sibel & states secrets, again

Further to our current mission of trying to identify who Sibel is talking about in the Turkish Embassy, comes this from University of Pittsburgh law school website (via calipendence):

The State Secrets Privilege and Executive Misconduct

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Shayana Kadidal, one of the lead attorneys on the Center for Constitutional Rights' challenge to the NSA domestic surveillance program
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Similar cover-ups have been at work in several recent cases where the government has managed to successfully assert the state secrets privilege. One of them involved Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish translator hired by the FBI who was appalled at what she saw inside the agency’s translation section and complained to her superiors. Like many whistleblowers before her, she was fired. She brought suit, and the government successfully argued that the state secrets privilege was an absolute bar to her suit going forward. (Adding insult to injury, she was barred from the courtroom during the argument of her appeal.) The Supreme Court declined to review the case.

What was it she was trying to tell her supervisors that got her fired? Among other things: that a translator sent to Guantánamo to translate Farsi detainee interviews didn’t speak that language, and that foreign diplomats suspected of spying in the U.S. were having their wiretaps translated by their own relatives who worked for the FBI. Rather than let those serious national security breaches see the light of day (and perhaps become subjects of an embarrassing outside investigation), the FBI fired her, and then successfully managed to deprive her of her vindication in court, courtesy of the state secrets privilege.

The Edmonds case reveals the rot at the heart of the government’s “war on terror” — that the legal shortcuts the administration has used, by removing oversight, ended up weakening law enforcement’s efforts against terrorism by diminishing accountability. (emph in orig)

That would be interesting, wouldnt it. I suspect that he's got some details mixed up. I'll email him.

update - the author of the piece above has a blog where he also posted the article above - and it included a link to James Ridgeway at Village Voice (Nov 05) who writes:

Edmonds, a Turkish American born in Iran and fluent in Farsi and Turkish among other languages, discovered an odd network within the FBI where, among other things, relatives of foreign diplomats were working as interpreters. They were translating FBI wiretaps of foreign diplomats suspected of spying. As it turned out, these suspect family members were relatives of the translators--in other words moles working in the translation section.

Incidentally, in that piece Ridgeway links back to an earlier (Mar 05) piece of his where he says:

"Edmonds was fired after she complained about the fishy translations. She told her bosses that national security might have been breached when an interpreter with a relative at a foreign embassy in Washington actually gave wiretap information to the target of an FBI investigation. She claims these people are still working for the FBI. "

Ridgeway's original (mar05) claim is different to his second claim (the first one I listed) - i wonder if he has confused some issues.

Let's presume that Ridgeway is talking about Dickerson, and the Turkish embassy. In the original claim, he says that a) Dickerson had a relative at the Embassy and b) Dickerson gave wiretap information to a target of an investigation.

In Ridgeway's subsequent piece he claims that:
a) "relatives of foreign diplomats were working as interpreters" (the 'diplomats' thing may have been a leap)
b) the interpreters "were translating FBI wiretaps of foreign diplomats suspected of spying"
c) "As it turned out, these suspect family members were relatives of the translators"

Is Ridgeway adding that third piece of information as new information? it sure looks like that (rather than simply conflating the issues)

interesting.

(update: i have learned that ridgeway is incorrect when he says that the targets were family members)