| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Turkey Sent Female Agents to Seduce Bisexual Congresswoman |
| 2009-09-06 |
| Explosive news coming out of the just released deposition of former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. According to the just released transcripts, Edmonds testified as follows: [T]his Congresswoman's married with children, grown children, but she is bisexual. ... So they have sent Turkish female agents, and that Turkish female agents work for Turkish government, and have sexual relationship with this Congresswoman in her townhouse ... and the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house, this Congressional woman's house was bugged. ... to be used for certain things that they wanted to request ... I don't know if she did anything illegal afterward. ... the Turkish entities, wanted both congressional related favoritism from her, but also her husband was in a high position in the area in the state she was elected from,and these Turkish entities ran certain illegal operations, and they wanted her husband's help. But I don't know if she provided them with those. According to Brad Friedman, Edmonds has stated the congresswoman is a Democrat. |
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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| US on intimate terms with extremists in central Asia |
| 2009-08-02 |
| [Iran Press TV Latest] A former FBI translator has claimed that the US was on 'intimate' terms with the Taliban and al-Qaeda using the militants to further certain goals in central Asia. "With those groups, we had operations in Central Asia," said former Turkish language translator Sibel Edmonds on Friday speaking on the radio program, the Mike Malloy Show. Well, there's a pair you could rely on... AND PressTV Iran for the hat trick. Washington used the gunmen 'as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict'; she added referring to the US military support for Afghan fighters against Russia during the 1979-89 Russian invasion. Luke Ryland, a prolific investigator into the claims, says the tumultuous situation resulting from extremist operations would boost American arms sales in the region while forcing 'oil and gas concessions.' The "pipeline", Luke. Gotta mention the "pipeline". Gonna be built by Halliburton too. Edmonds worked for the FBI until 2002 when she was fired on the charge of revealing sensitive information. The US government has twice barred Edmonds' testimony on some controversial issues. This, of course, makes her credible. "These are the confirmed cases," she added stating that her claims were based on 'first-hand' information 'based on what I obtained.' "There are a lot of things that our government doesn't want us to know. It's not very difficult to put two and two together on this." Yeah. Sy Hersh told me. |
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| India-Pakistan |
| FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft |
| 2008-01-20 |
| THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets. The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agencys investigation of the network. Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agencys Washington field office. She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file. Edmonds believes the crucial file is being deliberately covered up by the FBI because its contents are explosive. She accuses the agency of an outright lie. I can tell you that that file and the operations it refers to did exist from 1996 to February 2002. The file refers to the counterintelligence programme that the Department of Justice has declared to be a state secret to protect sensitive diplomatic relations, she said. The freedom of information request had not been initiated by Edmonds. It was made quite separately by an American human rights group called the Liberty Coalition, acting on a tip-off it received from an anonymous correspondent. The letter says: You may wish to request pertinent audio tapes and documents under FOIA from the Department of Justice, FBI-HQ and the FBI Washington field office. It then makes a series of allegations about the contents of the file many of which corroborate the information that Edmonds later made public. Edmonds had told this newspaper that members of the Turkish political and diplomatic community in the US had been actively acquiring nuclear secrets. They often acted as a conduit, she said, for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistans spy agency, because they attracted less suspicion. She claimed corrupt government officials helped the network, and venues such as the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington were used as drop-off points. The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001. It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The officials warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US. The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish targets talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of operatives at the ATC. Edmonds is the subject of a number of state secret gags preventing her from talking further about the investigation she witnessed. I cannot discuss the details considering the gag orders, she said, but I reported all these activities to the US Congress, the inspector general of the justice department and the 9/11 commission. I told them all about what was contained in this case file number, which the FBI is now denying exists. This gag was invoked not to protect sensitive diplomatic relations but criminal activities involving US officials who were endangering US national security. Turks and Israelis stealing US nuclear secrets to sell to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. |
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| Home Front: WoT |
| For sale: Wests deadly nuclear secrets |
| 2008-01-06 |
| A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets. Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agencys Washington field office. She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey. Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions. Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official who has held a series of top government posts is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims. |
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| Home Front: Politix | ||||
| Leak of Classified Information Prompts Inquiry | ||||
| 2006-07-29 | ||||
WASHINGTON, July 28 A federal grand jury has begun investigating the leak of classified information about intelligence programs to the press and has subpoenaed a former National Security Agency employee who claims to have witnessed illegal activity while working at the agency.
