Feds, Supreme Court silence an FBI whistleblower who knew too much

Justice for Sibel Edmunds continues to elude her. She sits on a trememdous amount of information about FBI misconduct regarding 9/11 and perhaps bribery by the current Speaker of the House. Yet the Supreme Court has affirmed that the President can declare any information as an official state secret, without justification, despite compelling arguments to the contrary. Perhaps we will find out what her story is during the next Democratic president. Thanks to King of Zembla for the link.

The latest rebuke to Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who has been trying unsuccessfully to make public what she knows about the FBI’s 9-11-related operations, comes from the Supreme Court.

It has declined to hear her court case, thereby letting stand decisions of the lower courts that enforce a silence imposed upon her by the federal government. The ACLU represented Edmonds. “Sibel Edmonds is a true patriot who deserved her day in court," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, in an official statement. "We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not see the ongoing danger of allowing the FBI to hide its blunders behind the 'states secrets' privilege."

Even though its own inspector general has found much of what Edmonds has to say to be correct, the Justice Department--first under Attorney General Ashcroft and now under Attorney General Gonzalez--have invoked the arcane States Secrets law to shut her up. The department simply declared everything in her case secret, in the interest of national security.

Here are some of the revelations the government is trying to cover up, gleaned from earlier interviews:

• When she was hired by the FBI as a translator after 9-11, Edmonds, a Turkish American born in Iran and fluent in Farsi and Turkish among other languages, discovered an odd network within the FBI where, among other things, relatives of foreign diplomats were working as interpreters. They were translating FBI wiretaps of foreign diplomats suspected of spying. As it turned out, these suspect family members were relatives of the translators--in other words moles working in the translation section.
  
• Edmonds found her own initials forged on improper translations of documents--translations she had never seen before.


• Edmonds was startled when what she considered ill-trained and incompetent interpreters were sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate detainee interviews. For example, one Turkish Kurd was dispatched to interpret Farsi, a language he did not speak.



• Edmonds learned that a longtime reliable FBI asset who reported on Afghanistan, told FBI agents in April 2001 of Al Qaeda’s plans to attack the U.S.


• In the course of her work, Edmonds discovered Islamic terrorists might well have become entangled in ongoing international drug and money laundering. She suspects that this knowledge was one of
  the reasons the Justice Department classified everything in her case.

When Edmonds sought to protest these and other irregularities to her superiors in the FBI, she was called a “whore” by her supervising agent, who told her he would next see her in jail. She was dismissed and escorted out of the FBI building. Edmonds
never got a hearing before the 9-11 Commission, though she did have a chance to tell her story, sort of, on the side. A recent federal appeals court hearing on her case was made secret in the interest of national security. All in all, she was cast out as an enemy of the state. To fight back, she has launched a new organization to protect other government whistleblowers.

Another Call For Withdrawl And Impeachment

Any good chess player knows that the threat of military response is infinitely more powerful than military action. Once committed, weaknesses become obvious and a calculated response is limited. Bush and the Neo-cons demonstrated their lack of strategic sophistication. I'm no military expert, but I am a fair chess player. The disaster in Iraq was predictable from the beginning.
Another hawk with impeccable credentials as a military expert in Israel has seconded Murtha's call for withdrawal. He goes one big step further however, calling for impeachment and trial for Bush and "all the president's men."
Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest notes:

Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, "the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers."

At Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal points out that there is something we are not hearing about conditions in Iraq.

...van Creveld [appears to be] hearing things about the White House--through his own military-academic and Israeli-security networks--even more terrifying and devastating than I am hearing through my networks.


The Bush administration: worse than you can imagine, even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine.

And now the man of the day, Martin van Creveld in Forward Newspaper Online

What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.


Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America's forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam — which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists. Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.


Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today's armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America's national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.


Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.


Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.


Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.


Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.


