A report released this week by the Intelligence and Terrorism
Information Center (ITIC) said new details have emerged which show how
approximately 40 operatives from the Turkish Islamist IHH organization
carefully prepared a violent ambush on navy commandos last week on
board the Mavi Maramara ship, and acted with the full backing of the
Turkish government.

The IHH operatives were armed with knives, axes and other weapons,
communicated with one another using walkie talkies, set up a control
room onboard the ship, and maintained close ties with Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan, the report said.

In addition, the Mavi Maramara ship was purchased by the IHH from a
major shipping company owned by the Istanbul Municipality, which is run
by the ruling AKP party, it has emerged.

The ITIC said its report was based on an initial analysis of
statements taken from passengers onboard Mavi Marmara after it was
towed to the port of Ashdod last week, as well as findings from
computers seized by the IDF from IHH members.

“The operatives, who acted according to a clearly-defined internal
hierarchy, boarded the ship in the port of Istanbul without undergoing
a security inspection as opposed to the other passengers, who boarded
in Anatolia after a full inspection,” the report said.

“The IHH operatives’ preparations included handing out walkie-talkies
as they boarded the ship, taking over the upper deck, setting up a
situation room for communications, and a briefing given to the
operatives two hours before the confrontation by IHH head Bülent
Yildirim, who was on board the ship and commanded his men,” it
continued. 

Close relations between IHH and Erdogan
The men were armed large quantities of knives, axes, metal cables,
metal pipes used as clubs, wrenches, and other weapons, the report
said. “They were also equipped with box cutters which had been
prepared on the upper deck in advance,” it added.

“The passengers, including the IHH operatives, stated that there were
close relations between the organization and Turkish Prime Minister
Tayyip Erdogan and that the Turkish government was involved in
preparations for the flotilla,” the report asserted.

A journalist onboard the Mavi Marmara, described as having good links
with the heads of the Turkish government and Bulent Yildirim, head of the
IHH, had stated, “The flotilla was organized with the
support of the Turkish government and Prime Minister Erdogan gave the
instructions for it to set sail. That was despite the fact that
everyone knew it would never reach its destination,” according to the
report.

Files found in laptops seized from IHH members contained a letter
written in Turkish from IHH head Bülent Yildirim to Turkish President
Abdullah Gül. The letter requested Gal’s assistance in efforts to
release an IHH operative, named as Izzat Shahin, from an Israeli
prison.

Sahin was arrested by Israeli security forces in the West Bank on
April 27 on suspicion transferring cash to Hamas under the guise of
charitable aid. He has since been deported from Israel “at the request
of Turkish officials,” the report added.

Mavi Marmara purchased from AKP-run municipality of Istanbul
A second computer file showed that the “IHH purchased the Mavi Marmara
ship from a Turkish company called IDO… which was founded in 1987 by
the city of Istanbul.”

“[The] IHH acquired the Mavi Marmara ship from the AKP-run
municipality of Istanbul. It is not conceivable that the IHH’s Gaza
operation could have been carried out absent high-level government
sanction,” wrote Svante Cornell, a Swedish security expert who
specializes in Eurasia, in an article published on Monday.

Cornell, of Stokholm’s Central Asia-Caucus Institute, said the IHH was
“an example of how NGOs are used in the foreign policy sphere,”
adding, “The IHH operates joint projects with the Turkish Agency for
International Development, and is reported to have been used by the
government in order to shore up Turkey’s position in northern Iraq by
distributing aid to populations there. The IHH has its origins in the
Orthodox Islamic Milli Görüş movement, from which the AKP
organizationally split in 2001.”

“As such, the IHH is known as a dyed-in-the-wool Islamist movement,
which has been suspected and investigated repeatedly for alleged
involvement in arms shipment to Islamic forces in various conflicts,
such as Afghanistan and Bosnia. Leading former French counter-terror
magistrate Jean-Louis  Bruguière has repeatedly testified that the IHH
had ‘clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad’, including ties
to Al Qaeda in the late 1990s,” Cornell added.

Ely Karmon, a senior researcher from the Herzliya-based Institute for
Counter-Terrorism, told The Jerusalem Post that since coming to power,
the AKP party has worked repeatedly to assist the IHH. After being
elected into office in 2001, the AKP government ended a major legal
investigation into the IHH which had begun 1996 and examined
suspicions that the organization transferred weapons and other aid to
terrorist organizations around the world, Karmon said.

