The case of Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who has doggedly tried to blow the whistle on some security-related shenanigans for years now, finally lurched into the mainstream with a story in Murdoch’s Sunday Times. Based on the last we heard from Edmonds one would expect the story to expose law enforcement failures that missed the 9/11 plot.
No, Edmonds has much bigger fish to fry.
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.
Now, nuclear espionage is a pretty serious claim, and without corroborating evidence one can see why US papers felt reluctant to run with it. It also explains why the libel-shy UK press laundered out the names, although some Kossack researchers claim to have filled them back in here. It’s mostly neocons.
But Edmonds is just getting warmed up. When al Qaeda attacked us of September 11, America fairly quickly rounded up a number of people who we had varying reasons to think might have been involved in planning or supporting the attacks. The problem is, according to Edmonds, that some of these guys knew enough about the above nuclear espionage to potentially bring on what they call in Washington an “accountability moment”.
Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”
The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.
It goes on from there. Fault me if you like for not being paranoid enough, but the magnitude of Edmond’s claims helps me to understand why American reporters let the story pass. For one thing, I missed the part where they independently verified her claims. If you accuse prominent people of murder (nuclear espionage is arguably worse) then it helps to back it up. There are no Pentagon Papers here, at least not yet. The Times can independently corroborate the general background (Turkish espionage passed on to Pakistan) but not the bombshell.
In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.
One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.
In the end I’m left puzzled. I suppose that a former federal agent willing to make claims like this is news in itself, but the Times seems eager (if not quite ready) to go a step further and report the claims themselves. Until something tangible comes up that warrants stopping the presses (paging TPM Muckraker…) they should resist the urge. Citing Edmonds by name is the one thing that, for me anyway, bumps the story a step up from a Judy Miller snow job.
Pb
The magnitude of her claims speaks to me about how they should have looked into her story a ton more, period. Of course, the other huge story here is how deeply the administration tried to shut her up, and how Congress eventually went along with it. That speaks volumes too–if you aren’t a major news organization in the US, that is.
Credit where credit is due, of course, there have been a few scattered reports in the media about this over the years, and blogger lukery has been an absolute hero in covering this, following the story, and helping to keep it alive and let people know about it.
Incidentally, here’s a WaPo article noting that the US press was ignoring this story, and speculating as to why. Of course, that just doesn’t hold water now, four years later, still with their fingers in their ears. By now they probably think it’s an “old story” that they already managed to bury. That’s because they aren’t journalists at all–their lack of interest in finding out the truth betrays this as well as anything else.
Wilfred
Lukery writes:
AIPAC is why you haven’t heard more. Don’t hold your breath. Waxman will never let this be investigated.
DR
Also, let’s not forget that Larissa Alexandrovna has been working on the story from a completely different set of (corroborating) sources. It seems to have legs to me, but until we see some solid evidence, I agree that it should be considered as an interesting rumour.
Kirk Spencer
Edmonds is one of the reasons I became so distrustful of the whole administration. (I had no trust for Bush due to some things from way before his presidency run. But I generally trusted the government as a whole to be generally operating for the benefit of the nation.) Anyway, at first her claims seemed outlandish. Then, well, to quote from the article:
IG said, “She was kicked out because her claims were valid.” And then Ashcroft made it so that if she said anything she hadn’t already said, she’d be slapped with various espionage charges — wildly ironic, that.
So while the current things seem a bit out there… right now her credibility is just a wee bit higher than those she’s challenging.
Zifnab
Wilfred, blow me. Your obsession with AIPAC – to the exclusion of every other sleaze ball group in the country – is getting kinda old. At this point, you sound like a 9/11-Truther with an oral fixation.
You don’t think this story was getting bottled up by Republicans? That it absolutely, positively had to be Waxman because… omfg, t3h J00s!
The story itself is difficult to coroberate and already you’re calling out who gets blamed. Funny, its Waxman who suddenly gets tagged and not Joe “Neo-cons in my pants” Lieberman. Because its not like they’re on parallel committees doing the exact same fucking job or anything. No, fuck, its gotta be Waxman’s fault.
Seriously, blow me.
Wilfred
Gee Zif, you forgot to call me an anti-Semite.
Lukery brought up AIPAC, asshole. Now a person equipped with even a hint of critical thinking might ask how and why something as serious as this is hasn’t come anywhere near being investigated, while Mr.Waxman busies himself with investigating Roger Clemens’ trainer’s accusation that he supplied him steroids. I’ll gladly tag Lieberman as an AIPAC poster boy, too. You just made my point.
Waxman decides what his committee investigates. If he won’t give her a hearing, whose fault is that. Republicans? Fine, fuck them, too.
Stick your anti-Semite jackalope up your ass, get your head out first.
Bob In Pacifica
I am reading PRELUDE TO TERROR by Joseph Trento, which covers the history of this rogue intelligence network. I’ve got hundreds of pages before I get to A Q Khan but Ed Wilson and Chi Chi Quintero were there early on.
There have been plenty of books written about parts of this. And the movie about Charley Wilson touches on this area too, but no one has drawn the line to the nuclear bomb.
The difference between Edmonds and Alexandrovna and the others is that they are naming names of people who are around and currently in play.
One reason why there would be no press coverage is because it’s a bi-partisan scandal. Some names showing up are Democrats connected to Clinton, and Edmonds indicates Dem Rep Tom Lantos is involved.
Yes, the Mossad seems to be involved, as are intelligence services of Pakistan, the House of Saud and Turkey (at least). Israel’s involvement is important because it helps to keep the lid on press coverage here in the U.S. and it also offers a backdoor out when and if it does bust open. Lots of folks will gladly just blame it on the Jews. Unfortunately, corruption is endemic to all humanity.
But thanks, Tim, for telling us about another conspiracy we should ignore.
srv
Well, demonstrably, all these other groups have their Larry Franklins and what-not.
Pb
Waxman talks about baseball, not Sibel — from lukery, today.
Zifnab
I wish it was anti-Semitism. You’ve got a bizarre case of tunnel vision.
Waxman followed up on the steriods-in-baseball case that was the cause-du-jour of the ’05 Congress because it was an open investigation that needed to be closed. If you’re pissed that we’re wasting tax dollars on monitoring a governmentally bless monopoly like baseball, have the good decency to be pissed at the guys who actually started the investigation during the height of Iraq clusterfuckitude.
How you can single out Waxman in all of this is beyond me, however. When every newspaper, every intra-government agency, and a fair number of watch dog groups don’t seem to be picking up the slack, this “Democrats are at fault” meme is exhausting to say the least.
I don’t like how the issue has been dropped on the floor any more than you have, and I would love to see increased investigations. I’d just like to see a more productive response than “WAXMAN SUX” blog entries.
Innocent Bystander
Here’s another well developed and sourced write up on this subject-
American Judas
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/robertpaulsen/84
One thing I recently learned is that Brewster-Jennings had been monitoring Mark Grossman, Perle, and Wolfiwitz as part of their CIA WMD tracking in Turkey. Puts a whole new spin on why they had to neutralize this operation.
darms
It gets worse – Chris Floyd shows connections between what Ms. Edmonds is saying and BCCI. I hate this “down the rabbit hole” stuff but sometimes there’s just no choice…
liberal
Zifnab wrote, How you can single out Waxman in all of this is beyond me, however.
But Waxman is an interesting example. Despite being extremely liberal in general, he voted in favor of the October 2002 authorization of the invasion of Iraq.