Glenn Beck's Party

Glenn Beck's Party

By Paul Waldman

September 22, 2009 Prospect. org

In Great Britain, the opposition party assembles a "shadow cabinet," offering up individuals who are supposed to speak for it on various policy issues. One off th results is that the party is required to at least pretend to care about the substance of government. We have no such tradition here in America, so our opposition, without much to do with its time other than plot strategies to undermine the party in power, is free to be as trivial as it wants.

Granted, when you're out of power, stirring up trouble is a lot more fun than writing policy papers. But the problem for the GOP today is that it is increasingly being defined by its ugliest impulses, its most gullible conspiracy theorists, and its acceptance of a rising tide of nuttiness. Conservatives are having quite a bit of success drumming up manufactured controversies, but each one makes them look less and less like the kind of people you'd trust to run the country.

It is appropriate that the conservative moment's new leader is Glenn Beck, who spends his hours on the air drawing conspiracies on white boards and literally telling his viewers that he's terrified, and they should be too (in Time magazine's cover story on him, fellow Fox News anchor Shepard Smith calls Beck's studio the "fear chamber"). Watch Beck's disquisition on the hidden communist and fascist symbolism he discovered in the sculptures and building facades around Rockefeller Center, and you realize just how thin the line is between achieving media superstardom and standing on a corner with a sandwich board and tinfoil hat.

Having procured the scalp of Van Jones, whose job in the White House was to promote green jobs (a terribly nefarious task, I know), Beck has focused his all-seeing eye on the fact that there are people in the executive branch who have been referred to, at various times and by someone or other, as "czars." Just what is a czar? There's no definition, because the title doesn't actually exist. Aficionados of the czar conspiracy have devised lists with the number of czars ranging from 29 to 44, depending on which right-wing blog's comment thread they're using as a source. And no, that isn't a joke.

This has become Beck's latest anti-Obama crusade, that these czars, with their unchecked, unaccountable, nearly unlimited power, represent a threat to the life and liberty of every American. Though no actual Cossacks have been seen pillaging heartland towns, we should be vigilant.

I can't help but wonder if behind closed doors, Republicans say to themselves, "Man, that Glenn Beck is a real idiot. I wish we could just ignore him." But they can't, of course -- you go to war with the Fox News hosts you have. If Beck starts yammering on about a plague of czars, well, that's what the base is interested in. So you'd better put on your outrage beanie, step up to the microphone, and start yelling.

Doing their part in this piece of performance art, Republican members of Congress have been holding press conferences and posing in front of photo arrays of the alleged czars. House Republicans even have a bill, the Czar Accountability and Reform Act of 2009, which now has 100 co-sponsors. They argue that the czars are unaccountable because they haven't been confirmed by the Senate. Except many of those on the various lists were, in fact, confirmed. We have yet to see a reporter ask one of these officeholders for a definition of "czar" that goes beyond "I heard somebody once call that guy a czar, so he is one." What's the difference between a czar and someone who holds a job in the executive branch? None that we can tell. The Republicans may not be aware of it, but I heard there's a college student intern who makes copies in the office of the deputy undersecretary of agriculture. Egad -- a soybean document duplication czar!

But it's not just on the House side, where silliness is always a featured offering on the daily legislative menu. Senators are getting into the act, too. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas wrote a breathtakingly stupid op-ed for The Washington Post, decrying the unchecked power the czar epidemic represents. "A few of them have formal titles," Hutchison wrote darkly, "but most are simply known as 'czars.'" Actually, every single one of them has a formal title. And the only person who is really "known" widely as a czar would be the drug czar, or head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, an agency created under George H.W. Bush.

While Hutchison hasn't had the most distinguished of Senate careers, she has not appeared to be as much of an ignoramus as her op-ed would suggest. But she is running for governor of Texas against incumbent Republican Rick Perry, whose vigorous pandering to his party's nuttiest elements could teach Mitt Romney a thing or two. Running in a GOP primary against a man who has actually suggested that Texas consider seceding from the United States if Washington continues to pass laws and regulate things, the fairly moderate Hutchison knows she has to start shimmying her way up the crazy tree, and right quick. (A poll taken after Perry's remarks showed Texas Republicans evenly split, 48-48, on whether the state should remain part of the United States or not. Really.)

