Sibel Edmonds+Ted Gunderson+M. Riconosciuto=Time for class action lawsuit

[ramallamamama]

From The Brad Blog

LIVE BLOG: Deposition of Sibel Edmonds Completed, DoJ a 'No Show', All Questions Answered...

'State Secrets' privilege NOT asserted, FBI whistleblower answered ALL questions on Turkish infiltration of U.S. Government...

UPDATED: CONGRESS MEMBERS IMPLICATED UNDER OATH: ESPIONAGE, BRIBERY, SEXUAL BLACKMAIL, TAPING...

[Dig]

By Brad Friedman on 8/8/2009 8:51AM 
LIVE BLOG: Deposition of Sibel Edmonds Completed, DoJ a 'No Show', All Questions Answered...
'State Secrets' privilege NOT asserted, FBI whistleblower answered ALL questions on Turkish infiltration of U.S. Government...
UPDATED: CONGRESS MEMBERS IMPLICATED UNDER OATH: ESPIONAGE, BRIBERY, SEXUAL BLACKMAIL, TAPING...

Live blogging coverage of the Sibel Edmonds deposition at the National Whistleblowers Center in Washington D.C. For background see previous coverage:
8/5/09: Sibel Edmonds Subpoenaed, Set to 'Break' Gag Order
8/7/09: EXCLUSIVE: FBI Attempts to Block Edmonds Testimony in OH Election Case
8/7/09: EXCLUSIVE UPDATE: DoJ Pressures Ohio Election Commission to Block Edmonds Testimony

[Updates at bottom...]

8:00am PT (11:00am ET): The deposition has now begun inside the National Whisteblowers Center, and has not, apparently, been blocked by an assertion of the "state secrets" privilege by the DoJ.

The BRAD BLOG has some folks covering outside the testimony this morning, and I just spoke to some of the folks on the ground outside the NWC, just before the deposition was set to begin, including David Krikorian who flew in last night from Ohio.

Krikorian said that he hadn't yet seen anybody from the DoJ there yet, and both he and Edmonds confirmed that there hadn't been any new action (that they knew about) since the late-night legal back and forth between the DoJ and OEC on Friday night. Though Krikorian added that he "wouldn't be surprised" if someone from DoJ showed up. We'll find out later today if they did.

He said his team intended to ask detailed questions on the three major points they'd described in their press release [PDF] issued earlier this week, focusing on whether and how "The Government of Turkey had illegally infiltrated and influenced various U.S. government institutions and officials, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense and individual members of the United States Congress."

Krikorian did not seem dissuaded by the FBI's and then the DoJ's attempts to block Edmonds' testimony, and that they intended to be thorough in their deposition. "That's pretty much the whole point of this exercise," he told me.

Schmidt (R-OH)'s attorney is Bruce Fein, the one time Assoc. Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration who has, over the past several years, become a fierce critic of the George W. Bush Administration. He believed the deposition would not take long, though Krikorian's people may have a differing opinion there.

There are apparently a handful of mostly independent and foreign media outlets present outside the NWC. No corporate MSM, from the reports I've gotten. Independent TV/media, an Armenian English language weekly, and press attache representatives of some foreign governments are among those present.

8:40am PT (11:40am ET): During a break, Edmonds and the attorneys stepped outside.

DoJ still a no-show, so the questioning has proceeded, and Edmonds has been able to say "everything that she hasn't been able to say so far, implicating many members of Congress in a criminal conspiracy," according to interviews with Fein and others.

Edmonds' attorney, Michael Kohn said: "The Justice Department decided not to show. Therefore, the deposition has gone much more smoothly than we had anticipated."

Edmonds told me in a brief phone conversation during the break: "Bruce Fein is raising objections to everything", though that's to be expected. She said she's been asked, and has answered, questions on Dan Burton (R-IN), Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), and other questions on those high-ranking officials and lobbyists in her "State Secrets Gallery".

She added that "somebody said the FBI was given the wrong time, for 11:30 instead of 10:30", though she didn't see how that could be, given that the time for the start of the deposition has been well publicized. In any case, it's now 11:45am ET, so we'll see if they showed up during this break. They have now gone back into session...

9:41am PT (12:41pm ET): Another break...Edmonds still being questioned under direct. Fein believes his cross-examination will last two hours or so once he begins. They are now breaking for lunch. DoJ/FBI still did not show up.

The deposition is being videotaped and Edmonds hopes that it can be released as soon as possible after the deposition, though there has been some objections about releasing the video tape...

10:09am PT (1:09pm ET): Wow... just had lengthy conversation with Krikorian about Edmonds' testimony. Just wow... coming momentarily...
...
Spoke to Edmonds, who says she's "tired, gotta put some sugar into her system", but that she's satisfied with what's being put on the record so far. "Things we have never discussed outside before".

A lengthy conversation then, with Krikorian, may give you some idea of what she's referring to.

Here's Krikorian, directly quoted. Hang on to your seats...

"From my opinion, if I'm some of the current members of Congress, I'd be very very worried about the information that's going to come out of this. There are current members of Congress that she has implicated in bribery, espionage. It's not good. It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy. For people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence.

[Which current members have been implicated?]

[Dan] Burton (R-IN), described as basically accepting bribes and involved in espionage for the Turkish government...she could not discuss the extremely illegal activities that Mr. Burton committed against U.S. interests, as she put it.

Also, a current female Democratic [ed note: I misheard, he later said he didn't know if she was Dem or Rep] member of Congress who has been blackmailed by the Turkish Government...called a 'hooking exercise'...she's apparently bi-sexual and they bugged her apartment, she's married with children, and they set up a relationship with another female who went in and had sexual relationships with her. And they had all the episodes bugged within this current Representatives home and they blackmailed her. ... She wouldn't give her name, but her photograph [is the one with the question mark on it in the "Sibel Edmonds Rogue Gallery" ] .

The context of the discussion was that this particular Representative was amenable to passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution. And then based on this 'hooking' operation, changed her position. She was reluctant to put this person's name on record.

[Other people implicated included] Livingston (R-TX), Hastert (R-IL), Dick Gephardt (D-MO), other non-Congressional members, people like Brent Scowcroft, other appointed members of the U.S. government.

One of the reasons we sought her testimony is especially for these reasons. I can tell you that counsel for Schmidt has been objecting to much of the testimony. I stopped counting the number of objections that were raised. But, she's an extremely credible witness, she knows a lot about what happened. She's implicated Turkish organizations operating in the U.S. with both overt and covert operations.

[Q: Which ones?]

ATC, ATAA, TACA...She talked about how she was recruited to join these operations, she talked about the fact that the Inspector General's report exonerated her, she talked about the circumstances around her dismissal, she talked about the fact that these the fact that these Turkish American operations were, she said in her words 'all receiving support from the Turkish government'.

She talks about one of the main lobby issues is suppressing U.S. media coverage of the Armenian Genocide and preventing the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress from passing. She said very very strongly that is one of their major issues.

She also attested there is no credible opposition to the historical facts of the Armenian genocide, that it's only coming from Turkey.

[Ed note: Edmonds was raised in Turkey, though is a U.S. citizen. Krikorian is of Armenian descent. Schmidt is neither, but she is co-chair of the Congressional Turkish Caucus.]

Did not have very flattering things to say about former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert. ... Actually, I stopped taking notes because I was o fascinated by what she was saying. ... She talked about the Rand Corp., Brewster-Jennings, nuclear secrets...

Frankly it's disappointing that things like this are happening in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Is it a huge surprise? No. Should it be tolerated? Absolutely not. I can't imagine George Washington and Thomas Jefferson allowing this sort of thing to go on in the Republic that they created. I cannot imagine it.

We're talking about High Crimes against the United States government. If the Government is aware of these High Crimes and doesn't prosecute them, I'm not sure what can be said about this.
...
[Q: Do you predict problems with Democrats whose support you will need when running against Schmidt as a Dem in 2010?]

Problem with Democrats...?

Well, Mr. Gephardt and Mr. Solarz are no longer Representatives of the U.S. House of Representatives. I think it would be extremely naive and the height of folly for the Democratic leadership to suggest for a moment that Democrats aren't also corrupt. I don't mean as an entirety, but that there aren't corrupt members of the Democrat caucus. I think there was a recent Democrat down south somewhere who was found with thirty thousand dollars cash in his freezer, or whatever.

If Democratic National Committee or the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Comm.] came out and said, 'hey, we're entirely clean and there's no fault on us', I think the American public would laugh at them. So, this is not an indictment of one party or the other. This is about standing up for what's right for the country, and what is right for the citizens of our country.

Again, I ran as an independent last time [in 2008]. I'm running as a Democrat [in 2010] because I think right now they're probably the better of the two parties. But nevertheless, I don't necessarily buy into the fact that they're without blood on their hands...

[Q: Did she implicate any sitting Democrats?]

She did not indicate any names of any currently serving Democrats that I'm aware. [Though he wasn't certain if the unnamed female Representative was either Democratic or Republican].

Krikorian went on to say that he expects to release the video of the deposition, which, along with the transcript, is the property of his legal team. says "There will be...This could be a 10 part YouTube video segment, that we'll put out there."

He doesn't yet know when a transcript will be available.

The cross-examination of Edmonds, by Schmidt's attorney Fein is still in progress...

12:24pm PT (3:24pm ET) Apparently the proceedings are now wrapping up. It's believed that Edmonds and Krikorian and the attorneys will speak to whatever media is outside the NWC. Will cover...

12:56pm (3:56pm ET) Okay, I believe this will be the final update. But it will end with a BANG. Big time...Read to the end...really...

The attorneys and Krikorian and Edmonds all had a media avail after the deposition completed.

Bruce Fein, the attorney for Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) --- who began all of this with her complaint at the Ohio Election Commission against David Krikorian, claiming he made "false statements" by alleging she took "blood money" from Turkish interests to suppress a vote in the U.S. House on the Armenian Genocide resolution --- was confronted by a reporter with Armenian TV who asked if it wasn't the "cornerstone of free speech for candidates to talk about freely about these matters.

Fein became very defensive, said that Krikorian "can say whatever he wants about the Armenian Genocide, but what he's not allowed to do is state lies. We don't want to close anybody's mouth when it comes to taking about the Armenian Genocide...What we're trying to do is promote freedom of speech. Some versions are trying to harass individuals who are trying to dispute history."

The reporter, Elizabeth Chouldjian, freelancing coverage today for Armenian Horizons TV, is also with Armenian National Committee of America, and she continue to press her points, and asked Fein if he didn't have a conflict of interest in this case. She had earlier told me that Fein was a Board member of the Turkish Coalition of America, Turkish American Legal Defense Fund and legal counsel for Assembly of Turkish American Associations. She wondered if it was appropriate for Fein to represent Schmidt, since he himself could be called to testify, as a witness on behalf of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations.

Chouldjian had told me that he's been flying around the country, essentially trying to deny that the genocide ever occurred, has sued the state of Massachusetts to put Armenian genocide "denialist" material in text books, is suing the Southern Poverty Law Center for putting out an article last year called "State of Denial" which, she says, focused on Turkish interests trying to block Armenian Genocide resolution from being passed.

Fein left very quickly thereafter, so I didn't get a chance to ask him if he, himself, recognized what he called, several times, "the Armenian genocide".

Chouldjian later told Edmonds of Fein's connections to those organizations, several of whom came up in the deposition apparently. Edmonds had no idea Fein was allied with those organizations.

Michael Kohn, Edmonds attorney, working on behalf of the National Whistleblower Center made his statement to say he's "glad her testimony has finally count out...It's been many years in the making. We're delighted that the Justice Department did not intervene and allowed the testimony to go forward." He said it was "a breath of fresh air from the previous administration." He didn't "think it would have happened with the previous administration."

He was not sure when the transcript of the session would be released. New information today, he said, including naming persons by name and with a great deal of specifics. NWC would review the testimony and disseminate publicly as soon as possible.

Krikorian stated: "We came here to get the sworn testimony of a very very credible witness in defense against a current Congresswoman. And then, beyond that, doing what is right for the country, which is why I'm running. I plan to win this case, and I plan to win this election," he said.

He said their is an Ohio Election Commission preliminary meeting on Aug. 13th, and a hearing on Sept 3rd, and that he would look at releasing both video and transcript thereafter.

Edmonds, however, seemed to suggest that the video tape, at least, might be released in full sooner.

Here comes a bombshell or two...

At the venue, Edmonds said that she named names and details on all of the Congress members noted on her "State Secrets Gallery" page. And then some.

She said she told them about "Mr. [Marc] Grossman and Brewster Jennings...And the real story about them, not the crap they got from the media."

I was unable to follow up that statement with a question, before she got into a cab, but was able to track her down on her cell thereafter.

First, I asked if she specified whether the sitting bi-sexual, married Congresswoman who had been taped sleeping with a woman, without knowing, and then bribed by Turkish interests with the tape, to vote against the Armenian Genocide resolution had been a Democrat or a Republican. She said she is a Democrat, and that she testified to that during her deposition. (See Krikorian's long statement above for more details on that woman.)

Second, I asked about the the "real" story on Brewster Jennings, as opposed to the "crap...from the media" as she mentioned at the venue.

"Basically," she said, "I told them how [third-ranking State Dept. official in the Bush Admin and former Ambassador to Turkey] Marc Grossman disclosed" that Brewster Jennings was a CIA front company] to the target of an FBI investigation. "And it was under oath and that some some lives may have been lost."

"Novak has nothing to do with it. Wilson has nothing to do with it. Valerie Plame has nothing to do with it. The whole operation has to do with something totally different and it had to do with the American Turkish Council and the Turkish clients who were about to hire Brewster Jennings as an analyst ... and Grossman found out about it, and tipped off his diplomatic contact who was a target of the FBI counter-intelligence, and that person notified the ISI [Pakistani intelligence agency], etc."

She says that Brewster Jenning was then "dismantled as soon as the FBI notified the CIA" after which "FBI requested CIA to do a damage assessment, to see if lives would be lost."

All of this, she re-iterated was "long before, three years before" Novak outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative in his newspaper column.

Brewster Jennings was "absolutely" dismantled in August of 2001.

"Grossman and [Richard] Armitage, they are the only two people involved. Later on Cheney and his people may have used it, but it had nothing to do with those other things, [Brewster Jennings] was completely destroyed and gone by the summer of 2001."

For those not fully up on Edmonds story, her job at the FBI was to listen to wiretaps in the counter-intel department, to translate foreign targets caught on those taps. Presumably, that's where her details on the destruction of Brewster Jennings comes from. She was hired by the agency shortly after 9/11.

Bombshell enough for ya? Let's see if anyone in the corporate media bothers to agree, and/or pick up on this --- now that it's officially "on the record" and, as Edmonds took pains to point out: under oath!

Here endeth today's live-blogging session. We hope to be hitting the road this afternoon (we were supposed to go on "vacation" today, but have had to put things off for this), so if anyone feels like tipping us some gas money, to make up for three hours sleep and today's marathon coverage, we'd much appreciate it!

[ramallamamama]

I can't friggin wait for the yootoob of it.

There are woo woo aspects of this story that come up in the work of halfpasthuman's predictive linguistic work on the interwebz.

They predict that there will be a cascade of whistlblowers coming forth for a variety of reasons.

[Waltraut]

it shouldn't be that hard to produce a candidate list for the representative who was bribed, but they don't seem to refer to the ~10 other people who were on Edmonds' chart including Hastert. What did Gephardt do?

[ramallamamama]

Secrets will be revealed.

[Dig]

Sibel Edmonds Case: The Real Culprits Of 9/11
http://www.911blogger.com/node/11334
Submitted by Jon Gold on Thu, 09/13/2007 - 10:22am.
Source: opednews.com Luke Ryland 9/11/2007
Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has made a number of disturbing claims about the 911 attacks, but perhaps the most disconcerting is her oft-repeated statement that the US authorities have covered up an entire organizational layer within al-Qaeda. In the documentary, Kill The Messenger, Sibel says:

"They haven't mentioned anybody who actually is connected to Al Qaida, in mid or higher level."

Similarly, Sibel often says:
"And I would like to give an analogy - if you take the War on Drugs, imagine if they only went after street dealers and they refused to investigate the mid-level dealers or the drug lords. This is very similar."

As we approach another 911 anniversary, it's time we learnt:
1) Who are these mid and high-level al-Qaida operatives?
2) What role did they play in planning 911?
3) What operational support did they provide?
4) Why they are still roaming free today?
5) Why did the US authorities continually exclude key participants from the official narrative?

Sibel Edmonds is the most gagged woman in US history making it a little it difficult for us, the public, to have a detailed understanding of everything she knows about al-Qaida and the 911 attacks, but she has given interviews and written a number of great articles and letters which enable us to put some of the pieces together. Immediately after the release of the 911 Commission report, Sibel wrote an open letter to Thomas Kean and the Commission in which she chided the 911 Commission panel for ignoring important issues related to the attacks, and she also made public some of her closed-door testimony to the 911 Commission. For example, in that letter, Sibel identified specific warnings from April 2001 that:
"1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities;
2) the attack was going to involve airplanes;
3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States;
4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months."

As we all know, this information was not included in the Commission report, and was barely mentioned in the US media even though it was confirmed in the Chicago Tribune and FBI Director Robert Mueller was surprised that he wasn't asked about it by the 911 Commission. In fact, according to Sibel,  "(A)fter 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to "keep quiet" regarding this issue." More importantly, for today's purposes, I want to focus on this statement from the same letter:

"The public has still not been told of the intentional obstruction of intelligence. The public has not been told that certain information, despite its relevance to terrorist activities, is not shared with counterterrorism units. This was true prior to 9/11, and it remains true today. If counterintelligence receives information about terrorism that implicates certain nations, semi-legit organizations or the politically powerful in this country, then that information is not shared with counterterrorism, regardless of the consequences. In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents have cited "direct pressure by the State Department." The Department of Justice Inspector General received detailed evidence regarding this issue. I provided your investigators with an account of this issue, the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this, and the names of U.S. officials involved in these transactions and activities."

In order to understand this, we need to understand a little bit about how the FBI operates. 'Counterintelligence' (CI) is essentially a monitoring organization which routinely investigates various groups - such as embassies, and groups like AIPAC and the American Turkish Council (ATC) - which might be involved in criminal activity, or otherwise might be able to provide valuable information. If and when CI comes across evidence of criminality, they are supposed to forward that information and evidence to other divisions of the FBI which have the authority, and responsibility, to act on the information and arrest the guilty parties. Typically the cases will be forwarded to, for example, Public Corruption, or Narcotics, or in this case, Counter Terrorism (CT). As Sibel indicates, prior to 911, the State Department put pressure on people at FBI HQ to block the transfer of certain cases to the actionable divisions within the FBI. Outrageously, even immediately after 911, the State Department continued to refuse CI permission to pass significant information to Counter-terrorism that was directly relevant to the 911 attacks. In other words, while the Bush administration was rushing through the PATRIOT ACT, rounding up thousands of 'suspects' and gutting the Constitution, the State Department was protecting many of the key participants in the mass murder on 9/11 in order to protect 'sensitive diplomatic relations.'

Here's Sibel describing the cover-up:
"What occurred with the 911 related investigation - be it the FBI, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of State, or the CIA or the Pentagon - they choose to basically publicize the deal at the hijacker level - and completely went about covering up certain entities that they had DIRECT evidence, DOCUMENTED evidence of the support networks - be it the financial support networks, or communications, or obtaining visas - they have not touched those individuals. Those individuals are still roaming free! Today!"

And here's Sibel again, making the same point:
"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..." 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." Which people are Sibel talking about? Sibel is talking about three different, though often over-lapping, groups of:
a) Those who were directly involved in planning and/or facilitating the 911 attacks,
b) Those who knowingly, specifically, intentionally provided and facilitated 'indirect' support functions for the attacks
c) Those who support and finance al-Qaeda generally.

Let's begin at the highest level. In Sibel's "THE HIGHJACKING OF A NATION - Part 1" she quotes Senator Bob Graham's numerous statements that Saudi Arabia's support for some of the 911 hijackers has been hidden in the redacted 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report into 911. Sibel notes:
"What Graham is trying to establish in his book and previous public statements in this regard, and doing so under state imposed 'secrecy and classification', is that the classification and cover up of those 27 pages is not about protecting 'U.S. national security, methods of intelligence collection, or ongoing investigations,' but to protect certain U.S. allies. Meaning, our government put the interests of certain foreign nations and their U.S. beneficiaries far above its own people and their interests. While Saudi Arabia has been specifically pointed to by Graham, other countries involved have yet to be identified." (emphasis mine)

In various other interviews and articles, Sibel gives us some clues as to which 'other countries' she is pointing to. For example, in this 2006 interview, Sibel says, "We're not just talking about - as they say - Saudi Arabia and Egypt - but they have glossed over the involvement of certain entities within other countries - such as Turkey, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan - many Central Asian countries. They have absolutely covered up the involvement of certain entities - it's not necessarily only governmental - from these other countries - Central Asia - they call it "Sensitive Diplomatic Relations' - you know they are putting (military) bases there.

Please note that not only is the US establishing military bases in these countries, these countries are generally:
1) Major customers for US military hardware
2) US 'allies'
3) Anti-democracy, anti-freedom, police states
4) Major players in the heroin trade
5) Supporters of various terrorist activity

Sibel describes the US' hypocrisy (if that's the correct descriptor), particularly as it relates to Turkey, in The Highjacking of a Nation: Part 2: "Curiously enough, despite these highly publicized reports and acknowledgments of Turkey's role in these activities (Ed: nuclear black market, heroin trafficking, illegal arms sales), Turkey continues to receive billions of dollars of aid and assistance annually from the United States. With (Turkey's) highly placed co-conspirators and connections within the Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Congress, Turkey never has to fear potential sanctions or meaningful scrutiny; just like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The criminal Turkish networks continue their global criminal activities right under the nose of their protector, the United States, and neither the catastrophe falling upon the U.S. on September Eleven, nor their direct and indirect role and ties to this terrorist attack, diminish their role and participation in the shady worlds of narcotics, money laundering and illegal arms transfer.

