Gail Sheehy on Whistleblowers story on FBI security 9-11 MUST READ!

[RamboLiberal]

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

<snip>
The Moms are Kristen & her group.

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.

When she arrived, her enormous respect for the F.B.I. was initially confirmed.

"The field agents are wonderful, but they were terribly exasperated with the D.C. office," she said.

<snip>

thousands of pages of translations falsely labeled "not pertinent" by Middle Eastern linguists who were either not qualified in the target language or English, or, worse, <b>protecting targets of investigation.</b>

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Maybe it's time to O.J. Simpson the 9/11 Commission.

There's some pretty damning information not getting into the public record through that commission. If Orrin Hatch isn't allowing this information to come to light, maybe it's time the information get reported to the public in the same manner as the O.J. Simpson trial. The guilty may go free, but the court of public opinion can still pass its own sentence.

"When the 9/11 commission seemed close-minded, they met with Judiciary Committee staffers, echoing Sibel’s pleadings that Senator Grassley hold his own hearings. Senator Grassley had told this writer that his hands were tied, because, "Senator Hatch is now chairman of the Oversight Committee.""

[9215]

2. The nasty bastards tried to "Wilsonize" Edmonds as well!!

The dirty fucking bastards!!!!

.......Going by the book was not without personal sacrifice for Ms. Edmonds. She remembered her erstwhile tea companion, Ms. Dickerson, threatening: "Why would you make such a fuss over translations? You’re not even planning to stay here. Why would you put your life and your family’s lives in danger?"

Ms. Edmonds said that after she reported this threat to Dale Watson, then executive assistant director of the F.B.I., she learned from friends in Turkey that plainclothes agents went to her sister’s apartment in Istanbul with an interrogation warrant.

Ms. Edmonds had already brought her sister and mother to Washington in anticipation of such reprisals by Turkish intelligence. But her younger sister, a totally apolitical airline employee, hasn’t spoken to her since........

I want to see Watson's ass on the chopping block for this!! That son-of-bitch loosed his thugs on this woman's family. :grr: :grr:

This is the same kind of shit that happened in Wilson/Plame.