Think Tank floats Gladio-like Black Op Scenarios for Turkey

[Gouda]

The think tank entertaining strategy of tension and other ideas for plausibly deniable black ops would be the Hudson Institute.
And we know that Gladio structures operated (operate) in Turkey as well.

Terrifying scenarios discussed at US think tank
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detay ... ink=114232

A Washington-based think tank is reported to have had participants at a closed-door meeting, including Turkish military officials and civilian experts, discuss various crisis scenarios for Turkey in a brainstorming session.

Assassination of the recently retired chief of Turkey’s Constitutional Court, Tülay Tuğcu; a plot where 50 people would lose their lives in a terrorist act claimed by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in İstanbul’s Beyoğlu district; and a cross-border operation by the Turkish military into Iraq were among the possible scenarios discussed at the Hudson Institute, known for its anti-Islam discourse and neocon stance, both favored at the time of the US invasion of Iraq. Sources close to the think tank said that a significant number of the participants from the US objected to the scenarios floated during the session, asserting that they were too “unrealistic,” and refrained from making comments on the possibilities mentioned. (...)

More details revealed on scandalous meeting
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detay ... ink=114287

A workshop organized on Turkey by a Washington-based think tank last week turned out to have an invitation text for participants that was no less scandalous than the meeting itself.

While the workshop included discussions on strange and terrifying scenarios in Turkey as part of a brainstorming exercise, the invitation text listed terrorist attacks and assassinations as possible Turkish case scenarios to inform the participants about the exact topics beforehand.

(...)

Sources confirm that various Turkish military officials and civilian experts, the Hudson Institute’s Turkey expert Zeyno Baran, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s son Kubat Talabani, as well as Brig. Gen. Suha Tanyeri and military attaché Brig. Gen. Bertan Nogaylaroğlu participated in the meeting.

The text of the scenario briefly envisions chaotic days for Turkey beginning with a suicide bomber killing 50 people, including tourists, on the pedestrian Beyoğlu Street in İstanbul. ... Beneath this scenario, the invitation text lists brainstorming questions such as: “How would the military operation change if it turns out that the two attacks were not the work of the PKK, but al-Qaeda?”

Scenario: Into northern Iraq

June 18: A suicide bomber crashes his explosives-laden pick-up truck into the police station in Beyoğlu, a crowded shopping and cultural district of Istanbul frequently visited by tourists. The resulting detonation collapses the front of the police station and severely damages several nearby buildings. The attack claims the lives of at least 50 police officers, shoppers and tourists, while critically wounding over 200. Within hours, rumors spread that the PKK was behind the horrific attack, although no organization has yet claimed responsibility.

June 19: Interior ministry officials announce that the attacker was trained at a PKK camp in northern Iraq. The Turkish General Staff concurs with the interior ministry’s findings. General Büyükanıt warns that PKK terrorists will continue their attacks in major cities as long as the Turkish-Iraqi border is left unprotected and the command and control structure of the terrorist organization is still intact. He maintains that the border can only be protected from both sides, and therefore, a military incursion should be enacted immediately. The US State Department releases a statement urging Turkish authorities to remain calm despite the severity of the attack.

June 23: Iranian officials announce that an Iranian truck convoy carrying ammunition to Damascus has been attacked by PKK operatives in Iran. They claim that the Americans instructed the PKK to attack the train in order to stop the supplies from reaching Syria. Iran, angered by this attack, offers to provide logistic and military support for any Turkish operation against the PKK in northern Iraq.

June 24: Another suicide attack occurs outside the Constitutional Court in Ankara. This attack is timed so as to coincide with the departure of President of the Court Tülay Tuğcu. She is mortally wounded and dies later that day at a nearby hospital. Investigators confirm that the explosives used in this attack were the same kind as those used in the Beyoğlu bombing.

June 25: Dual statements from the interior ministry and the General Staff point to the PKK’s involvement in the attack. Millions of Turks take to the streets in Ankara, Istanbul, Samsun and Izmir to denounce this violence and call for the military to deal the PKK a mortal blow.

June 25-28: In an effort to acquire political capital in the pre-election period by appealing to the ultranationalists, Prime Minister Erdoğan successfully lobbies Parliament and acquires authorization for a cross-border operation. The General Staff identifies the following objectives for such an operation: 1) to undertake precision assaults against designated regions; and 2) to halt the flow of weapons and militants into Turkey.

