SIBEL EDMONDS AND AMERICA’S SECRET WAR IN CENTRAL ASIA
By Mike Mejia
OpEd News
s-and-America-by-Mike-Mejia-091026-177.html
Oct 30 2009
Two weeks ago, I wrote an article detailing why I believed Chicago
Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D., I11) was the unnamed female
legislator referred to in FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds’ recent
deposition in the Schmidt V. Krikorian case: The former FBI translator
claimed in her testimony that a Congresswoman was a target of sexual
blackmail by Turkish agents when it was discovered said Representative
was bisexual. In an interview with the American Conservative that was
released last Tuesday, Edmonds confirmed that Schakohwsky is indeed
the anonymous congresswoman to whom she referred in her deposition. In
addition, the former FBI translator put out another explosive item
that she had previously not disclosed. Edmond claims there was a
covert American operation in Central Asia from 1997 to 2001 that
involved several members of the bin Laden family.
There were bin Ladens with the help of Paskitanis or Saudis, under
our management. (State Department official) 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.
Although revelation that the U.S. government law may have had
associations with al-Qaeda operatives, via Turkey, right up until 9/11,
should have caused the most shock waves in the alternative media,
the naming of Schakowsky as a possible lesbian was the item that
was set off a furor on left wing web sites Daily KOS and Democratic
Underground. Schakowsky herself appeared to use the 9/11 angle to
discredit Edmonds and shield herself from scrutiny:
The American Conservative’s most recent hit piece against Congresswoman
Schakowsky is complete fantasy; cut from the same cloth as the stories
by "birthers" that President Obama is not an American citizen. The
source of this story subscribes to the bizarre conspiracy theory
that elements of the United States government were involved in the
9/11 attacks["].
Yet, Edmonds was not speaking in the American Conservative of an
‘inside job theory’ about 9/11. The former FBI translator has always
been clear she does not have all the answers to the tragic events that
brought down the WorldTradeCenter. What Edmonds is doing with this
statement is simply pushing the timeline out for when U.S. support for
Islamic fundamentalists in Central Asia ceased: she is claiming this
support did not actually end until September 11, 2001. Furthermore,
Edmonds claims U.S. support for Islamic radicals was carried out with
the help of Turkish paramilitary groups and that Turkish officials
were aided the importation of al-Qaeda heroin into Europe and the
United States.
A lot of 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.
As the proprietor of Daily KOS like to say, extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence. The claims that the U.S. was using
bin Laden for its geostrategic game in Central Asia, via Turkey,
even after the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998,
and that this support involved allowing heroin to be distributed
in the West are certainly extraordinary. It is also certain that
we should not take them at face value, since they are coming from
a single source. However, those who try to dismiss Edmonds as a
‘fantasist’ do so at their own peril.
Consider this: Few in the mainstream media believed Edmonds when the
Vanity Fair article detailing a covert relationship between Turkish
nationals and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was revealed.
However, three years later, Hastert officially became a lobbyist for
the Turkish government. When Edmonds claimed Turkey was smuggling U.S.
nuclear secrets out of the country, she was again ignored by the
mainstream of American thought. Later, the Bush Administration
admitted it and retroactively pardoned Turkish ‘private entities’
for involvement in nuclear proliferation. Then there is the fact that
Edmonds is one of the most gagged persons in U.S. history: The state
secrets privilege was twice invoked by the U.S. Justice Department
against her, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft silenced the
Senate in 2004 by retroactively classifying previously unclassified
materials about her case. Finally, we must always remember that the
U.S. has a long history of involvement with terrorists, organized
crime and drug dealers. The best book on that subject is Whiteout by
Andrew Cockbum and Jeffrey St. Clair.
So, even in the face of it, Edmonds’ story is plausible. It becomes
especially so when one reads the actual history of the U.S. government
ignoring crimes of valued allies when they involved pushing forward
cherished foreign policy goals of the state. If we assume then that
Edmonds’ shocking allegations of bin Laden-heroin-Turkey connection
in the Balkans and Central Asia are true, or at least partially so,
what are we to make of it? Why would the U.S. have allowed such an
unholy alliance to occur?
The answer perhaps, lies in the book by former Jimmy Carter National
Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard. In relation
to U.S. goals in Central Asia, Brzezinski wrote:
Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the
geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause
a potentially important shift in the international distribution of
power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective
political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to
attain them; ["] second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset,
co-opt, and/or control the above ["].
For those not steeped in speaking the language of diplomats and
academics,
the plain English translation is: "It is the right of the United States
to do whatever it wants in Central Asia, regardless of the will of
the people in those countries, in order to extend its own power."
Edmonds’ story appears to indicate that the U.S. may have included
supporting mujahedeen as one policy to "co-opt and/or control"
both Central Asia and the Balkans. Previous accounts, including
form counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke’s book, Against All
Enemies, have claimed to U.S. officials quickly moved to stop al Qaeda
operatives from taking over Bosnian conflict. This whistleblower seems
to indicate that the U.S. was actually the facilitator of bringing
jihadists into the former Yugoslav state. As far as Chechnya goes,
it appears that the U.S. was dangerously close to committing an act
of war with Russia.
This brings us to the present. Although Edmonds speaks of events
that took place years ago, they are relevant to what is going on
in the world today. As we speak, America’s desire for control of
Central Asia is what many believe is really being the ‘surge’ of
troops in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. has
successfully pushed Armenia, a strategic state in the nearby Caucasus,
to sign protocols with Turkey. This has important implications for
oil pipelines, according to Armenian-American writer David Boyajian:
The West has already built two major gas and oil pipelines – BTE and
BTC – from Azerbaijan’s Caspian coast, through Georgia and Turkey.â~@
The U.S. insists that all pipelines bypass Russia and Iran ["]. That
left Armenia, perhaps Russia’s only real ally in the world, as the
sole obstacle to total American domination of the western land route
into the Caspian.
While the major reason for gagging Sibel Edmonds appears to be the
cover-up of a major bribery scandal, there does appear to be a foreign
policy rationale as well. If the Turkish espionage scandal had been
fully vetted publicly in 2002, the American people have demanded
accountability from Turkey and its domestic agents in the United
States. This might have caused a rift in U.S. – Turkish relations
and ultimately torpedoed (at least partially) the current policy
‘triumphs’, the aforementioned Turkey-Armenia protocols, as well as
the continuing presence of a U.S. military base in Kyrgyzstan.
However, it is debatable whether the U.S. control of Central Asia and
the Caucasus, as well as America’s insistence that natural resource
pipelines bypass territory of her rivals, is really worth the cost
in lives and money. A demonstration that the U.S. continued using
al-Qaeda operatives right until September 2001 – and the possible
implication that 9/11 occurred as a result of it – it could bring to a
naught the backing of the war in Afghanistan by most Americans, as it
would their support for co-opting Central Asian republics. To be sure,
as a result of current policies, America’s largest rival in the region
is being encircled, but can America continue to afford to squeeze the
Russians while the U.S. economy lies in such dire straits? Also, is
this ongoing "chess game" consistent with the Obama Administration’s
stated goal of a nuclear free world?
These are the hard questions all Americans must ask as they demand
answers from their elected representatives on this very important
espionage case.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
