Vanity Fair An Inconvenient Patriot Sibel Edmonds

by **seemslikeadream** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 9:35 am

An Inconvenient Patriot by David Rose Vanity Fair September 2005 Love of country led Sibel Edmonds to become a translator for the F.B.I. following 9/11. But everything changed when she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals. Fired after sounding the alarm, she’s now fighting for the ideals that made her an American, and threatening some very powerful people. In Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, December 2, 2001 was fine but cool, the start of the slide into winter after a spell of unseasonable warmth. At 10 o’clock that morning, Sibel and Matthew Edmonds were still in their pajamas, sipping coffee in the kitchen of their waterfront town house in Alexandria, Virginia, and looking forward to a well-deserved lazy Sunday. Since mid-September, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Sibel had been exploiting her fluency in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani as a translator at the F.B.I. It was arduous, demanding work, and Edmonds—who had two bachelor’s degrees, was about to begin studying for her master’s, and had plans for a doctorate—could have been considered overqualified. But as a naturalized Turkish-American, she saw the job as her patriotic duty. The Edmondses’ thoughts were turning to brunch when Matthew answered the telephone. The caller was a woman he barely knew—Melek Can Dickerson, who worked with Sibel at the F.B.I. "I’m in the area with my husband and I’d love you to meet him," Dickerson said. "Is it O.K. if we come by?" Taken by surprise, Sibel and Matthew hurried to shower and dress. Their guests arrived 30 minutes later. Matthew, a big man with a fuzz of gray beard, who at 60 was nearly twice the age of his petite, vivacious wife, showed them into the kitchen. They sat at a round, faux-marble table while Sibel brewed tea. Melek’s husband, Douglas, a U.S. Air Force major who had spent several years as a military attaché in the Turkish capital of Ankara, did most of the talking, Matthew recalls. "He was pretty outspoken, pretty outgoing about meeting his wife in Turkey, and about his job. He was in weapons procurement." Like Matthew, he was older than his wife, who had been born about a year before Sibel. According to Sibel, Douglas asked if she and Matthew were involved with the local Turkish community, and whether they were members of two of its organized groups—the American-Turkish Council (A.T.C.) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (A.T.A.A.). "He said the A.T.C. was a good organization to belong to," Matthew says. "It could help to ensure that we could retire early and live well, which was just what he and his wife planned to do. I said I was aware of the organization, but I thought you had to be in a relevant business in order to join. "Then he pointed at Sibel and said, ‘All you have to do is tell them who you work for and what you do and you will get in very quickly.’" Matthew could see that his wife was far from comfortable: "She tried to change the conversation to the weather and such-like." But the Dickersons, says Matthew, steered it back to what they called their "network of high-level friends." Some, they said, worked at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. "They said they even went shopping weekly for at a Mediterranean market," Matthew says. "They used to take him special Turkish bread." Before long, the Dickersons left. At the time, Matthew says, he found it "a strange conversation for the first time you meet a couple. Why would someone I’d never met say such things?" Only Sibel knew just how strange. A large part of her work at the F.B.I. involved listening to the wiretapped conversations of people who were the targets of counter-intelligence investigations. As she would later tell investigators from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (O.I.G.) and the U.S. Congress, some of those targets were Turkish officials the Dickersons had described as high-level friends. In Sibel’s view, the Dickersons had asked the Edmondses to befriend F.B.I. suspects. (In August 2002, Melek Can Dickerson called Sibel’s allegations "preposterous, ludicrous and slanderous.") Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C., one of the organizations that the Dickersons allegedly wanted her and her husband to join. Sibel later told the O.I.G. she assumed that the A.T.C.’s board—which is chaired by Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national-security advisor—knew nothing of the use to which it was being put. But the wiretaps suggested to her that the Washington office of the A.T.C. was being used as a front for criminal activity. Sibel and Matthew stood at the window of their oak-paneled hallway and watched the Dickersons leave. Sibel’s Sunday has been ruined. Immediately and in the weeks that followed, Sibel Edmonds tried to persuade her bosses to investigate the Dickersons. There was more to her suspicions than their peculiar Sunday visit. According to the documents filed by Edmonds’s lawyers, Sibel believed Melek Can Dickerson had leaked information to one or more targets of an F.B.I. investigation, and had tried to prevent Edmonds from listening to wiretaps of F.B.I. targets herself. But instead of carrying out a thorough investigation of her allegations, at the end of March 2002 the F.B.I. fired Edmonds. Edmonds is not the first avowed national security whistle-blower to suffer retaliation at the hands of a government bureaucracy that feels threatened or embarrassed. But being fired is one thing. Edmonds has also been prevented from proceeding with her court challenge or even speaking with complete freedom about the case. On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the "state-secrets privilege"—a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has filed contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, "could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States." Using the state-secrets privilege in this fashion is unusual, says Edmonds’s attorney Ann Beeson, of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It also begs the question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?" It may be more than another embarrassing security scandal. One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s. That inquiry found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American politicians in at least two major cities—Washington and Chicago. Toward the end of 2001, Edmonds was asked to translate some of the thousands of calls that had been recorded by this operation, some dating back to 1997. Edmonds has given confidential testimony inside a secure Sensitive Compartmented Information facility on several occasions: to congressional staffers, to investigators from the O.I.G., and to the staff from the 9/11 commission. Sources familiar with this testimony say that, in addition to her allegations about the Dickersons, she reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politician indeed—Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information. "The Dickersons," says one official familiar with the case, "are only the tip of the iceberg." It’s safe to say that Edmonds inherited her fearless obstinacy from her father, Rasim Deniz, who died in 2000. Born in the Tabriz region of northwestern Iran, many of whose natives speak Farsi (Persian), Turkish, and Azerbaijani, he was one of the Middle East’s leading reconstructive surgeons, but his forthright liberal and secular opinions brought him into a series of conflicts with the local regimes. One of Sibel’s earliest memories is of a search of her family’s house in Tehran by members of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, who were looking for left-wing books. Later, in 1981, came a terrifying evening after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamist revolution, when Sibel was 11. She was waiting in the car while her father went into a restaurant for takeout. By the time Deniz returned, his vehicle had been boxed in by government S.U.V.’s and Sibel was surrounded by black-clad revolutionary guards, who announced they were taking her to jail because her headscarf was insufficiently modest. "My father showed his ID and asked them, ‘Do you know who I am?,’" Sibel says. "He had been doing pro bono work in the slums of south Tehran for years, and now it was the height of the Iran-Iraq war. He told them, ‘I have treated so many of your brothers. If you take my daughter, next time I have one in my operating room who needs an amputation at the wrist, I will cut his arm off at the shoulder.’ They let me go." It was time to get out. As soon as he could, Deniz abandoned his property and his post as head of the burn center at one of Tehran’s most prestigious hospitals, and the family fled to Turkey. When Sibel was 17, she wrote a paper for a high-school competition. Her chosen subject was Turkey’s censorship laws, and why it was wrong to ban books and jail dissident writers. Her principal was outraged, she says, and asked her father to get her to write something else. Denis refused, but the incident caused a family crisis. "My uncle was mayor of Istanbul, and suddenly my essay was being discussed in an emergency meeting of the whole Deniz tribe. My dad was the only one who supported what I’d done. That was the last straw for me. I decided to take a break and go to the United States. I came here and fell in love with a lot of things—freedom. Now I wonder: was it just an illusion?" Sibel enrolled at a college in Maryland, where she studied English and hotel management; later, she received bachelor’s degrees at George Washington University in criminal justice and psychology, and worked with juvenile offenders. In 1992, at age 22, she had married Matthew Edmonds, a divorced retail-technology consultant who had lived in Virginia all his life. For a long time, they lived an idyllic, carefree life. They bought their house in Alexandria, and Sibel transformed it into an airy spacious haven, with marble floors, a library, and breathtaking views across the Potomac River to Washington. Matthew had always wanted to visit Russia, and at Sibel’s suggestion they spent three months in St. Petersburg, working with a children’s hospital charity run by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Sibel’s family visited America often, and she and Matthew spent their summers at a cottage they had bought in Bodrum, Turkey, on the Aegean coast. "People said we wouldn’t last two years," Sibel says, "And here we still are, nearly 13 years on. A lot of people who go through the kind of experiences I’ve had find they put a huge strain on their marriage. Matthew is my rock. I couldn’t have done it without him." In 1978, when Sibel was eight and the Islamists’ violent prelude to the Iranian revolution was just beginning, a bomb went off in a movie theater next to her elementary school. "I can remember sitting in the car, seeing the rescuers pulling charred bodies and stumps out of the fire. Then, on September 11, to see this thing happening here, across the ocean—it brought it all back. They put out a call for translators, and I thought, Maybe I can stop this from happening again." The translation department Edmonds joined was housed in a huge, L-shaped room in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office. Some 200 to 300 translators sat in this vast, open space, listening with headphones to digitally recorded wiretaps. The job carried heavy responsibilities. "You are the front line," Edmonds says. "You are the filter fro every piece of intelligence which comes in foreign languages. It’s down to you to decide what’s important—‘pertinent,’ as the F.B.I. calls it, and what’s not. You decide what requires verbatim translation, what can be summarized, and what should be marked ‘not pertinent’ and left alone. By the time this material reaches the agents and analysts, you’ve already decided what they’re going to get." To get this right requires a broad background of cultural and political knowledge: "If you’re simply a linguist, you won’t be able to discern these differences." She was surprised to discover that until her arrival the F.B.I. had employed no Turkish-language specialists at all. In early October she was joined by a second Turkish translator, who had been hired despite his having failed language-proficiency tests. Several weeks later, a third Turkish speaker joined the department: Melek Can Dickerson. In her application for the job, she wrote that she had not previously worked in America. In fact, however, she had spent two years as an intern at an organization that figured in many of the wiretaps—the American-Turkish Council. Much later, after Edmonds was fired, the F.B.I. gave briefings to the House and Senate. One source who was present says bureau officials admitted that Dickerson had concealed her history with the A.T.C., not only in writing but also when interviewed as part of her background security check. In addition, the officials conceded that Dickerson began a friendship at the A.T.C. with one of the F.B.I.’s targets. "They confirmed that when she was supposed to be listening to his calls," says one congressional source. "To me, that was like asking a friend of a mobster to listen to him ordering hits. She might have an allegiance problem. But they seemed not to get it…They blew off their friendship as ‘just a social thing.’ They told us ‘They had been colleagues at work, after all.’" Shortly after the house visit from the Dickersons, Sibel conveyed her version of the event to her supervisor, Mike Feghali—first orally and then in writing. The "supervisory language specialist" responsible for linguists working in several Middle Eastern languages, Feghali is a Lebanese-American who had previously been an F.B.I. Arabic translator for many years. Edmonds says he told her not to worry. To monitor every call on every line at a large institution such as the Turkish Embassy in Washington would not be feasible. Inevitably, the F.B.I. listens more carefully to phones used by its targets, such as the Dickersons’ purported friend. In the past, the assignment of lines to each translator has always been random: Edmonds might have found herself listening to a potentially significant conversation by a counter-intelligence target one minute and an innocuous discussion about some diplomatic party the next. Now, however, according to Edmonds, Dickerson suggested changing this system, so that each Turkish speaker would be permanently responsible for certain lines. She produced a list of names and numbers, together with her proposals for dividing them up. As Edmonds would later tell her F.B.I. bosses and congressional investigators, Dickerson had assigned the American-Turkish Council and three other "high-value" diplomatic targets, including her friend, to herself. Edmonds found this arrangement very questionable. But she says that Dickerson spent a large part of that afternoon talking with Feghali inside his office. The next day he announced in an e-mail that he had decided to assign the Turkish wiretaps on exactly the basis recommended by Dickerson. Like all his translators, Edmonds was effectively working with two, parallel lines of management: Feghali and the senior translation-department bosses above him, on one hand, and, on the other, the investigators and agents who actually used the material she translated. Early in the new year, 2002, Edmonds says, she discovered that Dennis Saccher, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge of Turkish counter-intelligence, had developed his own, quite separate concerns about Dickerson. On the morning of January 14, Sibel says, Saccher asked Edmonds to come into his cramped cubicle on the fifth floor. On his desk were printouts from the F.B.I. language-department database. They showed that on numerous occasions Dickerson had marked calls involving her friend and other counter-intelligence targets as "not pertinent," or had submitted only brief summaries stating that they contained nothing of interest. Some of these calls had a duration of more than 15 minutes. Saccher asked Edmonds why she was no longer working on these targets’ conversations. She explained the new division of labor, and went on to tell him about the Dickersons’ visit the previous month. Saccher was appalled, Edmonds says, telling her, "It sounds like espionage to me." Saccher asked Edmonds and a colleague, Kevin Taskasen, to go back into the F.B.I.’s digital wiretap archive and listen to some of the calls that Dickerson had marked "not pertinent," and to re-translate as many as they could. Saccher suggested that they all meet with Feghali in a conference room on Friday, February 1. First, however, Edmonds and Taskasen should go to Saccher’s office for a short pre-meeting—to review their findings and to discuss how to handle Feghali. Edmonds had time to listen to numerous