More on Sibel Edmonds

[Lanya]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.ece

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

The FBI has been accused of covering up a file detailing government dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets


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 agency?s investigation of the network.

Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency?s 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.
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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), Pakistan?s 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 official?s 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 c?l?bre 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.?

Insight: Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert and Joe Lauria

[Michael Tee]

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT in the 1970s, has blogged today in Antiwar.com that the U.S. MSM are burying the Sibel Edmonds story, which is front-page news in the U.K.  This is a bad sign, you are losing an independent, free press and that's not by accident either.   Oh well, what the sheeple don't know can't hurt them, eh?

[yellow_crane]

The true nature of America as a sovereign nation and its moral profile is dramatically represented in the treatment of its whistleblowers.

The influence to punish whistleblowers is where to begin the cauterization.

In truth, they are the most heroic Americans we have.

[BT]

One would suspect if there were anything to this, Waxman would be all over it.

[Lanya]

Waxman has been very, very closemouthed on this subject.  Why, I don't know.

Michael, the MSM have buried most of the important news for the last 7 years or more.  I don't know what it's going to take to whack sense into them.

When I realized it cost about 120 bucks a year to have the local paper delivered, I quit getting it back in the 90s.  I'm hoping many people do that. We deserve better news coverage.  This paper barely mentioned Ney and his trial, or any of the myriad other GOP state scandals/indictments/trials/convictions.  I would think that was important, but evidently not.

[BT]

Waxman has been very, very closemouthed on this subject.  Why, I don't know.

Ponders who investigates the investigators.

[Michael Tee]

<<When I realized it cost about 120 bucks a year to have the local paper delivered, I quit getting it back in the 90s.  I'm hoping many people do that. We deserve better news coverage.>>

I used to always get a New York Times every morning when I was in New York and read it at a Starbucks on 57th Street across the road from my daughter's apartment early in the morning, before the babies woke up.  One morning, reaching for the paper (this was after Judith Miller, after Jayson Blair) I just pulled back my hand, thinking "This is crap!  Why am I buying it?"  I haven't bought another one since.  I noticed on that same trip, the NYT was saturating the local TV stations with a series of black & white ads, supposedly candid "man in the street" interviews with a cross-section of New Yorkers, soccer moms, black college girls, etc., and the common theme was trust, reliability, long-standing family associations with the paper.  "I TRUST the Times . . .   it's always bin THERE for me, y'know? . . . Ever since I was a kid, I've always been able to TRUST the New York Times."  A dozen variations on trust.   It was painfully obvious that they had a big problem with trust.  A lot of people just like me no longer trusted them, and it was showing in readership numbers, so they had to do something about it.  So instead of doing anything to ensure the paper would become more trustworthy, they went out and spent a bundle on ads, proclaiming how trustworthy they were.  Sad, but funny. 

I feel bad for the print journalists.  They work hard, they're very conscientious, they have impeccable credentials and standards, but if their editors or publishers won't run their stories, they have to work on whatever they're assigned to and someone on re-write will take all the heart out of the story anyway if the management has a different political take on it.   Freedom of the press is reserved for the man or woman who owns one.

[Lanya]

Yeah, I see those same ads on TV, trying to get people to subscribe to the Times.
"It's like starting the weekend early! I know all the sales, have lots of good recipes, things to do. "   And they repeat the "it's always been there for me" thing.

They made a really bad move when they put their columnists behind a pay-to-read wall, NYTimes Select.  I don't know about other people, but it got me out of the habit of looking them up online.  I used to, just to read Paul Krugman. Now they did away with Select and I still don't read them.