A coup in Turkey before any attack on Iran ??

[Peter Presland]

In light of Erdogan's very public put-down of Shimon Peres over Operation Cast Lead, together with his subsequent NATO-displeasing policy shifts on Israel in the denoument to the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, this seems to me like a VERY plausible prognosis and forecast for unfolding events in Turkey.

From Aangirfan's blog:

Before any attack on Iran, there may be a military coup in Turkey.

Turkey's government is friendly with Iran and has fallen out with Israel.

On 1 August 2010, Turkey's Supreme Military Council held the second day of its annual meeting to discuss promotions and dismissals of officers in the armed forces, then this Turkish Military Council seeks the promotion of coup suspects

The military wants to promote 11 generals who have been charged with plotting to bring down the government. Reportedly, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for a cancellation of the promotions for the 11 generals. But he lacks the power to cancel appointments wanted by the generals.

Abdullah Gul, the president, does have that power because Military Council decisions become law only after being signed by the president. In the past, no president has dared veto the military’s plans. Reportedly, Gul has asked the military not to go ahead with the promotions, hinting that he would not sign the Yas documents if the 11 generals were promoted.

A Turkish court recently issued arrest warrants for the 11 generals and 91 other serving and retired officers, with dozens of generals among them. They are to stand trial in December 2010 for their suspected participation in a plan, code-named Sledgehammer. Allegedly, Sledgehammer was hatched in 2003 and called for a coup against the government of Mr Erdogan.

According to the prosecution, the plotters planned to bomb a mosque in Istanbul and to provoke tensions with Greece in an effort to cause unrest and prepare the ground for a military coup. Only one of the 102 suspects has been arrested so far. The others have appealed against their arrest warrants. Some officers, including retired high-ranking generals, are standing trial as suspected members of Ergenekon, a fascist group with links to the CIA and Mossad.

Constitutional amendments designed to curb the generals’ political influence will be put to a referendum in September 2010.

The government is struggling to deal with a fresh wave of attacks by Kurdish rebels, who are said to be backed by Ergenekon, the CIA and Mossad.

What with the escalating Israeli-Lebanon skirmishing; renewed Gaza and West-Bank/Jerusalem conflict and the incessant rhetoric about Iran - plus a whole lot more bubbling away under the surface - ie how about this for an example of US insider pot-stirring? - Daniel Pipes interview with the 'Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry' in the July/August edition of "Israel - My Glory" magazine no less:

Daniel Pipes: I think it's realistic for the Israelis to attack [Iran] and do real damage. Now, what constitutes success, I'm not exactly sure. There are many, many questions.

If I were [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, I would say to [U.S. President Barack] Obama:

"Why don't you take out the Iranian nukes? Or else we will. And we will not do it by trying to fly planes across Turkey and Syria or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. We will do it from submarine-based, tactical nuclear weapons. You don't want that; we don't want that; but that's the way we can do this job for sure. You do it your way so we don't have to escalate to that."

That would be a way of applying pressure. There are so many details which I'm not privy to. But that would be my kind of approach if I were the Israelis.

Nice Christian/Jewish 'Love thy neighbour' and 'do unto others' guys eh?

The Middle-Eastern pot gives every impression of approaching boil-over point to me.

Stand by

[Magda Hassan]

The Kurds and the Armenians are the weak spot there too. Then there is Ocalan's former right hand man recently saying that he, Ocalan, has been working for the Turkish deep state at least since he was imprisoned. I haven't had a chance to research this yet but plan on doing so asap. Danny Jarman posted about it here a few days ago.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Kurds and the Armenians are the weak spot there too. Then there is Ocalan's former right hand man recently saying that he, Ocalan, has been working for the Turkish deep state at least since he was imprisoned. I haven't had a chance to research this yet but plan on doing so asap. Danny Jarman posted about it here a few days ago.

Here's the thread about Ocalan being a Gladio asset:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=4336

The government is struggling to deal with a fresh wave of attacks by Kurdish rebels, who are said to be backed by Ergenekon, the CIA and Mossad.

Strategy of Tension?

Oh yes.

[Magda Hassan]

Israel is supposed to be training some of the Kurds and Israel is also making a big thing in the UN about the Armenian genocide being recognised as such. These are things that they have only recently taken an interest in.

[Peter Dawson]

Daniel Pipes is a walking, talking, zionist wet-dream. The only trouble with that being a lot of his most fanciful dreams have come true in the last 10 years.

Israel would at least want their new missile shield installed before anyone attacked Iran, because unless they obliterate Iran's military (a job only the US could do) there will be missiles headed towards Israel, which will have negative domestic PR consequences in Israel, so I don't think there's any chance that they or the US will attack any time soon. Then there's the question of whether/how well the missile shield would work in practice.

I'm still leaning heavily towards looking at the "attack Iran" talk as a rhetorical device to keep people's attention away from all the mundane atrocities the US & co. get away with on a daily basis. The best way to stop people questioning whether the West has just committed big war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq is to seriously propose that the most moral thing to do next would be to attack yet another, third country, for same reasons you attacked the first two.

All this isn't to say that Israel wouldn't be interested in straightening out the situation in Turkey to their advantage.

[Peter Presland]

Daniel Pipes is a walking, talking, zionist wet-dream. The only trouble with that being a lot of his most fanciful dreams have come true in the last 10 years.

