We! / My Town
FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds told the London Sunday Times in January, 2008 that a court order muzzling her protects people who sold nuclear secrets to a Turkish-Israeli network. The Liberty Coalition attempted to acquire, through the Freedom of Information Act, a Justice Department file ( 203A-WF-210023) that would verify her story. The FBI responded that the file did not exist, but then the Times came up with a document that proved that the file exists. A Justice counter-intelligence unit had been investigating the network since 1996. The document states that the Turks had been warned that Brewster Jennings was a CIA front working to stem nuclear proliferation.
Edmonds learned through translating tapes that a senior State Department official and senior Pentagon people were selling information to the Turks and others. The State Department official was useful in obtaining the release of four foreign operatives who had been rounded up after 9/11.
Secrets were sold to Turkish officials and people connected with the American-Turkish Council. Sometimes, Turks bought information on the behalf of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence( ISI). Some of the secrets went to Saudi Arabia. Edmonds said it was clear that the Turks and Israelis had planted moles in US military and scientific operations.
It appears that the cases of Sibel Edmonds and Valerie Plame are linked. Plame was in hot pursuit of the same network. Wayne Madsen, an investigative reporter, was the first to see the connection between the Edmonds and Plame cases. He wrote that Plame’s Brewster Jennings operation had intercepted a nuclear materials shipment that was supposed to have been planted in Iraq to make the case for weapons of mass destruction there. Madsen traces the corrupt tie to Turkey and other Islamic countries far beyond 1996 and, like The Times, links it to the Pakistani bomb. .Richard Barlow, head of the Counter-Proliferation Division, was fired in 1989, when he found evidence that the George H.W. Bush administration was helping the A.Q. Khan nuclear manufacturing program in Pakistan. Stephen Hadley, then an assistant to Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, led the effort to fire Barlow. Today, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office has been complaining that the administration of George W. Bush will not assist it in its investigation of AQ Khan.
The Scooter Libby case is interesting because “Turkey” kept turning up in documents that were released. When Cheney aids and Rove discussed Plame, their discussion evolved into a discussion of Russian mogul Mikhail Khodorkovsky, A Q Khan and the Turks. At one point, some of the White House e-mail had been lost, but prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald learned that it was stored at a facility in Olney, Maryland. After he found what he needed, the White House also found the missing e-mail and turned it over. In the trial, the prosecution produced hand written notes that proved that Cheney, Libby, Deputy White House communications director Cathie Martin, and others conspired to besmirch the reputation of Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Despite revelation of this damaging information, some believe that Fitzgerald, who covered up some important information regarding the first World Trade Center bombing, has little choice but to take a dive in the current case for the Bush administration and that only Libby would suffer in connection to the revelation that Plame was a CIA covert operative. The defense continually said it would put Vice President Cheney on the stand, but declined to do so in the end. Libby was found guilty of lying, and President Bush subsequently commuted Libby’s sentence.
Sibel Edmonds , then 32, was employed by the FBI after 9/11 to translate intercepts of conversations in Turkish and Farsi. She was employed as a language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. She repeatedly claimed that the government had enough information to enable it to foil the 9/11 plot. Specifically, she said the FBI had information that terrorists planned to fly planes into the World Trade Center. She also believed the evidence she saw meant that narcotics money was going to both Al Qaeda and US politicians. Three weeks after she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was terminated. That left the FBI with no really proficient Turkish translators.
Edmonds found one co-worker who had worked for an organization that was then under FBI surveillance. Edmonds was sure that that woman was changing texts that dealt with Turkish interests. She found a nest of Turkish spies operating in the US, some at the Turkish embassy and others in the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, the American Turkish Associations, and the American Turkish Council. Questionable activities included bribery, espionage, and infiltration of nuclear research labs. Some investigators assume that many of the weapons and secrets were not intended for Turkey, but were to be resold to China and others.
Edmonds first got into trouble with her FBI employers when she complained of sloppy translations being done by others and that one translator was asked to translate communications from a former employer. She was forced to take a polygraph test and was hounded for typing her complaints on a home computer even though the inspector general later determined that her supervisor said she could do this.
She claimed that she was instructed to translate slowly so the agency could claim it needed more staff. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Edmonds found Turks trafficking in nuclear materials and narcotics, and they also has some links to Israel. Moreover, she seemed to be suggesting that profits from these criminal dealings made their way to the office of Speaker Dennis Hastert in the form of campaign contributions and bribes. According to Daniel Ellsberg’s account of her message: “Suitcases of cash were delivered to the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert at his home near Chicago from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.” He interpreted her to mean that Afghan drugs made their way to Turkey where they were processed and sent to Europe via the Kosovo Liberation Army and a number of private military contractors, especially Dyn Corp.
The KLA, in turn, had relations with Al Qaeda through Al-Zawahiri’s brother. Some American money filtered to KLA by Douglas Feith and Richard Perle probably spilled over to Al Qaeda.
She also claimed that Al Qaeda was 95% financed by drugs, but the 9/11 Commission went out of its way to write “there is no reliable evidence that Bin Laden was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking.” This drug trade goes back to the CIA’s long-time involvement with Pakistan’s ISI and the BCCI. It grew greatly during the effort to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. If today, the CIA, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda are all involved in the Afghan drug trade, it would not be surprising if they had some common business relationships or, at the least, were all dealing with the same major Afghan drug lords.
