What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?

Below is a short-as-possible piece which hopes to answer the burning question in Sibel's case: What the heck is her case about?

For a longer version, see my recent interview with Scott Horton

Please call the offices of Congressmen Waxman - (202) 225-3976 - and Conyers - (202) 225-5126 - demanding open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case and the State Secrets Privilege.

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Sibel Edmonds' case is about the intersection of illegal arms trafficking, heroin trafficking, money laundering, terrorist activities and the corruption of many "highly-recognizable, highly-known names" in and around the US government. Sibel says that the people involved will go straight to prison if we can get hearings into her case. Richard Perle, in prison. Douglas Feith, in prison. Dennis Hastert, in prison. Marc Grossman, in prison.

According to Sibel, the best place to begin trying to understand the case is a recent article by Phil Giraldi in the American Conservative. Sibel says “Giraldi has it 100% right; this I consider the most accurate summary of my case.”

Giraldi writes:

"Sibel Edmonds... could provide a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time. On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection.
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Turkey benefits from the relationship by securing general benevolence and increased aid from the US Congress - as well as access to otherwise unattainable military technology. The Turkish General Staff has a particular interest because much of the military spending is channeled through companies in which the generals have a financial stake, making for a very cozy and comfortable business arrangement. The commercial interest has also fostered close political ties, with the American Turkish Council, American Turkish Cultural Alliance and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations all developing warm relationships with AIPAC and other Jewish and Israel advocacy groups throughout the US.

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar."

Giraldi goes on to list some neocons who are "linked to Turkey" - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, and Stephen Solarz - and he suggests that they "enrich themselves" via drug trafficking and arms dealing.

The American Turkish Council (ATC)
The main Turkish lobbying group in the US is an organization called the American Turkish Council (ATC) - one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country. The ATC is heavily stacked with former government officials - statesmen, lobbyists and 'dime a dozen generals' - lobbyists and representatives of the military-industrial-complex (MIC). Brent Scowcroft is the chairman, and heavy hitters from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and other 'defense' contractors populate the board.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Turkey is a major recipient of US military aid - running to the billions of dollars - with much of it financed by the US taxpayer. Giraldi suggests in his article that this largesse appears to be the result of bribes paid to congressmen - a suggestion that shouldn't surprise anyone - but there's much more to the story than the usual Iron Triangle / Revolving Door story that we're all familiar with.

In a 10-page article in Vanity Fair on Sibel's case, the ATC is described as "a front for criminal activity" involving "large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder." We'll discuss the drug side of the story shortly, but let's first take a quick look at the military technology element - not only are the MIC contractors bribing congress to ensure that military aid flows to Turkey (and Israel), the Turks and the Israelis are also illegally selling that technology to the highest bidder - which inevitably includes America's enemies, States, and terrorist groups.

Sibel's case also involves the nuclear black market - some Turkish members of the ATC have supplied Pakistan's A.Q. Khan network with hardware, as have American companies that Sibel overheard on the wiretaps. Perhaps even more disturbing, as reported in Vanity Fair, other wiretaps indicate that "Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons." Daniel Ellsberg says that, according to Sibel, bribes were paid to people at the State Department to facilitate this activity.

These are extraordinary claims, of course, and we have a lot of evidence to support the claims - including, but not limited to, the fact that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, had been conducting a counter-intelligence operation against the ATC for years.

One very interesting aspect of Sibel's case that has not really gained traction is that while the ATC is understood to be the key focus of her case, it appears that AIPAC is equally involved. In a terrific 2005 interview with Chris Deliso, Sibel said:

Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one... But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it... You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people.

And she went a little bit further in a great interview with David Swanson this week:

"AIPAC helped form the American Turkish Council - look at the board members, look at the people. You will see the same people involved in both fronts, because it is the same operation."

Reading between the lines (in a number of different places), it appears that Sibel was actively involved in 'the AIPAC investigation' as well as the investigation into the ATC. As she says, both the ATC and AIPAC are both 'fronts' for the 'same (criminal) operation.'



Drug Trafficking.
As I document in "Sibel Edmonds & the Neocons' Turkish Gravy-Train," Afghanistan supplies almost 90% of the world's heroin, and most of that goes straight to Turkey where it is processed, packaged, warehoused, and then re-exported to other countries for final consumption. Turkey supplies approximately 80% of Europe's heroin, and 15% of heroin in the US - worth approximately $40 billion at street prices.

Turkey is widely acknowledged to be controlled by a "Deep State." In 1996, a deadly car crash at a place called Susurluk blew this out into the open. In the car were four people who probably shouldn't have been in the car together:

"an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli... Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself.
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The Susurluk Incident became Turkey’s Watergate, exposing the deep links between the Turkish state, terrorists and drug traffickers. It revealed what Turks call the Gizli Devlet, or Deep State – the politicians, military officers and intelligence officials who worked with drug bosses to move drugs from Afghanistan into Europe."

Sibel spells it out:

"The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks."

As I outlined in the curiously-titled "Sibel Edmonds: America's Watergate," Sibel's case demonstrates that Turkey's Deep State 'owns' large parts of the American establishment, to the point where it appears that there also is a 'Deep State' in the US as well. ATC/AIPAC appear to be headquarters for this Deep State in the US, a cozy club where drug dealers, weapons traffickers and past-and-present government officials coexist. Happily!

And if that's not bad enough, we also know that:

"Heroin trafficking is also the main source of funding for the al-Qaeda terrorists. A Time Magazine article in August 2004 reported that al-Qaeda has established a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, and in turn is using the drug revenues to purchase weapons and explosives. The article states: “...al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are increasingly financing operations with opium sales. Anti-drug officials in Afghanistan have no hard figures on how much al-Qaeda and the Taliban are earning from drugs, but conservative estimates run into tens of millions of dollars.”

That is, our Turkish Deep State friends, the people we are directly providing with weapons, are outsourcing some of their distribution activities to al-Qaeda and the Taliban (and, while we're at it, to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA.))

When we are discussing issues such as al-Qaeda smuggling heroin through Afghanistan and the other 'Stans, sometimes it can seem remote and distant, so let's come back to something more concrete. In Adrian Gatton's terrific recent article, The Susurluk Legacy, he quotes Huseyin Baybasin, a Turkish heroin kingpin who is now in jail in Holland:

“I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England... I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.”

Gatton also describes how anyone in the UK government who dared speak about the issue were immediately rebuked by the Foreign Office (the UK equivalent of the State Department.)

The parallels with Sibel's case couldn't be clearer. As 60 Minutes first reported (youtube) in 2002, and Vanity Fair later reported, the Turkish Embassy was directing a lot of the heroin trafficking activity - in conjunction with people at the ATC.

"Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C.
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In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled hearing... Many (calls) involved an F.B.I. target at (Chicago's) large Turkish Consulate... Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes."

And just as the UK Foreign Office silenced anyone in the UK who tried to speak out, Sibel says:

The Department of State is easily the most corrupted of the major government agencies.
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In some cases where the FBI stumbles upon evidence of high-level officials being involved in drug-smuggling, they're even prevented from sharing it with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. The Department of State just comes in and says, "Leave it."

Elsewhere, Sibel says:

"For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power. Those with direct knowledge have been prevented from making this information available and public by various gag orders and invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. Why?"

Pay attention here, because the ATC is where the worlds of the MIC and the heroin trafficking collide. One of the key Turkish interfaces at the ATC is the Turkish Generals - people that Giraldi says own a stake in the companies through which the military spending is channeled. As described earlier, these exact same people, the Turkish Deep State, also control much of the global heroin market. In between the MIC and the heroin traffickers - are the "neoconservatives (who) distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time."

One of the difficulties in trying to unravel the Sibel Edmonds case is that we aren't sure where one case ends and another begins. We know that some of the wiretaps were from the ATC, and some from the Turkish embassy in DC, and some from the embassy in Chicago. We also know that many of the wiretaps involve conversations between the embassies and the ATC.
Some of the wiretaps relate to drug trafficking, some relate to the nuclear black market and other weapons trafficking, and some refer to terrorist activity - including 9/11.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, when she says:

You have the same players when you look into these activities at high-levels you come across the same players, they are the same people.

Those 'same people' - at least on the American side - according to Giraldi, appear to be Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, and Stephen Solarz. It appears that we can also add William Cohen and Joseph Ralston - and Dennis Hastert - to that roster, and I'm sure there are a few more that haven't yet been publicly identified.

If what Sibel says is true, and her claims are all backed by documents and wiretaps, and also backed up by other agents who have filed similar complaints, and are ready and willing to testify. All of these people should be in jail. For a long, long time.

Congress must hold hearings to get to the bottom of these crimes. If you agree, please call Congress, today, and demand public, open hearings.

(for more, see Who wants to gag Sibel Edmonds? And why? (with answers!))

Contact Information

Congressman Henry Waxman (contact page)

(Those calling Waxman's office should ask for Michelle Ash & David Rapallo.)

In Washington, D.C.
2204 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3976 (phone)
(202) 225-4099 (fax)

In Los Angeles
8436 West Third Street, Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 651-1040 (phone)
(818) 878-7400 (phone)
(310) 652-3095 (phone)
(323) 655-0502 (fax)

House Government Reform Committee (contact page)
By Mail or Phone:
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-5051

Please also contact Congressman John Conyers, asking him to support hearings by Chairman Waxman.
(Those calling Conyers' office should ask for Elliot Mintzberg.)
Email: John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

Washington, DC
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax

Sibel Edmonds: There are traitors in our midst. Call Waxman. Demand hearings. (with video!)

Today is the last day of the current spike of the Let Sibel Edmonds Speak campaign. We are begging you to call Henry Waxman's office (202-225-3976) and demand public hearings into her case.

Sibel is a former FBI translator who has documented evidence, supported by a number of agents, and confirmed by numerous government investigations, that people like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Dennis Hastert have been involved in treasonous activities.

Waxman has seen the evidence and was "outraged" and "stunned" and promised to hold hearings when the Dems controlled Congress - but has been ignoring our requests.

In this post, I have some compelling video of a recent interview that Sibel gave asking people to demand that Waxman hold hearings, and I also want to focus on one important issue that comes up in Sibel's case. High level officials are literally selling out their government, and the country, while they are in office. This maybe isn't that surprising, but here we have a case where we literally have evidence, and we have proof that many governmental organizations were aware of the fact, and they didn't do anything, and they continue to do nothing.

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I've been running diaries all this week on Sibel's case asking you to call Waxman and demand hearings.

My post yesterday demonstrated that the US Attorney crisis pre-dates the current scandal - and the Pentagon (Perle & Feith) were dictating which FBI investigations were and were not allowed to proceed (Hint: they were not allowed to proceed when Perle & Feith were targets).

Tuesday's post was mostly a recent interview that Sibel gave describing the importance of public hearings and asking you to contact Waxman. I've resolved some technical issues and the YouTube segment is below.

In Monday's post I argued that we need to support people like Sibel because if she can't get public hearings, with documented evidence, validated by previous governmental investigations, then we can't reasonably ask any other people to come forward with evidence in any of the other investigations that Waxman might conduct.

For background information on the case, see What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? and Who wants to gag Sibel Edmonds? And why? (with answers!)

