Luke Ryland discusses the A.Q. Kahn nuclear secrets peddling network, its correlation to the Sibel Edmonds case, the CIA’s knowledge of the network since the mid ‘70’s, the six years of deafening silence by Congress and the media about Sibel’s case and how the nuclear black market, neocons, and the Israeli and Turkish lobbies are connected.
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All right, so there's this international nuclear black market where they smuggled, I don't know, switches and vacuum tubes and stolen secrets and technology.
It mostly goes by the name of the AQ Khan Network after the father of the Pakistani bomb, who apparently was a major kingpin in this network of nuclear proliferation.
Of course, he doesn't run it now.
There are at least some indications that the darn thing still exists.
But here's what we know.
We know that Libya, Iran, and North Korea all got equipment from this network.
We know that the Iranians got the furthest with it and were revealed to be spinning centrifuges or having the equipment and working on spinning centrifuges to enrich uranium to a mere 3.6%, which you can't possibly use to make a nuclear weapon.
But still, they went around all the basically American-imposed sanctions and went to the black market and got this stuff.
We know that the North Koreans bought some uranium enrichment equipment from the AQ Khan Network.
There's no evidence whatsoever that they ever used any of it.
Of course, when the North Koreans actually did test their nuclear bombs, as expected over at antiwar.com, but a shocking surprise to Broad and Sanger at the New York Times, it was made of plutonium harvested from their Soviet-era reactors.
Still, there remains to be seen a single atom of evidence that they ever used any of the Pakistani equipment to enrich uranium.
And the Libyans, of course, just had it stacked in boxes in a warehouse and gave it up as part of the deal where the Bush administration actually finally allowed Libya to kiss up to the West, which they'd been trying to do for years and years.
But they had to wait until the war in Iraq was over so that they could give the war in Iraq credit for Libya coming over.
So anyway, that's what we know about the major axis of evil states and their participation in this AQ Khan Network.
But the more that seems to come out about this thing, the more for a loop I'm thrown, I guess, is the way to say it, because I never really can tell who's running this thing.
Apparently the CIA has known that AQ Khan stole these centrifuge plans from the Urenko Consortium in Europe back in the 1970s.
They turned a blind eye to the entire Pakistani bomb program in the 1980s while they were helping us help the Mujahideen fight the Russians in Afghanistan.
And of course the Sabel Edmonds case has at least indicated, if not proven, that there are Americans, not people likely to be working undercover for any intelligence agency, who are in on this network and making their ends in a big way, perhaps hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, in participating in this nuclear black market.
We know it was at least investigated, if not participated in, by Valerie Plame's group at the CIA, Brewster Jennings & Associates, which was outed by the Vice President's office.
And, well, so there's a big giant mystery and there's some background.
But now Luke Ryland is here, and Luke Ryland really knows this stuff.
He's been following the case of Sabel Edmonds for a long time now.
He's a proprietor of the blog letsabeledmondspeak.com.
He also writes regularly at the Daily Kos.
Welcome back to the show, Luke.
Scott, good to speak to you.
So tell me, Luke, I guess basically I just said a whole bunch of stuff about this AQCon network.
Basically my brief sketch understanding of what's going on here.
Before we really get into the details, was there anything that really needed correcting in what I said, do you think?
No, that was a pretty good summary, as always, from you, Scott.
The interesting thing that I want to pick up with, that you mentioned, is that if the participants in the network or the customers are part of the Axis of Evil, then, as you say, the Bush administration is very interested in making a big brouhaha about that and targeting their military machine at those customers.
If there are allies that are participating in the network, then the U.S. government turns a blind eye to their involvement.
Same thing for when it's neocons here in the United States, too.
Exactly.
Speaking of allies, let's talk about this AQCon thing.
My best understanding here really is that what he sold, Iran, North Korea, Libya, was the leftover junk from the Pakistani's garage sale.
