http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1894035from
Minstrel Boy
Sibel Edmonds: Turkey, drugs and 9/11
Interesting analysis by John Stanton of the link of international drug trafficking to the 9/11 conspiracy, which pays attention to the Turkish link alluded to by Sibel Edmonds. (Remember, while an FBI translator, she was courted by a Turkish spy ring which appears to have operated with the agency's sanction.)
Here's a memorable quote: "50 billion dollars worth of foreign debt is nothing, it is two lorry loads of heroin."
Turkey, Drugs, Faustian Alliances & Sibel Edmonds
by John Stanton
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 29, 2004
Taking Turkey as the focal point and with a start date of 1998, it is easy to speculate why Sibel Edmonds indicated that there was a convergence of US and foreign counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism and US national security and economic interests all of which were too preoccupied to surface critical information warning Americans of the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, who would have believed drug runners operating in Central Asia? And besides, President Clinton was promoting Turkey, one of the world’s top drug transit points, as a model for Muslim-Western cooperation and a country necessary to reshape the Middle East.
The FBI’s Office of International Operations, in conjunction with the CIA and the US State Department counter-narcotics section, the United Kingdom’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, Pakistan’s ISI, the US DEA, Turkey’s MIT, and the governments and intelligence agencies of dozens of nations, were in one way or another involved in the illicit drug trade either trying to stop it or benefit from it. What can be surmised from the public record is that from 1998 to September 10, 2001, the War on Drugs kept bumping into the nascent War on Terror and new directions in US foreign policy.
...
In 1998, the US Department of State (DOS) was finally forced to admit that Turkey was a major refining and transit point for the flow of heroin from Southwest Asia to Western Europe, with small quantities of the stuff finding its way to the streets of the USA. In that same year, Kendal Nezan, writing for Le Monde Diplomatique, reported that MIT, and the Turkish National Police force were actively supporting the trade in illicit drugs not only for fun and profit, but out of desperation.
"After the Gulf War in 1991, Turkey found itself deprived of the all-important Iraqi market and, since it lacked significant oil reserves of its own, it decided to make up for the loss by turning more massively to drugs. The trafficking increased in intensity with the arrival of the hawks in power, after the death in suspicious circumstances of President Turgut Özal in April 1993. According to the minister of interior, the war in Kurdistan had cost the Turkish exchequer upwards of $12.5 billion. According to the daily Hürriyet, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5 billion in 1996...Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the police and the army could possibly organize trafficking on such a scale. Drug barons have stated publicly, on Turkish television and in the West, that they have been working under the protection of the Turkish government and to its financial benefit. The traffickers themselves travel on diplomatic passports... the drugs are even transported by military helicopter from the Iranian border."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/June04/Stanton0629.htm