A Sibel Edmonds Timeline - ''We Can't Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans''

A Sibel Edmonds Timeline

"We Can't Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans"

By GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch
January 29, 2008

I am not one to easily embrace conspiracy theories, and in particular have found the idea that 9-11 was somehow an inside job too incredible for serious consideration. On the other hand, there are some very fishy aspects to some officials' behavior pertaining to the attacks. Justin Raimondo has made a very good case for the fact that Mossad agents posing as "Israeli art students" were tracking al-Qaeda operatives in the U.S. before 9/11. Over 120 Israelis were detained after 9/11, some failing polygraph tests when asked about their involvement in intelligence gathering. But they were not held or charged with any illegal activity but rather deported. As former FBI translator and whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds has revealed, there was a curious failure of the government before 9/11 to act upon intelligence pertaining to an al-Qaeda attack. Most importantly Edmonds, defying the gag order that former Attorney General Ashcroft imposed on her in 2002, is implicating Marc Grossman, formerly the number three man in the State Department, in efforts to provide U.S. nuclear secrets to Pakistan and Israel. She suggests this was done through Turkish contacts and Pakistani contacts, including the former head of Pakistan's ISI who funneled funds to Mohamed Atta! Now there's a conspiracy for you.

Edmonds claims that during her time at the FBI (September 20, 2001 to March 22, 2002) she discovered that intelligence material had been deliberately allowed to accumulate without translation; that inept translators were retained and promoted; and that evidence for traffic in nuclear materials was ignored. More shockingly, she charges that Grossman arranged for Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students to acquire security clearances to Los Alamos and other nuclear facilities; and that nuclear secrets they acquired were transmitted to Pakistan and to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father of the Islamic bomb," who in turn was selling nuclear technology to Libya and other nations. She links Grossman to the former Pakistani military intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad, a patron of the Taliban who reportedly arranged for a payment of $ 100,000 to 9/11 ringleader Atta via Pakistani terrorist Saeed Sheikh before the attacks. She suggests that he warned Pakistani and Turkish contacts against dealings with the Brewster Jennings Corp., the CIA front company that Valerie Plame was involved in as part of an effort to infiltrate a nuclear smuggling ring. All very heady stuff, published this month in the Times of London (and largely ignored by the U.S. media).

She does not identify Grossman by name in the Times article, but she has in the past, and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi does so in an extremely interesting article in the American Conservative. From that and many other sources, I come up with the timeline that appears below. But first, some background on Grossman. A graduate of UC-Santa Barbara and the London School of Economics, he was a career Foreign Service officer from 1976 when he began to serve at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. He continued in that post to 1983, when he became the Deputy Director of the Private Office of Lord Carrington, the Secretary General of NATO. From 1989 to 1992 he was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Turkey, and from 1994 to 1997, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. As ambassador he strongly supported massive arms deals between the U.S. and Ankara.

Thereafter he was Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, responsible for over 4,000 State Department employees posted in 50 sites abroad with a program budget of $1.2 billion to 2000. In 1999 he played a leading role in orchestrating NATO's 50th anniversary Summit in Washington, and helped direct U.S. participation in NATO's military campaign in Kosovo that same year. As Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from the beginning of George W. Bush's administration to January 2005, he played a bit role in the Plame Affair, informing "Scooter" Libby of Plame's CIA affiliation.

Grossman is close to the American Turkish Council (ATC) founded in 1994 as a sister organization to the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Its founders include neoconservatives involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, as well as Henry Kissinger, Brent Snowcroft and former congressman Stephen Solarz. (Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith's company, International Advisors Inc. Parle was at one point making $ 600,000 per year from such activity). Edmonds says this is "an association in name and in charter only, the reality is that it and other affiliated associations are the U.S. government, lobbyists, foreign agents, and Military Industrial Complex." (M. Christine Vick of Grossman's Cohen Group serves on the Board of Advisors.) Grossman is also close to the American Turkish Association (ATA), and regularly speaks at its events.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp01292008.html

More on Marc Grossman...