This was not the best stuff that they use in order to make their nuclear weapons.
This was the garbage they had left over, right?
Well, that's true, as far as we know, as far as information that is public.
But those three countries that you mentioned, Libya, North Korea, and Iran, are the only three countries that ever get named as customers of the network.
Reportedly, up to 12 different countries have bought product from AQCon, and for some reason or other, those nine countries never get mentioned.
Well, I guess there's this new New York Times story.
It's again by Broad and Sanger, who I guess are in the Olympic contest versus Judy Miller and Michael Gordon for who can make up the most stuff in the New York Times.
And these guys have consistently, these two, Broad and Sanger, have consistently gotten this story wrong in major ways, including most especially sticking in my craw.
Their just acceptance of our government's assertions that the North Koreans were enriching uranium with a secret uranium enrichment program, which of course was never proven.
They literally acted surprised when it turned out that the North Korean nuke that they tested was based on plutonium, not uranium.
So I already have a bone to pick with these two extremely lousy, sloppy reporters at the New York Times, but now they have this new article.
In Nuclear Net's undoing, a web of shadowy deals, and this starts to get into the CIA's angle on this network, how far into this network the CIA was and what was going on with that.
And they do mention other countries involved in the New York Times article.
They talk about how some of the CIA dealings with the AQ Khan network, if you want to call them that, went through Malaysia, that they had some kind of secret program in Malaysia.
Is that right?
Well, the head of the particular ring, you know the stories about the Tinner family, ostensibly, but that particular procurement ring that the Tinners were involved with, this is a Swiss family, was run by AQ Khan, obviously, at the top, but then BSA Tahir, who is a Malaysian citizen.
In fact, he was married to a woman whose father was a retired diplomat.
So, you know, it starts to get pretty spooky quite quickly.
But he was running his operation basically from Dubai, which is a free trade port, basically, which means that products can come in and out very easily without being checked, you know, to see what's in the tank.
This particular procurement ring was exposed back in 2003 when a ship called BBC China was on its way to Libya with product from this particular ring, which included, you know, the Tinners, as we've mentioned, but also a couple of Turkish guys called Salim El Gidez and Junoz Cire.
So a lot of the product came through Turkey.
Turkey was a key supplier to the network as well, both in manufacturing particular, you know, hardware, but also as a trans-shipment point, just as Dubai was.
Now, is there any indication that these guys were working for the CIA as well?
Well, it's interesting.
When you look at the record of the people in this ring that was busted, you know, none of them got any jail time.
One of them got four months, I think, in jail, but, you know, that was about it.
So all the Tinner family have just been basically pardoned by the US government, effectively.
And when you look through the other participants in the ring, all of them have received the same treatment.
I can't say specifically that the Turkish guys were working for the CIA, but, you know, neither of those guys got charged either.
And this is an important point.
The AQ Khan network, or this particular ring, appears to be operating today, and all of the companies that were, you know, dealing in the network are all freely operating today, including companies in the United States.
Yeah, you were asking about whether the Turkish guys were part of the CIA operation or whether they were working for the CIA, and I don't know the specific answer, but if you look at the treatment that the Tinners got, effectively being pardoned by the US government, and you look at all of the other players in the network, all of them got similar treatment.
Essentially, no jail time, and all of their companies are still operating freely.
Now, according to this New York Times story, what the Tinners were doing is they were supplying this network, but in working with the CIA, they were sabotaging the vacuum tubes, sabotaging different pieces of equipment.
And it's interesting because you think back about some of the massive failures that the Iranian program has had.
There was a few different occasions, I believe, where their centrifuges flew apart into a million pieces, weren't working right at all.
At least in one case, it was blamed on the microbes in the oils on a fingerprint left on one of the centrifuges, that kind of thing.
This story here says that the CIA, the Tinners, in working for the CIA, were sabotaging this equipment that they were selling to the Iranians and to others.
Right.