June 29: At dawn, 50,000 Turkish troops cross into Iraq, establishing several checkpoints along the Iraqi side of the border and engaging in minor skirmishes with PKK fighters. The Iraqi government strongly condemns the actions of the Turkish military, demanding that it leave immediately. The US State Department’s response to the incursion is similar, asserting that Turkey’s actions will only serve “to destabilize the region and could very well end up decreasing Turkish security in the long run.” However, late in the afternoon, the White House releases a statement saying that Turkey has “the right to defend itself against terrorism, just as all sovereign countries do.”

June 30: Massoud Barzani denounces the Turkish “invasion,” and vows that the Peshmerga will defend Iraqi Kurdistan.

Key questions for discussion
Are the responses of the various actors (White House, State Department, etc.) to the Turkish operation realistic?
How would Iraq’s neighbors respond? How would Israel respond? How would the Arab League respond?
How would the EU respond? Would this effectively spell the end of Turkey’s accession talks?
How would Russia respond? Would it seek to exacerbate tensions between the US and Turkey? How?
Given the treacherous terrain and difficulties of guerilla warfare, can the Turkish army conduct a successful operation against the PKK camps located in northern Iraq?
What would be the consequences of a clash between a small band of Peshmerga and Turkish Special Forces, resulting in multiple casualties from each side?
Would the Turkish Armed Forces welcome the Iranian proposal to conduct a joint operation against the PKK in northern Iraq? How would this cooperation impact US-Turkish relations? How would it affect NATO solidarity?
How would Baghdad react to this operation? Would it throw its full support behind Barzani and the Kurds? Or would it side with Turkey?
Would the US Congress move to threaten sanctions against Turkey, as it did during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974?
How would new evidence that the June 24 bombing of the Constitutional Court was actually perpetrated by al-Qaeda affect the Turkish campaign?
Potential Wildcards
A new set of clues indicates that the suicide terrorist who attacked the police station in Beyoğlu was trained by Hezbollah in a Syrian camp.
In a raid near Kandil Mountain, Turkish security forces confiscate two-year-old MOSSAD training manuals and videos showing Israeli agents side by side with the PKK militants.


A Peshmerga unit on patrol in northern Iraq panics and attacks a group of Turkish Special Forces. After the battle, it is revealed that one of the gunned-down Peshmerga is, in fact, an American soldier who was training the Kurdish militia. This soldier, however, was not authorized to be on patrol with the Peshmerga.

[tal]

"plus ça change plus c'est la même chose" or "it's deja vu all over again"

....In the nineteenth century, the great headquarters of international terrorism was London. The defense of the empire required operations which the public decorum of the Victorian era could not openly avow. The main vehicle for British terrorist operations in Europe was Giuseppe Mazzini and his phalanx of organizations starting from Young Italy: Young Germany, Young France, Young Poland, Young Turkey, Young America. Mazzini was a paid agent of the British Admiralty, and received his funding through Admiralty official James Stansfeld. Mazzini’s terrorism was directed against what the British called “the arbitrary powers”: Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Each of these had a large population of oppressed nationalities, and Mazzini created a terrorist group for each one of them, often promising the same territory to two or more of his national sections. The important thing was that rulers and officials be assassinated, and bombs thrown. The net effect of all this can be gauged by the complaint of an Austrian about Mazzini’s operations in Italy: Mazzini aimed at making Italy turbulent, he lamented, which was bad for Austria, but without making Italy strong, which might be bad for the British. Mazzini operated out of London during his entire career, which simply means that he was officially sanctioned, as were anarchists like Bakunin and a whole tribe of nihilists. Mazzini worked well for Europe – including the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. For other parts of the world, the Admiralty had specialized operations.

State-sponsored terrorism can have a number of goals. One of these is to eliminate a politician, business leader. Back around 1500, Niccolò Machiavelli included a long chapter on conspiracies in his masterwork, The Discourses. For Machiavelli, a conspiracy meant an operation designed to assassinate the ruler of a state, and to take his place by seizing power. Modern terrorism is more subtle: by eliminating a leading politician, it seeks to change the policy direction of the government that politician was leading. The paradox here is that a faction or network penetrating the state sometimes undertakes the elimination of the head of state or head of government, and often a very eminent and beloved one.

A good example is the French Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle would not accept the demand of the US and UK to dictate policy to France as a member of the Atlantic Alliance. De Gaulle took France out of the NATO supernational command, ejected the NATO headquarters from its home near Paris, condemned the Vietnam war, refused the British entry into the European Economic Community, challenged the US to pay its foreign obligations in gold rather than paper dollars, called for a free Quebec, and otherwise demonstrated creative independence from the Anglo-Americans. The result was a series of approximately 30 assassination attempts, carried out by French right-wing extremists. but with the Anglo-American secret services lurking in the background. None of the attempts to assassinate De Gaulle was successful.