For today's post, firstly, here's the YouTube (2 parts) of the last 12 minutes of a recent interview that Sibel gave where she discusses the need for hearings, the fact that her case is documented, that other agents want to testify, and that Waxman has ignored her, despite previous promises to hold hearings into her case.






If you cant see these embedded here, try Part One and Part Two.

(partial transcript here)

I also want to highlight something that Sibel says in this interview that sometimes gets missed, but it's still important today, and the specific example in her case can apparently be generalized across broad swathes of the US government.

We are all aware of the problem of the revolving doors within the Military Industrial Complex - but Sibel says that (at least) one of the key perps in her case, Marc Grossman, was explicitly working for foreign interests while he was in office, with a guaranteed payoff when he left office.

Sibel says:

"This is very important: In order to obtain (the post-retirement job) they had to serve those foreign interests while they were working and they had those high positions. That's how they earn those future positions, that's how it happens. In every single case, that’s how it happens."

Sibel has previously written: "Please do not make the grave and naive mistake of assuming that Grossman found and obtained his highly lucrative and questionable positions after his resignation in January 2005."

Again, this is nothing new, really. We recently saw that the CIA's Number 3, Dusty Foggo, did exactly the same thing in the Duke Cunningham case - but a) we need to put a stop to it b) Grossman's 'sponsors' are most unsavoury and c) a number of people, in a variety of US Govt agencies knew about Grossman's dirty dealing, and did nothing about it, for years.

Most people don't know much about Grossman, fair enough. He was the #3 guy at the State Department under Armitage and former Ambassador to Turkey. To the extent that his name is familiar, it is because it was his memo to Scooter Libby that first identified Valerie Plame as Joe Wilson's husband - but his proximity to a number of scandals forces us to ask exactly what Grossman did to earn his new $2m+ salary.

For example, contrary to conventional wisdom, as I detail here,

The thing is, Brewster Jennings was 'outed' (privately, within the criminal network) long before Valerie Plame was officially outed. In fact, Brewster Jennings' cover was blown in the Summer of 2001 by Marc Grossman, former #3 at the State Department and Ambassador to Turkey.

Brewster Jennings was investigating Pakistan's AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network - a network which also involved Turkish companies. WHy did Grossman 'out' Brewster Jennings? and why is he now working with a shady Turkish company?

According to Sibel:

Most and foremost, Grossman is known for his extraordinarily cozy relationship with Turkey and Israel; followed by Pakistan.

Grossman's relationship with Pakistan is curious. As British MP Michael Meacher wrote in the Guardian:

"...General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead (911) hijacker.

Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to "retire" by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?"

Sibel has previously commended me on highlighting Grossman's meeting with General Mahmoud Ahmed that week.

That isn't Grossman's only involvement in 911 related stuff. As I wrote here:

"Thirdly, two weeks after 911, Sibel overheard two 'targets' of a (Counter intelligence) monitoring program having a conversation. Apparently, three associates of these targets were arrested in New Jersey immediately after 911 - two Turkish guys and an Uzbeki. The targets were desperate to get their associates out of jail, and out of the country, so they called Marc Grossman who duly facilitated their release. (I've previously documented the NJ connection - home to Giza Technologies and a Brewster Jennings operation)"

My point here isn't to mount a critique of Grossman, per se, but it's important to understand what Sibel is talking about when she says that she has documented evidence that high level officials routinely sell out their country, to an extraordinary degree, because they have been promised post-career payoffs. And the parallel problem that many US govt agencies have known about this for years, and done nothing. How many Grossmans are there in the US Government today, making the same deals to sell out their country?

We need to put a stop to it. And that's why you should call Waxman (202-225-3976) and demand public hearings into Sibel's case. Do it today. Please.

(dkos, DU - please go rec)

Who wants to gag Sibel Edmonds? And why? (with answers!)

I was explaining the case of FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' to a friend yesertday, and she asked a good question:

"Do we have a good sense about why the FBI didn't want to pursue this investigation?"

The short answer is "Yeah, mostly" - downstairs I'll lay out what we know, and then we'll discuss some possible complications/wrinkles to the narrative.

The Pentagon and the State Department want Sibel to STFU to protect their profitable racket.

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Sibel has repeatedly emphasized that much of what she learnt was the result of FBI Counter-Intelligence (CI) programs - and a large component of CI is simply monitoring places like embassies, and groups like AIPAC and the American Turkish Council (ATC).

We know that CI was conducting ongoing monitoring of these groups, and by all accounts it would be a breach of duty not to do so - that's why there's such a body of documented evidence in Sibel's case. We know that embassies are 'protected' space (legally, I don't think they are actually on "US soil" - or some similar concoction) - and any nefarious activity that is uncovered there can't be acted on - however, once the activity extends beyond an embassy, then it falls within the purview of the FBI. Vanity Fair reported that there were many phone calls discussing illegal activity between the Turkish Embassy and the (non-'protected') ATC which ought to mean that the case becomes actionable.

When CI discovers such illegal activity, they are supposed to hand the case over to the relevant division at the FBI - e.g. Counterterrorism (CT), narcotics, criminal etc. As Sibel repeatedly states, in her case(s) this never happened. (Remember that Sibel's cases include drug-running, terrorism, public corruption, nuclear black market & illegal arms trafficking.)

For example, in Sibel's Hijacking of a Nation, Part 2, she writes:

"For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power."

(as an aside, it's interesting here that Sibel is saying that the problem extends beyond the FBI, she is apparently saying that CI investigations by the CIA are buried in the same manner. We know that the CIA's cover company, Brewster Jennings, was also investigating the ATC.)

In Sibel's open letter to Thomas Kean and the 911 Commission, she also notes that even when CI uncovers relevant information pertaining to terrorism, say the 911 attacks, that information isn't handed over to the counterterrorism branch at the FBI. As I understand it, CI had relevant information pertaining to 911, and they didn't hand it over to CT, even after the attacks.

Why didn't counterintelligence hand these cases to the relevant bodies?
In Sibel's letter to the 911 Commission, she writes:

"If counterintelligence receives information about terrorism that implicates certain nations, semi-legit organizations or the politically powerful in this country, then that information is not shared with counterterrorism, regardless of the consequences."

In other words, CI (under pressure) is protecting:
* Certain nations - Turkey, and probably Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some of the 'Stans.
* Semi-legit organizations - the American Turkish Council, Assembly of Turkish American Associations (and others), and probably AIPAC.
* Politically powerful - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman and Dennis Hastert - and probably Paul Wolfowitz, Bob Livingston, Stephen Solarz and others.

Who is pressuring CI to not move on the cases?
In Sibel's letter to the 911 Commission, she writes "In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents have cited "direct pressure by the State Department."" In an interview with Chris Deliso, Sibel states
"The Department of State is easily the most corrupted of the major government agencies.""

Not only was the State Department ensuring that none of these cases were acted on, they were also in charge of shutting down all aspects of Sibel's case, with guidance from the Pentagon. As ex-CIA agent Phil Giraldi notes in Kill The Messenger, the recent movie about Sibel's case:

The 'State Secret Privilege' was invoked not by the FBI but by the Pentagon and the State Department!

Apparently the State Department can dictate to the Dept of Justice, as well as the FBI, as Sibel relates in Gagged But Not Dead:

The attorney general cites two reasons to justify the unconstitutional, panic-driven assault on me. Reason one: to protect certain diplomatic relations – not named since our officials are obviously ashamed to admit to these relations. Reason two: to protect certain U.S. business interests.

Let's take each one and dissect it (I have given up on our mass media to do that for us!). Since when is the Department of Justice in the business of protecting U.S. diplomatic relations? They appear to be acting as a mouthpiece for the State Department. Now that's one entity that has strong reasons to cover up what will end up being considered a mammoth blunder. It is the American people and their outrage they must be worried about; they wouldn't want to have a few of their top officials held criminally liable; would they?

As for reason two, I can assure you that the U.S. foreign business relations they may be referring to are not among those that benefit the majority of the American people. But the American people's security and best interests are being sacrificed for a handful of military-industrial entities and their lobbying arms. And since when are nuclear black market activities considered legitimate business, one may wonder?

In other words, for those of you who might think that the State Dept might have legitimate reasons for burying investigations in order to maintain diplomatic relations, that's not what is going on here.

Why would the State Department facilitate criminal activity?
Because the people involved are criminals.

As Vanity Fair reported,

"According to (Sibel's) later secure testimony, in one conversation... a Turkish official spoke directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They suggested that the State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed time to the American-Turkish Council office, at 1111 14th St. NW, where he would be given $7,000 in cash. “She told us she’d heard mention of exchanges of information, dead drops—that kind of thing,” a congressional source says. “It was mostly money in exchange for secrets...

...Yet another (conversation) implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity...””

Daniel Ellsberg was more explicit:

"there's a great deal of dealing of information in illicit arms trades including, (Sibel) says, nuclear information, from our nuclear weapons labs - for which cold cash is paid - to people in the labs, and to people, she says, to people in the State Department - who have essentially given 'OKs' for various trades, or have turned a blind eye - deliberately - to it."

Former Deputy Secretary of State, Marc Grossman, apparently was a key player in the criminal enterprise. When he left State in 2005, he immediately began earning the big bucks - more than $2 million p.a. Sibel argues that this payoff was for selling his soul, and selling out the national interest while he was in office.

Possible Complications to the Narrative
At the top of this post, I mentioned that there are some wrinkles/complications to "why the FBI didn't want to pursue this investigation?" - I'll outline them here.

FBI Translation Unit
We know that the FBI Translation Unit didn't even have any Turkish translators until Sibel joined immediately after 911. This is somewhat surprising given Turkey's " importance in the areas of terrorism, money laundering, illegal arms sales, industrial and military espionage, and the nuclear black-market." Occasionally the Translation Unit would temporarily borrow a Turkish translator from elsewhere, say, the Pentagon or the State Dept, to translate documents & wiretaps for them. I presume this was seen as a feature, not a bug.

We also know that the FBI Translation Unit was infiltrated by 'enemy elements' no later than November 2001. We also know that three-quarters of Sibel's translation work was retrospective - translating (and 're-translating') stuff going back to 1996.

It is conceivable, therefore, that the Translation Unit was actually compromised much earlier than 2001, and that CI simply wasn't even getting (some of) the important, relevant translations. That is, perhaps a partial explanation of why CI didn't move on these cases is because they simply weren't receiving (some of) the damning evidence.

Illegal Spying
In March 2007, new evidence was released by a Special Agent Gilbert Graham from the Turkish counterintelligence program (the same program that Sibel was working on) indicating that many of the wiretaps that Sibel translated were illegally acquired. FBI headquarters and senior Justice Department officials had illegally arranged FISA warrants (designed to be used on foreigners) to spy on matters of domestic public corruption. According to James Bamford, the case involved people "in the Turkish government, there were people involved in Turkish lobbies, people involved in the Bush administration, high officials in the Bush administration who were getting payoffs, getting money."

According the the NSWBC, "Graham blew the whistle (in 2002) on this illegal behavior, but the actions were covered up by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General’s office."

