January 28, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Found in Translation
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.
by Philip Giraldi
LINK

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world, with follow-ups appearing in Israel, Europe, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Japan—but not in the United States.

Edmonds is an ethnic Azerbaijani, born in Iran. She lived there and in Turkey until 1988, when she emigrated to the United States, where she received degrees in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University. Nine days after 9/11, Edmonds took a job at the FBI as a Turkish and Farsi translator. She worked in the 400-person translations section of the Washington office, reviewing a backlog of material dating back to 1997 and participating in operations directed against several Turkish front groups, most notably the American Turkish Council.

The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums. Edmonds refers to ATC and AIPAC as “sister organizations.” The group’s founders include a number of prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, notably Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and former congressman Stephen Solarz. Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc. The FBI was interested in ATC because it suspected that the group derived at least some of its income from drug trafficking, Turkey being the source of 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Europe, and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Edmonds told the Times, the Turks have “often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention.”

Over nearly six months, Edmonds listened with increasing unease to hundreds of intercepted phone calls between Turkish, Pakistani, Israeli, and American officials. When she voiced concerns about the processing of this intelligence—among other irregularities, one of the other translators maintained a friendship with one of the FBI’s “high value” targets—she was threatened. After exhausting all appeals through her own chain of command, Edmonds approached the two Department of Justice agencies with oversight of the FBI and sent faxes to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. The next day, she was called in for a polygraph. According to a DOJ inspector general’s report, the test found that “she was not deceptive in her answers.”

But two weeks later, Edmonds was fired; her home computer was seized; her family in Turkey was visited by police and threatened with arrest if they did not submit to questioning about an nspecified “intelligence matter.”

When Edmonds’s attorney filed suit to obtain the documents related to her firing, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft imposed the state-secrets gag order. Since then, she has been subjected to another federal order, which not only silenced her, but retroactively classified the statements she eventually made before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission.

Charismatic and articulate, the 37-year-old Edmonds has deftly worked the system to get as much of her story out as possible, on one occasion turning to French television to produce a documentary entitled “Kill the Messenger.” Passionate in her convictions, she has sometimes alienated her own supporters and ridden roughshod over critics who questioned her assumptions. But despite her shortcomings in making her case and the legitimate criticism that she may be overreaching in some of her conclusions, Edmonds comes across as credible. Her claims are specific, fact-based, and can be documented in detail. There is presumably an existing FBI file that could demonstrate the accuracy of many of her charges.

Her allegations are not insignificant. Edmonds claims that Marc Grossman—ambassador to Turkey from 1994-97 and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-05—was a person of interest to the FBI and had his phone tapped by the Bureau in 2001 and 2002. In the third-highest position at State, Grossman wielded considerable power personally and within the Washington bureaucracy. He had access to classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department. On one occasion, Grossman was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a cash bribe of $15,000 from an ATC contact. The FBI also intercepted related phone conversations between the Turkish Embassy and the Pakistani Embassy that revealed sensitive U.S. government information was being sold to the highest bidder. Grossman, who emphatically denies Edmonds’s charges, is currently vice chairman of the Cohen Group, founded by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly earns a seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing Turkey.

After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released and allowed to leave the country.

Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on to the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network.

Edmonds also claims that Grossman was instrumental in seeding Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students into major American research labs by godfathering visas and enabling security clearances. She says that she reviewed transcripts in which the moles in the U.S. military and academic community involved in nuclear technology reportedly carried out several “transactions” involving the sale of nuclear material or information relating to nuclear programs every month, with Pakistan being a primary buyer. In the summer of 2000, the FBI recorded a meeting between a Turkish official and two Saudi businessmen in Detroit in which nuclear information stolen from an Air Force base in Alabama was offered: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000,” the wiretap allegedly recorded. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” Edmonds told the Times.