The 'respectable' Turkish companies established and operate bases in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and other similar former Soviet states. Many of these front companies, disguised under construction and tourism entities, have received millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. government, allocated to them by the U.S. congress, to establish and operate criminal networks throughout the region; among their networking partners are Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Albanian Mafia. While the U.S. government painted Islamic charity organizations as the main financial source for Al Qaeda terrorists, it was hard at work trying to cover up the terrorists' main financial source: narcotics and illegal arms sales. Why?"  In summary, certain US allies protect a bunch of organizations which support al Qaeda and the Taliban. Despite this, these organizations, and their host countries, are protected by the US government under the guise of protecting 'sensitive diplomatic relations' and "protecting certain foreign business relations." When Sibel first began claiming publicly that the US was covering up the role of certain allies in 911, her claims sounded so outrageous that she was largely dismissed. In 2007 it has become accepted fact. For example, when Presidential hopeful Barack Obama states that Pakistan, a US ally, is protecting Osama bin Laden, there is no about about whether this is true or not, only what to do about it. Similarly, Senator Bob Graham says in his book: "It was as if the President's loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America's safety."

Some Specific Examples of Hiding the Culprits
In this section, I'll take a look at some examples of organizations and individuals that were believed by the FBI to have played roles in 911 but have escaped any accountability.

American Turkish Council (ATC)
The ATC is a mini-AIPAC - a lobbying group where Turkey's business and military leaders interface with America's finest; current politicians from both parties, CEOs from the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), and former high-level officials acting as lobbyists. The ATC was being monitored by FBI counterintelligence (as well as CIA counterintelligence (Brewster Jennings)) and much of the information that Sibel learned is believed to have come from the surveillance of the ATC. Sibel says that the ATC is essentially a front organization for various criminal activity - ranging from nuclear black market, heroin trafficking and illegal arms sales - and was being "monitored in a 9/11 investigation." Despite the ATC's role in all of this criminal activity, it is demonstrably untouchable and is alive and well today. In fact, Sibel goes as far as to say that the ATC is basically a representative arm of the U.S. government, lobbyists, foreign agents, and the MIC. It's not a surprise, therefore, that the ATC has some type of informal 'protected' status, and that the FBI can't act on any of the information uncovered in any of the counter-intelligence operations.

Melek Can Dickerson
Dickerson joined the FBI in October 2001 as a Turkish translator. She had previously worked at the ATC and two other organizations that were the targets of FBI counterintelligence. Almost immediately, Dickerson began engaging in various espionage activities including attempting to recruit Sibel and other translators into the espionage ring, intentionally covering up FBI evidence which implicated her friends at the ATC and elsewhere, stealing documents and leaking them to her friends, and falsifying "top-secret documents related to 9/11 detainees" in an attempt to falsely exonerate her guilty associates. Sibel's claims regarding Dickerson were investigated and validated by the FBI. Remarkably, Dickerson was allowed to keep her Top Secret clearance, and was allowed to continue translating Top Secret information regarding her friends and associates, including 911 investigations, for another 6 months until she fled the US.

Top Targets of 911 Investigation
Melek Can Dickerson and her husband, USAF Major Doug Dickerson, offered to introduce Sibel to some of their friends, including two Turkish guys who belonged to the ATC and worked out of the Turkish embassy in DC. According to Sibel, "These two people were the top targets of our investigation!" For one reason or other, these two (and maybe more) "top targets" of the 911 investigation were allowed to leave the US in mid-2002 without ever having even been interviewed. Prior to Robert Mueller's testimony at the 911 Commission, Sibel prepared a list of questions for the Commissioners to ask Mueller including: "Director Mueller, is it true that several top targets of FBI investigations, related to support networks of terrorist activities, were allowed to leave the United States, months after the 9-11 attacks, without ever being questioned? Why?" That question remains unanswered.

"Blueprints, pictures and building material for skyscrapers"
Another case that was apparently ignored by the US authorities was a mid-2001 wiretap that Sibel translated of a prisoner who had been arrested on narcotics charges. The FBI agents suspected that he might be involved in terrorism-related activity and wiretapped his phone calls from prison. In one phone call, this individual organized for blueprints, photos & details of the building material of the World Trade Center to be sent to (presumably) the authors of the 911 atacks who were hiding in a remote border location somewhere in the Middle East. The wiretap also "revealed illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East through network contacts and bribery."

Immediately after 911, another wiretap captured this same individual congratulating an associate on the successful attack. Who was this individual? Who did he phone to deliver the blueprints? Was he a mastermind of 911? Was he acting on his own initiative? If not, at whose behest (and why was he doing from jail?)? Who was he congratulating? We don't know the answer to any of these questions. In fact, in July 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller "maintained... that the 19 al-Qaida hijackers operated independently in the U.S. and were an isolated case" telling the joint congressional 911 inquiry:  "As far as we know, the (hijackers) contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States," Mueller was effectively lying (although he may have technically given himself wiggle-room). As Sibel said, the US authorities "completely went about covering up certain entities that they had DIRECT evidence, DOCUMENTED evidence of the support networks - be it the financial support networks, or communications, or obtaining visas... They have absolutely covered up the involvement of certain entities - it's not necessarily only governmental - from these other countries" Of course, it's not just Mueller who knows what Sibel knows. I'll finish with two more quotes. The first is from an interview with Chris Deliso

Deliso: You think they [the government] know who they are, the top guys, and where?

Sibel: Oh yeah, they know.

Deliso: So why don't they get them?

Sibel: 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.

And finally, in Kill The Messenger, Sibel says:
"I am not the only one who knows about this. Too many people know this! The fraudulent 9/11 Commissioners, every single one of them knows about my case and the details, and the names, and all the specifics. Several people within the U.S Congress do know. Everybody in the FBI, involved, they know! Everybody in Department of Justice, they know! My goal has been exposing the criminal activities: money laundering, narcotic activities, and nuclear black market, converging with terrorist activities. Put out the tapes, put out the wiretaps! Put out those documents! Put out the truth! The truth is going to hurt them, the truth is going to set me free!"

Everybody knows except us. It's time we knew.

Let Sibel Edmonds Speak: Call Waxman. Demand public open hearings:
DC phone: (202) 225-3976
LA phone: 323 651-1040
Capitol switchboard phone: 800-828-0498

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 10/29/2007 5:30AM  
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5197


EXCLUSIVE: FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Will Now Tell All - and Face Charges if Necessary - to Any Major Television Network That Will Let Her
She's Prepared to Name Names, Including Those of Two 'Well-Known' Congress Members Involved in Criminal Corruption
The 'Most Gagged Person in U.S. History' Tells The BRAD BLOG She's Now Exhausted All Other Channels...

-- By Brad Friedman

Attention CBS 60 Minutes: we've got a huge scoop for you. If you want it.

Remember the exclusive story you aired on Sibel Edmonds, originally on October 27th, 2002, when she was not allowed to tell you everything that she heard while serving as an FBI translator after 9/11 because she was gagged by the rarely-invoked "States Secret Privilege"? Well, she's still gagged. In fact, as the ACLU first described her, she's "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America."

But if you'll sit down and talk with her for an unedited interview, she has now told The BRAD BLOG during an exclusive interview, she will now tell you everything she knows.

Everything she hasn't been allowed to tell since 2002, about the criminal penetration of the FBI where she worked, and at the Departments of State and Defense; everything she heard concerning the corruption and illegal activities of several well-known members of Congress; everything she's aware of concerning information omitted and/or covered up in relation to 9/11. All of the information gleaned from her time listening to and translating wire-taps made prior to 9/11 at the FBI.

Here's a handy bullet-point list, as we ran it in March of 2006, for reference, of what she's now willing to tell you about.

"People say, 'why doesn't she just come forward and spill the beans?' I have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and was shut down, I went to Congress and now consider that shut down," she told The BRAD BLOG last week when we spoke with her for comments in relation to our story on former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's original attempt to move a resolution through the U.S. House in 2000 declaring the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in Turkey as "genocide."

"Here's my promise to the American Public: If anyone of the major networks --- ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX --- promise to air the entire segment, without editing, I promise to tell them everything that I know," about everything mentioned above, she told us.

"I can tell the American public exactly what it is, and what it is that they are covering up," she continued. "I'm not compromising ongoing investigations," Edmonds explained, because "they've all been shut down since."


"She's Very Credible"

She has, in fact, spent years taking every reasonable step to see that the information she has goes through the proper channels. The Supreme Court refused to hear her whistleblower lawsuit, even in light of the Department of Justice forcing the removal of both her and her own attorneys from the courtroom when they made their arguments concerning why it was that she still had to remain gagged under the "States Secrets Privilege."

On the morning that the SCOTUS refused to hear her case, the facade cracked on the front of the building. In a ridiculously ironic metaphor which would have been rejected by any credible screen-writer, a chunk of marble --- just above an allegorical statue representing "Order" and just below the words "Equal Justice" --- came crashing to the ground.

She has met with, and told her story to, U.S. senators including Republican Charles Grassley and Democrat Patrick Leahy, both of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both who found her extremely credible. 60 Minutes producers may remember when Grassley told them, "Absolutely, she's credible...And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story."

In fact, the FBI itself has done so. Their Inspector General found her allegations, as described in the unclassified version of his report, to be "credible," "serious," and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI."

As far back as 2002, Grassley and Leahy co-wrote letters on Edmonds' behalf to Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and DoJ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, calling on all of them to take action in respect to the allegations she's made.

"Certain officials in this country are engaged in treason against the United States and its interests and its national security," she said during an interview an August 2005 interview on Democracy Now. That comment followed 60 Minutes' revelation years before alleging that Edmonds had information revealing that a "Turkish intelligence officer" she worked with at the FBI "had spies working for him inside the US State Department and at the Pentagon."

She's briefed many legislative offices --- as well as the 9/11 Commission --- in regard to her claims, and now, she says, she's even prepared to tell the media "the names of every single Congressional office who has received the names of the witnesses" to the crimes she's detailed.

When we spoke last week, Edmonds seemed to reserve most of her frustration for Congressman Henry Waxman's office. Waxman is the Democratic Chairman of the U.S. House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

After briefing members of his security-cleared staff "inside the SCIF" --- a high-security room in the U.S. Capitol, specially created for discussion of highly sensitive information --- Edmonds says she was told on several occasions, prior to the 2006 Election, that her case would be one of the first heard in his committee, once he became Chairman.

"I even gave names of former and current FBI agents who were willing to go to Waxman's office and give more information on all of this," she said.

"Before the elections, I had a promise from Congressman Waxman's office." She claims they told her, before the election, "the only reason they couldn't hold hearings, was because the Republicans were blocking it."

"They said 'your case will be one of the first ones we will hold investigations on,'" she told us. Now, however, since the Democrats have become the majority in the House, Waxman's office is "going mum." They won't even respond to her calls.

The congressman's office did not respond to several requests for comment on this story.

Two Other "Well-Known" Congressmen

Aside from the allegations she's already made concerning Hastert, as we reported in some detail in early 2006, following up on a Vanity Fair exposé in 2005, Edmonds says there are at least "two other well-known" members of Congress that she's prepared to name as well.

"There are other Congressional people, whose names have not come out," she explained. "As [Waxman's office knows] I'll be able to give them file numbers and investigations, including investigations by the IRS. I will be giving details one by one, not just allegations."

"But," she added, "unfortunately nobody wants to have an investigation like that."

For the record, she told The BRAD BLOG, the other two "well-known members" are from the House, both Republican, and "one of them is recently no longer there."

So far, she says, "those names have not been public."

"Kafka-esque"

Since leaving the FBI, and in the wake of her years-long ordeal, which she frequently describes as "Kafka-esque," Edmonds has founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

In addition to the support she has received, at various times, from members of Congress, she's received a great deal of support from members of the national security whistleblower community and government watchdog organizations.

As we reported last Spring, Veteran FBI counterintelligence agent John Cole has said he's "talked to people who had read her file, who had read the investigative report, and they were telling me a totally different story" than that given publicly by FBI officials. "They were telling me that Sibel Edmonds was 100 percent accurate," he said, "management knew that she was correct."

Famed "Pentagon Papers" whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has described Edmonds as "extremely credible." In a 2005 interview on KPFA, Ellsberg said, "FBI agents we've talked to have, in every respect that was raised, have confirmed her story - that she's a very credible witness."

More than 30 groups, from across the political spectrum --- including the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the September 11th Advocates, the Liberty Coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), OMB Watch, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and People for the American Way (PFAW) --- all signed a letter in March of this year calling on the House Oversight Committee to "hold public hearings into the case of FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and the erroneous use of the State Secrets Privilege to shut down all court proceedings in her case."

That petition was sent almost precisely one year after The BRAD BLOG originally reported on a public petition to Congress, demanding they hold public hearings. More than 30,000 people, Edmonds says, have now signed that petition since it was first announced.

"Exhausted Every Channel"

In a speech given over the Summer in D.C. at the American Library Association (ALA, video here), Edmonds detailed the "Kafka-esque" nature of her unprecedented gag-order. Among the information still-regarded as "classified" under the States Secret Privelege: the fact that she was a translator for the FBI, where she was born, what languages she speaks, the date of her birth, the universities she attended, and the degrees she earned.

In fact, the interview that CBS's 60 Minutes aired with her in 2004, was later retroactively classified by the Department of Justice under the same "privilege"!

But enough is enough. She's now ready to tell all. To the public. But not (yet) to us. She will speak, however, to any broadcast network that would like to have her.

"I have exhausted every channel. If they want to, they can bring criminal charges against someone who divulges criminal activity, and see how far they're going to get."

But will any of the corporate mainstream networks take her up on the offer? It'd certainly be an explosive exclusive.

"I don't think any of the mainstream media are going to have the guts to do it," she dared them.

So whaddaya say 60 Minutes? We've given you scoops before that you ended up turning down --- and likely later regretted. Will you be smart enough to take this one?

"You put me on air live, or unedited. If I'm given the time, I will give the American people the exact reason of what I've been gagged from saying because of the States Secrets Privilege, and why it is that I'm the most gagged person in the history of the United States."

"My feeling is that none of them have the guts to do that," she dared them, before charging, "they are all manipulated."

"I keep using the word Kafkaesque..." she paused, during her speech at ALA, clearly showing her exasperation, "because...," she continued slowly, "...I really can't come up with a better word."

[Dig]

Also from earlier...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

SIBEL EDMONDS SPEAKS TO UK SUNDAY TIMES: SAYS U.S. OFFICIALS INVOLVED IN RELEASE OF NUKE SECRETS TO TURKEY, PAKISTAN, IRAN, OTHERS, POSSIBLY EVEN AL-QAEDA
Former 'Gagged' FBI Whistleblower Alleges Pentagon, State Department Officials Overheard Receiving Payoffs in Exchange for Classified Info; Crimes Covered Up at Highest Levels of Government
U.S. Media Scooped Again, Failed to Air Claims After Offer of Disclosure by Edmonds in Recent BRAD BLOG Exclusives...

-- By Brad Friedman

Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who has been under a Bush administration gag order for the past 5 years, has now begun to disclose some of the classified information she has been prohibited from revealing.

"A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets," reports Great Britain's Sunday Times in the lede of their front page exclusive, headlined "For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets."

In the article, just filed tonight, Edmonds reveals details overheard on wiretaps she translated during her time at the FBI, just after 9/11. Her disclosures to the Times reveal a maze of nuclear black market espionage involving U.S. Defense and State Department officials, that resulted in the sale and propagation of nuclear secrets to Turkish and Israeli interests. In turn, that information was then sold to Pakistan and used by A.Q. Kahn for development of nuclear weapons. The secrets were subsequently proliferated to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and potentially al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, just weeks prior to September 11th, 2001.

The explosive allegations, shared with the Sunday Times over the last several weeks, follows on the heels of two reports published late last year by The BRAD BLOG, based on our own exclusive interviews with Edmonds.

While not everything Edmonds has to reveal is reported by the Times tonight, the foreign paper's front-page feature underscores, yet again, the failure of the U.S. mainstream media to adequately report on issues of extraordinary importance to American national security.

In late October, Edmonds had told The BRAD BLOG she was prepared to reveal the information to any major U.S. broadcast media outlet, after feeling that she had exhausted all efforts to see the disturbing information properly investigated by U.S. Government agencies. She had, in fact, spent years in classified interviews with high-ranking officials from the FBI, DoJ, 9/11 Commission and both houses of the U.S. Congress, in hopes of seeing accountability brought concerning the issues of national security, which the DoJ's own Inspector General had described as "credible," "serious," and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI."

Despite broken promises for hearings on her case by U.S. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), support from Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Patrick Leahy (D-MI), and a number of mainstream exposés several years ago detailing aspects of her story before she was willing to break her unprecedented "States Secrets Privilege" gag order, none of the American broadcast media outlets took her up on her offer.

"She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities' failure to act," reports the Sunday Times tonight...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"While that "well-known senior" State Department official is not named by the paper, Australia's Luke Ryland, perhaps the world's foremost expert concerning the Sibel Edmonds story, has told The BRAD BLOG that the official, unnamed by the Times, is Marc Grossman."
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5518

http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=8137

Marc Grossman named to have possible roll in Plame outing as well.


 Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame
by Christopher Deliso

balkanalysis.com

From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.

Aside from the high-visibility officials involved or presumably involved in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame – Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. – we also have a generous sprinkling of neocons who, while somewhat less well known, have played a crucial role in not only the Plame outing but in policy-crafting and, perhaps, criminal activities as well.

The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon.

Marc Grossman


Executive summary: US Under Secy. for Political Affairs, 2001-05

Career diplomat, who spent a lot of time in Turkey and Pakistan. During the critical years 2001-05, Grossman held the third-highest position at the US State Department, Under Secretary for Political Affairs. According to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Grossman informed Lewis Libby of Valerie Plame's CIA identity.

    University: BA, University of California at Santa Barbara (1973)
    University: MSc International Relations, London School of Economics (1974)

    The Cohen Group Vice Chairman (2005-)
    US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2001-05)
    US State Department Director General of the Foreign Service (2000-01)
    US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (1997-2000)
    US Ambassador to Turkey (1994-97)
    US Executive Secretary of State (1993-94)
    US State Department Deputy Chief of Mission, Ankara, Turkey (1989-92)
    US State Department Embassy official, Pakistan (1976-83)
    Member of the Board of DynCorp
    American Academy of Diplomacy Vice Chairman
    Army and Navy Club
    Campaign for American Leadership in the Middle East

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Marc Grossman Vice Chairman
http://cohengroup.net/about/teammember.cfm?id=5
mgrossman@cohengroup.net [email him and see if he wants to give a statement]

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2001-2005)
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs (1997-2000)
U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (1994-1997)

In 2005, Ambassador Marc Grossman completed 29 years of distinguished public service when he retired from the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Ambassador Grossman served as the Department’s third-ranking official, supporting U.S. diplomacy worldwide. Following the September 11th attacks, he helped marshal international diplomatic support for the Global war on Terrorism and for the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ambassador Grossman previously served as the Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources from 2000 to 2001. At the direction of the Secretary of State, he revamped the State Department’s human resource strategies, including the Department’s strategies for training, assigning, and retaining personnel both at home and abroad.

As Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs from 1997 to 2000, Ambassador Grossman was responsible for over 4,000 State Department employees posted in 50 sites abroad with a program budget of $1.2 billion. He played a lead role in orchestrating NATO's 50th anniversary Summit in Washington in 1999 and helped direct U.S. participation in NATO’s military campaign in Kosovo that same year.



Ambassador Grossman was U.S. Ambassador to Turkey 1994-1997. In Turkey, he promoted security cooperation, human rights and democracy and a vibrant U.S.-Turkish economic relationship. Ambassador Grossman had previously served as the embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission from 1989 to 1992.

As the Executive Secretary of the State Department and Special Assistant to the Secretary of State from 1993 to 1994, Ambassador Grossman managed operations for the senior State Department leadership. He served as the Deputy Director of the Private Office of Lord Carrington, the NATO Secretary-General, from 1983 to 1986 and at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan from 1976 to 1983.

A native of Los Angeles, California, Ambassador Grossman graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara and later received an MSc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. As a result of his outstanding service to his country, Ambassador Grossman is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. He attained the Foreign Service’s highest rank in 2004 when the President appointed him to the rank of Career Ambassador; he received the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award the following year.

Ambassador Grossman serves on the Board of Directors/Trustees of a number of non-profit and educational institutions.
___________________________________

AWB Limited
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=AWB_Limited
AWB Limited is a privately owned company that is the exclusive manager and marketer of all Australian bulk wheat exports. (AWB is the acronym derived from the pre-privatisiation name of the Australian Wheat Board).Contents [hide]

[edit]
Oil for Food, Lobbyists, and Corporate Profits

Prior to the October 2005 release of Paul Volcker's report on violations of the United Nations' Iraq oil-for-food program, the Australian wheat exporter AWB Limited hired the Washington DC lobbying firm The Cohen Group, which is headed by former U.S. defense secretary William S. Cohen. AWB paid approximately $A300 million in trucking fees on its wheat contracts to a Jordanian company, Alia, which owns no trucks. The funds were funnelled to Saddam Hussein's government, according to information given to an Australian government-appointed Royal Commission.

Last week, AWB Middle East Marketing Manager Chris Whitwell mentioned The Cohen Group when asked about diary entries related to "develop[ing] a communications strategy." Whitwell said "Chalabi - link to Alia" referred to Ahmed Chalabi, as "he and Alia have some issues." Stanley McDermott, a partner in the law firm DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, which has a "strategic alliance" with The Cohen Group, has also advised AWB. [1]

In December 2005, AWB hired Peter Sandman to assist in handling the kickbacks crisis. According to testimony by AWB Secretary Richard Fuller, Mr Sandman's strategy was to "over apologise" and that he had drafted a letter to the Australian people doing so. AWB subsequently decided not to proceed with the strategy. [2]
[edit]
AWB Lobbyists and PR Advisers
Jill Gillingham
The Cohen Group
Peter Sandman
[edit]
Contact details

AWB Limited
380 La Trobe Street
Melbourne 3000, Victoria, Australia
Phone: 61 3 9209 2000
Fax: 61 3 9670 2782
Web: http://www.awb.com.au
[edit]
External links
Richard Baker, "Lobbyists hired by AWB", Sydney Morning Herald, February 22 2006.
Gerard McManus, "AWB dumped apology plan", Herald Sun, March 25, 2006.
David Marr, "AWB vows long legal fight to keep files secret", Sydney Morning Herald, May 31 2006.
"AWB considered $91,000 spin plan", AAP, August 10, 2006.
Leonie Wood, "Sorry is the hardest word for AWB", The Age, August 16, 2006.
"PR guru warned AWB of 'evil' Saddam", The Age, August 22, 2006.
Marian Wilkinson, "AWB kickbacks no big deal, Cole commission hears", Sydney Morning Herald, August 23, 2006.This article is a stub. You can help by expanding it.