Edmonds has hinted at corrupt roles of unelected officials, whom some investigators thought could well have been neocons Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and Marc Grossman. It is known that Grossman worked hard to stop probes of the possible link between Turkey and Al Qaeda. She has repeatedly spoken about how the international black markets in arms, sex, and drugs are interlinked. Before Congress, she also described the sale of information by State Department employees, various payments, and “dead drops. ‘ There were also Pentagon officials being paid for passing on secret information.
Representative Henry Waxman and two Senators defended her, Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley. Grassley, a Republican, even went on camera to speak up for her. Behrooz Sarshar, another translator, took information to Grassley to support her claims, but the senator has not acted on it. In an informal meeting, FBI investigators confirmed that there was substance to her charges. John M. Cole, now a retired FBI counter intelligence agent, made the mistake of supporting her and saw his career go up in flames. He was forced to resign in 2004, but not before he was able to use numerous bureau contacts to confirm her story. A Justice Department Inspector General’s letter, released January 14, 2004, concluded that her claims "were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services." Attorney General John Ashcroft, retroactively classified what she had told Congress as well as the Inspector General’s report.
Another FBI translator said to her: “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?” After this, Turkish police made an effort to locate her sister.
The Justice Department quickly muzzled Edmonds, and her efforts in court to regain free speech were not successful. The first gag order was issued by Michael Chertiff. Court proceedings were blocked when the government twice employed the assertion of the “State Secret Privilege. ‘ The Project on Public Oversight and The ACLU supported her efforts to regain free speech. Federal Circuit Judge Reggie Walton upheld the government’s right to silence her. He was later to preside over the case of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was accused of perjury in the matter of the exposing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Oddly, Walton listed no prior employment on the disclosure forms that federal judges must sign. He was the drug czar under G.H.W. Bush and now is the only federal judge whose past employment and financial records are not available
At the heart of her problems were her claims that Turkish money was making its way to US politicians and that the Turks and others were involved in the drug and illicit arms trade. She has repeatedly claimed that she was gagged because she knew criminally obtained money was reaching people in high places in the United States government. In 1997, British Home Secretary Tom Sackville angered his government by openly stating that Turkey was neck-deep in the international drug trade. He was correct in point of fact, but Turkey is an important western ally, and it would be disconcerting to take the next step and suggest that the US and UK simply look the other way, even when some of this drug money ends up in the coffers of Al Qaeda.
About $40 billion worth of heroin and illegal drugs pass through Turkey each year; most of it going to Europe. Turkey receives, processes, and ships heroin from a “Golden Triangle,” Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. The Turkish mafia coordinates all this, but they work in conjunction with the MIT (Turkish Intelligence Agency), the military command, and police. The trade comprises about a quarter of the nation’s GNP, and it can be assumed that much of the profit goes to the state itself. For some reason, the people on Vice President Cheney’s staff who were busy discrediting CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson had close ties to Turkey. So did their ally Assistant Secretary of State Marc Grossman, who busily discredited Plame and her husband. He was also under investigation for passing classified information to Turkey and AIPAC. It is ironic that Ambassador Joe Wilson first met his wife at the American Turkish Council in 1997. Brewster Jennings, a CIA front for the counter-proliferation division, had dealings with all the Turkish American organizations. Some of Sibel's comments suggest that she thought someone within those organizations found out Plame was a spy and could have been tied to the effort to out her .
It is probably more than coincidental that a number of top neo-cons have business relationships with Turkey. Richard Perle and Doug Feith do consulting and lobbying for Turkey through International Advisors, Inc. Others who work or worked for Turkey are Marc Grossman, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric Edelman, and former Congressman Stephen Solarz. Most of these people also have close ties to Israel. Of course, there is a strong de facto, but silent, alliance between Turkey and Israel. Citizens of both countries work together moving illegal arms and procuring illegal end user certificates to cover their shipments. Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith have established records of trying to create loopholes in regulations affecting the arms trade.
In January, 2004, Israeli citizen Asher Karni, who was connected to the network, was arrested for shipping 66 nuclear triggers to Pakistan. Federal judge Thomas Hogan released him on $100,000 bail --which the prosecutor did not challenge, and Karni moved into a Jewish rest home. Hogan is the same judge who permitted the FBI to raid William Jefferson's Congressional office. Karni was eventually given a three year sentence. Zeki Bilman, his alleged accomplice, died under strange circumstances.
Karni lived in South Africa for twenty years and is said to have masqueraded as a Muslim. FBI leakers claim that wiretaps named Douglas Feith and Turkish MIT intelligence agents working in the American Turkish Council. In 1995, Der Spiegel claimed that Urs Tanner, who operated a plant in Switzerland and was allegedly tied to the ring, was a CIA agent, probably tied to Plame's Brewster Jennings counter proliferation effort. The same leakers claim that Eric Edelman , former ambassador to Turkey, was deeply involved in the drug and nuclear arms network. He had served as Scooter Libby's assistant and is now Undersecretary of Defense. Richard Pearle's International Advisors, Inc., a lobbyist for Turkey, was also tied to the network. Former Speaker Bob Livingston also lobbies for Turkey, and Dennis Hastert has received large political contributions from the Turkish lobby.
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© 2007 Don Swift
URL: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/01/25/on_fbi_whistle_blower_sibel_edmonds
SOURCE: http://www.mytown.ca/ev.php?URL_ID=122060&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201