calls before the Friday meeting, and some of them sounded important. According to her later secure testimony, in one conversation, recorded shortly after Dickerson reserved the targets’ calls for herself, a Turkish official spoke directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They suggested that the State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed time to the American-Turkish Council office, at 1111 14th St. NW, where he would be given $7,000 in cash. "She told us she’d heard mention of exchanges of information, dead drops—that kind of thing," a congressional source says. "It was mostly money in exchange for secrets." (A spokesperson for the A.T.C. denies that the organization has ever been involved in espionage or illegal payments. And a spokesperson for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations said that to suggest the group was involved with espionage or illegal payments is "ridiculous.") Another call allegedly discussed a payment to a Pentagon official, who seemed to be involved in weapons-procurement negotiations. Yet another implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder. Before entering the F.B.I. building for their Friday meeting with Saccher, Edmonds and Taskasen stood for a while on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes. "Afterwards, we went directly to Saccher’s office," Edmonds says. "We talked for a little while, and he said he’d see us downstairs for the meeting with Feghali a few minutes later, at nine A.M." They were barely out of the elevator when Feghali intercepted them. He didn’t know they had just come from Saccher’s office. "Come on, we’re going to start the meeting," he said. "By the way, Dennis Saccher can’t be there, He’s been sent out somewhere in the field." Later, Edmonds says, she called Saccher on the internal phone. "Why the hell did you cancel?" she asked. Bewildered, he told her that immediately after she and Taskasen had left his office Feghali phoned him, saying that the conference room was already in use, and that the meeting would have to be postponed. Edmonds says Saccher also told her that he had been ordered not to touch the case by his own superiors, who called it a "can of worms." Despite his role as special agent in charge of Turkish counter-intelligence, he had even been forbidden to obtain copies of her translations. Saccher had two small children and a settled life in Washington. If he dared to complain, Edmonds says, he risked being assigned "to some fucked-up office in the land of tornadoes." Instead, Edmonds was ushered into the windowless office of Feghali’s colleague, translation-department supervisor Stephanie Bryan. Investigating possible espionage was not a task for which Bryan had been trained or equipped. Bryan heard Edmonds out and told her to set down her allegations in a confidential memo. Edmonds says that Bryan approved of her writing it at home. Edmonds gave the document to Bryan on Monday, February 11. Early the following afternoon, the supervisor summoned Edmonds. Waiting in a nearby office were two other people, Feghali and Melek Can Dickerson. In front of them were Edmonds’s translations of the wiretaps and her memo. "Stephanie said that she’d taken my memo to the supervisory special agent, Tom Frields," Edmonds says. "He apparently wouldn’t even look at it until Mike Feghali and Dickerson and seen it and been given a chance to comment. Stephanie said that, working for the government, there were certain things you didn’t do, and criticizing your colleagues’ work was one of them. She told me, ‘Do you realize what this means? If you were right, the people who did the background checks would have to be investigated. The whole translation department could be shaken up!’ Meanwhile, I was going to be investigated for a possible security breach—for putting classified information on my home computer. I was told to go the security department at three P.M." Before Edmonds left, Dickerson had time to sidle over to her desk. According to Edmonds, she made what sounded like a threat: "Why are you doing this, Sibel? Why don’t you just drop it? You know there could be serious consequences. Why put your family in Turkey in danger over this?" Edmonds says the F.B.I.’s response to her was beginning to shift from indifference to outright retaliation. On February 13, the day after her interview with the bureau security office, three agents came to her home and seized the computer she shared with her husband. "I hadn’t had time to back up the data, and I told them that most of my business was on that computer, Matthew Edmonds says. "An agent called the next morning," Matthew says. "He told me, ‘Everything on your computer is destroyed, and we didn’t back it up.’ They were playing games. When I got the computer back, they had wiped out everything. Four days later, I got a CD-ROM with it all backed up." A lifelong conservative Republican, Matthew was being shocked into changing his worldview. I was so naïve. I mean, what do you do if you think your colleague might be a spy? You go to the F.B.I.! I thought if Sibel’s supervisor wasn’t fixing this problem she should go to his superior, and so on up the chain. Someone would eventually fix it. I was never a cynical person. I am now." While the agents were examining the Edmondses’ computer, Mike Feghali was writing a memo for his own managers, stating "there was no basis" for Sibel’s allegations. A day earlier, an F.B.I. security officer had interviewed Dickerson. A report issued by the O.I.G. in January 2005 states, "The Security Officer did not challenge the co-worker with respect to any information the co-worker provided, although that information was not consistent with F.B.I. records. In addition…he did not review other crucial F.B.I. records, which would have supported some of Edmonds’ allegations." Instead, he treated her claims as "performance issues," and "seemed not to appreciate or investigate the allegation that a co-worker may have been committing espionage. According to a congressional source, the fact that Edmonds was a mere contract linguist, rather than an agent, made her claims less palatable. "They seemed to be saying, ‘We don’t need someone like this making trouble,’" the source says. "Yet, to her credit, she really did go up through the chain of command: to her boss, his boss, and so on." Edmonds reached the top of the language-section management on February 22, when she met with supervisory special agent Tom Frields, a gray-haired veteran who was approaching the end of a long bureau career. At first it seemed he was trying to set her mind at rest: "He told me, I just want to assure you that everything is fine, and as far as you’re concerned, your work on this matter is done,’" Edmonds says. "I told him, ‘No, it’s not fine. My family is worried about possible threats to their safety in Turkey.’ His face went through a transformation. He warned me that these issues were classified at the highest level and must not be disclosed to anyone. He started to interrogate me: Who had I told? He said if it was anyone unauthorized he could have me arrested." Edmonds’s meeting with Frields on the 22nd was probably her last chance to save her job. The inspector general’s 2005 report disclosed, "Immediately after the meeting, began to explore whether the F.B.I. had the option to cease using Edmonds as a contract linguist." Four days later the bureau’s contracting unit told him, "If it was determined that was unsuitable, the F.B.I. would have sufficient reason to terminate her contract." Stymied by Frields, Edmonds tried to go still higher, and on March 7 she was granted an audience with James Caruso, the F.B.I.’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism and counter-intelligence. Edmonds says he listened politely for more than an hour but took no notes and asked no questions. Afterward, Matthew picked her up and they drove to the Capital Grille for an early lunch. It was only 11:30 and the restaurant was still empty, but as the Edmondses began to study their menus, they saw two men in suits pull up outside in an F.B.I.-issue S.U.V. They came inside and sat down at the next table. "They just sat and stared at Sibel," Matthew says. "They took out their cell phones, opened them, and put them on the table. They didn’t eat or drink—just sat, staring at Sibel, the whole time we were there." Modified cell phones, Sibel knew, are commonly used by bureau agents as a means of making covert recordings. That afternoon, Sibel wrote to two official bodies with powers to investigate the F.B.I.—the Justice Department’s internal affairs division, known as the Office of Professional Responsibility, and its independent watchdog, the O.IG. She went on to send faxes to the Senate Intelligence Committee and Senators Charles Grassley, Republican from Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to say that she had found evidence of possible national-security breaches. On March 8, Sibel appeared at a dingy little office in Washington’s China Town, where she was polygraphed. According to the 2005 inspector general’s report, the purpose of this examination was to discover whether she had made unauthorized disclosures of classified information. "She was not deceptive in her answers," the O.I.G. reported. Dickerson was polygraphed two weeks later, on March 21, and she too was deemed to have passed. But, according to an official cited in the report, the questions she was asked were vague and unspecific. "The polygraph unit chief admitted that questions directly on point could have been asked but were not." Nevertheless, then and for a long time afterward, "the FBI continued to rely on the polygraph as support for its position that Edmonds’ allegations were unfounded." Dickerson’s polygraph test, however unsatisfactory, seems to have sealed Edmonds’ fate at the FBI. The following afternoon, she was asked to wait in Stephanie Bryan’s office. "Feghali saw me sitting there and leaned across the doorway," Edmonds says. "He tapped his watch and said, ‘In less than an hour you will be fired, you whore.’" A few minutes later, she was summoned to a meeting with Frields. They were joined by Bryan and George Stukenbroeker, the chief of personal security and the man in charge of investigating her case. Edmonds had violated every security rule in the book, Stukenbroeker said. A hulking security guard arrived to help escort her from the building. Edmonds asked if she could return to her desk to retrieve some photos, including shots of her late father of which she had no copies. Bryan refused, saying, "You’ll never set foot in the FBI again." Bryan promised to forward them, says Edmonds, who never got the photos back. Edmonds looked at Frields. "You are only making your wrongdoing worse, and my case stronger. I will see you very soon," she told him. According to Edmonds, Frields replied, "Soon maybe, but it will be in jail. I’ll see you in jail." (When interviewed by the O.I.G., Frields and another witness denied making this comment.) Matthew was waiting outside. "I’m not a crybaby," Sibel says. "But as I got into my husband’s car that afternoon, I was in floods, shaking. As soon as she returned home from the February meeting where Dickerson allegedly cautioned her not to endanger her family in Turkey, Sibel called her mother and sister in Istanbul, even though it was the middle of the night there. Sibel is the oldest of three sisters. The youngest was studying in America and living with the Edmondses in Alexandria, but the middle sister – whose name Edmonds wishes to protect – was enjoying a successful career at an international travel company based in Istanbul. The 29-year-old was also engaged to be married. Within days of receiving Sibel’s call, she flew with her mother to Washington. Early in April, Sibel and Matthew were having lunch in their favorite Thai restaurant in Old Town Alexandria – a precious chance, with their house now fully occupied with Sibel’s family, to share a private moment together. "My phone rang," Sibel says. "It was my middle sister. She said something really bad had happened and I must come back at once." The sister’s Istanbul neighbor had just phoned, saying that two policemen had knocked on her door, asking for the sister’s whereabouts. They would not disclose the reason, saying only that it was an "intelligence matter." They also left a document. Sent by Tevfik Asici of the Atakoy Branch Police Station and dated April 11, it was addressed to Sibel’s sister and read, "For an important issue your deposition/interrogation is required. If you do not report to the station within 5 days, between 09:00 and 17:00, as is required by Turkish law CMK.132, you will be taken/arrested by force." In July 2002, with a written recommendation from Senator Grassley, Sibel’s sister requested political asylum in the United States. Her application statement cited the threat allegedly made by Dickerson, adding that Sibel would be considered "a spy and a traitor to Turkey under Turkish law, and the Turkish police will use me to get at her. Turkish police are known for using cruelty and torture during interrogation; subjects are kept without advice to family members and often disappear with no trace." Estranged from Sibel, the sister remains in America, unable to go home. Edmonds did what numerous avowed whistleblowers had done before: she appealed to congress, and she got a lawyer – David Colapinto of the Washington firm of Kohn, Kohn and Calapinto, which advertises itself on its Web site as specializing in cases of this kind. He filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act for full disclosure of what happened inside the bureau, and submitted a claim for damages for the violation of Edmonds’s constitutional rights. By August he was ready to depose Douglas Can Dickerson. But before their scheduled deposition, the couple abruptly left the country. Douglas had been assigned to an air-force job in Belgium. Virgil Magee, a U.S. Air Force spokesman in Belgium, confirms that Dickerson remains on active duty in Europe, but refuses to say exactly where. That fall, Attorney General John Ashcroft tried to wipe out Edmonds’s legal action by invoking the state secrets privilege. This recourse, derived form English common law, has never been the subject of any congressional vote or statute. Normally, says Ann Beeson of the A.C.L.U., it is used be the government when it wants to resist the legal "discovery" in court of a specific piece of evidence that it fears might harm national security if publicized. But in Edmonds case Ashcroft argued that the very subject of her lawsuit was a state secret. To air her claims in front of federal judges would jeopardize national security. This, Beeson says, had distinct advantages for the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice: it meant they did not have to contest the merits of her claims. Moreover, the substance of the arguments they used to justify this level of secrecy was and is secret itself. The full version of Ashcroft’s declaration invoking the privilege, filed on October 18, 2002, was classified, and in the public case for blocking Edmonds’s action rested on the mere assertion that it would be damaging to proceed. Later, in 2004, the law firm of Motley Rice sought to depose her for a pending case on behalf of the families of 9/11 victims. Immediately, Ashcroft asserted the privilege again. Motley Rice submitted a list of questions it wanted to ask Edmonds, almost all of which were prohibited. Among them: "When and where were you born?," "What languages do you speak?," and "Where did you go to school?" Edmonds still wanted to fight, and to challenge Ashcroft in court. But over the next few months, the relationship with her lawyers began to suffer. "Let’s face it, taking on the D.O.J. is no joke, especially in Washington," Edmonds says. It was the absolute low point. I tried to find another firm," she says, "but as soon as I mentioned the state-secrets privilege, it was like, ‘Turn around, go back, and by the way the clock is running at $450 an hour.’ I must have been turned away by 20 firms." The Dickersons, the Justice Department, and the F.B.I. and its relevant personnel declined to comment for this article. In August 2002, Melek Can Dickerson told the Chicago Tribune, "both the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice have conducted separate investigations of claims…. They fired her and, interestingly, they continued my contract." In September 2002, Colonel James Worth of the Office of the Air Force Inspector General said that, in response to a letter from Edmonds, there had been a "complete and thorough review of Major Dickerson’s relationship with the American-Turkish Council" that found "no evidence of any deviation from the scope of his duties." Edmonds says she was not interviewed by those conducting the review. Edmonds’ treatment by the F.B.I. seems to fit two baleful patterns: the first is the bureau’s refusal to address potentially disastrous internal-security flaws; the second is a general tendency among national-security agencies to retaliate against whistle-blowers. Amid the lush greenery of his parents’ garden in Plattsmouth, Nebraska; former F.B.I. senior intelligence-operations specialist John Cole describes how these institutional inclinations combined to destroy his career. Now 44, Cole joined the F.B.I. in 1985. By the late 1990’s, he was running undercover operations in the Washington area, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence. Later, while playing a key role in the 9/11 investigation, he became the F.B.I.’s national counter-intelligence program manager for India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Early in the fall of 2001, Cole was asked to assess whether a woman who had applied to work as a translator of Urdu, Pakistan’s national language, might pose a risk to security. "The personnel security officer said she thought there was something that didn’t seem right," Cole says. "I went through the file, and it stuck out a mile: she was the daughter of a retired Pakistani general who had been their military attaché in Washington." He adds that, to his knowledge, "Every single military attaché they’ve ever assigned has been a known intelligence officer." After September 11, this association looked especially risky. The Pakistani intelligence service had trained and supported the Taliban in Afghanistan, and still contained elements who were far from happy with President Pervez Musharraf’s pro-American policies. Cole gave his findings to the security officer. "Well done," she said. "You’ve found it." A week later, she called Cole again, to say that the woman had started work that morning with a top-secret security clearance. F.B.I. director Robert Mueller had promised Congress that the bureau would hire lots of new Middle Eastern linguists, and normal procedures had been short-circuited as a result. As of July 2005, the woman was still a bureau translator. Sibel Edmonds said she remembers her well – as the leader of a group that pressed for separate restrooms for Muslims. Cole says the incident was only one of several that caused him to doubt the quality and security of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, and, like Edmonds, he says he tried to fix the problems he saw by going up the chain of command. Getting rid of an agent of his stature was a lot more difficult than firing a contract linguist. Cole says the retaliation began when, after years of glowing reports, his annual appraisal found his work in one area to be "minimally acceptable." Next, he was placed under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, first on a charge that he lied on a routine background check, and then, after he had disclosed classified information without authorization. Finally, he was demoted to menial roles: "They literally had me doing the Xeroxing" Bitterly disillusioned, he says, he resigned in March 2004. "According to the terms of our employment, whistle-blowing is an obligation," Cole says, "We sign a piece of paper every year saying we will report any mismanagement or evidence of a possible crime. But the management’s schtick is that if you draw attention to the bureau’s shortcomings you’re disgracing it. Cole is one of about 50 current and former members of the FBI, C.I.A., National Security Agency, and other bodies who have made contact recently with Sibel Edmonds. Another is Mike German, one of the bravest and most successful counterterrorism agents in the bureau’s history, who penetrated a neo-Nazi gang in Los Angeles and a militia group in Seattle and brought them to justice. German made his bed of nails in 2002 when he was asked to get involved in an investigation into a suspected cell of Islamist terrorists. "I came down and reviewed the case, and it was a complete mess," he says. "There were violations of FBI policy and violations of the law. As someone who had been through successful terrorism prosecutions, I knew you couldn’t afford to make mistakes." Like Cole, German says he thought himself obliged to report what was going wrong, not to penalize other agents but in the hope of putting it right. "I though the bureau would do the right thing: that the case would get back on track, and we’d get the opportunity to take action against the bad guys involved." Instead, he says, he faced the familiar litany of escalating retaliation – including an internal investigation of his own work on the terrorist cell case. "Bear in mind that only a handful of people have ever infiltrated terrorist groups," German says. "You’d think that after 9/11 they might have been interested in that. But word came back to me that I’d never get a counterterrorism case again." He resigned from the bureau in June 2004. As I talked to whistle-blowers, I had the impression that those treated the worst were among the brightest and best. There could be no clearer example than Russ Tice, and 18-year intelligence veteran who has worked for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.) and American’s eavesdroppers, the National Security Agency. "I dealt with super-sensitive stuff," he says. "I obviously can’t talk about it, but I had operational roles in both Afghanistan and Iraq." It was at D.I.A. in the spring of 2001 that he wrote a report setting down his suspicions about a junior collage, a Chinese-American who Tice says was living a lavish lifestyle beyond her apparent means. Although she was supposed to be working on a doctorate, he noticed her repeatedly in the office, late at night, reading classified material on an agency computer. "It’s not like I obsessed over the issue," Tice says. "I did my job, and then 9/11 happened, and I was a very busy boy." He moved to the N.S.A. toward the end of 2002. The trigger for his downfall the following April was the arrest of Katrina Leung; the F.B.I. informant accused of spying for China while having an affair with a bureau agent. It prompted Tice to send a classified e-mail to the D.I.A. security section, commenting that the Leung case showed that the F.B.I. was "incompetent." The implication was that the D.I.A. could prove it’s competence by fully investigating the junior colleague. Tice, a big, powerful man with a forthright manner, has to pause to control his emotions when he describes what happened as a consequence. "I was sent for an emergency psychiatric evaluation. I took all the computer tests and passed them with flying colors. But then the shrink says he believes I’m unbalanced. Later he said I’m suffering from "paranoid ideation." He was examined by an independent psychiatrist, who "found no evidence of mental disorder." But he had already been denied access to secure places at N.S.A. As a result, this highly commended technical-espionage expert was put to work in the N.S.A.’s motor pool, "wiping snow off cars, vacuuming them, and driving people around. People looked at me like I had bubonic plague." (The D.I.A. did not respond to a request for comment, and an agency spokesperson said the agency does not discuss personnel matters.) After about eight months of this purgatory, apparently an attempt to persuade him to resign, he was placed on "administrative leave." Like other whistle-blowers, he tried to redress his treatment. In August 2004, Tice wrote letters to members of the House and Senate. Six days later, the N.S.A. began the formal process which would lead to his getting fired, and to having his clearance revoked permanently. "What happened to me was total Stalin-era tactics," he says. "Everyone I know or ever worked with says I’m perfectly sane. Yet I just don’t know what to do next. I’ve been in intelligence all my life, but without a security clearance, I can’t practice my trade." Echoing Cole and German, one of the congressional staffers who heard Edmonds’s secure testimony likens the FBI to a family, "and you don’t take your problems outside it. They think they’re the best law enforcement agency in the world, that they’re beyond criticism and beyond reproach." To an outside observer that ethos alone might explain the use of the state secrets privilege against Edmonds. But, the staffer adds, some of the wiretaps she said she translated "mentioned government officials." Here may lie an entirely different dimension to her case. Vanity Fair has established that around the time the Dickersons visited the Edmondses, in December 2001, Joel Robertz, an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent; all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in 1997. "It became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on." Its subject was explosive; what sounded like attempts to bribe elected members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. "There was pressure within the bureau for a special prosecutor to be appointed and take the case on, "the official says. Instead, his colleagues were told to alter the thrust of their investigation – away from elected politicians and toward appointed officials. "This is the reason why Ashcroft reacted to Sibel in such an extreme fashion," he says "It was to keep this from coming out." In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled hearing. In all, says a source who was present, she managed to listen to more than 40 of the Chicago recordings supplied by Robertz. Many involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associates. Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes. To a person who knew nothing about their context, the details were confusing and it wasn’t always clear what might be significant. One name, however, apparently stood out – a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname "Denny boy." It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. According to some of the wiretaps, the F.B.I.’s targets had arranged for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small checks. Under Federal Election Commission rules, donations of less than $200 are not required to be itemized in public filings. Hastert himself was never heard in the recordings, Edmonds told investigators, and it is possible that the claims of covert payments were hollow boasts. Nevertheless, an examination of Hastert’s federal filings shows that the level of un-itemized payments his campaigns received over many years was relatively high. Between April 1996 and December 2002, un-itemized personal donations to the Hastert for Congress Committee amounted to $483,000. In contrast, un-itemized contributions in the same period to the committee run on behalf of the House majority leader, Tom Delay, Republican of Texas, were only $99,000. An analysis of the filings of four other senior Republicans shows that only one, Clay Shaw of Florida, declared a higher total in un-itemized donations than Hastert over the same period: $552,000. The other three declared far less. Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton, of Texas, claimed $265,000; Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, of California, got $212,000; and Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas, of California, recorded $110,000. Edmonds reportedly added that the recordings also contained repeated references to Hastert’s flip-flop, in the fall of 2000, over an issue which remains of intense concern to the Turkish government – the continuing campaign to have Congress designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. For many years, attempts had been made to get the house to pass a genocide resolution, but they never got anywhere until August 2000, when Hastert, as Speaker, announced that he would give it his backing and see that it received a full house vote. He had a clear political reason, as analysts noted at the time: a California Republican incumbent, locked in a tight congressional race, was looking to win over his district’s large Armenian community. Thanks to Hastert, the resolution, vehemently opposed by the Turks, passed the International Relations Committee by a large majority. Then, on October 19, minutes before the full House vote, Hastert withdrew it. At the time, he explained his decision by saying that he had received a letter from President Clinton arguing that the genocide resolution, if passed, would harm U.S. interests. Again, the reported content of the Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign. Nevertheless, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000. Hastert’s spokesman says the congressman withdrew the genocide resolution only because of the approach from Clinton, "and to insinuate anything else just doesn’t make any sense." He adds that Hastert has no affiliation with the A.T.C. or other groups reportedly mentioned in the wiretaps: "He does not know these organizations." Hastert is "unaware of Turkish interests making donations," the spokesman says, and his staff has "not seen any pattern of donors with foreign names." For more than years after Edmonds was fired, the Office of the Inspector General’s inquiry ground on. At last, in July 2004, its report was completed – and promptly labeled classified at the behest of the F.B.I. It took months of further pressure before a redacted, unclassified version was finally issued, in January 2005. It seemed to provide stunning vindication of Edmond’s credibility. "Many of Edmonds’ core allegations relating to the co-worker were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses," the report said. "We believe that the F.B.I. should have investigated the allegations more thoroughly." The F.B.I. had justified firing Edmonds on the grounds that she had a "disruptive effect," the report went on. However, "this disruption related primarily to Edmonds’ aggressive pursuit of her allegations of misconduct, which the F.B.I. did not believe were supported and which it did not adequately investigate. In fact, as we described throughout our report, many of her allegations had basis in fact," the report read. "We believe … that the F.B.I. did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the F.B.I.’s decision to terminate her services." Meanwhile, Edmonds had new lawyers: the A.C.L.U.’s Ann Beeson, who is leading the challenge to the state-secrets privilege, and Mark Zaid, a private attorney who specializes in national-security issues. Zaid has filed a $10 million tort suit, citing the threats to Edmonds’s family, her inability to look after her real-estate and business interests in Turkey, and a series of articles in the Turkish press that have vilified her. In July 2004, a federal district court had ruled in favor of the government’s use of the state-secrets privilege. Like Ashcroft’s declaration, its opinion contained no specific facts. Next came a bizarre hearing in the D.C. appeals court in April 2005. The room was cleared of reporters while Beeson spoke for 15 minutes. Then Beeson and Edmonds were also expelled to make way for the Department of Justice lawyers, who addressed the judges in secret. Two weeks later, the court rejected Edmond’s appeal, without expanding on the district court’s opinion. At press time, she was set to file a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court agrees to take the case, the government’s reasons for its actions may finally be forced into the open; legal experts say the Supreme Court has never allowed secret arguments. A week after the April appeal hearing, Edmonds gathered more than 30 whistle-blowers from the F.B.I., C.I.A., National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies to brief staffers from the House and Senate. Among the whistle-blowers were Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, and Coleen Rowley, the F.B.I. agent from Minneapolis who complained that Washington ignored local agents who in August 2001 had raised concerns about a flight student named Zacharias Moussoui, who has since admitted being an al-Qaeda terrorist. Many of those present had unearthed apparent breaches of national security; many aid their careers had been wrecked as a result. At a press conference after the briefings, Congressman Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, praised Edmonds and her colleagues as "national heroes," pledging that he would introduce a bill to make it a crime for any agency manager to retaliate against such individuals. Afterward, the whistle-blowers mingled over hors d’oeuvres and explored their common ground and experiences. By July, they are working to formalize their not-for-profit campaign group, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. "When they took on Sibel," says Mike German, who is now the coalition’s congressional liaison, "they made the wrong woman mad." "I’m going to keep pushing this as long as I can, but I’m not going to get obsessional," Edmonds says. "There are other things I want to do with my life. But the day the Iranians tried to arrest me, my father told me, "Sibel, you only live your life once. How do you choose to live? According to your principles, or in fear?" I have never forgotten those words."