The story can become a little bit complicated, but the short version is that a) the FBI was spying illegally b) the illegal spying uncovered massive criminality c) nobody did anything about a) or b)

We aren't exactly sure why the FBI was spying illegally - but maybe it was because the FBI was blackmailing the targets of the investigations. As Sibel states:

"Another troubling aspect of this new case is the fact that we don't know what they did with this information that they obtained illegally. Obviously they did not transfer it to the criminal division to be investigated – so what did they do with this information? Based on what we are getting from our sources, and these are people who have recently left the Bureau, it would not be illogical to actually consider the fact that the Bureau and the Justice Department may be using this information to actually blackmail people within Congress."

It's a felony to use FISA warrants to to conduct domestic investigations - so it appears we have an imperfect storm where nobody wants any of the information to become public. Here's Sibel, again:

"Everybody was happy in the end because on one hand you have corrupt congressional representatives – several of them, and they know who they are and they know about this case. Then, you have people in the State Department – you have at least one individual within the State Department – you have two or three individuals within the Pentagon and you also have certain well-known lobbyists. So this was a case where the Justice Department didn't want their own illegal actions, in terms of conducting these wiretap operations, to be known – so they had their own reason of quashing this thing and basically wanting to cover it up via the State Secrets Privilege.

You had the State Department wanting to have it covered up, you had the Pentagon, and then also you had the Congress not having the reason, the motivation – which should be representing the American people and fulfilling their obligations to the American people – not wanting to touch the case because it's a controversial case."

Hastert
There was one element of Sibel's case that nearly resulted in charges. Dennis Hastert is accused of taking bribes a variety of bribes. In 1999, the Clinton Administration actually asked the Department of Justice to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate Hastert. The process got derailed with the impeachment hearings, and instead of Hastert going to prison, he ended up as Speaker. Ashcroft closed the case in 2001 when Sibel started kicking up a storm. Sibel has direct first hand documented evidence of this, but Hastert is essentially a distraction from the main issues in Sibel's case.

AIPAC Investigation
If you look at the details of the AIPAC case (Franklin, and Rosen & Weissman) you quickly see that the investigation began at some point before 1999, but there wasn't any activity till Franklin waltzed onto the scene in 2003. An argument can plausibly be made, therefore, that it isn't unusual for a case of this nature to be stuck in CI for years. However, as Sibel explains, the AIPAC investigation was actually a "sister operation" to the investigation into the ATC - in other words, the same people were being investigated, the same issues were involved, and, undoubtedly, the State Department and the Pentagon was inflicting the same pressure.


One thing is for sure - open public hearings by Henry Waxman would certianly clear up many outstanding questions, and would put many of the guilty parties in prison. Sibel guarantees it.

As you know, we've been demanding that Waxman hold hearings - details at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak. It will only take a day or two - as she says:

"It's not a case (that needs) to be investigated, that part has already been done by the Senate Judiciary Committee, by the DoJ's Inspector Generals office, so it just have to have a hearing and just put an end to it and see some oversight and accountability as a result. "

And given the nature of Sibel's work, all of her claims are backed up by documented proof. Sibel has issued a challenge:

"Put out those tapes. Put out those wiretaps. Put out those documents. Put out the truth. The truth is going to hurt them. The truth is going to set me free."

As I mentioned yesterday, at some point later this week, we will have some new content being released, and when that gets published, we'll start with the phones again - calling Waxman's office demanding hearings. We'll need your help.

(let me know if you want to be added to an email list for announcements)

(DKOS, DU)

You can help Sibel Edmonds & your country, today.

Let Sibel Edmonds Speak is a campaign we've been running for the last week asking people to demand that Henry Waxman hold hearings into former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds' case and the State Secrets Privilege.

We've had a lot of support here as people learn more about Sibel's case, and I ask that you help turn that energy into hearings by calling Waxman and Conyers today, Monday, and Tuesday and we'll be asking Waxman to go on the record midweek and state that he will have hearings.
Congressman Waxman: ph: (202) 225-3976, fax: (202) 225-4099
Congressman Conyers: (202) 225-5126, fax (202) 225-0072
(Capitol switchboard number - 800-828-0498)

Over at campaign headquarters, I have a new post called "Sibel Edmonds: The most ungagged person in American History (and I helped!)" where we're asking you to go on the record and leave a comment saying that you made a call or sent a fax, and perhaps share any feedback that you received.

Downstairs, I'll discuss a few things that you might not know about Sibel's case...

------------
First, here's the video of the speech:

The official transcript is here. A snippet:

"We must be vigilant & fight back, for our freedom is under assault – not from terrorists – for they only attack us, not our freedom, and they can never prevail. No, the attacks on our freedom are from within, from our very own government; and unless we recognize these attacks for what they are, and stand up, and speak out – no shout out – against those despots in government who are attempting to silence the brave few who are warning us; then we are doomed to wake up one sad morning and wonder when and where our freedom died."

I wrote a post yesterday that some of you may have missed which attempts to document a very simple component of Sibel's story that should outrage everyone, and it doesn't require any familiarity with Sibel's case to comprehend. Sibel's boss was actively involved in espionage to protect the targets of the FBI's investigations. This is documented and acknowledged by the FBI and the Department of Justice etc. He got promoted, and now, five years later, he is in charge of the entire desk of 300 Arabic speaking translators. He was apparently being bribed and/or blackmailed 5 years ago into protecting targets of FBI investigations, and I can only presume that he is still being bribed/blackmailed by the same people - he certainly is compromised and a security risk. His promotion seems to suggest that all of the people above him are also compromised. That should scare the living daylights out of you and ought to be sufficient to get even your right-wing uncle in fly-over country to call Waxman and demand hearings.
Perhaps you could send him the post and ask him to make a call or two (hint, hint) and you won't even have to discuss the merits of firing gay Arabic linguists under Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

What else? Well, there's the fact that "Turkish (criminal) groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to (steal) information about black market nuclear weapons." These criminal groups were bribing people at the State Department to ensure that these 'students' got placed at the nuclear labs. Being criminal groups, they then sold their loot to the highest bidders, including America's state-based and terrorist enemies.

What else? Sibel is aware of an April 2001 FBI briefing that indicated that:

1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities; 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes; 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States; 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months. The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism Thomas Frields at the FBI Washington Field Office... No action was taken by the special agent in charge, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to "keep quiet" regarding this issue.

Incidentally, this event didn't make it into the 911 Commission's section on "missed opportunities."

What else? Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Marc Grossman and Dennis Hastert (and others) will all go to prison for a long time, presuming that the standard penalty for treason isn't implemented.

What else? To clarify, a lot of the writing I have done about Sibel's case has, for simplicity, assumed that the American Turkish Council is the only organization involved. There are a number of other Turkey-related organizations - Phil Giraldi mentions some of them in his article. More importantly, Sibel says (and Giraldi hints at this as well) that AIPAC and the ATC are both (equal?) fronts for the same criminal network that her case involves.

What else? In case you missed my "Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings" post from last week, Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings was investigating the ATC for years, which appears to support the claims that the ATC was involved in WMD proliferation. It isn't known whether Brewster Jennings was also investigating AIPAC

What else? In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, I wrote a post last week called "What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?"

What else? Because Sibel was a translator, there is documented evidence for all of her claims. She says:

"Put out those tapes. Put out those wiretaps. Put out those documents. Put out the truth. The truth is going to hurt them. The truth is going to set me free."

What else? Sibel and I will be interviewed Monday night at 7eastern on Peter B Collins. Listen live or it'll be available at WhiteRoseSociety at some point soon. If it's a good interview, I'll try to transcribe it quickly, but time is going to be short in the next day or two (and it probably won't be great - I've only ever done 3 interviews in my life, all of them I the last 2 weeks - so I'm a total amateur)

What else? I think that's about it for now. Except, you know, begging that you call and demand hearings on Monday and Tuesday.

If I had to 'order' our priorities in terms of who to contact first etc, I'd say (I'd prefer calls and faxes rather than emails):
1. Waxman's DC office:
(202) 225-3976 (phone)
(202) 225-4099 (fax)
Michelle Ash (Michelle.Ash@mail.house.gov)
David Rapallo (David.Rapallo@mail.house.gov)

2. Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
(202) 225-5051 (phone)
email

3. John Conyers' DC office:
(202) 225-5126 (phone)
(202) 225-0072 (Fax)
email: John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

What else? Don't forget to tell us how you get along, and register that you helped ungag Sibel at "Sibel Edmonds: The most ungagged person in American History (and I helped!)"

(DU thread, DKOS thread)

Sibel Edmonds: we aren't safe today. you can help.

Former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds discovered massive criminality when she was at the FBI and was told to shut up. Sibel is the most gagged person in US history. We're in the final days of a campaign, Let Sibel Edmonds Speak, to demand that Henry Waxman hold hearings into her case and the State Secrets Privilege. (contact details downstairs)

Because Sibel is gagged, and because her case is complicated, it can be difficult to understand of all the different elements. In this post, I will lay out the most simple of the issues that Sibel raised - espionage in the FBI translation department - and why it is still important today (hint: a confirmed 'mole'/foreign agent is in charge of all Arabic translators at the FBI.)

In other words, I hope that you can send this diary to your friends and family - people who may not be involved in politics, people who have never heard of Sibel - and they are sufficiently outraged that they can't wait to call Waxman on Monday morning and demand hearings.

The reason they should be outraged is because America is more likely to be attacked because of the information in this diary.

Last week, more than 30 'good-government' groups from across the political spectrum petitioned Henry Waxman to hold hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case.

From the petition:

The issues that were reported by Ms. Edmonds include:

• Cases of espionage activities within the FBI...
• Cases of cover-up of information and leads pre and post 9/11, under the excuse of protecting certain diplomatic relations
• Cases of intentional blocking and mistranslation of crucial intelligence by FBI translators and management

Today I want to describe exactly what she's talking about regarding espionage at the FBI translation unit, and prove that we are all less safe because the problems have not been rectified - in fact, the problems are much worse today.

When Sibel Edmonds joined the FBI immediately after 911, she was the first and only Turkish translator there. Shortly afterwards, the FBI recruited two other translators, Melek Can Dickerson and Kevin Taskasen. Their boss was former translator Mike Feghali.

Let's dispense with Kevin Taskasen first, because he isn't particularly important in the scheme of things, although his situation does demonstrate the massive incompetence and cronyism in the translation department. Taskasen failed two language proficiency exams, English and Turkish, but his wife worked at the FBI's language testing center so... he got the job. Three months later he was sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate the interrogations: to perhaps help foil a new terror attack, or to help determine the guilt or otherwise of the prisoners held there.

Now on to more serious matters: Melek Can Dickerson.

In a fantastic interview with Sibel last week titled "What if the FBI Hired Someone Honest to Look into 9-11?" David Swanson said:

There's a saying in Italian "Traduttore traditore" which means "The translator is a traitor"...

Not all translators are traitors, of course, but translators do have tremendous power, as Sibel described in the same interview:

You know, a lot of people consider the language specialists as like a clerical job, but you need to realize, when the information comes... the first people exposed to it are the language specialists. Before that information gets transferred to agents or analysts, the first person who sees it is the language specialist... and that language specialist is in a position to decide whether or not this particular piece of information... is important enough to be translated, whether or not it should be translated verbatim - in detail, or just a summary translation. So by the time that information goes to an analyst or an agent, it has already gone through this filter of the language specialist.

