Shuffle Between Ken Gladney and Union Over Health-care Instant Net Myth

Shuffle Between Ken Gladney and Union Over Health-care Instant Net Myth
The conservative blogosphere is absolutely atwitter with news that an activist was attacked by union thugs at a town hall meeting this week in St. Louis. It's the best the right-wing can do to deflect blame for unleashing mini-mobs on town hall forums: They did it!

The tale was first told in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Kenneth Gladney, 38, a conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with "Don't tread on me" printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room at St. John's Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was awaiting treatment for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack.

The newspaper had no witnesses, just Gladney's account. Then Gladney's attorney got involved and from conservatives' perspective, the tale got better and better:

He went to the ground. Subsequently, two other SEIU representatives or members, however you want to say it, jumped on top of him, yelled racial epithets at him...kicked him, punched him...He sustained some injuries to his back, some bruising.

And even better:

The SEIU member used a racial slur against Kenneth, then punched him in the face. Kenneth fell to the ground. Another SEIU member yelled racial epithets at Kenneth as he kicked him in the head and back. Kenneth was also brutally attacked by one other male SEIU member and an unidentified woman. The three men were clearly SEIU members, as they were wearing T-shirts with the SEIU logo.

Gladney was clearly beaten at length (it was "brutal"), and at least from this description, was lucky to survive with his life, right?

Mary Katharine Ham wrote up an especially excited write-up at The Weekly Standard about the vicious union thugs and how Gladney was severely beaten. The only mistake Ham made was including a YouTube clip of the incident; a clip that pretty much undercuts the entire tale of run-away union violence.

Go watch the YouTube video. (Or, the "shocking video," as Power Line hypes it.) The first thing you notice when the camera starts rolling is a union member already sprawled out on the ground with somebody standing over him. No explanation of how he got there (pushed, shoved, punched?) and Ham couldn't care less. Then yes, Gladney is pulled to the ground by somebody wearing a union shirt. (At the :06 mark.) But instead of Gladney being beaten and punched, as his attorney describes, and instead of union "thugs" standing over him and threatening him, Gladney bounces right back on his feet in approximately two seconds and the scuffle ends.

That was the savage "beating" the conservative blogosphere can't stop talking about?

The only real mystery from the incident is why Tea Party member Gladney, who's seen up-close after the brief encounter walking around and talking to people and who appears to be injury-free, then decided to go to the hospital to treat injuries to his "knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face." All that from a two-second fall to the pavement?

Also unclear is why he contacted a newspaper reporter, or why his attorney wrote up lavish accounts and sent them to conservative bloggers, or why Gladney and his attorney appeared on Fox News.

FYI, according to his attorney, Gladney plans on filing a civil lawsuit against the union.

UPDATED: The Hill erroneously reported that Gladney had been "hospitalized" after being "attacked." As you can see from the video, Gladney was not "hospitalized." (i.e. Rushed away by ambulance.) Instead, as the Post-Dispatch correctly reported, Gladney "said he sought hospital treatment."

video at link: Gladney is the guy in the tan shirt waving down police after his supposed beating.

CNN Interviews Republican Corporate Health-care CEO That Ran Hospitals Like McDonalds

CNN Interviews Republican Corporate Health-care CEO That Ran Hospitals Like McDonalds
A CNN anchor today tore down Rick Scott, the founder of an organization that's been funding anti-health care reform protests and the former CEO of a hospital company that, as Sanchez pointed out, paid $1.7 billion to settle charges of overcharging Medicare and Medicaid.

It was brutal.

Sanchez started simply, asking Scott, the founder of Conservatives for Patients' Rights, if he takes credit for the recent disruptions at health care reform events. Scott responded, "It'd be nice to, right?" before saying he thought everyone should go to meetings, but "oughta be nicer about it."

Then Sanchez started in on him, describing the charges and fines against Scott's company, the Columbia Hospital Corporation.

"Some would argue, and it would be hard to say they're wrong, that you would be the poster child for everything that's wrong with the greed that has hurt our current health care system," Sanchez said.

Scott tried to defend himself, saying other companies were fined in the big health care fraud scandals of the 1990s. Sanchez stopped him.

"How much more wrong can you be than what you just said? Not only is your company screwed up, and you just admitted to it, but you said look at all the other companies, they did the same thing," Sanchez said. "It doesn't sound like a sterling system we have here, does it?"