by **maggrwaggr** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 1:50 am

Is this the entire article? I've been meaning to pick it up somewhere, but I sure hate to pay money for anything with Jennifer Aniston on the cover

by **Starman** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 6:01 am

GREAT article -- Thanks for posting. Besides outraging me even more, it confirms for me how thoroughly rotton our overly-vaunted Intelligence and Security institutions are. What I found especially appalling in Edmonds' atrocious treatment by officials who were essentially validated for their supreme arrogance and contempt for law, and in her nemesis that she had found excellant grounds to suspect of espionage remaining in a classified intelligence position despite her patently false, manipulative behavior and her overt threat -- is the almost certain implication that such rampant corruption has thoroughly infected Congress and the FBI and Chicago politics and even the courts -- as well as the NSA, DIA, and CIA -- or else Edmond's superiors should have been able to assure her they took her concerns seriously and were going to put the Dickersons under close, covert surveillance. Of all the ways to 'manage' Edmonds and reassure her, to secure her cooperation and confidence, the way she WAS treated is simply inexplicable -- unless she found something that goes to the heart of a totally compromised intelligence system. The fact that they began to retaliate, intimidate, and take reprisals against her suggests that the whole ediface of Secret Intelligence and top government officials has been infiltrated and numerous individuals are being actively blackmailed and manipulated -- THAT'S the REAL security-danger risk here, with who-knows WHAT secret deals and covert operations being covered-up and WHAT operations are being facilitated. This degree of pervasive corruption and cover-up, competely absent any Congressional oversight and noteably lacking principled, dedicated leadership, with the Attorney General using extra-ordinary means to keep the whole issue hidden, strongly indicates that Americans can have NO confidence any more in their Government officials and agencies charged with defending the nation. This is a monumental betrayal and perversion which SHOULD rightly be thoroughly investigated by a fully-authorized independant counsel absolutely above reproach -- with serious action taken to reform every affected department and discharge or indict everyone with even the least evidence of compromised integrity. The safety and well-being of the Nation require nothing less -- Unless the whole country is so far gone it can't be effectively reformed. Apparently, the FBI was at a loss as how to deal with an honest, principled straight-shooter -- the whole institution is likely bogus and compromised, judging by how impervious the Translation Dept. was to any constructive criticism in accordance with its own policies requiring improprieties to be promptly reported -- This issue is FAR, FAR bigger than just Edmonds. Thanks to the traitors and criminals and frauds who have infiltrated top Government agencies like the FBI, the principle of 'Patriotism' has become terribly degraded and has become practically valueless. If decent, honorable people wish to salvage this concept, its gonna take a COMPLETE housecleaning -- but frankly, I doubt if there's sufficient will for the kind of massive purge it will take to remove everyone from positions of authority who have even the slightest taint of compromise and criminality. While searching google for more info to see if this was the full Vanity Fair article, I found the following through a recent libertypost discussion, a news article reporting an advertising campaign Sibels will participate in that will publicize the names of major government and public officials suspected of major criminal wrongdoing with their suspected crimes listed. A great Idea! As well as details about Edmonds' upcoming Supreme Court Appeal. At the same libertypost discussion site I also found a suggestion that Vanity Fair may have pulled the Edmonds' article from their September issue, since someone found that the feature article was about the Plame affair instead -- but whether this just affected their web-magazine or their newstand copy wasn't made clear. But IF Vanity Fair was pressured to pull this article describing serious FBI lapses and the National Security Act being used to absolve the agency for all accountability for such a gross and evident misconduct threatening US security, then its a REAL serious matter. I guess we'll find out more next week. Anyway: Starman ***** <a href="http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=104195">www.libertypost.org/cgi-b...Num=104195</a> Title: National Security Watch: FBI whistle-blower petitions high court [Sibel goes to Supreme court!] Source: usnews.com URL Source: <a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050805/5natsec.htm">www.usnews.com/usnews/new...natsec.htm</a> Published: Aug 5, 2005 Author: Danielle Knight Post Date: 2005-08-06 09:38:03 by palo verde --excerpt-- Lawyers for Sibel Edmonds, the former translator for the FBI, have petitioned the Supreme Court to hear her case. Edmonds claims that she was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and possible espionage within the bureau. The FBI hired Edmonds, who is fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani, shortly after the 9/11 attacks. She was fired in 2002 and filed a lawsuit later that year arguing that her firing was in retaliation for blowing the whistle on other FBI officials. In its defense, the Justice Department is using the "states secrets privilege," an argument that information related to Edmonds's case is highly classified and cannot be disclosed without endangering the nation's security. The states secrets privilege is an executive power that is not a law, but based on a series of legal precedents. In July 2004, a federal district court ruled in favor of the government's use of this privilege in Edmonds's case. In May 2005 the D.C. appeals court upheld the district court's opinion. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, the court's decision could influence the fate of several other lawsuits involving national security and intelligence in which the administration has used the states secrets argument. The government has relied on this argument in several high-profile federal cases, including that of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who claims the U.S. government interdicted him at JFK Airport in New York in 2002 and sent him to be interrogated in Syria, where he alleges he was tortured. "We are urging the Supreme Court, which has not directly addressed this issue in 50 years, to rein in the government's misuse of this privilege," says Ann Beeson, associate legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, who is one of the lawyers representing Edmonds. The states secrets privilege, she says, "should be used as a shield for sensitive evidence, not a sword the government can use at will to cut off argument in a case before the evidence can be presented." Edmonds told U.S. News that she and other whistle-blowers from the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security are so furious with the lack of congressional oversight on intelligence and national security that they plan to launch an advertising campaign targeting government officials who have allegedly endangered national security. The newspaper ads, which could be launched as early as two months from now, would name officials, their titles, their salaries, where they work, and their alleged or documented wrongdoing, says Edmonds. The campaign would be funded by private donations and would be coordinated by the recently formed advocacy group she heads, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. (snip) Go Sibel, GO! -S Uh, How about Cindy Sherman for President in 2008, and Sibel Edmonds as her VP? We NEED people of tremendous courage and uncorruptable character, who CAN'T be bought-out or blackmailed or intimidated by the Defense Industry thugs or the globalist-parasite gangsters or the Criminal Syndicate-neocon A-holes or the Chickenhawk Warmongers. The HELL with sell-out Hillary -- The US sure don't need another Clintonista Bush-crony insider to further lie to and defraud the American people! Sherman/Edmonds for '08! (Well, it's nice to dream a bit, ennyway...)

by **wintler** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 8:11 am

..Finding out S.E. is happily married, i was hoping she'd be my sweetheart, since Arundhati Roy hasn't even bothered to call.

by **antiaristo** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 9:15 am

Starman, Do you mean Cindy SHEEHAN for prez? If this "State Secret Privelige" bugs you, you might consider doing a little research on the Public Interest Immunity certificate (PII) that is used by the British to "fix" cases in court. It has been used repeatedly to prevent British courts from pronouncing on the legality of the war. Rather like the status of BCCI in its heyday or indeed the future of the British nuclear deterrent, it is intended that the issue NEVER be addressed. While thet carry on doing what they want. If you remember Lord Goldsmith and his opinion, he said the war was unlikely to be considered legal by a court. But of course that will never be tested because they use the PII to prevent such a test. What is the PII? It is a certificate, signed by a minister, which states that certain information would be injurious to the "national interest". This is done under the authority of the Fundamental Law, the Treason Felony Act. But she sees no public interest beyond her selfish self, so PIIs are ALWAYS against the public interest and in Her Majesty's interest. For example many innocent men today languish in prison because she has used this power to "fix" them. Some public interest! We are seeing more and more use of this "personal power". Just today there is a story... Clarke uses 'personal power' to ban Bakri from UK Alan Travis, Duncan Campbell, and Audrey Gillan in Beirut Saturday August 13, 2005 The Guardian The radical Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed was banned yesterday from setting foot in Britain again under a "personal power" exercised by the home secretary, Charles Clarke. Last night the man nicknamed "the Tottenham Ayatollah" was at liberty in Beirut after being released from a day of questioning by the Lebanese authorities. The Syrian-born cleric, 46, who has lived in Britain for 20 years, told a Beirut television station he did not plan to challenge the ban. "I don't want to go back to Britain unless the government announces personally that I am no longer persona non grata," he said. It appears that Home Office officials have established that Mr Clarke has the power to exclude him on the grounds that "his presence is not conducive to the public good". <a href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1548394,00.html">politics.guardian.co.uk/t...94,00.html</a> "He's banned because he's smelly!"