In other words, America's enemies are motivated to A) try to recruit existing translators B) place their own translator 'moles' in the translation unit and C) if they're really lucky/skilled/successful, take over an entire 'desk' in the FBIs translation unit. Unfortunately, and scarily, in Sibel's case, we see all three.

Melek Can Dickerson had worked for at least three organizations that were under investigation by the FBI's counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism divisions. She lied on her application form, saying that she'd never worked before in her life, and was given Top Secret clearance and immediately began working in the translation unit. We don't know whether Dickerson was given her job, and Top Secret clearance, as a result of FBI incompetence or corruption - I suspect corruption - but it doesn't really matter, because within weeks of her arrival, the Turkish desk of the FBI translation unit was completely corrupted.

On Sunday December 2nd, 2001, Dickerson and her husband, Doug, arrived at Sibel's house and tried to persuade Sibel and her husband, Matthew, to join the American Turkish Council (ATC) - one of the organizations that Dickerson had previously worked for and failed to mention on her FBI application form. The Dickersons promised Sibel and her husband, Matthew, an early retirement if they joined the ATC. Sibel immediately recognized that she was being recruited to be a mole in the translation unit because the ATC, and some of the Dickersons' other friends, were targets of counter-intelligence & counter-terrorism investigations that Sibel had been translating at the FBI.

According to the 10-page Vanity Fair article on Sibel and her case, the ATC "was being used as a front for criminal activity" involving "laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder." In other words, serious business. We also have evidence from a bunch of other places that suggest that the ATC was involved with all sorts of illegal activity - not least, we know that Valerie Plame's CIA front company, Brewster Jennings, had been investigating the ATC for years.

Brewster Jennings' main focus was Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and we know that companies involved with the ATC were actually supplying rogue nations with nuclear technology - hardware, and nuclear secrets, stolen (via bribes paid to vaious State Dept officials) from US nuclear labs (Sandia, Los Alamos etc)

Story so far: FBI employed Melek Can Dickerson, an agent/mole for a foreign/criminal network involved in WMD (among other things). Dickerson tried to recruit Sibel into the network.

Sibel immediately reported the Dickerson's 'recruitment' attempt to her boss at the FBI, Mike Feghali, but he had already (if not before) been co-opted by Dickerson and the ATC. Within a month of Dickerson joining the FBI, she had changed the FBI translation unit's internal procedures, with the help of her boss, Feghali, so that she alone was in charge of translating any intercepts from her friends at the ATC (and elsewhere). Of course, now that Dickerson, the mole, was in charge of 'translating' her criminal friends' wiretaps, whenever she came across anything incriminating (and there were many such situations), she simply didn't translate it, or marked it 'Not Pertinent.'

Sibel thinks that Feghali and Dickerson were having an affair - often conducted in his office, during business hours. Not only that, he also
"covered-up information and leads pre and post 9/11" (for more, see Sibel's open letter to the 911 Commission)

Sibel reached out to Dennis Saccher, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge of Turkish counter-intelligence, and told him what had happened. He said "It sounds like espionage to me." We aren't sure of what other payoffs Feghali may have received, from Dickerson or the ATC, but he clearly shouldn't be in charge of such a sensitive translation facility at the FBI. "The translator is a traitor."

Sibel took her case up the FBI hierarchy - eventually pleading her case that the translation unit, the frontline against America's enemies, had been infiltrated by a criminal network to FBI Director Robert Mueller, to no avail - and was eventually fired 'at the government's pleasure.'

Despite being fired, Sibel continued to try to bring attention to the fact that America was in danger because foreign criminal elements had taken over the FBI translation unit. She went to the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility (internal affairs), the Department of Justice's Inspector General, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the 911 Commission, and Henry Waxman's office. Every one of them confirmed Sibel's allegations - Republican Senator Charles Grassley explains why:
"Absolutely, she's credible. And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story."

Veteran FBI counterintelligence agent John Cole said the same thing:

"I knew (Sibel) was doing the right thing. I knew because she was right."

Cole tells how he had “talked to people who had read her file, who had read the investigative report, and they were telling me a totally different story” than FBI officials...

“They were telling me that Sibel Edmonds was a 100 percent accurate, that management knew that she was correct.”

In fact, in a CBS 60 Minutes report (download, 300 megs) by Ed Bradley about Sibel's case in 2002, Charles Grassley said angrily, about these facts, "We need to turn the FBI upside down." Five years later, and the FBI has indeed been turned upside down. Five years ago, Mike Feghali was in charge of three Turkish translators, a patriot, an incompetent, and a foreign agent - he fired the patriot, sent the incompetent to Guantanamo, and had an affair, and probably received payment, from the foreign agent. Five years later, he is no longer at the bottom of the pyramid, but at the top. The FBI has been turned upside down! Feghali has been promoted, and promoted again, and is now in charge of all Arabic speakers at the FBI. "The translator is a traitor."

And if Feghali's promotion isn't bad enough, in and of itself, let me repeat that Sibel's claims about him have been reported up the chain all the way to Direct Mueller, and her allegations have been verified by the FBI OPR, the Dept of Justice's Inspector General, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 911 Commission. All of them know of Sibel's claims, all of them know that her claims have been validated, and all of them know that Feghali has been promoted again and again and that he is now in charge of all 300 Arabic translators.

Surely that makes us all much less safe.

For more detail on just this one element of Sibel's case, see my "Sibel Edmonds' Corrupt Boss is STILL the key to National Security" post.

Please call the offices of Congressmen Waxman and Conyers demanding open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case and the State Secrets Privilege. We need you to call on Monday and Tuesday of this week - and we'll demand an answer from Waxman mid-week. Contact details below.

------------------
Some other matters.

1. If you are interested in more about the issues Sibel has raised, see this post from earlier in the week:
What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?

2. Sibel and I will be doing a joint interview on The Peter B. Collins Show on Monday at 7pm Eastern. You can listen live, or get the archive at White Rose Society.org

3. I gave a 90 min interview to Expert Witness Radio about Sibel's case last week. If you are quick, you'll be able to download the first 60mins from that site now. Tomorrow, they'll post the final 30 mins - which is mostly about Feghali and the 'incompetence-vs-corrupt' issue.

4. We have 2 days to go, folks. If we can't get hearings now, I don't think Sibel has anywhere to turn to. I'm serious - this is her/our last best chance. She's done EVERYTHING she possibly can. If you ever thought 'wow - she's tough' or 'wow - she's brave' or 'wow - she can bring down these bastards' or 'gee - I wish she'd just tell us what she knows' or 'wow - i'd love to know what sibel knows' or 'gee - Douglas Feith and Richard Perle should be in jail' or 'gee - I hope we are doing everything we can to keep the country safe' - well, now's your chance to help out. If you ever thought any of those things, you owe it to yourself, and to all of us to call Waxman (and Conyers) and demand hearings. And you should probably recruit as many people as you can to do the same. Call all the numbers below, and call them repeatedly. If we get hearings, imagine how much fun it will be to think 'Ya know, I helped in my own little way.' And if we don't get hearings, and you didn't make your phone call, my patience will be very thin every time I hear someone say 'The Dems are weak' or 'Why doesn't Sibel just tell us everything she knows?' or "How come Doug Feith, Richard Perls and Dennis Hastert are enjoying their riches and not in jail?" or any of a thousand similar statements I could conjur.

Seriously. This is it. We've had amazing support these last two weeks - our diaries have repeatedly been in the top recommended lists at DailyKos and DemocraticUnderground, and people have been re-posting our stuff like crazy all over the InterToobz - and we are eternally grateful for all the support. If we can also get you to call Waxman's office (and Conyers' if you have the time) then we'll make the Plame hearings yesterday look like Laura Bush's book club.

5. We are asking everyone who calls Waxman's office to go on the record at:Sibel Edmonds: The most ungagged person in American History (and I helped!) - with any luck, the most gagged woman in US History will soon be free to speak, and thus become the most ungagged woman. If you make a call, you can claim some credit. Make your call, then head over there and let us know that you did good. You great grandchildren will be proud.

I think that's all for the moment. More tomorrow.

=====================================
Contact details:

Capitol switchboard number - 800-828-0498

Emailers have suggested that those calling Waxman's office should ask for Michelle Ash (Michelle.Ash@mail.house.gov) & David Rapallo. Those calling Conyers' office should ask for Elliot Mintzberg.

Waxman Contact Details:
In Washington, D.C.
2204 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3976 (phone)
(202) 225-4099 (fax)

In Los Angeles
8436 West Third Street, Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 651-1040 (phone)
(818) 878-7400 (phone)
(310) 652-3095 (phone)
(323) 655-0502 (fax)

Conyers Contact Details:
Email: John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax

Trenton, MI 48183
(734) 675-4084
(734) 675-4218 Fax

Detroit, MI 48226
(313) 961-5670
(313) 226-2085 Fax

Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings

With the Plame hearings scheduled today, I just wanted to make sure that everyone understands the link between Sibel Edmonds' case, Brewster Jennings and Valerie Plame.

I don't know a lot about how congressional hearings work - but it'll be interesting today to see if Waxman asks Valerie Plame what damage, if any, was done to Brewster Jennings when she was outed by Cheney/Libby/Armitage/Rove/Grossman in the summer of 2003.

It appears that there's some confusion about when Plame worked for Brewster Jennings, and Corn/Isikoff/JTFI notwithstanding, it appears that there is a general presumption that Plame was working for Brewster Jennings when she was outed after Joe Wilson's op-ed was published in the NYT.

As I discussed in yesterday's diary, the American Turkish Council (ATC) was at the core of the criminality that Sibel became privvy to - including, but not limited to, the nuclear black market.

From the diary:

"Sibel's case also involves the nuclear black market - some Turkish members of the ATC have supplied Pakistan's A.Q. Khan network with hardware, as have American companies that Sibel overheard on the wiretaps. Perhaps even more disturbing, as reported in Vanity Fair, other wiretaps indicate that "Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons." Daniel Ellsberg says that, according to Sibel, bribes were paid to people at the State Department to facilitate this activity.

These are extraordinary claims, of course, and we have a lot of evidence to support the claims - including, but not limited to, the fact that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, had been conducting a counter-intelligence operation against the ATC for years."

The thing is, Brewster Jennings was 'outed' (privately, within the criminal network) long before Valerie Plame was officially outed. In fact, Brewster Jennings' cover was blown in the Summer of 2001 by Marc Grossman.

It appears, and I'm speculating here, that Sibel actually heard that particular conversation where Grossman 'outed' Brewster Jennings, and I can only presume that Brewster Jennings was dismantled immediately.

In the new movie about Sibel "Kill The Messenger" there's a scene where Sibel 'describes' her familiarity with Brewster Jennings. I interviewed Mathieu Verboud, the director of the film, and he described it thusly:

"In November 2005, we learnt from the Turkish paper Hurriyet that Plame was investigating Turkey, but not only that: she was investigating the ATC! Our intuition had proved right.

Later, in April 2006, we confronted Sibel with this set of facts and ask her to go on the record. Sibel’s line about Plame and Brewster Jennings is just gold. She said: "During my time at the FBI, I never heard the name Valerie Plame - but if you are asking me about Brewster Jennings, that's another story, a story that I cannot comment on because I cannot talk about anything that I did at the FBI - and the targets and the details of the investigations." The message is crystal clear: there are mentions of Brewster Jennings on the wiretaps! Praises to Sibel to be so smart in front of a camera."

