Valerie Plame: Part 1
November 24, 2005
Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame
by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com
From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President xxxx Cheney.
Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.
Aside from the high-visibility officials involved or presumably involved in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame – Lewis Libby, xxxx Cheney, Karl Rove, etc. – we also have a generous sprinkling of neocons who, while somewhat less well known, have played a crucial role in not only the Plame outing but in policy-crafting and, perhaps, criminal activities as well.
The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon.
John Bolton's Attack Dogs
While he has always been an outspoken opponent of arms control of all kinds, John Bolton was assigned to precisely that brief by the Bush administration in May 2001. Now his brief has been changed to acting UN ambassador, though he has in the past called for the cessation of the world body. At least he's consistent in his perversity.
On Oct. 27, on the eve of the Libby indictment, Richard Sale reported that according to "several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials," Libby was told of Plame's CIA identity via a phone call that "definitely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department."
More specifically, says Sale, Bolton assistants David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz were part of the relay team responsible for leaking Plame's identity to Libby and then to Novak and Miller. "These same sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC)." Gary Leupp's Nigergate timeline of Nov. 9, 2005, gives further details on their involvement.
David Wurmser: A Blowhard Empowered
Bolton's attack dogs come from the very heart of the neocon establishment. It was Wurmser, after all, who largely wrote the now-infamous 1996 policy paper urging an invasion of Iraq for the sake of Israel: "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." Among the signers were Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Another was Wurmser's wife, Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser, director of Middle East studies at the neocon-friendly Hudson Institute.
Out of power but continuing to skulk around the AEI with his neocon comrades, Wurmser handed out yet more free advice in a similar study published in 2000 by neocon Daniel Pipe's Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon; it "advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon":
"The study, 'Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: The U.S. Role?' called for the United States to force Syria from Lebanon and to disarm it of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. It also argued that 'Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals' and criticized the United States for engaging rather than confronting the regime. Among the documents signers were several soon-to-be Bush administration figures, including Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, and Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky. Other signers included Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney."
When the neocons started feeling their oats with the return to power of a Republican administration later that year, hawks like Wurmser were locked and loaded to put these ideas into practice. With 9/11 came their ultimate opportunity. As Raw Story reports:
"[S]hortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Wurmser was handpicked by Harold Rhode, a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, a Pentagon 'think tank,' and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith to head a top secret Pentagon 'cell' whose job was to comb through CIA intelligence documents and find evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its neighbors in the Middle East so a case could be made to launch a preemptive military strike. Wurmser largely invented evidence that Iraq had close ties to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden."
Wurmser's two-man "cell" was officially known as the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, and was based in "a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon." In order to expedite Wurmser's "research," Feith and Rhode had to perform some "softening-up" operations on the professional intelligence community. A Jan. 26, 2004, report from Mother Jones explains their methods like this:
"[A]ccording to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be 'pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with,' says a former analyst. 'They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the f*ck out of there.'
Frederick Fleitz: Dual-Use Technology Personified
For his part, Fleitz was an old confidante of Bolton's and "on loan" to his office from the CIA. A State Department intelligence analyst on WMD, Greg Thielman, told Seymour Hersh in 2003 that Bolton "surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get CIA information directly." Bolton affirmed for Hersh that he had demanded and received "direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous administrations, such data had been made available to undersecretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specific secured offices of the INR [the State Department intelligence branch]."
That Bolton's boys would betray Valerie Plame should come as no surprise, considering their consistently vicious previous tactics with intelligence officers who resisted their orders to make the intelligence fit their case. In April 2005, the New York Times reported on several antagonistic e-mails sent during 2002 by Fleitz to Christian Westermann, "the State Department's top expert on biological weapons," who also worked under Thielman.
Apparently, John Bolton could not tolerate the "wimpy" language that the INR recommended he use in a speech about Cuba. The always bellicose Bolton sought to accuse Cuba of developing biological weapons – a prospect even more fanciful than Iraq's alleged ambitions in the field. In any case, the war of attrition had its effect on Westermann, who on Sept. 23, 2002, wrote a high-ranking INR official, Thomas Fingar, stating that the incessant attacks from Bolton/Fleitz were "affecting my work, my health, and [my] dedication to public service."
Westermann, a career naval officer, was moved in 2000 to the State Department's Bureau of Nonproliferation. In 2005, he testified in a Senate hearing [.pdf] that "Mr. Bolton was very unhappy that a working level analyst [i.e., himself] had the temerity to alter language that he wanted to say." Regarding Fleitz, Westermann revealed that "Fred was a conduit for Mr. Bolton to receive other information [from the CIA] … there were times that material flowed from other agencies to Undersecretary Bolton not through INR." Frank affirmations of Bolton's abusive nature while in the State Department were made at his April 2005 UN confirmation hearings by Carl W. Ford Jr., Westermann's ultimate boss at the INR.