by **AnnaLivia** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 10:38 am

woke this morning, put on the coffee, opened the blinds to let the sun-rise in, made my to-do list, put on my choice of Saturday morning music,then started reading this thread. and just as i finished...you'll think i'm lying...but THIS song was next: EVERYTHING IS BROKEN Broken lines, broken strings, Broken threads, broken springs, Broken idols, broken heads, People sleeping in broken beds. Ain't no use jiving Ain't no use joking Everything is broken. Broken bottles, broken plates, Broken switches, broken gates, Broken dishes, broken parts, Streets are filled with broken hearts. Broken words never meant to be spoken, Everything is broken. Seem like every time you stop and turn around Something else just hit the ground Broken cutters, broken saws, Broken buckles, broken laws, Broken bodies, broken bones, Broken voices on broken phones. Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin', Everything is broken. Every time you leave and go off someplace Things fall to pieces in my face Broken hands on broken ploughs, Broken treaties, broken vows, Broken pipes, broken tools, People bending broken rules. Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking, Everything is broken. Washington, DC is the darkest spot on the globe, and this song is America's rightful theme song. this country is the biggest disgrace and the greatest failure this planet has ever seen. if it weren't for Starman, i'd be convinced i am the most disgusted person alive. it's a wonder i don't spontaneously combust, i swear....even though i know the wealthpower nightmare has all gone on for so long now. next sign in my yard will read: FRODO FAILED! BUSH HAS THE RING! (the last one was about children being raped in Iraq prisons thanks to Bush voters...and i live right across the street from an elementary school, and a well-traveled bike path runs adjacent my house. fuck what the town thinks. it's full of complicit sleepers.) ever since dickhead cheney personally sent my kids' dad's job overseas we've been in dire straits financially, but it looks like it's time to fire off another small check to the ACLU. and i can't wait to contribute to that advertising campaign to name names and crimes. i owe it to Sibel and these other whistle-blowers to do more than give them respect and kudos. up next on the playlist is Motion City Soundtrack. i wanna hear that line about how "I'm riding hard on the last legs of every lie..." (here, btw, are all of Bob Dylan's lyrics): <a href="http://orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dylan/default.html">orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/...fault.html</a>

by **Starman** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 2:51 pm

Antiaristo: Quite right-- I meant Cindy SHEEHAN for President -- It was quite, quite late when I wrote the post, wanting to vent while I was still fuming over the details in the Vanity Fair article, and not firing on all cylinders. Thanks for the heads-up. Sheehan for Prez. is about the kind of massive shake-up to the status-quo that I think it's gonna take to restore a fair measure of hope for many, that the trend can be actively reversed that America is well-on of self-contradiction and internal decay infecting all of America's governmental and corporate institutions. The thing is, as I see it, that the motivation and ambition of America's civil servants have been corrupted by concerns OTHER than serving honorably and well. I would be pretty damn sure that Sheehan couldn't be bought by the Defense Industry. Re: the British exercise of Personal Power to exempt critical issues from legal review -- What an unconscionable but too-common sign that tyranny is within our midst, that the majority of brain-dead sheeple are acculturated to accept as right and given. What can one say but Shame!? AnnaLivia said: "Washington, DC is the darkest spot on the globe, and this song is America's rightful theme song. this country is the biggest disgrace and the greatest failure this planet has ever seen. if it weren't for Starman, i'd be convinced i am the most disgusted person alive. it's a wonder i don't spontaneously combust, i swear....even though i know the wealthpower nightmare has all gone on for so long now." BLESS-YOU! It lightens my black mood somewhat to read your words and know my profound disgust is shared. Trying to be perceptive to encouraging signs, I don't see anything on the horizon. Your observations re: America's theme song are right-on. As too, your comment about Washington DC being the darkest spot on the globe. What an enormous about-face, that the 'beacon' of the Free World should in actually have become such a complete contradiction. As the result of my understanding of how America really functions in the world, and the degree to which its own citizens are ignorant of how much suffering and tragedy is caused or aggravated by American policies and actors, I don't see how America or Washington DC can ever regain its reputation as reflecting a noble ideal -- which is perhaps fitting as much of its positive, inspiring reputation was based on lies and fraud and not deserved. In the current crisis of what to believe in, I increasingly think of the major conflict today as being between a minority of powerful, wealthy elites and the majority of the world's poor. By inclination, culture, disposition, experiences, philosophical bent and such, I strongly identity with the world's dispossed and working poor, finding a kind of superior dignity in those who toil and suffer that shames the feigned presumption and arrogance of the priveleged upper-classes. Meanwhile ... Another story I just found linked to rense that suggests the Edmonds'/FBI story might have been pulled from Vanity Fair and replaced with an article slamming the press for its failure to pursue the Plame leak/Rove story. <a href="http://209.11.49.220/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001013806">209.11.49.220/eandp/news/...1001013806</a> 'Vanity Fair' Rips Media 'Conspiracy' in Covering Up Role in Plame Scandal By Greg Mitchell Published: August 11, 2005 9:00 PM ET --excerpt-- NEW YORK In an article in the September issue of Vanity Fair (not yet online), Michael Wolff, in probing the Plame/CIA leak scandal, rips those in the news media -- principally Time magazine and The New York Times -- who knew that Karl Rove was one of the leakers but refused to expose what would have been “one of the biggest stories of the Bush years.” Not only that, “they helped cover it up.” You might say, he adds, they “became part of a conspiracy.” --snip-- So, I dunno what the real deal is. Perhaps BOTH stories are in the Sept. issue. We'll see. Regrdz! Starman

by **rapt** » Sat Aug 13, 2005 5:18 pm

I received the print copy today and both articles are in the magazine. No they didn't pull it.

by **seemslikeadream** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 11:39 am