She further reports that beginning in 1999, the FBI was investigating senior Pentagon officials who were assisting agents of foreign governments, including Turkey and Israel. Edmonds has not publicly named names at the Pentagon, but a website linked to her appears to be a non-incriminating instrument for identifying suspects without doing so directly. Its “rogues gallery” includes photos of Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Perle was chief of the Pentagon’s prestigious Defense Policy Board when Edmonds was working at the FBI, and Feith was undersecretary of defense for policy. If either were being investigated, it would be a matter of record, as would any reasons for dropping the investigation. “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,” Edmonds told the Times.

She claims to have also learned that corrupt officials in the Turkish and Israeli Ministries of Defense falsified end-user certificates on weapons purchased in the United States to enable sales to third countries not allowed access to the technology. Principal recipients include the five “Stans” in central Asia—Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.

Furthermore, Edmonds says that former House speaker Dennis Hastert and at least two other congressmen were investigated as suspected recipients of illegal political contributions or even bribes from Turkish sources. Her website gallery includes photos of Congressmen Roy Blount, Dan Burton, and Tom Lantos, though she has not otherwise implicated any of the three directly.

A low-level contractor might seem poorly positioned to expose major breaches of national security, but the FBI translators’ pool, riddled with corruption and nepotism, was key to keeping these secrets from surfacing. Edmonds’s claims that the section was infiltrated by translators who should never have received security clearances and who were deliberately failing to translate incriminating material are supported by the Justice Department inspector general investigation and by an FBI internal investigation, which concluded that she had been fired after making “valid complaints.” One translator, Melek Can Dickerson, who had worked for three Turkish front organizations under investigation—she failed to reveal this when applying for employment—allegedly stamped many documents of interest “not pertinent,” removed classified documents from FBI premises, and forged signatures on classified documents relating to 9/11 detainees. An Urdu translator was the daughter of a Pakistani Embassy employee who worked for Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani intelligence service who is accused of authorizing a $100,000 wire transfer to Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank account immediately before 9/11. The Justice Department IG report confirmed Edmonds’s charge that translators’ section managers issued a go-slow order shortly after the terrorist attacks to create an artificial backlog that would justify an increase in budget and manpower. Those managers are reportedly still in place. Some have been promoted.

Edmonds’s revelations have attracted corroboration in the form of anonymous letters apparently written by FBI employees. There have been frequent reports of FBI field agents being frustrated by the premature closure of cases dealing with foreign spying, particularly when those cases involve Israel, and the State Department has frequently intervened to shut down investigations based on “sensitive foreign diplomatic relations.” One such anonymous letter, the veracity of which cannot be determined, cites transcripts of wiretaps involving Marc Grossman and a Turkish Embassy official between August and December 2001, described above, in which Grossman warned the Turk that Brewster Jennings was a CIA cover company. If the allegation can be documented from FBI files, the exposure of the Agency cover mechanism took place long before journalist Robert Novak outed the company in his column on Valerie Plame in 2003. The anonymous informant conveniently provides the FBI file number containing the transcripts of the recorded conversations: FBI Washington Field Office, Counterintelligence Division, Turkish Unit File 203A-WF-210023. According to the source, the FBI also recorded a subsequent conversation in which a Turkish official contacted the Pakistani Embassy to inform an ISI officer of Grossman’s warning. The FBI also reportedly informed the CIA of the Grossman conversations to determine if there was any “conflict of interest,” presumably to determine if the CIA was running its own operation that might be compromised as a result of the phone tap.

Curiously, the states-secrets gag order binding Edmonds, while put in place by DOJ in 2002, was not requested by the FBI but by the State Department and Pentagon—which employed individuals she identified as being involved in criminal activities. If her allegations are frivolous, that order would scarcely seem necessary. It would have been much simpler for the government to marginalize her by demonstrating that she was poorly informed or speculating about matters outside her competency. Under the Bush administration, the security gag order has been invoked to cover up incompetence or illegality, not to protect national security. It has recently been used to conceal the illegal wiretaps of the warrantless surveillance program, the allegations of torture and the CIA’s rendition program, and to shield the telecom industry for its collaboration in illegal eavesdropping.