Do we even have to mention the epic hypocrisy at work here? I suppose we do. These Republicans -- who are now so concerned that by hiring people to work on issues, President Obama is "consolidating power" (Sen. John Thune of South Dakota) in a way that "upsets the checks and balances" (Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee) -- were quite happy about consolidation of power when a Republican was in the White House. They didn't criticize the Bush administration's "unitary executive" theory, which said, among other things, that criminal laws don't apply to the president as long as what he's doing has anything to do with national security. They didn't object when the Bush administration claimed that the president had the power to wiretap citizens without warrants, or arrest and lock up Americans for life, without charge or trial. They didn't disagree when over 1,200 times, Bush used "signing statements" to assert that he would ignore laws or parts of laws he found displeasing. All that was no problem -- not to mention the fact that Bush also had staffers whom people sometimes called "czars." But the presence of an Obama adviser not subject to Senate confirmation? Tyranny!

If you're a politician in either party, you often find yourself pulled to the ideological edge by your most fervent supporters. This sometimes means you have to assure them that your heart is with them, even if you know that political reality means you won't be able to give them what they want. I agree with you that a single-payer health-care system would be better, a Democrat might say, but a weak public option is all we can get -- and maybe not even that. You're right, we really should privatize Social Security, a Republican might assure a supporter, but it's just not politically possible.

But what the GOP faces now is that portions of its base, spurred on by the likes of Beck, have gone completely, utterly mad. And prominent Republicans, many of them otherwise fairly reasonable people, have decided to check into the asylum.

Why? There are many reasons. Some of the members of Congress taking up these charges are not really playing with a full deck (see, for instance, this video of Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio whispering "I agree with you" to a constituent claiming Obama wasn't born in the U.S.). Others may actually be so ignorant of how government works that they believe that an official who is not confirmed by Congress is a dangerously unaccountable czar (and yes, it's possible to be elected to our national legislature and still be a dolt -- there are more than you'd think). But the most relevant reason is that, at least in the short term, it works. Drawing the news media's attention away from policy and toward craziness is as easy as waving a shiny ball in front of a baby. And the more time they spend talking about whatever the conservatives want them to talk about, the less time goes toward a reality-based discussion of actual issues.

Ames: Sound weapons from Iraq war used on Americans

You're protesting a government that wants to give you access to health care; meanwhile, that same government is planning to blow out your eardrums if it doesn't like your protest.

God bless America!  

I said, GOD BLESS AMERICA!  I SAID, GOD BLESS AMERICA!  Oh, what's that?  You can't hear me?  Never mind.

Sound Beam Weapons Turned on Americans

By Mark Ames

September 25, 2009 | Exiledonline.com

Here's some blowback anyone could have seen coming from 10,000 miles away–or however far Iraq and Georgia are from the USA: those crazy LRAD sound-beam weapons which were used to devastating effect by Georgia's authoritarian leader to crush massive pro-democracy demonstrations two years ago, have finally made their Big Debut here in America, melting the eardrums of G20 demonstrators in Pittsburgh. Clickhere to see a video of the LRADs used on protestors in Pittsburgh.

It's not the first time they've been deployed against American citizens: a couple of weeks ago, a controversy erupted in San Diego when the county Sheriff, Bill Gore, secretly deployed LRADs at town hall events held by local Republican congressmen and a Democrat congresswoman. At first Gore told a local reporter that the LRADs were for search and rescue missions, but eventually he owned up that he'd purchased the LRADs from the San Diego maker of the weapons, ATC, for "crowd control purposes." Gore is the notorious FBI agent who led the horrible Ruby Ridge raid, which, thanks to Gore's "shoot on sight" orders, resulted in FBI snipers killing the intended suspect's wife as she held her baby, as well as his son and his dog, but left the intended target, Randy Weaver, alive.

LRAD: So convenient, you can crush demonstrations while working on your tan!