My friend, Scott Horton, who writes for Harper's sent me this last night and thought it important to share with you:

"I represented Nikolai Melnichenko, the Ukrainian state security guard who taped 2000 hours of conversations of Leonid Kuchma and then got asylum in the US (through me). I discovered that when Maj Melnichenko arrived in the US at JFK, fearing for his life, the Ukrainian SBU knew all about it and were tracing him, creating a hair-raising security situation. When I researched how they had learned about it, I discovered, from a source in the Ukrainian Embassy, that Marc Grossman had immediately jumped in a car, drove over to the Embassy and briefed the ambassador about all the details--that Maj Melnichenko had asylum, when it was granted and when and where he would arrive in the states.

I protested this to the DOS, noting that what Grossman did was illegal. There was no response or action by the State Department on the matter. The circumstances of the whole thing suggested to me that Grossman was improperly feeding highly sensitive information to the Ukrainian Government. No one ever offered me a plausible explanation of why."

SOURCE:

http://www.atlargely.com/2008/01/more-on-marc-gr.html

Covering Up the Coverage - The American Media’s Complicit Failure to Investigate and Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case

by Daniel Ellsberg
Published on Monday, January 21, 2008 by The Brad Blog

For the second time in two weeks, the entire U.S. press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch’s London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt U.S. officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the U.S. Congress and the courts.For the last two weeks — one could say, for years — the major American media have been guilty of ignoring entirely the allegations of the courageous and highly credible source Sibel Edmonds, quoted in the London Times on January 6, 2008 in a front-page story that was front-page news in much of the rest of the world but was not reported in a single American newspaper or network. It is up to readers to demand that this culpable silent treatment end.

Just as important, there must be pressure by the public on Congressional committee chairpersons, in particular Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Patrick Leahy. Both have been sitting for years on classified, sworn testimony by Edmonds — as she revealed in the Times’ new story on Sunday — along with documentation, in their possession, confirming parts of her account. Pressure must be brought for them to hold public hearings to investigate her accusations of widespread criminal activities, over several administrations, that endanger national security. They should call for open testimony under oath by Edmonds — as she has urged for five years — and by other FBI officials she has named to them, as cited anonymously in the first Times’ story.

And this is the time for those who have so far creditably leaked to the Times of London to come forward, accepting personal risks, to offer their testimony — and new documents — both to the Congress and to the American press. I would say to them: Don’t do what I did and waste months of precious time trying to get Congressional committees to act as they should in the absence of journalistic pressure. Do your best to inform the American public directly, first, through the major American media.

But perhaps today the alternative media and the international press are a necessary precursor even to that. It shouldn’t be true, but if it is, it’s a measure of how far the New York Times and Washington Post have fallen from their responsibilities to the public, to their profession and to American democracy, since I gave them the Pentagon Papers in 1971. They printed them then. Would they today?

It’s impossible to believe that they — or Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — could not have acquired documents and testimony that Murdoch’s London paper reports on today. Now the challenge to them is to end their silence on that reporting and do their job.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/16/6523/

Found in Translation

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.

by Philip Giraldi
January 28, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

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 unspecified “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.

CONTINUED...

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_28/article1.html

FBI Reveals Investigation Continues

The Vindication of Sibel Edmonds

By JOHN STANTON
CounterPunch October 25, 2006

On October 10, 2006, FBI spokesman Bill Carter confirmed that matters raised by Sibel Edmonds and shielded form public view by the invocation of the US States Secret privilege were still under internal investigation by the Bureau.

"Due to the fact that the allegations of Sibel Edmonds reflect internal administrative and investigative matters it would not be appropriate to respond to your inquiry. I will point out that the DOJ Office of the Inspector General has reviewed this matter and released a public report. I would refer this report to you for your review. The Inspector General's report concluded that the FBI did not adequately investigate allegations Ms. Edmonds made regarding a co-worker. After the OIG's initial classified report, the FBI conducted further investigation into Ms. Edmonds' allegations. That investigation is continuing."*

Back in March of 2002, Edmonds was released from the FBI over her discovery of an array of espionage activities. Looking back, and with the benefit of new information from the FBI and elsewhere, it appears that the government of Turkey was spectacularly successfully in compromising FBI, CIA, DEA, DIA and DOS operations, and was also able to mount other espionage programs that allowed Turkish interests to obtain assorted military and WMD technology know-how, and garner US and Israeli military support for its bloody internal struggle against its significant and much maligned Kurdish population/opposition.

