A lawyer for FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds said Tuesday the bureau’s prepublication review office has adopted overly expansive restrictions that are preventing Edmonds from publishing a book about her life at the FBI.
Edmonds, once a contract linguist at the bureau, was fired a decade ago after complaining to FBI managers about shoddy wiretap translations and alleging that an interpreter with a relative at a foreign embassy might have compromised national security by blocking translations in some cases and notifying targets of FBI surveillance.
Edmonds sued for unlawful termination, but Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped her lawsuit by invoking the state secrets privilege. He said her claims might expose government secrets that could damage national security.
Attorney Stephen Kohn said his client’s book, “Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story,” contains no classified information, yet has been under review by the bureau for the past year. Bureau regulations promise reviews will take only 30 working days. In all, reviews can cover a dozen different factors, which may significantly delay the 30-day limit, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson.
In this startling new memoir, Sibel Edmonds—the most classified woman in U.S. history—takes us on a surreal journey that begins with the secretive FBI and down the dark halls of a feckless Congress to a stonewalling judiciary and finally, to the national security whistleblowers movement she spearheaded. Having lived under Middle East dictatorships, Edmonds knows firsthand what can happen when government is allowed to operate in secret. Hers is a sobering perspective that combines painful experience with a rallying cry for the public’s right to know and to hold the lawbreakers accountable. With U.S. citizens increasingly stripped of their rights in a calibrated media blackout, Edmonds’ story is a wake-up call for all Americans who, willingly or unwillingly, traded liberty for illusive security in the wake of 9/11
A Limited Time Exclusive BFP Package
We are now offering a very limited number of advanced signed copies of Classified Woman to Boiling Frogs Post readers and supporters. In addition to the book you will receive a one-year subscription to Boiling Frogs Post and a copy of our recently released DVD containing our CIA Series, Bonus Episodes, and Jamiol Toon Gallery. All that for $100. Currently this offer is only valid for U.S. shipments.
On September 11, 2001, within hours of the murderous 9/11 attacks, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney had committed America to what they later called the “War on Terror.” It should more properly, I believe, be called the “Terror War,” one in which terror has been directed repeatedly against civilians by all participants, both states and non-state actors.1 It should also be seen as part of a larger, indeed global, process in which terror has been used against civilians in interrelated campaigns by all major powers, including China in Xinjiang and Russia in Chechnya, as well as the United States.2 Terror war in its global context should perhaps be seen as the latest stage of the age-long secular spread of transurban civilization into areas of mostly rural resistance — areas where conventional forms of warfare, for either geographic or cultural reasons, prove inconclusive.
Terror War was formally declared by George W. Bush on the evening of September 11, 2001, with his statement to the American nation that “we will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”3 But the notion that Bush’s terror war was in pursuit of actual terrorists lost credibility in 2003, when it was applied to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country known to have been targeted by terrorists but not to have harbored them.4 It lost still more credibility with the 2005 publication in Britain of the so-called Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British intelligence service MI6 reported after a visit to Washington in 2002 that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”5 False stories followed in due course linking Iraq to WMD, anthrax, and Niger yellowcake (uranium).
This essay will demonstrate that before 9/11 a small element inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit and related agencies, the so-called Alec Station Group, were also busy, “fixing” intelligence by suppressing it, in a way which, accidentally or deliberately, enabled the Terror War. They did so by withholding evidence from the FBI before 9/11 about two of the eventual alleged hijackers on 9/11, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, thus ensuring that the FBI could not surveil the two men or their colleagues.
This failure to share was recognized in the 9/11 Commission Report, but treated as an accident that might not have occurred “if more resources had been applied.”6 This explanation, however, has since been refuted by 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean. Asked recently by two filmmakers if the failure to deal appropriately with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi could have been a simple mistake, Kean replied:
Oh, it wasn’t careless oversight. It was purposeful. No question about that .… The conclusion that we came to was that in the DNA of these organizations was secrecy. And secrecy to the point of ya don’t share it with anybody.7
MSNBC has carried a couple of articles in the past few days relating to the important Florida-Saudi-9/11 connections. Mishandling investigations, cover-ups, Suadi support of 9/11, Senators wanting more answers, US complicity….this is big news!
Please visit all original sources for the full length articles, and to show MSNBC that you care that they covered these important and unresolved issues.
A Saudi man who triggered an FBI investigation after he and his family left their Sarasota, Fla., area home and moved overseas two weeks before 9/11 considered Osama bin Laden a “hero” and may have known some of the hijackers, an informant told the FBI in 2004.
