Source – dalje.com
– The documents that she had access to are marked as state secret, and the former FBI translator is prohibited from revealing their contents.
Sibel Edmonds has kept away from public life since autumn 2007, but has recently given an interview for Antiwar Radio, and has again been brought to the centre of attention with her stances that condemn the politics of the war that is being carried out by the current American administration.
She was fired because she could not keep quiet
Her story started after the great tragedy of September 11. The FBI hired her as a translator because she was a language expert for languages of the Middle East. The job that she did allowed her access to documents that were sent by intelligence agencies from Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Carefully translating those documents, her conscience started working.
In February 2002, she decided to talk about what she had read. She was convinced that America could have stopped the attacks, but they were not doing their jobs properly, and their failures allowed the terrorists to kill nearly three thousand people.
However, her attempt at bringing the story, names and events to the public, was stopped by the court. The designation of state secret printed on the documents represented the top possible protection, and anyone that published the documents or gave them to thepublic could be charged with grand treason.
Edmonds was immediately fired from the FBI, and her battle that the public know the truth has not stopped. She tried to remove the designation from the documents a number of times, with her reasoning being that it should not be a secret why innocent people died, but did not have to die. However the court ignored her attempts, as well as the attempts by hundreds of other families – the designation remains, Sibel must remain silent.
Wanted to publish the truth that the American government is hiding
The former translator even gave a sort of ad. Regardless of the fact that she may be facing life in prison, she is willing to tell the whole truth to anyone that wanted to report it. However nobody wanted to take that risk upon themselves.
In recent years she was neglected by the media, and her appearance on a Texas radio station was truly surprising.
In the interview, she again mentioned that she was ready to tell the truth, because her sacrifice would be nothing compared to what it would bring. She still demands the start of an investigation and the processing of people that are responsible for great mistakes.
Apart from telling the same well known story, Sibel talked about the politics in the USA that leads from war to war. She considers that the current administration are “preparing the ground” for a new war, the one in Iran, all under the excuse of nuclear danger.
Even though there is a reason for everything she is saying, because she knows all of what stood behind September 11, she must not mention any of them in any way, besides as an opinion. This is why the story of September 11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and who knows what else, will have to wait for the day that Sibel Edmonds can get the right to speak.
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets – By Philip Giraldi:
Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.
But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”
After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world, with follow-ups appearing in Israel, Europe, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Japan—but not in the United States.
Edmonds is an ethnic Azerbaijani, born in Iran. She lived there and in Turkey until 1988, when she emigrated to the United States, where she received degrees in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University. Nine days after 9/11, Edmonds took a job at the FBI as a Turkish and Farsi translator. She worked in the 400-person translations section of the Washington office, reviewing a backlog of material dating back to 1997 and participating in operations directed against several Turkish front groups, most notably the American Turkish Council.
The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums. Edmonds refers to ATC and AIPAC as “sister organizations.” The group’s founders include a number of prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, notably Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and former congressman Stephen Solarz. Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc.
The FBI was interested in ATC because it suspected that the group derived at least some of its income from drug trafficking, Turkey being the source of 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Europe, and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Edmonds told the Times, the Turks have “often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention.”
hundreds of intercepted phone calls between Turkish, Pakistani, Israeli,
and American officials. When she voiced concerns about the processing of
this intelligence—among other irregularities, one of the other
translators maintained a friendship with one of the FBI’s “high
value” targets—she was threatened. After exhausting all appeals
through her own chain of command, Edmonds approached the two Department
of Justice agencies with oversight of the FBI and sent faxes to Sens.
Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. The next
day, she was called in for a polygraph. According to a DOJ inspector
general’s report, the test found that “she was not deceptive in
her answers.”But two weeks later, Edmonds was fired; her home computer was seized;
her family in Turkey was visited by police and threatened with arrest if
they did not submit to questioning about an unspecified
“intelligence matter.”
When Edmonds’s attorney filed suit to obtain the documents related
to her firing, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft imposed the state-secrets gag
order. Since then, she has been subjected to another federal order,
which not only silenced her, but retroactively classified the statements
she eventually made before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11
Commission.
Charismatic and articulate, the 37-year-old Edmonds has deftly worked
the system to get as much of her story out as possible, on one occasion
turning to French television to produce a documentary entitled “Kill
the Messenger.” Passionate in her convictions, she has sometimes
alienated her own supporters and ridden roughshod over critics who
questioned her assumptions. But despite her shortcomings in making her
case and the legitimate criticism that she may be overreaching in some
of her conclusions, Edmonds comes across as credible. Her claims are
specific, fact-based, and can be documented in detail. There is
presumably an existing FBI file that could demonstrate the accuracy of
many of her charges.