This raises a whole bunch of other questions - including why did douchebag Novak write his second column 'outing' Brewster Jennings, and why did the administration take so much heat for 'outing' Brewster Jennings (when they outed Plame) if they didn't actually out Brewster Jennings? A very clever blogger suggested to me privately (and I'd credit them with the idea but I haven't asked for permission) that the administration realized that they'd got themselves in trouble after outing Plame, and so they decided to reach back to the Brewster Jennings claim so that they could pretend that they were working off old (not new, not classified) information (given that Brewster Jennings had been wound down 2 years earlier.)

Under this hypothesis, it appears, the administration/OVP realized they were on very shaky legal ground, and were happy to take the hits to what is left of their reputation by riding out the 'OMG! They outed Brewster Jennings!' fallacy, rather than risk shedding light on the fact that they were just using the old Brewster Jennings information as a CYA mechanism. At least, that's how we can (conceivably) read the story given what we know publicly - they may very well have used the 'but Brewster Jennings is long defunct!' argument behind closed doors. Regardless, their silence on this issue is deafening.

As an aside, I also want to share this anecdote from my interview with Kill The Messenger director Mathieu Verboud:

Mathieu Verboud: Coming back to Grossman, exposing his role would have been interesting for the film, but the guy being what he is, there was no way that he would have given an interview if we had brought up any kind of charges. So we decided to just let him talk, give us his vision of Turkey...

Then we tested him - we asked him about Valerie Plame - and it was amazing to see his face change! He had the nerves to say that he didn’t know anything about Valerie Plame, or about Brewster Jennings - which is simply false! As mentioned earlier, his name had already appeared publicly in the Valerie Plame's case! Anyway, we didn't point out to that simple fact and fended off.

Next, we just mentioned that there was this little woman of Turkish origin whose name was mentioned in an article in Vanity Fair speaking about FBI and Turkey… His face changed again, and he came up with this answer: "Vanity Fair? I am afraid it is not a magazine I read!" We then asked him directly about Sibel Edmonds and he said that he didn't know anything about her. Even the name was "unfamiliar".

Luke Ryland: That's hysterical. When was that interview?

MV: early May 2006.

LR: (laughs) Oh that's great. And he's never heard of Sibel Edmonds and Valerie Plame. That's fantastic. I'd love to see that footage.

MV: Well - if we ever sell this film in the U.S, we will consider adding a small chapter on him.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see if any of this comes out in the hearings today. As you know, Waxman knows all of this - Sibel has briefed his office in classified hearings - and it appears that he is going to make a decision (& announcement) early next week about whether he will hold separate hearings into her case.

Congress must hold hearings to get to the bottom of these crimes. If you agree, please call Congress, today, and demand public, open hearings.

Contact Information

Congressman Henry Waxman (contact page)

(Those calling Waxman's office should ask for Michelle Ash & David Rapallo.)

In Washington, D.C.
2204 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3976 (phone)
(202) 225-4099 (fax)

In Los Angeles
8436 West Third Street, Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 651-1040 (phone)
(818) 878-7400 (phone)
(310) 652-3095 (phone)
(323) 655-0502 (fax)

House Government Reform Committee (contact page)
By Mail or Phone:
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-5051

Please also contact Congressman John Conyers, asking him to support hearings by Chairman Waxman.
(Those calling Conyers' office should ask for Elliot Mintzberg.)
Email: John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

Washington, DC
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax

crossposted at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak and DU and DKOS

What the heck is Sibel Edmonds' Case about? And why should I care?

As part of our campaign this week to call for hearings into Sibel Edmonds case, below the fold is a short-as-possible piece which hopes to answer the burning question in Sibel's case: What the heck is her case about?

For a longer version, see my recent interview with Scott Horton

Please call the offices of Congressmen Waxman - (202) 225-3976 - and Conyers - (202) 225-5126 - demanding open hearings into Sibel Edmonds' case and the State Secrets Privilege.

-----------

Sibel Edmonds' case is about the intersection of illegal arms trafficking, heroin trafficking, money laundering, terrorist activities and the corruption of many "highly-recognizable, highly-known names" in and around the US government. Sibel says that the people involved will go straight to prison if we can get hearings into her case. Richard Perle, in prison. Douglas Feith, in prison. Dennis Hastert, in prison. Marc Grossman, in prison.

According to Sibel, the best place to begin trying to understand the case is a recent article by Phil Giraldi in the American Conservative. Sibel says “Giraldi has it 100% right; this I consider the most accurate summary of my case.”

Giraldi writes:

"Sibel Edmonds... could provide a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time. On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection.
[]
Turkey benefits from the relationship by securing general benevolence and increased aid from the US Congress - as well as access to otherwise unattainable military technology. The Turkish General Staff has a particular interest because much of the military spending is channeled through companies in which the generals have a financial stake, making for a very cozy and comfortable business arrangement. The commercial interest has also fostered close political ties, with the American Turkish Council, American Turkish Cultural Alliance and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations all developing warm relationships with AIPAC and other Jewish and Israel advocacy groups throughout the US.

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar."

Giraldi goes on to list some neocons who are "linked to Turkey" - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, and Stephen Solarz - and he suggests that they "enrich themselves" via drug trafficking and arms dealing.

The American Turkish Council (ATC)
The main Turkish lobbying group in the US is an organization called the American Turkish Council (ATC) - one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country. The ATC is heavily stacked with former government officials - statesmen, lobbyists and 'dime a dozen generals' - lobbyists and representatives of the military-industrial-complex (MIC). Brent Scowcroft is the chairman, and heavy hitters from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrup Grumman and other 'defense' contractors populate the board.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that Turkey is a major recipient of US military aid - running to the billions of dollars - with much of it financed by the US taxpayer. Giraldi suggests in his article that this largesse appears to be the result of bribes paid to congressmen - a suggestion that shouldn't surprise anyone - but there's much more to the story than the usual Iron Triangle / Revolving Door story that we're all familiar with.

In a 10-page article in Vanity Fair on Sibel's case, the ATC is described as "a front for criminal activity" involving "large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder." We'll discuss the drug side of the story shortly, but let's first take a quick look at the military technology element - not only are the MIC contractors bribing congress to ensure that military aid flows to Turkey (and Israel), the Turks and the Israelis are also illegally selling that technology to the highest bidder - which inevitably includes America's enemies, States, and terrorist groups.

Sibel's case also involves the nuclear black market - some Turkish members of the ATC have supplied Pakistan's A.Q. Khan network with hardware, as have American companies that Sibel overheard on the wiretaps. Perhaps even more disturbing, as reported in Vanity Fair, other wiretaps indicate that "Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons." Daniel Ellsberg says that, according to Sibel, bribes were paid to people at the State Department to facilitate this activity.

These are extraordinary claims, of course, and we have a lot of evidence to support the claims - including, but not limited to, the fact that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, had been conducting a counter-intelligence operation against the ATC for years.

One very interesting aspect of Sibel's case that has not really gained traction is that while the ATC is understood to be the key focus of her case, it appears that AIPAC is equally involved. In a terrific 2005 interview with Chris Deliso, Sibel said:

Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one... But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it... You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people.

And she went a little bit further in a great interview with David Swanson this week:

"AIPAC helped form the American Turkish Council - look at the board members, look at the people. You will see the same people involved in both fronts, because it is the same operation."

Reading between the lines (in a number of different places), it appears that Sibel was actively involved in 'the AIPAC investigation' as well as the investigation into the ATC. As she says, both the ATC and AIPAC are both 'fronts' for the 'same (criminal) operation.'



Drug Trafficking.
As I document in "Sibel Edmonds & the Neocons' Turkish Gravy-Train," Afghanistan supplies almost 90% of the world's heroin, and most of that goes straight to Turkey where it is processed, packaged, warehoused, and then re-exported to other countries for final consumption. Turkey supplies approximately 80% of Europe's heroin, and 15% of heroin in the US - worth approximately $40 billion at street prices.

Turkey is widely acknowledged to be controlled by a "Deep State." In 1996, a deadly car crash at a place called Susurluk blew this out into the open. In the car were four people who probably shouldn't have been in the car together:

"an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli... Catli, a heroin trafficker on Interpol’s wanted list, was carrying a diplomatic passport signed by none other than the Turkish Interior Minister himself.
[]
The Susurluk Incident became Turkey’s Watergate, exposing the deep links between the Turkish state, terrorists and drug traffickers. It revealed what Turks call the Gizli Devlet, or Deep State – the politicians, military officers and intelligence officials who worked with drug bosses to move drugs from Afghanistan into Europe."

Sibel spells it out:

"The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks."

As I outlined in the curiously-titled "Sibel Edmonds: America's Watergate," Sibel's case demonstrates that Turkey's Deep State 'owns' large parts of the American establishment, to the point where it appears that there also is a 'Deep State' in the US as well. ATC/AIPAC appear to be headquarters for this Deep State in the US, a cozy club where drug dealers, weapons traffickers and past-and-present government officials coexist. Happily!

And if that's not bad enough, we also know that:

"Heroin trafficking is also the main source of funding for the al-Qaeda terrorists. A Time Magazine article in August 2004 reported that al-Qaeda has established a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, and in turn is using the drug revenues to purchase weapons and explosives. The article states: “...al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are increasingly financing operations with opium sales. Anti-drug officials in Afghanistan have no hard figures on how much al-Qaeda and the Taliban are earning from drugs, but conservative estimates run into tens of millions of dollars.”

That is, our Turkish Deep State friends, the people we are directly providing with weapons, are outsourcing some of their distribution activities to al-Qaeda and the Taliban (and, while we're at it, to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA.))

When we are discussing issues such as al-Qaeda smuggling heroin through Afghanistan and the other 'Stans, sometimes it can seem remote and distant, so let's come back to something more concrete. In Adrian Gatton's terrific recent article, The Susurluk Legacy, he quotes Huseyin Baybasin, a Turkish heroin kingpin who is now in jail in Holland:

“I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England... I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.”

Gatton also describes how anyone in the UK government who dared speak about the issue were immediately rebuked by the Foreign Office (the UK equivalent of the State Department.)

The parallels with Sibel's case couldn't be clearer. As 60 Minutes first reported (youtube) in 2002, and Vanity Fair later reported, the Turkish Embassy was directing a lot of the heroin trafficking activity - in conjunction with people at the ATC.

"Sibel also recalled hearing wiretaps indicating that Turkish Embassy targets frequently spoke to staff members at the A.T.C.
[]
In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled hearing... Many (calls) involved an F.B.I. target at (Chicago's) large Turkish Consulate... Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes."

And just as the UK Foreign Office silenced anyone in the UK who tried to speak out, Sibel says:

The Department of State is easily the most corrupted of the major government agencies.
[]
In some cases where the FBI stumbles upon evidence of high-level officials being involved in drug-smuggling, they're even prevented from sharing it with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. The Department of State just comes in and says, "Leave it."

Elsewhere, Sibel says:

"For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power. Those with direct knowledge have been prevented from making this information available and public by various gag orders and invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. Why?"

