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Friday, January 11, 2008

Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb: A Real 8/11 Cover-Up? by Dave Lindorff

Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb
A Real 9/11 Cover-Up?

By DAVE LINDORFF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

3 comments:

Michele Kearney said...

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mi...london_blow.htm

January 7, 2008

Times of London Blows Open Sibel Edmonds Case

By Mike Mejia

Deep within the bowels of the FBI translation program are contained many dark secrets. If the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress have their way, many of these painful truths will never see the light of public scrutiny. Some come in the form of transcripts of wiretapped conversations that reveal U.S. officials are willing to sell nuclear secrets for cold, hard cash to untrustworthy allies.

So says FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, in an explosive new interview with the The Times (U.K.). In the story, Edmonds claims “ 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 article goes on to say:

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

The Times article does not name the high-level State Department official who is alleged to have sold out his country to Turkey and Pakistan. However, to those who have paid close attention to the Edmonds case, there is little doubt that she is referring to Mark Grossman, currently an associate of the Cohen Group.

Grossman, former Ambassador to Turkey under President Clinton and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under President Bush, has been named repeatedly by Edmonds in interviews as someone “very important” to her case. The fact that any indiscretions Grossman may be accused of occurred during both a Democratic and a Republican Administration may explain why neither political party has aggressively tried to pursue Edmonds claims.

If the charges are true, the unnamed State Department official, whoever he or she is, may be guilty of more than leaking secrets to a trusted ally; cash payments may have been involved as well. Edmonds apparently told the Times that “in one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe”. It is not clear whether there is proof any cash payments ever took place, yet the charge is damning.

Grossman, besides being a former policymaker at State, is known publicly as Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s first witness in the Scooter Libby trial. Libby was accused of perjury in the investigation of former CIA operative Valerie Plame, who was part of a CIA front company monitoring the global nuclear black market. At least one story claimed Grossman himself had leaked the identity of Plame’s front company, Brewster-Jennings, to Turkish agents in June, 2001. Though the story was never picked up by the mainstream media, if true, it would lead credence to the idea that the Brewster Jennings operation had already been compromised before the retaliation against Plame’s wife, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, by members of the Bush Administration.

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

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

Michele Kearney said...

From The Sunday Times January 6, For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets Insight: Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle3137695.ece

Michele Kearney said...

http://www.reason.com
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124310.html

U.S. Nuke Secrets for Sale? And What Was the Deal With that B-52 Stratofortress Again?Brian Doherty | January 9, 2008, 4:15pm

Interesting (and quite alarming, if true) piece from the London Sunday Times that has gotten very little U.S. play, about accusations by a former FBI translator. The basic deal:

[Sibel Edmonds] 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.

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

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

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

Dave Lindorff at CounterPunch does a spinoff of the Sunday Times piece and ties it into one of those "oh yeah, what was that all about?" moment that provide so much fun fodder for conspiracy theorizing:

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

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

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

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

Accidents can happen.

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