Blogs that mention this article
"EXPERTS," RATS, AND AVOIDING MILITARY SERVICE
The Highjacking of a Nation: Part 2 : The Auctioning of Former Statesmen & Dime a Dozen Generals

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

American Friends of Bilderberg
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bilderberg
"The U.S. group is directed by Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Paul Arthur Allaire and Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke.

"Since 1953, the Bilderberg group has convened government, business, academic and journalistic representatives from the U.S., Canada and Europe with the express purpose of exploring the future of the North Atlantic community. The international steering committee includes Conrad Black, publisher of newspapers throughout Canada, the U.S. and the London Telegraph and Jerusalem Post, Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr., George J. Mitchell, Kissinger and Rockefeller.

"On the agenda for the November [4-5, 1999] meeting [at the Library of Congress] is a panel discussion of the U.S. presidential elections and an exploration of the national security requirements for the 21st century. Among those involved in the discussion of the latter subject will be former U.S. Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Bruce Rudman, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, journalist Leslie H. Gelb and Secretary of Defense William Sebastian Cohen. John McCain, at the special invitation of Kissinger, will speak at breakfast Friday morning and Albert Gore, Jr. will make a Thursday night dinner address, according to the agenda obtained by WorldNetDaily.

"Others making presentations include Rep. Bill Thomas of California, Sen. Christopher John Dodd of Connecticut, Evan Bayh of Indiana and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles.

"The list of potential invitees to the Washington conference includes the following: Dwayne O. Andreas, Michael H. Armacost, Robert Bartley, Samuel R. Berger, C. Fred Bergsten, Richard Bernstein, James H. Billington, Gen. Charles G. Boyd, Bill Bradley, John H. Bryan, William F. Buckley, Jr., William P. Bundy, John H. Chafee, E. Gerald Corrigan, Kenneth W. Dam, Lynne E. Davis, John Mark Deutch, Thomas E. Donilon, Theodore L. Eliot Jr., Dianne Feinstein, Martin S. Feldstein, Stanley Fischer, James J. Florio, Lynn Forester, Charles W. Freedman Jr., Stephen Friedman, Thomas Friedman, David Frum, Richard Furland, Orit Gadiesh, Gen. John R. Glavin, David Gergen, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Paul Gigot, Katherine Graham, Donald Graham, Marc Grossman, Chuck Hagel, Jim Hoagland, James F. Hoge, Jr., Mrs. Karen Elliott House, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Peter Jennings, Jems Johnson, Peter Kahn, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Robert M. Kimmitt, Henry Kravis, William Kristol, Jan Leschly, Winston Lord, Jessica Tucher Matthews, Charles Mac Mathias, William J. McDonough, George C. McGhee, Richard A. McGinn, Donald F. McHenry, Sam Nunn, Joseph Samuel Nye, Jr., John M. Page, Jr., Norman Pearlstine, William J. Perry, Thomas R. Pickering, Gen. Colin L. Powell, Sir Kieran Prendergast, Larry Lee Pressler, Clyde V. Prestowitz, Steven Rattner, William Rhodes, William Richardson, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Robert Shapiro, George Soros, Lesley Stahl, James B. Steinberg, George Stephanopoulos, Lawrence H. Summers, G. Richard Thornan, Franklin A. Thomas, Alexander J. Trotman, Wiliam Clay Ford, Jr., Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Lodewijk J.R. de Vink, Dr. Ezra F. Vogel, Paul Adolph Volcker, Stanley A. Weiss, John C. Whitehead, Christine Todd Whitman, James David Wolfensohn and Casimir A. Yost.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Good ol' Marc...taking away sovereignty from the Iraqi people. How is this f**ker not in jail?
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Iraqi_sovereignty:_June_30%2C_2004
Writing for the April 22, 2004, edition of the New York Times, Steven R. Weisman reported that Bush administration officials admitted during the day's "Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing on the goal of returning Iraq to self-rule on June 30[, that the administration's] "plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws [and] ... Only 10 weeks from the scheduled transfer of sovereignty, the administration is still not sure exactly who will govern in Baghdad, or precisely how they will be selected."

Although leadership of Iraq's 25 ministries should go to the Iraqis, CPA "senior advisers" have been in charge of them for the past year, with ultimate control of both "budgets and policy. ... After June 30, ministries will theoretically become free from US control; their budgets will be set by the Iraqi interim government. The people now acting as provisional authority advisers may stay on, US officials say, but only as consultants to the Iraqi ministers." [18]
"In testimony before the Senate and the House Armed Services committees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman said the United States will operate under the transitional law approved by the Iraqi Governing Council and a resolution approved by the U.N. Security Council last October. Both those provisions give control of the country's security to U.S. military commanders.
"Whereas in the past the turnover was described as granting total sovereignty to the appointed Iraqi government, Grossman yesterday termed it limited sovereignty because 'it is limited by the transitional law . . . and the U.N. resolution.'"
"Under the current plan, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's special adviser, Lakhdar Brahimi, will appoint a temporary government that will run Iraqi government agencies for six months and prepare the way for January 2005 elections of an assembly that will select a second, temporary government and write a constitution.
"Wolfowitz described the July 1 government as purely temporary and there to 'run ministries . . . but most importantly, they'll be setting up elections.' In addition he said, the government will run the police force 'but in coordination with Centcom [the U.S. Central Command], because this is not a normal police situation.'"
"'Sovereignty is not something we can, or want, to take back,' Wolfowitz said yesterday, outlining efforts to develop a large, new armed force there. 'The security of Iraq . . . will be part of a multinational force under U.S. command, including Iraqi forces.'"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3538277.stm "US pushes Nato role for Mid-East," BBC/UK, March 6, 2004: "Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman said Nato could offer security, disaster relief and help in combating the flow of illegal drugs and weapons. ... Mr Grossman stressed that the Bush administration's reform initiative for the 'greater Middle East' - which has been defined as stretching from Morocco to Pakistan - was not meant to replace the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."


Treasongate - November 2005 http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Treasongate:_Beyond_Karl_Rove:_External_Links_October_through_December_2005
Larisa Alexandrovna and Jason Leopold, "Bolton's chief of staff gave information on outed agent to Libby, lawyers involved in leak case say," The Raw Story, November 2, 2005. re Marc Grossman and Frederick Fleitz, John R. Bolton's chief of staff

Future of Iraq Project -  http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Future_of_Iraq_Project A hearing on the U.S. Department of State's Future of Iraq Project was held by Senate Commmittee on Foreign Relations on February 11, 2003, with Senator Dick Lugar presiding.
Two witness panels at the hearing included: (Panel 1) Marc I. Grossman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, and Douglas Jay Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and (Panel 2) Colonel Scott R. Feil (Ret.), Executive Director, Role of American Military Power; General Anthony C. Zinni, (Ret.) (a fellow of the Center for Defense Information), Former Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command; and Professor Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair for Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Iraqi Interim Government - http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Iraqi_Interim_Government "Officials Explain Plans for Sovereignty Transfer in Iraq." Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman and Lieutenant General Walter L. Sharp, director of Strategic Plans and Policy of the Joint Staff, testified before the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives May 13 about the administration's plans to transfer sovereignty to Iraq on June 30, 2004.
"At the national level, our focus today is on forming the Iraqi Interim Government (IIG). At the invitation of the Iraqi Governing Council, and with our full support, the UN is playing a vital role in the formation of the Iraqi Interim Government by June 30 and in preparing for national elections by January 2005.
"In April, Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi conducted extensive consultations with Iraqis as part of this process. On April 27, Ambassador Brahimi briefed the UN Security Council on his preliminary ideas for the formation of the IIG.
"Based on his consultations in Iraq, Ambassador Brahimi has proposed establishing by the end of May an interim government led by a Prime Minister that also includes a President and two deputy presidents. A council of ministers would report to the Prime Minister. An Advisory Body, selected in July by a National Conference, would serve alongside the Executive but have no legislative authority."
"The Iraqi Interim Government will be the sovereign governing authority of Iraq on June 30. But it will also be a temporary government. As Ambassador Brahimi has noted on several occasions, the priorities of this government should be the day-to-day administration of the country, the preparations of elections for the Transitional National Assembly, providing for the security and safety of the Iraqi people, and continuing economic reconstruction and development.
"On June 30, Iraq will be fully sovereign. Iraqis have told us, however, of their desire to have limits on the authorities of this government -- an unelected, short-term interim government. This reflects the view among Iraqis that there are some issues best left for decision to an elected Iraqi government."
"Iraqis have told us that only a government chosen by democratic elections will be viewed within Iraq as fully legitimate. We agree. The call for national elections in early 2005 was a key part of the November 15 agreement.
"The UN's involvement in helping Iraqis prepare for elections has been, and will remain vital to Iraq's political transition. The UN election team, headed by Carina Perelli, has a close, productive working relationship with Iraqi and CPA officials. Ms. Perelli has recently reported that preparations for the establishment of an Independent Election Commission are in good shape. A nationwide nomination process, endorsed by the Governing Council, to select the commissioners is now underway. The plan is to select seven commissioners through a careful review process. As its name suggests, the Commission will be independent and nonpartisan. Even with this progress, we continue to face a very tight timeline."

[Dig]

Sibel 'names names' (in pictures!)

Over at Sibel's website, she has published "Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery" - twenty one photos of people.

Sibel doesn't say anything about the photos - or the people in the photos - but we can reasonably presume that they are the 21 guilty people in her case.

Sibel has broken the photos into three different groups.

The first group contains current and former Pentagon and State Department officials.

Richard Perle


Douglas Feith


Eric Edelman


Marc Grossman


Brent Scowcroft


Larry Franklin


The second group is current and former congressmen

Dennis Hastert - Ex-House Speaker (R-Il)


Roy Blount - ( R, Mo)


Dan Burton - (R - IN)


Tom Lantos - (D- CA)


?

Bob Livingston - ex-Speaker of the House (R-LA)


Stephen Solarz (D-CA)


The 3rd group includes people who all appear to work at think tanks - primarily WINEP, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Graham E. Fuller - RAND


David Makovsky - WINEP


Alan Makovsky - WINEP


?

?

 Yusuf Turani (President-in-exile, Turkistan)


Professor Sabri Sayari (Georgetown, WINEP)


Mehmet Eymur (Former Turkish Spy Chief MIT)


As you can see, there are a couple of 'Question Marks' instead of photos. I'm not sure why that is the case.


I'll have some more later, obviously.

http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2008/01/sibel-names-names-in-pictures.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.mail-archive.com/kominform@lists.eunet.fi/msg02975.html

Mehmet Eymur (Former Turkish Spy Chief MIT)


Ex-Spy Spins Web of Collusion in Turkey's War Against Kurds

heikki sipilä
Sun, 20 Aug 2000 04:11:34 -0700

>From: Press Agency Ozgurluk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

>Subject: "[Ozgurluk.Org]" Ex-Spy Spins Web of Collusion in Turkey's War
>Against Kurds

>
>Saturday, August 19, 2000 |  Print this story
>
>Ex-Spy Spins Web of Collusion in Turkey's War Against Kurds
>
>By AMBERIN ZAMAN, Special to The Times
>
>
>ANKARA, Turkey--For years, Turkey's political establishment
>faced--and managed to fend off--assertions that it colluded with
>drug traffickers, hit men and gunrunners in its 15-year war against
>Kurdish separatists.
>  Since the separatists' defeat last year, however, the allegations
>have resurfaced from an unlikely and embarrassing source--a
>former chief of counterintelligence for Turkey's spy agency.
>Mehmet Eymur, who served in the National Intelligence Agency
>for three decades, is creating an uproar here with his popular
>5-month-old Web site, whose reports tarring dozens of officials
>are picked up daily by Turkey's newspapers and hastily denied by
>the accused.
>    From self-imposed exile in Washington, the former spy faces
>criminal charges at home for divulging state secrets.
> But there is little doubt that his painstakingly documented
>disclosures are bringing new pressure on the government to
>prosecute officials accused of collaborating with mobsters who
>trained Kurdish mercenaries to fight Kurdish rebels.
>Western governments have faulted successive Turkish
>administrations for laxity in fighting this country's flourishing drug
>trade. The State Department has reported that as much as 75% of
>the heroin seized in Europe last year "transited Turkey, was
>processed there or was seized in connection with Turkish criminal
>syndicates."
>   Turkey's prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, is credited with cracking
>down on drug lords. An alleged Kurdish heroin kingpin, Urfi
>Cetinkaya, was arrested in Istanbul this week.
>Yet politicians and security officials implicated in drug-related
>corruption scandals remain untouched. Several, including a man
>privately described by U.S. drug enforcement officials as a
>"well-known heroin chemist," were reelected to parliament last
>year.
>Eymur's decision to remove himself to Washington has invited
>speculation that he is being encouraged by the U.S. government.
>Some critics say he is trying to discredit Senkal Atasagun, the
>national intelligence chief who forced him into retirement two years
>ago.
>  "He is waging psychological war under the American flag
>against the Turkish army, in line with the CIA's directives," said
>Dogu Perincek, the leader of a small leftist party who is on the
>former spy's list of accused.
>In a telephone interview, Eymur vigorously denied the charges,
>saying he's seeking only "to help Turkish justice" while remaining
>outside the country and "waiting for Turkey to become a
>full-fledged democracy."
>    "If there was even one Turkish official [whom I could rely on], if
>he could send me his phone number, I would gladly shut down my
>Web site and call him," Eymur stated recently on the site,
>http://www.atin.org, which has had nearly 1 million visitors since its
>March 8 launch.
> Among other incriminating evidence, the site carries transcripts
>of the alleged confessions of a Kurdish rebel-turned-informer
>named Mahmut Yildrim, who has been linked to the slayings of
>several prominent Kurdish intellectuals and drug dealers. Yildrim,
>whose intelligence agency code name was "Green," was promptly
>freed after telling police interrogators of his connections with top
>Turkish officials, the site alleges.
>In its battle against the separatists, the Turkish state is widely
>accused of having enlisted many such characters, who, under
>state protection, killed Kurdish drug dealers and muscled in on
>their trade. Eymur has claimed that "Green," whose whereabouts
>remain a mystery, shared drug profits with "various police chiefs
>and [members of] the gendarmerie. This is not a secret."
>   Turkish officials have consistently blamed the drug trade on
>rebels of the outlawed separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, whose
>leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was captured, tried for treason and
>sentenced to death last year as the insurgency collapsed.
>But intriguing evidence of ties between government officials and
>Turkish criminals, including drug dealers, emerged in November
>1996 after a car crash in the small town of Susurluk. A police chief
>and a convicted heroin smuggler were among the dead. Sedat
>Bucak, a Kurdish lawmaker, survived the crash and claimed to
>have lost his memory.
>A parliamentary investigation into why this unlikely trio was
>traveling in the same car came to nothing, and critics of the
>government suspect a cover-up. Bucak has been reelected to
>parliament.
>  "Unfortunately," Eymur said, "in Turkey, one scandal ends only
>to be followed by another."
>
>--
>Press Agency Ozgurluk
>In Support of the Peoples Liberation Struggle in Turkey and Kurdistan
>http://www.ozgurluk.org
>
>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

More on Mehmet Eymur (Former Turkish Spy Chief MIT)


http://rastibini.blogspot.com/2007/01/jitem-and-hrant-dink.html

Yet more, from TNA: [story in the link is now gone]


    Hanefi Avci, who was then the police intelligence department acting head and now is Edirne police chief, best described the Susurluk connections. In his testimony at the parliamentary commission probing the Susurluk scandal, he claimed that there was an "illegal" organization established within the state to fight terrorism. He also said this organization then became a gang, which was established within the MIT, the police and Gendarmerie Intelligence (JITEM). Mehmet Agar, Korkut Eken, Ibrahim Sahin from the police, Mehmet Eymur, Duran Firat and Kasif Binbasi from the MIT and Lt. Col. Veli Kucuk from JITEM were in this organization and involved in numerous illegal actions under the leadership of Ahmet Cem Ersever, who was later killed by Kemal Uzuner (a.k.a Cubuklu), a driver working at JITEM, said Avci.



[Note: Mehmet Eymur is the bastard who was in charge of MIT's "counter-terrorism" department. He's been in "exile" in the US for some time, apparently after having some kind of trouble with the really big bastards behind the Deep State. Word on the street now is that he's been given some kind of reprieve, and that he's assisting Mehmet Agar in his campaign. Why is the United States protecting mass murderers like Mehmet Eymur? Inquiring minds want to know.]

----------------

The blogger who wrote the above just updated his blog for the first time since April of 27th about the Sibel Edmonds story. It can be found here:
http://rastibini.blogspot.com/2008/01/man-who-gave-pakistan-bomb.html

[Dig]

More info on the history of Sibel's whistleblowing here: http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=6231.0

[Dig]

Sibel Edmonds Requests Attorney General to Review Invocation of State Secrets Privilege
http://www.hairenik.com/weekly/2009/08/05/sibel-edmonds-requests-attorney-general-to-review-invocation-of-state-secrets-privilege/
By Weekly Staff • on August 5, 2009

Edmonds to Testify In Ohio Case Unless Attorney General Re-Invokes Privilege

WASHINGTON—The attorneys for FBI whistleblower Sibel D. Edmonds have requested that Attorney General Holder review the state secrets privilege invoked in her case and reverse the decision made under former President Bush.

Edmonds was illegally fired from the FBI due to her protected disclosures. An independent investigation by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General confirmed the serious misconduct committed by the FBI and the illegality of her termination.

On or about Oct. 18, 2002, the previous administration invoked the state secrets privilege in order to have Edmonds’s whistleblower/First Amendment claims dismissed, and to protect the government from embarrassment.

Edmonds has now been requested to provide sworn deposition and affidavit testimony in a case pending before the Ohio Elections Commission in the Schmidt v. Krikorian case. This case raises nationally significant issues of electoral fraud and violation of law. The state secrets privilege has stifled Edmonds for the past seven years, and this deposition will be the first time that she will put her knowledge on the record.

Given the pendency of this case and the request for her testimony, the National Whistleblowers Legal Defense and Education Fund requested that Attorney General Holder immediately and independently review the basis upon which that privilege was initially invoked, and formally and in writing withdraw that privilege.

At the time of this release, two separate deadlines for the Department of Justice to respond to the attorney’s letter had passed, and consequently the deposition has been scheduled for Sat., Aug. 8. Although a request was hand delivered to the Department of Justice, the attorney general’s office informed counsel that they were having difficulty locating it.

According to Stephen M. Kohn, the executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center and one of Edmonds’s attorneys, “The Obama Administration must take a fresh look at how the state secrets privilege was improperly used to hide government misconduct from the public view. The Edmonds case was the first case the ‘privilege’ was invoked, and it must be the first case the ‘privilege’ is revoked. The government’s misguided attempt to cover up wrongdoing by abusing the state secrets privilege to bully a whistleblower must end. Edmonds has been requested to provide testimony in court. She will do so unless the government again invokes the privilege to quash her First Amendment rights.”

Edmonds’s deposition is scheduled for 10:30 am on Aug. 8, at the National Whistleblowers Center, 3238 P. St. NW, Washington, D.C. The event is open to the press.

[Dig]

In Gag We Trust? An Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds
http://www.hairenik.com/weekly/2009/08/05/in-gag-we-trust-an-interview-with-fbi-whistleblower-sibel-edmonds/
By Khatchig Mouradian • on August 5, 2009

Below is an interview with Sibel Edmonds that appeared in the May 12 and May 19, 2007 issues of the Armenian Weekly. We repost it here for its relevance today, especially after recent reports that Edmonds has requested Attorney General Holder to review the invocation of the state secrets privilege. If the invocation is reviewed, Edmonds plans to testify in the Schmidt v. Krikorian case in Ohio.

FBI language specialist Sibel Edmonds was fired from her job with the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March 2002. Her crime was reporting security breaches, cover-ups, blocking of intelligence, and the bribery of U.S. individuals including high-ranking officials. The State Secret Privilege has often been invoked to block court proceedings on her case, and the U.S. Congress has even been gagged to prevent further discussion.

Edmonds uncovered, for example, a covert relationship between Turkish groups and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who reportedly received tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in return for withdrawing the Armenian Genocide Resolution from the House floor in 2000.

Born in Iran in 1970, Edmonds received her BA in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University and her MA in public policy and international commerce from George Mason University. She is the founder and director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) and in 2006, received the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. She speaks Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.

This interview was conducted in Washington on April 23. To follow the development of her case, visit www.justacitizen.com.

Khatchig Mouradian—It’s been more than five years since you first contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee to reveal the story on Turkish bribery of high-level U.S. officials. Can you tell us about how this has evolved since then, and where it stands now?

Sibel Edmonds—Sure. It’s been slightly over five years since I went to the Senate Judiciary Committee and briefed both Senator Charles Grassley’s (R-Iowa) staff and Senator Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) staff in a classified fashion, giving them the specific document numbers, document names, names of specific targets and detailing the issues related to my case. And as you might remember, a few months after I briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee, both Senators started speaking out pretty loudly in the media. We had the CBS 60 Minutes segment when Senator Grassley showed up and said this is outrageous. Even people within the FBI have confirmed all the stories and said we need to turn the FBI upside down on this issue. Senator Leahy was making similar statements and both Senators were trying to put together a hearing on this case. I was later told that the Chairman at the time prevented a hearing and some people—including good FBI agents who would be telling the truth under oath—from testifying and shedding light on the issue.

Two years later, we had the unclassified version of that report issued by the Inspector General’s Office. This is the Department of Justice’s own Inspector General’s Office. After two years of investigating, the report confirmed my own reports. It found that although these allegations were supported by documents and other witnesses, the FBI refused to conduct a follow-up or an investigation—a real investigation—on this case. So you have this case which for the past five years has been confirmed by Congressional sources, and people familiar with my case, and the Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s Office, and has never been contradicted or denied by the Justice Department or the FBI, and still nothing has been done.

There has been no hearing and nobody has been held accountable. We are basically where we started and I find that really appalling. It is a very sad situation and not only for me or my case. Many people think this is about one whistleblower, one language specialist who worked for the FBI and was wrongfully terminated. But I wouldn’t have been terminated if I hadn’t brought forth issues that were important to the American public, and even to people outside the United States. This case sheds light on several important areas, including our foreign policy, which is hypocrisy-ridden. We’re not talking only about foreign individuals; we’re talking about our own, about U.S. officials who have engaged in actions that are against the American public’s best interests and what we stand for. But the American people still don’t know about this case, and Congress has done nothing despite the fact that they have been fully briefed and have gotten full confirmation.

K.M.—This makes one wonder, who is actually working for the people and who is working for his own personal and private gains?

S.E.—This is important, the issue of self-interest versus the interests of the American public, especially when you’re talking about public servants. These are the people who have been given access to our national security-related issues and top-secret documents. And I emphasize that this is not about one party, this is not an issue of right wing versus left wing, this is not an issue of one administration against another. Because when you really go deep into these cases, you find that these people—these U.S. entities, U.S. officials—have been misusing and abusing their positions for a while. And we have been looking the other way. And the mainstream media has been looking the other way. These are not top-secret issues. All you have to do is take a look at these people.
For example, look at Mr. Marc Grossman. He used to be the U.S. ambassador in Turkey and used his position within the State Department to secure future higher-level positions while in office—and I would like to emphasize this—while in office and with several agencies knowing about it. Some people in these agencies wanted to investigate these cases but they were prevented from going forward.

In my case, with this one example that I gave you, I was told by my bosses—and these are the “good people” bosses, these are the agents that I work with—that the Pentagon and the State Department were pressuring the Justice Department to silence the case. And just take a look at where Mr. Grossman is today. Within a few months after he gave his resignation, he obtained a position with a semi-legitimate Turkish company that is supplying him with a very attractive monetary reward.

And then you can start going around and looking at similar cases, such as Mr. Douglas Feith and Mr. Richard Perle. They were registered as foreign agents for Turkey between 1988 and 1995. These were very lucrative positions, and they were not representing the American government at that point. So once they resumed their high-level positions within the U.S. government in 2000, do you think anything changed in terms of which interests they represented?

And unfortunately you also see this from the Congressional side. You saw it in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with Congressman Solaris, and again we saw it with Congressman—and later Chairman—Livingston and the position he obtained as a representative of a foreign interest. And we may see it shortly with current Congressmen, such as former chairman Hastert. And it is for the American public, for our mainstream media to really look hard at these issues. This is an example of one country [Turkey] we are talking about right now, one case. How many others are there? And why are they looking the other way? Do our people know, are they aware, that they are trusting and giving the authority to people who are not representing them?

K.M.—You are just one person and you’re a translator working on issues that have to do mainly with Turkey. You had some 200 colleagues. So one wonders how many stories like this there are. This one story, your story, by itself, is enough to show how corrupt the system is.

S.E.—My case has been known to a certain degree because of the activities that I have been engaging in, in terms of going to courts, going to Congress, etc. There are similar cases we are not hearing about. For example, the Larry Franklin case, with the espionage case that they pursued with AIPAC. And what the American public doesn’t know is the fact that there were other counter-intelligence operations within the FBI that obtained far more information not only limited to Mr. Franklin. Other operations were shut down in 2000 and 2001 because they ended up going to higher levels and involving way too many people. I’m talking about individuals who are breaking the law, misusing the trust and abusing their power, and in some cases I would even say engaging in treason.

Again it’s very easy to see what happened with my case. What kind of example is my case presenting to those other people who may want to do the right thing and come forward? They would say it doesn’t make a difference at the end, because I pursued every channel possible. I went as high as I could go with the courts, including the Supreme Court, and as you know, they issued a gag order on me several times and invoked the State Secrets Privilege. They say that everything about my case—including where I was born, including the languages I speak, everything—is classified. I’m prevented from discussing whether or not I’m right. And I went all the way to Congress, I did the right thing. I was not what they call a “leaker” who goes straight to the media and starts divulging classified documents. I went to the appropriate committees, the Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee, too, by the way, and the House and Senate… I went through the other legitimate channels—the courts, the Inspector General’s Office, which is the executive branch. I tried the media. So I don’t blame those people that get pessimistic and say it doesn’t make a difference, or think they’ll lose their job or possibly go to jail. Many of these people are the breadwinners for their families. They’re conscientious people, but they have put 15-20 years into their careers and think, “Oh, I’m 5 years away from my retirement and I don’t want to damage that.” So you have many reasons why more people aren’t coming forward.

They make an example out of you. Because if one case, let’s say my case, would really bring justice and accountability, you would see so many people doing the same thing. And how many times—let’s just look at the past decade—have you seen a legitimate whistleblower from any of these agencies come forward and prevail? I don’t think you can name one case.

You’re also looking at all the other channels being culprits, sometimes without even intending. For example, there is a lot of blame to be placed on our mainstream media today. Willingly or not, they have become accomplices by not reporting what they should be reporting, and not investigating what they should be investigating. They have abdicated their responsibilities. And where do we look at when we talk about issues such as accountability investigations? We look at Congress. And they have been a major reason we are not seeing more people coming forward from the FBI, agents that I worked with—solid, patriotic, good Americans, dedicated people. They were as outraged as I was when I was going through these cases and reporting them internally. If one of these committees, be it the Judiciary Committee or the Government Affairs Committee in the House, would set a hearing and call these individuals to testify, these agents would tell the truth under oath.

K.M.—So in your opinion, what is the definition of an agent today in the U.S.? What is his job? An important portion of his work is what we are talking about, things that are actually not being dealt with and that are being covered up. So it seems that agents are “good agents” as long as they’re dealing with the enemy. But this enemy is decided by people who are often corrupt and even committing treason…

S.E.—I can’t speak for other agents but I can speak for the FBI, and within the FBI you have different types of operations. For example, if they are looking at criminal cases, it is the agent’s job to collect evidence with court warrants, etc., to go after the criminals and bring them to justice. To a certain degree, the same concept holds true for counter-terrorism operations, the one division within the FBI that I consider the most important, but unfortunately the worst run. You have agents and translators and analysts overseeing the activities—sometimes criminal or espionage-related—of foreign entities in our country. Now, if they come across criminal activities and U.S. persons engaged in these what they should be doing and what they are able to do is to take it, report it, go to the Justice Department, go to the courts and start parallel investigations, no longer under counter-intelligence but through criminal or espionage cases. Now, by accident, this happened with this AIPAC case. It started in the Washington Field Office where I worked long before I started working with the FBI, and with the translators and the analysts and agents I spoke with, that operation started as counter-intelligence. The targets were not even U.S. individuals. They were, let’s say hypothetically speaking, AIPAC and Israeli Embassy entities. It is after they came across these explosive activities and after a certain agent in charge decided to really tackle this—and this was before 2000—that they opened a parallel investigation. This is when we later heard about Feith’s office and Larry Franklin.

Now the same thing was about to take place with Turkish counter-intelligence in the main portion of the documented—wiretapped or paper—operations that I translated verbatim not only for the Washington Field Office but also for the Chicago and New Jersey offices. They were obtained before 2001. If we were to put a date on it you’re looking at end of 1996 to 2001. Now, in 1998 and 1999, there were so many pieces of evidence of U.S. individuals’ involvement. We’re talking about people with official positions, whether they were in the State Department or the Pentagon or the U.S. Congress. The agents did the right thing again by starting a parallel investigation that targeted individuals who were possibly committing acts of treason.

However, as I was told by first-source agents I was working with, this was put on hold in 1999 because President Clinton was then going through the Lewinsky scandal. After the current administration came into power and after I was working there, the agents were told to shut down. The people who made that decision were not the Justice Department or the FBI, and that’s what I try to emphasize all the time—they were pressured, they were forced by higher-up forces within the Pentagon and the State Department. And what was their reasoning behind the scenes? I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but they gave similar explanations and justifications with the courts: “You’re talking about very sensitive diplomatic relations.” And in fact, then-Attorney General Ashcroft said this in his declaration when he invoked the State Secrets Privilege in my case. He said that exposing these issues in courts, whether or not I’m right, would damage certain sensitive diplomatic relations and would hurt certain U.S. foreign business relations. In this case we know one of the countries is Turkey. So you have a U.S. citizen here who has been deprived of her First Amendment rights. Gagged. I mean, is that an American concept, gagging a person? You’re not talking about an enemy combatant, you’re not talking about a terrorist suspect. You’re looking at a tax-payer, a law-abiding American citizen. So these business relations, these diplomatic relations have justified depriving a U.S. citizen of her First Amendment rights, of her Fourth Amendment rights in court. In fact, the U.S. State Department did a retroactive classification illegally and Congress was effectively gagged in May 2004. They’re not even saying what diplomatic relations they refer to. Are they ashamed of it? Are we talking about billions of dollars of weapons procurement? Why don’t they be more specific? Because this is top-secret, classified stuff. That’s why I have been writing these papers, relying on outside sources, getting all the data. You’re looking at $5 billion every two years of weapons procurements? That’s not top-secret. Who benefits from this? What companies? Who are the individuals who are benefiting from this? And is there anything in the issues that I dealt with that if exposed would harm the Americans and their security? None. None whatsoever.

In fact, they are issues and they are cases that would help with their national security because the same activities also involve money laundering or certain narcotic activities. All you have to do is look at the State Department’s own reports on Turkey and opium. Ninety-two percent of the heroin supplied in Europe is coming through Turkey, and it’s being marketed and distributed by Turkish individuals. This is not classified. This is within the State Department’s own report. The poppies are being produced in Afghanistan and Taliban-esque people are getting benefits, and Al-Qaeda people are getting the benefits of these poppies being sold to individuals in Turkey who then distribute and provide 92 percent of Europe’s heroin market. Have we said “clamp down on these narcotic activities because it’s helping the terrorists, and the terrorists are threats to our national security?” No, we haven’t.

Time Magazine ran a piece about 11 pages long on how the Afghanistan opium production has increased. They also put the value on that opium production. And there were statements from various Congressmen including Walter Jones who went to Afghanistan saying a lot of it goes to support Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The number was somewhere between $38 billion to $50 billion a year. This same article limited the issue of poppy production to some farmers. And you’re looking at these Afghans in shalvars cultivating the poppies there, and you think, these people aren’t capable of managing a $50 billion industry. They only get a small share. Processing the poppies into heroin and then transporting them through the Balkan route is done by Turkish individuals. And you’re not looking at street thugs in Turkey, you’re looking at the Turkish military and the Turkish police. In 2000, a professor in Turkey issued a documented report saying that a quarter of Turkey’s economy relies on heroin production and distribution. Of course, he had to escape the country, go to Germany and ask for political asylum because he committed treason by criticizing the Turkish government.

The Time Magazine article didn’t talk about the main actors, the big people, the powerful ones who are distributing, processing, marketing and laundering the proceeds. Those people are not touched. If you look at the report you’ll see the countries involved—Turkey, Cyprus, the UAE. But they were conveniently left out of the Time Magazine article, leaving any American to conclude that the farmers are making $50 billion a year. Again, the culprit is Time Magazine because that is not the case.

While the report shows Turkish, UAE and Pakistani involvement, we say they are our allies, we don’t want to touch them, we don’t want to turn them off. In fact, we have lots of good business and sensitive diplomatic relations with them, as Don Ashcroft put it. Now if one of them were part of the axis of evil, if one of them was Syria, if one of them was Iran, if one of them was Korea, if it was Saddam, you would see the stink they would raise—how Saddam’s country and people are helping the Taliban with their finances and helping Al-Qaeda with these cases. But there was this big oops! They’re our very close allies, the ones who we are giving billions of dollars of aid to, the ones who come back and buy our weapons. We can’t mess around with things like that. We have too many powerful people, too many powerful companies that are benefiting from this. There is this huge lobby industry that is benefiting from this.

Who is representing the American people? Well we know former chairman Mr. Livingston today is representing these outside interests, therefore our Congress is representing these foreign powers. But who is really representing the American public? And how? It’s very hard to see the track record. And these are the issues that you wish the mainstream media here in this country would cover, and they’re not.

K.M.—Let us talk about you: your frustrations, your feelings. How do you deal with all of this?

S.E.—I can’t say it’s been easy, the anger and disappointment over knowing that my country, my government, has let me down, that the mainstream media has let all of us down. With many whistleblowers, the pressure reaches a point where they either have nervous breakdowns or they explode. And many of them do explode or they get disgusted and go away. After one or two years of fighting, they say the heck with it, I’m just going to leave.

If you explode, you have given them the perfect excuse to point at you and say, look this person is crazy, she’s not legitimate. If you go and expose some documents, they have an excuse to say you have breached security and should be jailed—and again, they benefit. They get away with this because nobody has been willing to come forward, and right now, it’s only me. If there had been one or two other agents who had committed to that much compromise and sacrifice and come forward, maybe we would have seen some progress. But the fear factor is so great out there.

I’ve lived in this country for 18 years and am an American citizen. Maybe a lot of people born here take their citizenship for granted, but for me it was a conscious choice. At that point I was a student of this country’s history and its laws, and I was mesmerized. As part of that oath you make a commitment to stand up for this country’s constitution and rights and people, whether the enemies threatening it are foreign or domestic. And I did take it seriously and I do take it seriously, and I also look at the alternative—the alternative being count your losses and go away; it’s just going to get worse.

Again, many Americans think this is about one whistleblower who lost her job, that this is one case, and they don’t see themselves affected by it. With September 11, they saw themselves directly affected—”I can be next.” Well, I’m trying to tell them that with the money laundering, the narcotics, their own representatives going against their own interests, they’re all being affected by the cover-ups.

It’s been five years, and I never thought it would continue for this long. I went to the Judiciary Committee in March 2002, and I thought that was it. I thought that all I had to do was give them the documents, give them the facts, the names, and everything would be taken care of. It was not. When I went to the Inspector General’s Office, I thought that was it. When I went to the courts, I thought this was it, it was done. I never thought I would be sitting here, five years later, saying that everything was shut down successfully, and no accountability and no justice whatsoever had taken place.

I set up this organization [www.justacitizen.com] to encourage other whistleblowers, those good agents out there who dealt with Turkish counter-intelligence operations in the FBI. And that’s not the only agency. There are other agencies in this nation, within our government, with good conscientious people who should be saying enough is enough, it’s time to stand up.

K.M.—What can be done? What can the ordinary citizen do?

S.E.—It boils down to the people standing up and demanding their rights, the right actions. I don’t want to get my job back with the FBI. That’s not what I’m after. I’m not asking to be compensated in any way for my suffering.

I can never go back to Turkey and visit my family. I have been blacklisted because I have committed, as any good journalist in Turkey would automatically commit: the act of treason. Under their laws, anyone who criticizes Turkey, or shows it under some negative light or hurts certain official thugs there, is treasonous and should be arrested and taken to military tribunals. All you have to do is read the Human Rights Watch reports and see what happens to good reporters in Turkey. If they’re lucky, by the way, they will end up in a military tribunal, if not, they will end up dead or disappear. If you look at the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared in the past 10 years in Turkey for political reasons, the number is astonishing for a country that is considered a democracy and a great ally. You have tens of thousands of good activist students who have just disappeared into thin air and nobody knows where they are. It happened once upon a time in Argentina and Chile, but I don’t know how easy it is to say that things like that happen in a great democracy and an ally country.

But I’m not asking to be compensated, I’m not asking to get my position back. All I have been asking is for justice to take place, for the American people to know what’s going on, and for those people who are working against their interests to be held accountable.

Some respected, great Representatives, Democratic Congressmen, have expressed interest in my case. The leader of that group was Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and I briefed his staff several times, by giving them the same details I gave five years ago to the Judiciary Committee. They obtained the classified version of the Inspector General’s report two years ago and they were outraged. I have several letters from Congressman Waxman saying he finds these gag orders stunning and that the Republicans were preventing a hearing from taking place on my case. Well, in January, after we went through the change [in Congress], Congressman Waxman is now Chairman Waxman and there is no power within Congress that can prevent him from holding this hearing. He has the jurisdiction, the authority to put the hearing there, and I have already obtained the consent and names of conscientious, good agents. One of them was the head of the Turkish counter-intelligence operations who actually retired two years ago. They’re all willing to come forward and testify on all the issues I have been gagged on. And that gag doesn’t work in Congress during a hearing.

So in January, after the election results, especially since we have such a great Chairman today, 30 organizations have put together this petition addressed to Chairman Waxman saying you have been promising us for the past five years. These are major organizations, and we call them transpartisan, because there are organizations from the right, organizations from the left, organizations that are whistleblower-related such as the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the Government Accountability Project (GAP), the National Whistleblower Center, human rights organizations, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), civil liberties-related organizations such as the American Civil Liberties union (ACLU). We have 30 solid organizations. According to the ACLU, there has been no case of an American citizen who has had so many gag orders issued on her.

We also had 15,000 citizens sign the petition, and they delivered it to Chairman Waxman’s office in March 2007, just over a month ago. And based on the office’s own report, tens of thousands of people in the past 3-4 weeks have called to say, well, when are you going to hold a hearing?

But we have received no response and we don’t know why. None of these organizations know why because they have all the facts, they have all the confirmation, they have the IG report, they have the executive branch’s own report saying she’s credible and her allegations have been supported by other witnesses and documents. We are not talking about allegations. We are talking about facts, documented and witnessed facts.

And I still believe that the Americans who care about their rights can make this happen. Maybe it hasn’t happened because one of the factors that is not present there is the mainstream media. We know the mainstream media has such influence over the Congress. Maybe Congress is not finding it worthy of their attention despite all these severe consequences because the media isn’t there.

The citizens can change this, the constituents of Chairman Henry Waxman in California, in the LA area, can change that. They can say, you represent us, you represent our interests, and you are the chairman of the Government Reform Committee. So after not hearing back from Chairman Waxman through this petition and 30 organizations, I’m trying to reach out to those constituents in California, I’m trying to reach out to all citizens in this country and say, forget about me, this is not about Sibel Edmonds. Let’s go to the core issues: What was it that I reported that caused all these gag orders and firings and threats? What was it? What I reported had nothing to do with me. It had to do with the interests of the American public being stomped upon. It had to do with elected officials abusing their authority to obtain lucrative early retirement positions afterwards as representatives of foreign interests. And this is very important. In order to obtain it afterwards they had to serve those foreign interests while they were working and had those positions. In every single one of them that’s how it happens. You start serving the interests of outside influences before you obtain your positions afterwards and say bye to your civil service career. And that is, especially in some cases, criminal. That is not something that should be tolerated by this country, and we need to set an example of those people.

We have the facts, we have the documents, we have the witnesses, and it’s time to do it. So stand up and call Chairman Waxman’s office, keep calling until you get an answer on when the hearing will take place. For each citizen it may cost four minutes. But the benefit to this country, and the number of issues that we are going to shed light on, is worth it. And if it was not, they would not have gone this far to gag it. I have been fighting very hard, but they have been fighting very hard, too.

This is unprecedented. If I am the most gagged woman in the history of this country, and if they have gone as far as invoking the States Secrets Privilege, the issue is important enough. So for anyone who may say, well, how do I know this case is credible? I’ll tell you that there is a report, there are statements from bipartisan senators, Senator Grassley, Senator Leahy, Congressman Waxman. And these are all on the record establishing the credibility of the case.

Call Chairman Waxman and write to him and do not stop until we have this hearing in place, and we have the agents testifying. I’m going to emphasize two things here: a) that they testify on oath, and b) that the hearings be public. I have had some hearings, and they have been behind closed doors in the Congress. I have briefed them. They already have this information. It’s the American public’s turn to hear about this.

It’s possible that in light of the Chairman’s decision to hold a hearing, the government comes in and says it has to be in close session and not in public because these are classified issues. But they’re not. If that happens, we won’t get anywhere because then it’s futile. I would not even be willing to testify because I have already done so. Five years ago I gave them testimony behind closed doors. So did other witnesses. It’s time to have open, public hearings and have people under oath. I will testify under oath, and the consequences of lying are severe.

So let’s make this happen, and let’s say that when all channels we rely upon—be it the courts and the Congress and the executive branch and the mainstream media—fail us, we still should move forward and not stop, and reach out to the American public, and make it happen. I hope we can do it, because not being able to do it sends a very bad, awful message to our children and our grandchildren, to say that active citizenry is dead in this country.

[portuguese anarchist]

Let's hope it goes international again.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60651-2004Apr8.html

[Mike Philbin]

wow, you'd imagine (for this story of the millennium) MAIN STREAM MEDIA would be falling over themselves on the doorsteps of certain Members of Congress this morning.

did it happen?

[portuguese anarchist]

Of course not. It's just another proof of how controlled the US media is.

As I said, pay attention to the international press. You might have some pleasant surprises.

The NWO control of the press is not as big outside of the US.

The "Kill the Messenger" documentary, for example, was made by a European TV channel,

http://www.justacitizen.com/KillTheMessenger.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal%2B

and is available in English and French - the two most international languages there are.

[chris jones]

Incredible. Bless her heart.

One thing she said that will stick with me is that this will set her free. well my blessed friend, you are free and you spirit is soaring high over the fedded grounds of our criminal, sociaopathic Pls and their allies.

The truth, the true vaccine, the path to justice and freedom.

I am blown away, be safe, be protected, and expect a torrade of BS thrown at you, it is their method of defense, among others.

Not simply this nation needs you, humanity does.

[Scootle]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSvlwg3F6q0

[Mike Philbin]

come on, guys, I know it's Sunday but

where's the footage from the actual deposition?

I thought 'someone' was actually gonna film it?

Mike The Impatient.



Additionally, the WASHINGTON POST has a section on Turkey - that includes a link to CIA World Factbook
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/worldref/country/turkey.htm

I didn't even know there was ANY connection between Turkey and USA. I'm so out of the loop over here in UK - we got nothing in the way of real news.

[Irobot]

Noticeably absent any reference to Israel , and dare I say any new 911 info at all.

[Mike Philbin]

maybe she wasn't allowed to say anything about Israel - she is still under gag order, right?

or maybe this part of her deposition doesn't YET deal with Israel

[Mike Philbin]

actually, what am I saying, this whole hearing was ONLY about the Turkish lobby?

right?

there would be no National Security questions about 9/11 or Israel or Bush at such an inquiry?  she was subpoenaed for a specific case ONLY, right?

[ramallamamama]

RELEASE THE FRIGGIN VIDEO ALREADY!

[grayarea]

Well at least 1 journalist was brave enough to bring it up. Story below:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kreig/gagged-former-fbi-transla_b_254788.html
Sept. 11 Allegations Lost in Translation

By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, April 8, 2004; 9:51 AM

The sensational story of Sibel Edmonds illuminates the world of difference between the international online media and the U.S. press.

Edmonds is a 33-year-old former FBI translator whose February allegations to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks directly challenge the credibility of the commission's star witness, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. In an April 2 interview with the http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=507514 Independent of London, Edmonds said she read intelligence reports from the summer of 2001 that al Qaeda operatives planned to fly hijacked airplanes into U.S. skyscrapers.

"There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks," she said. She added that specific cities with skyscrapers were mentioned.

Edmonds said that she had provided the commission's staff with "specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."

Edmonds took issue with Rice's assertion in a March 22 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13881-2004Mar21.html Washington Post Op-Ed piece that the United States had no intelligence warning of al Qaeda's tactics. "That is impossible," she said.

As Rice's appearance before the commission grew into a huge news story, Edmonds's account went global. The Independent's story received respectful, extensive treatment from news sites on every continent, ranging from http://www.cronica.com.mx/nota.php?idc=117944 Cronica de Hoy (in Spanish) in Mexico City to Munich's http://www.sueddeutsche.de/ausland/artikel/632/29603/ Sueddeutsche Zeitung (in German) to the http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2004/April/theworld_April31.xmlsection=theworld Khaleej Times in the Persian Gulf to the http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3558620thesection=newsthesubsection=world New Zealand Herald in the South Pacific.

Edmonds's story has been almost uniformly ignored in the U.S. daily press. Her allegations have been detailed in the online magazine http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/03/26/translator/ Salon and several liberal sites are playing them up. The Independent's story was mentioned briefly on Monday in Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing blog on http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51323-2004Apr5.html washingtonpost.com. Tim Russert briefly quizzed the Republican and Democratic heads of the 9/11 commission about Edmonds during Sunday's "Meet the Press" program on NBC. Former Clinton White House aide Paul Begala mentioned it last week on CNN's "Crossfire." But the only U.S. newspaper to give Edmonds any extended coverage was the http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040402-064359-3845r.htm Washington Times. In January, a page-one New York Observer article on Edmonds's complaints about lax security in the FBI's translation office did not include the allegations that first appeared in the Independent.

Clearly, what we have here are two different standards of journalism: one American, one nearly global. The question is where does this difference come from?

One possible explanation is that the heart of Edmonds's story remains unconfirmed. Edmonds did work as a translator for the FBI for six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, but she was fired from her post for unspecified reasons. The documents that she says will corroborate her story have not yet surfaced and may not exist.

Perhaps U.S. news organizations are prudently laying off a story that may not be true while foreign editors are less scrupulous. As my roundup on foreign coverage of Matt Drudge's unconfirmed story about http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47805-2004Feb17.html" >John Kerry's alleged affair showed, news sites in England, Australia and Africa are more likely to run an unconfirmed story than their U.S. counterparts.

Foreign news organizations cite several qualities that make Edmonds seem a credible witness. She won good reviews for her work at the FBI. She told her story to the Sept. 11 commission staff. When she took her complaint about lax FBI security to Congress, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, a conservative Republican, called her "very credible."

Edmonds's story is newsworthy for three reasons, according to the overseas sites.

Edmonds's accusation "starkly contradicts claims by senior Bush Administration figures that they had no prior warning of the attacks in 2001 on New York and Washington," said the http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2729669 Scotsman, a generally conservative paper in Scotland whose editors favored the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Edmonds's charges dovetail with another pre-Sept. 11 revelation, reporter Shaheen Chughtai noted Tuesday on http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FD0E43E1-30D9-41FB-94BD-02DD3DED4D7D.htm Aljazeera.net, the Web site of the Arab cable news channel.

Chughtai cited a Sept. 2002 NBC News report that on Aug. 6, 2001, President Bush "received a one-and-a-half page briefing advising him that Osama bin Laden was capable of a major strike against the US, and that the plot could include the hijacking of an American airplane."

And finally, Edmonds's allegations go to the very heart of the Sept. 11 probe, according to Mushadid Hussain, a leading Pakistani political commentator. Writing in the http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en60180F_catID=17f_type=sourceday=1 Nation, the leading paper of Pakistan, he asked if Sept. 11 was "an intelligence fiasco" or the result of "a more fundamental flaw that had its origin in a policy, which simply refused to take threats from non-state actors like Al-Qaeda seriously?"

Will Condoleezza Rice address Edmonds's allegations when she takes the stand? If she does, people around the world may be more likely than Americans to know her name.



Amazing the level of concern this has been given in the MSM.

[Mike Philbin]

latest from Brad Blog (who've just uploaded the 'outside Deposition' footage)

The video of the deposition itself is still forthcoming. Monday earliest, so we're told, but no way of knowing anything for sure until it's actually made available. There's some 5 or 6 hours of tape, as we understand it. We hope the text transcript of the entire deposition will also be made available to the public soon as well. Edmonds has stated that she too shares both of those hopes. Until then, however, please do review our coverage from yesterday, for the complete, stunning details of what went on yesterday.

Look, if there are no MAINSTREAM MEDIA STORIES on this subject come Monday, then mankind (all six billion humans) are under a f**ked tyranny and nothing will save us. Nite nite and see you all in the week.

[ramallamamama]

I just linked the story on facebook.

Methinks it's the biggest one of the year.

[Mike Philbin]

man, I hope the Guardian here in UK enjoy the full report of this momentous event I just sent to their various news@ and politics@ email addresses - we gotta strike while the iron's hot.

http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com/2009/08/sibel-edmonds-subpoenad-to-give.html

[Dig]

August 08, 2009
http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/08/sibel-edmonds-and-the-sex-scandal-testimony.html
Sibel Edmonds and the sex scandal testimony...

We already know about Sibel Edmonds' rogue gallery of alleged bribe takers. But here is something you folks may have not known:

"From my opinion, if I'm some of the current members of Congress, I'd be very very worried about the information that's going to come out of this. There are current members of Congress that she has implicated in bribery, espionage. It's not good. It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy. For people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence.

[Which current members have been implicated?]

[Dan] Burton (R-IN), described as basically accepting bribes and involved in espionage for the Turkish government...she could not discuss the extremely illegal activities that Mr. Burton committed against U.S. interests, as she put it.

Also, a current female Democratic [ed note: I misheard, he later said he didn't know if she was Dem or Rep] member of Congress who has been blackmailed by the Turkish Government...called a 'hooking exercise'...she's apparently bi-sexual and they bugged her apartment, she's married with children, and they set up a relationship with another female who went in and had sexual relationships with her. And they had all the episodes bugged within this current Representatives home and they blackmailed her. ... She wouldn't give her name, but her photograph [is the one with the question mark on it in the "Sibel Edmonds Rogue Gallery" ] .

I know who the alleged Rep is and so do others.  It is not Rep. Jane Harman as some have speculated. I am, however, not going destroy the family and life of a public figure over evidence that I don't have and cannot obtain. Not to mention that I do not muckrake sex scandals in any case.

The allegations are fairly damning. I have long thought that Edmonds should publicly name the member of Congress as it is Edmonds who has a first hand account of the alleged "hooker exercise." Remember, if this person is being blackmailed - as is the allegation - then they are compromised and cannot do their job. They should not be in office. Since this woman has not left public office on her own and since she is allegedly compromised, she should be named so she can either deny or confirm the allegations. I think Edmonds' should go ahead and tell what she knows about this particular chapter of the Turkish scandal. 

I can tell you that the person is a Democrat.

Again, I don't have the evidence and therefor, I will not simply put out a name based on the testimony of someone else (single source), unless that testimony is to be made public or Edmonds wishes to put her name to the allegation. But Edmonds is being deposed under oath, so the Reps name is going to be part of a court record and that means it is only a matter of time before all of this will finally come out.

If the member of Congress in question is reading this, my suggestion is that you contact me and tell me your side of the story, because when this breaks - and it will - you won't have that chance again

[JBS]

Hey Sane, thanks for the Info. If you ever make a book, I'll buy it.

[Dig]

Hey Sane, thanks for the Info. If you ever make a book, I'll buy it.

thanks, but i have very little original thoughts (if you notice). I just regurgitate other people's awesome work.

[Mike Philbin]

and still nothing - nothing from UK Guardian since 2006 (one article about a Times London article) and 2004 (several articles mainly dealing with Condy Rice)

nothing from the USA online media outlets...  what about the morning papers/morning TV? anything happening over there in USA? Is the world totally asleep/ in denial?

[jofortruth]

Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Finally Testifies Under Oath - August 8, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSvlwg3F6q0

Is this the Turkish-American group (aka Armenian Caucus) they speak of? These guys most certainly vote in lockstep in Congress? Do they simply do as Pelosi tells them? You will see many of these guys as not supporting the HR 1207 Federal Transparency Act (just one example of group voting it appears)
http://www.armenpac.org/110thCongressionalCaucus.pdf
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17353079/HR-1207...Listed-by-State

(NOTE: The names of Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Henry Waxman (Mr Carbon tax and healthcare advocate), Barney Frank, John Conyers, John Dingell, Charles Rangel, and sadly Dennis Kucinich (who we thought was on our side), and others.)

Personally, I'm sick of all of these various lobbyist groups forming strongholds in our Congress, and representing their own selfish interests over that of American interests.

If you live in America, you should be representing OUR interests, not those of other countries.

AND THIS GOES FOR ANY GROUP WHO THINKS THEY CAN COME IN AND RUN OUR COUNTRY FROM WITHIN THE HALLS OF OUR GOVERNMENT!

THESE PEOPLE NEED TO BE BROUGHT UP ON CHARGES, AND THOSE WHO REPRESENT THEM NEED TO BE KICKED OUT OF CONGRESS STARTING WITH NANCY PELOSI!

 

[jofortruth]

The comment above is a bit confusing. The Armenian Caucus is not the same thing as the Turkish, however the Armenian Caucus members tend to vote alike on things and most of them voted for Cap and Trade and are not supporting HR 1207 Federal Transparency Act. So what are these groups up to? Are they simply NWO proponents?


Here's the Turkish Caucus:
http://www.tc-america.org/caucus.html

[Mike Philbin]

Well, it made the ARMENIAN REPORTER:
http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-08-10-sibel-edmonds-offers-details-of-turkey-s-covert-operations-in-u-s-

Sibel Edmonds offers details of Turkey’s covert operations in U.S.
Testimony part of Ohio Rep. Schmidt complaint
by Emil Sanamyan

Published: Monday August 10, 2009

 
Sibel Edmonds answering questions after her deposition on August 8, with her lawyer Michael Kohn on right. Armenian Reporter

Washington - Operatives allegedly acting at the behest of the Turkish government used evidence of an extramarital affair to blackmail a sitting Democratic member of Congress, while paying off others in Congress and the executive branch to support Turkey's agenda, a former translator privy to federal investigations of the activities said in a deposition for the Ohio Elections Commission.

The scandalous details were part of testimony by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds heard at the National Whistleblowers Association office in Washington on August 8 by representatives of incumbent Rep. Jeanne Schmidt (R.-Ohio) and David Krikorian, a candidate for the Democratic Party ticket in that district, who requested Ms. Edmonds' deposition.

With a full video of Ms. Edmonds' deposition anticipated to be released at a later time, Mr. Krikorian told journalists about some of the charges presented.

One case concerned "a current female member of Congress who [is] apparently bisexual and [Turkish operatives] bugged her apartment," Mr. Krikorian said. "She's married with children, and they set up a relationship with another female who went in and had sexual relationships with her. And they had all the episodes bugged within this current representative's home and they blackmailed her."

While Ms. Edmonds did not name the member of Congress, she later told Brad Friedman blog that the congresswoman in question is a Democrat.

Mr. Krikorian also confirmed that charges of taking bribes and engaging in other illegal activity were heard against sitting Rep. Dan Burton (R.-Ind.), ex-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.), and other current and former members of Congress.

Other charges of collusion with Turkish officials were made against Marc Grossman, a former undersecretary of state and ambassador to Turkey, and other former U.S. officials.

Since leaving government both Mr. Hastert and Mr. Grossman, who have in the past denied any wrongdoing, joined Washington lobby groups with ties to Turkish government contracts; reaction from Rep. Burton, one of the few members of Congress to engage in outright denial of Armenian Genocide, was not available as of press time.

The deposition came as part of the Ohio Elections Commission's consideration of a complaint filed by Ms. Schmidt, who alleged that Mr. Krikorian made "false statements" that she took "blood money" from Turkish interests to oppose a congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide.

By summoning Ms. Edmonds, Mr. Krikorian sought to establish a pattern of efforts on the part of the Turkish government and affiliated entities to induce U.S. policy makers into opposing the genocide resolution.

The Ohio Elections Commission is expected to rule on Rep. Schmidt's complaint on September 3.

Charges corroborated and ignored
The former FBI translator's testimony is based on her past access to wiretap recordings made as part of investigations of Turkish government activities in the United States from 1996 to 2002. After being fired from the FBI, Ms. Edmonds took evidence of federal mismanagement and corruption to Congress and sought reinstatement through the courts.

Ms. Edmonds' allegations – covered at the time by U.S. mass media – took on added weight when the Justice Department's internal investigation issued in early 2005 confirmed many of them and did not dispute others.

But no congressional investigation or prosecutions based on her charges ever followed.

Her deposition last Saturday came despite warnings from the Department of Justice that she "has not complied with the procedures for obtaining authorization from the FBI, her former employer, prior to making any disclosure relating to information that she acquired in the course of her work for the FBI."

Lawyers for Ms. Edmonds argued that without renewing the state secrets privilege first invoked by the Bush administration against the former FBI translator to prevent her from testifying, the current Department of Justice could not prevent Ms. Edmonds from offering her testimony.

[Mike Philbin]

and now a FRESNO newspaper's on the case, too.

FBI Insider Links Turkish Lobby To Bribery And Blackmail
http://www.asbarez.com/2009/08/10/fbi-insider-links-turkish-lobby-to-bribery-and-blackmail/

[Anti_Illuminati]

This is now moved over here, because of its high relevancy.

**BOMBSHELL** Riconosciuto WARNED OF 9/11 & ANTHRAX
 ATTACKS ON 02/01

http://web.archive.org/web/20020211064814/www.mindgallery.com/hiddenroom/wizard/

Michael gave prior warning of terrorist attacks! 37 surface to air missiles have been transported from Canada to the US for the purpose of shooting down aircraft. On this website we have posted letters which prove the efforts he has made to alert authorities.

On November 6, Michael was transferred from Allenwood to Springfield Medical Center where he is currently in solitary confinement. We have just received word that Michael finally received his much anticipated surgery for prostate cancer on January 16.

If you would like to send Michael some mail, you are welcome to do so.

Michael J. Riconosciuto
21309-086 Box 4000
U.S. Medical Center
Springfield, MO
65801-4000

Thanks go out to everyone who has made an effort to expedite Michael's treatment.

~~~~~

Michael has undergone harassment and threats from individuals working for the FBI. These documents show the efforts he has made to clarify his right to have an attorney present during questioning and they also verify that accusations made against him as a troublemaker were groundless. These documents from Coleman show punitive measures against him arising from his discussions with Canadian authorities.

We have posted letters which show the efforts of Michael Riconosciuto to alert authorities to impending assaults. These hand written letters contain important details, some of which have been sanitized because we do not wish to compromise an investigation.

[INSERT:  None of these links work, so they weren't included--however the 1st one does appear at another site which will be posted below.]

2/5/2001 - letter from Michael to attorney Don Bailey

2/7/2001 - letter from Michael to attorney Paul Killion

2/13/2001 - letter from Michael to Congressman Baird

2/18/2001 - letter from Michael to attorney Paul Killion

Here is a letter from attorney Louis P. Buffardi on behalf of his client, Michael Riconosciuto to Colin Powell, cc: John Ashcroft and a follow-up letter to Scott Lassar, Esq.




More information has been given by Michael regarding a germ attack! A militarized hybrid form of anthrax which is contagious, and approximately 100 times more deadly than the anthrax which has been used thus far, is slated for release. This hybrid is designed to escape detection! In the event of an outbreak, people are advised to stock up on food and water and stay away from crowds. The less physical contact we have the more protection we will have against spreading it. Canadian authorities have been given information which may help them break the terrorist ring, but this needs the attention of US authorities! Hopefully we are not too late to stop the attacks.

In the 1980s Michael Riconosciuto was involved in negotiations with the Mujahadeen on behalf of the US government. The negotiations were for arms and $600+ million per year in aid to assist in the war against the Soviets. Michael was encouraged to make his own contacts within the Mujahadeen network. After all these years, he still maintains his contacts.

Michael Riconosciuto is a super-genius who cannot help but have a tremendous impact on the world around him. People loyal to this modern wizard have been silent for fear of causing him harm, but immediate concerns are forcing us to go public. Serious efforts must be made to stop the coming attacks!

J. Orlin Grabbe has written a detailed article about Michael's involvement with the Mujahadeen negotiations and Bin Laden, aka Tim Osman.

Michael has been in jail for more than ten years because he signed an Affidavit exposing his involvement in the alteration of Promis Software which was illegally obtained by the US Justice Department from Inslaw Corporation. The high-level treason which he attempted to expose has a direct bearing on current events. Mike Ruppert alerted us that Bin Laden was reported by FOX News as being in possession of Promis. Insight Magazine published a series of articles written by Kelly O'Meara about Promis and the RCMP investigation.


Danny Casolaro

What happened to this Journalist who tried to write Mike's story?

[INSERT:  Photo is blank at the site, this site was taken offline years ago, this is an archive.]

This is the last photo of Danny Casolaro, the jounalist who "commited suicide" (they found a note) after getting too close to the Inslaw/Promis Octopus. This photo was taken only a few weeks before he was found in the bathtub of his hotel room with his wrists slashed. Friends relatives and associates DO NOT BELIEVE the suicide explanation. This series of photos have never been made public before this date. It is the one and only proof that Danny did carry his papers in a breifcase, (a fact that others have argued) and that this briefcase has never been found.

Evidence of Promis

What is promis and does it really exist?

This set of VAX computer tapes and hard disks was the "EVIDENCE" that was given to the House Judiciary Investigators shortly after Mike's arrest. The folder on the right side contains bits of papers and notes collected from Mike's residence. They include traces of every person mike was in touch with over several years. ALL of this evidence was seized by House Judiciary Investigators and has disappeared. Mike was NEVER credited for helping their investigation, nor did the government ever pursue the true nature of Mike's involvment in the Inslaw/Promis affair. All of this evidence has now mysteriously disappeared.

~~~~~

The non-existing Drug Lab

What happened to the "DRUG LAB" that Mike was working at when he was arrested? This letter was submitted to the government in 1996. it is the result of an investigation of the "drug lab" that the government raided when they arrested Mike Riconosciuto. The investigation was conducted by Ted Gunderson (former director of Los Angeles FBI).
_________________________________________________________
I will post the remainder of the website content later as it trails off into other topics, but here is another source:

MICHAEL RICONOSCIUTO
 
911 Prior Warning

[INSERT:  Here is one of the letters that was deleted from the other site, and as far as I know, is the only source of this on the Internet.

This would be:  2/5/2001 - letter from Michael to attorney Don Bailey]

http://www.michaelriconosciuto.com/nine11/






http://educate-yourself.org/tg/TCUreportexbB13feb01.shtml

The Riconosciuto Letters, Exhibit "B"
Urgent Feb. 14, 2001 Warning to Congressman of 'Planned Attacks in the U.S.'

    "This needs to be dealt with ASAP. If not dealt with in a timely fasion, this opportunity will be gone." ...Michael Riconosciuto

    [Editor's Note: Exhibit "B" is the second handwritten letter by Michael Riconosciuto (held in federal prison in Allenwood, PA) in Ted Gunderson's report Terrorism Cover Up in America.

About Ted Gunderson

Author of Terrorism Cover Up In America

http://educate-yourself.org/tg/TCUaboutgunderson.shtml

Ted 1. Gunderson, who joined the FBI in 1951, retired as Senior Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's Los Angeles Division in 1979. He was then appointed by Attorney General Griffin Bell as head of security for the Pan American Games. Drawing upon his 27 years of experience in heading several FBI field offices as well as multiple assignments at Bureau headquarters, he then established Ted L. Gunderson and Associates, a firm that specialized in international security consulting and investigations. This brought him into contact with persons in the so-called "intelligence community", one of whom was Michael J. Riconosciuto, the source of information contained in this report. Meeting him in 1982, Gunderson became Riconosciuto's pro bono investigator when the latter was arrested on federal drug charges, which Gunderson believes were "manufactured" .
 

© Copyright 2003 Educate-Yourself.org  All Rights Reserved.

 It was sent from Riconosciuto by certified mail (#7000 0600 0027 1175 6538) to Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA) on February 14, 2001 (The original handwritten letter can be viewed here: Page1, Page 2, and the certified proof of mailing).





Mike Riconosciuto had been an intelligence asset for the U.S. government for a long time, but ran afoul of the Big Boys because of the work he had done for them in opening a 'back door' for the (privately owned and proprietary) PROMIS software. Mike was subpoenaed to appear before the Brooks Congressional Committee investigating the government's role in the Inslaw Case which involved the PROMIS software. Three weeks before he was to testify in front of the committee, Mike got a telephone call from a Department of Justice official named Peter Videnieke, who, according to Michael Riconosciuto, told him that if he testified before the committee, he would have to 'suffer the consequences'. Riconosciuto testified anyway and shortly afterwards, his small trailer workshop/lab in northern Washington state (Riconosciuto is a scientist by profession) was raided by federal agents. .

    Riconosciuto suddenly found himself the target of an indictment for operating a "methamphetamine lab". Apparently, possession of common (& legally obtained) chemical solvents that could be used during one of many steps involved in meth production, is enough to get you convicted these days for running a meth lab, despite the absence of evidence of the drug itself (the feds having destroyed all of Mike's lab glassware; glassware that could have established the absence of illegal drug residues, which you would expect to find in abundance for a 'meth lab' operation). Mike's trial set a new mark for prosecutorial and judicial abuse even by federal 'railroading' standards. He was given a 30 year sentence for a first time drug offence.

    Riconosciuto's intelligence contacts continued after he was incarcerated and his investigative probes into the activities of Robert Booth Nichols (Cabazon Indian reservation scandal) led to an trusted inside source that was providing high level information about planned attacks in the U.S. by Islamic radicals. Riconosciuto and his lawyers were doing their best to bring this valuable information to the attention of the appropriate government agencies and the highest political figures with the authority to take action, but they were met with either stone silence, a perfunctory listening (FBI), or outright dismissal (FBI, DOJ). Mike was particularly weary of the FBI, because they kept betraying him. For example, they turned over a copy of Mike's intelligence info given to federal investigative authorities about Robert B. Nichols to Robert B. Nichols!

    In this letter, Riconosciuto calls Rep. Baird's attention to the "extreme urgency" and "time sensitive" nature of the planned terrorists attack information. He says that his Islamic source has "a chillingly accurate track record with his information" and is prepared to reveal much greater information if the government would consider his proffer and provide immunity from prosecution. At the same time, Riconosciuto's lawyers were also trying to bring this critical intelligence to cabinet level officials and influential Congressional politicians as other Exhibits in this Report will reveal. The greatest stonewalling, however, was yet to greet Ted Gunderson by Administration officials and the mainstream media following the WTC attacks, which Riconosciuto's warnings-had they been heeded and investigated- could have stemmed the attack. You cannot help but draw the conclusion that very powerful forces in this country wanted the 9-11 attacks to take place and they were doing their best to ignore anyone who was trying to warn them...Ken Adachi]

    Written By Michael Riconosciuto
    http://educate-yourself.org/tg/TCUreportexbB13feb01.shtml
    Posted Sept. 28, 2003

    2/13/2001

    Congressman Baird,

    Enclosed are copies of a recent series of articles that appeared in the Washington Times' Insight Magazine. The documents, that appear in the photo were taken from me during my trial, As a consequence, I did not have benefit of this material for my defense. Now, years later, this material shows up in the media. Of particular note, is the letter on Wackenhut stationary that refers to Dr. Fair's characterization of me as a potential national resource because of my technical ability. This is significant because it is in direct opposition to what was presented to my trial. jury. Also enclosed, is the paperwork trail on the initial contact I had with the Canadian RCMP/NSIS [Royal Canadian Mounted Police/National Security

    The treatment I received at FCI Coleman was in large part retaliation against me for cooperating with the RCMP/NSIS investigation. The FBI has lodged formal protest to the Canadian govt. for this RCMP investigation. The charges brought against me by the FBI at Coleman were found to be absolutely baseless. The timing of the events leading up to these charges is highly suspicious looking and beyond mere coincidence,

    Things are not alright in my case. The BOP [Bureau of Prisons] response to your inquiries have been mere bureaucratic cover responses. My present problems are too numerous to address in one letter. As per my last conversation with Barry, I will keep my letters basically confined to a single issue.

    The issue I wish to address here is of extreme urgency because it is time sensitive. As is apparent from the Insight series, my claims check out. Yet, the US govt. refuses to deal with me in a straightforward manner when I proffer information. As I previously stated, I have been cooperating with U.S. Customs agents against Robert Booth Nichols and his group. There is some reason that Mr. Nichols and associates seem to be immune from prosecution. In my efforts to help work a case against Nichols, I have come across some important intelligence leads.

    Recently, one of these contacts has found himself in a very unique position with a major Islamic radical group. This party is presently involved in providing ID's and passports. Very recently, he has been put in a position of trust with this group. The significant issue here is that this party has contacts with the principals of numerous cells in the organization. It is extremely rare that one source is able to penetrate across many different cells in one of these organizations! This is a rare and valuable asset. This needs to be dealt with ASAP. If not dealt with in a timely fashion, this opportunity will be gone. This source, and several others, report of planned attacks in the US. One of these sources is [...blanked out words...] . This party has a chillingly accurate track record with his information. Several very credible lawyers have attempted to get the DOJ [Department of Justice] to move on this situation. They went to the DOJ, and then finally to Senator Santorum. They were referred to Senator Patty Murray because I am from Washington State. We were told to contact a Mr. McMackin (202-224-2621). I have recently gotten ahold of a retired CIA Terrorism specialist. He is making a referral to a current case officer. This may take some time.

    Time is of the essence here. Will you please find someone in Senator Murray's office that is able to handle this information. I will attempt to call Barry in the Olympia office on Tuesday 2/20/01. Someone in a position of authority, capable of acting on this, needs to come and interview me on this.

    Mike Riconosciuto

    © Copyright 2003 Educate-Yourself.org  All Rights Reserved.

[ramallamamama]

This thread rocks.

[Dig]

We are so close to arresting these f**kers

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By Brad Friedman on 8/12/2009 12:07PM  
Ohio U.S. House Candidate Issues Press Release on Sibel Edmonds' 'Revealing' Testimony
David Krikorian campaign notes Google's removal of ads by Turkish lobby group denying Armenian genocide
Announces open-to-public preliminary hearing tomorrow in his Ohio Election Commission case against Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt...
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7353


As we continue to wait for the release of the video/transcript of long-gagged FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' deposition last Saturday, the campaign of David Krikorian, Ohio's Democratic candidate for the U.S. House seat in the 2nd Congressional district, has just issued a press release relating to it. (Complete release posted below.)

In the statement, they re-iterate some of the information which The BRAD BLOG covered during our live-blogging of the event over the weekend, including Edmonds' allegations under oath that "the Turkish Lobby in the United States was under the direction of the Turkish Government and engaged in operations including bribery, espionage and blackmail with certain members of the US House of Representatives to further its objectives in the United States including one of which is the denial of the Armenian Genocide."

Some of those current and former House reps, such as

Dennis Hastert (R-IL),
Dan Burton (R-IL), Bob Livingston (R-TX),
Dick Gephardt (D-MO), and
Stephen Solarz (D-NY),

were said to have been specifically named during the 5-hour-long deposition.

One female Representative, said to be a Democrat and still serving in the House, was described, but not named, as having been "hooked" by Turkish agents into participating in a lesbian affair which is said to have been videotaped for potential blackmail use against the sitting Congresswoman....


Krikorian's statement also repeats his allegations against his opponent, Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH), that she "took more money from the Turkish lobby in the 2008 election cycle than any other member of the House or Senate and has already booked thousands in contributions from the Turkish lobby in 2009 despite there being almost no Turkish people or interests in Ohio's 2nd congressional district."

He goes on to allege that "Jean Schmidt has displayed a pattern of taking money from groups in exchange for pushing their agendas."

Edmonds' testimony arose out of a "false statements" complaint filed by Schmidt against Krikorian, who is of Armenian descent, in the Ohio Election Commission over his claim that she has accepted "blood money" from Turkish interests who deny the 1915 Turkish genocide of ethnic Armenians. Edmonds herself is a Turkish-born U.S. citizen. Schmidt is the co-chair of the Congressional Turkish Caucus.

A preliminary hearing in the case will be conducted by the Ohio Elections Commission in Columbus tomorrow. It will be open to the public, beginning at 9:30am, according to the Krikorian press release.

The press release also cites a story on the Fox "News" website today, highlighting a complaint from the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA), against Google, charging that they inappropriately removed ads which deny the Armenian Genocide. Fox quotes "a person familiar with Google's policies" likening the ads to "a Nazi group that said the Holocaust is a myth."

On Saturday, Krikorian told The BRAD BLOG, during a break in Edmonds' testimony:

"From my opinion, if I'm some of the current members of Congress, I'd be very very worried about the information that's going to come out of this. There are current members of Congress that she has implicated in bribery, espionage. It's not good. It's crazy, it's absolutely crazy. For people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence."

Video of his reaction on Saturday, as well as that of Edmonds and several of the attorneys involved in the deposition, is now posted here.

The Krikorian campaign's press release, issued within the last hour today, follows in full below...

Krikorian For Congress Press Release


FBI Whistleblower Provides Revealing Testimony In Schmidt v. Krikorian Case

Ohio Elections Commission To Hold Preliminary Hearing Tomorrow

Cincinnati, OH - August 12, 2009 - FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, testified on Saturday to her knowledge of Turkish Government infiltration of US Department of State and the US House of Representatives. The testimony was revealing and will be used in David Krikorian's defense against frivolous false statement claims brought by his 2010 opponent Representative Jean Schmidt.

Ms. Edmonds testified that the Turkish Lobby in the United States was under the direction of the Turkish Government and engaged in operations including bribery, espionage and blackmail with certain members of the US House of Representatives to further its objectives in the United States including one of which is the denial of the Armenian Genocide.

Representative Schmidt took more money from the Turkish lobby in the 2008 election cycle than any other member of the House or Senate and has already booked thousands in contributions from the Turkish lobby in 2009 despite their being almost no Turkish people or interests in Ohio's 2nd congressional district.

FOX News is reporting today that the Turkish Coalition of America, whose political action committee is a large contributor to the Schmidt campaign, had its Armenian Genocide denial ads pulled by Google. A Spokesman for Google said the company does not allow ads for Web sites "that suggest revisions to history or attempt to revise history against the interests of a protected group."

"Jean Schmidt has displayed a pattern of taking money from groups in exchange for pushing their agendas" said David Krikorian "Whether it be taking money from the trucking industry to raise the federal weight limit on tractor-trailer trucks despite the public safety hazard and road damage concerns or taking money from the banking lobby to push for bailouts for the banking industry or in this case taking money from the Turkish lobby in exchange for pushing its denial of the Armenian Genocide, Jean Schmidt has shown that she is for sale in the US House.

The Ohio Elections Commission will conduct a preliminary hearing tomorrow in Columbus. The hearing is open to the public and begins at 9:30 AM. Mr. Krikorian is confidant that the facts of the case will support his defense against Schmidt's outrageous claims.

Krikorian For Congress
media@krikorianforcongress.com

[Anti_Illuminati]

See embedded link below for list of embedded links in the sources shown at the bottom of this post.  Not all of them work.  Feel free to individually view them and post their entire contents if it is explosive information.  This site was apparently removed from the Internet by the NWO, luckily we have mechanisms in place to counter that to a fair degree.  Thank you for playing, NWO-you F*CKING LOSE, AGAIN.

Al Qaeda

Abdullah Azzam

The Muslim Brotherhood has acted as a clever technique to recruit agent-provocateurs for the Iluminati. The lowest ranks may sincerely believe they are defending Islam, and confronting “Western imperialism”. However, these various terrorist groups, through representing different factions, are part of a single network serving the same Illuminati cause. When we explore the political and financial connections of the terrorists, we find that these are not merely wayward fanatics, operating in isolation, but that their channels penetrate to the upper reaches of power, in the British and American governments, and outward into the nether regions of the occult and criminal underworlds.

According to Svali, a former member of the cult, the Illuminati “.... are truly an international group, and the group’s agenda supersedes any nationalistic feelings.”[1] That members of this network could share a common goal, despite adhering to apparently conflicting ideologies and religious creeds, is explained by the fact that the Illuminati believe there is no truth. This reality, according to them, is too difficult to handle for all but the “elite”. As for the masses, however, they require religion. It is therefore perceived as necessary by the Illuminati to don the façade of religion to lead them. As Robert Dreyfuss clarifies:

    The real Muslim Brothers are those whose hands are never dirtied with the business of killing and burning. They are the secretive bankers and financiers who stand behind the curtain, the members of the old Arab, Turkish, or Persian families whose genealogy places them in the oligarchical elite, with smooth business and intelligence associations to the European black nobility and, especially, to the British oligarchy.

    And the Muslim Brotherhood is money. Together, the Brotherhood probably controls several tens of billions of dollars in immediate liquid assets, and controls billions more in day-to-day business operations in everything from oil trade and banking to drug-running, illegal arms merchandising, and gold and diamond smuggling. By allying with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Anglo-Americans are not merely buying into a terrorists-for-hire racket; they are partners in a powerful and worldwide financial empire that extends from numbered Swiss bank accounts to offshore havens in Dubai, Kuwait and Hong Kong.[2]


Ronald Reagan

So, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated President in January 1981, and the U.S. objective in Afghanistan shifted, because it was estimated that a Mujahideen fighting force of no less than 150,000 trained and well-equipped troops would have to be created, William Casey endorsed a worldwide recruitment effort, to be organized through the CIA. Exercised through the Muslim Brotherhood, it would reach to the Afghan exile communities in Europe, North Africa, other parts of the Islamic world, and America. The recruitment drive to attract Muslims from all parts of the world was of course a pretext. The Mujahideen were able to attract but a few thousand volunteers. In reality, the recruitment effort was aimed at indoctrinating an international pool of terrorists to serve beyond the war in Afghanistan, to be later used to instigate the phony War on Terror.

For the meantime, these would be regarded as “Freedom Fighters”, but the war in Afghanistan provided the Illuminati the opportunity to mobilize an international army of terrorist recruits, whose directives would later be changed to attack the US. The prime recruiting ground for these dupes, of course, was the bastion of that fanatical version of Islam created by the British in the eighteenth century, Saudi Arabia, a country now which, following the orchestration of the oil crisis, was in a financial position to fund these covert operations on behalf of their co-conspirators in London and Washingston.

To solicit Saudi Arabia’s support, Casey contacted Bandar, who arranged a meeting with King Fahd, as a result of which the Saudis, funneled through the BCCI, would match “America dollar for dollar supporting the Mujahideen,” according to Prince Turki al Faisal, longtime head of Saudi intelligence.[3] Besides ridding themselves of an increasingly volatile section of the population, according to Craig Unger, the war in Afghanistan was:

    ...a mission that could be embraced by the gamut of Saudi society, from the wealthy merchant families and the House of Saud to the militant clerics and the fundamentalist masses. For the royal family, the war was not just part of the cornerstone of the burgeoning Saudi alliance with the United States, but served other purposes as well. Contributing to the war effort placated the militant clerics and helped accommodate the growing unrest and the more radical elements of society.[4]

The ISI requested the presence of a Saudi prince to lead the “Jihad” in Afghanistan. While no volunteers were forthcoming, the Saudi leaders recommended the scion of a wealthy family that was close to the monarchy, Osama bin Laden. He was dispatched to the Pakistan border, arriving there just in time to hear Brzezinski, donning a turban, shout “Allah is on your side”.


Sayed Qutb

But, while Osama was responsible for the organization and training of new recruits, it was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam who formulated the ideological argument, according to Islamic law, in order to justify the war in Afghanistan as “Jihad”, by which recruits were to be motivated to serve American interests against the Soviets.

Barnett R Rubin, a Columbia University associate professor, and senior fellow at the C.F.R, says sources have told him that Abdullah Azzam was “enlisted” by the CIA.[5] Unrelated to the Egyptian Azzams, Azzam was a Palestinian-born teacher of religion, and an active member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank. Later, he pursued an education in Jordan and Damascus before receiving his doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Cairo’s Al Azhar University in 1973. While in Cairo, Azzam met the family of Sayed Qutb.[6] Thereafter, he moved to Saudi Arabia, after being invited to teach at King Abdul Aziz University, where he linked up with Sayed Qutb’s brother Mohammed.

Mohammed Qutb, like many in the Muslim Brotherhood, had emigrated under CIA sponsorship to Saudi Arabia during Nasser’s crackdown.[7] He was given different official positions at Saudi universities to teach and to carry out the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood. While in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Qutb conceived of the organization now known as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which was established in 1972, thanks to large donations from the bin Laden family. Osama’s brother Omar was at one time its executive director, and another brother, Abdullah, who also served as a director, was being investigated as a source of terrorist funding until the Bush administration halted the FBI’s investigation at the beginning of his term in 2001.[8]

Thereafter, Azzam moved to Saudi Arabia, after being invited to teach at King Abdul Aziz University, where he linked up with Sayed Qutb’s brother Mohammed. Mohammed Qutb, like many in the Muslim Brotherhood, had emigrated under CIA sponsorship to Saudi Arabia during Nasser’s crackdown. He was given different official positions at Saudi universities to teach and to carry out the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood. While in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Qutb conceived of the organization now known as the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which was established in 1972, thanks to large donations from the bin Laden family. Osama’s brother Omar was at one time its executive director, and another brother, Abdullah, who also served as a director, was being investigated as a source of terrorist funding until the Bush administration halted the FBI’s investigation at the beginning of his term in 2001.

Like Abdul Wahhab, and typical of all Muslim Brotherhood ideology, Azzam depended on an interpretation of Islamic law derived from Ibn Taymiyyah. In Ibn Taymiyyah’s time, the Islamic world had come under the sway of the Mongols. Despite the fact that the Mongol invaders had accepted Islam, Ibn Taymiyyah insisted that their religion was tainted, and therefore that they were unbelievers. By categorizing the Mongol rulers as infidel invaders, Ibn Taymiyyah argued that it was obligatory for the Muslims to fight them. Azzam employed similar arguments, claiming that once a Muslim land is invaded, the Muslims of the world must unite the defend it. Ultimately, what Azzam did was to convince his Muslim brethren that, despite the rampant corruption in their own countries, it was incumbent upon them to fight the unholy infidels in Afghanistan, omitting the fact that it was not a Muslim country, but had already been subjected to Communism.

Azzam, however, was finally assassinated in a car bomb attack in late 1989. Some US intelligence officials believe bin Laden ordered the killing.[9]


Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, emigrated from Yemen to Saudi Arabia as a bricklayer, and slowly built the largest Saudi construction firm. He established a close relationship with Ibn Saud, who asked him to rebuild the sacred city of Mecca. Ever since, the bin Ladens have been responsible for construction in Mecca and Medina.

After Mohammed’s death in a plane crash in 1967, his sons built the Saudi BinLaden Group into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. Recent ventures have included building a freeway around Riyadh, expanding King Khaled Airport, and constructing a base for U.S. troops. By the late 70s, Osama was running the business. As points out John K. Cooley, an ABC News correspondent, and Middle East specialist:

    Through his own personal reputation as a pious Muslim who favoured the cause of Wahabi Islamism, and through involvement of the bin Laden companies in construction and renovation at the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina, he seemed to both Saudi Intelligence and the CIA an ideal choice for the leading role he began to play. Bin Laden began to pay, with his own company and funds, for recruitment, transportation and training of the Arab volunteers who flocked, first to Peshawar, and to Afghanistan... By 1895 bin Laden had collected enough millions from his family and company wealth... to orgnize al Qaida.[10]


Bin Laden headquarters in Dubai

While attending King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden also became close to Mohammed Qutb, and was initiated into the Muslim Brotherhood.[11] Osama had also attended Azzam’s classes and was caught up into his militant ideology. In 1979, Azzam left Saudi Arabia, being one of the first Arabs to join the Afghan jihad, and Osama, at just twenty-two years of age, followed soon after, leading them to found the MAK, or “Maktab al-Khidamat”, or the Mujahideen Services Bureau, based in Peshawar, Pakistan. According to John Loftus, however, it was George Bush Sr., as vice president, who was in charge of the covert operations that supported the MAK.[12] The MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s ISI, and linked up with Pakistan’s Muslim Brotherhood organization, the Jamaat-e Islami, founded by Abul Ala Maududi, to recruit fighters.


Ted Gunderson
Michael Riconosciuto

By the late 1980s, there were branches of the MAK in fifty countries around the world, by means of which unsuspecting dupes from around the globe poured in to fight “Jihad” in Afghanistan. Azzam and bin Laden then recognized that many of the prospective Mujahideen lacked training, and established the Bayt Al-Ansar in Peshawar, as a central training base, or Al Qaeda, founded with the assistance of the resident CIA chief in Peshawar.[13] Bin Laden had made the first of many contacts with the CIA in 1979, after graduating from university in Jeddah, when he went to Istanbul, which the American intelligence center had chosen as a way station for the volunteers.[14]

When the Americans decided to change the tide of the war, Osama was brought to the US under the false name of “Tim Osman”. Osama then met with three men in Sherman Oaks, California. Among them was Ted Gunderson, a retired FBI agent, who had been approached by a high-level official in the administration of President Ronald Reagan to provide, outside of government channels, assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen. In 1986, Gunderson then arranged a meeting between himself, Riconosciuto, and Ralph Olberg. Michael Riconosciuto was architect of the Promis software who was closely involved with Hubbell’s Park-on-Meter operation. Olberg covertly represented the State Department where he served on its Middle East desk.[15]

Gunderson’s role was to put the key players in contact with Sir Dennis Kendall, a former member of the British parliament, and a double agent during World War II, who had worked for both the Germans and the British. After leaving Gunderson in California, Riconosciuto, bin Laden, Olberg and Kendall traveled to Boston, where they met with Abdullah Azzam, and details of the aid plan were further formulated. Interpol provided secure communications and kept the operation, formalized with a number of unnamed congressmen, from being compromised or discovered.[16]


Mujahideen fighter aims US-made Stinger missle

The project ultimately provided the Afghani resistance with 600 stinger surface-to-air, shoulder-fired missiles, which had been modified so they could not be used against American aircraft if captured. Gunderson confirmed that these weapons turned the tide of battle in Afghanistan against the Soviets, whose aircraft, and particularly attack helicopters, fell victim to the missiles.[17]

America’s support of the Mujahideen, even included, as revealed by John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC, and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, training inside the US. Training included rifle shooting at the High Rock gun club in Naugtuck, Connecticut. More technical training took place at the CIA’s Camp Peary, nicknamed “The Farm,” in Virginia. Among the topics that were covered were surveillance and counter surveillance, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics and paramilitary operations.


Michael Springman, the head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, told the BBC:

    In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. People who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington to Main Street, to the inspector general, and to Diplomatic Security, and I was ignored. What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists ­ recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets.[18]


Ali Mohammed

A former U.S. Army Sergeant, Ali Mohamed, testified in a New York court that he helped train members of Al Qaeda after he left the army in 1989. An Egyptian, Ali Mohamed rose to the rank of major his country’s Special Forces. In 1984, he was expelled from Egypt’s military as a religious extremist. He contacted the CIA, offering to act as a spy, but the CIA judged him unreliable. He was later placed on a U.S. government watch list, and yet was able to obtain a U.S. visa, marry an American woman, and become an American citizen. Until 1989, he was lecturing on the Middle East at the U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. In 2000, he admitted involvement in the bombing of the embassies in Africa.

Though his relationship with the FBI and the CIA remain shrouded in secrecy, a close friend of his, obstetrician Ali Zaki, stated, “everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause.”[19] In 1988, while still on active duty, he visited Afghanistan on leave, where he fought the Soviets and made contact with Osama bin Laden, apparently with CIA sponsorship. After Mohamed was honorably discharged in 1989, he joined the Reserves for another five years. Documents from U.S. court cases demonstrate that while either on active duty or a member of the Reserves, he continued to travel abroad to meet with Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, as well as training al Qaeda members within the U.S. Retired Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, who was at Fort Bragg testified that, as nothing was done after he had advised his superiors of


Ayman al Zawahiri

Mohamed’s activities, he was forced to conclude that Mohamed was “sponsored” by U.S. intelligence.[20] Mohamed Ali returned to California in the mid 1990s, where he helped Zawahiri raise money for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.[21]

Finally, even Ayman al Zawahiri, the alleged “number two man” in Al Qaeda, was part of several dubious associagtions. Zawahiri is a member of another Muslim Brotherhood organization, Islamic Jihad, founded in 1977, which had been discovered responsible for the assassination of Sadat. Zawahiri was one of the men charged in the plot. Zawahiri is also related to the family of the Azzams. His grandmother was the sister of the renowned Abdul Rahman Azzam, while his uncle was Salem Azzam. After he fled Egypt, he based his operations in Geneva, working under the cover of the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Islamic Center, led by Said Ramadan.


The Sudan, Bosnia and the Philipines
Hassan al-Turabi

At the end of 1989, Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia. Although, when the Gulf War broke out in 1990, he became an outspoken critic of the setting up of US bases in the country, which had been permitted by the Saudi family. Bin Laden decided to leave Saudi Arabia in 1991, going first to Pakistan and back to Afghanistan, before finally settling in Sudan, when General Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in a military coup. Just a few months later, at the Muslim Brotherhood meeting in London in 1989, it was decided that Sudan would be a new base for the Islamist movement, and a Muslim Brotherhood leadership council of nineteen members was subsequently established in Khartoum under Turabi, who would emerge as the real power in the Sudanese regime.[22]

Hassan al-Turabi, born in 1932, joined the Muslim Brotherhood while studying law at the British-run Gordon College in Khartoum. He received a master’s degree from the University of London, and then attended the Sorbonne University in France, receiving his doctorate in 1964. According to bin Laden biographer Roland Jacquard, Turabi visited London in 1992 and was a guest at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In addition, Turabi seems to have Masonic connections. When their relationship had broken down, and after Turabi had foiled an attempted coup by he and his party, Bashir denounced him as being sponsored by “Zionists and freemasons”.[23]

According to several authoritative sources, as the war was winding down in Afghanistan, leaders of the CIA in Peshawar held secret meetings with bin Laden, at the end of 1991, at Green’s Hotel, under the authority of Prince Turki al Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence. It was agreed to maintain the valuable collaboration of the “Afghan” Mujahideen, though the exact substance of the meeting is not known.[24] Consequently, many of the fighters who had trained and volunteered in Afghanistan were removed to Sudan. With support from his family, Osama extended large loans to the Islamic regime, in exchange for which the Binladen Group launched a great infrastructure construction project, including the building of highways, bridges, airports, and luxury residences.

Bin Laden also continued to finance training camps, for which he often returned to Afghanistan. On each of these visits he met with the CIA experts.[25] Together with weapons shipments to Sudan, bin Laden also managed an opium supply chain that was established before he departed for Afghanistan with Hekmatyar.[26] The DEA confirms having received multi-source information that Bin Laden has been involved in the financing and facilitation of heroin trafficking activities.[27] Al Qaeda reportedly earns as much as six billion a year from drug-trafficking.[28]


Edwin Angele, aka "Ibrahim Yakub"

fromIn Bosnia, where al Qaeda Mujahideen collaborated with the US, the militants established connections with Bosnian organized crime figures. The officials said al Qaeda and the Taliban found a route for the trafficking of heroin Afghanistan into Europe through the Balkans.[29] Followers also have been tied to bank robberies, holdups, credit card fraud and other crimes.[30]

Bin Laden had also pushed early funding through the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), as arranged in meetings between al Qaeda’s inner-circle and the charity’s directors. Al-Zawahiri was employed by the IIRO in Albania. The Philippine branch office was run by Osama’s brother-in-law, who made a hand-off of cash to the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda offshoot. The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), was co-founded by Edwin Angeles, who also went by the Muslim name of “Ibrahim Yakub”, an undercover agent for the Defense Intelligence Group, who, as the ASG’s operations officer and chief recruiter, was largely responsible for the spread and criminalization of the group. Filipina television news reporter, Arlyn de la Cruz, in her history of the ASG, wrote that Angeles/Yakub “holds the key to the deep intricacies of how some government agencies manipulated the rawness of the Abu Sayyaf during its early years.”[31]

WTC Bombing
Time cover of the 1993 WTC bombing

On November 5, 1990, in New York City, Meir Kahane, the founder of the terroristic Jewish Defense League (JDL), was assassinated by an Arab assailant. Kahane had been elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 1884, by advocating the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, but was subsequently barred from office after a new law banned parties that had racist platforms. Essentially, the history of the JDL and its founder indicates that the JDL functioned as an arm of the Mossad. Kahane’s biographer, Robert Friedman, revealed that “high-ranking members of Mossad” were directing Kahane, and that the “central player” was former Mossad operations chief, Yitzhak Shamir.[32]


Meir Kahane

Kahane had also been an asset of the FBI and the CIA, including a stint for the CIA in Africa, as a “news correspondent.” In 1965, under the name “Michael King,” Kahane and Joseph Churba formed a group to mobilize campus support for the Vietnam War, as part of a CIA operation “working both sides” of the Vietnam War issue, simultaneously funding anti-war groups. In 1968, Michael King became Rabbi Meir Kahane. His colleague, Churba, also a rabbi, was a key liaison between the Likudnik right-wing in Israel and neo-conservatives in Washington.[33] Churba became an influential asset for Israeli intelligence in U.S. foreign policy-making circles, having been promoted by the John Birch Society, and funded by CIA-backed Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon.[34]

The man accused of assassinating Kahane was El Sayed Nosair, one of dozens of Arabs who had spent time at the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, where the CIA had once recruited prospects to join the Afghan Jihad in the eighties. According to the February 1993 issue of the newsletter, Inside Israel, Kahane’s son claimed that “both the FBI and Mossad had infiltrated the group to which Nosair belonged.” As reported by Jane Hunter, for the Middle East International, “Benyamin Kahane says he was told by an FBI informant he identifies as Mustafa Shalabi that Nosair’s brother worked for the FBI.”[35] Shalabi, a former colleague of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, later turned up dead.


El Sayed Nosair

Files found in Nosair’s possession gave details of a terrorist cell, mention al Qaeda, and discuss the destruction of tall US buildings, but were not translated until years later. Instead, within twelve hours of the assassination, New York police declared the assassination was the work of a “lone gunman”, and stuck with that story. At Nosair’s trial, to which Bin Laden contributed for the defense, prosecutors chose nevertheless not to introduce his incriminating possessions as evidence, nor was his confession even mentioned, and a supposedly “open-and-shut case” ended with an acquittal. However, Nosair was sentenced to twenty-two years on other lesser charges.[36] Many of those involved in Kahane’s assassination later planned the 1993 WTC. As one FBI agent put it, “the fact is that in 1990, myself and my detectives, we had in our office in handcuffs, the people who blew up the World Trade Center in ‘93. We were told to release them.”[37]


Sheikh Omar Abdur Rahman

Omar Abdur Rahman
the "blind Sheikh"

Evidence found in Nosair’s apartment linked him to the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdur Rahman. Curiously, despite Sheikh Omar’s link to Nosair, a formal investigation was not undertaken. During the war in Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman had made frequent trips to Peshawar in Pakistan, where he was a friend of Abdullah Azzam. Sheikh Omar was known to have befriended bin Laden while in Afghanistan, and bin Laden secretly paid Abdul-Rahman’s US living expenses.[38] Though he had been tied to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the CIA nevertheless regarded him as a valuable asset, because they saw his anti-Western polemics as successful in uniting the Mujahideen forces. According to Peter Bergen’s Holy War, Inc., even though the Blind Sheikh was known to be the leader of the Gamat al Islamiyya, the radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, he had been issued a visa in 1987 and 1990.[39] As one FBI agent said in 1993, he is “hands-off…. It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he’s still in the country. He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA.”[40]

The charge that Sheik Omar Abdur Rahman operated with CIA sanction has come from a number of sources, including an anonymous government official, who leaked that it was a CIA officer assigned as a consular official that approved the Sheik’s visa from the Sudan after the consulate approved it, according to the New York Times on July 14, 1993. Egyptian President Mubarak suggested that the visa had been issued to Rahman as a payoff for “services” rendered. “The sheikh has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan,” Mubarak told Egypt’s al-Gomhuria newspaper. “He still earns a salary.”[41]

Specifically, according to Barnett R Rubin, a Columbia University associate professor, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Abdur Rahman received the visa for having gone to Peshawar on behalf of the CIA, soon after Azzam was killed, “to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.”[42] Also according to Rubin, not long after the sheikh was arrested, a source asked Robert Oakley, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, how the U.S. would respond if the sheikh disclosed he had worked for the CIA. Oakley laughed, saying it would never happen, because the admission would ruin the sheikh’s credibility with his militant followers.[43]

In the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, thousands of suspected terrorists were rounded up and jailed, among them were Omar Abdul Rahman, who was eventually convicted of a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks. Emad Salem, the Egyptian bodyguard for Sheikh Rahman, and the key witness in the trial, was an FBI informant. It was eventually revealed under questioning that Mr. Salem had received a quarter million to one million dollars for his services as an FBI informant. Salem testified that the FBI knew about the attack beforehand and told him they would thwart it by substituting a harmless powder for the explosives. However, this plan was called off by an FBI supervisor, and the bombing was not stopped.[44] Defense attorney William Kunstler investigated and discovered that not only was Salem a lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian army, he never stopped working for the Egyptian government. Apart from the FBI, Salem was also funded, according to Kunstler, by other sources linked to foreign governments, including money from an organization founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane.[45]

Renegade Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky, who left Israel’s secret police agency and wrote his best-selling book, By Way of Deception, told the Village Voice that Israeli intelligence may have been behind the World Trade Center bombing. Mossad had motive and opportunity, says Ostrovsky, though he readily admits he doesn’t have “a shred of evidence” to support his theory. Ostrovsky says that the Mossad would have infiltrated the radical mosques in New Jersey and Brooklyn, where Abdul Rahman preached and disciples like El Sayyid Nosair prayed, and almost certainly recruited a close associate of the Blind Sheikh. The insider is recruited in what Ostrovsky calls a “false flag operation.” The Arab “thinks he is being recruited by an Iranian agent or a Libyan,” says Ostrovsky. He never suspects he is actually being “run” by Mossad.[46]

Ostrovsky points out that in the past the Mossad has effectively used this modus operandi. In the early 1950s, Mossad recruited agents to bomb American buildings in Cairo, hoping to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Nasser. When the facts became known in Israel, the scandal brought down the government. According to Ostrovsky, in 1984 Mossad detonated bombs outside of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital city, claiming credit in the name of an unknown radical Saudi resistance group. A member of Mossad at the time, Ostrovsky says the purpose was to weaken U.S./Saudi relations, by demonstrating to the U.S. that the regime was fragile and about to fall.[47]

As reported by Robert Friedman, Ahmad Ajaj, of the men accused of conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center, may have been a Mossad mole, according to Israeli intelligence sources. The FBI had identified Ajaj as a senior Intifada activist in the occupied territories, having close ties to both El Fatah, a constituent group of the PLO, and Hamas. According to federal sources and the Israeli National Police, the Israeli military expelled him to Jordan in 1991, for conspiring to smuggle weapons to El Fatah on the West Bank.

However, according to Kol Ha’ir, a highly regarded weekly in Jerusalem, Ajaj was never involved in Intifada activities, or with the PLO, or Hamas. Citing court papers and other sources, Kol Ha’ir related that Ajaj was actually a small-time crook, and that during his prison stay, after having been sentenced in 1988 for counterfeiting U.S. dollars, he was apparently recruited by Mossad. Curiously, following his release, only a year later, he had seemingly undergone a radical transformation, and became a devout Muslim.[48]

It was soon after that when he was arrested for smuggling weapons into the West Bank, allegedly for El Fatah. However, Israeli intelligence sources say that the arrest for weapons smuggling, and Ajaj’s supposed torture and deportation, were staged by Mossad to establish his credentials as an intifada activist. Mossad allegedly “tasked” Ajaj to infiltrate radical Palestinian groups operating outside Israel. Israeli intelligence sources say that it is no unusual for Mossad to recruit from the ranks of common criminals.[49]
Footnotes:

[1] Svali. "The Illuminati: How the Cult Programs People".
[2] Dreyfuss, Hostage to Khomeini, p. 113. [pdf]
[3] Craig Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud, p. 98.
[4] ibid.
[5] Friedman, Robert. "The CIA’s Jihad". March 1995.
[6] Hizmet Books, "Answer to an Enemy of Islam".
[7] Mark Erikson. “Islamism, fascism and terrorism (Part 3)”. Asia Times, Dec 4, 2002.
[8] Joe Trento, “FBI Shut Down Bin Laden Investigation”.
[9] Peter Lance. Thousand Years of Revenge. p. 40-41
[10] Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, American and International Terrorism, p. 119.
[11] Peter Goodgame. "Globalists and Islamists".
[12] Interview with John Loftus About the Muslim Brotherhood.
[13] Labeviere, Richard. Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam, p. 103.
[14] ibid, p. 103.
[15] Mike Blair. "U.S. Armed, Promoted Accused September 11 Terrorist Mastermind".
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] Interview with Franck Anderson, quoted from Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud, p. 109-110
[19] Ahmed, Nafeez Mossadeq. The War on Freedom: US Complicity in 9-11 and the New Imperialism, p. 199.
[20] ibid.
[21] Ton Hays and Sharon Theimer. “Egyptian Agent Worked with Green Berets, bin Laden”. Jerusalem Post, December 31, 2001.
[22] Peter Goodgame. "Globalists and Islamists".
[23] “Darfur governor links Khartoum plot with rebels”, World News, Sep 27, 2004.
[24] RichardcLabeviere. Dollars for Terror. p. 104.
[25] ibid, p. 106.
[26] ibid, p. 105.
[27] Asa Hutchinson, DEA Administrator. “International Drug Trafficking and Terrorism”. Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information. Washington, DC. March 13, 2002.
[28] London Daily Telegraph, 9/15/01, 9/16/01; Montreal Gazette, 9/15/01; Le Monde, 9/14/01
[29] New York Times, December 10, 2001.
[30] Los Angeles Times, September, 15, 200.
[31] Alex Constantine. "Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists". PART 7: The Brother-Bruder-Akh Axis.
[32] Michael Collins Piper. “Was Irv Rubin Killed in 9-11 Mop Up?”. Exclusive to American Free Press.
[33] Steinberg, Jeffrey. “LaRouche: Moonies Are Target Too Big To Be Missed”. EIR, November 1, 2002.
[34] Michael Collins Piper. “Was Irv Rubin Killed in 9-11 Mop Up?”.
[35] Jane Hunter, Middle East International, March 19, p. 6
[36] Robert Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheikh”, The Village Voice. March 30, 1993.
[37] ABC News, July 16, 2002.
[38] Atlantic Monthly, May 1996, ABC News, July 16, 2002.
[39] p. 67.
[40] Freidman, “The CIA and the Sheikh”.
[41] ibid.
[42] Friedman. "The CIA’s Jihad".
[43] ibid.
[44] Blumenthal, Ralph. “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast”. The New York Times. October 28, 1993.
[45] Transcript of Paul DeRienzo’s interview with William Kunstler, Broadcast on WBAI in New York on August 3, 1993.
[46] Friedman, Robert. “By Way of Deception?”. The Village Voice, April 6, 1993.
[47] ibid.
[48] Robert I. Friedman, “Mossad Linked To WTC Bomb Suspect” The Village Voice, August 3, 1993.
[49] ibid.

[Anti_Illuminati]

Was Irv Rubin Killed in 9-11 Mop Up?
 

Did the late Irv Rubin have inside knowledge about the fact that Israeli intelligence operatives were trailing the alleged 9-11 hijackers while they were “on the ground” in California?


Exclusive To American Free Press

By Michael Collins Piper

 

When JDL chief Irv Rubin’s friends cry that their leader may have been murdered in federal custody, they may not be far off the mark. Rubin may have known too much for his own good and threatened to reveal—during his scheduled trial–his Mossad connection.

Undoubtedly, Rubin and his henchman, Earl Krugel, were as surprised as anybody when the Justice Department charged them last year with conspiring to blow up a mosque and the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

For years Rubin and Krugel and the JDL were almost “untouchable,” given free rein to practice their terrorist activities with virtually no sanction whatsoever.

As such, there appears to be a lot more to the quite unexpected indictment of Rubin and Krugel than meets the eye.

As a growing body of evidence indicates, much of which has already been reported in AFP, Israeli intelligence operatives were almost certainly monitoring at least some of the Sept. 11 hijackers when the hijackers-to-be were operating in California prior to 9-11. And considering the fact that the JDL is known to have closely cooperated on numerous fronts with Israeli intelligence, it is likely that Rubin—now conveniently dead by “suicide”—and Krugel may have been aware of this operation.

HISTORY OF THE JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE

The history of the JDL and its founder, Brooklyn-born Meir Kahane—best-remembered today as the “militant rabbi” gunned down after being elected to the Israeli parliament—indicates that the JDL has functioned as an arm of Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad.

Kahane’s biographer, Robert Friedman, revealed that “high-ranking members of Mossad” were directing Kahane and that the “central player” was former Mossad operations chief (and later prime minister) Yitzhak Shamir, an outspoken critic of America.

Kahane himself had been an asset of the FBI and the CIA, including a stint for the CIA in Africa, posing as a “news correspondent.”

In 1965, under the name “Michael King,” Kahane and one Joseph Churba formed a group to mobilize campus support for the Vietnam War, a venture that was part of a CIA operation “working both sides” of the Vietnam War issue, with the CIA funding anti-war groups at the very same time.

In 1968 Kahane shed his “Michael King” personage and evolved into the Meir Kahane we remember today. His colleague Churba (also a rabbi) rose to power as an influential behind-the-scenes asset for Israeli intelligence in U.S. foreign policy-making circles, promoted by the John Birch Society, and funded by the CIA-backed empire of Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, now a major figure promoting the interests of Israel in American “conservative” circles.

The ultimate trial of JDL figure Krugel—if it ever happens—should be watched closely.

If the Justice Department of Israel’s strong supporter, Attorney General John Ashcroft, suddenly decides—citing “national security,” perhaps—to conceal information in the course of Krugel’s prosecution, a lot of “conspiracy theorists” might start thinking that it’s all part of the official 9-11 cover-up.

[Dig]

AI...

First Report: "Michael Riconosciuto was architect of the Promis software who was closely involved with Hubbell’s Park-on-Meter operation."

is from:[15] Mike Blair. "U.S. Armed, Promoted Accused September 11 Terrorist Mastermind".

Can you get that article?

If it is true that he was the architect then everything the gov said about his stuff being BS must be looked at again fresh without any preconceived notions.  We need to look at it again, also having a coment from Indira and/or Sibel would be awesome.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Concerning your second article:

"Undoubtedly, Rubin and his henchman, Earl Krugel, were as surprised as anybody when the Justice Department charged them last year with conspiring to blow up a mosque and the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)."

WTF, no wonder Issa has been kicking funcjing ass!  Great info AI!

[Anti_Illuminati]

AI...

First Report: "Michael Riconosciuto was architect of the Promis software who was closely involved with Hubbell’s Park-on-Meter operation."

is from:[15] Mike Blair. "U.S. Armed, Promoted Accused September 11 Terrorist Mastermind".

Can you get that article?

If it is true that he was the architect then everything the gov said about his stuff being BS must be looked at again fresh without any preconceived notions.  We need to look at it again, also having a coment from Indira and/or Sibel would be awesome.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I found the referenced article (which I will post later) but it doesn't mention Hubbell, however I found another one that does.  The author must have known about that already and just threw that in there with his otherwise referenced source.
________________________________________________________
SNOW JOB: THE CIA, COCAINE, AND BILL CLINTON

Part 2: The Money Trail

<!--#include file="Requests.inc"-->

How the CIA laundered millions in drug profits from Mena and paid for Clinton's 1992 election campaign.

by John Dee

* * *

In part one of this article, we examined a CIA-supervised
cocaine smuggling operation based during the '80s in Mena, Arkansas. We also detailed evidence of then-Governor Clinton's role in suppressing evidence, mishandling federal funds, even blocking a congressional level investigation into the affair. While Clinton's at-least tacit role in the Mena cover-up continues to this day (he has yet to authorize any investigation into the charges), behind the scenes are highly secretive, quasi-independent elements within the US intelligence community who are handling the actual machinery.

In a high level deal between the National Security Council and the Medellin cartel, millions of dollars were paid to Felix Rodriguez, the CIA's commander at El Salvador's Ilopango Air Base, and others (including Manuel Noriega) in exchange for access to the CIA pipeline for Medellin cocaine. In this conclusion, we examine the secret network which laundered the Mena drug money. We also find that these same covert bankers, with close ties to BCCI, financed Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. [It should be noted that since the publication of part one, this writer has learned that Buddy Young was appointed by Pres. Clinton to head the Dallas Regional Office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Young was Governor Clinton's chief of security, and the man who framed Terry Reed for trying to quit the Mena operation. FEMA, of course, is the agency empowered to sieze control of the country in the event of martial law.]

HIGH FINANCE

There is one estimate that Barry Seal ran as much as $100 million worth of cocaine a month--$1.2 billion a year--through the Mena airbase.

Former Mena pilot Terry Reed has testified that large sums of money were being laundered through leading Arkansas banks and bond brokers (a pattern of investment also being examined by a federal investigator just as his researches were abruptly terminated).[1] For a period, he says, satchels containing $10 million in laundered cash were airdropped weekly at the airfield. These funds did not include other secret bank arrangements.

CBS News correspondant Bill Plante has said that there is trail of "tens of millions of dollars in cocaine profits [from Mena], and we don't know where it leads. It is a trail that has been blocked by the National Security Council."[2]

But despite the efforts of the NSC, there actually is a pretty good indication of where the money went (beside's the Secret Team's pockets). Money from CIA drug smuggling operations is known to have been laundered through BCCI, a massive transnational mega-bank set up and run to launder "covert funds" for intelligence and criminal clients.[3]

Coincidentally, BCCI has extremely deep roots in Arkansas. In fact, President Clinton has ties with some of BCCI's top shareholders. Most of the money for Clinton's 1992 campaign came from these people. They are the same people who were also raking in fortunes through companies which were supplying the Mena operation. In plain words, President Clinton was elected with money from CIA guns-and-drugs operations.

'COMPANY' PROPERTY & BIOWARFARE

One business in the CIA's Arkansas network was Park-on-Meter, or POM Inc. Based in Russellvile, AR its current annual revenue is estimated at $18 million.[4]

Commercially, it produces parking meters and machine parts. Covertly, it was manufacturing untraceable custom weapons parts for the Contras and shipping them to Mena. POM had subcontracted the job from a CIA front called Iver Johnson's Firearms (now bankrupt), of Jacksonville, AR.[5]

Former CIA scientist Michael Riconosciuto[6] has told reporters that he was closely involved in these covert arms operations at POM. He claims that he supervised high-tech equipment transfers to POM, and had developed software to help launder the Mena drug money.[7] He also says that POM manufactured external fuel tanks for C-130 transport planes.

This would have allowed the massive cargo planes to travel the long distances to Central and South America.[8] He also claims to have worked on fuel-air explosives specifically for use in the Contra war.[9] But Riconosciuto's most disturbing allegations concern his work in developing chemical and biological weapons in a project connected to POM. He says that in 1983 the company, in conjunction with the infamous "private" police force Wackenhut and Stormont Laboratories in Woodland, CA, began production of the delivery system for the new chemical and biological warfare CBW weaponry for use in the Contra war.

He claims that POM was to receive chemical agents from the 354th Chemical Company of the Army Reserve, located on property across from the corrugated barn housing the POM facilities, for use in small explosive devices made with the same equipment POM used to produce parking meters.[10]

When contacted by journalist Alexander Cockburn, Stormont Labs acknowledged only "discussions" with Wackenhut about biological weapons. Wackenhut denied ever working with POM.

POM pres. Seth Ward admitted that the company had defense contracts, but only for "re-entry nose cones for the nuclear warheads on the MX missile and nozzles for rocket engines," not CBW weapons. Ward also falsely denied that POM ever accepted any money from the ADFA.

THE A.D.F.A.

Park-On-Meter was the first company to receive a loan from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), receiving $2.85 million tax-free with low interest. Growing out of a program offering low-interest loans for housing construction, the ADFA was created by the state legislature at Clinton's urging in 1985.

Its ostensible purpose was to attract capital to the state for the purpose of economic development, offering companies long-term loans financed through the sale of tax-exempt bonds.[11] The ADFA took over much of the state's bond-issuing power and gave the governor the ability "essentially to create money". The ADFA has no regulator and no legislative oversight. The governor appoints the board and has the right to approve or disapprove every bond issue. There is virtually no limit on the value of bonds that can be issued. One financial advisor described this scenario as a "prescription for abuse".[12]

The principle bond underwriter for the ADFA was Lasater & Company, founded in 1983 by Dan Lasater. In just two years Lasater & Co. underwote $664 million in Arkansas bonds. A child of poverty born in Indiana, Dan Lasater made his fortune when he founded Ponderosa, a steakhouse chain that went public in 1971. He then moved to Little Rock, AR.

Lasater had close ties with Bill Clinton, through his friendship with Clinton's mother and half-brother, Roger. By the early '80s, Lasater was known throughout Little Rock for his extravagant parties and fast living. In 1982 he was one of the biggest contributers to Clinton's election campaign, when he won back the governorship after a term out of office. When Lasater formed his company in 1983, the firm became a frequent underwriter of Arkansas municipal bond issues.[13] Then, in 1985 Clinton gave Lasater & Co. the ADFA plum as a quid pro quo repayment for his campaign debt.

Terry Reed alleges in court documents and his recent book, Compromised:

Clinton, Bush and the CIA, (NY: S.P.I. Books, 1994), that Barry Seal made deposits of cash from the Mena drug operation directly to Lasater & Co. Reed also says that Lasater introduced Seal to him once as a client of his, although Lasater's attorney denies the charge. This drug money laundering was in addition to services ADFA was providing to channel large amounts of cash to POM and other companies. Former ADFA marketing director Larry Nichols claims that no one was actually buying these bonds, that they were instead sold to out-of-state banks, two with connections to BCCI.

The losses from these junk bonds were then mixed into the vortex of vanishing money in the S&L crisis.[14] Nichols and other witnesses state that ADFA used BCCI branches in Florida and Georgia, as well as Garfield Ridge Trust & Savings Bank in Chicago. That bank is partially owned by indicted congressman Dan Rostenkowsi.[15] Other shady deals known to be made by the ADFA included the transfer of $50 million into Fuji Bank in the Caymen Islands and using a trading account belonging to Dennis Patrick to move another $50 million in junk bonds.[16]

Awash in drug money and good connections, Lasater became a heavy user of cocaine. The noose tightened when his friend Roger Clinton, who was then working as Lasater's driver, came under scrutiny by narcotics police. Lasater sent him to his Florida horse-farm to lie low, but to no avail. The pair were eventually arrested and indicted on drug charges.

Lasater was charged with "social distribution" of drugs and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison. He served only six months, until Governor Clinton pardoned him. (Lasater is now back in Little Rock and still active in business. His aptly-named Phoenix Corporation has been bidding on assets being sold off by the Resolution Trust Company. Some of these very S&Ls collapsed precisely because of Lasater & Co.'s illegal bond trading.)

THE NAME OF THE ROSE

POM president/co-owner Seth Ward's brother-in-law is Webster ("Webb") Hubbell, who served on POM's board during the early '80s. Later Webb Hubbell would become a partner in the Rose Law Firm, the Little Rock firm which employed Hillary Rodham Clinton and is currently at the center of the Whitewater scandal. While a partner at Rose, Hubbell served as POM's lawyer on a number of cases, including a failed claim of patent infringement.

Hubbell co-wrote the documents which created the ADFA in 1985. He also represented Madison Savings and Loan, owned by McDougal. Later, he served on the Resolution Trust Corporation during its takeover of Madison. Hubbell neglected to inform the RTC of this conflict of interest.[17]

Clinton appointed Hubbell as the Associate Attorney General, the number-three position in the Justice Department (although he was viewed by many as the de facto head). In December 1993 he ordered a new FBI review of the death of Danny Casolaro and the Promis software case. Only a month later Hubbell resigned under a cloud because of questions about his role in Whitewater, and a question about $1 million owned by POM to the Rose firm.[18] His resignation not only shielded him from other accusations related to Whitewater, but it also served to get POM out of the headlines.

The names of Hubbell and the Rose law firm appear on the bond issues and loan agreement papers for the largest contributions to Clinton's presidential campaign. The banks, which extended several loans of more than $3 million, were all owned by a company named Stephens Inc., which was also a primary underwriter of ADFA bonds. Stephens Inc. is owned by one Jackson T. Stephens.

EMPIRE

The names of Jackson Stephens and his companies are virtually
synonymous with the economy of Arkansas, where the family owns a large chunk of more than a dozen banks, the most exclusive hotel in Little Rock, and the building that houses Bill Clinton's Arkansas office.
The Stephens Group[19] is at the center of a multibillion-dollar empire. This includes Stephens Inc, which is the largest brokerage firm outside of New York City.

The family-owned empire includes "a maze of offshore accounts,"[20] stretching to the Middle East and Asia, with holdings that include hazardous waste incinerators in Massachusetts and Ohio, the nation's largest nursing home operator, real estate developments in the Midwest and South, oil and gas, a savings and loan in New Mexico, an insurance company, a nationwide group of manufacturing companies, and a management company for entertainers like Burt Reynolds.[21]

Stephens Inc. has long been the major underwriter and seller of municipal bonds in Arkansas, partially handling (though not managing) more than 70% of the ADFA bonds alone.[22] It has also provided financing for firms such as Wal-Mart Stores. Last year, the company acquired the Donrey Media Group for $500 million. This company owns 53 daily newspapers, 71 non-dailies, outdoor advertising, TV broadcasting and cable television companies.

Donrey is valued at about $950 million.[23] Thanks to Jackson's 37 year old son Warren, Stephens Inc. has investment banking offices in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Kansas City. Some 240 banks in 21 states, including Wells Fargo & Co. and Nations-Bank Corp. now turn to the Stephens brokerage services. According to the New York Times, "for decades he [Stephens] has maintained close ties to Presidential administrations of both political parties." In fact, Jackson Stephens' Bal Harbor condo is neighbor to Senator Bob Dole's and former Speaker of the House Thomas P. O'Neill's.[24]

Stephens also has a close personal relationship with Rose senior partner William H. Kennedy 3d, as well as with Bill and Hillary Clinton. No one else raised more money for Clinton's presidential bid, one which saw his campaign manager James Carville married to the Bush campaign manager, Mary Matallan. Amidst such strange bedfellows, perhaps it should not be so surprising that Stephens had been a life-long top Republican. He was a major contributor to George Bush and part of "Team 100", a Republican group where membership required a $100,000 donation to Bush's election campaign.

His second wife, Mary Anne, was the 1988 co-chairman of the Bush for President drive.[25] (When Stephens divorced Mary Anne in 1991, he succeeded in getting the court records sealed.[26]) In fact, the Stephens family disliked Clinton, consistently bankrolling candidates who ran against him as governor. Reportedly, Witt Stephens (Jackson's brother) habitually referred to Clinton as "that boy." The Stephens clan evidently had a major change of heart when it appeared that George Bush's presidency was doomed and That Boy Bill was the likeliest successor. Jackson Stephens was also the main man behind the deal which secured a huge contract to drill oil in Bahrain for George Bush's son, George Jr.

The company, Harken Energy, never sank a well and even at the time was millions of dollars in debt. Although Harken Energy continues to lose money, Bush Jr. and the other directors of the company receive six-figure salaries and generous stock options. Stephens was able to convince the Union Bank of Switzerland to invest $25 million in Harken.[27] In 1984, the company was taken over by Alan Quasha, whose father was deeply involved in the Nugan and Bank scandal in Australia. The bank was founded and run by a team of covert operators who laundered billions in profits from CIA drug smuggling out of Southeast Asia.

(See The Crimes of Patriots (Touchstone, 1987) by Jonathan Kwitny.) Bush Jr. has quite a number of companies through which he somehow makes millions of dollars even though they never make a profit. Another such company was appropriately called Arbusto Energy Co.[28] It's initial investor group included Bush family cronies like James R. Bath and the likes of Saudi financier and BCCI frontman Ghaith Pharaon, and major BCCI sharholder Khaled bin Mahfouz.
Interestingly enough, Jackson Stephens made a fortune off of BCCI.

BANK OF COKE & CLINTON

Fact: of the known BCCI assets in the US--approximately $60
billion--only $1.9 billion was ever located by investigators.
Fact: Despite pleading guilty to 31 felony counts--and the
missing $58.1 billion--BCCI paid only a simple $15 million fine in the United States, in a deal offered by Attorney General Richard Thornberg in 1990. (Thornberg was succeeded by William Pelham Barr, a "retired" CIA employee.)

And you could say Jackson Stephens had close ties to BCCI--he was the one who brokered the very arrival of BCCI in America in 1977. He is an old friend of former Carter official Bert Lance and was investment banker to Lance's National Bank of Georgia. Stephens introduced Lance to Saudi billionaire Ghaith Pharaon (who, fronting for BCCI, would later buy the National Bank of Georgia) and to BCCI founder Agha Hassan Abedi. SEC documents show that Stephens also steered Abedi to take over First American Bankshares in Washington DC.[29]

In 1990, another BCCI investor, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, doubled his stake in Stephens' Worthen National Bank to a $10 million share. Worthen National is a Stephens-owned bank which extended a $3 million line of credit (at a lucrative rate of interest) to Clinton's presidential campaign in January 1992. (The Stephens family itself donated $100,000 to the Clinton campaign.) Later, Worthen became the Clinton campaign's depository for $55 million in federal campaign funds.

Last year Worthen National and Stephens Inc. were under investigation by the Federal Reserve last year for federal banking and antitrust violations. The investigation centered in part around misleading documents filed to the Fed in 1984 by William H. Kennedy 3d. Kennedy is now associate White House counsel and formerly the head of the Rose law firm.

And when former Whitewater special prosecutor Robert Fiske showed up in Little Rock, Worthen had a mysterious fire in which important documents related to the case were lost.

BCCI & THE CIA

The congressional Iran-Contra committee noted that then-CIA
director William Casey wanted to establish an offshore entity capable of conducting operations in furtherance of US foregin policy that was "stand-alone"-- financially independent of appropriated funds, and, in turn, congressional oversight.

Casey got his wish. The CIA was used BCCI and a complex offshore
financial system to set up its own unregulated, private, foreign policy apparatus. In this way, it could ignore Congress and carry out its own political objectives throughout the world.

There is no question that BCCI was intimately involved in
covertly funding the decade's most heinous secret wars. "Black funds" travelled through BCCI for the Contra war, the Iranian-Israeli payoffs, and large covert wars in Afganistan and Angola.[30]

Since its inception in 1972, BCCI was born and bred to move
billions of dollars of blood money with no one seeing it. Time magazine wrote of the bank, "Superlatives are quickly exhausted: it is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever."

Even enemies were apparently welcome at the trough. A 1987 intelligence report by the French security services, later supported by US Congressional findings, stated that "BCCI had commercial links with Abu Nidal and front companies set up to finance his radical Palestinian group. The report also said Kuwaiti embassy officials paid $60 million into Nidal's BCCI account in London in 1987.[31] (This would have been around the time of the first Persian Gulf "Crisis", when Kuwaiti ships were reflagged as American and escorted by US warships.) The bank also maintained "cozy relations" with Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the PLO.

BCCI shareholder/frontman Abdul-Rouf Khalil is known to have
Saudi CIA connections, and frequents the office of the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia.

The chief attorney for BCCI's powerful legal team was Clark
Clifford, a former Secretary of Defense and advisor to four presidents. His influence stretched even into the Federal Reserve. When Clifford was tried and convicted for his role in BCCI, Clinton himself pardoned him, ostensibly out of concern for the old man's health.

Perhaps most significantly, the US Senate has investigated the role
in BCCI of former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms. Helms aided the 1978 takeover attempt of First American Bank on behalf of BCCI Ltd, Georgia (Stephens' bank deal).[32]

Richard Helms was the Deputy Director of (covert) Operations at the CIA in the 1960s, under Nixon. Not surprisingly, his projects included the Laos operation, which first brought together the Secret team which would later wreak such havoc in the '80s.

Helms conducted the CIA's Chile campaign, climaxing with the assassination of Salvador Allende and the installation of Pinochet's fascist military state.

Helms was then CIA Director in the '70s. He later served as the US Ambassador to Iran. He joined the Shah's payroll and declared himself an agent of a foreign government after retiring.[33]

FULL SERVICE BANK

Not surprisingly, the sprawling BCCI transnational bank network
has been directly linked to the laundering of CIA drug money.
John Blum, a former chief special counsel for the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee's investigation of BCCI chaired by John Kerry, disclosed that the US Dept. of Justice "failed to act" on substantial evidence of money laundering, including a Chicago operation that dated back to 1985.[34] Blum also said that in 1988 he met BCCI employees in Florida who detailed drug-money laundering activities by the bank. He said the Senate knew about the use of BCCI by Manuel Noriega to launder large sums of cash.

As part of the CIA drug network, Noriega received millions of dollars in kickbacks from the Medellin cartel, laundering $90 million of it through BCCI. His credit was such that BCCI executives routinely took him and his mistress out for extravagant nights on the town, running up tabs of $100,000.[35]

According to Congressional testimony by Jose Blandon, the CIA had actually advised Noriega to use BCCI as his bank. They themselves were paying an additional $200,000 a year into his account there.
BCCI's Panama branch, in the words of Time magazine, also "systematically helped Noriega loot the national treasury."[36]

HEROIN IN THE GOLD CRESCENT

BCCI's drug dealings stretched also into the Middle East.
Pakistan's finance minister, Sartaj Asis, revealed that local branches of BCCI had laundered drug money for the CIA, channelled covert CIA aid to the Afghan resistance, and also managed a multi-million dollar "slush fund" for covert operations.[37]

The CIA's Afghan effort was one of the largest of the post-WWII era.
Coincidentally, Afghanistan and Pakistan are two of the largest producers of heroin and opium in the world. (As is the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.) Thus they became part of the CIA's global drug supermarket. Even the Colombians showed up.

In what has been described as a "typical operation", a container ship from Colombia docked at night in Karachi, Pakistan. On one particular night in April 1989, "black unit operatives" paid $100,000 in bribes to Pakistan officials and then directed the unloading of massive crates. Using cranes, the crates were put onto trucks and taken to a secure airport where they were loaded onto an unmarked 707 jet. The loading was supervised by an American CIA officer.[38]

From Karachi the plane flew to Czechoslovakia, electronically disguised as a Pakistan International Airlines commercial flight. From Czechoslovakia the drug laden plane flew into the United States.[39]

The network which supported these routine missions thus moved heroin from the "Golden Crescent" and cocaine from South America through Europe and into the United States. The routes closely parallel those used by the CIA since the 1950s to move heroin from the Corsican mafia. The famous French Connection was a small fragment of the huge international network set up in a deal between the CIA and gangster Lucky Luciano.

(For a superb history of the early days of CIA drug running, see The Great Heroin Coup [South End Press, 1980] by Henrik Kruger.)

CONCLUSION

While Clinton is clearly a mere cog in the secret network, close examination of his friends and backers repeatedly betrays their deep connections in some of the most heinous covert operations in modern history. These include the smuggling of cocaine into the US by government officials, the theft of billions of dollars through bank and S&L fraud, top-secret bio-chemical warfare conducted against the civilian population of Nicaragua, and campaigns of terror, framing, and even assassination.

Furthermore, there is evidence which points pretty clearly to CIA's rigging of the US election in an operation which makes the October Surprise look like a game of tiddly winks. Using drug profits and money stolen from BCCI and other corrupt banks, the CIA and its co-conspirators actually paid for the election of a man ostensibly their rival. They have gone from merely sabotaging US elections to installing their own to appear as a rival.

The revelations of connections to the Casolaro "Octopus" are also profoundly disturbing. There are, in fact, surprising similarities between the apparently unrelated scenarios, all the way down to the fortuitous deaths of key witnesses and investigators, most of whom showa surprising propensity for dying within Treasury Dept. jurisdiction.

This story is far from being fully told. It is this writer's opinion that the United States is amidst a silent crisis which threatens to annihilate any vestige of constitutional government, freedom, and privacy. The government's use of the Promis software means that they have had the ability to track dissident populations--within the US and abroad--to a degree previously left only to the most laughable science fiction.
This story, and the tentacles it could only touch upon, describes a nation--the most powerful on earth--which has successfully been seized by a small army of blood thirsty pirates. It is a coup d'etat of astounding proportions and astonishing efficiency, one which begs a whole new definition of the word.

This is a story which makes one view the world through new eyes.
The question that remains: is Clinton a part of the Directorate, or is he himself a mere--perhaps unwitting--pawn in an incredibly cynical plan to destroy democracy as we know it this country?

SIDEBAR TO ARTICLE

L.J. DAVIS 'ASSAULT' A HOAX!

In part one of this article, we reported claims by _New Republic_ journalist L.J. Davis that he was bludgeoned into unconsciousness and important papers related to his investigation of Whitewater and Mena stolen. Davis, with the help of such high-profile cheerleaders as the Wall Street Journal, claims his assault was part of a massive campaign to silence (even murder) those who might be able to expose alleged high-crimes committed by Clinton.

But new evidence has surfaced which thoroughly discredits Davis' story. Lies of Our Times, in its June 1994 issue, reported:

According to reporting by Richard Fricker[1] in the New York Observer on April 4, Davis had been drinking that night ("Off the Record," p. 6). The Arkansas Democrat Gazette quoted the bartender at Davis's hotel saying that Davis had been in the bar for the four hours he claimed to be face down in his room (Noel Oman, "Hotel Records, Writer's Claims Don't Jibe," April 11). Far more important than Davis's sobriety, however, Davis himself told Fricker that the pages of his notebook were partially torn, not missing. "I could have done it myself when I stuffed the damn thing back in my shoulder bag," Davis told Fricker. Thus, even if Davis were assaulted, the evidence for a political motive simply doesn't exist.

Similar tales of mysterious assaults against reporters investigating Clinton have come from the likes of Gary Lane, reporter for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network (CBN). CBN has documented ties to intelligence and propaganda operatives of the CIA. At this writing, no further information about Lane's alleged trauma has emerged. Indeed, journalists are not the only ones involved in the Mena story with interesting friends and connections. Former ADFA employee Larry Nichols has proved to be a tireless barker of all manner of outrageous claims against Clinton, including L.J. Davis' hoaxed assault. As reported in Part 1, Nichols never officially left the CIA. It is quite possible that he is a CIA disinformation agent acting under secret orders to implicate Clinton in crimes real or imagined.

----
[1] Last year, Fricker wrote an excellent article for _Wired_ magazine which detailed the Inslaw/Promis/Casolaro/Octopus story: "The INSLAW Octopus-- Software Piracy, Conspiracy, Cover-Up, Stonewalling, Covert Action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice."


ENDNOTES:

[1] Alexander Cockburn, "Chapters in the Recent History of Arkansas", Beat the Devil [regular column],