And when Scott tried to shirk responsibility for the fines, saying they were leveled after he left the company, Sanchez put his foot down.

"No, no, no, no! You're playing with the facts, sir!" he said.

"Some people are gonna look at your record ... and say, 'This is the guy leading this charge? Is he the one we should be listening to?' Not exactly a perfect past when it comes to what's right for taxpayers and patients," Sanchez said.

"Absolutely," Scott said.

Sanchez also tore into Scott for buying up all the hospitals in an area and shutting down all but one. "Is that good for patients?" he asked.

"Absolutely. Now, first of, that didn't happen," Scott responded. He went on, saying it's good for patients to go to the hospital with the best equipment. Sanchez also reminded Scott of charges of poor, dirty conditions at his hospitals.

Republicans Shouting Down Health-care Debate, Shutting Down Democracy

Obama Style Health-Care Reform Will Work

Mass. bashers take note: Health reform is working
PUNDITS and politicians who oppose universal healthcare for the nation have a new straw man to kick around - the Massachusetts reform plan that covers more than 97 percent of the state’s residents. In the myth that these critics have manufactured, this state’s plan is bleeding taxpayers dry, creating nothing less than a medical Big Dig.

The facts - according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation - are quite different. Its report this spring put the cost to the state taxpayer at about $88 million a year, less than four-tenths of 1 percent of the state budget of $27 billion. Yes, the state recently had to cut benefits for legal immigrants, and safety-net hospital Boston Medical Center has sued for higher state aid. But that is because the recession has cut state revenues, not because universal healthcare is a boondoggle. The main reason costs to the state have been well within expectations? More than half of all the previously uninsured got coverage by buying into their employers’ plans, not by opting for one of the state-subsidized plans.

This should be exciting news for those fiscal conservatives, including both Republicans and “blue dog’’ Democrats, who claim to support the goal of universal coverage while despairing over its budget impact. But that’s not what you hear from the Massachusetts bashers. Trying to scare off the nation from helping the uninsured get coverage, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said recently, “You don’t have to look any further than the universal healthcare mess in Massachusetts to see disaster ahead.’’ New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Monday accused President Obama of “pushing a health plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts.’’

The Republican governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, has also gotten his licks in. Costs in Massachusetts, he wrote in the Washington Post Monday, “have been dramatically higher than expected.’’ Pawlenty’s purpose in attacking this state’s plan might be both to discredit a national plan and to score points against former governor Mitt Romney, one of the architects of what Massachusetts has accomplished. Romney, of course, is a possible rival of Pawlenty for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

Whether out of ignorance or convenience, all three bashers have it wrong. Unlike the Big Dig, health reform came in on time and under budget. It will be proportionately more expensive nationally to provide coverage for the uninsured than it has been here simply because the state began the task with a much lower rate of uninsured, 7 percent, compared with the US rate of 17 percent. But a national plan that relies, as Massachusetts’ does, on both government-subsidized insurance and a mandate on employers to offer insurance or pay a penalty (in Massachusetts’ case, a very small penalty) should be able to cover nearly everyone without busting the budget.

In Massachusetts, cost estimates for the reform plan before its passage in 2006 were so low that Romney and the reform law’s Democratic supporters in the Legislature were able to get away without creating a new tax to fund it. After the costly Wall Street bailout and the $787 billion stimulus package, that option is not open to President Obama and Congress. But Congress should not allow itself to be buffaloed by false claims about Massachusetts into fearing a tsunami of red ink.

There is one other statistic about the Massachusetts plan that politicians, in particular, should appreciate. According to Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government, the law’s approval rating in June 2008 was 69 percent. That is a figure officeholders can only dream about.

Tea bagger "patriot" lynch mobs out to stop all health-care debate

Tea bagger "patriot" lynch mobs out to stop all health-care debate
Jane has the deets on Freedomworks, the lobbyist-funded group activating the teabag rallies at health care town halls across the country. Somehow CBS, with its large cadre of producers and researchers, put a Freedom Works spokesman on its air last night without disclosing their ties, but a blogger with virtually no staff can uncover all this useful information about the organization.