SNIP...

It is widely known that the Turkish military used Lockheed Martin F-16s to assist with the destruction of Kurdish villages in North Kurdistan during the 1990's Dirty War, with the facts well-documented by human rights groups. In 1995, Human Rights Watch documented arms sales to Turkey, along with related violations of the laws of war by that state included the many gross abuses that Turkey perpetrated against the Kurdish people the F-16 fighter jet figure prominentlyIn a report ordered by the Congress, the State Department admitted that the abuses included the use of US Cobra helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and F-16 fighter bombers. In some instances, critics say, entire Kurdish villages were obliterated from the air.

This proposed sale in 2006, the has claimed, will enhance the Turkish Air Force's ability to defend Turkey, no doubt against its internal Kurdish threat in colony in the southeast, and its external one in southern Kurdistan/Northern Iraq nation's extensive coastline and borders against future threats and to contribute to the Global War on Terrorism and NATO operations With this in mind, you should ask yourself what, exactly, General Ralston is coordinating. We all know the real deal, don't we? We all know who have been the targets of those F-16s"

Plame & Wilson: Spies Like Us

SNIP...

In 2002, Dickerson and his spouse Melek Can left the country for Belgium and a quiet post with NATO after Edmonds' exposed them as Turkish operatives or, perhaps, US counterintelligence operatives. Dickerson and his wife's activities remain a mystery. According to various reports, they were once stationed in Ankara, Turkey in the 1990s, and had contact with Douglas Feith and Marc Grossman. Another report indicated that: in 1995, while in Turkey, Dickerson was the subject of investigation for accepting money from foreign agents, whereupon he was abruptly transferred to Germany. In 1999, Major Douglas Dickerson returned to the United States. His wife, Melek Can Dickerson, started to work for American Turkish Council (atc.org) and related Turkish American business groups.

In 2001, Dickerson was apparently given a position in the weapons systems acquisition arena with the Pentagon and US Department of State. Dickerson's areas of responsibility supposedly included Turkey, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. He also had dealings with Edelman formerly US Ambassador to Turkey, and now with the Pentagon's Policy Organization. Dickerson was also active with ATC and Scowcroft. He and his wife associated with several Turkish and American individuals from the Turkish Embassy and the ATC. Many of these folks were targeted by FBI counterintelligence for criminal activity. But thanks to the Turkish government's penetration of the highest echelons of the US political-military-intelligence-corporate apparatus, the Pentagon and US State Department forced the FBI to back off any criminal investigations that may expose criminal activity, and untidy and covert operations.

Finally, there's the perplexing case of Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. According to dozens of media reports, Valerie Plame was introduced to Joe Wilson by Brent Scowcroft at an ATC function. Shortly thereafter, the pair was invited to a Turkish Embassy function. Quickly after that, Plame's CIA WMD operation (Brewster Jennings) was exposed by then Under Secretary of State, Richard Armitage. Coincidently, Dickerson was in close proximity to Plame & Wilson in the 1999-2002 timeframe and the Pentagon and US State Department. It seems likely that only a Turkish operative located somewhere in the US government/intelligence community would have uncovered that information and disclosed it to the Turks and their US sympathizers. Was it Wilson? Dickerson? Armitage?

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http://www.counterpunch.org/stanton10252006.html

Ashcroft’s War on Truth

Our Broken System

By SIBEL EDMONDS
Former FBI translator
CounterPunch July 9, 2004

On Tuesday, July 6, 2004, Judge Reggie Walton made a decision and ruled on my case. Under his ruling, I, an American citizen, am not entitled to pursue my 1st and 5th Amendment rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States. The vague reasoning cited, without any explanation, is to protect "certain diplomatic relations for national security." Judge Walton reached this decision after sitting on this case with no activity for almost two years. He arrived at this decision without allowing my attorney and I any due process: NO status hearing, NO briefings, NO oral argument, and NO discovery. He made his decision after allowing the government attorneys to present their case to him, privately, in camera, ex parte; we were not allowed to participate in these cozy sessions.

Is this the American system of justice we believe in? Is this the due process we read about in our Civics 101 courses? Is this the judicial branch of our government that is supposed to be separate from the other two branches in order to protect the people's rights and freedom?

