WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

[Spartacus]

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166

or google "Sibel Edmonds" for dozens of other hits.

so the neocons wanted to attack Iran, because they knew Iran had nukes - how did they know? THEY TRIED TO SELL THE TECH To IRAN !!!!!!!!!!!!

I REALLY hope this is a hoax.



http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5527

>>>
Here in the United States, the mainstream media coverage included:

That's right. Nobody. None of them. Zilch. Not a one.

Edmonds told The BRAD BLOG last night that her phone had been ringing of the hook since the Times story hit. From reporters around the globe, she said. As to America: "Not a single mainstream media channel, not even a newspaper."

Apparently American nuclear secrets, stolen by "moles" at America's most sensitive nuclear installations, sold on the black market with the help and protection of highly placed American officials, which then found their way into the hands of America's enemies, is not notable news to Americans. According to the American corporate mainstream media, anyway. We suppose they're all too busy fighting the War on Terror in New Hampshire or something.

[grapejelly]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

The Times (UK) supposedly has the identity of this senior administration official...

I gave up on the MSM anyway. Don't know why I get the Washington Post (but they have good comics). The media are a joke and luckily with blogs and YouTube we aren't victims of it anymore. My, how the world has changed.

[Rajiv]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

Embedding Sibel Edmonds video

See also Sibel 'names names' (in pictures!)

and Let Sibel Edmonds Speak

[World Traveler]

Re: It's TRUE, NOT a Hoax - Sibel Edmonds

Siebel Edmonds is gagged by States Secrets Act applied by John Ashcroft as Attorney General. It appears that current Administration is trying to protect itself under guise of "National Security", given the people she names. The poltical appointees in list were VERY high level, especially in Defense/ VP environments.

Sibel testified before 9/11 Commission, and closed congressional hearings. There are FBI agents willing to corroborate what she says and testify under oath before Congress.

Follow some of the links in dailykos post below and bradblog post above and you'll see names assigned to the pictures.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1...231/854/431373

[Guest]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

It really does sound sound like potentially the biggest scoop of the decade.

This looks like a massive story. If someone forces the American mainstream media to cover this, it has the potential to be an institutional hornets nest like we've never seen before.

Will be fascinating to see if it's resolutely squelched and the media continues to refuse to cover it. If it is not really covered anywhere after this news story has been broken by the London Times, that in itself will be a watershed for this country.

If I see that, this one story will change my core views of what's salveageable out of Washington more than practically anything has done in decades. It's horrific.

[Rajiv]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

Sibel Edmonds website

[Andreuccio]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

It really does sound sound like potentially the biggest scoop of the decade.

This looks like a massive story. If someone forces the American mainstream media to cover this, it has the potential to be an institutional hornets nest like we've never seen before.

Will be fascinating to see if it's resolutely squelched and the media continues to refuse to cover it. If it is not really covered anywhere after this news story has been broken by the London Times, that in itself will be a watershed for this country.

If I see that, this one story will change my core views of what's salveageable out of Washington more than practically anything has done in decades. It's horrific.

Try looking up the Downing Street Memo. Same massive story. Same media silence.

Lukery, the author of the dailykos post World Traveler linked to, has written a whole series of articles on Sibel Edmonds dating back at least to 2006. (I got tired of going to new screens to see how far back they went.)

It's amazing this story hasn't gotten any airplay here in the US. Spartacus and Lukester are obviously fairly well educated and fairly well informed, yet they haven't heard anything about this until now. The "watershed" happened quite some time ago. We're in uncharted territory.

[Spartacus]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

I heard of her before, several times, but at that time had not seen specific names

What's new for me is this issue of what was corroborated by other evidence - her unfair treatment by the FBI or the names she gives and they acts they committed

obviously fairly well educated and fairly well informed, yet they haven't heard anything about this until now

[Rajiv]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

You may also want to look at Sibel Edmonds - Official Web Site and Let Sibel Edmonds Speak

[Slimprofits]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

There are are a couple or problems with Edmonds' story.