Freedomworks isn't some "organic grassroots" outfit. It's run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey -- corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladie's man. The President and CEO of Freedomworks is Matt Kibbee, who was trained by Lee Atwater. Kibbe was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Paul Krugman noted, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin nexus, as well as other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

Freedomworks has a long history of skunk works. In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a "single mother" in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

David Koch is also Chairman of the other major outfit heavily involved in these "organic" uprisings, Americans for Prosperity, whose members lynched Democrat Frank Kratovil in effigy. Koch is the 19th richest man in the world. They recently renamed the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater.

These aren't just some organizations that these guys gave money to. They run them.



Americans for Prosperity, incidentally, are on the record about busing their people to rally against reform in 13 states.

Brian Beutler of TPMDC - again, with resources not nearly as large as CBS - has a lot more. He notes the role of Conservatives for Patients Rights, founded and funded by Rick Scott, a disgraced former head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company who paid the largest fine in US history, $1.7 billion dollars, for overcharging state and federal health plans. This guy has sunk millions of dollars of health industry money into anti-reform ads, and if you read Beutler's piece, they are clearly orchestrating this "organic" uprising among the teabaggers.

The people on the ground may have their own extremist, anti-government beliefs. But they are being activated by corporate lobbyist-backed astroturf groups. And what is the mindset that this industry money is giving rise to?

From Burt Prelutsky's August 3 Townhall.com column:

When it comes to our national security, keeping the likes of Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and John Kerry in the loop would be the height of insanity. The only loop appropriate for most of the ninnies in Congress is one hanging from the branch of a very tall tree.

So far as I can tell, the only real difference between members of Congress and cockroaches is that one of the two species has a few more legs than the other.



Every Republican officeholder should be asked the question: are you with civil discourse, or with those advocating the lynching of Democratic politicians?

Health care reform will not be advanced by putting out bullet-pointed debunks. It will be advanced by forcing politicians to line up for or against lobbyist-supported and -funded lynch mobs.

Republican Culture of Corruption - Bushies Behaving Badly – A guide to GOP scandals

The Conservative Culture of Corruption continued.

The Ugly Racism of Conservatives Will Be Their Undoing

The Ugly Racism of Conservatives Will Be Their Undoing
It'd be nice to think that the recent surge in overtly racist rhetoric on the right has been a case of random opportunism, provoked by the coincidence of a wealthy black Harvard professor yelling at a white cop who arrested him in his own home. Like, who could've predicted that the professor would be a friend of the Harvard law school graduate who is president, or that president would then say on camera that the cops acted "stupidly"? Or that the incident would happen just as Congress was going into a clinch over health care reform?

The Henry Louis Gates imbroglio did come out of nowhere, and it did give President Obama's opponents a chance to howl about the onerous burdens "reverse racism" puts on the fading white majority in this country. You may not see how that justifies the big-time bigotry that took over the discourse last week, but hey, it's a white thang: There were Birthers insisting that Obama's presidency is illegitimate because he was "born in Kenya"; CNN's Lou Dobbs trying to legitimize the Birthers, and of course, an angry Rush Limbaugh fuming that Obama "is an angry black man." None of them, however, could hold a fuse next to Glenn Beck, who asserted that the biracial POTUS is a "racist" who has "a deep-seated hatred of white people," something so unhinged that even the Brown-Haired-Guy-Who's-Not-Steve-Doocy (the Fox & Friends cohost who had to apologize a couple weeks ago for blurting that Swedes and "other ethnics" are different "species") called him on it.

It's not only angry white male pundits who are waving the white victimhood flag. It's also the chair of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who last Thursday called the kettle dusky by excoriating Democrats who've defended Sonia Sotomayor for "giving cover to groups and individuals to nurture racial grievances for political advantage."

With every passing day it gets harder to think of this sudden dialing-up of whiny hate speech as sheer coincidence. Instead, it's beginning to look inevitable -- so much so that maybe the real question is, What is it about health care that brings out the latent racism in the GOP?

The answer is simple: For two or three generations, Republicans have defeated progressive reform of the health care system by hinting that it would mean redistributing wealth from whites to blacks. As Beck himself said, practically redefining "welfare queen" as "healthcare queen": "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America, and they're all driven by President Obama's thinking on one idea: reparations."

Nevertheless, when we see that Obama's poll numbers have dropped back to the margin of victory he had in the election and have even gone underwater on his handling of health care, it really shouldn't make us give up on the prospect of reform.

