An October Surprise for Bush and the FBI? (Sibel Edmonds)

[oldhat]

http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1244/article12523.asp

An October Surprise for Bush and the FBI? FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds talks about her case --and hints at a forthcoming scandal.

by Steve Perry

Sibel Edmonds's claims of incompetence, malfeasance, and possible espionage in the FBI's translation unit have received only sporadic attention since she first aired them widely in a 60 Minutes report in October 2002--not least because of the veil of silence that the Bush Justice Department has tried to draw over the case. In July of this year, a Bush-appointed judge dismissed Edmonds's lawsuit against the FBI on the grounds that the case would necessarily expose state secrets. Judge Reggie Walton's logic parroted that of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who in May 2004 issued an order retroactively classifying all the information that had been presented to Congress in her case because of its alleged national security sensitivity.

But l'affaire Edmonds is heating up again. Last month Edmonds filed a new lawsuit seeking to compel release of the documents in her case under the Freedom of Information law. And last Tuesday's page one New York Times story about the 120,000-hour backlog of untranslated intelligence tapes the FBI is presently sitting on lent additional credence to her charges. (Some al Qaeda communiqués, the Times reported, were automatically deleted by the overloaded computer system in the department before they could be translated.)

It wasn't the first time Edmonds had been featured on the front page of the Times; she was the subject of a July 29 dispatch which disclosed that the DoJ Inspector General had completed a report--classified, of course--concluding that her whistleblowing activities were a factor in her April 2002 firing, after just six months-plus of employment at the FBI.

Despite the legal walls the FBI and the Bush administration have attempted to build around her case, it's nonetheless clear from letters and documents that are already irretrievably in the public realm that Edmonds's claims (give or take those of Richard Clarke) may be the most explosive yet lodged against the U.S. government's anti-terrorism work post-9/11.

[Warpy]

1. She probably knows who all the Israeli spies are

That would be my guess. Franklin was only the tip of a very large iceberg, I'm afraid. We know the OSP within the Pentagon was badly compromised, along with Wolfowitz and Feith, and that the FBI went public rather than have the whole thing buried by Asscrock's DOJ.

[Fridays Child]

2. "FBI received detailed, accurate description of 9/11 in April 2001."

That should be the headline on every front page in the country.

From the article:

"In addition, Edmonds has charged that the FBI suppressed evidence that it received a specific, detailed, and ultimately accurate description of the 9/11 plot from an Iranian source in April 2001."

[Moderator]

3. Duplicate

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=887182