Originally the LRADs, which can cause permanent ear damage, were deployed in hot war zones like Iraq. They worked so well on our enemies that by 2006, Bush's Air Force Secretary called for turning the weapons on American citizens.

In the meantime, one of Bush's closest pals, Georgian strongman Mikheil Saakashvili, used the LRADs on pro-democracy demonstrations which he violently crushed in November, 2007 (they've since restarted and gained momentum, particularly since Saakashvili's disastrous war against Russia). You can watch a Russian TV report of the LRADs used on Georgian demostrators here.

Shortly after Saakashvili crushed his pro-democracy protests, the Chinese went on an LRAD shopping spree for its police force, just in case there should be another Tiananmen Square situation. Funny thing is that weapons sales to China are illegal ever since they crushed the Tianenmen Square democracy protests; but by some stroke of luck, LRADs aren't classified as weapons, and therefore, they can be used on pro-democracy Chinese just as they can be used on pro-democracy demonstrators in Georgia or our own country;.

Now we know what John McCain meant last year when he told Georgia's leader, "I know I speak for every American when I say to him today, we are all Georgians." And what a wonderful thing that is.

35 million Americans receiving food stamps

G**d**n welfare queens! They all ought to be deported to Mexico, along with those 15 million illegals. I'm tired of supporting these low-life deadbeats! Get a job, feed yourselves, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, why don't you, you lazy ingrates!

These people have forgotten the foundation of our country created by our Founding Fathers, which was PERFECT and needed no changes whatsoever. Damn socialist-pinko-commie-sobs!

I'm particularly appalled that the once-great Republic of Texas has more people receiving food assistance than any other state. Remember the Alamo, and stop munching on government cheese, you fat bastards!

35 Million Americans on Food Stamps: 12 Percent of U.S Population on Food Stamps Highest Since Records Kept in 1969

Mybudget360.com

URL: http://www.mybudget360.com/35-million-americans-on-food-stamps-12-percent-of-us-population-on-food-stamps-highest-since-records-kept-in-1969/

Sufism shows Islam is diverse; war radicalizes religion

This article is important to read for two reasons: (1) to see that Islam is a diverse religion with various strains and thus it ill behooves us to paint the world's 1.2 to 1.6 billion peaceful Muslims with too broad a brush; and more importantly, (2) this commentary shows what I've argued before that political and military conflict radicalizes religions, and not vice-versa, as we in the West are so often led to believe.

Americans really need to understand the latter truth, as it pursues military occupations in two Muslim countries. Take Chechnya as a case in point, a place where American forces have not been involved. The conflict there has attracted jihadists from all over the globe, who have preached a radical, militant version of Islam, and who didn't much care about the welfare of the local population, which was traditionally moderate Muslim. Russia's brutal military occupation there attracted jihadi whackos like moths to a flame, who indoctrinated a contingent of the youth there in a radical brand of Islam that had never existed in Chechnya. So, contrary to what we are told by our leaders and the U.S. mainstream media, it is war and occupation that in fact makes Islamic countries radicallly militant. Although it is not a complete remedy, the lesson is that we should avoid war in Muslim countries which do not threaten us, because we sow the seeds of religious extremism when we invade and occupy formerly moderately Muslim countries like Iraq.

Can Sufism Defuse Terrorism?

By Ishaan Tharoor

July 22, 2009 | TIME

In recent years, the dominant image of islam in the minds of many Westerners has been one loaded with violence and shrouded with fear. The figures commanding global attention — be they al-Qaeda's leadership or certain mullahs in Tehran — preach an apocalyptic creed to an uncompromising faithful. This may be the Islam of a radical fringe, but in an era of flag-burnings and suicide bombings, it is the Islam of the moment.

And that is why some lament the decline of another, older and more tolerant Islam. For centuries many of the world's Muslims were, in one way or another, practi-tioners of Sufism, a spiritualism that centers on the mystical connection between the individual and the divine. Sufism's ethos was egalitarian, charitable and friendly, often propagated by wandering seers and storytellers. It blended with local cultures and cemented Islam's place from North Africa to the Indian subcontinent. (Read "An Islam of Many Paths.")

