Sibel Edmonds, POTUS, Exec Priv & Espionage

As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities. And the Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity. This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would use.

The other thing I noticed is how Chicago, with its culture of political corruption, is central to the new administration. When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.
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Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator and the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist.

Stuxnet Computer Worm Mysteries

Blake Hounshell discusses six mysteries regarding the Stuxnet computer worm that may have infected Iran's nuclear facilities. Here are some of the more interesting ones.

1. What was the target? Although the worm has affected computers in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and elsewhere in addition to Iran, security researchers who have been pouring over Stuxnet for months say it appears aimed at a very specific target. According to Siemens, "The behavioral pattern of Stuxnet suggests that the virus is apparently only activated in plants with a specific configuration. It deliberately searches for a certain technical constellation with certain modules and certain program patterns which apply to a specific production process." Two German experts, Ralph Langner and Frank Rieger, have offered competing theories as to what that target might be, both of them in Iran, where most of the affected machines are.

Langner guesses that Stuxnet is aimed at Bushehr, Iran's civilian nuclear power plant, which is slated to go online this fall. Langner's case rests largely on the fact that Bushehr runs Siemens software and that Russian contractors would have had access to the facility -- and that they would have used USB drives to set up the system.

Rieger counters that Natanz, Iran's uranium enrichment plant, is a more likely target. Not only is it more of a proliferation threat, there's suggestive evidence that it actually may have been affected by sabotage. (More on this later.) He also points out that Natanz is more likely to have the kinds of identical nodes, in this case "cascades" or groups of centrifuges, that would be susceptible to an attack.

2. Who did it? The obvious culprit is Israel, which has both the sophisticated technology and the motive to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, which it deems a mortal threat. An eerily prescient Reuters article published in July 2009 quotes Scott Borg, a U.S. cybersecurity expert, speculating that Israel might want to do so, adding that "a contaminated USB stick would be enough" to cause real damage to Iranian facilities.

Other countries, such as the United States, China, and Russia, probably have the capability, but only one -- the United States -- has a clear motive (some might add France and Germany to this list). One could spin complicated theories as to why Russia would want to sabotage its own facility, but Occam's Razor probably applies here -- and other reporting has indicated that the United States and Israel have, in fact, approved a covert sabotage campaign that may include a cyber component.

You think WE - the world's biggest experts on cybersecurity - would do something like that? Hmmm.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Espionage Charged Dept of State Cables

Fearing disclosure of State Dept. secrets leaked by an Army intel analyst, the feds took the hard drive of the man who turned him in. Will Bradley Manning be charged with espionage?

Defense Department investigators are weighing espionage charges against a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist accused of leaking highly classified documents to the website Wikileaks. On Saturday, the investigators took custody of electronic records from a former computer hacker based in California who has emerged as the Pentagon's key informant in the case, the informant tells The Daily Beast.

The former hacker, Adrian Lamo, first alerted the Defense Department to the leaks by Army Specialist Bradley Manning—including a 2007 video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad, which created a sensation when posted recently by Wikileaks, as well as a cache of sensitive State Department cables.

Lamo said in an interview Saturday night that he had voluntarily turned over his computer records, including contents of one of his hard drives, to the Pentagon earlier in the day. He said criminal investigators from the Defense Department were scheduled to interview him again on Sunday near his home in California.

Lamo said he first learned that Manning might face espionage charges, a crime that could carry the death penalty, when the word "espionage" appeared on a formal release form that he was asked to sign by the Pentagon criminal investigators who took custody of his electronic records. "It's one of the statutes that was written down on a piece of paper that I signed to authorize the search," Lamo said. Calls to the Pentagon press office were not immediately returned Saturday night.

Philip Shenon, The Daily Beast

Spy Downloaded 260,000 State Dept Cables

An Army intel analyst charged with leaking classified materials also downloaded sensitive diplomatic cables. Are America's foreign policy secrets about to go online? Philip Shenon reports.

