Steele has previously written that “9/11 was at a minimum allowed to happen as a pretext for war.”
This month, Steele went further, writing:
Pakistan briefed Cheney [about the plans for the terrorist attacks ahead of time] …nations also got wind of this and warned the CIA. We also had two walk-ins to the FBI, one in Orlando, one in Newark, that were dismissed by the FBI because the names were all virgins and not in the FBI data base—the arrogance of stupid bureaucracy.
Cheney saw an opportunity for what Bush called his trifecta, and gave it to him by giving the go-ahead to ISI and Al Qaeda, and ordering up a terrorism exercise that allowed him to send all relevant close-in air defense strip alert craft away from the target areas, and to disable the NORTHCOM normal response to flight path diversion.
Dick Cheney Hiding in the Bushes (Late Night with Conan O'Brien)
Associated Press
August 13, 2009
Former Vice President Dick Cheney believes his old boss, President George W. Bush, gradually turned away from his advice during their second term in the White House, showing a surprising independence as he started taking more flexible positions on a range of issues, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Cheney, often described as the most influential vice president in U.S. history, has been discussing his years in office in informal talks with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues, the Post said, as he works on a memoir due out in 2011 from Simon & Schuster's Threshold Editions.
Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney's book contract, passed word to potential publishers that the memoir would be packed with news, said the article published on the Post Web site, and Cheney himself has said, without explanation, that "the statute of limitations has expired" on many of his secrets.
Cheney Tells America, "Go F-ck Yourself"
The book will cover Cheney's long career from chief of staff under President Gerald Ford to vice president under Bush.
"When the president made decisions that I didn't agree with, I still supported him and didn't go out and undercut him," Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. "Now we're talking about after we've left office. I have strong feelings about what happened... And I don't have any reason not to forthrightly express those views."
According to the author of the Post piece, Barton Gellman, who earlier wrote a book on Cheney called "Angler," the former vice president believes Bush made concessions to public sentiment, something Cheney views as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end, Gellman says.
"In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him," Gellman quoted a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney's reply. "He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney's advice. He'd showed an independence that Cheney didn't see coming."
Bush - The Decider
The Post quoted John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security adviser, as saying Cheney remains driven, now as before, by the possibility of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons from a nation hostile to the U.S.
What is new, Hannah said, is Cheney's readiness to acknowledge "doubts about the main channels of American policy during the last few years," a period encompassing most of Bush's second term.
A federal panel has accused Houston-based KBR Inc. (subsidiary of Halliburton) of resisting government oversight and failing to cut costs on support work in Iraq.
The allegation comes from the Commission on Wartime Contracting. That's an independent panel examining waste and fraud in wartime spending.
During a hearing before the commission in Washington, the contracting giant defended its performance. Its representatives told commissioners that it was under heavy pressure to meet the urgent demands of military commanders.
But commissioners say KBR's internal accounting and cost estimating systems have been inadequate since 2005. That's led to questionable billings and drawn out arguments with federal auditors over hundreds of millions of dollars in charges.
Commissioner Dov Zakheim said KBR's top managers meet regularly with the Defense Contract Audit Agency. Yet the company has been unable to come up with solutions that satisfy the agency. By comparison, he says Dyncorp International and other large contractors seem to work out their problems quickly.
To settle charges that its agents bribed Nigerian officials in order to obtain billions of dollars in contracts in the country, Halliburton Co. and KBR agreed in February to pay a combined total of $579 million to the U.S. government.
And if that did not sting the company coffers enough, a group of shareholders is now suing the company in Harris County District Court, seeking to “punish” officials who allowed such lax standards that millions of dollars could be spirited away to Nigerian bureaucrats, incurring massive fines and harming shareholders’ profits.
“According to the lawsuit, ‘the defendants caused Halliburton to maintain internal controls that were so deficient that Halliburton insiders were able to divert millions of dollars of company funds to pay illegal bribes to various foreign officials in direct violation of the [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act]. Defendant’s failure in this regard has caused substantial damage to Halliburton,’” Houston Press reports.
Nearly $150 million of the $180 million given was later discovered in a Swiss bank account.
The suit adds that for bribing officials between 1994 and 2004, damages should reflect “an amount necessary to punish defendants and to make an example of defendants to the community.” It was filed by the Central Laborer’s Pension Fund, which represents almost 7,00 retired workers.