Her allegations are not insignificant. Edmonds claims that Marc
Grossman—ambassador to Turkey from 1994-97 and undersecretary of
state for political affairs from 2001-05—was a person of interest to
the FBI and had his phone tapped by the Bureau in 2001 and 2002. In the
third-highest position at State, Grossman wielded considerable power
personally and within the Washington bureaucracy. He had access to
classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA, and
Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department.
On one occasion,
Grossman was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a cash
bribe of $15,000 from an ATC contact. The FBI also intercepted related
phone conversations between the Turkish Embassy and the Pakistani
Embassy that revealed sensitive U.S. government information was being
sold to the highest bidder. Grossman, who emphatically denies
Edmonds’s charges, is currently vice chairman of the Cohen Group,
founded by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly
earns a seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing Turkey.
After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the
interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to
Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the
men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said
that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released
and allowed to leave the country.
Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman
tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation
cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and
that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service
representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information
was then passed on to the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network.
Edmonds also claims that Grossman was instrumental in seeding Turkish
and Israeli Ph.D. students into major American research labs by
godfathering visas and enabling security clearances. She says that she
reviewed transcripts in which the moles in the U.S. military and
academic community involved in nuclear technology reportedly carried out
several “transactions” involving the sale of nuclear material or
information relating to nuclear programs every month, with Pakistan
being a primary buyer.
In the summer of 2000, the FBI recorded a meeting
between a Turkish official and two Saudi businessmen in Detroit in which
nuclear information stolen from an Air Force base in Alabama was
offered: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for
$250,000,” the wiretap allegedly recorded. “The network appeared
to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United
States,” Edmonds told the Times.
She further reports that beginning in 1999, the FBI was investigating
senior Pentagon officials who were assisting agents of foreign
governments, including Turkey and Israel. Edmonds has not publicly named
names at the Pentagon, but a website linked to her appears to be a
non-incriminating instrument for identifying suspects without doing so
directly. Its “rogues gallery” includes photos of Richard Perle
and Douglas Feith. Perle was chief of the Pentagon’s prestigious
Defense Policy Board when Edmonds was working at the FBI, and Feith was
undersecretary of defense for policy. If either were being investigated,
it would be a matter of record, as would any reasons for dropping the
investigation. “If you made public all the information that the FBI
have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through
criminal trials,” Edmonds told the Times.
She claims to have also learned that corrupt officials in the Turkish
and Israeli Ministries of Defense falsified end-user certificates on
weapons purchased in the United States to enable sales to third
countries not allowed access to the technology. Principal recipients
include the five “Stans” in central Asia—Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.
Furthermore, Edmonds says that former House speaker Dennis Hastert and
at least two other congressmen were investigated as suspected recipients
of illegal political contributions or even bribes from Turkish sources.
Her website gallery includes photos of Congressmen Roy Blount, Dan
Burton, and Tom Lantos, though she has not otherwise implicated any of
the three directly.
A low-level contractor might seem poorly positioned to expose major
breaches of national security, but the FBI translators’ pool,
riddled with corruption and nepotism, was key to keeping these secrets
from surfacing. Edmonds’s claims that the section was infiltrated by
translators who should never have received security clearances and who
were deliberately failing to translate incriminating material are
supported by the Justice Department inspector general investigation and
by an FBI internal investigation, which concluded that she had been
fired after making “valid complaints.” One translator, Melek Can
Dickerson, who had worked for three Turkish front organizations under
investigation—she failed to reveal this when applying for
employment—allegedly stamped many documents of interest “not
pertinent,” removed classified documents from FBI premises, and
forged signatures on classified documents relating to 9/11 detainees.
An Urdu translator was the daughter of a Pakistani Embassy employee who
worked for Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani intelligence
service who is accused of authorizing a $100,000 wire transfer to
Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank account immediately before 9/11. The
Justice Department IG report confirmed Edmonds’s charge that
translators’ section managers issued a go-slow order shortly after
the terrorist attacks to create an artificial backlog that would justify
an increase in budget and manpower. Those managers are reportedly still
in place. Some have been promoted.
Edmonds’s revelations have attracted corroboration in the form of
anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been
frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature
closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those
cases involve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened
to shut down investigations based on “sensitive foreign diplomatic
relations.” One such anonymous letter, the veracity of which cannot
be determined, cites transcripts of wiretaps involving Marc Grossman and
a Turkish Embassy official between August and December 2001, described
above, in which Grossman warned the Turk that Brewster Jennings was a
CIA cover company.
