Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I. - 9-11 (Bookmark this)

[RamboLiberal]

Kristen Breitweiser and the Moms are mentioned in this story. Gail Sheehy, author of this article, covered Kristen and her groups efforts to get Bush Admin and lawmakers to investigate 9-11 and of course their frustration and questions in her book Middletown, America: One Town's Passage from Trauma To Hope

http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage1.asp

<snip>

While fighting a mostly losing battle for a transparent investigation, the Moms are winning on another score: Whistleblowers from agencies culpable in the failures of 9/11—long silent—are being attracted to their mission.


Sibel Edmonds read an article published in these pages last August about the 9/11 widows’ bold confrontation with Director Mr. Mueller in a private meeting last summer, and recognized kindred spirits.

"This was the first time I’d heard anybody ask such direct questions to Mr. Mueller," said Ms. Edmonds, a Turkish-American woman who answered the desperate call of the F.B.I. in September, 2001 for translators of Middle Eastern languages. Hired as contract employee a week after 9/11, without a personal interview, Ms. Edmonds was given top-secret security clearance to translate wiretaps ordered by field offices in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities by agents who were working around the clock to pick up the trail of Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters in the U.S. and abroad. Working in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office, she listened to hundreds of hours of intercepts and translated reams of e-mails and documents that flooded into the bureau. In a series of intimate interviews, she told her story to this writer.

<snip>

While the news was full of reports of heaps of untranslated material languishing inside the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism unit, Ms. Edmonds has claimed that translators were told to let them pile up. She said she remembers a supervisor’s instructions "to just say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations" so that the department could use the pileup as evidence to demand more money from the Senate. Another colleague she recalls saying bitterly, "This is our time to show those assholes we are in charge."

F.B.I. translators are the front line for information gathered by foreign-language wiretaps, tips, documents, e-mails, and other intercepted threats to security. Based on what they translate and the dots they connect, F.B.I. field agents act against targets of investigation-or fail to act-in a timely manner. As an agent later told the Judiciary Committee which oversees the F.B.I., "When you hear a suspect say ‘The flower will bloom next week,’ you can’t wait two weeks to get it translated."

[jbfam4]

1. WOW

Thanks for posting this....I saw something similar on 60 minutes,I think, several months ago. The part about letting the work pile up so they could get more money.

This is really sad. Many of us won't live long enough to get the real truth of what happend on 9-11 and why no one stopped it.

[Old and In the Way]

2. I wonder.....

"Ms. Edmonds has claimed that translators were told to let them pile up. She said she remembers a supervisor’s instructions "to just say no to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations" so that the department could use the pileup as evidence to demand more money from the Senate."

Is that the real reason or the cover? I know some FBI agents that were in the chain of paperwork were promoted (I think one was named Frasca), even though his actions contributed to the logjam.

Convenient to blame it on a bureaucratic ploy to get more money. It could just as easily have been a willful stuffing of information so that there'd be no smoking gun that the information was in this administration's hands. Personally, I'm more inclined that it was a political appointee that made the information pile up on someone's desk.

[enough]

3. Amazing story.

Kick