Kill The Messenger
By Sibel Edmonds - Video Documentary:
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….
By Sibel Edmonds - Video Documentary:
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….
Posted 23, 2009
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.
By Philip Giraldi - American Conservative Magazine
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.”
Over nearly six months, Edmonds listened with increasing unease to 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.
Sibel Edmonds Names Names in "States Secrets" Gallery
As Edmonds has said, her case involves "highly-recognizable, highly-known names", as can be confirmed below.
| ©bradblog.com |
Current and former Pentagon and State Department officials:
Richard PerleCurrent and former congressmen:
Douglas Feith
Eric Edelman
Marc Grossman
Brent Scowcroft
Larry Franklin
Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Ex-House SpeakerThink Tank members:
Roy Blount (R-MO)
Dan Burton (R-IN)
Tom Lantos (D-CA)
?
Bob Livingston (R-LA), Ex-House Speaker
Stephen Solarz (D-NY)
Graham E. Fuller - RANDSo what are these men guilty of? In response to this summary of the allegations, Edmonds as said: "as far as published articles go, this one nails it 100%":
David Makovsky - WINEP
Alan Makovsky - WINEP
?
?
Yusuf Turani (President-in-exile, Turkistan)
Professor Sabri Sayari (Georgetown, WINEP)
Mehmet Eymur (Former Turkish Spy Chief MIT)
Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish FBI translator turned whistleblower who has been subjected to a gag order could provide a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time. On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection. Israel has long cultivated a close relationship with Turkey since Ankara's neighbours and historic enemies - Iran, Syria and Iraq - are also hostile to Tel Aviv. Islamic Turkey has also had considerable symbolic value for Israel, demonstrating that hostility to Muslim neighbours is not a sine qua non for the Jewish state.
Turkey benefits from the relationship by securing general benevolence and increased aid from the US Congress - as well as access to otherwise unattainable military technology. The Turkish General Staff has a particular interest because much of the military spending is channeled through companies in which the generals have a financial stake, making for a very cozy and comfortable business arrangement. The commercial interest has also fostered close political ties, with the American Turkish Council, American Turkish Cultural Alliance and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations all developing warm relationships with AIPAC and other Jewish and Israel advocacy groups throughout the US.
Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar. In fact the neocons seem to have a deep and abiding interest in Turkey, which, under other circumstances, might be difficult to explain. Doug Feith's International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey, with Richard Perle taking $48,000 annually as a consultant. Other noted neoconservatives linked to Turkey are former State Department number three, Marc Grossman, current Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, Paul Wolfowitz and former congressman Stephen Solarz. The money involved does not appear to come from the Turkish government, and FBI investigators are trying to determine its source and how it is distributed. Some of it may come from criminal activity, possibly drug trafficking, but much more might come from arms dealing. Contracts in the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars provide considerable fat for those well placed to benefit. Investigators are also looking at Israel's particular expertise in the illegal sale of US military technology to countries like China and India. Fraudulent end-user certificates produced by Defense Ministries in Israel and Turkey are all that is needed to divert military technology to other, less benign, consumers. The military-industrial-complex/neocon network is also well attested. Doug Feith has been associated with Northrup Grumman for years, while defense contractors fund many neocon-linked think tanks and "information" services. Feith, Perle and a number of other neocons have long had beneficial relationships with various Israeli defense contractors. (Philip Giraldi from Cannistraro Associates, April 24 edition of The American Conservative)
While Edmonds claims the Times published only 20% of her allegations, antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo has published a good analysis
that gets to the heart of some of the deeper implications of her case,
including Israeli involvement in 9/11, and the
American-Israeli-Turkish-Pakistani-"Al-Qaeda" (i.e., CIA/Mossad/ISI)
terror connections.
by Justin Raimondo,
January 08, 2008
"The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack," averred ABC’s Charles Gibson at Saturday
night’s Democratic presidential debate. "The day after a nuclear weapon
goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent
it and what will we actually do on the day after?"
It’s a
question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no easy
answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most
seemed baffled. Hillary Clinton made sure she used the word "retaliation"
with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she
would retaliate against "stateless" terrorists nevertheless insisted
that she would indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to have a "haven" somewhere within a state.
Yes,
well, that’s not necessarily true, but what if that "haven" is… right
here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?
Say what?
Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of telephone intercepts and has now told the London Times
that several top U.S. government officials conspired with foreign
agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets and sell them on the black market.
The Times reports:
"Edmonds
described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of
U.S. officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and
nuclear institutions.
"Among the hours of covert tape
recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior
official in the U.S. State Department was being paid by Turkish agents
in Washington who were selling the information on to black market
buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official – who has held a
series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times.
He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: ‘He was aiding
foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly
classified information, not only from the State Department but also from
the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political
objectives.’
"She claims that the FBI was also gathering
evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names –
who were aiding foreign agents. ‘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,’ she said."
Edmonds brought all this to the attention of lawmakers, as well as the American media, and several news organizations filed reports – until a federal judge issued an unprecedented gag order. Edmonds’ story was deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed to know what she knows, according to our government,
America’s national security would be severely impaired. Yet now she is
speaking out, and what she has to say is unsettling, to say the least.
Edmonds has named at least one of the officials: he is Marc Grossman,
a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for
European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of
state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice
chairman of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s defense secretary, William S. Cohen.
Edmonds contends
that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the
intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been
permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she
claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign
governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out
its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and
espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.