The State Department and American embassies around the world are bracing for what officials fear could be the massive, unauthorized release of secret diplomatic cables in which U.S. diplomats harshly evaluate foreign leaders and reveal the inner-workings of American foreign policy.

Diplomatic and law-enforcement officials tell the Daily Beast their alarm stems from the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst based in Iraq who has reportedly admitted that he downloaded 260,000 diplomatic cables from government computer networks and was prepared to make them public.

Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Md., who is now under arrest in Kuwait, is also accused of having leaked—to Wikileaks, a secretive internet site based in Sweden—an explosive video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The website released the video in April.

"If he really had access to these cables, we've got a terrible situation on our hands," said an American diplomat. "We're still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain."

Philip Shenon, The Daily Beast

The Activists Generally Ignore the Real Issues

In no special order, I list problems to be addressed. They include sale of nuclear secrets to the highest bidder, government-run trafficking in drugs and human beings, torture, corporate use of slave labor, abduction across international borders and human rights abuse.
The culprits thrive in federal, state and local governments throughout the world. Any talk of reform or revolution is premature. The first step is to define and to publicize the ills and the perpetrators. It should not be left to a handful of whistle blowers to risk their lives to shed light on these matters.
All of us should stand with them.

New Boffo Box Office Hit

There are no respected senior military figures who utter unbiased opinions.
From the evidence, I suggest this scenario.
Since 1996 the FBI has been selling US nuclear 'secrets' through the State Department to ambitious Middle East buyers. Of course, the 'secrets' are bogus.
The Americans figured the buyers would never make a serious effort to build the secret weapons. Only the Iranians in 2003 had carried the plans to the point they detected the fraud. The Iranians abandoned the program [NIE] not eager to disclose how the US had duped them.
The Administration hopes they can use the bogus information as a future false flag operation to start bombing the nuclear facilities.
The President has just announced the September 2007 Israeli air raid took out a potential Syrian nuclear reactor in the desert. The Israeli action might have been an experiment to gauge future world reaction. If the Syrians were entirely innocent in this operation, they would have howled to high heaven.
My screenplay on this scenario is in second draft. After Bush nukes Iran, the film could be a boffo box office hit.

Sibel Edmonds - The Fateful Visit

Sibel The Fateful Visit

The Fateful Visit

CD: Now let's fast-forward to November 2001, when Jan Dickerson joined you at the FBI. What were her duties?

SE: She was a "monitor," the second type of translator, because she didn't have the scores on one of her two language proficiency exams. As a monitor she was supposed to make general summary translations, not verbatim.

CD: Did you have any idea at the time about her suspect allegiances?

SE: I had no idea at first. It was only after some suspicious behavior and then her and her husband's unannounced visit to our house that everything became clear.

One day in December [2001], my husband and I were at our home in Alexandria, Va., when the doorbell rang. It was Jan and Doug Dickerson. They also lived in Alexandria, so I didn't think of it as suspicious at first. I think the point for her was to introduce her husband to mine. We invited them in for coffee, and –

CD: She started trying to recruit you for their illegal activities?

SE: No, actually she herself did not. It was the husband who started talking about this semi-legitimate organization: "Hey, have you ever heard of this group?" he said, casually mentioning this organization to my husband. He replied, "Yeah, I know about them." And I started sweating, because I knew this organization was under FBI investigation, and I was by law not allowed to discuss anything about it with my husband.

CD: But, for your husband to have heard of it, it had to have been a group that was well known to the public as something fairly innocuous, right?

SE: Yes, as I said, a legitimate front. And Dickerson asked my husband if he'd ever thought of joining the organization.

CD: So there was something socially desirable about belonging in this group?

SE: Correct. And so my husband was kind of surprised, you know, because this wasn't the sort of group just anyone could belong to. "But I thought you had to be such and such a person, with such and such connections and references to get in," my husband was saying.