I don't know any of the specifics on that, but the New York Times did report that that was a CIA operation that blew up the Iranian program.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
And when you read the New York Times article, you can see that all they do is quote U.S. government press officers.
So it's hard to...
The guys in Sanger and Broad didn't do any objective reporting there at all, so it's hard to peer through and see what's real and what's nonsense.
Yeah, it's a real problem in having to rely on the New York Times for any of this stuff.
I guess here's what I'm really trying to understand here, Luke, and I don't know if you really know the answer to this, but I guess it sort of seems like you have factions within the government, or at least individuals within the government, who, as Cybele Edmonds has indicated, were participating in this nuclear black market ring, protecting people involved in it here in the United States and making their ends that way.
Does it seem right that the CIA was trying to stop this thing, that they were really trying to thwart this ring, or they were running this damn thing from the beginning?
I mean, why didn't they stop AQ Khan 25 years ago?
I was just about to say, as you said in the setup, that CIA was aware of this activity going back to 1976, and in fact twice asked the Dutch government not to arrest AQ Khan.
So they were watching it from the absolute genesis, and they watched the Pakistani program be developed.
In Richard Barlow's case, he was the U.S. government's expert on Pakistan's nuclear program, and he set up a few sting operations and tried to arrest a few people, and people within the U.S. government kept on sabotaging his arrests.
So the U.S. government has watched the whole program from the beginning, so it's a little bit difficult to understand what's going on.
And if they argue that it's a sting operation, then it's completely failed, because Pakistan got the bomb and have sent their plans and blueprints to, as I say, up to 12 different countries.
And the important thing, when you come back to Sabal Edmond's case, is that she reports that the program wasn't a state-to-state operation.
There was a lot of individual players who were selling stuff on the nuclear black market, and once that information gets out there, then there's no telling where technology ends up, including in the hands of terrorist groups.
Well, yeah, and this is something that has always been interesting to me.
She says that she, well, I don't know if she said this outright, but I think it's pretty safe to say we know that this is what she means, that she overheard on some of the intercepts while working for the FBI, Mark Grossman warned members, Mark Grossman being a neocon, a career employee type at the State Department, that she overheard him warning members of this black market to beware of Brewster Jennings & Associates.
They're not to be trusted.
That's the agency working against us.
And it turns out that that was where Valerie Plame worked.
And when Robert Novak broke the story and said the name of Brewster Jennings, Valerie Plame's front company, on CNN in 2003, well, I guess only the stragglers inside the network were being clued into anything.
Mark Grossman had already tipped them off two years before.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, Savelle's case deals with a lot of things.
Only one of them is the nuclear black market.
But this Mark Grossman who you mentioned, he used to be the ambassador to Turkey and was then promoted to a couple of different positions and during the time that you mentioned was the number three guy at the State Department.
He was facilitating a number of different mechanisms for extracting information from the U.S. government and supplying the nuclear black market network all for personal profit.
One thing they were doing was installing Ph.
D. students who were moles, foreign Ph.
D. students who were moles, in every nuclear lab in the country and every nuclear agency.
So they were planting moles there to suck out information, which was then reported back to, let's say, the Turkish embassy in the U.S. and then that information then went from the Turkish embassy, I think, to the Israeli embassy and the Pakistani embassy and then back into the AQ Khan network and elsewhere.
You know, a lot of the people that Savelle heard on these wiretaps were, you know, even though they might have been facilitating stuff for, let's say, Pakistan, they'd make a copy of the information as it passed through their hands and then go and sell that to, you know, whoever wanted to buy it.
Now, there's no indication, is there, that the Turks are actually working on a bomb of their own, right?
This is just the Turkish deep state making money on the black market.
Well, there's no evidence that the Turkish government is working on a nuclear weapon, but they have been working on a nuclear program and earlier this year they announced plans to start enriching uranium in Turkey and opened up their contracting to foreign businesses to help facilitate that.