Sure, Professor Gates's run-in with Cambridge's Finest wasn't planned, any more than the rump rebellion at GOP Rep. Mike Castle's townhall meeting about health care by a Delaware chapter of the Birthers (video of which catapulted the loonies to national prominence) was. There was no "conspiracy" linking those two events, but the mainstream media quite predictably chose to make them headliners, all but obliterating detailed discussion of health care reform for more than two weeks (and this just when the subject was beginning to resurface after the blanket coverage of Michael Jackson's and Sarah Palin's exits).

The news media could have instead been running, say, commentary about Michael Moore's Sicko, like the interview Bill Moyers did with CIGNA's former PR chief just two weeks ago; or they could have aired footage of the uninsured being wheeled out onto the sidewalk outside hospitals to "walk it off." That they didn't isn't a conspiracy, either -- I mean, those endless ads for "purple pills" and aphrodisiacs on the evening news are just the way capitalism works, and don't necessarily mean that Big Pharma has already paid for that microphone. Right?

The Obama people are always talking about how they don't want the perfect to become the enemy of the good, and that often seems to suggest that they have no notion of the bad and the ugly. In fact, they were exquisitely attuned to the American racial divide, at least during the campaign. Obama's nomination was a way of calling the bluff behind the GOP's Southern Strategy -- it forced this sort of overt racism out into the open, where before it was always cloaked behind anti-tax or anti-welfare rhetoric, and that exposure helped split the Republican coalition. The Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll showing that 58 percent of Republicans either don't believe Obama was born in the U.S. or aren't sure (compared to 7 percent for Dems and 17 for independents), confirms Bill Maher's formulation: Not all Republicans are racist, but if you are a racist these days, you're probably a Republican.

Who knows where it will end up, but the not-terrible news right now is that there seems to have been just enough of a demographic shift toward racial equality in America to pass Obama's own middling approach to health care reform, as furthered watered down as it will likely be. After all, the Medicare bill passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 is not the program we have today; there have been 44 years of amendments, fill-ins, and gap coverages that have created the best-loved insurance program in America. The kinds of arguments Obama has to sell are hard to make: his health care plan is by definition a Trojan horse, a gradual glide toward guaranteed care that will take several more years (at least) of handing out emergency room addresses to the poor, unemployed, and unlucky before it really kicks in. Arguing that we have to settle for something less than a single-payer system like those in every other advanced industrial country can seem rhetorically dishonest, or at least lame -- and people are starting to distrust Obama's ability to discipline the Dems and get it done.

But watching the Republican Party morph into the National Association for the Advancement of White People should give us all hope, not despair: Anything that brings 'em out of the closet and gets 'em running naked through the streets shouting, "I'm the victim here, dammit!" will only ensure their minority status over the long run.

Republican Hate Radio Spreading Cruel Medicare Rumors

Republican Hate Radio Spreading Cruel Medicare Rumors
A campaign on conservative talk radio, fueled by President Obama's calls to control exorbitant medical bills, has sparked fear among senior citizens that the health-care bill moving through Congress will lead to end-of-life "rationing" and even "euthanasia."

The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.

But on right-leaning radio programs, religious e-mail lists and Internet blogs, the proposal has been described as "guiding you in how to die," "an ORDER from the Government to end your life," promoting "death care" and, in the words of antiabortion leader Randall Terry, an attempt to "kill Granny."

Though the counseling provision is a tiny part of a behemoth bill, the skirmish over end-of-life care, like arguments about abortion coverage, has become a distraction and provided an opening for opponents of the president's broader health-care agenda. At a forum sponsored by the seniors group AARP that was intended to pitch comprehensive reform, Obama was asked about the "rumors." He used the question to promote living wills, noting that he and the first lady have them.

Democratic strategists privately acknowledged that they were hesitant to give extra attention to the issue by refuting the inaccuracies, but they worry that it will further agitate already-skeptical seniors.

The side battle also undercuts what many say is the more fundamental challenge of discussing sensitive, costly societal questions about how to align patient wishes at the end of life with financial realities, for both the family and taxpayers.

"I don't think it's about cutting costs; it's about quality," said Tia Powell, director of the Montefiore-Einstein Center for Bioethics. Pointing to extensive research, she said: "The good news is if you get people in an environment that is of their choosing, where there is support and they have good pain control, it is very likely to extend their life."