And then Major Douglas Dickerson smiled and pointed at me. "All you have to do is tell them where your wife works and what she does, and they will let you in like that," he said [snapping his fingers]. They wanted to sell me for the information I could provide, basically.

CD: What did you take this to mean? You would have to hand over classified FBI information –

SE: Correct. The information I could give these people would be worth a lot of money.

CD: And what would you get out of it?

SE: Well, money, and we could leave the country, you know, live a very comfortable life wherever we wanted. We would never have to work again, they promised.

CD: So what did you do then, with him propositioning your husband right in front of you?

SE: I tried to change the subject, because anything I might say on the subject would have been against the law, considering the ongoing investigation.

CD: When you went back to work, did you bring the matter up?

SE: I reported it two days later to my direct supervisor, a former Arabic translator. He told me he would file it immediately with the security department. This was in December 2001. When nothing happened, I pursued the matter with a special agent who had also been getting suspicious about some of Jan Dickerson's translations. When we finally got through to the security department, they said they'd never been notified in the first place about my complaint. I have all of the dated documents, emails, etc., still to prove it.

CD: Did Dickerson's protection of the suspects, and their larger infiltration of the American security apparatus, did these things have a deleterious effect on bureau investigations?

SE: As a result of their penetration, certain people who had been detained were released – people who had valuable information. And other targets of this investigation, key people, were allowed to flee the country, right up through January and February of 2002.

CD: These were foreign nationals based in the United States?

SE: Correct.

CD: Did you have any awareness of this exodus?

SE: I reported some of the suspects' names higher up as I came across them in our investigation. And you know what? Within two weeks, they had all left the country. Just vanished.

Sibel Edmonds: Whistle Blower

SIBEL CORRUPTION THE KEVIN TASKASEN AFFAIR

This is a snippet describing the corruption in a small part of the FBI. Many employees take part in the theft. Others know what’s going on, but are afraid to say anything. As a result, the taxpayers foot the bill for money laundering, drug smuggling and the theft of national secrets. No one works to limit the damage.

Incompetence, Corruption and Cover-ups: The Kevin Taskasen Affair

CD: In your October 25 2002 interview with 60 Minutes, "Lost in Translation," you charged the FBI with incompetence and greed – and also of allowing infiltration by foreign intelligence outfits. Some of these charges have also been substantiated by other sources, both congressional and from inside the bureau. For example, there's the Guantanamo Bay Turkish-English translator who actually didn't know either language very well, Kevin Taskasen, I believe? And he worked with you at some point?

Sibel Edmonds: Correct.

CD: And also, your bosses told you to work more slowly, in some cases not at all, so that the department's seemingly huge workload would mean more funding the next year, right?

SE: Correct.

CD: Can you provide any more details on these subjects?

SE: Well, as for Kevin – he was this poor little guy who was very nice, his only fault as a translator being that he, well, didn't speak English.

CD: Really! Where was he from? How did he get that job, anyway?

SE: Kevin was from Turkey. He had met an American woman there, married her, and moved to America. But his lower-elementary-school-level English was only enough to get him a job as a busboy/dishwasher in a restaurant.

However, his wife worked in the languages testing center at FBI headquarters in Washington. Hers was the office that takes in the applications of aspiring translators and schedule language proficiency tests.

CD: So in other words, she used her connections to get him a job in the FBI, even though he wasn't qualified?

SE: Correct. There was an Arabic language supervisor in our department, who had about seven or eight family members under his wing, working away in the Arabic language section even though several of them weren't qualified, hadn't passed the proficiency test in either English or Arabic…

CD: So they made a bargain?

SE: Yes, he had made a deal with this woman, Kevin's wife. She had approved all of his extended family members to work for the FBI translations center, and so she then asked to do the same with her poor husband. And I can't really blame him at all, he was just a nice guy who dreamed of opening his own restaurant. But that's not likely to happen when you're working as a busboy for $6.50 an hour.