In January, the IHH helped organize a convoy to Gaza which became
stranded at El-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula after being denied entry
into Gaza by Egypt, “Turkey enacted major pressure on  Egypt to let
the convoy into Gaza. The Egyptians eventually agreed,” Karmon added.
An Egyptian soldier was killed during clashes between members of the
convoy and the Egyptian security forces.

Last week, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)  released
footage of statements made by Bulent Yildirim, head of IHH,  in Gaza
in February 2009.

During the speech, which was filled with references to “martyrdom,”
Yildirim said,  “All the peoples of the Islamic world would want a
leader like [Turkish prime minister] Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”

Splash! Could that be the sound of Lord Mandelson hitting one of the Dolce hotel’s four pools? Or Robert Zoellick of the World Bank? Paul Volcker of the US Economic Recovery Advisory Board? Or merely the euro taking another dive?
That is the thing about the Bilderberg group’s top secret meetings: you never know quite what is going on behind the police checkpoints.
Across the world, secretaries to the rich and the powerful have blocked out the next three days in their bosses’ calendars for their annual gathering, this time at the Dolce in Sitges, one of Spain’s most exclusive resorts. 

Normally, every minute of their working lives is accounted for but, each year, a couple of hundred of the world’s financial elite and the more business-friendly members of the political class disappear from view; supposedly to save the planet from the dangers of parochialism, the nationalist genie.
It is all terribly confidential — breathe a word about it and you’re out of the club — but the Bilderberg watcher Daniel Estulin claims to have a copy of the agenda. The big question this time around is whether the euro will survive. “They are afraid that the countries in trouble will leave and the euro will fall apart,” said Mr Estulin. “The biggest nightmare is if EU members return to nationally orientated policies.”
That would certainly explain why the keynote address is being given by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister. The Piigs — Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain — are of concern to the Bilderbergers. After all, the club was set up in 1954 by a Polish exile, Joseph Retinger, to create a European bulwark against the spread of communism. It provided the germ of the European idea; Franco-German reconciliation, the entry of West Germany into Nato, the Maastricht treaty — all were cooked up in annual fireside chats.
Now, according to Mr Estulin’s information, the Bilderbergers are nervous that the erosion of the euro could nudge the world back into recession while public services cuts could trigger unrest and radicalise the political climate.
Plenty to talk about at the Dolce, then. The Bilderberg protesters, sure that they can smell a good oldfashioned capitalist conspiracy, will be holding fringe meetings in the town. The hunt will be on to find a chambermaid ready to ransack hotel litter bins for evidence that evil work is afoot. It has been easier to get nuggets of information out of Bilderberg since hotel staff started to read Dan Brown and talk about the illuminati.
Could it be, though, that the Bilderbergers are simply having fun, away from their spouses, on their annual jamboree? The secret of Bilderberg could be that there is no secret. Certainly, the hotel offers plenty of distractions for stressed CEOs: qi-gong courses, excellent fish, fine wines and bicycle tours.
Henry Kissinger, 87, the former US Secretary of State, and David Rockefeller, 95, the former chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, are the elder statesmen of Bilderberg — but the leaked invitation list reveals that the gathering is made up primarily of elderly white gents.
Remember Richard Perle, 68, George Bush’s erstwhile Prince of Darkness? He could perhaps form a Prince of Darkness sub-group with Lord Mandelson. Paul Wolfowitz, 66, formerly of the World Bank? Mario Monti, 67, EU commissioner for the single market between 1995 and 1999?
Only the possible attendance of George Osborne, 39, the British Chancellor, will reassure hotel staff that they are not dealing with a Saga Holidays tour. Other members of this clandestine coven include Queen Sofia of Spain and Queen Beatrix of Holland. No doubt their views will be sought on the Swedish royal wedding later this month. Is it right, for example, that a young princess should marry her personal trainer? Fortunately, the Dolce has a team of personal trainers on hand ready to chip into the debate.
Last year Bilderberg held its meeting at the Nafsika Astir Palace hotel in Greece and apparently failed to spot how close their host country was to melting down. Watch out, Spain!
The weather forecast is for three days of sunshine — time for the Bilderbergers to slink out of the shadows.

The Turkish organization IHH (a Turkish acronym for “humanitarian relief fund”), the force behind the boats attempting to reach Gaza, has a radical Islamic anti-Western orientation and a history of ties with and fund-raising for Hamas.  