“The fund was the owner and holder of Halliburton common stock,” continued Houston Press. “It claims that as a result of the fines, which were paid to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission, Halliburton recorded a $303 million loss due to discontinued operations in the fourth quarter of 2008, or rather, a loss of 34-cents a share.”
“KBR’s subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root LLC pleaded guilty in a Houston federal court [in February] to criminal charges of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” thus incurring the deluge of massive fines, noted Market Watch.
All Africa News added:
Last September, former KBR chief executive Albert “Jack” Stanley pleaded guilty to conspiring in a decade-long scheme to bribe Nigerian government officials to obtain $6 billion in engineering and construction contracts for a liquefied natural gas plant.
Stanley acknowledged in his plea that a four-company joint venture that included KBR paid about $182 million to consulting companies that then paid bribes to several Nigerian government officials.
Under federal law, it is illegal for U.S. companies to pay bribes to win foreign business. The investigation, under the US Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act, focused on KBR’s involvement in the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in Nigeria from 1996 onwards. At the time it was Africa’s largest ever industrial investment project.
The recent settlement for its alleged Nigerian bribery is not the first time Halliburton has been involved in shady foreign dealings, as activist group Halliburton Watch illustrates:
The Pentagon admitted that a $7 billion no-bid contract to extinguish oil fires in Iraq was awarded to Halliburton after a “political appointee” from the Bush administration recommended the company for the job.Government policy forbids politicians or their appointees from taking a role in awarding contracts to private corporations.But Vice President Cheney ignored this basic principle when his political appointees were directly involved in awarding a $7 billion contract to Halliburton to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure (Cheney is former CEO of Halliburton).
Halliburton sells goods and services to Iranian companies through its Cayman Islands subsidiary. The sales appear to have violated the U.S. trade embargo against trading with Iran. The OFAC referred the case to the Department of Justice, which is conducting a criminal investigation.
The Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice issued a subpoena to a former employee of Halliburton’s KBR unit to determine whether the company criminally overcharged for gasoline imported into Iraq. KBR, along with its Kuwaiti subcontractor Altanmia Commercial Marketing Co., allegedly overcharged the government by $61 million, but Democrats in Congress say the overcharges were closer to $167 million. KBR charged the government $2.64 per gallon of gasoline while competitors were importing gasoline for less than half that price.
Excerpt from Cassell Bryan-Low, “Cheney Cashed in Halliburton Options Worth $35 Million,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2000, www.wsj.com
“Richard Cheney recently cashed in options valued at about $35 million
in Halliburton & Co. . . .[the Dallas oil-services company where he
served as chairman and chief executive for five years before stepping
down last month to become the GOP vice presidential nominee.]
“Mr. Cheney was one of five Halliburton insiders who sold a combined
total of 859,232 shares for $45.09 to $53.44 a share, or about $45.4
million, between Aug. 10 and Aug. 31, according to First Call/Thomson
Financial . . . . [which tracks trading activity among company
insiders.]
“Mr. Cheney exercised options to sell 660,000 shares between Aug. 21 and
Aug. 28, according to First Call. The sale, which was the largest by a
Halliburton executive to date, insider-data analysts say, netted Mr.
Cheney an $18.5 million profit after he paid about $16.4 million to
exercise options. . . .[An option allows an individual to buy a stock at
a pre-set, or strike, price. If the stock price goes up, that
individual then can buy shares below market value.] Mr. Cheney exercised
options at between $21 and $29.56 a share, and sold them for $52.28 to
$53.93 each.
“Mr. Cheney also disposed of 39,200 company shares he held outright,
worth $2.1 million, by transferring them to Halliburton for payment of a
federal income-tax withholding obligation, according to documents filed
with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of August, Mr.
Cheney held 189,800 shares outright, and 500,000 unvested options.”
McALLEN, Texas – Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have been indicted on state charges involving federal prisons in a South Texas county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles under the outgoing prosecutor.
District Attorney for Willacy County, Juan Angel Guerra, said the prison-related charges against Cheney and Gonzales are a national issue and experts from across the country testified to the grand jury.
Cheney is charged with engaging in an organized criminal activity related to the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds financial interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.
Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on Tuesday, saying that the vice president had not yet received a copy of the indictment.
The indictment accuses Gonzales of using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons.
Gonzales' attorney, George Terwilliger III, said in a written statement, "This is obviously a bogus charge on its face, as any good prosecutor can recognize." He said he hoped Texas authorities would take steps to stop "this abuse of the criminal justice system."
RAYMONDVILLE, Texas – A judge dismissed indictments against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday and told the southern Texas prosecutor who brought the case to exercise caution as his term in office ends.
Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra had accused Cheney and the other defendants of responsibility for prisoner abuse. The judge's order ended two weeks of sometimes-bizarre court proceedings.
Guerra is leaving office at the end of the month after soundly losing in his March primary election.
"I suggest on behalf of the law that you not present any cases to the grand jury involving these defendants," Administrative Judge Manuel Banales said in court while ruling that eight indictments against Cheney, Gonzales and others were invalid.
He also set a Dec. 10 hearing on whether to disqualify Guerra from those cases.
Even in defeat, Guerra saw the outcome as confirmation of the very conspiracy he had pursued. "I expected it," he said. "The system is going to protect itself."
Banales withheld judgment on whether probable cause existed for the Cheney and Gonzales indictments because they were not represented in court and did not present any argument. For the other defendants, he found no probable cause to support the charges.
A White House spokeswoman said Monday night that Cheney's office had no comment. A call to Gonzales' attorney was not immediately returned.
Three of the eight indictments returned Nov. 17 targeted private prison operator The GEO Group, state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., Cheney and Gonzales, as part of an investigation into prisoner abuse at privately run federal prisons in the county.
Guerra ran the investigation into alleged prisoner abuse with a siege mentality. He worked it from his home, dubbed it "Operation Goliath" and kept it secret from his staff, he said. He gave all the witnesses biblical pseudonyms — his was "David."
Banales dismissed all eight indictments because GEO Group attorney Tony Canales showed that two alternate jurors were part of the panel that day but had not been properly substituted.
Five of the indictments — against two district judges, two special prosecutors and the district clerk — were dismissed because Guerra was the alleged victim, witness and prosecutor. The indictments accused the five of abusing their power by being involved in a previous investigation of Guerra.
The indictment against Cheney alleged that his personal investment in the Vanguard Group, which invests in private prison companies, made him culpable in alleged prisoner abuse at privately run federal detention centers.
Gonzales was accused of using his position to stop an investigation into abuses at a federal detention center.
Lucio was alleged to have used his Senate position to profit as a prison consultant, but Banales ruled that the indictment failed to address whether Lucio knew he was only being hired to consult because he was a state senator.
Award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped another bombshell this week when he revealed that former Vice-President Dick Cheney had his own SS-style political assassination unit that reported directly to him.
Hersh told a University of Minnesota audience on Tuesday,
“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe how the Joint Special Operations Command was an executive assassination unit that carried out political assassinations abroad...
“It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office… Congress has no oversight of it.”
The revelation that Cheney had his own private assassination unit is not too far removed from Hitler’s notorious SA (Sturmabteilung), the much feared para-military wing of the Nazi party who were used to beat, torture and kill political opponents of the Nazi party in 1930’s Germany and the Waffen SS, who were later used in the war to carry out executions and war crimes.
The SA were later targeted by Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives, a brutal purge to eliminate political adversaries both inside and outside of the Nazi party. Hundreds of people were executed in cold blood by the Gestapo and the SS.
Tellingly, German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extra-judicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to Hitler. The Waffen SS was deemed beyond prosecution despite it blatantly being involved in egregious and ongoing war crimes, as well as domestic assassinations.
The Joint Special Operations Command, Cheney’s assassination unit, is also described as an area of ‘extra-legal’ operations.
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”
And it’s still going on. None of Obama’s reversals of Bush executive orders say anything about abolishing the Joint Special Operations Command. Indeed, the specialist unit is an integral part of Obama’s vastly expanded bombing raids and other incursions in Pakistan.
August 8, 2009, Sibel Edmonds gave a sworn deposition in which she testified to her knowledge of treasonous crimes and corruption involving current and former members of Congress and State and Defense Dept. officials.
Given the nature of the deposition, the lines of questioning focused on Turkish espionage and services obtained through bribery and blackmail by Turkish officials and proxies.