This court decision by itself would have been appalling and alarming enough, but in light of all other actions taken against my case for the past two years it demonstrates a broken system, a system abused and corrupted by the current executive, a system badly in need of repair.

Under this broken system the attorney general of the United States is being allowed to illegally gag the United States Congress regarding my case. And even worse, the United States Congress is readily complying with this illegal gag.

Under this broken system the attorney general of the United States is being allowed to hinder ongoing investigations such as those of the 9/11 Commission and the DOJ-Inspector General.

Under this broken system the Attorney General of the United States is getting away with interfering and tampering with pending cases under the judicial process, such as my court cases and the lawsuit by the 9/11 victim families.

John Ashcroft's relentless fight against me, my information, and my case, on various fronts, from the Congress to the courts, and from the 9/11 Commission to the Inspector General's Office, has been taking place under his attempt at a vague justification titled "Protecting Certain Foreign and Diplomatic Relations for National Security."

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http://www.counterpunch.org/edmonds07092004.html

Fmr. CIA Analyst and FBI Whistleblower Dissect Final 9/11 Commission Report

As the bipartisan Commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks releases its much-anticipated final report, we take an in-depth look at what it says and what it doesn’t say with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. (includes rush transcript)

EXCERPT...

AMY GOODMAN: Vice chair of the 9/11 commission, Lee Hamilton. Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. Analyst, your response to this recommendation. Donald Rumsfeld was not pleased with it.

RAY MCGOVERN: Who is in charge? It used to be the buck stopped with the President. George W. Bush says he admires President Truman very much. That was Truman’s attitude. Who is in charge? The answer is very clear. The President is in charge. Let me outline the logic as I see it here. Several people, including Tom Kean, made the point very early on that we are not in the business of assigning blame. Well, why not? My cousin was killed in one of those twin towers. I’d like, if not blame—I’d like responsibility to be assigned. I’d like accountability of some kind. What the logic trail here that’s outlined is we’re he not going to blame anybody, and besides, it probably couldn’t have been prevented, and therefore, it’s nobody’s fault, so it must be the fault of the system. So, we’ll figure out a way to tweak the system whereby we can make it bureaucratically better, and the strategem that was picked here is both unnecessary and mischievous. Unnecessary because the Director of Central Intelligence already has the authority and the responsibility as the Chief Intelligence Advisor to the President to do all of these things. It’s just that we haven’t had a competent one since Stansfield Turner. These folks don’t seem to realize that. In other words, the authorities already exist. A lot of them are on referendum to the President. Stan Turner, when he was director, if he didn’t get cooperation from the F.B.I., he went down to the oval office and said Mr. President, I can’t do my job for you unless you get the F.B.I. to cooperate. Carter would call Ramsey Clark and say look, get that F.B.I. cooperating, sharing information with the C.I.A. That requires a certain, what the Germans call ‘vormacht’ a certain self-assurance and willingness to put other noses out of joint and a certain self-confidence. None of that has been exhibited in the D.C.I.‘s that have existed since Bill Casey took over. So that’s one thing. The other thing, if you make this a cabinet position, that is the kiss of death for intelligence. Bill Casey demonstrated that, because Bill was the first person to be elevated to cabinet status. He sat in the cabinet under Ronald Reagan and made policy. Those two things are like oil and water. They should be separated. Intelligence cannot be in the position of making policy. Or else it loses its entire credibility. The institutional corruption of intelligence, the willingness to tell the White House sort of sniff the prevailing winds from downtown and tell the White House what the intelligence community thinks the White House wants to hear, that started to be institutionalized under Bill Casey and his protégé, Robert Gates. What we’re seeing now is a bubbling up to the top of senior managers who learned under Casey and Gates to try to tell the White House what they think the White House wants to hear. So, if you get a new Director of National Intelligence and you put that person in the Cabinet, you are further institutionalizing the prostitution, I would say, of intelligence. You are making it so close to policy that people won’t be able to distinguish between objective fact, speaking truth to power, telling it like it is without fear of favor, and accommodating to this or that policy stream.

CONTINUED...

http://www.democracynow.org/2004/7/23/fmr_cia_analyst_and_fbi_whistleblower

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Let Sibel Edmonds Speak!