Now, Turkey, as I said, has long had a problem with the nuclear black market, including but not limited to the two guys that I mentioned earlier.
Back in the year 2000, President Clinton tried to sign an executive order to allow Turkey access to U.S. nuclear technology, but there were a couple of whistleblowers, we don't know who they were, in the U.S. government who threatened to, it appears, threatened to out, you know, certain activities.
So, the Clinton administration had to put a hold on that deal to supply Turkey with nuclear technology.
Just earlier this year, you know, the U.K.
Times, Sunday Times, started reporting on the nuclear black market element of Sabel's case and just a few weeks later, President Bush signed another executive order allowing Turkey to have this technology.
So, there's a lot of suspicious activity going on in Turkey, including supplying the network and, you know, who knows what else they're up to.
Wow.
You know, it's amazing how much George Bush Jr. has in common with Bill Clinton because that was exactly what Clinton did when the Justice Department began investigating some of the technology transfers to China, which, whether you think they were a good idea or not or don't care, were illegal at the time and Clinton then signed waivers, during the investigation, signed waivers legalizing what had been done criminally and it sounds like that's exactly what George Bush did here in this case with Turkey.
That's certainly my working hypothesis, yeah.
Incredible.
Alright, now, a big part of this Times article by Broad and Sanger is what's not in there and what you do in your blog entry at letsabeledmanspeak.com and at dailycoast.com and again, the blogger name is Lukery, Luke Ryland, Lukery Land you can find him at the Daily Coast, letsabeledmanspeak.com but what you do here is you fill in some of the omissions that Broad and Sanger felt fit to leave out of their New York Times article so you've already mentioned this guy Tahir and I'm not going to try to pronounce the names of these Turkish guys but why don't you just take us through the list here explain who some of these people are, what your understanding is about their involvement in this network and why, I don't know, apparently you think they're important enough that they should have been included in the newspaper of record.
Right, well, we have these Turkish guys and then we have another Turkish guy in the US, a guy called Zeki Billman now Sabel apparently overheard him dealing with, I believe, the Turkish embassy in the United States facilitating the transfer of nuclear hardware now Sabel finished at the FBI in early 2002 and translated wiretaps starting back in 1996 so during that period she heard evidence of this Zeki Billman and his company, Giza Technologies based in New Jersey, facilitating the transfer of nuclear technology now he was officially busted in 2003, I believe when he sold some, what they call spark gaps, or the centrifuges I guess to an Israeli businessman based in South Africa called Asher Carney now Carney then sent the gaps to the Pakistan military so there's another element, again in the US, that's been covered up by not only the New York Times, but just about everybody else the LA Times did run a story about it in 2004 so again we've got the Turkish connection there and there are a couple of other people that I've mentioned there Peter Griffin, who is a British man now there was a multi-million dollar, four year investigation into his activities now that investigation has dropped just earlier this year too and then there was another manufacturing plant in South Africa the point is that all of these guys, you know, were busted but doing very serious things being key participants in the Khan Network and they've all gone free now the New York Times, for one reason or another, chose not to mention any of this and my hypothesis is that they were, you know, by focusing just on the Kinner family and again misreporting even that they've allowed these Turkish guys and the Turkish connection to be whitewashed from the public knowledge of what's going on and not just Turkey as well, but a lot of this network was based in Dubai which is a key money laundering centre for this activity and other activities as well again, they're allies of the US it appears that the New York Times, acting as a government mouthpiece doesn't want these pieces of information made public and you know, they're public, but not publicised yeah, it's interesting, the editorial policy there of course, as you said in some of your opening comments there anything that has to do with Iran oh boy, that gets all the coverage anything