Marc Grossman: A Dark Horse Candidate?
It's clear that Cheney assistant Libby thought to ask John Bolton about the identity of the CIA's "secret envoy" to Niger (i.e., Wilson) because he recognized that the WMD-focused brief of Bolton and Fleitz meant they had a good chance of finding out who was behind Joe Wilson's trip to Africa. They also shared Libby's neocon ideology. In short, they were people he could count on.
But why, then, did Libby also ask a non-WMD specialist like Marc Grossman? How was he in a position to help, and why did Libby believe he could be trusted with the mission?
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important."
She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see. According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
At the same time, Pakistan was actively seeking to become a nuclear power following another humiliating military defeat at the hands of India in 1971. This pursuit necessarily involved clandestine, black-market transactions, and it in fact led Pakistan to spawn the world's biggest eventual nuclear proliferator – A.Q. Khan, father of the country's nuclear program and supplier to numerous sketchy regimes and underworld characters. The U.S., as Seymour Hersh recounted in 1993, looked the other way as Pakistan developed nuclear technologies throughout the 1980s: "protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy."
Grossman's professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.
A Pakistani article published on Sept. 10, 2001, claimed that Ahmed's
"most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. U.S. sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed 'matters of mutual interests.' What those matters could be is a matter of pure conjecture. One can safely guess that the discussions must have centered around Afghanistan, relations with India and China, disarmament of civilian outfits, country's nuclear and missiles program, and, of course, Osama bin Laden."
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The Silence of Henry Waxman
http://www.justacitizen.com./article...enryWaxman.htm
By Mike Mejia
And so it was, that in November, 2006, the American people cried for change and reform, an end to the quagmire in Iraq, as well as to the open and crass corruption of Dennis Hastert, Tom Delay and their fellow Congressional Republicans. The Democrats were swept into power on a wave of disgust at the decadence and decay that had enveloped D.C., taking back both Houses of Congress in one fell swoop. A revolution, it seemed, had begun. The good guys were in charge now.
Thus, one could not blame prominent FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, who served as a Turkish language specialist from 2001-2002, for feeling a surge of optimism after the Democratic sweep. After all, it was the Bush Administration and Republicans in Congress who had done everything in their power to suppress her case, which revealed high-level U.S. Neoconservatives acting as Turkish spies (amongst other illegal activities.) And it was the Democrats that assured Ms. Edmonds behind the scenes from 2002 to 2005 that once they took over, she would have the full, open hearings she had been pushing for. Furthermore, the buzz on the Democratic blogs was that, since Henry Waxman was going to be in charge of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, all the buried scandals of the Bush years would now finally be uncovered. Surely Ms. Edmonds had reasons to feel the tide was turning.
Alas: The bad news is that the sweeping changes the people voted for last November have been severely watered down. The war in Iraq wages on, and Waxman is confining his 'oversight' to very safe scandals that reflect badly only on Republicans. He appears unwilling to take on messy scandals like the Edmonds case, which reflects well on neither Party. Edmonds and a coalition of civil liberties and good government groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), presented Waxman with a petition containing over 15,000 signatures in March asking Waxman to hold hearings. But Waxman has to date refused to give any response.
Henry Waxman knows very well who Sibel Edmonds is; he can't plead ignorance. He has heard her testimony behind closed doors and has worked with her and her organization, the National Security Whistleblower's Coalition, in drafting whistleblower legislation. But despite the shock and outrage that Waxman apparently expressed when he heard the full classified version of Edmonds' allegations, his answer to the former translator and her grassroots supporters has been silence. Absolute silence.
For the record, the whistleblower's sources in Congress told her Waxman was initially disposed to hold hearings on the Edmonds case, but they were not going to be hearings that dug into the heart of the matter. They would not have exposed the darker machinations of the Turkish and Israeli lobbies, nor exposed an underground network of arms and drugs dealers with its tentacles reaching into U.S. agencies. Indeed, such hearings probably would not have allowed the words "Turkey" or "Israel" to be mentioned at all, much less named some of the U.S officials allegedly involved in passing classified information to these foreign powers. The hearings Waxman had planned, according to the grapevine, would have been the type of hearings to put even the most ardent Constitutional legal scholar to sleep for the night: they would have been sham discussions on the more arcane details of the 'state secrets privilege', with testimony limited to boring Bush hacks like FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Edmonds, a very strong-willed individual with a low tolerance for weak-kneed politicos, sent a clear message through her own channels: ‘no hearings’ were better than trumped up ones. Ms. Edmonds was not willing to let Waxman or any other politician grab the limelight and become "hero of the blogs for a day" unless they were really prepared to go to bat on this issue and defy John Ashcroft’s illegal retroactive classification. In the face of her principled stand, Waxman appears to have caved to the will of corrupt interests. His choice is logical from a political perspective, especially considering the Turkish lobby has now hired former Democratic House Minority leader Richard Gephardt. Waxman won't investigate these allegations because his current colleagues in the House and ex-colleagues like xxxx Gephardt and Stephen Solarz do not want him to. He has everything to lose, and nothing to gain, from a political perspective: by digging up this can of worms, he risks exposing that corruption and bad foreign policy is not limited to the Bush Administration.
