[Intro...] Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.
A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.
John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”
But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”
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Her interviewer in that article Philip Giraldi discusses Edmonds’s latest revelations at Antiwar radio. And in this (separate) interview of Jim Bovard Scott Horton jokes about the fact that the MSM will probably simply ignore Edmonds’s most sensational claim - a sex and spy scandal involving a bisexual Congresswoman and a honey-trap foreign agent! I guess you have to laugh at media and political corruption sometimes or you’d be permanently irate. Bovard’s interview is interesting as well. I had not heard before that some of the FBI agents investigating 9/11 simply trawled the phone book for people with Arabic sounding names to call in for interview. I don’t find it surprising, and I’m not so concerned about the appearance of racism as I am about the broader implication: this was not really an investigation, it was an exercise in creating the appearance of one. ‘See how thorough we’ve been,’ they could say, ‘interviewing thousands of people with “possible connections” to the terrorists.’ If a proportion of these people had outstayed their visas and could then be classed as ‘terrorist suspects’ under new guidelines, ramping up the numbers of designated ‘terrorist suspects’ and thereby ensuring more funding and fear, all to the good.
Sibel Edmonds is running her own podcast interview series, ‘Boiling Frogs,’ with Peter B. Collins. Show details and download links here.
2 comments:
Re FBI.
Seems like a police state always connives at lower level law breaking - in this case illegal immigration. Then when you need to arrest someone for something, hey presto - you have just cause right there!
Ideally the whole population would have committed crimes that are conveniently overlooked for most of the time but there is always a legitimate reason to detain anyone at any time. It looks so much better in PR terms.
Yea, complex tax codes, the surveillance state and modern data sharing methods mean that they probably have a reason handily stored away to arrest most of us.
I don't know anyone in my age group who doesn't have pirated films or music for example.
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