A report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) states that in addition to its legitimate philanthropic activities, IHH supports radical Islamic networks, including Hamas, and has supported global jihad elements. In fact, IHH’s “orientation is radical-Islamic and anti-American, and it is close to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ parent movement. IHH supports Hamas and does not hide the connection between them.”    
Established in 1992 and active in supporting orphans, establishing schools, building mosques, supporting human rights, and the like, IHH has begun in recent years expanding its activities to European countries.
In practice, ITIC states, “besides its legitimate humanitarian activities, IHH supports radical Islamic terrorist networks. In recent years, it has prominently supported Hamas, [and there is] reliable information that in the past IHH provided logistical support and funding to global jihad networks.”
IHH supports Hamas propaganda campaigns in Turkey by organizing public support conferences there, at which senior IHH figures have expressed their support for Hamas and strategy of armed struggle, and their opposition to the policies of the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority.
ITIC further notes that IHH is a member of the Union of Good, an umbrella organization of more than 50 Islamic funds and foundations around the globe that channels money into Hamas institutions in the PA-controlled territories. In January 2008, Israel outlawed 36 associations belonging to the Union of Good, including IHH.
IHH also operates widely throughout Gaza. In January 2009, IHH head Bülent Yildirim met with Khaled Mashaal, chairman of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, and Mashaal thanked him for the support of his organization.
In 2006, the Danish Institute for International Studies conducted a study on Islamic charity funds and support for terrorism. Over 20% of the study deals with IHH, and it found that IHH had connections with Al-Qaeda and global jihad operatives. In December 1997, Turkish authorities raided IHH offices in Istanbul, finding weapons, explosives, instructions for making homemade bombs, a flag with a jihad message, and documents indicating that IHH members were planning to take part in jihad activities in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.
IHH purchased three ships – including the Mavi Marmaris – of the original nine slated to take part in the “humanitarian” effort to Gaza. Its participation in the flotilla is “part of the massive aid it gives Hamas and its desire to make propaganda capital for Hamas and itself,” ITIC states.  On May 21, Muhammad Kaya, head of IHH’s branch office in Gaza, said there was a plan to send flotillas to the Gaza Strip every month.
The ceremony marking the departure of the Mavi Marmaris from Istanbul was organized by IHH. Participating were Ra’ad Salah, head of the northern faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel, as well as Kazem Sawalha, a Hamas activist affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood who found refuge in Britain. The large crowd held flags of Turkey, the PA, Hamas, and other organizations affiliated with Hamas and radical Islam.

Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said Moscow was bidding to help lead efforts to build a new world economic order after the old system collapsed in the global financial crisis.

Opening Russia’s annual economic forum in St Petersburg where hundreds of global chief executives have flocked, Mr Medvedev said the renewed interest in Russia this year was a sign of a changing world in which the institutions of the western-dominated world order had had their day amid thousands of corporate defaults and the threat of sovereign defaults.  

“What had seemed untouchable has collapsed. The bubbles that created the illusion of flourishing economies have burst,” Mr Medvedev said. “For Russia this situation is a challenge and an opportunity. We are living in a unique time. And we should use it to build a modern, flourishing and strong Russia … which will be a co-founder of the new world economic order and a full participant in the collective political leadership of the post-crisis world.”
Mr Medvedev insisted “Russia has changed” in the past year as it sought to pursue a course of “smart politics” that would leverage its competitive advantages in the raw materials sector, while shifting emphasis towards modernising the economy and focusing on boosting innovation over resources.
Acknowledging that the country still had a great deal to do to meet these aims, Mr Medvedev laid out a series of new initiatives that aim to boost its attractiveness as an investment destination. “Russia needs a real investment boom”, in order to achieve its modernisation goals, he said. To stimulate that, Mr Medvedev announced Moscow would introduce zero taxation on capital gains for companies working on long-term investments starting from January next year and said Russia was improving the legal system to provide better protection for businesses against the long arm of bureaucracy.
He added Russia had already simplified migration procedures to help attract “highly-qualified specialists” working in investment and high-tech sectors into the country.
Responding to criticism that Russia’s approach to building an innovation economy was driven from the top down and state interference could hinder development, Mr Medvedev said the state would concentrate its efforts on fostering a good business climate. “No matter how many state-owned companies we have, modernization will happen, above all, through private business. And only if there is competition,” he said. “The state should not tear down the apples from the tree of economics. What the government should do is help grow our apple orchard, develop our economic environment.”
Mr Medvedev said he was cutting the list of strategic enterprises five fold in order to reduce the role of the state in the economy and foster more private initiatives.