In order to believe it, one must buy that Marc Rich and his fellow pro-Israel associates were helping Pakistan (not exactly Pro-Israel) to obtain the 'Islamic bomb'.

And she recently complained that in addition to the MSM, that the 'alternative media' had dropped the ball in reporting her story. She appeared on 60 minutes in October of 2002 and as well, if not for the 'alternative media', she'd have been forgotten soon after that.

[PeterM]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

Do you really think this story is so far fetched? Same old ... same old ...

I suppose you all know the name of Khan, the father of the Pakistan bomb, and spreader of such knowledge to the black market and Islamic countries.

But how many know that Khan (and by logic Pakistan, Korea and Iran) would not have had the required technology for the bomb, if the CIA had not thwarted his arrest.
Not once, but twice the CIA interfered in the planned Khan's arrest.

'Tinfoil hat' stuff...... hardly.
The former Dutch prime minister Lubbers confirmed some details in 2005. Lubbers was directly involved with both decisions by Dutch government, in 1975 as Minister of Economic Affairs and during the years from 1983-1994 as Prime Minister.
Type in 'Kahn Lubbers Urenco' in Google and do some digging yourself.

Over the last few months, this story has taken a new twist. Ruud Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister, revealed in August 2005 that the Netherlands was prepared to arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan 30 years ago. Dutch authorities came close to arresting Khan twice, first in 1975 and later in 1986, but the CIA requested that they let him act freely. This revelation is embarrassing to both the CIA and Dutch minister of Justice P. H. Donner, who was previously asked about possible CIA action concerning Khan, and told parliament ''that nothing of the kind has happened. The CIA had nothing to do with it''.
Dutch intelligence had suspicions that Khan was stealing nuclear secrets in the Netherlands. They began to monitor him as soon as he arrived at the Physical Dynamic Research Laboratory. However, according to Lubbers, the country's security agency asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 1975, then headed by him, not to act against Khan. “I think the American intelligence agency put into practice what is very common there; just give us all the information. And do not arrest that man; just let him go ahead. We will have him followed and that way gain more information," Lubbers told VPRO Argos Radio in an interview.
The CIA's pressure against the Dutch authorities and its handling of Kahn's activities resulted in a disaster. Khan skilfully outplayed the CIA, manoeuvred around the international export controls of the IAEA, and acquired all the equipment needed for the fabrication of the A-bomb. Dr. Kahn would later recall: "My long stay in Europe and intimate knowledge of various countries and their manufacturing firms was an asset. Within two years we had put up working prototypes of centrifuges and were going at full speed to build the facilities at Kahuta."
Lubbers said that, while he was Prime Minister in 1983, Dutch authorities could have reopened the case after the verdict was quashed. Once again, the Dutch authorities did not do so because of US pressure. “The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”
The State Department declined to elaborate about Lubber's remarks². “It is not something that I feel we really have anything to say about because it deals with events long in the past, it deals with intelligence matters and for those reasons, I don't have anything to say about it.” US State Department Deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said.

Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan's activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets. At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers' assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn't care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”


By September 10 2005, this story had taken yet another new twist. The Amsterdam court, which sentenced Abdul Qadeer Khan to four years in prison in 1983, has lost Khan's legal files. The court's vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, suspects the CIA had a hand in the documents' disappearance. "Something is not right, we just don't lose things like that," she told Dutch news show NOVA. "I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of". She had asked to see Dr. Kahn case files several years ago but they had disappeared from the archive.
Mr. Lubbers admitted that succumbing to CIA pressure was a mistake but emphasized that in the cold war era "you had to listen to the Americans". Lubbers also claimed that Dr. Khan continued to "slip in and out of Holland illegally" and the CIA knew about it. Regrettably, the fact that the CIA forbade the Dutch secret service to arrest Khan allowed him to become, in the words of President George W. Bush, the "primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how". Dr. A. Q. Khan is blamed for selling nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya but the CIA bears a significant share of the responsibilities for the worst case of nuclear proliferation in history.