As
a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many
hours of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and
Pakistanis, Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI’s
counterintelligence unit. Thousands of hours of intercepted calls
revealed a network of moles placed in various military installations and
academic venues dealing with nuclear technology. Edmonds gives us the
details, via the Times:
"Edmonds says there were
several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the
Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. ‘The network appeared to be
obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,’
she said.
"They were helped, she says, by the
high-ranking State Department official [Marc Grossman] who provided some
of their moles – mainly Ph.D. students – with security clearance to
work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los
Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the
security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent."
And "while the FBI
was investigating," says Edmonds, "several arms of the government were
shielding what was going on." An entire wing of the national security
bureaucracy, associated with the neoconservatives, has long profited from representing Turkish interests in Washington: this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser.
Edmonds
draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish,
Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S.
nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the
black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.
This was no "rogue" operation, but a covert action executed by Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad,
the chief of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, at the time. The
Turks were used as intermediaries because direct ISI intervention would
have roused immediate suspicion. Large amounts of cash were dropped off
at the offices of Turkish-American lobbying groups, such as the American Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly picked up by at least one top U.S. official.
This
Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their
respective embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for
potential moles, compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the Times,
“contained all their ‘hooking points,’ which could be financial or
sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff
they had access to.” Nice work, there.
This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted spy Larry Franklin
worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel Franklin
and pass it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former Israeli
ambassador Danny Ayalon; Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the embassy; and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And there is indeed a connection to the Franklin case, according to the Times,
"One
of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a
former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense
information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an
Israeli diplomat. ‘He was one of the top people providing information
and packages during 2000 and 2001,’ [Edmonds] said."
Franklin delivered his "packages" to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman
and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but others, such as
Grossman – according to Edmonds – did it for money. Grossman angrily
denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash transactions were
recorded on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S. officials were
heard selling the nation’s nuclear secrets. As the Times relates:
"Well-known
U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear
secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a
wiretap discussing ‘nuclear information that had been stolen from an air
force base in Alabama,’ in which the agent allegedly is heard saying:
‘We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.’"
A
vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign
intelligence agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials,
including some "household names" – if true, it’s the story of the
decade. Yet that isn’t all. The really scary aspect of this labyrinthine
network of foreign agents, and their American dupes and collaborators,
is its connections to terrorist organizations, specifically al-Qaeda.
To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected
of having wired a large amount of money into Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank
account shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times
reports: "Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken
in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or
somehow aided the attacks."
Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. However, the U.S. authorities did round up a large number of Israelis, including these guys, and held them for several months before extraditing them back to their home country.
Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times
with the story, "after reading about an al-Qaeda terrorist who had
revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in
Turkey." That’s a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka,
who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp
situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.
Now that‘s curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the Times
puts it: "Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic
activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But
they posed no threat to Turkey at the time."
Not a threat to
Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists’ target was the U.S. The
al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top
leadership of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin Laden
– to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That
they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our
NATO allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel
Edmonds seriously. Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into
place.
The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds’ testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world’s foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:
"The Times article then notes something that I reported
18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of
people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four
associates of key targets of FBI’s counterintelligence operations. Sibel
heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: ‘We need to get them out of the
U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.’ Grossman duly
facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left
the country without further investigation or interrogation.
"Let
me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated
the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the
FBI’s investigation."
Corruption and a massive cover-up
organized at the highest levels of government – America’s nuclear
secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our
enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign "friends," while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians
scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what
Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big
trouble.
In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to
reconsider the implications of the question Charles Gibson opened with
during the ABC Democratic debate:
"The day after a nuclear
weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to
prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?"
Perhaps congressman Henry Waxman,
who solemnly pledged to launch a public investigation into the
allegations made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept his promise. Maybe
even the national news media, which has been offered this story repeatedly, by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they had covered it.
Fortunately,
we don’t need the "mainstream" media to get the truth out to the
American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we can do
an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:
As
Edmonds says, "we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the
witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the
intercepts – put out the truth."
If a nuke ever goes off in an
American city, it will probably have been stolen from our own arsenal –
once the American people wake up to that scary fact, the rest will follow automatically.
Wiretap scandal of leading Democrat 'who lobbied for Israeli spies'
Sources: U.S. may drop AIPAC spy case
'US may drop AIPAC classified leak case'
Former lobbyists allegedly shared classified info on US policy with reporters and former diplomats.
What Israeli lobby?: Prosecutors Considering Dropping Espionage Charges Against Former AIPAC Lobbyists
La sécurité nucléaire au coeur du scandale d'espionnage à l'AIPAC
Cheney furieux que Bush n'ait pas pardonné "Scooter" Libby
Judge in AIPAC case to probe jurors on anti-Jewish bias
Rice, Hadley, Abrams, Wolfowitz, Feith, Armitage, Rosen et Weissman devront s'expliquer en cour sur leur rôle dans le scandale d'espionnage à l'AIPAC
The Washington Post is urging the Justice Department to drop its prosecution of two former AIPAC staffers.
Washington Post Columnist Gives Private AIPAC Talks
'Washington Post' urges dismissal of AIPAC espionage case, asks for counter-argument, and promptly rejects same
AJC, ADL urge AIPAC prosecution to reconsider
Israel's secret nuclear weapons program
S'ils vont en enfer, ils nous entraîennt avec eux
JFK et le nucléaire israélien
Les mensonges de Richard Perle
Espion pour Israel arrêté après 23 ans
Vanunu: l'ex-juif qui leva le voile sur la Bête nucléaire israélienne
11 septembre et réseaux d'espionnage israéliens: une chronologie
Lettre de Mordechaï Vanunu au Comité du Prix Nobel de la Paix
Shimon Peres discrédite le Prix Nobel- 2009-03-05