WinterPatriot
Thursday, March 08, 2007

Sibel Edmonds is the most gagged person in US history. The government has repeatedly invoked the State Secrets Privilege in her case - not for reasons of "national security" but to hide ongoing criminal activity.

Thus writes Luke Ryland, the Tasmanian journalist who has done more than anyone to keep us up to date on developments in the Sibel Edmonds story. Ms. Edmonds, as you may know, is a former FBI Language Specialist who joined the Bureau shortly after 9/11 in an attempt to use her considerable skills to enhance our National Security.

The FBI quickly learned that Sibel was more interested in National Security than "going along with the program", and they got rid of her as soon as they found out that they couldn't shut her up.

She's been trying to enhance our National Security ever since.

The things Sibel Edmonds saw, and the documents she translated, in her few months with the FBI are enough to make your head spin. It's all so incredible! And yet, according to one expert after another, every word is true!

As if her story hadn't been sufficiently confirmed, a document released Monday -- a report written by a former FBI Special Agent (for whom Ms. Edmonds once worked) -- lends even more support to her accusations.

What exactly is her story? That's what we don't exactly know. We do know that it involves Turkey, heroin smuggling, money laundering, illegal weapons trafficking, terrorism, and corruption of US government officials.

We know that Sibel Edmonds is gagged -- according to a so-called State Secrets Privilege -- and that her formerly public testimony has been retroactively classified -- because otherwise the information she revealed would jepoardize important business ties and sensitive diplomatic relations!

Did you read that right? I think you did. Sibel Edmonds' public testimony has been retroactively classified -- as if that made any sense! -- because the information is damaging ... but to what?

Why can't we find out all there is to find out -- about Turkey, about terrorism, about 9/11 and all the circumstances surrounding it!! -- and then decide for ourselves which business ties and which diplomatic relations deserve to be damaged?

How can we hope to protect ourselves against "another 9/11" if we don't even understand what caused the "first" one?

CONTINUED w LINKS...

http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/2007/03/let-sibel-edmonds-speak.html

"...he was our man. The arms supplies for the Afghan rebels were being smuggled through his district, but everybody knew that Haq was also running the drug trade. BCCI was completely involved..." (Beaty & Gwynne, p.52)

Pakistan's former president, the late Gen Zia-ul-Haq and his close associates had made "untold millions" from the illicit heroin trade, according to a new book.

"They earned more than Rs 20,000 crore per annum. The United States Government looked over Zia's involvement in heroin trade because he was needed to carry on US war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. It was only after the withdrawal of Soviet forces that the USA made a hue and cry of Pakistan's involvement in narcotics trade and trafficking publicly.."

"...the Nidal group had long used a London branch of BCCI to move the money it used to mount attacks on Western targets, and MI5... had known about the accounts.

...the CIA had maintained accounts in BCCI's London offices to pay scores of English citizens who were providing information to the American intelligence agency ...

...Pakistan's finance minister had confirmed that the CIA used BCCI branches in Pakistan to channel money for covert operations involving the support of the Afghan rebels." (Beaty & Gwynne p.118)

...

While the Senate brought up questions of impropriety by BCCI, the Senators avoided some of the most sensitive questions raised about CIA involvement in the bank. Author Alfred McCoy discussed one of those unanswered questions with the Shadow, the expansion of the heroin trade from Southeast Asia to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

...

The size of the heroin shipments from Afghanistan grew with the involvement of the Pakistan military. By the time of the 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq, heroin trafficking was widespread among the ranks of officers in the Pakistan military. Heroin trafficking from Pakistan soon outstripped shipments from Southeast Asia and by 1991 more than 60% of the heroin sold on the streets of New York City originated in Afghanistan.
Alfred McCoy speculates that if a congressional investigation would ask tough questions about BCCI, it would uncover drug trafficking and money laundering by United States allies protected from prosecution by the CIA. McCoy told the Shadow, "I think what we'll possibly discover is that the CIA was shipping its funds into Pakistan through BCCI, protecting BCCI thereby from serious investigations elsewhere in the world. That the Pakistan military were in fact banking their drug profits, moving their drug profits from the consuming country back to Pakistan though BCCI.