that has to do with North Korea well, Broad and Sanger can't wait to help the Bush administration indict them right, I mean, if you look at the latest piece there by Broad and Sanger you know, it's basically a warmongering piece against Iran it's a four page article that was based on the front page of the New York Times now, if you go to the final page, the fourth page you'll see a quote saying there's no evidence that Iran got any of these designs from this particular network so, you know, it's nice of them to bury that at the end of the article there's no evidence that the Iranians got what?take it back a step back in May of this year, the Swiss government the Tinner family were arrested in 2004 and have been sort of awaiting trial since then but the US government doesn't want them on trial because that would expose the fact that they were working for the US government so in May of this year, the Swiss government announced that they had destroyed 30,000 pages of evidence relating to the Tinner case some of that evidence was bomb design, apparently other evidence included contracts with the CIA and other such information that would be, let me say, embarrassing to the CIA so back in May, you know, the big story was that the Swiss government had destroyed all this information at the behest of the CIA, basically to keep the Tinners out of court some of the headline stories at the time indicated that there was a complete set of bomb you know, nuclear bombs that could fit miniature nuclear bombs that could fit on a mini warhead you know, which made it very dangerous so that's the reason why all this information was destroyed, purportedly at the time, you know, there was always threats about whether Al-Qaeda or Iran got the information and if you look at the latest New York Times article it says Iran about 50 times at the bottom of the page it says there's no evidence that Iran got any of this information right, and of course it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever because, well, correct me if I'm wrong you obviously know much more about this than me but the so-called bomb design in question is for a plutonium bomb, right?
I believe this is another type of bomb this is the bomb that Pakistan exploded in 1998 that's what the argument was yeah, I mean, the thing is that the Iranians could shut down their nuclear reactors and keep them off for a year and then spend another year or more going through the process of attempting to harvest weapons-grade plutonium out of their reactors to make one of these bombs assuming they have the rest of the technology to make it fire right and everything else which there's no evidence that they have but this is not a plan for how to make a bomb out of uranium which is actually the basis for all the accusations against Iran that they're trying to perfect the enrichment of uranium so that once they're really good at it I guess the fantasy is that they will then withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty kick the inspectors out and start making a bomb out of that so, you know, none of this is really consistent at all in fact, it almost seemed like perhaps it was part of the same narrative of disinformation when they started talking again at the same time that this tenor stuff was coming out they started bringing up the so-called North Korean-Syrian nuclear reactor that supposedly was going to make plutonium for an Iranian bomb and here's just a bunch of garbage all crammed together into one narrative it's almost like they're trying to license a war in Iraq again or something yeah, it certainly looks like that and the key point here is that if you're looking and this is why my first article yesterday mentioned those people and my upcoming article which will be out in a couple of days talks about which countries are involved in this activity and Iran isn't even up on the list really you've got Sanger and Broad pushing the Iran narrative but you've got US allies who, when you look at the facts are much more complicit in this sort of activity and we should be bombing them, arguably I'm not arguing for that, but along the same lines you've got countries like Turkey who are much more in these activities than Iran is and you know, if the war party wanted to make sure that the Iranians didn't buy a ready-made plutonium core on the black market somehow which I haven't seen any indication that you actually have bomb-ready material being sold in this market so far you can tell me if you know otherwise but if they really wanted to stop that well maybe they shouldn't have outed Brewster Jennings and associates which, it was their job, right?