CD: How much do they pay in the translating department that he was hired to?

SE: The average is $40 an hour.

CD: So basically, what you had was a nudge-nudge wink-wink thing going on between the woman in the application office and the head honcho in the translation center.

SE: Correct. In light of what she'd done for him, the deal was that he [the Arabic supervisor] would turn a blind eye to her poor husband's incompetence for 3 years. He agreed and in October 2001 it started. Again, I can't blame Kevin. He would be coming to me every five minutes asking, "What does this word mean?" He was really trying, but he was struggling because he just didn't know English well enough. So I ended up having to do his work for him too.

CD: How long did this go on for? Did you alert your supervisors?

SE: Yes. I went to them and asked, "what is he doing here?" But nothing was done and only a few months later, in February of 2002, he was given a TDY [travel assignment] – to translate the testimony of Turkic-speaking detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

When told of this assignment, Kevin stood in front of all the other translators. He was crying, and said, "I can't do it, I just can't." I told him to go to the boss – and just say no, if he didn't feel capable. But he didn't.

CD: Come on! One would think that for the marquis interrogation center in the war on terror, the government would send only the best and brightest. Why did they even think of sending him?

SE: Aside from sending Kevin, the FBI had only two options, neither of them good for them. They could send me, as I was the only qualified Turkish linguist, but this raised a red flag considering that I had already started to make a fuss about how the game was being played. Their other choice was to humbly ask the NSA or DIA or another agency to borrow a Turkish-language translator. But they couldn't do this because there is all this intra-agency competition. None of them would ever let it look like their people weren't as good as the other agencies'. So it was partly a matter of pride.

CD: Do you know what happened to Kevin in Guantanamo?

SE: He didn't come back till mid-April [2002]. But surely while there he had heard information he wasn't able to convey properly in English. Maybe clues about 9/11, or about future terrorist attacks in the works. Or maybe information proving that some detainees had been wrongfully imprisoned.

That's another thing. What if a military detainee is on trial? You have to, you simply have to double-check the translations that are being used as evidence against the detainee. After all, you might be sending someone to his death based on faulty evidence! But all too often, they just put the stamp of approval on anything that says "FBI translation," because that is supposed to indicate automatically a certain unassailable level of quality.

CD: After coming back, and after the story broke proving he wasn't a qualified translator, what happened then? Did he get fired?

SE: No. After all that, he is back in Washington D.C., and is the head of the Turkish department in the FBI translations center. As far as I know, he is the only Turkish-speaking translator there now. Even after all this.

CD: Good God! One translator – and an incompetent one at that! Isn't that a national security liability?

SE: Yes, but you have to look at it from their perspective. What if they let him go, and he starts talking about what he knows? Either way, it's about control. If they fire someone, they might either corroborate my story, or even release documents that could prove damning for the FBI … it works out to be more of a liability for them to fire someone than to keep them in the office, where they can continue to compromise our national security.

A full script available at Pogo.org

Antiwar.com conducted many of these interviews.

Sibel Edmonds

Google Sibel Edmonds

The mainstream media has shut down coverage on Sibel Edmonds. In contrast to the news black-out, a Google search will list over 44,000 articles on her.

A former Turkish translator for the FBI in Washington, she had access to many transmissions. Some of these detailed the theft of US nuclear secrets from labs and research facilities. The espionage carried out by PhD candidates with top secret credentials, the US State Department marketed the intelligence to criminal intermediaries for overseas sale.

Turkey was the major conduit.

When Sibel moved to make her information public in 2001, a judge issued an unprecedented gag order that still is in place seven years later. Official Washington has turned its back on her.

For information we have the Internet and a London Sunday Times article several weeks ago.

Some writers have suggested probes by law enforcement and Congressional figures. I believe it has gone far beyond this.