Another example was Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state oil company ENI. Mattei challenged the hegemony of the US-UK seven sisters oil cartel. He offered Arab oil producers a 50-50 split of the profits, far more than the Anglo-Americans were offering, and he was willing to help the Arabs with their own economic development. Mattei was growing powerful enough to challenge the subordination of Italy to the US-UK domination of NATO when his private jet crashed near Milan in October 1962, an event which can be attributed to sabotage on the part of the CIA and its alliances, among them some of the French Algerians who were also the enemies of de Gaulle. After Mattei’s death, ENI began to abide by the rules of the Anglo-American oil cartel....

link

[Gouda]

The toolbox is deep and old. Thanks tal.

And when one looks at Col. Ralph Peter's redrawn, redivided map of the middle east and reads a little from oddly prescient imperial apologists like Robert Kaplan, one realizes that Turkey is in for some shit. It is one of the Key, not key, strategic hinges in the world right now - perhaps even more than Italy was during the cold war.

[jingofever]

Jim Lobe wrote an article looking at the neoconservative agenda regarding Turkey: Perle Prefers Military Intervention to Islamic Party Election Sweep in Turkey.

Earlier this year Prime Minister Erdogan talked about the "Deep State". I wonder if he is feeling pressure.

[chiggerbit]

Makes a person wonder how hot this will get before it boils over.

http://tinyurl.com/2xsx39

TUNCELI, Turkey (Reuters) - Two Kurdish militants rammed an oil-filled truck into a Turkish police station on Saturday in a suicide attack, army sources said, marking a sharp escalation of separatist violence.

After the explosion other members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) attacked the station in the eastern province of Tunceli and the army responded with an operation supported from the air, the sources said.

The two militants in the truck were killed but no further details were available on the death toll.

The armed forces have called for an operation into northern Iraq to deal with militants based there and a large attack could increase pressure on the government to agree to one.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who faces elections next month, has said he agrees with the army over northern Iraq, and that an operation could be launched if necessary, but has not reconvened parliament to approve such a move.

The United States, which like Ankara considers the PKK a terrorist organization, has said it opposes a cross-border operation into relatively stable northern Iraq.

Saturday's attack comes just weeks after militants killed seven paramilitary policemen at a station in the same province, in which a militant was also killed. The gendarme paramilitary police work alongside the army in the troubled east and are responsible for security in rural areas.

That attack was part of a wider escalation of violence in the recent months in which dozens of soldiers and paramilitary police have been killed. Army figures showed on Saturday that the PKK has carried out 76 attacks with mines and other explosives in the last six months alone.
The PKK, which has been fighting for a homeland since 1984, was also blamed for a deadly suicide bombing in Ankara last month.

Earlier on Saturday around 2,000 people marched through Istanbul protesting against the increasing violence, following a call from Turkey's popular and powerful army for the public to show a mass response to PKK attacks.

[Gouda]

Mein Kampf sales soar in Turkey
http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/ ... 09,00.html

[chiggerbit]

I know a lot of people on this board suspect that it isn't incompetence that runs this administration but rather a deliberate intention to break down Iraq into more manageable pieces. But I really have to wonder, when we have this example of the administration's inability to deal with the complexities of this specific region's issues. Trying to view this area's hodgepodge of ethnic groups and cultures as being simply two-dimensional rather than multi-facetted is too lame for words. I shudder every time I see some soldier being interviewed over there and he refers to the oppostion as "bad guys".

[tal]

From Armed Forces Journal June 2006:



[/url]

[chiggerbit]

Well, if the military has a map like that, then the military must understand what's going on. And that's not a sarcastic comment, btw.

[chiggerbit]

Dang, look at that "Free Kurdistan" chunk! Don't let the Turks see this map.

[tal]

Don't let the Turks see this map.

Too late. The Turks saw this map a year ago Muslims alarmed over redrawn map for Islamic world



Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”

The Map of the “New Middle East”

....A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been causally allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the “New Middle East.”...


....The Turkish Protest at NATO’s Military College in Rome

Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters’ map of the “New Middle East” has sparked angry reactions in Turkey. According to Turkish press releases on September 15, 2006 the map of the “New Middle East” was displayed in NATO’s Military College in Rome, Italy. It was additionally reported that Turkish officers were immediately outraged by the presentation of a portioned and segmented Turkey.8 The map received some form of approval from the U.S. National War Academy before it was unveiled in front of NATO officers in Rome.

The Turkish Chief of Staff, General Buyukanit, contacted the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, and protested the event and the exhibition of the redrawn map of the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.9 Furthermore the Pentagon has gone out of its way to assure Turkey that the map does not reflect official U.S. policy and objectives in the region, but this seems to be conflicting with Anglo-American actions in the Middle East and NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan. ....