<a href="http://www.theinternationalpost.com/z15082005.html">www.theinternationalpost....82005.html</a> Hastert’s Turkish Allies Tied to Bin Laden 15 Aug 2005 07:48:00 GMT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Lynn Grant “If they were to allow the whole picture to emerge… certain elected officials will stand trial and go to prison.” – Sibel Edmonds CHICAGO, Illinois, Aug 15 (IP) – During the current flurry of September 11th related news, one item has gone largely unnoticed. Reports of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds’ allegations concerning improper financial ties between House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Turkish officials and businessman have become a source of discontent for beltway insiders on both sides of the aisle. However, the recent coverage has not addressed why Sibel Edmonds’ information regarding Speaker Hastert’s dealings with the Turks necessitated an in-depth investigation by the September 11th Commission. In an August 10, 2005 interview about her reported allegations, Edmonds was asked, “What are you alleging about the Speaker of the House?” Though under a strict gag order, she replied: “I have been giving all the details to the appropriate channels. And they have been confirmed. And what I have said all along is the fact that as far as the 9/11 is concerned, September 11 is concerned, these departments -- and when I say “these departments,” the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense -- have intentionally blocked the investigations of real -- the real criminals in this country. … Most of al Qaeda’s funding is… through narcotics. And have you heard anything to this date, anything about these issues which we have had information since 1997? And as I would again emphasize, we are talking about countries. And they are blocking this information, and also the fact that certain officials in this country are engaged in treason against the United States and its interests and its national security, be it the Department of State or certain elected officials. While alluding to treason, Edmonds’ reply indicates that her allegations about Speaker Hastert are linked to al-Qaeda and the September 11th attacks. To understand this link, it is necessary to examine the substance of Mrs. Edmonds’ allegations, as reported in the recent issue of Vanity Fair: A large part of her work at the F.B.I. involved listening to the wiretapped conversations of people who were the targets of counter-intelligence investigations. … Many involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associates. Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes. … One name, however, apparently stood out – a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname “Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. According to some of the wiretaps, the F.B.I.’s targets had arranged for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small checks. Under Federal Election Commission rules, donations of less than $200 are not required to be itemized in public filings. The Vanity Fair article adds: The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information. … “She told us she’d heard mention of exchanges of information, dead drops—that kind of thing,” a congressional source says. “It was mostly money in exchange for secrets.” … There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder. … “There was pressure within the bureau for a special prosecutor to be appointed and take the case on, “the [FBI] official says. Instead, his colleagues were told to alter the thrust of their investigation – away from elected politicians and toward appointed officials. “This is the reason why Ashcroft reacted to Sibel in such an extreme fashion [invoking the rarely used State Secrets Privilege],” he says “It was to keep this from coming out.” Though a Hastert spokesperson has dismissed Edmonds’ allegations and no evidence is presented confirming Hastert received illegal payments, the article reports on another wiretap in which “a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution [recognizing the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in the early 1900s as Genocide] would have been at least $500,000.” The targets of the wiretaps translated by Edmonds were heavily concentrated near Hastert’s Chicago-area congressional district: Vanity Fair reveals that the FBI’s investigation centered on Speaker Hastert’s Chicago-area district: One counter-intelligence official familiar with Edmonds’s case has told Vanity Fair that the F.B.I. opened an investigation into covert activities by Turkish nationals in the late 1990’s. That inquiry found evidence, mainly via wiretaps, of attempts to corrupt senior American politicians in at least two major cities - Washington and Chicago. … In December 2001, Joel Robertz, an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent; all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in 1997. “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official who is familiar with the case file. But “it became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on.” These disclosures about Edmonds’ targets help to clarify her past statements to the press. For example, when asked in a January 2005 interview if she had any information that would tie the targets of her FBI wiretaps to the September 11th attacks or Osama bin Laden’s organization, Edmonds replied, “Through certain activities with money laundering, and narcotics and illegal weapons procurement. Yes.” (audio) More specifically, Edmonds wrote in a July 2004 article that she has “firsthand knowledge of ongoing intelligence received and processed by the FBI since 1997, which contained specific information implicating certain high level government and elected officials in criminal activities directly and indirectly related to terrorist money laundering, narcotics, and illegal arms sales.” Yet Edmonds may not be the only well-known FBI Whistleblower with connections to this 9/11-related investigation in Chicago. Beginning in the mid-1990s, FBI Special Agent Robert Wright was given orders to investigate several Chicago-based businessmen with ties to Turkey – and Osama bin Laden. Special Agent Wright shared details of his investigation with Brian Ross of ABC’s Primetime Live in 2002: ROSS: Their story begins in the mid-1990s. With growing terrorism in the Middle East, the two agents were assigned to track a connection to Chicago, a suspected terrorist cell that would later lead them to an Osama Bin Laden connection. WRIGHT: We had a cell in Chicago, right. And that was, that was the premise of how we got the investigation going. ROSS: But Wright says he soon discovered that all the FBI Intelligence Division wanted him to do was to follow suspected terrorists around town and file reports, but make no arrests. WRIGHT: The supervisor who was there from headquarters was right straight across from me and started yelling at me, “You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.” ROSS: You’re on the Terrorism Task Force and you were told you will not open criminal cases? WRIGHT: Yes. ROSS: In 1998, Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed two American Embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 people. The agents say some of the money for the attack led back to the people they had been tracking in Chicago, and to a powerful Saudi Arabian businessman, this man, Yassin Kadi, who had extensive business and financial ties in Chicago. Yet, even after the bombings, the agents say headquarters ordered no arrests. WRIGHT: Two months after the embassies are hit in Africa, they want to shut down the criminal investigation. They wanted to kill it. ROSS: The move outraged the Federal Prosecutor in Chicago, who says Agents Wright and Vincent were helping him build a strong criminal case against Kadi and others. MARK FLESSNER, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: There were powers bigger than I was in the Justice Department and within the FBI that simply were not going to let it happen. And it didn’t happen. Wright’s investigation appeared to have had little effect on Chicago businessman Yassin Kadi. The Boston Globe reported in 2002, “Qadi was so well respected that he escorted former president Jimmy Carter around a Saudi women’s college in 2000.” Though a presidential escort, Kadi’s al-Qaeda ties are so widespread, agents working on his investigation once pondered whether he may have been Osama bin Laden. During a June 2003 conference at the National Press Club, Special Agent Wright declared: On June 9, 1998… I became the only FBI agent before 9/11 to utilize the civil forfeiture laws of the United States to seize $1.4 million in international terrorism assets from a Middle Eastern terrorist group. The original source of these seized funds was Yassin Kadi, a Saudi businessman. During 1998, an assistant United States attorney and I discussed the possibility that Mr. Kadi might actually be Osama bin Laden, or at least a close associate of bin Laden’s. … However, my repeated attempts requesting FBI’s international terrorism unit to investigate Kadi’s financing of international terrorism was ignored. … Four years later, only three weeks after the September 11 attacks, Mr. Kadi was designated by the United States government as the financier of Osama bin Laden. Kadi, now 48, acted as ‘the financier of Osama bin Laden’ not only in the Chicago-area, but in Turkey as well. Two months after 9/11, The Turkish Daily News published an article detailing Kadi’s investments entitled “Osama bin Laden’s ‘Cashier’ in Turkey”. The Turkish Daily added: Kadi, who was living in Istanbul, fled from Turkey following the Sept.11 attack. Kadi is a partner in two Turkey-based companies, the Karavan DisTicaret, a foreign trade company, and Ella Film-Produksiyon, a movie company. He once owned a 90 percent stake in Karavan and 30 percent in Ella but more recently these stakes have changed due to capital expansion. In March 2005, Turkish authorities concluded an investigation into Yassin Kadi’s suspected links with al-Qaeda. The Arab News described the probe’s findings: Turkey’s chief public prosecutor has formally ruled that there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Saudi businessman and philanthropist Yassin Abdullah Al-Qadi has had contact with or has assisted the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization. … The probe concluded that, far from being a member or supporter of Al-Qaeda, Al-Qadi was above board and his actions were at all times wholly legitimate. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, took no issue with his chief prosecutor’s questionable ruling. Though few familiar with Turkish politics would be surprised at Prime Minister Erdogan’s position. In November of 2001, The Turkish Daily News published an article with the headline ‘Tayyip – bin Laden Relationship’ referring to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The article provided translation of a Turkish language report one of the country’s largest newspapers which stated, “A Cumhuriyet headline said, referring to Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan: “… Al Kadi’s business partner Faruk Sarac is a close friend of the Erdogan family.” Though the Turkish Prime Minister is a close family friend of a business partner of bin Laden’s financier, this may be nothing more than a coincidence. However, another report seems to cast doubt on the coincidence theory. The Turkish Daily News reported in October 2001: Hurriyet said: “Cuneyd Zapsu is the partner in Turkey of Saudi businessman Yasin al-Qadi whose assets in the United States have been frozen because he has links with terrorism. Zapsu, one of the founders of the AKP, is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s closest friend.” Some Turks consider Zapsu to be their own version of Karl Rove. Earlier this year Prime Minister Erdogan sued a news contributor because of a political cartoon depicting Zapsu perched on Erdogan’s back. And in late 2004 The Economist reported: Secular Turks… fear that Mr Erdogan might use his muscle to expand the role of religion in public life. The real worry should be that more power could encourage his authoritarian streak. Even today only a handful of his advisers, among them Cuneyd Zapsu, a wealthy businessman, and Omer Celik, his youthful speech-writer, dare to disagree openly with Mr Erdogan. The terrorist tendencies are not confined solely to Erdogan’s closest friends and advisors. The Prime Minister himself has been involved in extremist behavior. According to The Turkish Daily News, “A Cumhuriyet headline said, referring to the Istanbul Municipality during Erdogan’s time as mayor, “The headquarters of religious reactionaryism [sic].” While Mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, Erdogan was jailed for four months by Turkey’s secular military after reading an Islamic poem containing the phrase, “Mosques are our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the believers our soldiers.” Erdogan imprisonment began in 1998, after a military coup forced his political party from power. Less than four years later, Erdogan’s party resumed power and the national hero soon became Turkey’s Prime Minister. The Prime Minister’s life story reads like a movie script: a man of destiny and vision, who can overcome any obstacle his path. Erdogan is surrounded by leaders who have been by his side from early on in his political career, including his Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Parliamentary Speaker Bulent Arinc. An April 1998 report in The Turkish Daily News stated: Cumhuriyet reported that the prison sentence Istanbul Mayor Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been given has come as a relief to the older generation. … Meanwhile, Abdullah Gul and Bulent Arinc are expected to come to the foreground as the younger generation’s potential candidates. Another 1998 Turkish news article reported: Commenting on the prison sentence given to Istanbul Mayor Erdogan, Gul said… “This incident will add strength to our cause -- to Erdogan’s own cause and to our party.” … Arinc said that they had not expected Erdogan to receive a sentence of this kind… “We have joined our fates with our friend, Tayyip Erdogan.” Erdogan, Gul and Arinc would soon become the three most powerful men in Turkey. Such power combined with the Erdogan administration’s various ties to Osama bin Laden should cause alarm among American officials engaged in the War on Terror. Yet even post-September 11, 2001, the result has been the opposite. During a 2002 visit with the Prime Minister in Turkey, Dennis Hastert stated: It was a very good meeting that we had with the new Prime Minister. … We are committed as our country, the United States, to work with Turkey, to carry on. We see Turkey as a very stable country, as a matter of fact the model for stability and moderation and democracy. Despite the Turkish government’s refusal to grant coalition forces access to key military bases during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Speaker Hastert never wavered in his support of Turkey. According to Turkish Speaker Arinc, Hastert declared, “We respect your parliament’s decision. Our Congress does the same thing from time to time. It is nothing to be offended by.” In late 2004 Hastert made another trip to Turkey, as The Washington Post reports: Folks in Europe are still talking about that splendid, 10-day, pre-Christmas tour of Europe led by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to attend the 60th anniversary ceremonies of the Battle of the Bulge. The group stopped to… visit more troops at Incirlik air base in Turkey… Support personnel... [were] amazed the plane got off the ground in Turkey -- what with all the fine rugs and pashminas -- not to mention some Turkish-made shotguns Hastert and Dingell bought. With such a display of hospitality, it is not surprising that Speaker Hastert invited his Turkish friends for a visit in May 2005. The Anatolia News Agency reported on the trip: Turkish Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc has indicated today that his visit to the US Congress will be the first ever one by a Turkish parliament Speaker… Arinc will be in Washington DC upon an invitation from US House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert. A Turkish government website added: Parliament Speaker Bülent Arýnç visited Washington between May 24-27 as the guest of Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Arýnç also attended a reception hosted in his honor by Hastert. … Arýnç, who completed his meetings in Washington D.C. arrived in Chicago on May 27. … Arýnç, who got information from Turkish Consul General Naci Koru about the work of the Turkish Consulate General in Chicago on Saturday… met Turkish community in Chicago on May 29. The previous passage would have seemed relatively innocuous, if not for the recent Vanity Fair article which included passages such as: “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official who is familiar with the case file. But “it became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on.” … The FBI’s investigations into a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000. … In all, says a source who was present, she [Edmonds] managed to listen to more than 40 of the Chicago recordings supplied by Robertz. Many involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate… and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations. It should come as little surprise that while in the U.S., Arinc visited the ATAA, according to the Anatolia News Agency: Turkish Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc, who is currently in the United States upon formal invitation of the U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert, met representatives of the Jewish community and of the Assembly of the Turkish-American Associations (ATAA) on Wednesday. Though even without the recent allegations by Sibel Edmonds, the following report from The Turkish Daily News regarding Prime Minister Erdogan’s 2004 trip stateside to meet President Bush may have raised an eyebrow: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan… first arrived at the Peninsula Hotel in Chicago. … After the concert, Chicago Municipal Mayor Richard M. Daley held a dinner for Erdogan. Welcome to America.

by **seemslikeadream** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 12:26 pm