Yet amid the hurly-burly of 19th century empires, Sufism lost ground. The fall of Islam's traditional powers — imperial dynasties such as the Mughals and the Ottomans — created a hunger for a more muscular religious identity than that found in the intoxicating whirl of a dervish or the quiet wisdom of a sage. Nationalism and fundamentalism subdued Sufism's eclectic spirit. In the West, Sufism now usually provokes paeans to an alternative, ascetic life, backed up perhaps by a few verses from Rumi, a medieval Sufi poet much cherished by New Age spiritualists. But there was nothing fringe or alternative about it. "In many places, Sufism was the way whole populations expressed their Muslim identity," says Faisal Devji, an expert on political Islam at Oxford University. "In South Asia, it was the norm."

Some analysts think that historical legacy can still be exploited. A 2007 report by the Rand Corp., a U.S. think tank, advised Western governments to "harness" Sufism, saying its adherents were "natural allies of the West." Along similar lines, the Algerian government announced in July that it would promote the nation's Sufi heritage on radio and television in a bid to check the powerful influence of Salafism, a more extreme strain of Islam that is followed by al-Qaeda-backed militants waging a war against the country's autocratic state.

But can Sufism really bend terrorist swords into plowshares? The question is most urgent in South Asia, home to more than a third of the world's Muslims and the cradle of Sufi Islam. Shrines of Sufi saints are ubiquitous in India and Pakistan and still attract thousands of devotees. Yet the Taliban in Pakistan have set about destroying such sites, which are anathema to their literalist interpretation of the Koran. "Despite our ancient religious tradition," says Ayeda Naqvi, a writer and Sufi scholar from Lahore, "we are being bullied and intimidated by a new form of religion that is barely one generation old." (See pictures of the Taliban on LIFE.com.)

Still, Naqvi, Devji and other academics doubt that governments can use Sufism to fight their political battles. As in the past, foreign meddling would likely do more harm than good. "What is needed today, more than the West pushing any one form of religion," says Naqvi, "is a propagation of the underlying values of Sufism — love, harmony and beauty." This is not easy, especially in Pakistan, where poverty, corruption and the daily toll of the global war on terrorism simmer together in a volatile brew. Set against this, the transcendental faith of Sufi mystics seems quaint, if not entirely impotent.

But there is more to the allure of Sufism than its saints and sheiks. In 2001, one of the first things to happen after the Taliban was chased out of Kabul was that the doors of the Afghan capital's Bollywood cinemas were flung open to the public. The language of cosmic love that animates Bollywood music and enchants millions of Muslims around the world, even if sung and acted out by non-Muslims, is a direct legacy of centuries of Sufi devotional poetry. At Sufism's core, suggests Oxford University's Devji, is an embrace of the world. "It allows you to identify beyond your mosque and village to something that can be both Islamic and secular," he says. "It's a liberation that jihadis could never offer."

Nevertheless, it has also been Sufism's fate to fall afoul of more narrow-minded dogmas — even during an earlier golden age. The tomb of Sarmad the Armenian, a storied Sufi saint, sits close to Delhi's Great Mosque. Sarmad looked for unity within Muslim and Hindu theology, and famously walked the streets of Lahore and Delhi naked, denouncing corrupt nobles and clerics. In 1661, he was arrested for heresy and beheaded under the orders of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, a ruler admired now by Pakistani hard-liners for his championing of an orthodox Islam and the destruction of hundreds of Hindu temples. As Sarmad was led to his execution, he was heard to mutter lines of poetry: "There was an uproar, and we opened our eyes from eternal sleep," intoned the Sufi. "Saw that the night of wickedness endured, so we slept again." For many, Sufism's slumber has lasted far too long.

The American Conservative: Gagged whistleblower

Well, there's enough dirt thrown around here to cover everybody.  If even half of this is true, it's an outrage.  I want to see somebody come out and debunk this.  Anybody?

 

Who's Afraid of Sibel Edmonds? 

By Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi

November 1,  2009 Issue  | The American Conservative

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.

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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.