The woman in this picture looks unlikely for that title, but she is "the most gagged person in U.S. history." She looks more like Governor Sarah Palin's younger sister, or Palin herself, without glasses.Her name is Sibel Edmonds. If you haven't heard of her it is because our government - and several others - don't want you to hear her, hear of her or read what she's read.
This is the first story I've taken up at Progressive Alaska that doesn't appear to have an Alaska connection. But her story appears to be the truth, and even though she's under several court orders not to tell it, it appears she started doing that over the past weekend. Not to the U.S. mainstream press, but to The Sunday Times of London. Although newspapers in Israel, India, Pakistan and other places have started repeating her weekend Times story, or parts of it, no U.S. newspaper of record has even alluded to it yet. I.N.N. Video News covered the story today.
Edmonds, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Azerbaijan, began working for the FBI shortly after September 11, 2001. She speaks Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani. She was set to work translating some of the incredible number of untranslated telephone intercepts at the FBI, as they attempted to play catch-up after the 9/11 intelligence fiasco. When she started asking supervisors inconvenient questions about information she was putting together, she was terminated from her job. She has won every hearing since having to do with her job performance. Nobody has poked a hole yet into any information she has divulged.
The Edmonds article at wikipedia hasn't been updated lately, but it is informative. There is a blog devoted to her chronicle, and several hundred blogs around the planet have picked up on the Times story. Justin Raimondo wrote an excellent essay on the Times revelations, and Brad Friedman at BradBlog is in touch with Edmonds through the beginning of this week. YouTube has an excellent cache of interviews and talks featuring Sibel Edmonds. Daniel Ellsberg has been an outspoken advocate for Edmonds.
Here's the essence of her new revelations:
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.
However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”
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.
The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.
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.
They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.
Edmonds has today posted pictures of most of the main figures in her narrative.
If there is some sort of Alaska connection to her story, it might be in the parallels involving the FBI being thwarted in pursuing a criminal investigation or investigations. Ray Metcalfe has told me that the White House attempted to shut down the Alaska GOP legislative corruption probe in early 2007. Metcalfe, like Edmonds, has been avoided by the mainstream press.