If the allegation can be documented from FBI files,
the exposure of the Agency cover mechanism took place long before
journalist Robert Novak outed the company in his column on Valerie Plame
in 2003. The anonymous informant conveniently provides the FBI file
number containing the transcripts of the recorded conversations: FBI
Washington Field Office, Counterintelligence Division, Turkish Unit File
203A-WF-210023. According to the source, the FBI also recorded a
subsequent conversation in which a Turkish official contacted the
Pakistani Embassy to inform an ISI officer of Grossman’s warning.
The FBI also reportedly informed the CIA of the Grossman conversations
to determine if there was any “conflict of interest,” presumably
to determine if the CIA was running its own operation that might be
compromised as a result of the phone tap.
Curiously, the states-secrets gag order binding Edmonds, while put in
place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State
Department and Pentagon—which employed individuals she identified as
being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous,
that order would scarcely seem necessary. It would have been much
simpler for the government to marginalize her by demonstrating that she
was poorly informed or speculating about matters outside her competency.
Under the Bush administration, the security gag order has been invoked
to cover up incompetence or illegality, not to protect national
security. It has recently been used to conceal the illegal wiretaps of
the warrantless surveillance program, the allegations of torture and the
CIA’s rendition program, and to shield the telecom industry for its
collaboration in illegal eavesdropping.
Both Senators Grassley and Leahy, a Republican and a Democrat, who
interviewed her at length in 2002, attest to Edmonds’s
believability. The Department of Justice inspector general investigation
into her claims about the translations unit and an internal FBI review
confirmed most of her allegations. Former FBI senior counterintelligence
officer John Cole has independently confirmed her report of the presence
of Pakistani intelligence service penetrations within the FBI
translators’ pool.
Edmonds wasn’t angling to become a media darling. She would have
preferred to testify under oath before a congressional committee that
could offer legal protection and subpoena documents and witnesses to
support her case. She claims that a number of FBI agents would be
willing to testify, though she has not named them.
Prior to 2006, Congressman Henry Waxman of the House Government Reform
and Oversight Committee promised Edmonds that if the Democrats gained
control of Congress, he would order hearings into her charges. But
following the Democratic sweep, he has been less forthcoming, failing to
schedule hearings, refusing to take Edmonds’s calls, and recently
stonewalling all inquiries into the matter. It is generally believed
that Waxman, a strong supporter of Israel, is nervous about exposing an
Israeli lobby role in the corruption that Edmonds describes. It is also
suspected that Waxman fears that the revelations might open a
Pandora’s box, damaging Republicans and Democrats alike.
Edmonds’s critics maintain that she saw only a small part of the
picture in a highly compartmentalized working environment, that she was
privy to only a fragment of a large operation to penetrate and disrupt
the groups that have been stealing U.S. weapons technology. She could
not have known operational details of what the FBI was doing and why.
That criticism is serious and must be addressed. If Edmonds was indeed
seeing only part of a counterintelligence sting operation to entrap a
nuclear network like that of A.Q. Khan, the government could now reveal
as much in general terms, since any operation that might have been
running in 2002 has long since wound down. Regarding her access to
operational information, Edmonds’s critics clearly do not understand
the intimate relationship that develops between FBI and CIA officers and
their translators.
Operations run against a foreign target in languages
other than English require an intensive collaboration between field
officers and translators. The translators are invariably brought into
the loop because it is up to them to guide the officers seeking to
understand what the target, who frequently is double talking or
attempting to conceal his meaning, is actually saying. That said, it
should be conceded that Edmonds might sometimes have seen only a piece
of the story, and those claims based on her own interpretation should be
regarded with caution.
Another objection is that Edmonds would only have seen “raw
intelligence” that does not provide nuance and does not really
indicate whether someone is guilty. That argument has merit, and it is
undeniable that many intercepted communications lack context. But it
ignores the fact that someone recorded in the act of taking a bribe or
interceding to have a suspect in a criminal investigation released is
behaving with a certain transparency. One either takes money or does
not. There is very little interpretation that can change that reality.
Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal
behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to
warrant official investigation.
Her allegations are documentable: an
existing FBI file should determine whether they are accurate. It’s
true that she probably knows only part of the story, but if that part is
correct, Congress and the Justice Department should have no higher
priority. Nothing deserves more attention than the possibility of
ongoing national-security failures and the proliferation of nuclear
weapons with the connivance of corrupt senior government officials.
_________________________________________
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro
Associates, an international security consultancy
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