Not since 2003, when Congress and President George W. Bush became involved in the case of Terri Schiavo, who lay in a vegetative state in a hospice in Florida, have lawmakers waded into the highly charged subject, said Howard Brody, director of an ethics institute at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The attacks on talk radio began when Betsy McCaughey, who helped defeat President Bill Clinton's health-care overhaul 16 years ago, told former senator Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) that mandatory counseling sessions with Medicare beneficiaries would "tell them how to end their life sooner" and would teach the elderly how to "decline nutrition . . . and cut your life short."

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.) said they object to the idea because it "may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia."

Brody says the proposal to reimburse counseling sessions "is an excellent idea," because too few doctors or adult children know what an elderly person wants, even sometimes when the patient has signed a medical directive.

About one-third of Americans have living wills or a document designating a health-care proxy who would make decisions if they become incapacitated, said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit group that focuses on the rights of the terminally ill. "But it's alarming how rarely they actually get honored because often doctors haven't familiarized themselves with the patient's wishes," she said.

Wesley Smith, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, said Obama's focus on controlling costs and the legalese in the bill have contributed to the confusion. "People fear these counseling sessions will push toward less care because the point is to cut costs," he said. The average cost of care for a chronically ill Medicare patient in the final six months of life is $46,400, according to Dartmouth University data.

The emphasis on cost containment means "you'll end up with denial of care for the elderly," said Charmaine Yoest, president of Americans United for Life, who also testified against the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. Possible abortion coverage and end-of-life care in the health bill will be "a watershed battle for the life community."

In the past two weeks, AARP has fielded a few thousand calls from people who mistakenly think the legislation would require every Medicare recipient to "choose how they want to die," said James Dau, a spokesman for the organization.

Though he is "willing to give the benefit of the doubt" to some who may be confused, Dau complained that the effort to "intentionally distort" the proposal "is just plain cruel to anyone who is forced to make one of these difficult decisions at the end of life."

The American Medical Association, which supports the provision, has received similar inquiries and protests from patients who fear doctors will begin denying care late in life.

"These are important discussions everyone should have when they are healthy and not entering a hospital, so they are fully informed and can make their wishes known," said association President J. James Rohack. "That's not controversial; it's plain, old-fashioned patient-centered care."

After letting the controversy simmer on talk radio and the blogosphere, expecting that it might blow over, Democrats have begun to respond.

The allegations of mandatory counseling and euthanasia "are blatantly false," Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.) wrote colleagues. The accusations are "as offensive as they are untrue."

Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for US till 9/11

Bombshell: Bin Laden worked for US till 9/11
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell on the Mike Malloy radio show, guest-hosted by Brad Friedman (audio, partial transcript).

In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained 'intimate relations' with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, "all the way until that day of September 11."

These 'intimate relations' included using Bin Laden for 'operations' in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These 'operations' involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner "as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict," that is, fighting 'enemies' via proxies.


As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from 'actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia') as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.

Control of Central Asia
The goals of the American 'statesmen' directing these activities included control of Central Asia's vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.

The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.

In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)

Accordingto Sibel:

This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.

Uighurs
Sibel was recently askedto write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that "our fingerprint is all over it."

Of course, Sibel isn't the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:

"were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China."

And also that:

"Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia."

In a separate interview, Margolis said:

"That illustrates Henry Kissinger's bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America's enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.

The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden's collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this."

Rogues Gallery
Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she publishedeighteen photos, titled "Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery," of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called 'President-in-exile' of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called 'government-in-exile' was 'established' on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.

Also featured in Sibel's Rogues Gallery was 'former' spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani's 'government-in-exile' of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his "Xinjiang Project" for Rand Corp is apparentlythe blueprint for Turani's government-in-exile. Sibel has openly statedher contempt for Mr. Fuller.

Susurluk
The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.

Sibel states that "a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered 'certain' aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs)."

One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chiefof Counter-Terrorism for Turkey's intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel's Rogues Gallery. Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel's gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman's underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel into the spying ring.

The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.

Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo
Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel's gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated$25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.

US interests also convergedwith those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.

Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.

State Secrets
Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony. In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting " 'sensitive diplomatic relations,' protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia..." This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.

******more at the link.