Both Senators Grassley and Leahy, a Republican and a Democrat, who interviewed her at length in 2002, attest to Edmonds’s believability. The Department of Justice inspector general investigation into her claims about the translations unit and an internal FBI review confirmed most of her allegations. Former FBI senior counterintelligence officer John Cole has independently confirmed her report of the presence of Pakistani intelligence service penetrations within the FBI translators’ pool.

Edmonds wasn’t angling to become a media darling. She would have preferred to testify under oath before a congressional committee that could offer legal protection and subpoena documents and witnesses to support her case. She claims that a number of FBI agents would be willing to testify, though she has not named them.

Prior to 2006, Congressman Henry Waxman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee promised Edmonds that if the Democrats gained control of Congress, he would order hearings into her charges. But following the Democratic sweep, he has been less forthcoming, failing to schedule hearings, refusing to take Edmonds’s calls, and recently stonewalling all inquiries into the matter. It is generally believed that Waxman, a strong supporter of Israel, is nervous about exposing an Israeli lobby role in the corruption that Edmonds describes. It is also suspected that Waxman fears that the revelations might open a Pandora’s box, damaging Republicans and Democrats alike.

Edmonds’s critics maintain that she saw only a small part of the picture in a highly compartmentalized working environment, that she was privy to only a fragment of a large operation to penetrate and disrupt the groups that have been stealing U.S. weapons technology. She could not have known operational details of what the FBI was doing and why.

That criticism is serious and must be addressed. If Edmonds was indeed seeing only part of a counterintelligence sting operation to entrap a nuclear network like that of A.Q. Khan, the government could now reveal as much in general terms, since any operation that might have been running in 2002 has long since wound down. Regarding her access to operational information, Edmonds’s critics clearly do not understand the intimate relationship that develops between FBI and CIA officers and their translators. Operations run against a foreign target in languages other than English require an intensive collaboration between field officers and translators. The translators are invariably brought into the loop because it is up to them to guide the officers seeking to understand what the target, who frequently is double talking or attempting to conceal his meaning, is actually saying. That said, it should be conceded that Edmonds might sometimes have seen only a piece of the story, and those claims based on her own interpretation should be regarded with caution.

Another objection is that Edmonds would only have seen “raw intelligence” that does not provide nuance and does not really indicate whether someone is guilty. That argument has merit, and it is undeniable that many intercepted communications lack context. But it ignores the fact that someone recorded in the act of taking a bribe or interceding to have a suspect in a criminal investigation released is behaving with a certain transparency. One either takes money or does not. There is very little interpretation that can change that reality.

Sibel Edmonds makes a number of accusations about specific criminal behavior that appear to be extraordinary but are credible enough to warrant official investigation. Her allegations are documentable: an existing FBI file should determine whether they are accurate. It’s true that she probably knows only part of the story, but if that part is correct, Congress and the Justice Department should have no higher priority. Nothing deserves more attention than the possibility of ongoing national-security failures and the proliferation of nuclear weapons with the connivance of corrupt senior government officials.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is a partner in Cannistraro Associates, an international security consultancy.

Brad Friedman| BIO | I'M A FAN OF THIS BLOGGER
FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Will Now Tell All, Name New Names -- to Any Major Television Network That Will Let HerPosted October 30, 2007 | 10:08 AM (EST)
Read More: Sibel Edmonds, Breaking Politics News

Will Release the Identity of Two 'Well-Known' Congress Members Involved in Criminal Corruption...and Much More
The 'Most Gagged Person in U.S. History' Tells The BRAD BLOG She's Now Exhausted All Other Channels...
Attention CBS 60 Minutes: we've got a huge scoop for you. If you want it.

Remember the exclusive story you aired on Sibel Edmonds, originally on October 27th, 2002, when she was not allowed to tell you everything that she heard while serving as an FBI translator after 9/11 because she was gagged by the rarely-invoked "States Secret Privilege"? Well, she's still gagged. In fact, as the ACLU first described her, she's "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America."