...

In fact the boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI. The interrelationship between the Afghan resistance and the CIA and the Pakistan drug trade can all be seen through the medium of BCCI, the banker to both operations, the resistance and the drug trade."

...

The reason that the regulators and the Congressional hearings don't seem to want to touch upon it is that, very possibly and probably, BCCI had direct ties to the Justice Department and to the regulators who were supposed to be watching the store. In fact, the reason that BCCI was not investigated and not prosecuted a lot earlier for its activities was because it was providing necessary services -- a full service bank.

Interview with Alfred McCoy

November 9, 1991 (2nd Book was published in Dec. 1992)

Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Educated at Columbia and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about Southeast Asian history and politics. Dr. McCoy participated in Causes and Cures: National Teleconference on the Narcotics Epidemic Saturday, November 9 1991, at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.

PD: How did you come to write The Politics of Heroin; CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade?

AM: In 1971 I was a graduate student doing Southeast Asian History at Yale University. An editor at Harper & Row, Elisabeth Jakab, read some articles in a volume I had edited about Laos, which made some general references to the opium trade in Laos.

She decided this would be a great idea for a book and asked me to do a background book on the heroin plague that was sweeping the forces then fighting in South Vietnam. We later learned that about one third of the United States combat forces in Vietnam, conservatively estimated, were heroin addicts.

I went to Paris and interviewed retired general Maurice Belleux, the former head of the French equivalent of the CIA, an organization called SDECE (Service de Documentation Exterieure et du Contre-Espionage). In an amazing interview he told me that French military intelligence had financed all their covert operations from the control of the Indochina drug trade. (The French protected opium trafficking in Laos and northern Vietnam during the colonial war that raged from 1946 to the French defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu.)

The French paratroopers fighting with hill tribes collected the opium and French aircraft would fly the opium down to Saigon and the Sino-Vietnamese mafia that was the instrument of French intelligence would then distribute the opium. The central bank accounts, the sharing of the profits, was all controlled by French military intelligence.

He concluded the interview by telling me that it was his information that the CIA had taken over the French assets and were pursuing something of the same policy.

So I went to Southeast Asia to follow up on that lead and that's what took me into doing this whole book. It was basically pulling a thread and keep tugging at it and a veil masking the reality began to unravel.

PD: What was the CIA's role in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia?

AM: During the 40 years of the cold war, from the late 1940's to this year, the CIA pursued a policy that I call radical pragmatism . Their mission was to stop communism and in pursuit of that mission they would ally with anyone and do anything to fight communism.

Since the 1920's the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations, and the United States have prohibited opium and cocaine products from legal sale. These products had already emerged as vast global commodities with very substantial production zones and large markets, large demand for those commodities both in the third world and the first.

The historic Asia opium zone stretches across 5,000 miles of Asian mainland from Turkey to Laos along the southern borders of the Soviet Union and the southern border of communist China. It just so happened that one of the key war zones in the cold war happened to lay astride the Asian opium zone.

During the long years of the cold war the CIA mounted major covert guerilla operations along the Soviet-Chinese border. The CIA recruited as allies people we now call drug lords for their operation against communist China in northeastern Burma in 1950, then from 1965 to 1975 their operation in northern Laos and throughout the decade of the 1980's, the Afghan operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Powerful, upland political figures control the societies and economies in these regions and part of that panoply of power is the opium trade. The CIA extended the mantle of their alliance to these drug lords and in every case the drug lords used it to expand a small local trade in opium into a major source of supply for the world markets and the United States.

While they were allied with the United States these drug lords were absolutely immune to any kind of investigation. If you're involved in any kind of illicit commodity trade, organized crime activity like drug trafficking, there is only one requisite for success, immunity, and the CIA gave them that. As long as they were allied with the CIA, the local police and then the DEA stayed away from the drug lords.

Finally, if there were any allegations about the involvement of their allies in the drug trade, the CIA would use their good offices to quash those allegations.

SNIP...

The same thing happened in Afghanistan. During the 1980's from the time that heroin trade started, there were 17 DEA agents based in Pakistan. They neither made nor participated in any major seizures or arrests. At a time when other police forces, particularly Scandinavian forces, made some major seizures and brought down a very major syndicate connected with former president Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan.