Plame was working on Iran, that was her job was making sure that that's the kind of thing that did not happen supposedly anyway, I don't know it's funny in the latest New York Times article they say the reason that they interrupted the Swiss prosecution of the Tinners was for two reasons one, because it would lead to embarrassing revelations about the CIA's relationship with the Tinners and secondly, because they didn't want to deter future moles from working with the CIA if one of their moles gets thrown in prison, i.e. the Tinners then it'll be hard to recruit new moles, that's their argument and as you say, they did exactly the same thing to Valerie Plame, their own agent there's a certain, let me say, irony there yeah, well and also we're talking about Switzerland the neutral country, where everybody does their banking and never has a war with them and they're not supposed to be taking part in stuff like this and it's my understanding that for a private citizen in Switzerland to be part of a covert operation of a second country against a third is a big time crime in that country that these guys under the laws of the Swiss state ought to be going to prison but instead, they're going along with what the CIA says that's exactly right it certainly caused an uproar in Switzerland at the time, the president made the announcement on May 31 and he said, oh we have to destroy all of this information which was in their hands and just parenthetically, there's also multiple copies of it existing in the black market anyway he said we have to destroy this information so it doesn't get in the hands of terrorists and rogue states which was just complete nonsense so that caused an uproar the court system wasn't aware of it Parliament was in an uproar interestingly, just prior to that sorry, they destroyed that information the announcement was made in May but they destroyed all of that information back in November 2007 so they kept it secret for six months immediately prior to that I think it was the Attorney General of Switzerland came to visit the CIA and to ask what he could do or not so he met with the CIA and said, well, give us all the information he also met with the State Department and they said, well, just destroy it because we don't want the bombs to get into the hands of terrorists but very interestingly he also met with the Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and head of the FBI Robert Mueller in other words, now as you know those guys only have domestic jurisdiction so why is the Swiss Attorney General meeting with Mueller and Gonzalez?because obviously there are key U.S. citizens who are involved in domestic activity that was supplying this network as well criminal activity did Mueller and Gonzalez go to Switzerland?no, the Swiss guy came to visit them in the U.S.
I see and coming back to Sabal's case she overheard lie-taps of companies like Giza Technology and people at the American-Turkish Council facilitating this sort of activity so there are U.S. persons involved in this probably not as a part of the CIA's operation they're freelancing a lot of them and that's why Sabal's been calling for public open hearings so that this stuff can be exposed because that endangers not only the U.S. public safety but also the safety of people all around the world she wants public open hearings she's been calling for them for six years now and as you know, any congressman can call hearings all read the information into the public record for six years nothing's happened so hopefully one of the congressmen will stand up soon and invite her to testify not only her, but also the FBI agents that she worked with who are also outraged about this sort of activity and they've been silenced by various means but they're all willing to come and testify under oath too yeah, well it sounds like there's a lot to cover up here in terms of covert operations that may or may not be looked upon kindly by the American people but also individual criminality including members of both parties and so nobody has any sort of motivation to do anything about this do they?in Congress?well, you're exactly right it's a bipartisan problem because it has been going on for years and Sabal had hearings with congressmen of two different parties Charles Grassley and Patrick Leahy for example Democrat and Republican the first thing they did was say well this sounds like a sting operation we better go and check so they went and checked with the FBI and CIA came back and said oh no, actually it's not a sting operation this is criminal activity let's proceed but then they were shut down and haven't done anything since so you're right there appears to be no incentive for any congressman to stand up and hold these hearings because it will damage his or her party in the process and by the way there's an honest congressman left somewhere, Scott I'm not confident but hopefully there's one there somewhere yeah, well doesn't it matter which committee they're on or not?any congressman can do something?well, I think I'm not sure of the exact details there are certain committees obviously but there are, you know I would guess at least ten different committees that could hold hearings into this case but I believe that any congressman can read any of this classified information into the public record for example, the Department of Justice Inspector General did a report into Sabal's case a classified report still classified report that validated everything that she said as far as we know and any congressman can read that into the public record hmm well, there's very few to choose from but there are a couple of good men up there we'll see by the way Phil Giroldi, a former CIA officer I guess he was the station chief in Turkey is that right?