Pay attention here, because the ATC is where the worlds of the MIC and the heroin trafficking collide. One of the key Turkish interfaces at the ATC is the Turkish Generals - people that Giraldi says own a stake in the companies through which the military spending is channeled. As described earlier, these exact same people, the Turkish Deep State, also control much of the global heroin market. In between the MIC and the heroin traffickers - are the "neoconservatives (who) distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time."

One of the difficulties in trying to unravel the Sibel Edmonds case is that we aren't sure where one case ends and another begins. We know that some of the wiretaps were from the ATC, and some from the Turkish embassy in DC, and some from the embassy in Chicago. We also know that many of the wiretaps involve conversations between the embassies and the ATC.
Some of the wiretaps relate to drug trafficking, some relate to the nuclear black market and other weapons trafficking, and some refer to terrorist activity - including 9/11.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, when she says:

You have the same players when you look into these activities at high-levels you come across the same players, they are the same people.

Those 'same people' - at least on the American side - according to Giraldi, appear to be Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, Eric Edelman, and Stephen Solarz. It appears that we can also add William Cohen and Joseph Ralston - and Dennis Hastert - to that roster, and I'm sure there are a few more that haven't yet been publicly identified.

If what Sibel says is true, and her claims are all backed by documents and wiretaps, and also backed up by other agents who have filed similar complaints, and are ready and willing to testify. All of these people should be in jail. For a long, long time.

Congress must hold hearings to get to the bottom of these crimes. If you agree, please call Congress, today, and demand public, open hearings.

(for more, see Who wants to gag Sibel Edmonds? And why? (with answers!))

Contact Information

Congressman Henry Waxman (contact page)

(Those calling Waxman's office should ask for Michelle Ash & David Rapallo.)

In Washington, D.C.
2204 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-3976 (phone)
(202) 225-4099 (fax)

In Los Angeles
8436 West Third Street, Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(323) 651-1040 (phone)
(818) 878-7400 (phone)
(310) 652-3095 (phone)
(323) 655-0502 (fax)

House Government Reform Committee (contact page)
By Mail or Phone:
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
(202) 225-5051

Please also contact Congressman John Conyers, asking him to support hearings by Chairman Waxman.
(Those calling Conyers' office should ask for Elliot Mintzberg.)
Email: John.Conyers@mail.house.gov

Washington, DC
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax

crossposted at Wot Is It Good 4 & Let Sibel Edmonds Speak and dkos and DU

transcript: sibel edmonds interview

here is a transcript from my interview with Scott Horton about Sibel Edmonds - as usual when i transcribe something, all errors, mine. (update: scott has an 'official' version of the transcript at his place)
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Scott Horton: For AntiWar.com, and KAOS Radio 95.9 fm in Austin Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is AntiWar Radio. When you have an empire, you get wars without enemies, and criminals in charge of enforcing the law - that's just the way it works.

It's really an amazing story, this poor lady was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After September 11, she was a patriotic American citizen, an immigrant who decided she'd get a job at the FBI helping them translate foreign languages in their counter-terrorism section - and she just so happened to stumble across something near the core of the crime syndicate that controls the USA. Of course, her name is Sibel Edmonds, and she's got a gag order, and she can say some things that have already been revealed one way or other - she can reiterate them, but she has never really been able to tell her full story in public. The story has always been of interest to me, but it's so complicated and convoluted that I always have a hard time keeping up and making sense of the story - so I always turn to my friend Luke Ryland. He writes the great blog wotisitgood4 and he's basically my walking crib-sheet for cheating on the Sibel Edmonds test and keeping track of this story. Welcome to the show, Luke.

Lukery: Thanks Scott - good to be here.

SH: It's good to talk to you my friend. Let's start with the basics of the Sibel Edmonds story - as I said, she's an immigrant, an American citizen, who after 911 decided to be a patriot and would go to the FBI and be a translator. She speaks Farsi, Azerbaijani and Turkish and a few other languages and she went to go be a patriotic American citizen and do her duty and as a result her whole world got turned upside down. Luke, what happened?

LR: That's right, Scott. She started working at the FBI the week after 911. She actually had an application in to work in a different department for them that she'd applied for two years earlier, and they'd lost her application. After 911 they must have run a new check and they found that they had Sibel's application there and it had three languages on it - Turkish, Azerbaijani and Farsi and they thought she'd be pretty helpful in the translation unit in Washington to help them sort through the backlog of stuff that they had built up over the time. She started there and before long she realized that there was a whole bunch of shenanigans going on in the translation department including mistranslations and translations that were intentionally being falsified to coverup a whole bunch of different criminal activity. It was long before that, in early December, when one of her fellow translators and her husband knocked on Sibel's door one Sunday morning and tried to recruit her basically to be a spy for a certain criminal network.

SH: And this was the infamous Melek Can Dickerson, right? Who was this lady?

LR: She was married to Major Doug Dickerson - actually he's had a promotion since then, whatever his title is today, he's an airforce Major who'd been involved in weapons procurement in Turkey going back a decade. So, the two of them turned up to Sibel's house and tried to recruit Sibel. Sibel's husband was there, and they were all having a friendly chat when Major Doug Dickerson said 'Why don't you come and join this organization - the American Turkish Council?' And he basically said, 'If you work for these guys, we'll be able to get you in there, and you'll never have to work again.' He was basically trying to recruit Sibel to either mistranslate documents that were incriminating, or steal other documents that were in the building and feed them out to targets of the investigation so that the targets would know where the investigation was going.

SH: Now this lady, Melek Can Dickerson was really giving Sibel problems in the translation unit - is that correct?

LR: I don't know that specifically - I'm not sure if that was true before the recruitment attempt, or only after the attempted recruiting had failed. Sibel rebuffed the espionage recruiting attempt and then reported it to her boss a day or two later.

SH: Who's her boss that she reported it to?

LR: Sibel's boss was a guy called Mike Feghali - he was in charge at that time of the Turkey desk. Dickerson was also Turkish - she actually joined the FBI after Sibel did. Sibel was actually the first and only Turkish translator in the FBI translation unit when she first joined. They didn't have anyone else there.

SH: They didn't have anyone??

LR: Nope. They recruited Sibel, and then Dickerson, and then another guy, Kevin Taskasen. It turns out that Dickerson was a spy, and Taskasen could speak neither Turkish nor English - so the FBI translation unit in Washington was just a disaster.

SH: And what is this American Turkish Council that they tried to recruit Sibel Edmonds to join?

LR: The ATC is basically a mini-AIPAC (ref) - in fact it was established using the AIPAC model, I believe. It had the same people on the board, common members etc. It is basically the Turkish version of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby group. The ATC is basically, as Sibel says (ref) "an association in name and in charter, the reality is that it and other affiliated associations are the U.S. government, lobbyists, foreign agents, and MIC." So the members include people like the CEO of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing, I presume (I'm not sure). So it's basically a lobbying group for the military industrial complex.

SH: I see - and there are a lot of common interests there - I guess you have the Iron Triangle, the Revolving Door, where the politicians get jobs working at the firms and the regulators and the lobbyists and they all go back and forth in these little circles, and also internationally, you keep bringing up Turkey here, and the American Turkish Council, it makes sense when you think of the fact that America has been a NATO ally with Turkey since World War Two and has armed them and supplied them all along, that the American contractors - I guess what you're saying is that this is their forum to make sure that Turkey buys American planes with American dollars, specifically from these corporations. It's that kind of networking, right?

LR: Exactly. And there's obviously a Turkish component there as well in terms of the membership of the ATC.

SH: Yeah - but what's criminal about that Luke? This is the American way, buddy.

LR: There's nothing criminal about that, per se. Although, there was an article in Vanity Fair by David Rose last year - a 10 page article about Sibel's story - where the ATC is described as "a front for criminal activity." So it's not so much the ostensibly appropriate activities that go on at the ATC - but there are also a bunch of illegal activities that are operating under the guise of the ATC according to Vanity Fair and a few other articles that we can point to.

SH: And what kind of illegal activities are we talking about then?

LR: Well - it's important to have a good understanding of Turkey so that we can understand what's going on at the ATC. Turkey is ruled by, let me call it a 'governing elite', that is known as Deep State in Turkey - which is basically a collection of drug dealers, the Turkish military, Turkish police, and the politicians. The reason that we know about the Turkish Deep State is because there was a car crash in 1996 at a place called Susurluk. This crash exposed the Deep State for everyone to see. It happened in the middle of the night at Susurluk, and 'Susurluk' has now become shorthand for the Deep State.

SH: Oh - I remember something about this - all the different people in the car shouldn't have been in the car together, right?

LR: Exactly. They refer to it as Turkey's Watergate. There was an MP, a police chief, a beauty queen who was also an assassin and her lover, a top Turkish gangster and hitman called Abdullah Catli.

SH: I think I've seen that movie!

LR: Right! It sounds like a joke. In the car they found these machine guns and whatnot - plus false diplomatic passports for the terrorist drug traffickers types and it was a real mess. Someone gave an American analogy: "Imagine a car accident at, say, a hotel in WVA. Several people are killed, among them Jeff Gannon, Douglas Feith, Warren Christopher, and Osama bin Laden." That's sort of the equivalent. I told Sibel that one, she thought it was hysterical.

SH: So basically what you're saying is that the regime in Turkey is no less corrupt than the regime in the US - and that basically military thugs run the place, dope dealers run the place, right? And not the good kind of dope - we're talking heroin here.

LR: Right - Turkey is the major transit point for Afghan heroin. Five tons per week (Ed: correction - that should be 'per month')

SH: Now, I remember, Luke, in the 1990s Bill Clinton took the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army which were nothing but basically Osama Bin Laden type narco-terrorists in Kosovo - is that right?

LR: That is correct.

SH: And this is the same pipeline for drugs that they talked about then, right? The Golden Crescent - where it's grown in Afghanistan and ships across Central Asia into southern and central Europe and up through Bosnia to the rest of Western Europe and the US right?

LR: Umm - correct - except you left out Turkey! (ed: so did the recent World Bank report that I documented here) 90% of it goes through Turkey

SH: That's the bridge between Central Europe and Central Asia there

LR: Right - Turkey is either blessed or cursed by geography. That's for sure.

SH: And part of the result of that geography, I guess, is that the Turks are in a way kind of Western. As previously mentioned they're members of the NATO alliance, they're extremely friendly with the Israeli government and even though they are a Muslim country, they're kind of the bridge, figuratively between East and West, right?

LR: Exactly.

SH: So no matter who you are - if you're the Arab powers, or Israel, or the US, or the European Union, or Afghanistan drug lords, it's all about Turkey, really.

LR: It's all about Turkey - and the Turkish military, and the MIT, which is the intelligence agency there, pretty much know exactly what is going on. I'm not sure it would be correct to call it a police state but when you're moving that amount of heroin through the country, they're basically aware of, and in control of, and "actively participating in" (ref) the distribution of heroin through the country.

SH: Didn't you tell me that the Turkish Generals are even in control of the drug trade all the way back to Afghanistan? It's not like they're just receiving it in Turkey - they're basically in charge of the whole operation from the poppy field on?

LR: Well - not from the farmers directly, but one or two levels above the small aggregators that run around and connect the stuff from the farm gate.

SH: But on the ground, in Afghanistan?