PD: What is the role of banking in the heroin trade? What, if any, are the connections to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal.

AM: There have been three times in the past 15 years in which the CIA's money transfer activities have surfaced. The first came in the late 1970's when the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, investigated a Nassau bank called the Castle Bank. It's a very interesting bank. It was set up by a man named Paul Helliwell, a very senior CIA operative who had retired from the agency. He set up this bank and it grew into a Latin American network of banks. It was used by the CIA to launder money.

In essence, what appears to emerge from the investigation of the Castle Bank in the late 1970's, was that the CIA did not want to move operational funds for covert operations through normal banking channels, where they could be uncovered, either by the United States or abroad, where they could come to the knowledge of opponents of the agency.

They preferred to work through allied banks. Banks that were secure, that were a little bit loose in their accounting procedures. When the Castle Bank was uncovered, the IRS announced a major investigation of the bank's money laundering activities. Suddenly the IRS cancelled the investigation and the Wall Street Journal was told by informed sources in the IRS that the CIA had blocked the investigation.

As soon as Castle Bank collapsed, a small merchant bank based in Australia, operating offshore between Australia and southeast Asia, suddenly mushroomed into a global network of banks, acquiring Latin American and European structures that had belonged to Castle Bank. This bank in Australia called the Nugan-Hand Bank began very quickly in the late 1970's, to acquire a board of retired U.S. intelligence officials, either CIA or various military intelligence services.

The most prominent example, the former Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, became the legal council of Nugan-Hand Bank. The bank was founded by Frank Nugan, an insecure and incompetent Australian lawyer, and by Michael John Hand, a man with a high school degree who had gone to Vietnam with the Green Berets. He had served in Laos in the 1960's as a contract CIA operative, fighting with three of the people who became very prominent in the CIA's privatized operations, Thomas Clines, Theodore Shackley and Richard Secord, all very big names in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Michael John Hand was the one who worked with William Colby as legal counsel. One of their big operations was to buy a former U.S. naval base in the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean. Australian police investigators who examined that contract, drawn up by William Colby for Michael John Hand, concluded that the plausible explanation they could discover for that contract was to establish a way-station for cocaine smuggling between Colombia and the United States.

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http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/heroin/mccoy1.htm

Sibel Edmonds: A Patriot Silenced, Unjustly Fired but Fighting Back to Help Keep America Safe

(1/26/2005)

Sibel Edmonds, a 32-year-old Turkish-American, was hired as a translator by the FBI shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 because of her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages. She was fired less than a year later in March 2002 for reporting shoddy work and security breaches to her supervisors that could have prevented those attacks.

Edmonds has been fighting the corruption permeating the FBI since her unfair dismissal and sued to contest her firing in July 2002. On July 6, 2004 , Judge Reggie Walton in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed Edmonds' case, citing the government's state secrets privilege. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing Edmonds in her appeal of that ruling. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for April 21, 2005.

The privilege, when properly invoked, permits the government to block the release in litigation of any material that, if disclosed, would cause harm to national security. However, the government has employed the privilege to dismiss Edmonds' entire case in an effort to protect itself from embarrassment. While an FBI translator, Edmonds discovered poorly translated documents relevant to the 9-11 attacks and reported the shoddy work to her supervisors. She also expressed concerns about a co-worker who had previously worked for an organization under FBI surveillance and had a relationship with a foreign intelligence officer also under surveillance. In addition, Edmonds claimed that she was told to work slowly to give the appearance that the agency was overworked so it would receive a larger budget, despite a large backlog of documents that needed translating.

Even though she followed all appropriate procedures for reporting her concerns up the chain of command, Edmonds was retaliated against and fired. After her termination, many of Edmonds' allegations were confirmed by the FBI in unclassified briefings to Congress. More than two years later, in May 2004, the Justice Department retroactively classified Edmonds' briefings, as well as the FBI briefings, and forced Members of Congress who had the information posted on their Web sites to remove the documents.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) sued the Justice Department and Attorney General John Ashcroft in June 2004 claiming the retroactive classification of Edmond's testimony was a violation of the First Amendment. That lawsuit is still pending, although Ashcroft and the Justice Department have moved to dismiss the suit.