However, Edmonds has previously disclosed that the corruption involving U.S. officials also includes money laundering, trafficking in drugs, arms and nuclear secrets, U.S. support for Bin Laden/Al Qaeda, and obstruction of FBI investigations related to 9/11, before and after the attacks; she said these things came up “briefly” during the deposition.
Edmonds learned of these things from wiretaps she listened to while working as a translator for the FBI in 2001-2002.
Edmonds' Aug 8 testimony was subpoenaed by David Krikorian (Democratic 2010 Congressional candidate-OH) to support his defense against a lawsuit brought by Jean Schmidt, R-OH. Krikorian had circulated a flier in his 2008 campaign in which he alleged that Schmidt had accepted “blood money” from Turkish interests in exchange for opposing a Congressional resolution acknowledging the Turkish genocide of Armenians in World War I. The deposition took place in Washington, DC at the headquarters of the National Whistleblower Center
After the deposition, Edmonds took questions, and spoke in general terms about the deposition subjects (video, 13:25):
Larson- “Were you able to talk about any of the stuff that you’ve said about 9/11 in the past - did any of that come up?”
Edmonds- “We talked very briefly on Central Asia angle and 9/11 and the Mujahideen and Al Qaeda… and the role played by certain Turkish entities, so we talked briefly about that, yes, but mainly on the corruption U.S. persons, even in relation to those activities… it came up briefly.”
Larson- “How about the stuff about nuclear trafficking, drug smuggling, arms trafficking?”
Edmonds- “Yes, it came up - not in detail - Mr. Grossman’s name came up and Brewster-Jennings - I believe this is gonna be for the first time under Oath, on the record, people getting answer on Brewster-Jennings and the real story - not the crap that they got from the media.”
It seems that while a great deal of new information came out in this deposition that will justify criminal investigations and widespread media coverage, Edmonds was witness to a great deal more that remains to be disclosed and properly investigated.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft had invoked the State Secrets privilege in 2002 to quash Sibel Edmonds’ lawsuit against the DOJ for suppression of her Right to speak freely about the crimes and corruption she had witnessed.
He invoked the State Secrets privilege again in 2004 to prevent her from testifying in a case brought by family members of 9/11 victims, classified her date of birth and also retroactively classified letters from Sens. Grassley and Leahy that had been public for nearly 2 years (this was later overturned, when POGO, who had published the letters, sued the DOJ).
The DOJ attempted to dissuade Edmonds testifying this time as well, but did not re-invoke the State Secrets privilege and did not appear at the deposition.
No so-called “mainstream” print or broadcast media showed up to cover the deposition. Too bad for them, as Edmonds’ allegations reportedly include a juicy sex scandal involving a current Democratic Congresswoman - exactly the kind of thing the mainstream media loves to cover in depth ad nauseum. Given that these allegations intersect with allegations of treasonous activities by high-level figures in the Democrat and Republican establishment, it seems unlikely the corporate media will report on this, even when the video and transcript are made public.
One mainstream media outlet did acknowledge that the deposition would be happening:
Several U.S. and Armenian independent media stayed until the press conference following the deposition, and will be covering further developments:
The event was reported on in advance and live blogged by Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com; Friedman interviewed participants by cell phone with the help of on-site associates, who also took video and photos...
David Krikorian said, quoted by Brad Friedman:
“From my opinion, if I'm some of the current members of Congress, I'd be very very worried about the information that's going to come out of this. There are current members of Congress that she has implicated in bribery, espionage. It's not good. It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy. For people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence.”
Regardless of whether the Obama Administration or the Democrat-controlled Congress want to investigate evidence of treason by Democrats and Republicans, and regardless of whether the corporate “news” media are inclined to report on any of this, public opinion and action organized through word of mouth and the web have the power to compel public servants to follow the law, as well as turn this into a story the corporate media can’t ignore.
Just over two weeks ago, FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds was finally allowed to speak about much of what the Bush Administration spent years trying to keep her from discussing publicly on the record. Twice gagged by the Bush Dept. of Justice's invocation of the so-called "State Secrets Privilege," Edmonds has been attempting to tell her story, about the crimes she became aware of while working for the FBI, for years.