LR: As I understand it. And then it either goes through Iran and Pakistan to Turkey, or it goes up through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan etc and around that way into Turkey - and that's where all the wholesaling is done, and the manufacturing of the product, and the packaging and warehousing - all of it is done in Turkey (ref). Turkey supplies something like 80% of all European heroin, and 15% of American heroin.

SH: How much money are we talking about every year?

LR: That's $40 billion worth, more or less, every year, at street prices. So there's a fair margin in there for the people involved - and as we were saying, this is the Turkish Deep State that is controlling this business.

SH: How close is the tie, then, between these Turkish heroin-dealing Generals and say the American Turkish Council back here in the States?

LR: Well - if we consider that the Turkish folks at the ATC in the US are basically the Generals, the people dealing with the military-industrial players like Lockheed Martin etc - in other words, they're basically the "same people" (ref). The ATC is basically a front organization that is basically running this heroin operation as well. And they're also being played by the military contractors. You know, Phil Giraldi is an ex-CIA agent - he used to work in Turkey, he used to be based in Ankara - he wrote a terrific article recently in the American Conservative magazine.

SH: I actually interviewed Phil - in part about Sibel's case.

LR: I'm not familiar with that interview... In any case, he wrote an article about Sibel's case, perhaps 6 months ago, Sibel said it "sums up the case very well... this one nails it 100%" and Giraldi describes how Sibel's case provides "a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time." He also talks about how the military industrial complex, and the neocons, get together at places like the ATC and deal with the Turkish General staff.

SH: Right - and when I interviewed Sibel Edmonds before, she told me that she thought that the AIPAC scandal and the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame story were all basically just one onion and we've just got to peel off the layers and figure out what is going on.

LR: Right - and I think the reason that she said that is because, as Giraldi mentions in his article, Richard Perle and Doug Feith are literally agents of Turkey, they were registered lobbyists for them for five or so years. Larry Franklin of course worked directly under Douglas Feith - so I think that's perhaps how she connects that particular AIPAC case. (Ed note: actually, I have no idea how Sibel connects the two cases. I presume that Sibel has more reason to believe that the two cases are related beyond the fact that Franklin worked for Feith.) Similarly, she effectively suggests that AIPAC and the ATC are essentially are the same organization, or at least have the same roles, with the same people, so I think that's part of the analogy that she's drawing there.

SH: Now which powerful Americans from the Bush administration, people whose names we'd recognize, are members of this ATC, Luke?

LR: Ummmm. Members from the Bush administration? Actually, there are a bunch of people there that cover generations - Brent Scowcroft is the chairman there. I can't really name them off the top of my head - it's basically all of them (ed: what a dumb response. I kinda blanked a bit. The list is here)

SH: Now Perle and Feith and Grossman are all members, right?

LR: Grossman's a member. In Giraldi's article, he talks about neocon friends of Turkey - I'm not sure how many of them are literally 'members' of the ATC, but they all give speeches there, for example. Giraldi points to Perle, Feith and Grossman as you've mentioned. Grossman was the former number 3 at the State Dept under Richard Armitage, Eric Edelman is there, he now has Feith's old job as Undersecretary of Defence for Policy. Edelman was previously the ambassador in Turkey, a role that Grossman also used to have in the past.

SH: Now this guy Doug Dickerson who tried to recruit Sibel - wasn't Grossman his boss for a long period of time?

LR: Yeah - in Ankara in fact, when Grossman was the ambassador in Turkey, Dickerson worked under him. Dickerson worked in weapons procurement. Dickerson in fact was suspected of being corrupt back in those days as well. There was an investigation into him - but it didn't go anywhere for one reason or other. And Dickerson went on to get promoted again and again - the same thing that seems to happen to a lot of these people. Giraldi mentions a couple of others in his article - Paul Wolfowitz who is now at the World Bank, and former congressman Steven Solarz - he's a lobbyist for Turkey as well.

SH: Luke - do you think that these people, Grossman, Feith, Perle, that they're involved in dealing heroin and such?

LR: Let me put it this way, the broad outline of Sibel’s case which she has repeated again and again is that her case involves illegal arms trafficking, heroin smuggling, money laundering, and terrorist activity. And she says that you can't look at those elements separately - it's basically the same group of people involved in each of those different elements once you get high enough up the food chain. So if we take that as gospel, then guys like Feith and Perle are involved in the heroin smuggling business at one level or other.

SH: I'm imagining something like, maybe, they're doing some arms dealing, and then the money is being laundered at the same place with a lot of drug money and then a lot of that money is ending up in the hands of terrorists... is it more direct than that?

LR: Well - I'm sure that they know how to keep their hands clean, generally, yeah. But as Sibel says, it's the "same people" who are involved in each of those activities - and they all seem to be at the core of her case. Exactly which tasks they personally have, I don't really know. But we know in Turkey, for example, it's all the same people. It's the Turkish Deep State that is running the shop. (Ed: why would we be surprised that it's any different in the US?)

SH: One thing we know, too, even though we haven't heard all that Sibel Edmonds has to say, we do know that the Dept of Justice Inspector General's office says that she's telling the truth, and I believe there are senators that are on the record as saying they've heard what she has to say in private, during secret session, and they believe every word of it!

LR: Yep. Exactly. And the reason they believe it, they say, is because everyone at the FBI tells them that it's true. And because it's all documented, and they've seen the documents to back up exactly what she says. (Ed note: as Sibel says in the movie: "Put out those tapes. Put out those wiretaps. Put out those documents. Put out the truth. The truth is going to hurt them. The truth is going to set me free.”)

SH: Right - so this is all corroborated even though we don't have our hands on it, by hearsay, we are to understand that it's corroborated, I guess.

LR: Right. Exactly. I have a separate blog to the one you mentioned earlier at sibeledmonds.blogspot.com - one of my buddies, Miguel, wrote a post there recently, it's almost at the top of the blog at the moment, called "The Incredibly, Credible Sibel" - and he lists in that post all of the reasons why we should believe what Sibel says - including quotes from the two senators who she's dealt with the most, Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican, and Senator Pat Leahy as well, have verified her story. She's told her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, and also of course the 911 Commission, all behind closed doors - and as you say, there's also the Inspector General's report, and a bunch of other places. There's a new movie about Sibel's case - particularly the nuclear black market side of it called Kill The Messenger, and in the movie they talk to former veteran FBI counter-intelligence agent called John Cole who was in charge of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran (ed note - that should be 'India', not Iran) - and he tells the story that he heard about Sibel's case, and he investigated internally in the FBI and he says in the movie that was Sibel was claiming is "a 100 percent accurate" - so that's just another point of validation from him.

Obviously, because she is gagged, and because we've had to put the pieces together a little bit piecemeal, when you get my version of the story, it might not be exactly the same as her version of it because I have to fill in some of the gaps a little bit, so I can't tell you that what I'm telling you is 100% accurate, but everyone says that what she says is 100% accurate.

SH: I'm glad that you brought that up because this is the USA and around here the government is supposed to recognize that all individuals are naturally born with the right to say whatever the hell they want to, and the fact that the courts have invoked the 'State Secrets Privilege' that exists nowhere in law, that is directly contrary to the first amendment of the constitution, that's why you and I are sitting here sounding like conspiracy kooks connecting a bunch of disparate dots is because we can't just ask her to tell us the story - they won't let her, they'll put her in prison if she does. They'll put her in prison for talking.

LR: That's right. There have been a couple of good articles that have come out recently that do shed a lot of light on her case. One is the Phil Giraldi article that I mentioned earlier - she says it "nails her case 100%" - and the other is a two part article called "Highjacking of a Nation" (part one, part two) - I recommend that people go read that, particularly part two, which really lays out a lot of the things I've been talking about in terms of the heroin dealing in Turkey and she basically lays out as much of her case as she can - so go to NSWBC.org and read them.

SH: OK - and what am I going to have to do to see a copy of "Kill The Messenger"? When is it playing?

LR: You'll have to be patient on that one - I get that same question every day. Unfortunately I don't really have a time frame for that. I have a copy of it - it's terrific.

SH: Has it been shown here at all?

LR: It played a couple of weeks ago in DC - Sibel had a private screening of 100 people or so - with whistleblower organizations (and the media) - they had a panel afterwards with James Bamford, the directors of the movie, Robert Parry, and a couple of others talking about how tragic it is that Sibel is gagged, and also discussing the appalling US media, which has been completely absent from her case, and completely doesn't understand it, as well (ed: I presume)

SH: Right - which is part of the reason why they haven’t paid any attention because they haven’t the slightest idea what it means - they don't know what to do with it.

LR: I'm not exactly sure of the reason. It might be similar to the fact that it's difficult to criticize, for example, Israel in the US press. Similarly, it's difficult to criticize Turkey. The good news is that the US media is soon going to get a chance to prove itself again on this case. There's likely to be some new information that's related to Sibel's case that will be released next week, as I understand it. Sibel tells me that it's 'newsworthy' so hopefully your famous media agrees and we'll actually see some articles about it - although, heavens knows, given the way her story has been covered up so far, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't read anything about it.

SH: Do you have any indication about what this news is about?

LR: No. But as I said, she says it's going to be newsworthy and, you talked about her being gagged, she's going to use any momentum from the news next week to announce a new call, a new petition, calling for her case to be re-opened. She wants to have public, open hearings, in the Senate (ed: actually, it'll probably be the House). That call will go out in the next week or two, I believe. She has a lot of supporters who all agree that her case should be brought out in the open.

SH: You can see how that would be problematic, Luke, if her story is that the US is run by a bunch of terrorist-financing heroin dealers.

LR: That is a problem! But the truth is the truth, isn't it? As we've discussed, Sibel has already told a number of Senators and committees, including the 911 Commission, and they all know exactly what is going on - so we either have all of Congress knowing all this and doing nothing, or we have open hearings and force some change.

SH: That's kind of the way it happens with some of these stories - they're too big, because if you ever got into it, you'd have to tear down the government of the US and start all over again.

LR: Maybe that wouldn't be a bad thing, Scott.

SH: You'll get no argument from me, pal. I know I'm not supposed to agree with foreigners on stuff like that... but what the hell!

LR: Well - Sibel’s not a foreigner, and she calls it "treason" as you know. I think she called it treason on your show, and if that's what's going on at the highest level, if nothing's done about it, then the whole National Security is at risk, right?

SH: Absolutely - and that's a good segue to the Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson connection - what the hell do they have to do with all this and the ATC?

LR: Valerie Plame worked for an organization called Brewster Jennings - which is a CIA front company that was doing due diligence, trying to work out what the hell was going on, particularly in relation to WMD. Brewster Jennings, going back to when Sibel was working at the FBI, and even years before then as I understand it - probably back to 1996 - were investigating the ATC, and Turkey. Valerie Plame went to Turkey a number of times - so the ATC was being scoped by Brewster Jennings, and I guess that's how the FBI has all the wiretaps that Sibel translated. Sibel joined the FBI the week after 911 as we discussed, but 75% of the stuff that she translated pre-dated 911, from the archives, going back to 1996. So she had an archive of 5 years of this stuff which detailed all of these crimes that had been going on.

SH: Now, didn't David Rose in the Vanity Fair article verify with other agents that there was this investigation that she was involved with, and yes it did go back to the mid-nineties and that investigation had been shut down for political reasons?