CONTINUED...

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/18828res20050126.html

Nuclear proliferation cannot be controlled now

Former CIA agent says

Hamid Mir, from Islamabad

A former American CIA agent and nuclear expert David Dastych has claimed that main nuclear arsenals of Pakistan, India, Britain, France, the USA, Russia and China are safe but nuclear proliferation could not be controlled now because it has completely slipped out of control.

...

Q: Do you know anything about some US officials selling nuclear secrets to others?

A: I do, but only through my American contacts in the Intelligence and the FBI. Some corrupt US officials of the Department of Defence and State Department facilitated the theft of US nuclear secrets (technology) from American national laboratories -- Los Alamos and Sandia -- to customers in several countries, including Pakistan. This procedure involved Israeli and Turkish intelligence and also Pakistan's ISI.

Dr A Q Khan's laboratories were brokers for nuclear proliferation to other countries, including Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Myanmar and other states looking for nuclear technology. This information first surfaced five years ago through reports of a Turkish-American FBI translator, Ms Sibel Edmonds. She was gagged by US court decision and only recently she disclosed more information, which is still being blocked by the Bush Administration. It was revealed in part by three articles, published by "The Sunday Times" in London on the 6th, 20th and 26th of January 2008 (with my contribution).

Q: Is it correct that US officials sold nuclear secrets not only to Pakistan but also to Israel and some Arab countries?

A: Of course, they did. The main recipient of the most of the US nuclear information was always Israel, specifically after the capture, sentencing and jailing of their main spy in the USA. Jonathan Pollard, whose handler was a former top Israeli intelligence officer Rafi Eitan (now member of the Israeli government and chairman of the Pensioners Party).

An informal group in the Mossad composed of right-wing operatives and working hand-in-hand with the Turkish and Pakistani Intelligence was offering US nuclear technology to some Arab countries and to other countries. They did this for profit and, in some cases also for political motives, for example, to get direct proof of some foreign states illegally purchasing nuclear materials or technology. At present, this might be used as a justification to prove that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

SOURCE: http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=21222

Holy nuclear secrets, Batman!

by RICHARD BABB:
1/27/2008 6:51:40 AM
Daily Journal

Something is happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.
– The Buffalo Springfield

Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.
– Memo from Associated Press Los Angeles assistant bureau chief

On the heels of a Jan. 2, 2008, op-ed in the New York Times by 911 Commission Chairmen, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, in which they aver that the 911 Commission was stonewalled by the CIA (say what?), comes a huge story the “Old Gray Lady” (the Times) has refused to touch with a 10-foot pole.

And that is the story of Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator.

Because of a recent interview Edmonds did with the London Sunday Times (which ain’t exactly some 1967 San Francisco anti-establishment rag being mimeographed by an acid-spracked hippie in an empty storefront on Haight-Ashbury), the story has been making the Internet rounds, picked up by both left and right websites devoted to all things political.

In the story, Edmonds has spun a wondrous tale of espionage and intrigue which, if even fractionally true, ought to make the average card-carrying American turn off Dr. Phil’s analysis of Britney’s current psycho-sexual complexes, and wonder exactly what is going on in this country.

The facts are serenely simple, but the implications are profoundly troubling. Here’s the skinny: Some years ago, Edmonds, fluent in a couple of Middle Eastern languages, was hired by the FBI to do a little translating. Her job included translating tapes made of wiretaps of suspected foreign agents. Apparently Edmonds heard tapes of high-level U.S. officials engaging in a conspiracy with foreign agents to install a series of moles in sensitive nuclear and military installations. According to Edmonds, at least one U.S. senior official was being paid by Turkish agents. These agents were then selling the information onto the black market, which included Pakistan. Some ally we have there.

Edmonds also claims the FBI was gathering information against senior Pentagon officials who were aiding foreign agents. The money quote from the Times article: “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 her story to closed sessions of Congress and the 911 Commission a couple of years back, but has since become disenchanted with the failure of authorities to act. And apparently the “Main Stream Media” in this free country won’t touch the story with a 10-foot pole, so Whistleblower Edmonds took her story overseas.

CONTINUED...

http://www.djournal.com/pages/story.asp?ID=264628&pub=1&div=Opinion