I forget anyway, he was on this show and he said it is inconceivable that the CIA would use somebody like, say, Mark Grossman for example, at the State Department as part of some sting operation on this level this kind of thing and there's no way the CIA would not even ask and the State Department would say hell no anyway that's exactly right that's exactly right and you had Joe Lauria one of the co-authors of the Sunday UK Sunday Times series on Sabal's case on your show just recently and he said that he'd heard that a lot of the US media which had been, you know remarkably silent on Sabal's case had been told the US media had been told not to write about it because, you know it was a sting operation now this is after the UK Times did a three part series on the story so, you know if there was a sting operation in place hypothetically it had already been exposed by the UK Times and anyone else over the last six years that's been paying any attention the US media accepts that it's a sting operation we're not going to write about it even though, you know it's just nonsense at face value right, of course a sting operation on this level is a great news story if that's what it is but, you know another thing that Lauria talked about was trying to get I think one of the editors or something one of his bosses at the Boston Globe to let him write about this for the Boston Globe and they just couldn't hear it wouldn't couldn't hear it what do you mean?like actual real international criminality by the most powerful some of the most powerful people in America come on nah couldn't be so just I don't even want to hear it they told him they just could not even understand how you know even open their mind to the possibility and he said I forget his exact words but something to the effect of you know hear no evil see no evil speak no evil they just can't can't see it at all right and then on the other hand you get guys like William Broad and David Sanger writing for the New York Times that just spoon fed information from press offices and write it up verbatim as I say this story broke in Switzerland in May 31 New York Times was silent on it for two weeks I think until June 16 when they finally wrote a story and said oh you know there are these complete bomb plans floating around and we have no idea who's got them obviously being fed by the by the CIA sources you know it took them two and a half weeks to even write about it now we have it and they're saying oh actually sorry about that it wasn't actually a complete bomb and there's no way that terrorists could use it but you know they don't apologize for their earlier reporting which was completely complete scare tactic and designed to cover up this particular story that's come out in the US media just now it was the CIA that destroyed all the evidence in the Swiss case to protect themselves do you remember was it James Risen that wrote the story about how they had hired I think a Russian to funnel some bomb plans but that were deliberately done wrong in just a couple of places but it turned out that the mistakes the built in mistakes were so obvious that what they amounted to were actual bomb plans the CIA just furnished you know the best kind of bomb plans they could straight to the Iranians in an attempt to frame them basically right that was called Operation Merlin yeah and you know watching Khan and his network since 1976 what have they got to you know to show for their efforts absolutely nothing they did that thing with Operation Merlin that you've just described and in you know in this current article in the New York Times they talk about Turkey these guys in Turkey sending centrifuge motors to Iran that got you know 50 motors that got blown up or something that you mentioned earlier now there's a quote in the article they don't check you know they test the motors before they use them you know it's pretty simple stuff and in the meantime you know there's all this presumed bomb plans that were on this CD that the tinners had has been passed around to god knows how many people so you know this information the CIA has been watching it and they can't argue that they were watching it you know to keep a control of the network because it got completely out of hand and all this information has been distributed to the world so first of all let me again remind the audience for those just tuning in I'm talking with Luke Ryland he is the proprietor of the blog letsabelleedmanspeak.blogspot.com he also blogs over there with the democrats at the daily coast and one of the major themes in the Sabelle Edmonds story and in all this nuclear black market stuff is the role of the foreign lobbyists here in the United States the American Turkish Council there's another one involved I forget the name of it but I like it and this seems to all kind of also surround or have something to do with so-called legitimate arms sales to countries like Turkey NATO expansion and that kind of thing is that right?yeah yes?no?anything?yeah exactly I think Justin Armando has a piece there today on the foreign lobbyists earlier this year Sabelle put a as you know she's gagged in a way to expose some of the people who are the guilty parties in her case she checked up the law and she's allowed to publish public photos of public figures so she put up on her website a thing called the State Secret Privilege Gallery or some such now that's broken up into three different sections the first section has the State Department and Pentagon officials Richard Perle Douglas Fyfe Brent