The informant also told authorities that the Saudi, Abdulazziz al-Hijji, once introduced him to Adnan El Shukrijumah – another former Florida resident and suspected top al-Qaida operative who today has a $5 million bounty on his head.
Al-Hijji’s name made headlines in September 2011 when The Miami Heraldreported on a counterterrorism source’s disclosure of a previously unknown FBI-led probe that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington — one that pointed to a possible Saudi support operation for the hijackers in Florida.
“If we are truly going to be respectful of the victims of 9/11 one of the things the president and this administration must do is get to the bottom of these questions,” said Graham, who co-chaired Congress’s bi-partisan Joint Inquiry into the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. – Broward Bulldog
by Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers source: Broward Bulldog Feb 22, 2012
Former Florida Senator Bob Graham has seen two classified FBI documents that he says raise new questions about the Bureau’s once secret investigation of a possible Saudi support operation for the 9/11 hijackers in Sarasota.
Graham would not disclose the content of the documents, which are marked “Secret,” but said the information they contain is at odds with the FBI’s public statements that there was no connection between the hijackers and Saudis then living in Sarasota.
“There are significant inconsistencies between the public statements of the FBI in September and what I read in the classified documents,” Graham said.
“One document adds to the evidence that the investigation was not the robust inquiry claimed by the FBI,” Graham said. “An important investigative lead was not pursued and unsubstantiated statements were accepted as truth.”
“How can Budget Increases…Addition of ‘Intelligence Czar’ Fix the Problem?” -Sibel Edmonds
Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator, wrote this open letter to 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean in 2004. I have edited it down just slightly in hopes that more people read it, though the full text links are recommended and provided at bottom. I have added bold for emphasis of one, consistent point.
I encourage everyone to become more familiar with Sibel Edmond’s story – this is a really good starting point. – Brian @ Nor Cal Truth
————
Dear Chairman Kean:
It has been almost three years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, during which time we have been placed under a constant threat of terror and asked to exercise vigilance in our daily lives. Your commission 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 and its recommendations with 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, as a witness to the commission, made you aware of. Thus, I must assume that other serious issues I am not aware of were also 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 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, request your response to the following questions and issues.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, we, the translators at the FBI’s largest and most important translation unit, were told to slow down or even stop translation of critical information related to terrorist activities so that the FBI could present the United States Congress with a record of an “extensive backlog of untranslated documents” and justify its request for budget and staff increases. While FBI agents from various field offices were desperately seeking leads and suspects, and completely depending on FBI HQ and its language units to provide them with needed translations, hundreds of translators were being told by their administrative supervisors not to translate and to let the work pile up… I provided your investigators with a detailed account of this issue and the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this…
…Your report omits any reference to this most serious issue, foregoing any accountability whatsoever, and your recommendations refrain from addressing this issue, which will have even more serious consequences. This issue is systemic and departmental. Why does your report exclude this information despite the evidence and briefings you received? How can budget increases address and resolve this misconduct by mid-level bureaucratic management? How can the addition of a new bureaucrat, the “intelligence czar,” in a cocoon away from the action, address and resolve this problem?
Melek Can Dickerson, a Turkish translator, was hired by the FBI after Sept. 11 and placed in charge of translating the most sensitive information related to terrorists and criminals under the Bureau’s investigation. Dickerson was granted top secret clearance, which can be granted only after conducting a thorough background investigation. Dickerson used to work for semi-legit organizations that were FBI targets of investigation. She had ongoing relationships with two individuals who were FBI targets of investigation. For months, Dickerson blocked all-important information related to these semi-legit organizations and the individuals she and her husband associated with. She stamped hundreds, if not thousands, of documents related to these targets as “not pertinent.” Dickerson attempted to prevent others from translating these documents important to the FBI’s investigations and our fight against terrorism. With the assistance of her direct supervisor, Mike Feghali, she took hundreds of pages of top-secret intelligence documents outside the FBI to unknown recipients. With Feghali’s assistance, she forged signatures on top-secret documents related to 9/11 detainees. After all these incidents were confirmed and reported to FBI management, Melek Can Dickerson was allowed to remain in her position, to continue the translation of sensitive intelligence received by the FBI, and to maintain her top-secret clearance… The Melek Can Dickerson case was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. It received major coverage by the press…
…Dickerson and several FBI targets of investigation hastily left the United States in 2002…..Your report omits these significant incidents, and your recommendations do not address this serious security breach and likely espionage issue… The translation of our intelligence is being entrusted to individuals with loyalties to our enemies. Important “chit-chats” and “chatters” are being intentionally blocked from translation. Why does your report exclude this information and these serious issues despite the evidence and briefings you received? How can budget increases address and resolve this misconduct by mid-level bureaucratic management? How can the addition of an “intelligence czar” solve this problem?