For months, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been looking into disclosures of secret intelligence operations, including The New York Timess reports in December about the N.S.A.s domestic surveillance program and The Washington Posts articles on the Central Intelligence Agencys overseas jails for terror suspects. But the subpoena is the first public confirmation that a grand jury has begun to hear evidence.
Mr. Tice said in a telephone interview on Friday that he believed that the leak investigation and subpoena were designed to discourage A Justice Department official, who would discuss the confidential criminal investigation only on condition of anonymity, said that the leak inquiry was in a preliminary investigative phase and that no journalist had been subpoenaed. The official said federal agents had interviewed officials at several intelligence agencies about their contacts with reporters at The Times and other news organizations. Mr. Tice was dismissed last year from his job as a space systems specialist at the N.S.A., the eavesdropping agency based at Fort Meade, Md., where he worked on top-secret satellite intelligence collection programs. In a 20-year career, he also worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency and in Air Force intelligence. By his account, his troubles began after he raised questions inside the agency about various N.S.A. activities. Eventually, Mr. Tice said, agency officials questioned his mental health and stripped him of the security clearance he needed for intelligence work. He said that his mental health was perfect and that his dismissal was retaliation for his whistle-blowing. He said he was now doing housing construction work. Mr. Tice said that he had discussed unclassified information about the security agency with reporters for The Times and other publications but that he had always been careful not to reveal classified information.
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| Home Front: WoT |
| FBI Translator suit dismissed over Security issues |
| 2005-11-29 |
| WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Tuesday by a former FBI translator because the information needed to prove the case was classified and protected by what is known as the "state secrets privilege." In the lawsuit, originally filed in July 2002, Sibel Edmonds alleged that her rights under the Privacy Act and her First and Fifth amendment rights had been violated by the government. Edmonds, who worked as a contract linguist, claimed she was fired after she alerted authorities about purported security and management problems in the bureau's language branch. The Justice Department and the FBI both argued to the court that her lawsuit should be dismissed because much of the information needed to be considered for it was protected by the "state secrets privilege," which is meant to protect classified national security information from being disclosed. U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton agreed with the government's position. "The Court finds that the plaintiff is unable to establish her First Amendment, Fifth Amendment and Privacy Act claims without the disclosure of privileged information, nor would the defendants be able to defend against these claims without the same disclosures ... the plaintiff's case must be dismissed, albeit with great consternation, in the interests of national security," Walton wrote in the opinion. Edmonds, who worked for the FBI from September 2001 to March 2002, alleged she was fired from the FBI for coming forward with her complaints; a claim officials have privately dismissed. Edmonds had told the FBI that another translator, who has not been publicly identified, belonged to an organization that was a target of FBI surveillance and had not reported contacts with a foreign government official who was under surveillance. Edmonds and the co-worker were hired to translate sensitive wiretaps resulting from court-approved government surveillance. In the lawsuit, Edmonds claimed that the government leaked confidential information about her to several publications, which she says violated her rights under the Privacy Act. She also alleged that the FBI violated her free speech and due process rights when it fired her, a termination she said was in retaliation for whistleblowing. Edmonds was seeking monetary damages and re-instatement to a contract job. In defending the invocation of the state secrets privilege, Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote in a declaration to the court: "Based on my personal consideration of the matter, I have concluded that further disclosure of the information underlying in this case, including the nature of the duties of the plaintiff or the other contract translators at issue in this case reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security interests of the United States." Edmonds' lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in a statement that the government has gone too far. "The decision today represents another example of the Executive Branch's abusive nature of using secrecy as a weapon against whistleblowers," Zaid's statement said. The Justice Department had no reaction to the ruling. Edmonds has raised controversy on several fronts. Information she provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee several years ago was recently deemed classified under the state secrets privilege. And lawyers filing a lawsuit stemming from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks wanted to depose her, but their request was quashed for the same reason. Edmonds has testified in closed session to the 9/11 commission and has made claims that the FBI possessed some information prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon which could have proved helpful in preventing the terrorist strikes. |