I just wonder how mainstream info this is in the US :confused:

From a lot of other stuff I read about this in the past, I don't believe this was a case of a bungled investigation. I still remember an aired interview of Lubbers where he said he was still bound by secrecy, and could not disclose everything, but emphasized it was not a bungle by the CIA.

But if you read the BBC it doesn't say more than

According to Mr Lubbers, US intelligence wanted to find out more about Mr Khan's contacts while he was working as an engineer at the top secret Dutch uranium enrichment plant at Almelo.
"The Americans wished to follow and watch Khan to get more information," he told Dutch radio.

It surprisingly leaves out the other stuff that Lubbers told.


For a whole list of interesting reading, see
Carnegie, Resources on the Abdul Khan Nuclear Black Market

[Verrocchio]

Re: WOW - I hope this is a hoax - Sibel Edmonds

I REALLY hope this is a hoax.

I, too, would prefer that this is a hoax, Spartacus.
This is one of those reports that, if true, call into question beliefs about important aspects of our lives. While we'd rather that our basic assumptions remain undisturbed, we also want to know the truth. Ultimately, we must each peer through the fog of information and misinformation as clearly as we are able.

This morning the Dallas Morning News broke MSM silence on the Sibel Edmonds story by publishing an essay about her written by former CIA officer Philip Giraldi on its Sunday Commentary (Opinion) page. The article is adapted from a longer version that can be found on the Web site of The American Conservative magazine (www.amconmag.com). Read the Dallas newspaper article below or click on this link to go to their site.

Philip Giraldi: What FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds found in translation
Why is her story being covered up?

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will.


The former FBI translator turned whistle-blower tells a chilling story of corruption at highest levels – sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Ms. Edmonds' account is full of dates, places and names.

And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Ms. Edmonds' case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation "could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States."

After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Ms. Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Rupert Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world – but not in the United States.

Ms. Edmonds is an ethnic Azerbaijani, born in Iran. She lived there and in Turkey until 1988, when she immigrated to the United States. Nine days after 9/11, she took a job at the FBI as a Turkish and Farsi translator. She worked in the 400-person translations section of the Washington office, reviewing a backlog of material dating to 1997 and participating in operations directed against several Turkish front groups, most notably the American Turkish Council.

The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums.

The FBI was interested in the ATC because it suspected that the group might be tangentially tied to drug trafficking and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Ms. Edmonds alleged in the Times, the Turks have "often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention."

(In 2005, a spokesperson for the ATC denied to Vanity Fair magazine that the organization has ever been involved in illegal payment or espionage activities.)

Over nearly six months, Ms. Edmonds listened with increasing unease to hundreds of intercepted phone calls between Turkish, Pakistani, Israeli and American officials. When she voiced concerns about the processing of this intelligence – among other irregularities, one of the other translators maintained a friendship with one of the FBI's "high value" targets – she was threatened.

After exhausting all appeals through her own chain of command, Ms. Edmonds approached the two Department of Justice agencies with oversight of the FBI and sent faxes to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. The next day, she was called in for a polygraph. According to a DOJ inspector general's report, the test found that "she was not deceptive in her answers."

But two weeks later, Ms. Edmonds was fired. Her home computer was seized. Her family in Turkey was visited by police and threatened with arrest if they did not submit to questioning about an unspecified "intelligence matter."

When Ms. Edmonds' attorney sued to obtain the documents related to her firing, Attorney General John Ashcroft imposed the state-secrets gag order. Since then, she has been subjected to another federal order, which not only silenced her but retroactively classified the statements she eventually made before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 commission.
Passionate in her convictions, Ms. Edmonds has sometimes alienated her own supporters and ridden roughshod over critics who questioned her assumptions. But despite her shortcomings in making her case and the legitimate criticism that she may be overreaching in some of her conclusions, Ms. Edmonds comes across as credible. Her claims are specific and fact-based, and they can be documented in detail. There is presumably an existing FBI file that could demonstrate the accuracy of many of her charges.

