between the lines in the article, Oguz's 'frustration' is palpable:

She urged the international community to share more information on known smugglers of the chemicals, many of whom were "long-established and based in neighboring countries."

These chemicals are not coming into Afghanistan on the backs of mules - as the media often presents Afghanistan's export of heroin -they are coming through major transit points.

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, made the same point in his 2007 article "Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time." Murray writes:

(Afghanistan) now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.
[...]
My knowledge of all this comes from my time as British Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004. I stood at the Friendship Bridge at Termez in 2003 and watched ... the tankers of chemicals roaring into Afghanistan.

Let me emphasize - the US government/NATO might have arguably legitimate reasons to 'protect' the poppy farmers, they might even have reason not to attack the drug labs. But what possible excuse is there for allowing tanker after tanker of requisite heroin precursor chemicals for entering Afghanistan? Who does that help?

For comparison, I mentioned Bashir Noorzai recently. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for heroin-related charges last week. One of the charges against him in his indictment was:

In or about 1997, Taliban authorities in Afghanistan seized a truckload of morphine base that was owned by BASHIR NOORZAI, a/k/a "Haji Bashir Noorzai," the defendant. Shortly thereafter, Taliban authorities returned the seized morphine base to NOORZAI with personal apologies from Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban.

Is it categorically better or worse to seize and release a 'truckload' of morphine base, or to knowingly allow many truckloads of heroin precursor chemicals to enter a country that you occupy and to effectively create a 'green zone' for heroin labs? Shouldn't Feith, Wolfowitz, and the others be subject to the same punishment of life imprisonment?

I'll finish with some more from Peter Dale Scott's important article:

It follows that there are many players with a much larger financial stake in the Afghan drug traffic than local Afghan drug lords, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Sibel Edmonds has charged that Pakistani and Turkish intelligence, working together, utilize the resources of the international networks transmitting Afghan heroin.[30] Others have also written about the ties between U.S. intelligence and the Turkish narco-intelligence connection.[31]

Loretta Napoleoni has argued that there is an ISI-backed Islamist drug route of al Qaeda allies across North Central Asia, reaching from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan through Azerbaijan and Turkey to Kosovo.[32] Dennis Dayle, a former top-level DEA agent in the Middle East, has corroborated the CIA interest in that region’s drug connection. I was present when he told an anti-drug conference that "In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."[33]
[...]
The UNODC Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, has reported that "money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis."[34]
[...]
The global drug traffic itself will continue to benefit from the protracted conflict generated by "full-spectrum dominance" in Afghanistan, and some of the beneficiaries may have been secretly lobbying for it.

Obama's tax havens.

President Obama called out the use of tax havens by US corporations. Good on him.

Will he also forbid the use of the same tax havens by "US government agencies," "certain US government people," "certain non-profit organizations in the US," "certain US institutions including banking institutions," and "certain US-based organizations" to launder and distribute money'?

Will he investigate the source, and use, of dirty money in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus? Malta? Dubai? Cayman Islands?

Will he ask why former-House-Speaker, and Turkey's lobbyist Bob Livingston, was receiving $1m per year from the Cayman Islands?

Will he wonder why Bruce Fein is working for one of the worst money laundering places on the planet, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus?

Will he investigate "Fethullah Gulen's $25 billion madrassa-and-mosque-establishment efforts throughout the Central Asian region and the Balkans?"

Or will it be business as usual?

Bruce Fein, Turkey and the Armenian Genocide.

Last week I wrote an article highlighting the fact that the otherwise respected Bruce Fein is in the pay (and company) of the Turkish Lobby, and that he is apparently willing to write articles denouncing the notion of the Armenian genocide for money.

Now comes news via Inside Higher Ed, that one of Fein's organizations, the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, has launched a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for having the audacity to criticize a book by genocide-denier, Guenter Lewy.

The SPLC is known "for its studies of hate groups -- a focus that has led the center to criticize Holocaust deniers" - and as far as I know, is highly regarded (although there may be some evidence to the contrary).

The Inside Higher Ed article states that:

"Two quotes in the Southern Poverty Law Center article are cited as defamatory. One states: "Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide. ...”

The other states: “Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent lectures at university campuses across the country. ... Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide and are paid by the Turkish government provided politicians with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government’s present-day interests.
[]
Further the suit says that the statements "individually and taken as a whole in context of the article ... are defamatory because they falsely impute to Plaintiff academic corruption, fraud and deceit. ..." As a result of the accusations, the suit says that Lewy has had his "scholarly credibility" hurt and has lost book sales and speaking engagements.

"The acute stigma attached to failures to disclose the receipt of money or its equivalent that could distort academic or professional judgments finds expression in a welter of government conflict-of-interest regulations and financial disclosure standards...”

Funny. Yes, there is an acute stigma about failure to disclose the receipt of money. And there's a good reason for it. Inside Higher Ed asked Fein whether Lewy ever received money from the Turkish government or its subsidiaries, and Fein said he didn't know the answer... Inside Higher Ed should have asked the same question of Fein himself. How much is Fein getting from the Turkish government and its subsidiaries?

You might remember from my previous article that Fein is co-founder and Chairman of a group called the American Freedom Agenda. One of their ten founding articles is "Stopping threats to prosecuting journalists under the Espionage Act of 1917." This is obviously a defense of AIPAC's Rosen and Weissman - but there is a certain irony in the fact that while Fein is keen on defending journalists, he is also filing multi-million dollar harassment suits against journalists.

One further point: the Inside Higher Ed article notes that:

"In an interview two years ago, Lewy said that (his) book -- which was criticized by some scholars of genocide -- had been rejected by 11 publishers, including 4 university presses, before the University of Utah Press published it."

Lo and behold, the University of Utah recently announced a "new Turkish studies project titled "The Origins of Modern Ethnic Cleansing: The Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of Nation States in the Balkans and Caucasus."" The four year project will be "funded in part by the Turkish Coalition of America."

As I discussed in my previous article, Bruce Fein is 'resident scholar' at the Turkish Coalition of America, which incidentally shares an address with Bruce Fein & Associates. The president of TCA is Lincoln McCurdy who headed the American Turkish Council (ATC) for fifteen years. The ATC is at the heart of Sibel Edmonds' claims about Turkish corruption in the US.

In a related issue, Inside Higher Ed reminds us that when a scholar at the Institute of Turkish Studies at Georgetown University dared to mention 'genocide,' he was forced to quit, at risk of the Institute of Turkish Studies being shut down. As a reminder, the Executive Director of the Institute of Turkish Studies at Georgetown University is Sabri Sayari, named in Sibel Edmonds' Rogues Gallery.

Don't expect the University of Utah to publish anything critical of Turkey in the near future.

Summary
Bruce Fein is on the Turkish payroll. He wants to defend journalists (and, implicitly, lobbyists) when it comes to Israel, but he files spurious multi-million dollar lawsuits against those who criticize Israel's second-best friend, Turkey. This frivolous lawsuit against an anti-hate group, the SPLC, argues that it is wrong to allege that people like Lewy receive money from the Turkish government who deny the Armenian genocide, while the Turkish government, through Fein's TCA, gives money to the only university willing to publish Lewy's denialist book. And Lewy & Fein have the audacity to claim that criticizing his denial hurts his book sales!