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| Home Front: WoT | |
| FBI Translator's Complaints Were Supported by Evidence, Witnesses | |
| 2005-01-14 | |
| Evidence and other witnesses support complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage within the bureau's translator program in the months after the September 2001 terror attacks, according to a report Friday by the senior oversight official at the Justice Department. The department's inspector general, Glenn Fine, said the allegations by former translator Sibel Edmonds "raised substantial questions and were supported by various pieces of evidence." Fine said the FBI still has not adequately investigated the sensational claims. The government's report also revealed that Edmonds was fired for using her home computer to write one memorandum about her concerns that contained classified information, which the FBI deemed a security violation. The report released Friday was a 37-page, unclassified summary of a broader, 100-page internal review over Edmonds' case. The report noted that Edmonds, who had been granted "Top Secret" clearance, had first obtained permission from an FBI supervisor to work on the memorandum at home. The supervisor, who wasn't identified, relayed Edmonds' allegations to FBI security officials but also reported Edmonds' own violation of FBI procedures for handling classified materials, the report said.
Edmonds maintains she was fired in March 2002 after she complained to FBI managers about shoddy wiretap translations and told them an interpreter with a relative at a foreign embassy might have compromised national security by blocking translations in some cases and notifying some targets of FBI investigations about U.S. surveillance of them. Fine did not determine whether Edmonds' charges of espionage were true, which he said was beyond the scope of his investigation. But he criticized the FBI's review of the espionage accusations. "We found that many of Edmonds' core allegations relating to the co-worker were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds," the report said. "Moreover, we concluded that, had the FBI performed a more careful investigation of Edmonds' allegations, it would have discovered evidence of significant omissions and inaccuracies by the co-worker related to these allegations." The report did not identify Edmonds' co-worker, although Edmonds has publicly revealed her name in comments to journalists. The report said that while there could be innocent explanations for this coworker's behavior, "other explanations were not innocuous." Edmonds filed a federal lawsuit seeking to retain her job, but last summer - in an unusual move - the judge threw out her case at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft and said her claims might expose government secrets that could damage national security. She is appealing that decision. FBI Director Robert Mueller previously disclosed that the investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general did not conclude the FBI retaliated against Edmonds. But Mueller also acknowledged in a letter to lawmakers in July that he was concerned by the inspector general's determination that Edmonds' allegations "were at least a contributing factor in why the FBI terminated her services." The department's report concluded the FBI failed to adequately pursue Edmonds' allegation that her colleague committed espionage. Mueller told senators previously that the FBI conducted a "relevant investigation," but promised to review the case and conduct a further investigation if necessary. Edmonds was born in Iran and raised in Turkey; she speaks English, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Farsi, and was hired as a contract linguist by the FBI in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Edmonds also had sued the Justice Department under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to compel its inspector general to disclose results of his investigation into her firing. The complete report, classified at the "secret" level, has circulated among the FBI, Justice Department, the 911 Commission and some lawmakers on oversight committees. Edmonds' lawyer, Mark Zaid, said the Justice Department has agreed to provide Edmonds as early as next month with an edited version of its 100-page classified report. | |
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| Home Front: WoT |
| Letter From Sibel Edmonds to the 9/11 Commission |
| 2004-08-04 |