Humbly, I suggest the incarceration of all government employees GS/15 or over guilty until proven innocent. If we must endure the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts, we might as well use them for a good purpose.

What is So Liberal about the Mass Media?

The US mass media ignores the State Department theft of nuclear secrets, the violent deaths of over one million Iraqis, the lack of US government oversight, the detention and torture of victims grabbed illegally by the CIA, the unconstitutionality of NSPD 51, the threat of martial law etc.
What 'liberal' bias do you detect?
Maybe you call them biased for not urging the lynching of Michelle Obama and the assassination of her husband.

You Get What You Pay For

To buy cigarette lighters at three for a dollar, the customer has no choice in what he receives. My treasure included Frankenstein, Osama bin Laden and a purple happy face. For me, this replaces astrology charts from expensive newspapers. As you can read, it also provides stunning material for articles

With the decline of the Red Menace, the USA needed a new Frankenstein a godless psychopath to prop up as villain. Already the recipient of WMD, Saddam seemed to be a good paper tiger villain of choice. Adept at murdering his countrymen, he had no makings of a viable international threat.

Osama bin Laden showed more promise. The chances are he bombed the World Trade Center underground parking lot in 1993. This effort unsatisfactory, the CIA undertook false flag operations in Europe and Asia. The attacks increased the scope, but not the severity.

To be a viable threat, the Arabs needed more clout. The US began to sell nuclear secrets to the Arab States. This strategy relied on disinformation and public ignorance. There is a long road from knowing how to build a bomb and actually constructing one. The process involves considerable financial planning, brainpower and patience rare qualities in Arabia.

To enlist US public participation in the program, the officials attacked the rule of law. Major results from the 9/11 tragedy were widespread fear of the Arabs and a loathing for the rule of reason. The people perceived democracy as weakness and were willing to sacrifice civil liberties for safety.

The public is not angry at the administration for poor management of the Iraq War, but for failing to win it. The people do not understand the object for the military/industrial complex. An outbreak of peace is disastrous for profits.

The prudent administration always takes it easy on the adversary until they can prop up another despot as an appropriate villain.

What happened to the purple smiley face?

He is mocking us. Nobody twisted our arms to drown the country in greed, bigotry and fear. Where are the whistle blowers? Where are the investigative journalists? They are in hiding in a country that punishes doubters and tortures activists.

We can’t all flee to Paraguay.

False Flags Remember the Maine

It began with a boiler explosion the battleship Maine sinking in Havana harbor. The Hearst newspapers trumpeted war with Spain.

The Germans warned the US cruise ships to stay out of contested waters. The u-boat sank the steamship Lusitania and the USA moved a step closer to entry in World War One.

Pearl Harbor was a set-up and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a deadly farce.

The US had plenty of time to learn and to practice false flags techniques during the Cold War. The 9/11 tragedy was a masterpiece of deception. The conspirators focused the blame on far off cave dwellers historically unable to install a decent phone system.

Two vital elements in this were information control and the demise of rule by law. The three branches of government co-operated in this dramatic shift to totalitarian rule. Accomplished in what was formerly a democratic republic, it gained all the self-righteous trappings of the former regimes.

The citizens continue to believe they have a say in the actions of the administration. They insist the voting process will correct the current imbalance of power. They are delusional.

The real play goes back to 1996. To ensure steady profits for the military/industrial complex, the leadership needed perpetual war with a viable enemy. The so-called war on terror need never end. When the terrorist effort tails off, the CIA can supply any number of incidents.

Nuclear weapons grant viability to the potential enemy. The US officials have been selling nuclear secrets to potential enemies for over a decade. This action is a two-edged sword. Although the recipient may gain a nuclear expertise, he becomes a credible threat subject to false flag operations.

Let us assume for a moment that Baltimore and Denver have been vaporized. The President claims Pakistan as the perpetrator and destroys that country immediately.

Who will question him and how long will it take to dispute the action taken?