But if you'll sit down and talk with her for an unedited interview, she has now told The BRAD BLOG during an exclusive interview, she will now tell you everything she knows.

Everything she hasn't been allowed to tell since 2002, about the criminal penetration of the FBI where she worked, and at the Departments of State and Defense; everything she heard concerning the corruption and illegal activities of several well-known members of Congress; everything she's aware of concerning information omitted and/or covered up in relation to 9/11. All of the information gleaned from her time listening to and translating wire-taps made prior to 9/11 at the FBI.

Here's a handy bullet-point list, as we ran it in March of 2006, for reference, of what she's now willing to tell you about.

"People say, 'why doesn't she just come forward and spill the beans?' I have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and was shut down, I went to Congress and now consider that shut down," she told The BRAD BLOG last week when we spoke with her for comments in relation to our story on former House Speaker Dennis Hastert's original attempt to move a resolution through the U.S. House in 2000 declaring the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in Turkey as "genocide."

"Here's my promise to the American Public: If anyone of the major networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX -- promise to air the entire segment, without editing, I promise to tell them everything that I know," about everything mentioned above, she told us.

"I can tell the American public exactly what it is, and what it is that they are covering up," she continued. "I'm not compromising ongoing investigations," Edmonds explained, because "they've all been shut down since." ...

Read the rest of the story at The BRAD BLOG...

Bush administration's abuse of FISA warrants linked to Sibel Edmonds case
By Bill Conroy, Sun Feb 25th, 2007
LINK

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds is continuing her fight to expose what she claims is serious corruption within the Bush administration. To date, the Bush administration has used the state-secrets privilege claim to silence Edmonds and prevent her from presenting evidence in the courts or Congress.
However, it now appears Edmonds has found a way to beat the state-secrets gag order.

In the coming weeks, insiders tell Narco News, Edmonds and the group she founded, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, will be coming forward with hard evidence, obtained legally from third-party sources, demonstrating that the Bush administration has used FISA warrants to engage in unauthorized surveillance of members of Congress and their staffs, and allegedly the FISA court was not aware of this misuse of the warrants.
The federal FISA court (set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) issues surveillance warrants (usually to the FBI) that target foreign intelligence agents operating in the United States. However, the warrants are not supposed to be used to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens who are not acting illegally in the interest of a foreign power, such as members of Congress.

The fact that over the past five years, no known criminal investigations or indictments have resulted from the FISA warrants in question, Narco News sources claim, leads to the possibility that the information gathered through the warrants was being used by the Bush administration for political control and not law enforcement purposes.

These allegations go to the heart of Edmonds claims that she is being silenced for attempting to expose espionage-related activities (intercepted through wiretaps) that would reveal a trail of corruption within the Bush administration that is a threat to the national security of the country.

To date, the Department of Justice has used the broad powers of national security to prevent any public inquiry into Edmonds’ charges.

The new evidence soon to surface promises to expose the DOJ’s charade in the name of national security and also would raise serious questions about whether the Bush administration is improperly using FISA warrants to control members of Congress.

This is the information being provided to Narco News. The evidence itself is supposed to be released publicly in early March. So this represents little more than a heads up at this time. If the sources are correct, within the next few weeks, these new revelations should be the talk of the nation.

In anticipation of this new evidence being made public, behind the scenes an effort is already underway to get Congress to take up the Edmonds case through public hearings. A petition is currently being circulated for that very purpose, Narco News sources say.

So stay tuned to see if this all plays out as Narco News' sources predict -- and, assuming it does, if the mainstream press actually steps up to the plate to do its job in protecting the democracy.

The Petition

Sponsored by NSWBC & Liberty Coalition
To: The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

A Petition to require public hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into confirmed reports by FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds of wrongdoing, criminal activities, cover-ups against the security and interests of the United States and its citizenry, and the erroneous use of the State Secrets Privilege to shut down all court proceedings in her case.