Milo is the host of Touch, a daily program from 5:00-6:00 PM Pacific on The Bridge, 95.1 FM in Guerneville. Milo has invited me (Brian Romanoff) to be a regular guest on his show to try to bring more light into the events of 9/11. I appreciate the opportunity and I hope you enjoy the show.
This week we discuss FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. Sibel Edmonds has added many important pieces to the 9/11 puzzle, including startling pre 9/11 intelligence and foreknowledge by other FBI agents. Below the radio-show link, I have provided more information regarding Sibel Edmonds that is worth everyone’s time.
Available as a live-stream every Monday 5:00-6:00 PM Pacific at the website provided below:
Milo is the host of Touch, a daily program from 5:00-6:00 PM Pacific on The Bridge, 95.1 FM in Guerneville. Milo has invited me (Brian Romanoff) to be a regular guest on his show to try to bring more light into the events of 9/11. I appreciate the opportunity and I hope you enjoy the show.
“Martin Luther King Jr. warned that a country in continuous war approaches spiritual death. I wonder if he realized that this extinction would play out in the nation’s shopping malls as, like the Romans, we distract ourselves with bread and circuses from the crimes and catastrophes that surround us, and the responsibilities we avoid”
Celebrating Spiritual Death On Black Friday
How many remember that this “Black Friday” marks the 10th anniversary of George Bush’s famous presidential advisory just after 9/11 for citizens to do their patriotic duty by pushing their worries aside and going shopping? The idea of asking the American people to make sacrifices in the face of the coming “War on Terror” was too ’70s, too Jimmy Carter.
The 2001 attacks were quickly seized upon by hard-core propagandists and “shock doctrine” advocates as the “new Pearl Harbor,” sparking a decade of blatant social-psychological manipulation. The media onslaught has proved sadly effective in getting Americans to support the ongoing series of bloody and bankrupting wars and to overlook the root causes of this violence in today’s world.
By incessantly pushing on the emotional hot-buttons of fear, hate, greed, false pride and blind loyalty (in that order), warmongers and flim-flam men have, since time immemorial, sought to bring out the worst in human beings. Up to now the propaganda has worked, persuading most Americans to accept with minimal visible coercion the enormous corruption and cruelty at the heart of the corporate-military-industrial-congressional-media complex.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I played a small role back in late October 2001 in stoking the national shopping addiction, which worked so well to distract the American citizenry from looking closely at 9/11. At that time, the officially endorsed shopping compulsion served to prevent people from asking questions about how and why the attacks had occurred, and from paying full attention to the horrendously wrongheaded initial responses. These included the mass roundup of innocents; the establishment of indefinite, due process-free, Kafkaesque detention zones at Guantanamo and elsewhere; and the initial conspiracy to go to the “dark side” and resort to systematic torture — all of which served to morally bankrupt the United States.
At that time, Minnesota’s Mall of America boasted of being the largest shopping complex in the world. Soon after 9/11, its stores, like others around the country, fell victim to the “Halloween terrorist threat hoax,” which mall owners feared, would scare off would-be shoppers. And so, as our FBI office spokesperson, I dutifully participated in a hastily organized press conference instigated by the Mall. I merely spoke the truth at the press conference, assuring the gathered media that the warning that terrorists would target malls in the United States was just a hollow rumor that had gone viral, without any real evidence or intelligence behind it.
The 9/11 Commission Final Report did not mention it.
The FBI investigated it and interviewed many people, several different times. FBI officials never contested the media reports, nor did it ever release any findings of its investigation publicly.
Perhaps it was not important enough to warrant a note or comment ….. perhaps it is.
During the 10 year anniversary of the attacks, ABC brought us the first-in-a-long-time mainstream news report of the mystery:
UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 23
UAL flight 23 was scheduled to depart New York’s JFK airport at 8:30am September 11th, 2001, bound for Los Angeles. Piloting flight 23 was Tom Mannello with First Officer Carol Timmons.
Flight 23 was delayed, but it eventually taxied out to the tarmac to wait behind a line of other planes.
During this time, the first and second hijacked planes would strike the North Tower and South Tower at 8:46am and 9:03 am, respectively.
Apparently the pilots of flight 23 overheard another pilot, who was sharing the same frequency, say a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Expecting a long wait, Pilot Tom Mannello shut the engines off and told passengers a mechanical problem was holding them up.
It would not be long before flight 23 would receive its first warnings from an alert United employee.