[chiggerbit]

From Juan Cole's site today:

Turkey is giving the US military in Iraq an ultimatum: clean out the 5,000 PKK guerrillas holing up in Iraqi Kurdistan or Turkey will invade and take care of the problem itself.

[chiggerbit]

Says this Mr. Peters:

Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.

[Gouda]

Robert Novak alert. Novak dutifully reporting on covert US-Turkish special ops inside Turkey that "could be concealed and always would be denied," as former Cheney aide, Eric S. Edelman puts it. Now that it has been revealed, is that an admission...and to what end? This factional infighting between terminators is really a drag on smooth US foreign policy.

***

Bush's Turkish Gamble
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00859.html

By Robert D. Novak
Monday, July 30, 2007; Page A15

The morass in Iraq and deepening difficulties in Afghanistan have not deterred the Bush administration from taking on a dangerous and questionable new secret operation. High-level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq.

While detailed operational plans are necessarily concealed, the broad outlines have been presented to select members of Congress as required by law. U.S. Special Forces are to work with the Turkish army to suppress the Kurds' guerrilla campaign. The Bush administration is trying to prevent another front from opening in Iraq, which would have disastrous consequences. But this gamble risks major exposure and failure.

The Turkish initiative reflects the temperament and personality of George W. Bush. Even faithful congressional supporters of his Iraq policy have been stunned by the president's upbeat mood, which makes him appear oblivious to the loss of his political base. Despite the failing effort to impose a military solution in Iraq, he is willing to try imposing arms -- though clandestinely -- on Turkey's ancient problems with its Kurdish minority, who comprise one-fifth of the country's population.

The development of an autonomous Kurdish entity inside Iraq, resulting from the decline and fall of Saddam Hussein, has alarmed the Turkish government. That led to Ankara's refusal to allow U.S. combat troops to enter Iraq through Turkey, an eleventh-hour complication for the 2003 invasion. As the Kurds' political power grew inside Iraq, the Turkish government became steadily more uneasy about the centuries-old project of a Kurdistan spreading across international boundaries -- and chewing up big pieces of Turkey.

The dormant Turkish Kurd guerrilla fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) came to life. By June, the Turkish government was demonstrating its concern by lobbing artillery shells across the border. Ankara began protesting, to both Washington and Baghdad, that the PKK was using northern Iraq as a base for guerrilla operations. On July 11, in Washington, Turkish Ambassador Nabi Sensoy became the first Turkish official to assert publicly that Iraqi Kurds have claims on Turkish territory. On July 20, just two days before his successful reelection, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened a military incursion into Iraq against the Kurds. Last Wednesday, Murat Karayilan, head of the PKK political council, predicted that "the Turkish Army will attack southern Kurdistan."

Turkey has a well-trained, well-equipped army of 250,000 near the border, facing some 4,000 PKK fighters hiding in the mountains of northern Iraq. But significant cross-border operations surely would bring to the PKK's side the military forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government, the best U.S. ally in Iraq. What is Washington to do in the dilemma of two friends battling each other on an unwanted new front in Iraq?

The surprising answer was given in secret briefings on Capitol Hill last week by Eric S. Edelman, a former aide to Vice President Cheney who is now undersecretary of defense for policy. Edelman, a Foreign Service officer who once was U.S. ambassador to Turkey, revealed to lawmakers plans for a covert operation of U.S. Special Forces to help the Turks neutralize the PKK. They would behead the guerrilla organization by helping Turkey get rid of PKK leaders that they have targeted for years.

Edelman's listeners were stunned. Wasn't this risky? He responded that he was sure of success, adding that the U.S. role could be concealed and always would be denied. Even if all this is true, some of the briefed lawmakers left wondering whether this was a wise policy for handling the beleaguered Kurds, who had been betrayed so often by the U.S. government in years past.

The plan shows that hard experience has not dissuaded President Bush from attempting difficult ventures employing the use of force. On the contrary, two of the most intrepid supporters of the Iraq intervention -- John McCain and Lindsey Graham-- were surprised by Bush during a recent meeting with him. When they shared their impressions with colleagues, they commented on how unconcerned the president seemed. That may explain his willingness to embark on such a questionable venture against the Kurds.

[chiggerbit]

Edelman's listeners were stunned. Wasn't this risky? He responded that he was sure of success

You know, it's become the national joke about how incredibly stupid Bush himself, is, but what is striking me now is how incredibly stupid the neo-cons are, too. That surprises me.