In March 2002 the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-IG) began its investigation of Ms. Edmonds’ reports.

In June 2002, in at least two unclassified Senate briefings, FBI officials confirmed the validity of Ms. Edmonds reports; however, in May 2004 Attorney General Ashcroft retroactively classified information from these briefings and gagged the Congress, preventing further investigation.

In October 2002 Attorney General Ashcroft invoked the ‘State Secrets Privilege’ to block all court proceedings in Edmonds’ case.

In July 2004 the DOJ-IG investigation into Edmonds' dismissal was completed but was entirely classified.

In January 2005 the DOJ-IG released an unclassified summary report on Edmonds’ case which concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program, and that many of her allegations were supported by other witnesses and documents.

The issues that were reported by Ms. Edmonds include:

Cases of espionage activities within the FBI, DOD, and the Department of State;

Cases of cover-up of information and leads pre and post 9/11, under the excuse of protecting certain diplomatic relations;

Cases of intentional blocking and mistranslation of crucial intelligence by FBI translators and management;

Cases of foreign entities bribing certain government officials and elected representatives.

Edmonds filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the Department of Justice, but the government successfully argued that the state secrets privilege was an absolute bar to her suit going forward. She was even barred from the courtroom during the argument of her appeal! The Supreme Court declined to review the case. The government's invocation of the state secrets privilege in a motion to dismiss her case contradicts the core idea of judicial review and essentially allows the Executive Branch to dictate to the federal courts what cases they can and can’t hear.

Invoking the State Secrets Privilege is a tactic frequently used by the Executive Branch to stop potentially embarrassing lawsuits against the government. Many of these suits are brought by government employees, such as Ms. Edmonds, who allege fraud, mismanagement, or other unlawful conduct, and the state secrets privilege has successfully been invoked by the government to silence them. The state secrets provision has been used too frequently and with too little public protection.

Given the seriousness of Ms. Edmonds’ reports and in the best interests of the security of the country, it is incumbent upon the Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities and authority as representatives of the people of the United States, therefore:

We, the undersigned, now call upon the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in Congress to hold public hearings into the case of FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and the erroneous use of the State Secrets Privilege to shut down all court proceedings in her case.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Anthony Romero, National Director

National Coalition against Censorship
Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director

Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC)
Nancy Talanian, Director

National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
Bill Weaver, Board Member

Liberty Coalition
Michael Ostrolenk, Co-founder & Director

National Whistleblower Center
Steve Kohn, Chair

Open the Government .Org
Patrice McDermott, Executive Director

U.S.-Armenian Public Affairs Committee (USAPAC)
Ross Vartian, Executive Director

Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Melanie Sloan, Director

Citizen Outreach
Doug Bandow, Vice President of Policy

Concerned Foreign Service Officers
Daniel Hirsch, Board Member

Fairfax County Privacy Council
Mike Stollenwerk, Director

Federal Hispanic Law Enforcement Officers Association
Sandalio Gonzalez, Director

Government Accountability Project (GAP)
Tom Devine, Legal Director

National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation
Gail Dunham, President

Ohio Taxpayers Association & OTA Foundation
Scott Pullins, Chairman & CEO

Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
Danielle Brian, Executive Director

September 11th Advocates
Mindy Kleinberg, Director

Veterans Affairs Whistleblowers Coalition (VAWBC)
Dr. Jeffrey Fudin, President

U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation (USBOR)
Dane Von Breichenruchardt, President

Privacy Activism
Linda Ackerman, Staff Counsel

The Multiracial Activists,
James Landrith, Founder

The New Grady Coalition
Ron Marshall, Director

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Bush arrogance led to attorney firings
by Miguel Contreras on Sat Mar 17th, 2007
By Eugene Robinson - Washington Post -March 17, 2007.
LINK

Was it arrogance or ignorance that led the Bush administration to think it could pull off what looks, walks and quacks like a transparently political decision to fire those eight U.S. attorneys? A good deal of both, I'm guessing.

Actually, I take that back. No guesswork is needed.

Arrogance has been the most consistent hallmark of George W. Bush's presidency. His administration's simple philosophy of government has been consistent: We can do any damn thing we want.

We can invade Iraq. We can blow off the Geneva Conventions. We can listen to your private phone calls, Mr. and Ms. America, and we can read your private e-mails, too. We can arrest anybody we want, hold them as long as we want, and we don't even have to tell them why, much less file formal charges or hold a trial. We can even defy the laws of science -- or at least ignore the ones that annoy us, like that whole "greenhouse effect" thing. We can pose with the troops for photo-ops when they come back from war grievously wounded, and then basically forget about them.

And we don't have to explain ourselves, either. The nerve of anyone to even ask us. Don't you people understand that asking impertinent questions of the White House is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants you to do? OK, but even given this kind of world-class arrogance, it's still pretty amazing that barely a month after the nation had taken a two-by-four to the administration's head in last November's midterm election -- delivering a not-so-gentle reminder that the president works for us, not vice versa -- the White House would still plow ahead with a long-brewing plot to fire a few designated federal prosecutors who couldn't seem to get with the "any damn thing we want" program.

Just to be clear, this kind of selective dismissal of a group of U.S. attorneys is highly unusual. It's bad enough that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales misled Congress about the firings; the specific truths his falsehoods obscured -- that the White House was involved in the firings, and that partisan political motivations may have been involved -- are much worse.

We know from e-mails -- Why do people put this stuff in e-mails, which have the half-life of nuclear waste? -- that political "loyalty" to the White House was a factor in deciding which prosecutors to fire. We also know that the White House passed along to the Justice Department the complaints of Republican congressmen and other party pooh-bahs that allegations of voter fraud against Democrats were not being pursued aggressively enough.

All that adds up to arrogance. Here's where the ignorance comes in: Gonzales accepts "responsibility" without accepting the blame that comes with it, since he could hardly be expected to know what was going on in the whole vast Justice Department.

I've got to admit, I felt a twinge of sympathy for Gonzales when, bravely and cluelessly, he faced the television cameras Tuesday and vowed to find out why he had given Congress categorical assurances that were not remotely true. He bears the burden of being the first Latino attorney general -- the first member of the nation's largest minority to hold such a senior position in the U.S. government. I have a sense of what that must mean to him, a sense of why he is so determined not to resign, why he made a point of declaring that he didn't get to where he is by giving up.

But it was just a twinge. Then I remembered that Gonzales was the author of the notorious "torture memo" that greenlighted interrogation techniques for war-on-terror detainees that are designed to induce excruciating physical and psychological pain. Gonzales wrote of a "new paradigm" in which there is no conflict between American values and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners.

Determined to keep his job, Gonzales said he will leave no stone unturned in discovering why he said what he said to Congress about the U.S. attorney firings. I've got an idea: He can order the FBI to issue a "national security letter" and then rummage through his private communications on an unlawful fishing expedition, as has happened to many thousands of Americans -- on Gonzales' watch.

If that fails, Gonzales can declare himself an enemy combatant, have himself whisked away in the dead of night to some secret prison, and allow himself to be "waterboarded" until he finally sputters out the truth.

If the man is willing to practice what he preaches, he can stay. Otherwise, he's got to go.

Eugene Robinson writes for the Washington Post. His column is distributed by the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th NW, Washington, DC 20071. You can reach him at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Miguel Angel Contreras, PhD, CPP, CFE

Evidence of FISA warrant abuse released
by Bill Conroy on Tue Mar 20th, 2007

The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition came through on its end by releasing evidence of the Bush administration's use of FISA warrants to engage in unauthorized surveillance of members of Congress and their staffs.
However, it appears the mainstream press has once again fallen down on the job in reporting on this evidence. So in case you missed it, and likely you did, unless you did a Google News search under Sibel Edmonds' name, following is the NSWBC March 5 press release, including a link to the documented evidence, revealing the sordid activities by our beloved leaders.