Russia wants the ruble to be one of the world’s reserve currencies as President Dmitry Medvedev renews his push to reduce the dollar’s dominance and make Moscow a global financial hub.

“Only three, five years ago it seemed like a fantasy” to create a new reserve currency, Medvedev said yesterday in a speech in St. Petersburg, Russia. “Now we are seriously discussing it.”

Medvedev, who has repeatedly called for a supranational currency to match the dollar, said discussions with China are continuing on broadening the global options. Russia sold U.S. Treasuries for a fifth consecutive month in April, the U.S. Treasury Department said June 15. The world may need as many as six reserve currencies, Medvedev said.

“It’s something that’s obviously needed,” he said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “Developing a financial center in Moscow will considerably help to strengthen the ruble’s position as one of the reserve currencies.”

Reasserting Power

Medvedev’s comments underline Russia’s ambition to reassert its global power following the financial crisis. Gross domestic product shrank 7.9 percent last year, the worst contraction since the fall of communism in 1991, after the credit crunch sent commodity prices plunging.

If a country wants to alter the world economic order, including the number of reserve currencies, it must become an international financial center, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said in an interview yesterday.

“For a currency to be a reserve currency, you have to have capital markets in which you can sell it and buy it very easily,” Fischer said. “New reserve currencies don’t emerge by fiat. They emerge as countries change.”

The ruble and the yuan may by 2015 be added to the basket of currencies that set the value of International Monetary Fund units called special drawing rights, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Global Economist Jim O’Neill said. O’Neill coined the BRIC term in 2001 to describe the four nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — that he estimates will collectively equal the U.S. in economic size by 2020.

Free Float

The ruble “has as many reasons to be in it as the pound,” he said today in an interview in St. Petersburg. “If Russia really wants to be in it, it’s got to allow people to use it all over the world.”

Allowing the ruble to trade freely is “very important,” O’Neill said.

“Inflation targeting is key,” he said. Without a shift to an inflation targeting regime, the ruble “isn’t going to be part of the SDR. You can’t have it both ways, really, unless the Chinese change the rules, which they might do by the end of this decade. China is going to be so big.”

Russia may “come very close to floating the ruble” in the course of one year to 18 months, Bank Rossii Chairman Sergei Ignatiev said in April. Even so, the central bank doesn’t need to take on legal obligations to stop intervening in the currency market, he said.

Yuan Flexibility

The People’s Bank of China today said it will allow more yuan exchange rate flexibility and reform of the exchange-rate mechanism as the nation’s economic recovery has “cemented” after the global financial crisis.

Medvedev said he envisages a new economic hierarchy allowing emerging-market giants such as Russia and China to drive the global agenda as the world emerges from the first global recession since the 1930s.

“We really live at a unique time, and we should use it to build a modern, prosperous and strong Russia, a Russia that will be a co-founder of the new world economic order,” he said.

The BRIC countries were net sellers of U.S. assets in April, driven mainly by Russian divestments, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Senior Currency Strategist Win Thin said in a June 15 note.

Russia may add the Australian and Canadian dollars to its international reserves as the central bank diversifies the world’s third-largest stockpile away from the greenback, central bank First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said in a June 16 interview.

Though Russia is “very carefully monitoring what’s happening in the euro zone,” the emergence of the euro as a currency to rival the dollar’s dominance helped soften the impact of the global crisis, Medvedev said.

“If the world depended completely on the dollar, the situation would have been more difficult,” Medvedev said.

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* Brazil dropping role in Iran nuclear dispute South American country scales back active support of Islamic Republic in nuclear dispute with West following Security Council’s decision to impose new sanctions

* Saudi King to Visit Obama Before Netanyahu Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah will visit U.S. President Barack Obama on June 29, setting the stage for the July 6th visit of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the White House.

* Iran bars two UN nuclear inspectors over report Iran has told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) it will not allow two of its inspectors to enter the country, state media report.

* Geert Wilders: Change Jordan’s name to Palestine Rightist Dutch leader wants to end Mideast conflict by finding Palestinians ‘alternate homeland’

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* EU needs persuasion skills at G20 summit EU officials have conceded that Europe still has considerable work to do before persuading other G20 members on the need for a global bank levy and fiscal consolidation.