Her allegations are not insignificant. Among them: Ms. Edmonds claims that a former top State Department official was a person of interest to the FBI and had his phone tapped by the bureau in 2001 and 2002. Because of his senior-level position, this man had access to classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA and Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department.

Ms. Edmonds alleges to have heard evidence linking him to bribery from an ATC contact, to his intervening with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani intelligence operatives, and helping seed U.S. nuclear facilities with Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students who in turn sold nuclear secrets abroad, primarily to Pakistan. The accused, who emphatically denies Ms. Edmonds' charges, is now a senior executive at a Washington lobbying firm.

A low-level contractor might seem poorly positioned to expose major breaches of national security, but the FBI translators' pool, riddled with corruption and nepotism, was key to keeping these secrets from surfacing. Ms. Edmonds' claims that the section was infiltrated by translators who should never have received security clearances and who were deliberately failing to translate incriminating material are supported by the Justice Department inspector general investigation and by an FBI internal investigation, which concluded that she had been fired after making "valid complaints."

Ms. Edmonds' revelations have attracted corroboration in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases involve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down investigations based on "sensitive foreign diplomatic relations."
Curiously, the state-secrets gag order binding Ms. Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon – which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. Under the Bush administration, the security gag order has been invoked to cover up incompetence or illegality, not to protect national security.

Both Mr. Grassley and Mr. Leahy – a Republican and a Democrat, who interviewed her at length in 2002 – attest to Ms. Edmonds' believability. The Department of Justice inspector general investigation into her claims about the translations unit and an internal FBI review confirmed most of her allegations. Former FBI senior counterintelligence officer John Cole has independently confirmed her report of the presence of Pakistani intelligence service penetrations within the FBI translators' pool.

Ms. Edmonds wasn't angling to become a media darling. She would have preferred to testify under oath before a congressional committee that could offer legal protection and subpoena documents and witnesses to support her case. She claims that a number of FBI agents would be willing to testify, though she has not named them.

Prior to 2006, Rep. Henry Waxman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee allegedly promised Ms. Edmonds that if the Democrats gained control of Congress, he would order hearings into her charges. But following the Democratic sweep, he has been less forthcoming. It is suspected that Mr. Waxman fears that the revelations might open a Pandora's box, damaging Republicans and Democrats alike.

Ms. Edmonds' critics maintain that she saw only a small part of the picture in a highly compartmentalized working environment, that she was privy to only a fragment of a large operation to penetrate and disrupt the groups that have been stealing U.S. weapons technology. She could not have known operational details of what the FBI was doing and why.

That criticism is serious and must be addressed. If Ms. Edmonds was indeed seeing only part of a counterintelligence sting operation to entrap a nuclear network like that of A.Q. Khan, the government could now reveal as much in general terms, since any operation that might have been running in 2002 has long since wound down.

Regarding her access to operational information, Ms. Edmonds' critics clearly do not understand the intimate relationship that develops between FBI and CIA officers and their translators. Operations run against a foreign target in languages other than English require an intensive collaboration between field officers and translators. The translators are invariably brought into the loop because it is up to them to guide the officers seeking to understand what the target, who frequently is double talking or attempting to conceal his meaning, is actually saying.

That said, it should be conceded that Ms. Edmonds might sometimes have seen only a piece of the story, and those claims based on her own interpretation should be regarded with caution.

Still, Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to warrant official investigation. Her allegations are documentable; an existing FBI file should determine whether they are accurate.

It's true that she probably knows only part of the story, but if that part is correct, Congress and the Justice Department should have no higher priority. Nothing deserves more attention than the possibility of ongoing national-security failures and the proliferation of nuclear weapons with the connivance of corrupt senior government officials.