LR: There was an investigation through 96, 97 I think where the FBI picked up a lot of information about former Speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert - and in 1999, Sibel says the Clinton administration tried to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the case, looking into Hastert and a few other people. That case was shut down by Ashcroft in 2001 when Sibel started reporting her findings to Congress. I don't think that Clinton ever got around to appointing a Special Prosecutor because it was sort of at the time of the impeachment, as I understand it, and then George Bush was elected, or became President at least, and Ashcroft shut down the case. The Hastert element is just one small part of the story - as I mentioned earlier, the main part of Sibel's case is the weapons trafficking which has three components, the heroin trafficking, the money laundering, and the terrorism - and where those things intersect. When you phrase it in those terms, it sounds like a pretty big puzzle for everyone to put the pieces together - but there are really three elements of the weapons trafficking - so let's go through each of those. As we mentioned earlier in the Giraldi article, there is what we might call the quote 'legal' weapons trafficking - where you have organisations like the ATC lobbying Congress to provide Turkey with military funding. In fact, I think Turkey is second only to Saudi Arabia in terms of military aid - most of it comes in the form of grants from the US taxpayer - I think 80% of it comes from the US taxpayer.

SH: Doesn't everything?

LR: Right. Now, Sibel talks a lot about the lobbying - from various former members of congress, and the lobbying that goes on at the ATC - I suspect that the way that Turkey gets a lot of this military aid is that people at the ATC are bribing congressmen, and forcing them to vote for these weapons. The second element is that both Israel and Turkey, once they get US weapons technology, they re-export it to other countries which aren't allowed to have US technology. Giraldi describes how they do that - the Defence ministries in both of those countries simply create what he calls 'false end user certificates' - which are basically documents that say, yep, it's ok to get the technology from the US and then sell it to countries like China and India and other countries that are ostensibly enemies of the US.

SH: Now, do the Americans who are selling these weapons know that's what is going to happen to them?

LR: Ummm - I presume that they know and don't care - I don't really know.

SH: Ok - and the third aspect?

LR: Right - and this is the focus of the movie Kill The Messenger - and that's the nuclear black market - and that has a couple of components. Sibel's case ties into the AQ Khan network on a number of different fronts. There's a company in New Jersey called Giza Technologies - which is a supplier to the AQ Khan network. Sibel apparently heard some wiretaps from these guys - from the CEO, Zeki Bilmen. He exported the stuff to South Africa, and the minute it got to South Africa, his agent over there would turn it around and immediately send it to Pakistan. So that's one problem - and the American company, Giza Technologies, is still floating along without a hiccup - Sibel says that it appears that somebody wants to protect this guy, and enable him to continue to sell these things into the AQ Khan network. She says business is going great there - there are boatloads of stuff going every day to places like South Africa and Dubai, I think, and other places.

SH: OK - and for people who don't know anything about the AQ Khan network, basically what we're talking about is he is Pakistan's heroic, "rogue", scientist, ran this nuclear black market ring from the late 1980s through the early 1990s and it's through him that the Iranians got a lot of their equipment and the Libyans as well, right?

LR: And North Korea.

SH: and North Korea didn’t enrich uranium with anything they got from him, despite all the accusations to the contrary, but what you're saying is that American companies are involved in nuclear technology to countries where the technology is, or was, getting diverted immediately into this AQ Khan black market network that ultimately American officials are in on this, bribed to look the other way and so forth, and America is putting nuclear technology in the hands of our presumed enemies, basically?

LR: Correct.

SH: And is this why Sibel Edmonds is throwing around the word 'treason'? Is she talking about these house-hold names, these high level people in the State and Defence Departments involved in this?

LR: Again... well.. yes basically. The clients of AQ Khan, the DPRK, Iran and Libya - they're the three that we know about - but it appears that there another 8 countries that were possibly clients - and we don't publicly know who else has this technology.

SH: OK - and I know that you haven't published this yet, but you have a new interview with a former CIA guy stationed in Pakistan (ed: actually, he was the CIA exert in Pakistan's nuclear program, Richard Barlow) who's told you that the CIA and the American Govt knew all about AQ Khan all along - is that right?

LR: Correct - they knew from 1976 when Khan first "acquired" the blueprints in Holland. It's problematic, right - but if you look at Sibel's case we see exactly the same thing - we have companies like Giza supplying the network, and nobody does anything. And we have also other Turkish companies who are major members of the ATC who are literally manufacturing components for AQ Khan and sending them either to Pakistan or to Dubai for repackaging so that they can skirt the import restrictions and re-export them.

SH: Ok - how do I tie these elements together, Luke? This company in New Jersey, what does it have to do with the ATC and the neocons?

LR: I don't specifically know, other than Sibel overheard wiretaps with the CEO of Giza exporting this stuff to Pakistan to AQ Khan's network, and the CEO is still walking free - so we have at least that information.

SH: And you're saying that there are other companies involved with this that you can tie to the ATC - is that right?

LR: Correct - there are at least two companies. Sibel mentions them in her Hijacking of A Nation article, Part Two. One is called EKA, and I can't remember the name of the other one - but Sibel mentions the guys, they're actually friends of AQ Khan (ed: I'm not sure that they were friends - I should have said that they'd met repeatedly) - and they were shipping stuff to Khan, or they were shipping it straight to Libya. Some of the components were found in the Libya bust in 2003 - and again, all this has been going on for God knows how long, and the USG is doing nothing. There's a third element in the nuclear black market story that Sibel talks about, and that is Turkish companies placing doctoral students at nuclear weapons labs, I guess Los Alamos and Sandia and wherever else - so that they can steal secrets.

SH: Really? And she knows this from overhearing this on the FBI wiretaps?

LR: I can only assume that's where she learnt it

SH: Didn't she only work as a contract employee for the FBI for just a few months? Did she just stumble right into the rats nest or what?

LR: It's a hell of a story isn't it? The answer to that - because she did uncover so much, some people are a bit sceptical that she could have possibly overheard all of that while she was there. But, as I understand it, the reason why she uncovered all of this important information is because the agents that she was dealing with knew that they had been getting shoddy translations in the past, and so they pointed Sibel to particular documents where they expected to find something significant, because of, say, the participants in the phone call, but when they got their 'translations' in the first instance, the translation said 'oh - there's nothing important here.' As an example, let's say there was a phone call between Osama and President Bush, and the agent got a report saying 'There's nothing interesting here - they were just talking about having coffee.' And so when Sibel joined the FBI, immediately after 911, the agents were running around desperate to put the story together...

SH: Right - these aren't the spin masters, the political agents, these are the actual cops who want to solve the case...

LR: Exactly (ed: do I use that word a lot? or is it just that Horton always knows everything?) And Sibel says that they are all terrific. So they're trying to solve these cases, and they ask Sibel (to re-translate) and she says "wow - this is important"

LR: Exactly. In fact, this other translator, Melek Can Dickerson, even before Sibel reported the possible espionage, the field agent that she was working with, I think Dennis Saccer, had also suspected that Dickerson was involved in espionage. So - for one reason or other, he knew that the product that Dickerson was churning out was wrong. That's why, I presume, he asked Sibel to re-translate, because he had a sense that the stuff that he was getting from Dickerson was nonsense.

SH: Ok - Now is it the case that one of the things that she overheard was a call from the ATC to American officials to have some 911 suspects safely removed from the country?

LR: A lot of people think that Sibel has the holy-grail regarding 911 - but that's not the case, according to Sibel. She wrote a letter to the 911 Commission when their report came out and she says that basically all of the information that she knows about 911 is contained in that letter. She outlines a few things - one is the corruption in the translation unit involving Dickerson and her boss, Mike Feghali. The second thing that she mentions in the letter is that the FBI had information in April in 2001 that they had a long-term informant who used to be an Iranian intelligence agent who was in charge of Iran's Afghan program - the FBI had been using him for at least a decade - and he told the FBI in April 2001 that Osama Bin Ladin was planning a major terrorist attack in the US, targeting four or five cities, and the attack was going to involve airplanes, that some of the individuals who were going to carry out this attack were already in place in the US, and that the attack was going to be carried out soon - in a few months. So they had all of this information and did nothing with it apparently.

SH: Now - isn't that the case over and over again? It seems like the pile of leads leading to those hijackers was getting pretty thick by the time those planes crashed, wasn't it, Luke?

LR: It certainly was - I do know that this information was passed up to Thomas Frields - at least to that level, immediately, after the interview with this Iranian guy took place.

SH: And who's he?

LR: I forget his title - I think he was the counter-terrorism guy in Washington. (Ed note: correct. "Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism Thomas Frields at the FBI Washington Field Office"). As I mentioned before, Sibel testified to the 911 Commission and she told them all of this information, and none of it got into the report. As I understand it, the report listed a bunch of missed opportunities, but they didn't include in that list the fact that they were told that Osama Bin Laden was about to hijack planes and use them as weapons, in 4 or 5 cities, in a few months, and that the hijackers were already place. That sounds like a "missed opportunity" right? It wasn't included in the report. And there was other information that Sibel reported that was excluded from the report

SH: and somebody at that ATC called Marc Grossman at the State Department and said 'hey, I need you to spring my buddies from jail'?

LR: Well - I'll have to check the details on that. I'm not sure if it was a guy from the ATC necessarily, it may have been another target they were listening to, and it might have been a conversation between two targets saying 'we need to call Grossman and get him to spring our buddies' - but basically, yes, 3 of their buddies had been arrested in the post-911 sweep, and were presumably suspects for one reason or other, and because Grossman was asked, he made the relevant phone calls and freed these guys immediately.

SH: But Ashcroft rounded up all kinds of people, so is there anything that says that these guys actually knew anything or were in on any of this?

LR: Not that I know - but it's outrageous that Grossman can do that at the drop of a hat. And let me repeat, these people that were having the conversation were apparently targets of the investigations, so we can presume that there's at least some suspicion about them already - and if they want to call Grossman to get their friends out of jail, you know, it's pretty dodgy.

SH: There was something about blueprints being sent overseas - is that blueprints of the WTC towers?

LR: Well, this is also from Sibel’s open letter to the 911 Commission. In, I think, June of 2001, there was an Iranian guy who was in jail on some narcotics charges - and they were concerned that he was involved with something more nefarious, so they wiretapped his phone in jail. He called one of his friends, as I understand, and asked his buddy to send blueprints, pictures, and the building composites - what the buildings were made of - for a number of different skyscrapers - and to send those blueprints to somewhere in the Middle East.

SH: Did that include the WTC towers?

LR: Ummm - I think that the description that I have from Sibel is that the buildings were "over 100 stories" tall.

SH: Ok - so there aren’t too many of those... Was she just being coy there? Does the gag order get between her and saying the name of the buildings?

LR: I presume so - but there aren't many others - Sears Tower - but in any case, these blueprints were sent to the Mid East - but again, none of this information was included in the 911 Commission report - for one reason or other. It's crazy.

SH: Ok - we're running out of time here - is there anything important I'm missing here Luke?

LR: I think that's about it, Scott - other than, as of next week, hopefully we can get everyone to support the new call for these hearings. I'll have the details on my blog, of course, and I presume/hope you will as well. Hopefully we'll see it on the front page of the major newspapers in your country.