| Hat tip: http://www.danieldrezner.com/ Fred, I submitted this earlier. Don't know if it got lost in the server shuffle, so I am submitting it again. Long letter, but worth going to the link and reading the whole thing. I find your report seriously flawed in its failure to address serious intelligence issues that I am aware of, which have been confirmed, and which as a witness to the commission, I made you aware of. Thus, I must assume that other serious issues that I am not aware of were in the same manner omitted from your report. These omissions cast doubt on the validity of your report and therefore on its conclusions and recommendations. ... Dear Chairman Kean: It has been almost three years since the terrorist attacks on September 11; during which time we, the people, have been placed under a constant threat of terror and asked to exercise vigilance in our daily lives. Your commission, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, was created by law to investigate "facts and circumstances related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001" and to "provide recommendations to safeguard against future acts of terrorism", and has now issued its "9/11 Commission Report". You are now asking us to pledge our support for this report, its recommendations, and implementation of these recommendations, with our trust and backing, our tax money, our security, and our lives. Unfortunately, I find your report seriously flawed in its failure to address serious intelligence issues that I am aware of, which have been confirmed, and which as a witness to the commission, I made you aware of. Thus, I must assume that other serious issues that I am not aware of were in the same manner omitted from your report. These omissions cast doubt on the validity of your report and therefore on its conclusions and recommendations. Considering what is at stake, our national security, we are entitled to demand answers to unanswered questions, and to ask for clarification of issues that were ignored and/or omitted from the report. I, Sibel Edmonds, a concerned American Citizen, a former FBI translator, a whistleblower, a witness for a United States Congressional investigation, a witness and a plaintiff for the Department of Justice Inspector General investigation, and a witness for your own 9/11 Commission investigation, request your answers to, and your public acknowledgement of, the following questions and issues: |
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| Home Front: WoT |
| Former FBI Translator Testifies About Indications of Attack Using Aircraft |
| 2004-04-01 |
| A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qaâidaâs plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie". Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commissionâs investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege". She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily." She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used  but not specifically about how they would be used  and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities  with skyscrapers." .... Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBIâs Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qaâida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps. She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission  90 per cent of it  related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well. President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away. .... |
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| Home Front |
| American Arabs Support Terrorism Against America |
| 2004-01-07 |
| In a shocking revelation, an FBI whistleblower claims some Arab-Americans translating Arabic intercepts for the FBI spoke approvingly of the terrorist attacks on America more than two years ago. Former FBI translator Sibel D. Edmonds says translators of Middle Eastern origin working for the FBIâs Washington field office maintain an "us"-versus-"them" attitude thatâs so strong it may be compromising al-Qaida investigations. She cited examples of mistranslations and security breaches within the FBIâs language division, where translators with Top Secret clearance interpret sensitive terror-related information for agents. "The issues and problems within the FBIâs translation units range from security failures to questions of loyalty to competence of translation personnel to systemic problems within their low-to-mid-level management practices," Edmonds said. She made the explosive charges Monday in a letter to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, an independent panel investigating the 9-11 attacks and U.S. intelligence leading up to them. Edmonds, a translator who worked closely with FBI counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents at an office within blocks of the Washington field office, said she overheard some translators express sympathy for the 9-11 terrorist attacks. "During my work with the bureau, I was seriously taken aback by what I heard and witnessed within the translation department," she said. "There were those who openly divided the fronts as âUsâ — the Middle-Easterners who shared certain views — and âThemâ — the Americans who were the outsiders [whose] arrogance was now âleading to their own destruction.â" Not long after the attacks, Edmonds said one translator said: "It is about time that they get a taste of what they have been giving to the rest of the Middle East." She says the remark was made in front of the unit supervisor, also of Middle Eastern origin. "These comments were neither rare nor made in a whisper," Edmonds said. "They were open and loud." She says such attitudes call into question "the integrity and accuracy" of information Arabic translators are feeding agents. Edmonds says agents who donât speak Arabic have no way of knowing whether the information they receive from translators is tainted. "They simply have to trust the information given to them by translators," she said, "and based on that, decide to act or not act..." It is not only Arab Americans who are largely traitors. Pretend you are an anti-semite while in a Pakistani Americanâs taxi, and you will hear a murderous diatribe against Jews. The "us versus them" idea can work both ways. |
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