United Airlines dispatcher Ed Ballinger started to relay text messages to the planes for which he was in control of, 16 flights in total, including both UAL flight 23 and 93 as soon as he had an idea of what was happening.
9/11 Commission MFR (Memorandum for the Record) #040200009, from Ballingers time in front of the Commission, states that he sent a series of warnings to the planes in his control(download PDF). The following timeline is for the warnings UAL flight 23 received from Ballinger:
9:12 am Received a message to the effect that a “ground stop of all aircraft” was in process
9:20 am “Beware any cockpit intrusion…..Two aircraft in New York hit Trade Center buildings”
9:24 am ”Beware any cockpit intrusion…..Two aircraft in New York hit Trade Center buildings”
9:32 am “High Security Alert. Secure cockpit.”
The pilots of UAL flight 23 took heed to Ballinger’s warnings. First Officer Carol Timmons started to barricade the door with to the cockpit with luggage, while Pilot Tom Manello held the crash-axe for protection.
Captain Manello relayed the warnings to the flight crew, stating to not open the cockpit doors – “no exceptions!” Shortly after, the cockpit received a call from an attendant on the plane stating she thought “it was unusual” that a group of four Arab men were sitting in first-class. The warnings from Ballinger to the pilots of flight 23 did not contain any specifics of the hijackers appearance, to be sure.
The smoke from the World Trade Center was visible from the plane. JFK airport was in a declared emergency and shut down while UAL flight 23 was seventh in line to take off. The pilots, having already received warnings from Ed Ballinger and the in-flight call from the attendant, announced they were heading back to the gate.
As the plane headed back for the gate the group of Middle Easterners apparently got up and began consulting with each other, refusing orders from attendants to go back to their seats. An argument ensued between the men and the flight attendants, prompting a call from the plane to airport security. The men were reported to have insisted that they ”have got to be on this plane.”
In his recent book The Black Banners, former FBI agent Ali Soufan portrays a key 9/11 Commission staff member, Doug MacEachin, as believing the CIA deliberately withheld information from the FBI in January 2001. This is in contrast with the Commission’s final report, which states that the CIA failed to pass on intelligence to the FBI on multiple occasions, but puts it down to honest failings.
MacEachin was one of the best-known of the Commission’s staffers before its formation. He was a career CIA officer and even served as Deputy Director for Intelligence between 1993 and 1996.
According to Soufan, MacEachin believed that the CIA purposefully withheld information placing al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash at the Malaysia summit, a gathering of top al-Qaeda figures in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000 that was monitored by the CIA. This intelligence was especially significant because it linked bin Attash, then known to be a mastermind of the October 2000 USS Cole bombing, to future Flight 77 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi.
In the firsttwo parts of this series we saw how a group of officers at Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit, concealed information about al-Qaeda’s Malaysia summit from their FBI colleagues in January 2000. In particular they hid information about a US visa in the possession of Flight 77 hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. We also saw how this protection of Almihdhar, his partner Nawaf Alhazmi and al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash continued even after the involvement of Almihdhar and bin Attash in the October 2000 USS Colebombing became known to the US intelligence community. Concealing information about terrorists involved in seventeen homicides was bad enough, but things were about to get much worse.
Shortly after the CIA had failed to respond truthfully to a second formal request for information about the Cole bombing from FBI agent Ali Soufan in April 2001, the cables the CIA drafted about the Malaysia summit were reviewed at Alec Station. The review was conducted by Tom Wilshire, the station’s deputy chief and one of the key figures in the withholding of the information, and a female CIA officer whose name is not known. The two of them re-read cables from the previous year that said Almihdhar had a US visa and that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles with a companion, but neither of them took the appropriate action—watchlisting the Malaysia attendees and alerting the FBI.
After this review, Wilshire ordered another review of the same information. The review was to be carried out by Margaret Gillespie, a CIA detailee to Alec Station whose alleged memory loss regarding the events of January 2000 makes one suspicious of her motives. Wilshire believed, correctly as it turns out, that the cables contained the key to preventing the next major al-Qaeda attack—had they been handled properly, 9/11 would never have happened.
Three weeks before the attacks, Gillespie allegedly discovered a key cable, and this led her to tell the FBI about Almihdhar and Alhazmi. As you know, the FBI hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi was unsuccessful and this, as you probably don’t know, was largely due to Wilshire. Nevertheless, Wilshire received substantial praise from the post-attack investigations for getting Gillespie to do the review. Plenty of his other actions cast suspicion on him, but this review seemed to put him in the clear—if he really was trying to hide the information, why start a review?
Posted by Brian 