[...]For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins. MORE

Finally someone has said it. Since my expertise in military history isn't very deep, if I could see the debacle we were headed for as we sent our troops to Iraq, then it must be a huge one. But for an noted military historian to say that nothing in 2000 years has been an equivalent military folly is stunning. How could all those "experts" in the US stand-by and let it happen? Of course many stood up, many were tossed from their jobs for doing so, but many more in the public eye have relatively immunity to the massive retaliation for which the Bush Administration is noted. Most notable is Powell. It's the Powell Doctrine that first predicted disaster for Gulf War II. Loyalty is more important than thousands of deaths, a defeated and demoralized military, loss of prestige and credibility world-wide? And all that excludes losing the war against Islamic extremists and empowering Iran to go nuclear. A strong presence in Afghanistan with the threat of response would have had a chance to contain Iran's ambitions.
I think we may still have some capability to influence conditions in the Middle East and yes, even contain Iran. But the window to influence events is closing rapidly as our military continues to deteriorate on the ground. I'm convinced that this is the compelling truth that has moved Murtha and van Creveld to step up and call for withdrawal. Van Creveld, I suspect, rightly notes the folly of pursuing any war without support of voters and the absolute unforgivable sin of destroying the functioning ability and reputation of the US Army and Marines. No, history will not think well of Bush and the Neo-cons.

Bush Wanted to Did Bomb al-Jazeera?

It would appear the British government is taking very seriously the initially doubted leak of a memo by the Daily Mirror stating Bush talked of bombing the home offices of Al-Jazeera.
Guardian Unlimited

Fears that fresh revelations about disputes between Tony Blair and George Bush on the Iraq conflict could damage Downing Street's intimate relationship with the White House prompted this week's unprecedented threat by the attorney general to use the Official Secrets Act against national newspapers.


Senior MPs, Whitehall officials and lawyers were agreed yesterday that Lord Goldsmith had "read the riot act" to the media because of political embarrassment caused by a sensitive leak of face-to-face exchanges between the prime minister and the US president in the White House in April 2004. He acted after the Daily Mirror said a memo recorded a threat by Mr Bush to take "military action" against the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera. Mr Blair replied that that would cause a big problem, reported the Mirror. David Keogh, a former Cabinet Office official, has been charged under the secrets act with sending the memo on the Blair-Bush conversation to Leo O 'Connor, researcher to the former Labour MP Tony Clarke. Mr Keogh and Mr O'Connor will appear before Bow Street magistrates next week.


The meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair took place at a time when Whitehall officials, intelligence officers, and British military commanders were expressing outrage at the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which up to 1,000 civilians are feared to have died. Pictures of the attack shown on al-Jazeera had infuriated US generals. The government was also arguing with Washington about the number of extra British troops to be sent to Iraq at a time when it was feared they would be endangered by what a separately leaked Foreign Office memo called "heavy-handed" US military tactics.


There were UK anxieties that US bombing in civilian areas in Falluja would unite Sunnis and Shias against British forces. The criticism came not only from anti-war MPs, but from Mr Blair's most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers. When Mr Blair met Mr Bush in Washington, military advisers were urging the prime minister to send extra forces only on British terms. General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the army, said while British troops had to fight with the Americans, "that does not mean we must be able to fight as the Americans".

While some have argued Bush was joking, it's also very possible that he was speak whimsically about what he'd like to do. Afterall, Al-Jazeera has regularly given world media coverage to the shadiest enemies of the US. Of course, most of the media companies in the world would jump at the chance. What concerns me the most is that the US has had two "accident" involving bombing well known field offices of Al Jazeera. The Daily Mirror said Bush told Blair on April 16, 2004> that he wanted to target Al Jazeera.
In 2001, the station's Kabul office was hit by a US missle.
BBC News

The Kabul offices of the Arab satellite al-Jazeera channel have been destroyed by a US missile. "This office has been known by everybody, the American airplanes know the location of the office, they know we are broadcasting from there," said Al-Jazeera Managing Director Mohammed Jasim al-Ali. The Qatar-based satellite channel, which gained global fame for its exclusive access to Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban, announced that none of its staff had been wounded.

