Professor Marios L. Evriviades
(Teaches International Relations at Panteion University at Athens, Greece)
Copyright: Marios Evriviades on line
Six of the seventeen islamist terrorist that destroyed the twin towers in New York City and also attacked the US Pentagon on September 11, 2001 were trained in Turkey.
The Turkish state and its intelligence apparatus were well aware of the activities of the six terrorists which took place in the Fall of 1999 in the Yalova mountains not far from cosmopolitan Istanbul. In fact the six were placed in custody for a short period but were eventually released because their training was not deemed a threat to the Turkish state. At the time Turkey functioned as a training center for jihadists from the Muslim world who went on for holy wars against Serbs in the Balkans, Russians in Chechnya and the kafur (unbelievers) of Afghanistan. This is the same state that is by any measure the most spoiled member of NATO and one with a privileged alliance relationship with the US that is almost on par with that between Washington and Jerusalem.
It is also the same state whose establishment, be that islamist or kemalist, has adopted a holier –than- thou attitude while lecturing the West on the evils of terrorism. All along and under the rubric of fighting this evil of terrorism the Turkish state destroyed 3500 villages in the Kurdish regions of Anatolia in the 1990s, dispossessed millions of Kurds, implemented a well-documented campaign of assassination against the Kurdish elite, all the while framing itself and its Armed Forced as victims of Kurdish terrorism. Today the Turkish regime has succeeded that of Saddam Hussein as the primary oppressor of the Kurdish people in Turkey and Iraq.
While the six jihadists and would-be perpetrators of 9/11 were receiving training in the vicinity of Istanbul, the Turkish Embassy in Washington served as the nerve center of a spy ring that involved the intelligence agencies of Turkey, Pakistan and Israel. Their objective? Stealing through bribery highly classified US nuclear technology for themselves and for the highest bidder in the flourishing international black market on weapons of mass destruction. Besides US dollars, heroin smuggled out of Afghanistan, relieved the treasuries of Turkey and Pakistan and served as the medium exchange for this state agents of death.
Far worse, for the Americans, their valued Turkish allies bribed high standing US officials in the State Department and the Pentagon who ensured for the Turks (a) the valued goods and (b) provided cover and safety for the Turkish state and its Washington diplomats when the FBI started breathing down the neck of the Turkish ring leaders. The said ring leaders were in fact arrested by the FBI but did not stay in custody for long. The State Department intervened and rushed them out of the country because of concerns that their interrogation by the FBI might have linked the Turkish centered spying ring with the 9/11 conspiracy and the terrorist attack on the US.
In the case of one high official, allegedly recruited by the Turks, there is said to exist an intercepted FBI recording between himself and the Turkish Embassy instructing him how to obtain cash payment of 15 thousand dollars. The said official, who denies the allegation, reached the high echelons of the State Department and had served as Ambassador to Turkey. He also played an important role in formulating and marketing the Annan Plan which according to one of his subordinates, Daniel Fried, gave Cyprus to the Turks, (together with some billion US dollars), in exchange for Turkish cooperation in the US invasion of Iraq.
These startling revelations about Turkey’s role as an enabler of international terrorism are based on sworn testimony behind closed sessions of US Congressional Committees, sworn testimony in US courts, whose records have been sealed so as not to jeopardize US national security and are corroborated in the US 9/11 Commission Report. They can also be gleamed in the records of the trial in Turkey of one Louai al-Sakka, a Syrian national. Sakka was tried as an important al Qaeda leader and found guilty for a number of terrorists attack in Turkey, including the bloody attack on a Jewish synagogue in Istanbul in the Fall of 2003. Sakka, now in jail, managed to provide through his lawyer details of his terrorist activity in Turkey to The Sunday Times of November 2007 (“Al-Qaeda Kingpin: I trained 9/11 hijackers”). It is relevant to recall here that it is in this same paper that Israeli Mordachai Vanunu revealed in 1986 that Israel was a nuclear power.
The reputation of The Sunday Times as a maverick paper may have also led to the revelations in its pages of Turkey’s central role as enabler of international terrorism and of its Washington Embassy serving as an espionage den against the United States. The reference here is to the story of January 6, “For Sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets”. The source of the Sunday Times story is Sibel Edmonds a naturalized American of Persian-Turkish descent. Edmonds worked for a brief period of time after 9/11 as a translator of intercepted FBI and NSA communications and came upon the damning espionage material centered on the Turkish Embassy in Washington. Her determined and stubborn insistence that the US public be informed led to her firing from her job and the imposition of a gag court order against her. All the while internal US investigations proved the veracity of her allegations. The most damming of Edmond’s accusations that the US government had orchestrated a cover up so as not to jeopardize US relations with Turkey, Pakistan and Israel. Exposing this cover up, according to Edmonds will lead directly to the 9/11 conspiracy.
Gagging Edmonds may have been the most effective way of shutting her up in the US. But this worked until she spilled the beans to The Sunday Times. Sibel Edmond’s revelations are explosive and the evidence she provides, especially about Turkey’s duplicity and her central role as an enabler of international terrorism, is damming. Readers interested in the fascinating details of this story including the identity of the bribed US official named by Edmonds, can visit her web site at www.justacitizen.com and other related sites such as www.vanityfacr.com, www.antiwar.com, www.counterpunch.org Alternatively they can goggle “Sibel Edmonds” on the web.