<a href="http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=6934" target="top">www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=6934</a> 'The Stakes Are Too High for Us to Stop Fighting Now' An interview with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds by Christopher Deliso balkanalysis.com In this brand new interview conducted last week, we find the indefatigable Sibel Edmonds as spirited as ever and determined to press on with her legal cases, in her attempt to alert the American people of high-level criminal behavior and corruption in and around the U.S. government. The interview concentrates on her new appeal to the Supreme Court, reactions to the recent Vanity Fair article in which she was featured, some thoughts on the AIPAC-Larry Franklin investigation, more details on high-level global criminal activities – and on what kind of officials are involved in them. Current Developments: Petitioning the Supreme Court Christopher Deliso: It's nice to talk with you again, Sibel. A lot has happened since we last spoke, for the first Antiwar.com interview last July. What's the latest on your case? Sibel Edmonds: Well, now we are trying to get the Supreme Court to take my case. My lawyers and the ACLU are trying, and we have had several meetings about this. CD: Do you think they will they agree to hear the case? SE: You know, I'm not very optimistic. They take less than 10 percent of the cases that are requested of them, maybe 75-100 cases they take. And look at the make-up of the current Supreme Court – it's tilting towards the Bush administration. But my lawyers are more optimistic. CD: If they reject your case, are they obliged to tell you why, from a legal point of view, or otherwise? SE: As far as I understand, sometimes they do, other times no. They can just say, "sorry we refuse." And that's it. CD: Now, I understand that it's an involved process, but do you have any established timeline for when we can expect to hear yea or nay? SE: The Supreme Court will decide whether to take the case or not in mid-October. But in the meantime, the government – that is, the DOJ and FBI – will file their response to our Supreme Court petition by the first week of September. Further, we'll also be getting an amicus filing in support of our Supreme Court petition from 9/11 family groups, government watchdog organizations like POGO, GAP, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and more. This will all take place in early September too. So things are going to be getting busy pretty soon! CD: Wow, it will be exciting for us to watch it all unfold. But tell me, what if the Supremos refuse to take the case? Then what? SE: If that happens, not only this suit but all my other cases will be dead – the State Secrets Act will kill them all together. CD: Then what? SE: We will have to consider other options. CD: Aha! Evasive action? SE: There's a chance we could try for an independent prosecutor, and an open hearing about these issues – CD: Like another "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, you mean? SE: Yes, perhaps. We have to continue until there is some accountability and the American people know what kinds of things their elected officials are involving themselves [in] again – things directly contrary to national security. The Media: Barking Up the Wrong Tree CD: Well, I don't know if we can say a critical mass has been reached, but you are appearing more and more frequently in the media, and I think people are starting to take notice of whistleblower cases like yours. Just the other day there was the story about the Pentagon procurement whistleblower criticizing Halliburton, after all. SE: Yes, okay, but the media is focusing on the wrong angle of these stories – especially concerning my case. CD: How's that? SE: They are focusing too much on the whistleblower angle and not enough on the state secrets one. They're saying, "oh, look at the poor whistleblower, she lost her job for coming forward." That's not important. The important thing is, why are they using this State Secrets Act – which has almost never been used? What are they trying to hide? CD: I see. SE: I mean, come on, I wasn't some big diplomat or official or secret agent or something – I was just a lowly translator! So what could possibly be so dangerous about letting me speak? Why are they covering this up? You know, I found out the other day that there has been no person in the history of the United States to have had as many gag orders as I have. So when I say I am the most gagged person in history, I mean it. They are terrified of letting me speak, and just why they might be terrified – well, this is what the media should be concentrating on, not that the poor whistleblower got fired. CD: So can you tell me, if the State Secrets Act is wheeled out so rarely, why did they have to use it? Wasn't there a less drastic measure they could have taken to prevent you from talking? SE: Yes, and do you know what is the ironic thing about this? If there had been an ongoing investigation, all they'd have to do is say so! To shut me up, all they needed to do would have been to go into the court and say, "Judge, you can't let her speak because we have an ongoing investigating into these things she wants to talk about." That's all! CD: So the point is – SE: The point is, there was no ongoing investigation! They decided to block all investigations! They could have quieted me very easily from the beginning – but that would have meant they were taking my allegations seriously – CD: And thus you wouldn't have had to make them in the first place, if they were already being investigated. SE: Exactly! Very paradoxical. They had all the info – detailed information, names, and everything else, so they can really launch an investigation. What are they waiting for? But they are not interested. And because they refuse to investigate – their only remaining option to silence me is this "State Secrets" nonsense. CD: That's an interesting way to look at it. I was not aware of that procedural difference. So considering that the congressmen you testified before agreed that you were credible and raised serious concerns, why have there been no investigations? SE: The fact that there are no investigations – I will give you an analogy, okay? Say if we decided to have a "war on drugs," but said in the beginning, "right, we're only going to go after the young black guys on the street level." Hey, we already have tens of thousands of them in our jails anyway, why not a few more? But we decided never to go after the middle levels, let alone the top levels… It's like this with the so-called war on terror. We go for the Attas and Hamdis – but never touch the guys on the top. CD: You think they [the government] know who they are, the top guys, and where? SE: Oh yeah, they know. CD: So why don't they get them? SE: It's like I told you before – this would upset "certain foreign relations." But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling – and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves. Renewed Scrutiny CD: On that note, why don't we discuss the recent Vanity Fair article in which your case was discussed. This is the first time any possible official associated with illicit activities related to your case was named. The author cites sources familiar with your testimony and speculates that Dennis Hastert took bribes to squash the Armenian genocide resolution – SE: You know, that was such a surprise to me. I had no idea what the final article would look like, but when I opened the magazine and read this – well, it was a surprise. CD: Why? SE: Look, if you read the article you will see they mentioned that there were several other officials suspected of crimes. It's interesting because they mentioned the Department of State and the DOD – but they didn't get into it. CD: And maybe some of these others were more important than Hastert? SE: Of course they were more important! But they went with the Armenian angle. CD: Now, I understand because of your gag order, you were not the one giving the author his information. He was getting it from the other sources familiar with your testimony. So maybe this angle they took seemed like the most important because they didn't have all the facts – SE: I really don't know. A Pyrrhic Victory? CD: So what have been the initial reactions to this article? I don't think Hastert was particularly fazed. He said something like, "Next they'll blame me for the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston breakup." SE: Well, it's caused more problems for me than for him, obviously. I have been getting some very angry letters from Turkish people – now they think I'm an agent of the Armenian lobby! And so of course this guy from the ATC, [American-Turkish Council President James] Holmes, played on this. Because some of my allegations involved the ATC, he loved getting a chance to blacken me as some Armenian collaborator in the Turkish media – and at the same time made up outrageous claims, such as that the government investigated my claims and decided that I was lying about everything. So now I'm hated in Turkey. CD: That's crazy. But doesn't the media there know any better? I mean, haven't they been focusing on your case for a long time? SE: Yes, but for people with power and prestige such as Holmes, it's easy to smear someone. As you know, sensitivities are very strong for both Turks and Armenians on this issue. So ironically even if it [Hastert's alleged bribe-taking and the Armenian genocide issue] was just a sidebar to the real focus of my case, by connecting my name with the Hastert allegations, it just damaged my credibility for Turks everywhere. CD: This sounds like an absolute disaster. SE: And it's just too bad, because none of this [my allegations] has to do with the current government in Turkey. CD: So do you mean the previous one was more corrupted, or involved with these issues? SE: I didn't say that. I just said that the current Turkish government had nothing to do with any of these illegal activities I documented. But still the campaign against me goes on in the media in Turkey. It's very sad. Who's in Charge Here? CD: That's terrible. I have some thoughts based on what you just said, but first let's talk about something else. For us on the outside, it is very hard to know what is really going on in the government. And with all of the governmental manipulation and deceit that things like your case, as well as the whole Iraq War deception, show, critical people have come to suspect that the government is more often than not feeding us lies and working in our worst interests. And you talk about good, honest agents as well as bad and criminal ones. So, that said – how can we explain the case of Larry Franklin? SE: Do you mean how the case came about, or how it is being conducted? CD: I want to say this: the Turkish lobby might be powerful, but the Israeli lobby is by far the most powerful in Washington, at least with the current administration. So considering that the pro-Israel neocons are in power, how was it possible that this AIPAC investigation – which apparently started way back in 1999 – could have continued all these years, and didn't end up getting squashed like your investigation was? SE: I don't know. But it will be interesting to see how far they pursue it – whether they will be satisfied just to make an example out of the fairly low-level guys they're looking at now, or want to keep going higher. CD: When you were at the FBI, did you have any colleagues who were working on this case, investigating the Israelis? SE: Look, I think that that [the AIPAC investigation] ultimately involves more than just Israelis – I am talking about countries, not a single country here. Because despite however it may appear, this is not just a simple matter of state espionage. If Fitzgerald and his team keep pulling, really pulling, they are going to reel in much more than just a few guys spying for Israel. CD: A monster, 600-pound catfish, huh? So the Turkish and Israeli investigations had some overlap? SE: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it. But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything. CD: But you can start from anywhere – SE: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us. State Department the Source of All Evil? CD: I know you can't name names, but are there any government agencies in particular that you can single out as being more corrupt or more involved with the substance of your allegations? SE: The Department of State. CD: What, the most corrupt? SE: The Department of State is easily the most corrupted of the major government agencies. CD: That's interesting. I sometimes think of the State Department as being fairly emasculated, relatively speaking, of course not the "good guys," but surely not as evil as certain other agencies… but you have some personal experience that tells you otherwise? SE: You asked me before about the good FBI agents and bad, which group is really in control. I can tell you, in my case, the decision to terminate the investigation and bury my allegations, this decision was not made by the FBI. It came directly from the Department of State. CD: Really! I didn't know they had the power to interfere with FBI work. SE: Oh, of course they do! And the agent that handled the case I was working on, that person was so frustrated. It was all stopped because the State Department was dictating to us. CD: So while John Ashcroft looked like the bad guy, for coming down on you with the State Secrets Act – SE: Look, according to Vanity Fair, in 1999 the FBI even wanted to bring in a special prosecutor, to investigate – but guess what, after Bush came to power, they pulled the plug. And how was this request thwarted? By direct order of the Department of State! CD: Wow. So what other powers did they have over you? SE: In some cases where the FBI stumbles upon evidence of high-level officials being involved in drug-smuggling, they're even prevented from sharing it with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. The Department of State just comes in and says, "Leave it." You know, it's funny, after 9/11, the common criticism was that there was "no information-sharing" between the FBI, CIA, and the like, and this is why the terrorists pulled it off – as if we didn't want to cooperate. No information-sharing? That's the biggest BS I ever heard! CD: So you're saying that the whole process of sorting through the intelligence you received, executing investigations, and getting information where it needed to go was prevented by the State Department? SE: Several times, yes. CD: And again, because of the "sensitive foreign relations" excuse? SE: Well, yes, obviously all of these high-level criminal operations involve working with foreign people, foreign countries, the outside world – and to a certain extent these relations do depend on the continuation of criminal activities. Countries to Consider CD: Can you elaborate here on what countries you mean? SE: It's interesting, in one of my interviews, they say "Turkish countries," but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all the 'Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and [non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about. CD: What, you mean drug-smuggling? SE: Among other things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It's amazing that in this whole "war on terror" thing, no one ever talks about these issues. No one asks questions about these countries – questions like, "OK, how much of their GDP depends on drugs?" CD: But of course, you're not implying… SE: And then to compare that little survey with what countries we've been putting military bases in – CD: I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! SE: You know how they always talk about these Islamic charities funding the terrorists, right? CD: Yes… SE: Well, and this is not a firm statistic, just a sort of ratio… but these charities are responsible for maybe 10 or 20 percent of al-Qaeda's fundraising. So where is the other 80 or 90 percent coming from? People, it's not so difficult! How It All Works CD: So tell me something, say, in the case of drugs from Central Asia to Europe to America. When they come through Turkey, what is the procedure? SE: Well, I am not an expert on this. I know some of it gets to be processed in Turkey and travels in the Balkans. I know Holland is very important. But you might know better than me, being over there. I only know from this end, in North America. CD: Okay, so when the drugs – SE: Not only drugs. CD: Okay, so when whatever kinds of criminal contraband enter the U.S., then what happens to it? SE: They are circulated by huge front companies. Of course, these companies often have a legitimate side to their businesses; maybe even the majority of their business is aboveboard. In this way, they arouse less suspicion. Say if it was, I don't know, a textiles company in Delaware. The stuff comes into port, and when it comes off the boat they open it up, and – CD: "Hey, great, more textiles!" Something like that? SE: Sure. And then it gets sent everywhere, through other companies in other cities, other front companies under different owners or even different branches of the same company. They could be anywhere, Denver, Detroit, San Diego, and everywhere in between. CD: It sounds very sophisticated. SE: Oh, it's so sophisticated and so big, you can't imagine… and not only can they bring the stuff in, they can send it out. And do you think for a second the government doesn't know? CD: Can you give any specific examples of such an operation? SE: Well, not from my case, but there is quite a lot of public information about such things. A good example was the piece in the L.A. Times – CD: The black-market nuclear parts one? SE: Yes, by Josh Meyer. From last year. That article gives a very good example of how such a scheme works. CD: But that report came out of an official government investigation taking apart the smuggling ring, right? SE: Yes it did, but that doesn't mean the business was ended. CD: No? SE: I think one of the guys involved, Asher Karni, got a short sentence. But the other guy, the big guy, Zeki Bilmen? He got off completely – nothing. CD: How? SE: It's beyond logical explanation. Maybe it was decided in high places that no one would touch him. CD: And we're talking about people who are trading in nuclear black-market goods with terrorists and countries like Pakistan? SE: And anyone else who's willing to pay, for that matter. Zeki Bilmen is Turkish, but of Jewish background. He has a company, Giza Technologies in New Jersey, and everyone who works there is Turkish. He's worked closely with the Israelis. And business – well, business is good. They have many shipments going out, coming in, all day long. To places like Dubai, Spain, South Africa, Turkey. They have branches in all these places. Yep, they're sailing along very smoothly. CD: So if we are talking about suspected nuclear proliferators here, how can the government be protecting them when at the same time they're talking about Iran or North Korea having nuclear weapons? SE: Exactly! You tell me! Zeroing In CD: It must be very frustrating for you, not to be able to speak about what you know. SE: Yeah, really, it's so frustrating. CD: So since you are still gagged, is there anything you hope for, aside from getting heard before the Supreme Court? I mean, is there anything people can do? SE: I hope that if anything comes of this new media attention, they [congressmen] might say, "You know what, one name is out there already," and maybe people will start to say the others. Because enough people in Congress know who is involved and what the stakes are. It's not necessary for me to do it; any number of people can step forward. They just need to be a little more brave, and – yes, more patriotic. Because like I told you before, these kind of criminal acts some of our leaders are involved in do not have any benefit for 99.9 percent of the American people. And in fact they're actually very harmful for American and world security. CD: So what do you hope for from the media? I mean, I know you suggested the media should concentrate on the State Secrets aspect rather than the "poor whistleblower" one. That's clear. But of course we would love to know more details, even general ones. For example, can you give any kind of insight into where to look? I know some of these "semi-legitimate organizations" you've mentioned and how they operate. You discussed that at length in our first interview. But what about individuals? What is the profile of your average high-level crook? SE: Well, you can piece things together fairly well, I think, and not just from what I have to say. A lot of information is already out there. Things like the L.A. Times article I mentioned, they give a lot of context. But generally, look at what we discussed here. CD: You mean where such officials are to be found? SE: Yes. Watch the Department of State. Watch people who are involved with the countries I mentioned above. Watch their careers, where they were stationed, what jobs they held, what were their areas of expertise, where these interests overlap. Were they involved with weapons procurement ever? Would anything in their resumé indicate knowledge of and experience in not one, but several of these countries I have mentioned? Because you know, it is not very often you can find someone with the requisite linguistic and cultural training necessary for working with several countries simultaneously, as well as the acumen and right mindset for these kinds of adventures. There can't be many. Look out for the organizations they're involved in. Look at where these memberships overlap. Two major lobby groups that have come out in one way or another have been the American-Turkish Council and AIPAC. They're not the only ones, but you can start with them. Look at their members, their leaders past and present. Look at where these names overlap with the qualities I mentioned above. CD: Yes, that is good for background, but at the end of the day to have anything "real" it basically has to come down to what the guy had for breakfast that day. I mean, even the Vanity Fair "revelation" had to admit that there was no way of proving Hastert was ever given $500,000 to scupper the Armenian genocide bill. So obviously he could just laugh it off. It ended on a very deflationary note. SE: Yes, you have a point. But making specific charges in specific cases, no one in the media can ever do that without explicit evidence from someone very close to the investigation or activity. What I am telling you is that this network is visible, and it is possible to grasp what's going on. And I think to a certain extent it's obvious that some of your neocons will be involved in these criminal activities. You don't need me to tell you that. But too often, they [the media] have looked in the wrong places. CD: An example? SE: Well, I'm wondering why in this "war on terror" they aren't taking a look at the role of banks in Dubai, banks in Cyprus – they've always concentrated on banks in places like, say, Switzerland. They almost never look at these two other huge areas for money-laundering. A Hypothetical CD: Finally, Sibel, I was curious to ask you one sort of hypothetical question. SE: Okay. CD: Do you ever look back and wish you had done things differently? I mean, maybe you could have "played dumb" and stuck around a couple months longer in the FBI, and collected more "smoking gun" evidence, no? Like in some action/suspense movie. SE: This is a very interesting question. But you know, I didn't have the luxury to think about it. I didn't have time to make a conscious decision. CD: Why? SE: Well, the biggest reason I started to talk and to push for an internal investigation was because my family was already under threat. CD: You are referring to the period after you refused Can Dickerson's offer to work with her illegally? SE: Yes. I knew that the [Turkish] person under investigation had already been given all my details, and at that point they were trying to make problems for my younger sister back in Turkey. And Senator [Chuck] Grassley was helping us to get asylum for her. CD: So basically, my question is irrelevant. SE: Well, how can you play it cool when your family is under threat? CD: Indeed. So finally, even despite the total obstruction you have faced just to be able to get your day in court, do you feel like it has been worthwhile? And that there is something still that can be done to change things? SE: Yes. I believe, and everyone who is concerned about their safety and security should know it is in their best interests to get this information out and let the chips fall where they may. And since this level of crime is so massive, it doesn't affect only Americans – people in many countries have an interest in this too. The stakes are too high for us to stop fighting now.