Then in 2003 Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a U.S. air strike on Al-Jazeera's Baghdad office. The United States has denied deliberately targeting the station.
The Hindu

Reporters Without Borders expressed outrage at the U.S. bombing of the Baghdad office of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera that killed one of its journalists, cameraman Tarek Ayoub, and wounded another. The nearby premises of Abu Dhabi TV were also damaged. ``We strongly condemn this attack on a neighbourhood known to include the offices of several TV stations,'' said the secretary-general, Robert Manard, in a letter to Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. military operations in Iraq. ``To ensure the safety of its journalists, Al-Jazeera's management has been careful to inform the Americans of the exact location of its crews right from the start of the war. The U.S. army cannot therefore claim it did not know where the Baghdad offices were. ``Did it at least warn the journalists about an imminent bombing? The outcome was predictable: yet another journalist was killed covering this very deadly war for the media,'' Mr. Manard said. He called on Gen. Franks to make a serious and thorough investigation of who was responsible for the attack and why it was carried out. An Al-Jazeera journalist who was in Baghdad until a few days ago told Reporters Without Borders that "it couldn't've been a mistake. "We've told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.'''Ayoub, a Jordanian who was the station's permanent correspondent in Amman, was sent to strengthen the team in Iraq when the war broke out. He was seriously wounded in the attack and died soon afterwards.

I find it hard to believe that a huge banner visible from the air wouldn't have deterred a precision airstrike of a building surrounded by friendly and civilian buildings. Some people might agree with the Administration targetting a "propaganda" instrument of the enemy. I'd call it an immoral act, even a war crime. And it clearly violates international law.

Woodward's Methane Bomb

When Woodward talk loosely about Wilson on Larry King two weeks ago, his stink factor went sky high in my book. He was suggesting Wilson was making too big a deal about the outing of his wife Plame. He also said that Plame's job at CIA was widely known in the press corps that worked around CIA. First of all, there is significant evidence of damage done. Secondly, too many Bush apologists really think a Special Prosecutor hand picked by the Bush Attorney General's Office would actually make a big deal out of a "technical" Plame outing. I'm sure Fitzgerald's career would crash and burn if it were to come out that allegations in the Libby indictment was really weren't espionage because everyone knew she was a spy anyway. It is clear to me, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist has been bought out by Bush in exchange for getting deeply inside the Bush White House.
Now he's grabbing headlines again with a move that appears self-serving again.
Here is highlights from today's Washington Post article.

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed. In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

Smells to me that he's just bolstering his statements to Larry King. Woodward doesn't want the sales of his books on the Bush Administration to founder if this investigation spreads and leads to more indictments throughout the White House. The information for his book could become part of the evidence or could be written off as whitewashed facts in an administration struggling to cover-up.
Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah says:

I think Woodward's source is Dick. As someone over at Jane's place reminded (again, I'm looking through the haloscan swamps to find it), Dick was reportedly given a set of questions at just about the time of the indictment. If that really happened (remember, most of the Libby indictment week rumors have proven to be false), then one of the questions would almost certainly be "Did you share information about Plame with any journalist?"


And why would Dick admit he had?


While I don't think this leak exonerates Libby in an Espionage charge, I do think it exonerates Dick in an Espionage charge. It provides Dick with a very credible witness that Dick didn't pass on Plame's classified status--even though he knew it at the time (remember, Dick had already told Libby that Plame was DO, a spy). In any case, if it was Dick, I think he's still got a whole heap of trouble. But I think he may avoid going down himself on Espionage charges.

As usually, Emptywheels thoughts make a lot of sense and seem to explain predictions that Cheney will "retire" when the heat gets too close.
However, then my thought was about Hadley who allegedly told friends he expected to be indicted. Then, surprise! The Raw Story has a scoop.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell RAW STORY.


Testifying under oath Monday to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Woodward recounted a casual conversation he had with Hadley, these sources say. Hadley did not return a call seeking comment.

Whoever is the source will play out pretty soon. But the Fitzgerald investigation appears to be headed for a long run.