Scowcroft and Larry Franklin and others in the first section which is current and former congressmen some of them who were she knows were bribed by the Turkish lobby guys like Dennis Hastert Tom Lantos Roy Blunt and then she also has the ex-congressmen who are doing the bribing Stephen Solar the ex-Democrat congressman and Bob Livingston another powerful ex-congressman and so there's this system where the Turkish lobby bribes certain congressmen for various reasons and then uses them you know I guess they catch them on tape or whatever accepting the money and then they can leverage that into higher and higher bribes to get more and more favors so you have the current congressmen being bribed by former congressmen who were you know bribed when they were congressmen by other congressmen so the Turkish lobby is very good at doing this and Richard Perle and Douglas Fyfe were you know they were lobbyists for Turkey back in the day too it's notable that the congressman who succeeded Newt Gingrich as speaker of the house of representatives these aren't just nobodies in the congress these are the leaders of the house right and I'm sure that's no accident although in in Haft's case for example you know they had him going back they were bribing him going back to 1996 or 97 which was when he was a nobody but a lot of the illegal activity conducted by Turkish interests in the United States particularly in you know Chicago Illinois and that's Haft's home territory so they might have got him for that reason you know he was a nobody and was somehow promoted to speaker of the house and whether they had a role in facilitating that I don't know and when you talk about him being on the payroll from back in the 1990s this investigation goes back to the 1990s that's why you can know that or how you can know that they were bribed by the Turkish interests and back in 1998 the Clinton administration Janet Reno in fact one of your favourites went about appointing a special prosecutor to you know investigate these crimes they had so much evidence all on the FBI wiretaps you know this stuff is indisputable as happens with a lot of these cases particularly now the FBI they kept their investigation open they just didn't do anything well Sibel was very careful to point this out that a lot of the investigations that she was involved in was in counterintelligence which was basically a monitoring service counterintelligence you know they just watch stuff and try and learn what's happening they have a lower threshold of evidence with a warrant for probable cause for criminal investigations so you can use the evidence in court later that's exactly right most or all of the stuff that Sibel translated came through FISA warrants but when the FBI agents come across criminal activity involving US persons you know they're supposed to hand that investigation over to counterterrorism or counter criminal investigations got shut down these people have been getting away with it since 1996 at a minimum yeah well now first of all to the audience my friend Luke here is calling from the other side of the planet in Tasmania that's why there's a little delay on the line I'm sorry I keep interrupting you even though you can't hear me interrupt you for another minute very little clarity surrounds the accusations about their involvement in whether it's drugs the nuclear black market whatever it is that Sibel Edmund seems to have found out about them well as you know as Phil Giraldi said on your show you know when you asked him about it Richard Perle is an agent of influence for Israel and there's a CIA and when Perle and Feist were out of office back in the late 80s I believe they set up a lobbying company called International Advisors Inc that was you know I think it was a six or seven hundred thousand dollar per year contract to lobby for Turkey their activities drew a lot of unwanted attention there was a 1996 article in the Wall Street Journal that basically the American Turkish Council which was modelled on you know the Israeli lobby AIPAC Sibel calls the AIPAC and ATC sister organisations and there were sister investigations the same investigations that she talks about on the Turkish side were also taking place on the Israeli side and coming up with a lot of the same answers so I think that this ATC that they set up is the nexus of this nuclear black market in the United States it's also the centre for a lot of the drug narcotics trafficking in the United States that's why the FBI was originally looking at it and as you said the CIA was looking at the American Turkish Council and in the Sunday Times article on Sibel's case she said that there were people at the Pentagon who maintained a database of individuals and the information that they had access to so let's say people at the American Turkish Council wanted to recruit Larry Franklin Larry Franklin's personal weaknesses are that he's gay or that he has money problems or that he likes prostitutes or whatever whatever the hook might be and then the operatives the Turkish and Israeli operatives would then go and recruit Franklin who has access to the FBI's files on all the people that he wants to blackmail is that what you're saying there well exactly where he got that information from we're not sure it's not publicly a well they're blackmailing a lot of people in town sure but it used to be a personal and profit reasons now please elaborate what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that I don't know what you know about Brent Scowcroft other than that
