"...Veli Kucuk, a retired major general, was allegedly plotting
to kill (Turkish author) Pamuk, Turkish newspapers reported.
Kucuk is suspected of running a secret unit within
police forces that carried out bombings and killings for which
other groups were widely blamed. Also arrested was
Kemal Kerincsiz, a nationalist lawyer responsible for numerous
cases against Pamuk, Dink and other intellectuals. None of
the suspects have spoken about the charges.
...
Most Turks have long suspected the existence of a covert
web of elements within the security forces and bureaucracy
who act outside the law to uphold their own political ends.
There is even a household name for it: the "deep state,"
referring to a state within the state.
Newspapers have suggested that this network is the Turkish
remnant of Gladio, a Cold War-era program, orchestrated by
the U.S. in several NATO countries, to create a covert paramilitary
force to counter Communist activities.
...
But the audacity and sheer scope of the allegations raises
the unsettling question of whether the individuals arrested
might just be the tip of the iceberg. "Who gave the orders?
Who protected them for this long?" says Altinay. "We
are faced with the possibility that this network existed.
And, even worse, that it might still exist."
Although TIME won't say it, the Turkish network was framing
Muslims;
The detention in Istanbul last week of alleged members of
a shadowy Turkish ultranationalist group has revived charges
that elements within the Turkish security apparatus have long
tried to destabilize the country through a campaign of bombings
and assassinations. These allegedly include false
flag operations that have been attributed to Kurdish separatists
and violent Islamists.
Framing Muslims sure is trendy these days. In December of 2007,
the BBC* program Newsnight exposed British think tank "Policy
Exchange" fabricating evidence tying Muslim owned bookstores
to "extremist" literature, you can view the broadcast on YouTube;
Policy Exchange immediately tried
to spin the story... bad move. The Newsnight editor, Peter
Barron, went on the attack;
In October Newsnight had been due to run an exclusive report
on the findings and Policy Exchange had given us the receipts
to corroborate their claim that a quarter of the 100 mosques
their researchers had visited were selling hate literature.
On the planned day of broadcast our reporter Richard Watson
came to me and said he had a problem. He had put the claim
and shown a receipt to one of the mosques mentioned in the
report - The Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in London. They
had immediately denied selling the book and said the receipt
was not theirs.
We decided to look at the rest of the receipts and quickly
identified five of the 25 which looked suspicious. They appeared
to have been created on a home computer, rather than printed
professionally as you would expect. The printed names and
addresses of some of the mosques contained simple errors and
two of the receipts purportedly from different mosques appeared
to have been written by the same hand.
...
In the days that followed we focused further on the five
receipts about which we had concerns and eventually asked
a forensic scientist to analyse them. This is what we found.
1. In all five cases the mosques involved said the
receipts did not belong to them.
2. The expert analysis showed that all five had been
printed on an inkjet printer - suggesting they were created
on a PC.
3. The analysis found "strong evidence" that two
of the receipts were written by the same person.
4. The analysis found that one of the receipts had
been written out while resting on another receipt said to
be from a mosque 40 miles away.
Mr Godson says he stands by his report 100%. I also
stand by our report 100%. I don't think we can both be right.
Busted.
Earlier in December, Egypt stood accused of fabricating
the "Victorious Sect" terror group. A bunch of patsies were
rounded up, and tortured until they signed "confessions".
"...Like many other alleged extremists who have been targeted
by the authorities, Shareef didn't know that his brand-new
friend —the eager co-conspirator drawing him ever further
into a terror plot —was actually an informant for the FBI...
...The expenditure of such massive resources to find would-be
terrorists inevitably requires results. Plots must be uncovered.
Sleeper cells must be infiltrated. Another attack must be
prevented —or, at least, be seen to be prevented.
But in backwaters like Rockford, the JTTFs don't have much
to do. To find threats to thwart, the task forces have increasingly
taken to using paid informants to cajole and inveigle
targets like Shareef into pursuing their harebrained schemes...
...In Rockford, "Jameel" repeatedly urged Shareef to dream
up gory details of the havoc they would cause at the mall.
Chrisman had received a call, he told Shareef, from a man
he called "Cap" —a contact willing to sell them weapons. They
could buy "pineapples" —code for hand grenades —from Cap for
fifty bucks each. Cap, of course, was an undercover
agent...
...On the following Saturday, as snow blanketed Rockford,
Chrisman and Shareef engaged in the ritual of suicide bombers,
recording video statements of each other reciting
their last wills and testaments. The JTTF's affidavit
doesn't reveal whose idea it was to stare into the camera
and swear vengeance against America, but the prejudicial impact
it would have on a jury was huge...
An FBI informant helping out with the production of infamous
"last will" radical Muslim videos. How charming. It puts the
7/7 suicide bomber videos under
a new light, doesn't it?
Jose Padilla, the first United States citizen in the “War
on Terror” to have his constitutional rights stripped from
him by a stroke of George W. Bush’s pen,
was sentenced today to 17 years and four months in Miami by
Federal Court Judge Marcia Cooke, five and a half years after
his arrest. The charges—this time—were that he and two others
conspired to murder, kidnap and maim individuals in a foreign
country, as well as conspiracy to provide material support
to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists.
The prosecution never named any specific individual
or nation where this violence was to have occurred.
...
The Padilla case is central to the question of whether President
Bush, CIA chief George Tenet and others lied when they said
“the United States does not torture.” Judge Cooke, a protégé
of both Jeb and George Bush, refused to allow the showing
of videotapes of Padilla being questioned and probably tortured
during his three and a half years in solitary confinement
in a Naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina...
Prior to the start of the trial, the prosecution revealed
it had 78 videotapes of Padilla’s interrogation in the Naval
brig; although the final tape, the 78th, according to the
prosecution, had somehow turned up “missing.”
Despite the current controversy over the CIA’s destruction
of tapes showing severe “interrogation techniques” (a k a
“torture”) used on two Al Qaeda suspects—one of whom, Abu
Zubaydah, was said to have named Padilla as a terrorist in
training—Cooke was only mildly distressed about the missing
tape. Though she had the option of insisting the Government
produce the tape or dismiss one or more of the charges against
Padilla, she never exercised it. She also threatened
harsh sanctions against defense attorneys caught leaking the
contents of any of the 77 tapes.
Cooke did, however, exercise her judicial discretion to prevent
psychiatric defense experts from fully explaining the extent
of the damage to Padilla’s mental health.
Government-funded research over the past half century has
shown that sensory deprivation is a technique that produces
a near-psychotic break, sometimes in less than 24 hours. Padilla
experienced such conditions for three and a half years.
His defense attorneys, based on expert psychiatric evaluations,
argued that such a duration of relentless questioning and
isolation—which included extreme sensory deprivation—had driven
him to a state where he could not assist his attorneys
in his defense.
If radical Islamists are such a scourge, why the hell are governments
around the world, (and right-wing outfits like Policy Exchange),
exagerrating and flat-out faking the threat?