Now I'm going to go wrap some fish with my daily newspaper, in the hopes of covering up one stink with another.

Two FBI Whistleblowers Confirm Illegal Wiretapping of Government Officials and Misuse of FISA
State Secrets Privilege Was Used to Cover Up Corruption and Silence Whistleblowers

The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition ( NSWBC) has obtained a copy of an official complaint filed by a veteran FBI Special Agent, Gilbert Graham, with the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-OIG). SA Graham’s protected disclosures report the violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in conducting electronic surveillance of high-profile U.S. public officials.

Before his retirement in 2002, SA Gilbert Graham worked for the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) Squad NS-24. One of the main areas of Mr. Graham’s counterintelligence investigations involved espionage activities by Turkish officials and agents in the United States. On April 2, 2002, Graham filed with the DOJ-OIG a classified protected disclosure, which provided a detailed account of FISA violations involving misuse of FISA warrants to engage in domestic surveillance. In his unclassified report SA Graham states: “It is the complainant’s reasonable belief that the request for ELSUR [electronic surveillance] coverage was a subterfuge to collect evidentiary information concerning public corruption matters.” Graham blew the whistle on this illegal behavior, but the actions were covered up by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General’s office.

Click here to read the unclassified version of SA Graham’s Official Report.

The report filed by SA Graham bolsters another FBI whistleblower’s case that became public several months after Graham’s official filing with the Justice Department in 2002. Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Language Specialist, also worked for the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and her assignments included the translations of Turkish Counterintelligence documents and audiotapes, some of which were part of espionage investigations led by SA Graham. After she filed her complaint with the DOJ-OIG and Congress, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Court proceedings in Edmonds’ case were blocked by the assertion of the State Secrets Privilege by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the Congress gagged and prevented from investigating her case through retroactive re-classification of documents by DOJ. To read the timeline on Edmonds’ case Click here.

Edmonds’ complaint included allegations of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities. In its September 2005 issue, Vanity Fair ran a comprehensive piece on Edmonds’ case by reporter David Rose, in which several former and current congressional and Justice Department officials identified former House Speaker Dennis Hastert as being involved in illegal activities with the Turkish organizations and personnel targeted in FBI investigations. In addition, Rose reported: “…much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.” In January 2005, DOJ-OIG released an unclassified summary of its investigation into Edmonds' termination. The report concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program, and that many of her allegations were supported by convincing evidence.

Another Former Veteran FBI Counterintelligence and Espionage Specialist at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC also filed similar reports with DOJ-OIG and several congressional offices regarding violations of FISA implementation and the covering up of several espionage cases involving FBI Language Specialists and public corruption cases by the Bureau. The cases reported by this whistleblower corroborate those reported by SA Graham and Sibel Edmonds. In an interview with NSWBC investigators the former FBI Specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, stated: “…you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure. No wonder they invoked the state secrets privilege in Edmonds’ case.”

William Weaver, NSWBC Senior Advisor noted that: ”These abuses of power are precisely why we must pay attention to whistleblowers. Preservation of the balance of powers between the branches of government increasingly relies on information provided by whistleblowers, especially in the face of aggressive and expanding executive power. Through illegal surveillance members of Congress and other officials may be controlled by the executive branch, thereby dissolving the matrix of our democracy. The abuse of two powers of secrecy, FISA and the state secrets privilege, are working hand in hand to subvert the Constitution. In an abominably perverse arrangement, the abuse of FISA is being covered up by abuse of the state secrets privilege. Only whistleblowers and the congressional and judicial oversight their revelations spawn can bring our system back into balance.”

Several civil liberties and whistleblowers organizations have joined Edmonds and NSWBC in urging congress to hold public hearing on Edmonds’ case, including the supporting cases of SA Graham and other FBI witnesses, and the erroneous use of state secrets privilege by the executive branch to cover up its own illegal conduct. The petition endorsed by these groups is expected to be released to public in the next few days.

Bill Conroy