by **seemslikeadream** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 12:31 pm

<a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001701.htm" target="top">www.bradblog.com/archives/00001701.htm</a> Blogged by Joseph Cannon on 8/14/2005 @ 11:44pm PT... New Revelations Raise Serious Questions Are Illegal Drugs, Money Laundering, Cruise Ships, and 9/11 Terrorists Connected? And if so, does the connection involve a shady Republican money-man? Guest bloged by Joesph Cannon A little bird has chirped in my ear, telling me to look closer at the possible connection between shady Republican money-man Jack Abramoff and the... Guest bloged by Joesph Cannon A little bird has chirped in my ear, telling me to look closer at the possible connection between shady Republican money-man Jack Abramoff and the 9/11 terrorists. Uncharacteristically cryptic, the bird said no more. I knew about the Associated Press story (referenced here) which reported that Atta and company had hopped aboard a SunCruz casino ship on September 5, 2001. Abramoff owned SunCruz. He acquired the company under circumstances many consider strange -- so strange as to have resulted in his recent indictment. So strange as to involve the murder of the former owner, Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis. The feds had long suspected that SunCruz ships have been used for money laundering, and perhaps even drug importation. The ships are beyond all regulation -- nothing stops criminals from operating them. Al Qaida operatives have made many a strange visit to casinos -- visits that most investigators feel had more to do with criminal activity than with gambling. So what further information was the little bird chirping about? I suspect the answer has much to do with courageous FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, who is legally restricted from revealing in public all that she found out during her stint as a translator. Here is a snip from an Edmonds interview conducted last January: You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one. In certain points - and they (the intelligence community) are separating those portions from just the terrorist activities. And, as I said, they are citing "foreign relations" which is not the case, because we are not talking about only governmental levels. And I keep underlining semi-legit organizations and following the money. When you do that the picture gets grim. It gets really ugly.... I can tell that once, and if, and when this issue gets to be, under real terms, investigated, you will be seeing certain people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally. Elsewhere she has hinted that the true tale of the terrorists related to intelligence-gathering activities by semi-legitimate organizations. "When you have activities involving a lot of money, you have people from different nations involved.... It can be categorized under organized crime, but in a very large scale." "You have [a] network of people who obtain certain information and they take it out and sell it to... whomever would be the highest bidder. Then you have people who would be bringing into the country narcotics from the East, and their connections. [It] is only then that you really see the big picture." "And you see certain semi-legitimate organizations that may very well have a legit front, but with very criminal illegitimate activities --who start coming at you from these investigations." Of course, we have Sibel Edmond's open letter to Thomas Kean, Chairman of the National Committee on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: (Emphasis added.) To this date the public has not been told of intentional blocking of intelligence, and has not been told that certain information, despite its direct links, impacts and ties to terrorist related activities, is not given to or shared with Counterterrorism units, their investigations, and countering terrorism related activities. This was the case prior to 9/11, and remains in effect after 9/11. If Counterintelligence receives information that contains money laundering, illegal arms sale, and illegal drug activities, directly linked to terrorist activities; and if that information involves certain nations, certain semi-legit organizations, and ties to certain lucrative or political relations in this country, then, that information is not shared with Counterterrorism, regardless of the possible severe consequences. In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents cited 'direct pressure by the State Department,' and in other cases 'sensitive diplomatic relations' is cited. All of which brings us to the questions: Was Mohammed Atta involved in drugs or money laundering? Al Qaida did make its home in a country whose only real exportable crop was the poppy flower. Was SunCruz involved in drugs or money laundering? Federal investigators have looked into that very possibility. Gus Boulis cannot testify -- but we an be certain that Abramoff and Kidon wanted his ships very badly. For some reason. Why have investigators gone to such lengths to hide the fact that Mohammed Atta entered this country before June 2000? Why was the DIA team which had uncovered his activities, and had placed his picture on an Al Qaida flow chart, told by higher-ups to ignore him, and even to cover his image with tape?

by **Starman** » Mon Aug 15, 2005 2:02 pm

Sibel Edmonds said: "But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything." -- and so much more. Absolutely mind-bending -- affirming much of what I and many others have strongly suspected and believed based on numerous tidbits and judicious reading-between-the-lines, putting tenuous pieces together of an intricately-extended chain gathered from threads and snippits, puzzling voids and impossible 'answers', and damning allegations and suggestions from a wide range of principled whistleblowers who are appalled at the enormous implications for the security and well-being of America and indeed the world -- How FAR will these utterly-corrupt criminal-parasites who have completely infiltrated government and major political, legal. economic, military, intelligence infrastructure -- This freaks me out, seeing the outlines of something so monstrously sick and downright evil; I've long suspected that political and contemporary events are driven as much by the vital interest of deeply-involved perpetrators involved in the most atrocious modern crimes affecting global security and finance and governance in protecting themselves from discovery, as in the continuance of these extra-legal powerful interests, to which 'we, The People' are just pawns and dupes and stooges and beasts. We've all been betrayed so tragically, I fear these global networks of crime will never be 'allowed' to be exposed, as its effect on National Security becomes the REASON for continued cover-up. So what's it gonna take? The courts, esp. higher-up, the electoral college, Congress, CIA/NSA/FBI etc, State Dept., Pentagon, White House, they've ALL been co-opted and subverted -- (and Dear Norman with his Quaint faith in the 'system' believes nothing counts but 'voting' -- !!!?#@!) I think a HUGE problem is that for the most part, people just can't see how their lives are personally affected by all this 'stuff' going on under deep-cover at the highest levels of government and business, and so they don't understand what real difference it makes -- as of course, the connection between massive drug and arms smuggling, money-laundering, blackmail and subversion of political process and bribery and secret deals and corrupted courts and obstruction of justice and covert accomodation to global terorism as pretext for wars and covert conquests, just don't see enough light of day to alarm most people, who think everything is mostly under control. Is it any wonder people don't know WHAT to believe in anymore? With the US's atrocious record on global human rights and its hypocrisy in promoting tyranny and the worst kind of debt-peonage exploitation in many dozens of nations, is it any wonder people are distrustful of 'patriotism'? Who are the 'good guys'? Is it any wonder people are cynical and frustrated and confused, when the example is that well-connected crime Pays -- so it helps to be on the 'side' of the most successful crooks who have bent the law to their ends. Is Truth just relative? What a freaky, scary, unsettling Rabbit Hole this whole mess of Contemporary world has become. The complicity of top US elected and appointed officials in 911, and the horrible Iraq and Afghanistan wars aren't even the most awful things about the massive corruption and sheer evil which Sibels Edmonds and others including the 911 Truth Movement have been talking about -- but the difficulty of putting a 'face' to this enormous interlinked conspiracy makes it hard to know sometimes just what we're talking about. That's why I say it's mindbending. How can one resist what one can barely identify, except in its more blatant effects, when its being disguised and hidden and even denied so thoroughly? It's hard to even know what to say sometimes, or even what to think. There's an enormous lesson here if we can ever get to the bottom of what it really means. If this nation ever discovered to what extent our top officials and 'greatest' institutions failed us, I fear it would rip this country apart -- not that there mightn't be a certain justice there, but the terror and violence resulting, on a scale perhaps surpassing the horrors of what the US has unleashed either directly or indirectly in the Middle East, could make the Civil War seem like a pre-game warmup. THAT freaks the hell out of me. Starman

Vanity Fair An Inconvenient Patriot Sibel Edmonds

Vanity Fair An Inconvenient Patriot Sibel Edmonds

thanks for posting this

Vanity Fair Article on Sibel Edmonds

disappointing

State Secrets Privelige

too perfect, too bizarre, too angry

State Secrets, Washington DC as Black Hole Pit

Sibel in Vanity Fair

Re: Hastert’s Turkish Allies Tied to Bin Laden

Re:'The Stakes Are Too High for Us to Stop Fighting Now'

Re:Jack Abramoff and Sibel info

re: Stakes are too high ...

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