Grover Norquist’s Leaky Bathtub

DHinMI has another very interesting post about prospects for the Democrats in the upcoming election in 2006. He hit one hot button of mine. The promise of a disturbing history of economic sabotage yet to unfold. The Bush Administration has planted several booby-traps in our economy that may well enable them to accomplish their long range goal of shrinking the Federal government at the expense of the poor most of all, but also the middle class.
The Next Hurrah

The political trends seem to be converging in ways that suggest that Grover Norquist will not achieve his goal of reducing government to a size where he could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And for abetting Norquist’s’ pursuit of his insane and megalomaniacal dream, the Republican party is on the verge of losing control of Congress and losing the benefits of the (mistaken) perception that they have had momentum and popular support behind their unending attacks on government and governance. Just as George W. Bush and Karl Rove let Grover Norquist get his hands on government and he dragged it to the bathroom to drown it, America appears to have pulled the plug from the tub.

Unfortunately, too much water may have already run out of the tub. Grover Norquist had an idea that caught on with conservatives a long time ago, long enough for them to have improved on the idea. It started with Ronald Reagan. He decided he would make sure that America's appetite for government spending would be forever squelched by a plan that might also help Reagan with his other great ambition, winning the Cold War by escalating the arms race until the Soviet Union economy collapsed. It's called "starving the beast". Bill Moyers spoke of the plan in June of 2004.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us 20 years ago, when he predicted that President Ronald Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions.

But then Bill Clinton did what no Democrat was ever expected to do, he balanced the Federal Budget without significantly raising income taxes. That was a major setback for the foes of big government. So when Bush took office, he was determined to further Reagan's policies. Then 9/11 presented him with an historic opportunity. He would spend the US economy so deep in debt that no matter what happened in future elections, there would be so much owed in the National Debt, government would have to dramatically increase taxes or shrink the Federal budget just to allow payment of interest on the colossal outstanding loan. John Podesta understands the problem. He was the last chief of staff to serve under Clinton and currently heads the Center for American Progress. He was quoted in a January 2005 New York Times Magazine article, "Breaking the Code" by Nicholas Confessore.

Podesta has little faith in the conservatives' trickle-down approach. He also says it is bad economic policy -- "fatally flawed," as he put it. "We're already seeing the current account deficit increase by $600 billion a year," he continued. "People are mortgaged to the hilt. The middle class is now being fundamentally squeezed. They've gotten no benefit from the tax reduction. G.D.P. growth is going almost all to corporate profits. And we're creating an overall economic circumstance in which the dollar is certain to drop, interest rates are certain to rise and growth over the long term looks kind of sketchy." To understand why the G.O.P. has pursued such a policy, Podesta argues, you have to look at the political dividends, not the economic ones. "What are the structural elements of what they are trying to do with the tax code?" he began, busying himself at a small coffee machine. "I would say there are three. One is to eliminate taxation on wealth and investment. Second is to create a revenue stream that aims at a government the size of which we haven't seen almost since before the Depression." Already, he points out, the government takes in far less than it spends, forcing the Bush administration to borrow billions of dollars to cover the revenue lost from cutting taxes. "Three is that if you build in taxation only on wage income, you have massive resistance by the middle class to letting those taxes rise. So you've kind of locked in three structural components that end up being highly beneficial to wealthy people, and I think, from a conservative governance point of view, create not just restraint on the growth of government, but essentially pressure to downsize the government."

Raising taxes on the middle class will be a tough road to hoe. Raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations during the coming sustained economic "correction" (read "recession" or even "depression") is contrary to wise fiscal policy. Raising taxes during a recession prolongs or even worsens the downturn. Globalization is coming home to the American worker. So far wages have just stagnated. Already however, we're seeing bankrupt airlines demanding staggering rollbacks of wages and benefits. New jobs go overseas everyday because labor is cheap. If we simply raise trade tariffs to make American goods competitive at home, inflation will spin us deeper in recession.
Soon we will discover how well Bush and his cronies have done their dirtiest deed of all. They have deliberately sabotaged the health of the American economy to further their narrow elitist interests: lining the pockets of the rich and ensuring a weak central government that can't compete with the power and influence of mega multi-national corporations. May they burn in a historical hell fire.