Thanks to a subpoena issued by the campaign of Ohio's 2nd District Democratic U.S. Congressional candidate David Krikorian, her remarkable allegations of blackmail, bribery, espionage, infiltration, and criminal conspiracy by current and former members of the U.S. Congress, high-ranking State and Defense Department officials, and agents of the government of Turkey are seen and heard here, in full, for the first time, in her under-oath deposition.
Though there was much concern, prior to her testimony, that the Obama Dept. of Justice might re-invoke the "State Secrets Privilege" to keep her from speaking, they did not do so. Nor did they choose to be present at the Washington D.C. deposition.
By Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi, The American Conservative
September 23, 2009
Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.
A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.
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.”
But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”
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.
As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities. And the Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity. This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would use.
The other thing I noticed is how Chicago, with its culture of political corruption, is central to the new administration. When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.
__________________________________________
Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator and the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist.
CNP members from L to R: (Top) Jack McLamb, Dr. Stanley Monteith, Cliff Kincaid, Paul Craig Roberts (Bottom) Dr. Jerome Corsi, Larry Pratt, Dr. Michael Coffman, Bob Barr
Pictured above are just a few of the more popular names -- especially among followers of the "alternative" media -- who are members of the ultra-secret Council for National Policy (CNP).
If you have never heard of ultra-secret Council for National Policy (CNP) before, don’t be surprised because it’s almost never mentioned by the media, and especially not by those “big names” in the alternative media who regularly feature CNP members as guests on their show.
Established in 1981 by Tim LaHaye, an evangelical minister, author and speaker, the CNP was founded as a forum for “conservative” politicians, business leaders, members of the media, and evangelical leaders seeking to “strengthen the political right” in the United States. The group’s initial funding was provided by Rockefeller associate Nelson Bunker Hunt. Hunt and the Rockefeller family also played a leading role in the financing of the John Birch Society.
Since 1981, the CNP has been meeting in secret three times a year to set the agenda for the conservative and evangelical movement in the U.S. Its meetings are held in undisclosed locations and are off-limits to the general public and apparently the media as well. The reason for this, as claimed by the CNP, is to “allow for a free-flowing exchange of ideas,” a reason often used by other powerful and secretive elite non-governmental organizations that work to set policy from behind the scenes and outside of the so-called “democratic process.”
Because of the CNP’s secretive nature, some, including members of the CNP itself, have compared it to the slightly less secretive but more powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CNP is often viewed as the right wing’s version of the Eastern Liberal Establishment’s CFR, though when looking through the group’s roster, it doesn’t take long to find many names which are/were also members of the CFR. Surely anyone who has done their homework knows that the Left vs. Right argument is a ruse, and that whether somebody in a position of power claims to be “liberal” or “conservative” they are still — knowingly or unknowingly — working toward the furtherance of the globalist, one world agenda.
Some have said that the CNP is even more powerful than the CFR. I find this hard to believe because the CFR is part of a global network and simply the American branch of the British-based Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), which has satellites in all commonwealth countries — ie. Canadian Institute for International Affairs, Australian Institute for International Affairs, etc. (In the US it’s called the Council on Foreign Relations because we are supposedly free from British rule… or so we think.)
While there are no doubt some very powerful names involved with the CNP, and it receives its funding from some very dubious sources, it more than likely works under the auspices of the CFR and serves more of a dialectical role in the left/right paradigm, formulating propaganda for the “Christian” right, versus serving as globalist policy makers which truly do control both sides of the political game and have a global influence (like the CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, etc.). The group may be able to get away with their secrecy because they do, in fact, exercise less power and influence than the more widely known groups which wield global power.
With that said, it’s important not to discount the CNP’s role in the agenda. While the CNP may not be as powerful as other globalist NGOs, they are powerful in their control over the so-called conservative movement in this country, which ties in closely with the “patriot” movement and alternative media, which many people rely on to deliver them what they believe is “the truth.” The elite control and administer every side of every issue and debate, and the more people wake up and realize how this control is exercised, the less likely they will be duped by the controlled opposition that’s put out there to lead them in circles, while keeping them neutralized with endless fear-mongering and disinformation.
People also need to begin asking themselves why those they have depended on to bring them the truth will not talk about the CNP on their radio programs. These people need to be repeatedly confronted about this on air and questioned about what they know about the CNP...
