Coincidence? Bush visits Turkey ...Turkish kidnapped, Bombs explode?



Istanbul, Turkey-AP) June 26, 2004 - NATO says diplomats have informally agreed ahead of Monday's summit to grant Iraq's request for military help.
Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says diplomats have reached an initial agreement to the request of the Iraqi interim government. It wants help in training its security forces.

Earlier, the US and the European Union issued a joint statement backing Iraq's request for military assistance, and agreeing to reduce Iraq's international debt, estimated at $120 billion.

President Bush met with EU leaders in Ireland. He's on his way to Turkey for a NATO summit, where the troop-training deal is expected to be sealed Monday.
WIS10 News
 http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1971091


June 26- BAGHDAD - Iraqi militants loyal to al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi yesterday said they had seized three Turkish hostages and would behead them unless Turks stopped working with U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
In the latest attack aimed at derailing the transition to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, guerrillas detonated a car bomb in the town of Hilla, 100 km south of Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding 40, the U.S. army said.

Al Jazeera satellite television showed footage of the three men said to be Turkish hostages crouching before masked gunmen and holding up their passports. It said it had received the footage and a statement from Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group, threatening to kill the Turkish captives within 72 hours.
Haarezt
 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/443640.html


Leftist groups labelled 'terrorist'

Thursday, June 24- ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Bombs exploded in Turkey's two main cities on Thursday before a visit by President Bush to Ankara and a NATO summit in Istanbul, killing four people and injuring at least 18 others.
The White House said there would be no change to Bush's schedule despite the blasts.

Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler told reporters the bomber in the commercial capital of Istanbul was an unidentified woman carrying the device in her lap when it exploded on board a bus outside a hospital in the mainly residential Fatih district.

"The bus was not the target. The bomb was being carried from one place to another ... We suspect a Marxist-Leninist group."

The blast killed three people immediately, including the bomber, and injured 15, said surgeon Korhan Taviloglu at the hospital treating casualties. A woman died later in hospital.

Police detained three suspects in connection with the bus explosion, Anatolian news agency said, adding a female suspect was believed to have been on the bus when the explosion hit.

A small explosive device went off earlier on Thursday outside the Hilton Hotel in Ankara where Bush is due to stay on Saturday before he leaves on Sunday for Istanbul.

A leftist group called MLKP-FESK claimed responsibility for that explosion, one television station said. Ankara police chief Ercument Yilmaz told CNN Turk two policemen and an unidentified third person were injured.
Wired
 http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=883880&tw=wn_wire_story




Turkish police fired tear gas as more than 100 left-wing demonstrators hurled rocks and used sticks to try and break down a police barricade during a protest Saturday ahead of President Bush's arrival in the country. The clash came amid intense security in anticipation of Bush's visit and the opening of a NATO summit in Istanbul on Monday. Some 6,000 people, mostly members of trade unions and leftist groups, gathered in the center of Ankara, with some chanting "Murderer U.S.A. get out of the Middle East."
The area was completely closed off to traffic and surrounded by more than a dozen police armored personnel carriers. Shortly after the protest began, about 150 people rushed a police barricade, hitting the blue iron barrier with sticks. "We will go beyond barricades protecting Bush," the group shouted.
Police fired tear gas at the group from an armored personnel carrier.

A few minutes later the group, the "Socialist Platform of the Downtrodden," again attacked the barricade, throwing rocks at the police. The group is an umbrella organization representing several leftist labor unions in Turkey. Police again responded with tear gas.

After the second clash, organizers of the main protest asked everyone to disperse and people began leaving the square.

Bush arrives in Ankara late Saturday and is to meet with Turkish leaders the next day before the summit in Istanbul. On Thursday, a bomb went off near the Ankara hotel where he is to stay, wounding three people.

6000 Turks Protest Bush's Arrival (Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
 http://abclocal.go.com/wtvg/news/626_bushprotest.html

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"There are a certain number of volunteer patriots whose names are kept secret and are engaged for life in this special department," a military briefer told Ecevit. "They have hidden arms caches in various parts of the country."
At the time, Ecevit worried that these so-called lifetime patriots might have a rightist slant and would use their weaponry to advance their ideological goals. But he felt he was in no position to deny them funds. Ecevit's party was the largest, but it had won only a third of the votes. He was running a shaky coalition government. Ecevit released the funds the military wanted and never discussed the matter with the United States.

But the U.S. government surely knew about it. It set up the secret stay behind organization and funded it for more than two decades.

Working out of the Joint U.S. Military Aid Team headquarters, it was known first as the Tactical Mobilization Group and then the Special Warfare Department. In 1971, after a military coup, it was dubbed the counterguerrilla force and turned into an instrument of terror against the left.

Journalist Ugur Mumcu, who was arrested shortly after the coup, wrote later that his torturers told him, "We are the counterguerrilla. Even the president of the republic cannot touch us." (Mumcu, who continued to write in the daily Cumhuriyet about the counterguerrilla force and about the existence of rightist drug gangs connected to the government, was killed by a car bomb in 1993.)

Confirmation of the counterguerrilla force's existence has come from the highest sources. Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Kennan Evren, who led a 1980 coup, wrote in his memoirs that Suleyman Demirel, now president and in the late 1970s prime minister, asked then that the Special Warfare Department be used to combat terrorism. Evren said he refused, but that Demirel had insisted, pointing out that it had been used in 1971 against subversive activities.

General Evren acknowledged that the Special Warfare Department was involved in clandestine activities, citing the murder of nine leftwing militants at Kizildere in northern Turkey in 1972. He told a newspaper that civilians in the paramilitary organization run by the department may have been involved in terrorist incidents in the 1970s without his knowledge. Given the military's tight control over security, such ignorance is highly unlikely.

One notorious terrorist incident the stay behind group may have been involved in occurred on May Day, 1977, when the major trade union confederation organized a rally that brought several hundred thousand people to Istanbul's main Taksim Square. As the sun was setting, snipers on surrounding buildings started firing at the speakers' platform. The crowd panicked. Thirty-eight were killed; hundreds were injured. The shooting lasted for 20 minutes; several thousand police at the scene did nothing.
Turkey's Terrorists: A CIA Legacy Lives On
 http://www.ozgurluk.org/contrind/komisar.html