Israel would at least want their new missile shield installed before anyone attacked Iran, because unless they obliterate Iran's military (a job only the US could do) there will be missiles headed towards Israel, which will have negative domestic PR consequences in Israel, so I don't think there's any chance that they or the US will attack any time soon. Then there's the question of whether/how well the missile shield would work in practice.

I'm still leaning heavily towards looking at the "attack Iran" talk as a rhetorical device to keep people's attention away from all the mundane atrocities the US & co. get away with on a daily basis. The best way to stop people questioning whether the West has just committed big war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq is to seriously propose that the most moral thing to do next would be to attack yet another, third country, for same reasons you attacked the first two.

All this isn't to say that Israel wouldn't be interested in straightening out the situation in Turkey to their advantage.

A lot of perceptive stuff there Peter - and you may well be right about 'attack Iran' as a smoke screen. The thing is these things can take on a life of there own.

I have reservations about Webster Tarpley but his latest missive in Global Research 'Obama is preparing to attack Iran' is thought provoking (as always). Also, there's a recent RT interview with Michael Chussodovsky in which he opines that an Israeli attack could not take place without US/NATO sanction, but that, on the balance of probability, an attack WILL happen following manufacture of a credible cassus belli. There are a whole raft of things pushing almost inexorably in the direction of an attack and the stuff coming out of the US Congress is hardly designed to cool the issue either.

As for Pipes - here is my WikiSpooks page on him - by all means add to it/edit it or otherwise chop it about.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Webster Tarpley's article is well worth the read:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...leId=20487

Meanwhile:

“We’ll return Syria to the Stone Age by crippling its power stations, ports, fuel storage and every bit of strategic infrastructure if Hezbollah dare to launch ballistic missiles against us,” said an Israeli minister, who who was speaking off-the-record, last week.

The warning, which was conveyed to Damascus by a third party, was sent to reinforce an earlier signal by Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister. “If a war breaks out the Assad dynasty will lose its power and will cease to reign in Syria,” he said earlier this year.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo...101106.ece

A clear and presumably delibeate echo of the words of Colin Powell's pointman, Richard Armitage, in the days following 9/11:

The Pakistani President (Pervez Musharraf) said that, following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the US made some "ludicrous" demands of Pakistan.

"The intelligence director told me that Richard Armitage said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age'," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/5369198.stm

Richard Armitage, (aka Colin Powell's "white son" after their Phoenix Program exploits during the Vietnam War), subsequently denied the claim.

I'm inclined to believe the Pakistani version of this, ahem, conversation.

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...#post18371

[Ed Jewett]

Bombing people back to the Stone Age has been a US meme since the close of World War II.

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age."

Why the Atomic Bombings Could Have Been Avoided

The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1997 (Vol. 16, No. 3), pages 4-11.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

If the bastards get their way, we all may arrive simultaneously.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ed - good find.

So it is originally a fantasy of Dr Strangelove himself, Curtis LeMay, to bomb other countries "back to the Stone Age".

Clearly this ghastly ghost still roams the corridors of the highest levels of western military and geopolitical planning.

[Peter Presland]

As the 'attack on Iran' smoke and mirrors manoeuvrings continue, this from Debka File:

Russian S-300s in Abkhazia block possible Israeli air route to Iran
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 12, 2010, 10:12 PM (GMT+02:00)

Russian S-300 interceptors now in Abkhazia

US and Israeli military sources told debkafile Thursday, Aug. 12, that a threat from Georgia was not the reason why Russian posted advanced S-300 interceptor batteries Russia in Abkhazia and air defense weapons in South Ossetia on the northern shore of the Black Sea -as Moscow officially maintained, but rather possible moves by the US and/or Israel against Iran and its nuclear facilities.
Georgia's armed forces do not run to the sophisticated warplanes, missiles or drones that would warrant establishing the high-powered S-300 interceptors for defending the breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.Ordinary air defense batteries would do for deterrence.
Therefore, US military sources believe Moscow placed the sophisticated batteries on the Black Sea shore more as a counterweight for the US Sixth Fleet warships present in the Mediterranean and Black Seas and the two big American bases close to the latter waterway - the Mikhail Kogalniceanu Air Base near Constanta, Romania, and the Bezmer Air Base used by the US Air Force just 50 kilometers from the southern shore of the Black Sea.
Their location gives the US Air Force the freedom to operate over both the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
Our military sources disclose that attention was drawn in Moscow and Tehran to the exercises the Israeli Air Force has been conducting from the two American bases to simulate strikes against Iran's concealed nuclear sites.
They noticed in particular the Israeli Yasur CH-53 helicopter which crashed in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania on July 26, killing six Israeli airman and a Romanian flight captain. It was obvious to Russian and Iranian observers from the way the CH-53 crashed and the veil of secrecy clamped down by Israeli authorities that it had been engaged in practicing touch-and-go attacks on nuclear sites which the Iranians have holed up in tunnels burrowed in the sides of lofty mountain precipices.
DEBKfile's intelligence sources do not doubt that Russian placed the top-of-the line air defense systems in Abkhazia for intercepting flights taking off from the American bases in Bulgaria and Romania and heading east over Georgia and Azerbaijan and on to the Caspian and Black Seas to northern Iran.
Byt deploying the S-300s, Moscow has put paid to any plans Israel may have had for using this northern route for attacking Iran.
The deployment was also a message of reassurance from Moscow to Tehran: Although Russia is withholding the advanced S-300 interceptors from Iran it has its own methods for blocking an American or Israel raid on the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities.