Confirmed FBI Cover-Up Sibel Edmonds Nuke Secrets Case

[DJ BALL]

Hopefully the world media picks up on this.
Wouldn't it be nice to see all these shitheads be held accountable for their treason !

[kag9000]

Cross posted from the News Tips.

FBI whistleblower states US State Dept Officials Selling Nuclear Secrets
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=21080.0


UK Customs whistleblower in Secret Inquiry Over Smuggled Nuke Ring
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=21076.0

[Dig]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece

[bigron]

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets

The Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece

01/05/08 "Sunday Times" -- - - A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.

Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.

She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act.

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.

Edmonds said: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.”

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing.

She was able to discuss the case with The Sunday Times because, by the end of January 2002, the justice department had shut down the programme.

The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds’s allegations: “If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.”

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

How Pakistan got the bomb, then sold it to the highest bidders

1965 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, says: “If India builds the bomb we will eat grass . . . but we will get one of our own”

1974 Nuclear programme becomes increased priority as India tests a nuclear device

1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, steals secrets from Dutch uranium plant. Made head of his nation’s nuclear programme by Bhutto, now prime minister

1976 onwards Clandestine network established to obtain materials and technology for uranium enrichment from the West

1985 Pakistan produces weapons-grade uranium for the first time

1989-91 Khan’s network sells Iran nuclear weapons information and technology

1991-97 Khan sells weapons technology to North Korea and Libya

1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: “I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it”

2001 CIA chief George Tenet gathers officials for crisis summit on the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to other countries

2001 Weeks before 9/11, Khan’s aides meet Osama Bin Laden to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device

2001 After 9/11 proliferation crisis becomes secondary as Pakistan is seen as important ally in war on terror

2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists

2004 Khan placed under house arrest and confesses to supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with weapons technology. He is pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf

2006 North Korea tests a nuclear bomb

2007 Renewed fears that bomb may fall into hands of Islamic extremists as killing of Benazir Bhutto throws country into turmoil

[Dig]

http://www.atlargely.com/2008/01/sibel-speaks-pa.html

Sibel Speaks Part II: Naming Names...

Update Below

I have decided that after years of not getting anyone to publish what I have found out about the Edmonds case, I am simply going to give you folks some names. I won't explain what the allegations are, or how these people might fit together or even if they fit together. I also don't claim to have all the names or know the full story by any means.  But I am certain, that brilliant bloggers, researchers, and journalists will finally figure it out:

UPDATE: I have made some changes to the list. I have removed Lantos, despite what I have heard being confirmed by Sibel's gallery of people. I have added Kissinger too.

I have also added some extra points of information for some of the players some of the players (I will fill out the rest as time permits). And, I have added some names to the "phrases group."

Richard Perle: Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, under Bush. Member of JINSA, WINEP, PNAC, Co-Chair and Director of Hollinger (think Conrad Black). See also Hutchison Whampoa. See also Trireme Partners LLP.

Doug Feith: Defense Undersecretary of Defense for Policy during the Bush administration's first term. Lost his security clearances in 1982 for allegations of passing classified NSC documents to the Israeli embassy. Headed the Office of Special Plans (OSP) to cook up intel for the Iraq war. Founded Feith & Zell law firm, major client Northrup Grumman. Also started a lobbying company,  International Advisors, Inc., major client, Turkey. Perle joined him in this venture.

Eric Edelman
Marc Grossman
Larry Franklin 
Dennis Hastert
Roy Blunt
Dan Burton
Bob Livingston
Stephen Solarz
Graham Fuller
David Makovsky
Alan Markovsky
Enver Yusuf
Sabri Sayari
Mehmet Eymur
Henry Kissinger (He is not shown in Sibel's gallery, but I believe him to be on of the MIA photos)

And a few phrases for you folks to play around with (in no particular order):

Gray Wolves
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
RAND Corporation
PNAC
East Turkmenistan
Iran
Syria
Foreign Policy
King Faisal
ISI
Northrup Grumman
American Turkish Council
WINEP

Now start digging kids!!
Posted by Larisa Alexandrovna on January 06, 2008 at 07:48 PM | Permalink

Technorati Tags: Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Dennis Hastert, Doug Feith, Eric Edelman, Larry Franklin, Marc Grossman, Richard Perle, Roy Blunt, Tom Lantos

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Comments

Larissa:

Motive has everything to do with the topic at hand. It is critical to connecting the co-conspirators.

Ignoring motive in a search for the truth is not anything you would ever do in your investigative reporting, which is awesome and much appreciated.

Creation of "Eretz Israel" is in fact one of many motives to be considered. As Afghanistan, then Iraq, and soon Iran fall under occupation, all elements must be considered. You mentioned PNAC. The word Zionism is mentioned three times in the first paragraph. THREE TIMES.

Let's ignore that key element, and see if we can still discover the entire truth, shall we?

Exposing the entire truth can actually save peace loving Jews the world over a great deal of angst. Please do your part, and don't restrict the search for the entire truth, no matter where it leads.

Thank you.

Posted by: anonymous | January 07, 2008 at 09:14 AM

Larissa said:

"I find it offensive that the term Zionism is being used as though Jews are behind everything."

Who said that? You said that? Zionism and Judaism are completely unrelated. One is a religion that you practice - and is often misused to define a race of people. Israel is a country, not a religion.

A true search for the truth would allow all words to be used in a key word search, no?

RESPONSE FROM LARISA ALEXANDROVNA
I know the difference between them. The problem is, that most people don't. The other issue is that you post implied something with regard to Dov Z, Zionism, and 9/11. Do you see his name on the Sibel list? If I misunderstood you, then I apologize. But given the abuse of the term by those seeking to attack Jews, I have grown entirely opposed to using that term and frankly, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Posted by: anonymous | January 07, 2008 at 08:38 AM

add to that list:

Dov Zakheim

Key words: 9/11, Sysplan, Comptroller, Zionist

Kobi Alexander:

Keywords: 9/11, Comverse, warrantless wiretapping, fugitive, cheney, witness protection program

Ken Lay:

Keywords: Fake California Energy Crisis, Still Alive

RESPONSE FROM LARISA ALEXANDROVNA
Okay, can we please keep the Zionist bullshit out of comments at my site. Most of the people named are not Jewish or Zionists. Fascism is not Zionism, although some Zionists have become fascists. The point is, I find it offensive that the term Zionism is being used as though Jews are behind everything. Not specifically your comment, but just what I see all the time now. I am a Jew, my family are Jews. If there was a big ass conspiracy, then why the hell were we not invited to the secret meetings?

Do me a favor, respect my wishes and don't post those kind of remarks.

Posted by: anonymous | January 07, 2008 at 08:22 AM

Many thanks, Larisa. :-)
Check email.

Posted by: Matt | January 07, 2008 at 07:41 AM

Great times for women. When will the men in the MSM step up and speak truth to power?

Answer: when they are no longer chickenshit.

Posted by: Dredd | January 07, 2008 at 06:02 AM

In the interest of complete fairness, it isn't kosher to print names without specific allegations. That's not unlike our practice of holding people in prison without access to a lawyer for years because they "might be terrorists."

That said, there's no ideal way to get to the bottom of the Sibel Edmonds story. If government officials can censor evidence of their own treachery because the information is "classified," then we're no better than the worst totalitarian country.

RESPONSE FROM LARISA ALEXANDROVNA
The allegations are already there, this is not the first time Edmonds has dropped clues. You now have names to plug in, it is that simple. Use Google:)

Posted by: Robert Lockwood Mills | January 07, 2008 at 05:30 AM

interesting that on the wikipedia article on the terrorist group gray wolves, there is a girl using the same, or a similar, hand sign so much like the satanic sign that we have been seeing the bushes and bill clinton using so much in the last few years. do an image search for bush and satanism. kind of interesting how it all ties in to this new world order, fascism , satanic thing. not sure i buy into the satanism thing but its harder not to the more this comes out.

RESPONSE FROM LARISA ALEXANDROVNA
Ira, if you go down this path, you will likely start seeing little green men. Clinton is not part of some Satanic cult. The Wolves, the Brotherhood, etc., are not part of a Satanic cult.

In fact, what these groups are really and in all honesty far closer to is the neo-Nazi model. The Muslim Brotherhood worked closely with Hitler, for example. These are political groups (fascists) used by criminal networks. The religious element is only important to the lowest foot soldiers. This has nothing to do with religion for the higher ups. It is about money and power.

Clinton has nothing to do with these groups. You might consider, however, Henry Kissinger and Nixon.

Posted by: ira | January 07, 2008 at 05:19 AM

one more name to add to the list (based on Luke Ryland's analysis of Sibel's States Secrets Priviledge gallery)

ATC head and end to end nuclear review chairperson Brent Scowcroft.

"Global Guardian" 9/11 E-4B

RESPONSE FROM LARISA ALEXANDROVNA
I don't know if Scowcroft is simply a bystander who happens to be affiliated with ATC or if he is involved in anything. I don't have not found anything that directly implicates him, which is why I have not named him.

As for the war games, why do you think Scowcroft is related? I don't see the connection.

Posted by: WeCanChangeTheWorld | January 07, 2008 at 03:23 AM

Nice shootin', kid

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | January 07, 2008 at 02:08 AM

Larisa, came here via Cannonfire. Had you read the 'Vanity Fair' article on Sibel Edmonds (08/15/05, in September issue, article entitled "An Inconvenient Patriot")? Perhaps either the publication or the author David Rose might be interested.

RESPONSE FROM LARISA ALEXANDROVNA
Yes, I have read it. I know David. Vanity Fair scrubbed a good deal out of his original piece. Just as the Times would not list the full allegations and names of the people involved. It is not that journalists are not interested, it is that no one will publish this story. Believe me, I have tried. Luke can vouch for that as we met through my efforts on this story and his interest in this story.

Posted by: Dawn | January 07, 2008 at 01:56 AM

My question is for Henry Waxman, the pit bull of the Democratic Party: Why are you wasting time on steroids? Who cares about Clemens and the others! This is about lying, spying, destruction of our constitution, criminal acts by your fellow members of congress, national security, Israel and Turkey (our so called allies), this could be about Tom Lantos Henry - what is Tom doing on the list? Why are you willing to host baseball players and not listen to further information about nukes, bin Laden, Pakistan, Kahn, India, all of the names listed by Larissa, and most of all why are you not listening to Sibel? Do tell us pray tell.

Posted by: victoria2dc | January 07, 2008 at 01:41 AM

My question is for Henry Waxman, the pit bull of the Democratic Party: Why are you wasting time on steroids? Who cares about Clemens and the others! This is about lying, spying, destruction of our constitution, criminal acts by your fellow members of congress, national security, Israel and Turkey (our so called allies), this could be about Tom Lantos Henry - what is Tom doing on the list? Why are you willing to host baseball players and not listen to further information about nukes, bin Laden, Pakistan, Kahn, India, all of the names listed by Larissa, and most of all why are you not listening to Sibel? Do tell us pray tell.

Posted by: victoria2dc | January 07, 2008 at 01:40 AM

Grey wolves not gray wolves

Posted by: lawdog | January 07, 2008 at 01:35 AM


Thinking the people would go nuts and demand full investigations, I watched as Abramoff and Libby both got free passes by media investigators, a neck breaking turning of the cheek from the (so-called) Christian movement and the cult of all evil, the Neo-Con's. All are controlled by money. One could almost hear the mass winking that no doubt went around Washington. Realizing the fix is in, America's inability to meet face to face with the truth, had arrived. I think America knows it's day's of freedom is near , when it's government is nothing but a mafia crime syndicate feared by the people.

The list of names above are men who should have been put into prison years ago. They who can no longer hide from justice? They are the justice system. The truth is bursting at the seams.

Posted by: William H | January 07, 2008 at 01:24 AM

Turkmenistan pipeline dreamin' after grueling games on the grand chessboard

Posted by: jr | January 07, 2008 at 12:21 AM

Every one of them with dual Israeli citizenship! So is this going to bring out the firing squads? I doubt it you f**king sheep.

Posted by: Dancingdog | January 06, 2008 at 11:22 PM

Is this related to the Sibel Edmonds' State Secrets gallery just published at Sibel's website? Any idea why she published it? Is there trouble brewing?

Posted by: kenoma | January 06, 2008 at 09:10 PM

If this doesn't bring the whole f**ing thing down I don't know what will. I've followed this case for two years. Over and over the frayed edges of one scandal met another with the same names that you have listed popping up. Is this the Rosetta Stone? Does Sibel have documents? If this finally goes nova watch all the rats scurry for protection.

Posted by: corky44 | January 06, 2008 at 08:59 PM

[Nailer]

Dont forget to add to your for sale list the Corrupt senators /congressmen/ and 1 traitorous President.

One slightly used whitehouse  with good location , comes furnished with Disrespect for the Citizens, National Nuclear secrets , shredded US Constitution and Defiled Bill of Rights.

Money cant buy you love but it can buy you your own Government.

Only $9.95Billion  oops forgot to add the $90 Trillion National Debt .
Oh you just need the Nuclear Secrets , well they can be had for the price of a corrupt senator $ 3 Million.

[Dig]

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
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5518
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... [UPDATED SEVERAL TIMES]

-- By Brad Friedman

[Updated --- now several times --- with a number of significant items, additional info, background, reaction and analysis from around the blogosphere, all at the end of the article.]

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, follow 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-VT), 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...


In our mid-November follow-up article, the legendary 1970's whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had excoriated the U.S. media for their failure to cover the story, even as Edmonds was risking jail in order to expose crimes and massive corruption, allegedly, in the highest levels of the government. At the time, Ellsberg told us that he believed the information she had been forced by the Administration to withhold "is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers."

Ellsberg is known for having released thousands of pages of top-secret Defense Department documents, concerning America's involvement in Vietnam, to the New York Times in 1971, in what became a landmark whistleblower case.

"I can tell the American public exactly what it is, and what it is that they are covering up," Edmonds had promised in our October article. But it was, in fact, a UK media outlet that finally took up the Turkish-born, American citizen's offer for the whistleblower interview. The result is the release of explosive details on at least one aspect of the U.S. national security-related secrets that she is now willing to disclose.

"What I found was damning," Edmonds tells the Times about the information she learned while at the FBI concerning the nuclear blackmarket activities and proliferation of several government agencies, including her own unit at the FBI. "While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on."

Among the newly disclosed information from Edmonds, in the extraordinary front-page Times article tonight:

● Foreign intelligence agents from Turkey, Israel and Pakistan enlisted the support of high-level US officials in order to acquire a network of moles deep inside of sensitive American military and nuclear agencies, including "PhD students – with security clearance [at] Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent."

● Members of the diplomatic community were given lists of potential "moles" at the sensitive installations. Edmonds tells the Times: "the lists contained all their 'hooking points', which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to."

● Well-known US officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal US nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a wiretap discussing "nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama," in which the agent allegedly is heard saying: "We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000."

● Nuclear secrets were then subsequently sold by foreign agents to America's enemies, including Iran, North Korea and Libya.

● Pakistani officials involved in the nuclear black market network have significant cross-over with al-Qaeda and 9/11. Officials such as the chief of ISI, Pakistan's spy agency, allegedly sent $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, and aides of A.Q. Kahn --- who had used the stolen secrets to develop nuclear weapons for Pakistan --- met with Osama bin Laden "weeks before 9/11...to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device."

● Elements of the US government have repeatedly shut down investigations into these crimes under the guise of protecting "certain diplomatic relations."

● The US government has been aware of all of the above information since at least 2001.

Read the Times' full article for many more disturbing details and connected dots.

But we can add to at least one item of note in their report, concerning an unnamed "well-known senior official in the US State Department," allegedly heard to have received bribes as part of the network. According to the paper:
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.
...
"In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe."
...
Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

While that "well-known senior" State Department official is not named by the paper, Australia's Luke Ryland, who writes at a number of sites as "Lukery", is perhaps the world's foremost expert concerning the Sibel Edmonds story. Ryland has told The BRAD BLOG that the official, unnamed by the Times, is Marc Grossman.

Grossman was the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey ('94-'97), the Asst. Sec. of State for European Affairs ('97-'00) and served under Colin Powell and Richard Armitage at the State Department from 2001 to 2005 as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He's currently employed as the Vice Chairman of the D.C. and China-based consulting firm, The Cohen Group, founded by the former Republican Defense Secretary for Bill Clinton, William S. Cohen.

"The Cohen Group provides global business consulting services and advice on tactical and strategic opportunities in virtually every market," advertises the firm on the front page of their website.

Additional information on a related angle of Grossman's alleged involvement in these matters was reported by the prolific Ryland in 2006, on his blog, WotIsItGood4.

"The senior official in the State Department [who] no longer works there" offered the Times this non-denial denial of Edmonds' allegations: "If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money that’s outrageous," he reportedly said. "I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this."

Apparently, he also doesn't have anything to say, along the lines of "I never took any such money, or did any such thing," either.

"In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation," the paper writes. "While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story."

In a 15-page 2005 exposé in Vanity Fair, concerning yet another, if perhaps-related, aspect of Edmonds' allegations, British reporter David Rose detailed charges of nearly $500,000 in bribes from Turkish interests, said to have been prepared for former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). His attorney has denied those allegations, though, in another BRAD BLOG exclusive, Edmonds challenged specific details of the denial. Hastert recently resigned from Congress, sparking speculation for his sudden departure after reports by ABC News in 2006, that he was under DoJ investigation for bribery charges related to convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

In our October story, Edmonds had told us that, in addition to Hastert, she was prepared to name and give details of corruption involving at least "two other well-known" members of Congress. She told us at the time that they are both Republicans from the U.S. House and "one of them is recently no longer there."

For more details on the Edmonds case, in an easy to read primer, see "What The Heck is the Sibel Edmonds Case Anyway? And Why Should You Care About It?", a recent BRAD BLOG item based, in part, on the reporting of Ryland.

Whether the Sunday Times story tonight will give permission to the U.S. corporate media to finally pick up the story, and cover the many still-unreported aspects of Edmonds' charges, remains to be seen.

If any of them wish to contact us, we'll be happy, as we've offered many times, to help put them in contact with her.

As our friend Joseph Cannon mentions tonight, in relation to our coverage of the at least 4-years-overdue New York Times Magazine's Sunday cover story on the disaster of e-voting: "Journalism delayed is journalism denied."

[Dig]

UPDATE 12:06pm PT: Several notable reactions, furtherances of today's Sunday Times front page stunner...

● As usual, Luke Ryland offers tons of info, analysis, links and background in his dKos coverage (cross-posted at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak). Just a couple of the notable passages offering additional context on the story, from his coverage today:
The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks - including four associates of key targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: "We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans." Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's investigation.

...and this...
high-level Pentagon officials were maintaining 'dossiers' on the sexual and financial proclivities of their underlings in order to be able to blackmail them.

I know that many of you have been (rightly) concerned about FISA, and many of you have (rightly) been confused by the inexplicable behaviour of Democrats in Congress, and wonder why they behave as though they are being blackmailed.

Now you know.

● Rightwing blogger and "9/11 conspiracy theory debunker", Pat Curley, a previous --- and we would add, irresponsible --- critic of Edmonds' at ScrewLooseChange, offers what can only be seen as an ersatz apology for his previous coverage, in his item on today's news. Still, we note he has yet to retract, or issue a specific apology to Edmonds, for comments made in his previous irresponsible coverage. Given the focus of the Screw Loose Change site, we'd think journalistic integrity would be paramount, and that he'd add a retraction/apology to his previous coverage, if he's actually had the change of heart today's post would seem to indicate.

● Blogger Joseph Cannon describes the piece as a "BOMBSHELL!" and offers additional details on Pakistan's ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad --- who is central to the Times story, and Edmonds allegations --- including his relationship to both al-Qaeda, and a very cozy relationship with the neo-Cons in D.C. Writes Cannon:
Get the picture? Valerie Plame was trying to stop Khan in his tracks. But Armitage stopped Valerie Plame in her tracks. Armitage and his neocon comrades are good buddies with Mehmood Ahmad, who was engineering this trade in nukes.

● And, speaking of the Plame angle, her former CIA classmate, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson of NoQuarter notes this, about Edmonds claims of payoffs to Grossman, Hastert and others, in his coverage this morning:
The role that foreign money and intelligence officers have played in U.S. politics is not a Sibel Edmonds fantasy. The woman is simply trying to tell folks what she heard. This matter needs to be investigated. I do not believe that Sibel is making up what she heard.

UPDATE 1:14pm PT: Further reaction from the 'sphere...

● Our friend, RAW STORY investigative journalist, Larisa Alexandrovna, a longtime expert on this particular foreign affairs/nuclear black market beat, adds some thoughts and details on her at-Largely blog (and also cross-posted to Huffington Post.)

She too confirms the unnamed State Dept. official from the story to be Marc Grossman, and writes: "The Times could have published the name and also provided the denial from Grossman's camp. I find it incredibly disturbing that they would not name the official."

Noting that her source for this information is not Edmonds, she also adds the following about some of the other unnamed officials referred to in the story:
Those senior DOD officials that are not mentioned the Times, all but one are no longer in government. They are alleged to be Doug Feith, Richard Perle, among others. There is also one person who is part of these allegations, still serving in a high level position at the DOD. His last name begins with an E. [My money is on this guy: Ambassador Eric S. Edelman is the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. His last assignment was as Ambassador to the Republic of Turkey from July 2003 to June 2005. From February 2001 to June 2003, he was Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. Prior to being assigned to the Office of the Vice President, he was Ambassador to the Republic of Finland, 1998-2001. From June 1996 to July 1998, he served as Executive Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State. Mr. Edelman was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, Prague, Czech Republic, from June 1994 to June 1996. From April 1993 to July 1993, he served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large and Special Advisor to the Secretary of State on the New Independent States. Mr. Edelman’s areas of responsibility were defense, security and space issues. Mr. Edelman served as Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Soviet and East European Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) from April 1990 to April 1993. From April 1989 to March 1990, he was Special Assistant (European Affairs) to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Mr. Edelman served at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow 1987-89, where he was head of the external political section. He had responsibility for Soviet policies in the third world in the Office of Soviet Affairs at the Department of State from 1984 to 1986. Previously, Mr. Edelman served as Special Assistant to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, 1982-84; a staff officer on the Secretariat Staff, 1982; a watch officer in the State Department Operations Center 1981-82; and a member of the U.S. Middle East Delegation to the West Bank/Gaza Autonomy Talks Delegations, 1980-81. A career Foreign Service Officer, Mr. Edelman entered the Senior Foreign Service in 1992. He is a recipient of the Secretary of Defense’s award for Distinguished Civilian Service (1993) and the State Department’s Superior Honor Award (1990 and 1996). Mr. Edelman received a B.A. in History and Government from Cornell University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in U.S. Diplomatic History from Yale University in 1981.]

...as she goes on to include this additional excoriation of the Times' unwillingness to name names, and of the dangers of outsourcing national security to the global marketplace:
That the Times ran these allegations (she is under a state secrets gag folks, so it is not like she is gagged for lying) is encouraging. But that they omitted all names from the allegations is unethical. The point of a free press is not to protect the powerful against the weak, but to protect the public from the powerful. The Times was willing to stick a toe in, but was not willing to risk upsetting a foreign government (This is, after all, a British paper).

There are more names, including members of Congress and people serving in the FBI. This is what happens when basic government services as well as the most sensitive government functions are outsourced to the global marketplace.
...
You can see why Edmonds had to be silenced for "diplomatic reasons." As though diplomatic (read: business) relationships are more important than national security.

UPDATE 11:38pm PT: More reaction and analysis coming in late tonight...

● Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com and a contributing editor for The American Conservative adds a great deal of linked context and background in his detailed coverage of the Times piece. He says of Edmonds allegations: "if true, it's the story of the decade."

He frames his article around last night's Presidential Debate, in which ABC's Charles Gibson asked the Democratic candidates a remarkable question, in light of the Edmonds allegations today. "The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack," Gibson said. "The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?"

None of the candidates rose to the occasion and most seemed baffled, writes Raimondo, who sums of the details of this whole sordid tale this way...
Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of government – America's nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign "friends," while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big trouble.

...before closing with this eerie reminder...
As Edmonds says, "we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the intercepts – put out the truth."

If a nuke ever goes off in an American city, it will probably have been stolen from our own arsenal – once the American people wake up to that scary fact, the rest will follow automatically.

Ramaindo also reminds us of the following terrific video, put together by Luke Ryland last Summer, featuring Edmonds, in her own words, along with a few FBI colleagues, and Sen. Grassley singing her praises of "credibility" on 60 Minutes, from 2002. Well worth watching (less than 10 mins)...




UPDATE 1/7/08, 1:43pm PT: Over at Op/Ed News, Mike Mejia offers this additional information, concerning Grossman's ties to the Valerie Plame Wilson/Scooter Libby CIA leak case, in his coverage of the Times story...
Grossman, besides being a former policymaker at State, is known publicly as Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s first witness in the Scooter Libby trial. Libby was accused of perjury in the investigation of former CIA operative Valerie Plame, who was part of a CIA front company monitoring the global nuclear black market. At least one story claimed Grossman himself had leaked the identity of Plame’s front company, Brewster-Jennings, to Turkish agents in June, 2001. Though the story was never picked up by the mainstream media, if true, it would lead credence to the idea that the Brewster Jennings operation had already been compromised before the retaliation against Plame’s wife, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, by members of the Bush Administration.

Grossman is also being subpoenaed by the defense in the AIPAC espionage trial, along with several other officials who may have passed classified information to the powerful Israel-connected lobby group.

In addition, the Times article mentions Pentagon officials selling nuclear secrets to Turkey and Pakistan. AIPAC case figure Larry Franklin is discussed by Edmonds in the article. The whistleblower has suggested in separate interviews that Franklin’s supervisor at the Pentagon, Douglas Feith has been involved in the scandal, as well as prominent neoconservative and Feith associate Richard Perle.

UPDATE 1/7/08, 5:07pm PT: Former New York Times contributor, Dave Lindorff at Baltimore Chronicle, http://www.baltimorechro...8/010708Lindorff.shtml\">covers in detail, asks how Edmonds' story might tie in to the recent, and still unexplained, cross-country flyover of a B-52 with nuclear-tipped weapons on board, and closes by asking appropriately enough: "Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?"

Why, indeed, Dave.

[Dig]

Mr. Edelman has been a bad cheney puppet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

US Officals Sold Nuke Secrets to Iran and Al Qaeda! » PropellerMarc Grossman, the former Ambassador to Turkey and former speaker Dennis Hastert .... current Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, ...
www.donoevil.propeller.com/story/2008/01/06/us-officals-sold-nuke-secrets-to-iran-and-al-qaeda - 82k - Cached - Similar pages

Against All Enemies: Eric Edelman: key conspirator in Sibel ...If we want to address the reasons for anti-Americanism, Edelman must be issue one. As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral ...
www.lukery.blogspot.com/2007/08/eric-edelman-key-conspirator-in-sibel.html - 68k - Cached - Similar pages

NUKES, SPOOKS, AND THE SPECTER OF 9/11... WE'RE IN BIG TROUBLENot a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists' target was the US The ... If a nuke ever goes off in an American city, it will probably have been ...
www.etherzone.com/2008/raim010708.shtml - 15 hours ago - Similar pages

Gary Leupp: Edelman's EdictLies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed "No Nukes! ..... As long as Edelman stays in Turkey, the chill wind disturbing bilateral relations will last. ...
www.counterpunch.org/leupp07212007.html - 138k - Cached - Similar pages

US officials helped Pak steal nuke secrets: Report | The AgonistPakistan, Turkey... espionage in the State Department... preventing an investigation..." ... Eric Edelman Marc Grossman Brent Scowcroft Larry Franklin ...
www.agonist.org/20080106/us_officials_helped_pak_steal_nuke_secrets_report - 37k - Cached - Similar pages

RevolutionRadio.org » Blog Archive » Nukes, Spooks,and the Specter ...Nukes, Spooks,and the Specter of 9/11. We’re in big trouble if even half of .... Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists’ target was the US ...
www.revolutionradio.org/2008/01/07/nukes-spooksand-the-specter-of-911/ - 67k - 16 hours ago - Cached - Similar pages

Think Progress » Pres. Clinton: Edelman Is An ‘Ideological ...Since his appointment as US ambassador to Turkey, Edelman’s actions have ...... Hell, we held the Russians with all their nukes off for 50 yrs without ...
www.thinkprogress.org/2007/07/22/bill-clinton-edelman/ - 108k - Cached - Similar pages

Daily Kos: State of the NationLess familiar names include Eric Edelman, Feith's replacement at the Pentagon, ..... I am not sure at what level the decision was made not to use nukes, ...
www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/6/112413/4231/854/431373 - 417k - Cached - Similar pages

Winds of Change.NET: Mein Kampf a Bestseller in TurkeyAt Sabah, a columnist last fall accused the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman, of letting his "ethnic origins"--guess what, he's Jewish--determine his ...
www.windsofchange.net/archives/006690.php - 102k - Cached - Similar pages

[PDF] The Incirlik Question Derya Sazak Milliyet.com.tr May 30, 2006 ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Ambassador to Turkey Edelman’s term. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was not present at the session while this major issue was. being discussed. ...
www.nukestrat.com/us/afn/Turkey053006.pdf - Similar pages

[Dig]

This is fricking insane!!!!!!!!

The terrorists are in the Pentagon!!!!!!!!!!!

[gEEk squad]

This is fricking insane!!!!!!!!

The terrorists are in the Pentagon!!!!!!!!!!!

It seems like they were executing the beginning of the next attack before 9/11 even happened.

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=20972.0
Everyone who is connected to this plot.

[Ford]

Scary stuff.

I have to say I am a bit confused as to what this means.

Sibel Edmonds is saying public officials sold secrets that ended up with Al Queda. This conflicts with the view I have that Al Queda is a make believe boogeyman used to scare the public.

Selling secrets to foriegn governments is treason. What I don't understand is that if the NWO/Globalists are selling secrets, and they put a gag order on Edmonds to keep her quiet, and she talked anyway, why and how did we ever learn who she was in the first place? It seems possible that some kind of backstory is being set up, but to tell the truth I just dont know if the story is bogus disinfo, a backstory for something, or completly on the level.

[Dig]

Scary stuff.

I have to say I am a bit confused as to what this means.

Sibel Edmonds is saying public officials sold secrets that ended up with Al Queda. This conflicts with the view I have that Al Queda is a make believe boogeyman used to scare the public.

Selling secrets to foriegn governments is treason. What I don't understand is that if the NWO/Globalists are selling secrets, and they put a gag order on Edmonds to keep her quiet, and she talked anyway, why and how did we ever learn who she was in the first place? It seems possible that some kind of backstory is being set up, but to tell the truth I just dont know if the story is bogus disinfo, a backstory for something, or completly on the level.

We have known about Sibel for 3 years.  There is nothing bogus about her.  Do your research.  She has been commended as a credible witness by all levels of government.

It is time for the truth and the time is now.  This is as much a disinfo plot as the disinfo of Ron Paul not being invited to the Fox Debate!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cm-uRQmfUU

Ford, you also made this statement:

Dan Burton - (R - IN)Are you sure this site belongs to Sibel Edmonds? The man listed above has fought tooth and nail to get Mercury removed from vaccines, as his grandson was afflicted with autism. Sorry, I need to see more evidence before I believe he is connected with something nefarious.

Are you still unsure about him?

Is there anything else?

[Dig]

http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/

There have been some followup pieces to the latest news.

* Ha'aretz: "Report: Israeli agents in US gathering nuclear intelligence"
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/942027.html

* Times, India: "US officials helped Pak steal nuke secrets: Report"
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/US_officials_helped_Pak_steal_nuke_secrets_Report/articleshow/2678687.cms

* Justin Raimondo, AntiWar.com: "Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11"
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166

* Mike Mejia, Op-Ed News: "Times of London Blows Open Sibel Edmonds Case"
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mike_mej_080107_times_of_london_blow.htm

* Dave Lindorff, Counterpunch: "Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb. A Real 9/11 Cover-Up?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01072008.html

[industria]

UPDATE 1/7/08, 5:07pm PT: Former New York Times contributor, Dave Lindorff at Baltimore Chronicle, http://www.baltimorechro...8/010708Lindorff.shtml\">covers in detail, asks how Edmonds' story might tie in to the recent, and still unexplained, cross-country flyover of a B-52 with nuclear-tipped weapons on board, and closes by asking appropriately enough: "Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?"

Sane, excellent reporting as usual.

I have been distressed by this all last night and today. High anxiety. 

The article written by Dave Lindorff in the Baltimore Chronicle today firms up many of my worst fears.


9-11 Cover-Up, Treason and The Bomb
by Dave Lindorff

If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon information provided by US government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, we have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America’s enemies, even including Al Qaeda.

The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called “accidental” flight of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts have been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media in American news media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.

Edmonds, who was recruited by the FBI after 9-11 because of her Turkish and Farsi language skills, has long been claiming that in her FBI job of covertly monitoring conversations between Turkish, Israeli, Persian and other foreign agents and US contacts, including a backlog of untranslated tapes dating back to 1997, she had heard evidence of “money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.” But the Turkish training for 9-11 rang more alarm bells and made her decide that talking behind closed doors to Congress or the FBI was not enough. She had to go public.

Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence of moles within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey, to Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, agencies within the Bush administration were actively working to block investigation and to shield those who were committing the acts of treason.

Pakistan’s ISI is known to have had, and to still maintain close contacts with Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Times notes that Pakistan’s nuclear god-father, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

Edmonds claims, in the Times article, that following the 9-11 attacks, FBI investigators took a number of Turkish and Pakistani operatives into custody for questioning about foreknowledge of the attacks, but that a high-ranking US State Department official repeatedly acted to spirit them out of the country.

Edmonds was fired from her FBI translating job in 2002 after she accused a colleague of having illicit contact with Turkish officials. She has claimed that she was fired for being outspoken, and in 2005 her position was reportedly vindicated by the Office of Inspector General of the FBI, which concluded that she had been sacked for making valid complaints.

One of those whom Edmonds claims in the Times report was being investigated in connection with the nuclear information transfers was Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin. Franklin was convicted and jailed in 2006 for passing US defense information to American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. Franklin, in 2001, was part of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, a kind of shadow intelligence unit set up by the Bush administration inside the Pentagon whose job it was to gin up “evidence” to justify a war against Iraq. In that capacity, he (along with several other OSP members and arch neocon schemer Michael Ledeen) was also identified by Italian investigative journalists working for the newspaper La Republican, as having been at a crucial meeting in December 2001 in Rome with the Italian defense and intelligence service ministers. La Republicca reports that at that meeting a plan was hatched to fob off forged Niger embassy documents as evidence that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger.

If Edmonds’ story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years’ standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.

An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an “accident,” but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.

Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Yet in view of Edmonds’ story to the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.

Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media? 

[Dig]

Sibel Edmonds. Everybody Knows.

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

[Dig]

'I Saw Papers That Show US Knew Al-Qaeda Would Use Planes' 
Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington April 1, 2004 [Wow, they ran it on April Fool's Day.  What sickos]

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie". Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege". She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the 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." She added: "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. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities - with skyscrapers."
 
The accusations from Mrs Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish and English, will reignite the controversy over whether the administration ignored warnings about al-Qa'ida. That controversy was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings. The issue - what the administration knew and when - is central to the investigation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been hearing testimony in public and private from government officials, intelligence officials and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House made a U-turn when it said that Ms Rice would appear in public before the commission to answer questions. Mr Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, will also be questioned in a closed-door session. Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa'ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps. She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission - 90 per cent of it - related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well."
 
"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away. To try to refute Mr Clarke's accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qa'ida. But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists." Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word "we", Ms Rice told an "outrageous lie". She said: "Rice says 'we' not 'I'. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible." It is impossible at this stage to verify Mrs Edmonds' claims. However, some senior US senators testified to her credibility in 2002 when she went public with separate allegations relating to alleged incompetence and corruption within the FBI's translation department.
 

[Dig]

Sept. 11 Allegations Lost in Translation
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60651-2004Apr8.html
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.

[Dig]

National Security Experts Demand to Be Heard
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/?articleid=3574
by Sibel Edmonds et al September 14, 2004

The following letter to Congress is signed by 25 national security experts.

To the Congress of the United States:

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States ended its report [.pdf] stating, "We look forward to a national debate on the merits of what we have recommended, and we will participate vigorously in that debate." In this spirit, we the undersigned wish to bring to the attention of the Congress and the people of the United States what we believe are serious shortcomings in the report and its recommendations. We thus call upon Congress to refrain from narrow political considerations and to apply brakes to the race to implement the Commission's recommendations. It is not too late for Congress to break with the practice of limiting testimony to that from politicians and top-layer career bureaucrats – many with personal reputations to defend and institutional equities to protect. Instead, use this unique opportunity to introduce salutary reform, an opportunity that must not be squandered by politically driven haste.

Omission is one of the major flaws in the Commission's report. We are aware of significant issues and cases that were duly reported to the Commission by those of us with direct knowledge, but somehow escaped attention. Serious problems and shortcomings within government agencies likewise were reported to the Commission but were not included in the report. The report simply does not get at key problems within the intelligence, aviation security, and law enforcement communities. The omission of such serious and applicable issues and information by itself renders the report flawed, and casts doubt on the validity of many of its recommendations.

We believe that one of the primary purposes of the Commission was to establish accountability; that to do so is essential to understanding the failures that led to 9/11, and to prescribe needed changes. However, the Commission in its report holds no one accountable, stating instead that "our aim has not been to assign individual blame." That is to play the political game, and it shows that the goal of achieving unanimity overrode one of the primary purposes of this Commission's establishment. When calling for accountability, we are referring not to quasi-innocent mistakes caused by "lack of imagination" or brought about by ordinary "human error." Rather, we refer to intentional actions or inaction by individuals responsible for our national security, actions or inaction dictated by motives other than the security of the people of the United States. The report deliberately ignores officials and civil servants who were, and still are, clearly negligent and/or derelict in their duties to the nation. If these individuals are protected rather than held accountable, the mindset that enabled 9/11 will persist, no matter how many layers of bureaucracy are added, and no matter how much money is poured into the agencies. Character counts. Personal integrity, courage, and professionalism make the difference. Only a commission bent on holding no one responsible and reaching unanimity could have missed that.

We understand, as do most Americans, that one of our greatest strengths in defending against terrorism is the dedication and resourcefulness of those individuals who work on the frontlines. Even before the Commission began its work, many honest and patriotic individuals from various agencies came forward with information and warnings regarding terrorism-related issues and serious problems within our intelligence and aviation security agencies. If it were not for these individuals, much of what we know today of significant issues and facts surrounding 9/11 would have remained in the dark. These "whistleblowers" were able to put the safety of the American people above their own careers and jobs, even though they had reason to suspect that the deck was stacked against them. Sadly, it was. Retaliation took many forms: some were ostracized; others were put under formal or informal gag orders; some were fired. The Commission has neither acknowledged their contribution nor faced up to the urgent need to protect such patriots against retaliation by the many bureaucrats who tend to give absolute priority to saving face and protecting their own careers.

The Commission did emphasize that barriers to the flow of information were a primary cause for wasting opportunities to prevent the tragedy. But it skipped a basic truth. Secrecy enforced by repression threatens national security as much as bureaucratic turf fights. It sustains vulnerability to terrorism caused by government breakdowns. Reforms will be paper tigers without a safe channel for whistleblowers to keep them honest in practice. It is unrealistic to expect that government workers will defend the public if they can't defend themselves. Profiles in courage are the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, current whistleblower rights are a cruel trap and magnet for cynicism. The Whistleblower Protection Act has turned into an efficient way to finish whistleblowers off by endorsing termination. No government workers have access to jury trials like Congress enacted for corporate workers after the Enron/MCI debacles. Government workers need genuine, enforceable rights just as much to protect America's families as corporate workers do to protect America's investments. It will take congressional leadership to fill this hole in the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

The Commission, with its incomplete report of "facts and circumstances," intentional avoidance of assigning accountability, and disregard for the knowledge, expertise and experience of those who actually do the job, has now set about pressuring our Congress and our nation to hastily implement all its recommendations. While we do not intend to imply that all recommendations of this report are flawed, we assert that the Commission's list of recommendations does not include many urgently needed fixes, and further, we argue that some of their recommendations, such as the creation of an "intelligence czar" and haphazard increases in intelligence budgets, will lead to increases in the complexity and confusion of an already complex and highly bureaucratic system.

Congress has been hearing not only from the commissioners but from a bevy of other career politicians, very few of whom have worked in the intelligence community, and from top-layer bureaucrats, many with vested interests in saving face and avoiding accountability. Congress has not included the voices of the people working within the intelligence and broader national security communities who deal with the real issues and problems day after day and who possess the needed expertise and experience – in short, those who not only do the job, but are conscientious enough to stick their necks out in pointing to the impediments they experience in trying to do it effectively.

We the undersigned, who have worked within various government agencies (FBI, CIA, FAA, DIA, Customs) responsible for national security and public safety, call upon you in Congress to include the voices of those with firsthand knowledge and expertise in the important issues at hand. We stand ready to do our part.

Respectfully,

Costello, Edward J., Jr., former special agent, Counterintelligence, FBI

Cole, John M., former Veteran Intelligence Operations specialist, FBI

Conrad, David "Mark," retired agent in charge, Internal Affairs, U.S. Customs

Dew, Rosemary N., former supervisory special agent, Counterterrorism & Counterintelligence, FBI

Dzakovic, Bogdan, former Red Team leader, FAA

Edmonds, Sibel D., former language specialist, FBI

Elson, Steve, retired Navy Seal & former special agent, FAA & U.S. Navy

Forbes, David, aviation, logistics and govt. security analyst, BoydForbes Inc.

Goodman, Melvin A., former senior analyst/ division manager, CIA; senior fellow at the Center for International Policy

Graf, Mark, former security supervisor, planner, & derivative classifier, Department of Energy

Graham, Gilbert M., retired special agent, Counterintelligence, FBI

Kleiman, Diane, former special agent, U.S. Customs

Kwiatkowski, Lt. Col. Karen U., USAF (ret.); veteran policy analyst, DoD

Larkin, Lynne A., former operation officer, CIA

MacMichael, David, former senior estimates officer, CIA

McGovern, Raymond L., former analyst, CIA

Pahle, Theodore J., retired senior intelligence officer, DIA

Sarshar, Behrooz, retired language specialist, FBI

Sullivan, Brian F., retired special agent & risk management specialist, FAA

Tortorich, Larry J., retired U.S. Naval officer, U.S. Navy & Dept. of Homeland Security/TSA

Turner, Jane A., retired special agent, FBI

Vincent, John B., retired special agent, Counterterrorism, FBI

Whitehurst, Dr. Fred, retired supervisory special agent/laboratory forensic examiner, FBI

Wright, Col. Ann, U.S. Army (ret.); former Foreign Service officer

Zipoli, Matthew J., Special Response Team (SRT) officer, DOE

[Dig]

Sibel Edmonds: KILL THE MESSENGER

52 min - Nov 14, 2007 -  (28 ratings)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1991080575212848283


Mohamad Atta and the Venice Flying Circus (abridged) [Note: Some have claimed Hopsicker is an agent, but I have found no supporting evidence whatsoever.  He goes balls to the walss deep into the drug/CIA trade and that might make people nervous]

28 min - Sep 6, 2006 -  (24 ratings)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6456867285177039347

[Dig]

Nuke deal scandal hits US official
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=37810&sectionid=3510203
PRESS TV, Iran - 14 hours ago
An FBI whistleblower has revealed that US government officials sold nuclear weapon secrets to foreign costumers on the black market. ...

Israel Spying On US Nuclear Facilities
[Isn't our President heading over to Israel?]
http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=67516
ShortNews.com, Germany - 21 hours ago
Israel has planted "moles" inside American institutions dealing with nuclear technology according to British newspaper The Sunday Times. ...

Whistleblower accuses Turkish diplomats
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=93008
Turkish Daily News (subscription), Turkey - 22 hours ago
A former Turkish language translator for the FBI has claimed that some United States government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to “steal ...

Bigger Than Paul, Kucinich & Obama
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=5456
OpEdNews, PA - Jan 6, 2008
Foreign intelligence agents from Turkey, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey enlisted the support of high-level US officials in order to acquire a network of ...

[EchelonMonitor]

Anyone else see the recent McCain interview on NBC where he says he met recently with a former Al Qaeda leader in Iraq?

I jumped when I heard that, but the interviewer skipped right over it.

We're supposed to be hunting down Al Qaeda leaders, but McCain is meeting with them in Iraq?

We've imprisoned innocent people indefinitely in Gitmo, but we're letting Al Qaeda leaders meet with senators?

Something is wrong there.

Maybe that Al Cia Duh leader he met with was Dick Cheney.

[Dig]

Anyone else see the recent McCain interview on NBC where he says he met recently with a former Al Qaeda leader in Iraq?

I jumped when I heard that, but the interviewer skipped right over it.

We're supposed to be hunting down Al Qaeda leaders, but McCain is meeting with them in Iraq?

We've imprisoned innocent people indefinitely in Gitmo, but we're letting Al Qaeda leaders meet with senators?

Something is wrong there.

Maybe that Al Cia Duh leader he met with was Dick Cheney.

please find it, he is set to win tomorrow.

[bigron]

January 7, 2008

Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11

We're in big trouble if even half of what Sibel Edmonds says is true… 

by Justin Raimondo
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166

"The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack," averred ABC's Charles Gibson at Saturday night's Democratic presidential debate. "The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?"

It's a question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no easy answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most seemed baffled. Hillary Clinton made sure she used the word "retaliation" with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she would retaliate against "stateless" terrorists nevertheless insisted that she would indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to have a "haven" somewhere within a state.

Yes, well, that's not necessarily true, but what if that "haven" is… right here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?

Say what?

Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of telephone intercepts and has now told the London Times that several top U.S. government officials conspired with foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets and sell them on the black market. The Timesreports:

"Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of U.S. officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

"Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the U.S. State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: 'He was aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.'

"She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents. 'If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,' she said."

Edmonds brought all this to the attention of lawmakers, as well as the American media, and several news organizations filed reports – until a federal judge issued an unprecedented gag order. Edmonds' story was deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed to know what she knows, according to our government, America's national security would be severely impaired. Yet now she is speaking out, and what she has to say is unsettling, to say the least.

Edmonds has named at least one of the officials: he is Marc Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton's defense secretary, William S. Cohen.

Edmondscontends that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.

As a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many hours of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and Pakistanis, Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI's counterintelligence unit. Thousands of hours of intercepted calls revealed a network of moles placed in various military installations and academic venues dealing with nuclear technology. Edmonds gives us the details, via the Times:

"Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. 'The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,' she said.

"They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official [Marc Grossman] who provided some of their moles – mainly Ph.D. students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent."

And "while the FBI was investigating," says Edmonds, "several arms of the government were shielding what was going on." An entire wing of the national security bureaucracy, associated with the neoconservatives, has long profited from representing Turkish interests in Washington: this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith's successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser.

Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish, Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S. nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

This was no "rogue" operation, but a covert action executed by Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the chief of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, at the time. The Turks were used as intermediaries because direct ISI intervention would have roused immediate suspicion. Large amounts of cash were dropped off at the offices of Turkish-American lobbying groups, such as the American Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly picked up by at least one top U.S. official.

This Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their respective embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for potential moles, compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the Times, "contained all their 'hooking points,' which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to." Nice work, there.

This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted spy Larry Franklin worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel Franklin and pass it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon; Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the embassy; and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And there is indeed a connection to the Franklin case, according to the Times,

"One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. 'He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,' [Edmonds] said."

Franklin delivered his "packages" to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but others, such as Grossman – according to Edmonds – did it for money. Grossman angrily denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash transactions were recorded on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S. officials were heard selling the nation's nuclear secrets. As the Times relates:

"Well-known U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a wiretap discussing 'nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama,' in which the agent allegedly is heard saying: 'We have a package and we're going to sell it for $250,000.'"

A vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign intelligence agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials, including some "household names" – if true, it's the story of the decade. Yet that isn't all. The really scary aspect of this labyrinthine network of foreign agents, and their American dupes and collaborators, is its connections to terrorist organizations, specifically al-Qaeda.

To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected of having wired a large amount of money into Mohammed Atta's Dubai bank account shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times reports: "Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks."

Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that's the first I've heard of it. However, the U.S. authorities did round up a large number of Israelis, including these guys, and held them for several months before extraditing them back to their home country.

Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times with the story, "after reading about an al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey." That's a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka, who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.

Now that's curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the Times puts it: "Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But they posed no threat to Turkey at the time."

Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists' target was the U.S. The al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top leadership of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin Laden – to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our NATO allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel Edmonds seriously. Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into place.

The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds' testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world's foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:

"The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: 'We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't afford for them to spill the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

"Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's investigation."

Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of government – America's nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign "friends," while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big trouble.

In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to reconsider the implications of the question Charles Gibson opened with during the ABC Democratic debate:

"The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?"

Perhaps congressman Henry Waxman, who solemnly pledged to launch a public investigation into the allegations made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept his promise. Maybe even the national news media, which has been offered this story repeatedly, by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they had covered it.

Fortunately, we don't need the "mainstream" media to get the truth out to the American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we can do an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cm-uRQmfUU&eurl=http://antiwar.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Nukes%2C+Spooks%2C+and+the+Specter+ofiurl=http://img.youtube.com/vi/3Cm-uRQmfUU/default.jpg

As Edmonds says, "we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the intercepts – put out the truth."

If a nuke ever goes off in an American city, it will probably have been stolen from our own arsenal – once the American people wake up to that scary fact, the rest will follow automatically.
 

 
 
 
 

 
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166 

[bigron]

Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb

A Real 9/11 Cover-Up?

By DAVE LINDORFF

07/01/08 "Counterpunch"
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01072008.html

-- -- If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon information provided by US government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, we have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America's enemies, even including Al Qaeda.

The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called "accidental" flight of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana.

The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts have been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media in American news media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.

Edmonds, who was recruited by the FBI after 9-11 because of her Turkish and Farsi language skills, has long been claiming that in her FBI job of covertly monitoring conversations between Turkish, Israeli, Persian and other foreign agents and US contacts, including a backlog of untranslated tapes dating back to 1997, she had heard evidence of "money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology." But the Turkish training for 9-11 rang more alarm bells and made her decide that talking behind closed doors to Congress or the FBI was not enough. She had to go public.

Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence of moles within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey, to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, agencies within the Bush administration were actively working to block investigation and to shield those who were committing the acts of treason.

Pakistan's ISI is known to have had, and to still maintain close contacts with Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Times notes that Pakistan's nuclear god-father, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

Edmonds claims, in the Times article, that following the 9-11 attacks, FBI investigators took a number of Turkish and Pakistani operatives into custody for questioning about foreknowledge of the attacks, but that a high-ranking US State Department official repeatedly acted to spirit them out of the country.

Edmonds was fired from her FBI translating job in 2002 after she accused a colleague of having illicit contact with Turkish officials. She has claimed that she was fired for being outspoken, and in 2005 her position was reportedly vindicated by the Office of Inspector General of the FBI, which concluded that she had been sacked for making valid complaints.

One of those whom Edmonds claims in the Times report was being investigated in connection with the nuclear information transfers was Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin. Franklin was convicted and jailed in 2006 for passing US defense information to American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. Franklin, in 2001, was part of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, a kind of shadow intelligence unit set up by the Bush administration inside the Pentagon whose job it was to gin up "evidence" to justify a war against Iraq. In that capacity, he (along with several other OSP members and arch neocon schemer Michael Ledeen) was also identified by Italian investigative journalists working for the newspaper La Republican, as having been at a crucial meeting in December 2001 in Rome with the Italian defense and intelligence service ministers. La Republicca reports that at that meeting a plan was hatched to fob off forged Niger embassy documents as evidence that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger.

If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.

An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.

Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Yet in view of Edmonds' story to the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.

Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

[bigron]

Sibel Speaks Part II: Naming Names...



http://www.atlargely.com/2008/01/sibel-speaks-pa.html

[nustada]

Has alex jones ever interviewed Sibel Edmonds?

If no what is the best way to encourage that?

This seems important.

 

[Dig]

So let's pick up a detail brush -- and let's start with Al Kadi.
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2008/01/sibel-edmonds-talking-turkey.html

Yassin Al Kadi, or al-Qadi (as always with Arabic names, transliterations abound) is a Saudi multimillionaire whose possible ties to terror are detailed in this Cooperative Research page. Specifically, he has been linked to an investment firm called BMI which has been tied in with an extremist network. Although Al-Qadi says that his involvement with BMI was minimal, and even though BMI went belly-up in 1999...

Shortly after 9/11, the US will officially declare al-Qadi a terrorist financier
Despite which:

Saudi multimillionaire Yassin al-Qadi will say in an interview shortly after 9/11, “I have also met with US Vice President and former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in Jeddah [Saudi Arabia] when he came for a lecture organized by the Dallah Group. I spoke to him for a long time and we still have cordial relations.”
Al-Qadi also invested heavily in PTech, a firm already familiar to many of you, since it was accused of being a front for both Al Qaeda and a faction of American intelligence. The head of PTech, Oussama Ziade, confirmed that Al-Qadi spoke often -- and glowingly -- of his friendship with Dick Cheney.

There's much more, but it all comes down to this: Al-Qadi keeps denying having ties to terror, yet many continue to level that very accusation against him.
Al-Qadi admits to giving bin Laden money for his “humanitarian” work, but says this is different from bin Laden’s militant activities. Presented with this information, the US Treasury Department only says that the US “is pleased with and appreciates the actions taken by the Saudis” in the war on terror.
So how does he figure into Sibel's tale, which centers on Turkey?

Perhaps this page, which features an Online Journal article by Devlin Buckley offers a few clues:
A court in Turkey has frozen the assets of Yasin al-Qadi [1] a one-time acquaintance of Vice President Dick Cheney [2] and reported “chief money launderer” of Osama bin Laden.
Turkish investigations into al-Qaeda have been obstructed to protect conflicts of interest, financial and otherwise, among al-Qadi and high-ranking Turkish officials, according to dissenting investigators and government officials.

Al-Qadi, as the Turkish Daily News notes, “has high-level support in Turkey, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan going on record as saying ‘I know Mr. Yasin, and I believe in him as I believe in myself,’ when speaking to NTV on July 11, 2006.”

“Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal accused Erdogan’s government of blocking an investigation into Qadi’s financial affairs, focusing on reported money transfers by Erdogan’s adviser Cuneyd Zapsi to Qadi in the 1990s when Zapsi and Qadi were business partners,” the Turkish Daily News notes.
Al-Qadi owned a Massachusetts-based technology firm and defense contractor known as Ptech, which, according to U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to 9/11 whistleblower Indira Singh, was a “CIA clandestine op on the level of Iran-Contra.”

Moreover, according to Singh, a CBS affiliate in Boston “paid for private investigators to follow a couple of the Ptech people, and it did go to a mob-run warehouse area and the reports came back that basically it was a drop shipment place for drugs.”
Ah. Drugs. Now we are (you should pardon the expression) talking Turkey. Which is to say: Now we are getting into Sibel Edmonds territory.

Take it home, Sibel:

According to 9/11 whistleblower and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, state-sponsored Turkish networks make up the “main players” in Afghanistan’s illicit opium trade.

Such groups, according to Edmonds, “purchase the opium from Afghanistan and transport it through several Turkic speaking Central Asian states into Turkey, where the raw opium is processed into popular byproducts; then the network transports the final product into Western European and American markets via their partner networks in Albania.”

Coincidently, in December of last year, as reported by The American Monitor, al-Qadi’s assets were confiscated in Albania, where he reportedly assisted the CIA to funnel covert support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Such operations were reportedly financed using opium profits.
According to Edmonds, “The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks.”

“We know that Al Qaeda and Taliban’s main source of funding is the illegal sale of narcotics,” Edmonds notes, adding, “we know that Turkey is a major, if not the top, player in the transportation, processing, and distribution of all the narcotics derived from the Afghan poppies, and as a result, it is the major contributing country to Al Qaeda.”

[Dig]

Assets of reputed CIA front man frozen in Turkey
http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14738
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1808.shtml

By Devlin Buckley
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Mar 2, 2007, 01:30

A court in Turkey has frozen the assets of Yasin al-Qadi [1] a one-time acquaintance of Vice President Dick Cheney [2] and reported “chief money launderer” of Osama bin Laden. [3]

Al-Qadi, prior to being publicly identified as a key al-Qaeda financer, owned a prominent U.S. technology firm and reported CIA front known as Ptech. [4] He also escorted U.S. officials around during their visits to Saudi Arabia. [5]

“Council of State Administrative Cases Bureau on Thursday decided to annul a lower court’s decision to rescind a cabinet order to freeze the assets of Saudi financier Yasin al-Qadi, who has been accused of financing terrorism,” the Turkish Daily News reported last Saturday. [6]

As the Daily News summarizes, this is part of a long and ongoing political dispute in Turkey: “The previous government in Turkey had ordered the assets of Qadi frozen after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, saying that he was suspected of channeling money to terrorist organizations . . . The Council of State 10th Bureau overturned the order in July on technical grounds and ordered that the assets be returned, after a challenge made by Qadi.

“Upon appeal by the government, the case was taken up to the Council of State Administrative Cases Bureau, which is the top court on such cases (and ultimately ruled to freeze Qadi’s assets).” [7]

Turkish investigations into al-Qaeda have been obstructed to protect conflicts of interest, financial and otherwise, among al-Qadi and high-ranking Turkish officials, according to dissenting investigators and government officials. [8]

Al-Qadi, as the Turkish Daily News notes, “has high-level support in Turkey, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan going on record as saying ‘I know Mr. Yasin, and I believe in him as I believe in myself,’ when speaking to NTV on July 11, 2006.” [9]

“Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal accused Erdogan’s government of blocking an investigation into Qadi’s financial affairs, focusing on reported money transfers by Erdogan’s adviser Cuneyd Zapsi to Qadi in the 1990s when Zapsi and Qadi were business partners,” the Turkish Daily News notes. [10]

As the New Anatolian explains, “The file against figures allegedly financing terror groups, including Middle Eastern-based al-Qaeda was [purportedly] dropped due to a lack of evidence, but many believed that the reason for it being dropped was intense pressure from the government on the inspectors, since several ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party members have close business ties with a Middle Eastern figure being investigated.” [11]

According to the New Anatolaian, “The history of the file goes back to late 2001 when the government of the time, a coalition led by late Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, ordered the Finance Ministry to assign inspectors to look for Turkish links to terror financiers.

“Inspectors Hamza Kacar and Galip Sabuncu wrote a report in which they claimed that they had uncovered significant evidence of money movements linked to Yasin el Kadi in Turkey, but added that their probe was blocked by certain bureaucrats and politicians.

“The inspectors said that el Kadi’s money movements were concentrated on Albaraka Turk, an Islamic finance institution, of which [Turkey’s Finance Minister Kemal] Unakitan was a shareholder and executive board member before he was elected as a deputy at the last general elections in 2002.” [12]

Similar allegations of obstruction of justice and dereliction of duty have been reported here in the United States, where following the 9/11 attacks FBI agent Robert Wright and other members of his unit claimed that their investigation into Yasin al-Qadi had been repeatedly blocked by higher ups at the FBI. [13]

As Agent Wright told ABC News in 2002, “the supervisor who was there from [FBI] headquarters was right straight across from me and started yelling at me: ‘You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.’” [14]

According to Agent Wright, who seized $1.4 million directly linked to al-Qadi in 1998, [15] it is very likely that 9/11 would have been prevented if he had simply been allowed to do his job. [16]

Over the course of Wright’s investigation, however, al-Qadi was apparently assisting the CIA in Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, and the United States itself. [17]

Al-Qadi owned a Massachusetts-based technology firm and defense contractor known as Ptech, which, according to U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to 9/11 whistleblower Indira Singh, was a “CIA clandestine op on the level of Iran-Contra.” [18]

Moreover, according to Singh, a CBS affiliate in Boston “paid for private investigators to follow a couple of the Ptech people, and it did go to a mob-run warehouse area and the reports came back that basically it was a drop shipment place for drugs.” [19]

According to 9/11 whistleblower and former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, state-sponsored Turkish networks make up the “main players” in Afghanistan’s illicit opium trade. [20]

Such groups, according to Edmonds, “purchase the opium from Afghanistan and transport it through several Turkic speaking Central Asian states into Turkey, where the raw opium is processed into popular byproducts; then the network transports the final product into Western European and American markets via their partner networks in Albania.” [21]

Coincidently, in December of last year, as reported by The American Monitor, al-Qadi’s assets were confiscated in Albania, where he reportedly assisted the CIA to funnel covert support to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Such operations were reportedly financed using opium profits. [22]

“Since the 1950s,” Edmonds notes, “Turkey has played a key role in channeling into Europe and the U.S. heroin produced in the “Golden Triangle” comprised of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. These operations are run by mafia groups closely controlled by the MIT (Turkish Intelligence Agency) and the military.” [23]

According to Edmonds, “The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks.” [24]

“We know that Al Qaeda and Taliban’s main source of funding is the illegal sale of narcotics,” Edmonds notes, adding, “we know that Turkey is a major, if not the top, player in the transportation, processing, and distribution of all the narcotics derived from the Afghan poppies, and as a result, it is the major contributing country to Al Qaeda.” [25]

Yassin al-Qadi was also affiliated with Bosnia’s wartime president, Alija Izetbegovic, the recipient of substantial CIA support during the Bosnian civil war. [26] To fund these operations, the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Turkey, and Iran, in collaboration with a “range of radical Islamist groups,” established a “vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia.” [27]

NOTES
1. “Council of State freezes Qadi’s assets,” Turkish Daily News, February 24, 2006.

2. Dan Verton, “Ptech workers tell the story behind the search,” Computer World Magazine, January 17, 2003, quoting Ptech Chairman and CEO Oussama Ziade; “Treasury action smacks of arrogance, violates human rights, says Al-Qadi,” Arab News, October 14, 2001.

3. Jeff Johnson, “Tearful FBI Agent Apologizes To Sept. 11 Families and Victims,” Cybercast News Service, May 30, 2002.

4. “Customs searches software firm near Boston,” CNN, December 6, 2002; Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Dollars of Terror,” Front Page Magazine, April 18, 2005; Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, “The Business of Terror,” Front Page Magazine; Indira Singh, Testimony at the 9/11 Citizens’ Commission Hearing, September 9, 2004.

5. Merrie Najimy, “Support Ptech Employees,” The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee- Massachusetts, March 2003; Lynn Grant, “Hastert’s Turkish Allies Tied to Bin Laden,” International Post, August 15, 2005, quoting The Boston Globe.

6. Ibid., 1.

7. Ibid.

8. “Judiciary resumes controversial terror financier case,” The New Anatolian, February 23, 2007; Ibid., 1.

9. Ibid., 1.

10. Ibid.

11. “Judiciary resumes controversial terror financier case,” The New Anatolian, February 23, 2007.

12. Ibid.

13. “FBI AGENT ROBERT WRIGHT SAYS FBI AGENTS ASSIGNED TO INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS CONTINUE TO PROTECT TERRORISTS FROM CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS AND PROSECUTIONS,” Judicial Watch press release, September 11, 2002.

14. Brian Ross and Vic Walter, “FBI Called off Terror Investigations,” ABC News, December 19, 2002.

15. Ibid., 3.

16. Transcript of Judicial Watch press conference, National Press Club, May 30, 2002.

17. Devlin Buckley, “Ptech owner’s assets confiscated in Albania,” The American Monitor, January 16, 2007.

18. Ibid., 4.

19. Indira Singh, Testimony at the 9/11 Citizens’ Commission Hearing, September 9, 2004.

20. Sibel Edmonds, “The Hijacking of a Nation, Part 2: The Auctioning of Former Statesmen & Dime a Dozen Generals,” National Security Whistleblowers Association, November 29, 2006.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 17; M. Bozinovich, “Independence: Kosovo Albanian Criminal Enterprise,” Serbianna.com, February 11, 2007.

23. Ibid., 20.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Devlin Buckley, “Scratching the Surface,” The American Monitor, November 16, 2006.

27. Richard J Aldrich, “America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian Muslims,” The Guardian, April 22, 2002.

Devlin Buckley is a freelance writer and journalist residing in Troy, New York. His website is the American Monitor. You may reach him at PDevlinBuckley@TheAmericanMonitor.com.
__________________
No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG

[EchelonMonitor]

please find it, he is set to win tomorrow.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6OGG9lDCwc8  title:  McCain Says He Met With Al Qaeda

Threw it together and can't say I'm happy with the text I added, but at least it's up.

[DCUBED]

McCain/Dr. Strangelove '08

[EchelonMonitor]

Apparently McCain met with Cheney in Iraq:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OGG9lDCwc8

[rick reuben]

The Sibel Edmonds revelations were just about completely ignored by US media. What a joke. Democracy Now! has covered Edmonds a little in the past, but I guess the word went out that this story is too dangerous. D Now! search engine shows no mentions of Edmonds since 2006 on the program.

I thought it was funny that the same day I was seaching US media for coverage of the nuclear secrets case, I found a clip on youtube of the Regis and Kelly program. Regis went to a Christmas party at Phil Donahue's house, and among other gatekeepers, Mike Wallace and Amy Goodman were there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhz-i1uZQNQ

[independentWV]

Wexler to Present Cheney Impeachment Petitions on House Floor, Tuesday

January 11, 2008

This was an email sent by Chief of Staff for Rep. Robert Wexler to a friend of Impeach for Peace:

Congressman Wexler will present the signatures (wexlerwantshearings.com) he got on the floor of the house Tuesday night (1/15/07) and make the case for hearings. It will be on C-Span and we will post the video as well as email the video to the near 200,000 on our list.

He will also mention by name other groups that have collected signatures and how many they have, including impeachbush.org.

[YuvbinDuped]

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets

The Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece

01/05/08 "Sunday Times" -- - - A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

This is the most important story since 9-11 and indicates/proves that our media, certain politicians and the FBI are complicit in treason and espionage in the U.S.

The very fact that our media has not even made counter-claims is all the proof anyone should require to comprehend that we've all been duped.

[Dig]

This is the most important story since 9-11 and indicates/proves that our media, certain politicians and the FBI are complicit in treason and espionage in the U.S.

The very fact that our media has not even made counter-claims is all the proof anyone should require to comprehend that we've all been duped.

Absolutely!

And if you also look at the Abramoff connections and the Carol Lam investigations, you have a big piece of the anti-American domestic terrorist and drug smuggling network.

[independentWV]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/30041

Impeachment Marcher Reachers Washington - "Hello Madame Speaker"
Submitted by dandewalt on Sat, 2008-01-12 08:23. Impeachment
Impeachment Marcher Reaches Washington – “Hello Madame Speaker”
by Dan DeWalt
John Nurenberg, who has spent the last forty days and nights walking south on Route 1 from Boston to Washington D.C., has reached the outskirts of his goal, Nancy Pelosi’s office. And rather than the last stumbling steps of exhaustion, or steps glad to be finishing up and moving on, the final leg of John’s journey is rather more a river of energy that has been fed by the response that he has received along his route.
During his trek, John has been invited (and thrown out of) high schools and bolstered by vigils and events in Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York City, Jersey City, Philadelphia, and now Washington. His web site www.marchinmyname.org tells the tales of many a spirit touched, moved and even changed by learning about John and his dedication to actively protecting the Constitution.
And John hasn’t been the only one active on this topic in the last weeks. Congressman Henry Wexler, along with a growing number of his colleagues has been increasing pressure on Chairman John Conyers of the House Judiciary committee to open hearings on the impeachable charges that have been introduced by Dennis Kucinich. A couple of weeks ago, Wexler and two other members of the committee wrote a compelling op-ed detailing why they want to start hearings. After it was refused publication by several major newspapers, Wexler was forced to publish it on the web, along with an online petition for people to sign on to his demand. The number of signers is approaching a quarter million and the op-ed has now been published in at least two major newspapers.
Former Senator George McGovern just published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for impeachment, the first such call to appear on those pages. (This is the same Washington Post that wouldn’t publish the Wexler op-ed a week earlier.)
During the Presidential debates, before the power structure shut out Dennis Kucinich, and so the topic of impeachment, his calls for impeachment often received notable outbursts of audience approval. In spite of time almost certainly running out, in spite of an election upon which so many are pinning so much hope, in spite of a rising level of hysteria among liberal Democrats who are frantic that something may upset their apple cart and are begging when not shrilling that the I word not be mentioned, in spite of all this, more and more Americans are deciding that the cost to our nation is too great if we fail to uphold the Constitution and the principles that it embodies. American citizens are united in the belief that the President is not above the law. But a majority in Congress has decided to acquiesce to Mr. Bush’s lawbreaking.
Although the establishment media and power elite refuse to acknowledge it, we are in a Constitutional turmoil, and much of the mess we are now in at home and overseas has happened because Congress has allowed the Executive branch to unconstitutionally expand its power to a dangerous degree. We are engaging daily in a deadly, brutal, illegal, counterproductive and expensive occupation in Iraq, but we are dished out a fluff news diet of celebrity misadventures, fears about $4.oo gas, the horserace to be the next Corporate Representative in Chief, the success of the “surge” or Bush’s legacy. Many Americans are wondering if they are the only ones feeling distress and outrage. Many feel the utter hopelessness of being a single small voice against the monolith of power and money that seems to decide how things get done.
John Nirenberg’s walk turned one man’s outrage into a vehicle for thousands to help him take his message to Speaker Pelosi. His time in Washington will make a difference, but it must be followed up by other actions from other quarters. Citizen actions are already starting to have an impact on congress members. Democrats feeling the heat from constituents have started to break ranks from the leadership with recent votes against further war funding and for supporting Kucinich’s call for his impeachment bill to be brought to the floor of the House. South Florida activists have been shining a merciless spotlight on anti-progressive actions by their “representatives”. Now is the time to turn up the pressure. Let’s follow Mr. Nirenberg’s lead as he goes into Washington. Let’s all take the first steps to reclaiming our Republic, to demand accountability, and to finally end the foul occupation of Iraq that, along with torture, has cast us all in such a shamed and grim light.

[YuvbinDuped]

Absolutely!

And if you also look at the Abramoff connections and the Carol Lam investigations, you have a big piece of the anti-American domestic terrorist and drug smuggling network.

I'm stunned that Alex Jones isn't all over this one. I have seen nothing about it posted on his site. Did i miss something here?

[onehundredmonkeys]

"2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists"
What was in it for them? (Ghadaffi)
Anyone knows?
Can't be the Lockerbie cuz as that was CIA all over it.
Maybe the African Union thing?

[SCOBMAN]

Ex-lawmaker charged as terrorist conspirator
Former congressman accused of supporting fundraising ring

So its true, government people are Al-qaeda.

WASHINGTON - A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

A 42-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Mo., accuses the Islamic American Relief Agency of paying Siljander $50,000 for the lobbying — money that allegedly was stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Siljander, who served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, was appointed by President Reagan to serve as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations for one year in 1987