Should the grassroots be surprised that Waxman made a choice to snub Edmonds, the ACLU and CREW? Sure, Edmonds was declared 'credible' by conservative Senator Charles Grassley, and was largely backed up in her core allegations by the Department of Justice's own Inspector General Report. And, yes, Edmonds’ translations of Turkish counterintelligence wiretaps do not look good for hated conservatives like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Dennis Hastert. But these same wiretaps also do not look great for at least one Clinton appointee, former Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, or for at least two as of yet unnamed Democrats in Congress. Nor would they look good for the Turkish Lobby, the Israeli Lobby or defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, the beneficiaries of apparent corruption run out of the American Turkish Council. In Washington D.C., the only scandal that gets exposed is the scandal that implicates the other party and stays away from hurting vested groups that fund both Democrats and Republicans alike.
As former DEA agent and radio host Michael Levine noted in a recent interview with Australian Luke Ryland, a blogger who has written the most extensive investigative reports on the Edmonds case, the U.S. Congress has rarely tackled thorny issues like this Turkish corruption case. Not only do the Democrats have no backbone, but many of their own are bought off by the same special interest groups as the GOP, especially in the areas that touch on the military industrial complex and foreign policy. Most of the progressive community have not yet caught on to this harsh reality, and instead is focused on the 2008 elections. More sound advice would be to forget about 2008 and start holding the Democratic Party to its campaign promises. Otherwise, the illegal Bush wars will grind on and the corruption will continue unabated- albeit the Democrats will be getting a greater share of the lobbyist largesse.
Mike Mejia is a freelance writer with a degree in International Policy from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he specialized in International Trade and Arms Proliferation. He can be contacted at [email protected].Leave a comment:
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Interview Part II
Originally posted by Joseph View Post
. In Gag We Trust?
An Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Part II)
By Khatchig Mouradian
Part I of this interview appeared in last week's issue.
K.M. - Let us talk about you: your frustrations, your feelings. How do you
deal with all of this?
S.E. - I can't say it's been easy, the anger and disappointment over knowing
that my country, my government, has let me down, that the mainstream media
has let all of us down. With many whistleblowers, the pressure reaches a
point where they either have nervous breakdowns or they explode. And many of
them do explode or they get disgusted and go away. After one or two years of
fighting, they say the heck with it, I'm just going to leave.
If you explode, you have given them the perfect excuse to point at you and
say, look this person is crazy, she's not legitimate. If you go and expose
some documents, they have an excuse to say you have breached security and
should be jailed - and again, they benefit. They get away with this because
nobody has been willing to come forward, and right now, it's only me. If
there had been one or two other agents who had committed to that much
compromise and sacrifice and come forward, maybe we would have seen some
progress. But the fear factor is so great out there.
I've lived in this country for 18 years and am an American citizen. Maybe a
lot of people born here take their citizenship for granted, but for me it
was a conscious choice. At that point I was a student of this country's
history and its laws, and I was mesmerized. As part of that oath you make a
commitment to stand up for this country's constitution and rights and
people, whether the enemies threatening it are foreign or domestic. And I
did take it seriously and I do take it seriously, and I also look at the
alternative - the alternative being count your losses and go away; it's just
going to get worse.
Again, many Americans think this is about one whistleblower who lost her
job, that this is one case, and they don't see themselves affected by it.
With September 11, they saw themselves directly affected - 'I can be next.'
Well, I'm trying to tell them that with the money laundering, the narcotics,
their own representatives going against their own interests, they're all
being affected by the cover-ups.
It's been five years, and I never thought it would continue for this long. I
went to the Judiciary Committee in March 2002, and I thought that was it. I
thought that all I had to do was give them the documents, give them the
facts, the names, and everything would be taken care of. It was not. When I
went to the Inspector General's Office, I thought that was it. When I went
to the courts, I thought this was it, it was done. I never thought I would
be sitting here, five years later, saying that everything was shut down
successfully, and no accountability and no justice whatsoever had taken
place.
I set up this organization [www.justacitizen.com] to encourage other
whistleblowers, those good agents out there who dealt with Turkish
counter-intelligence operations in the FBI. And that's not the only agency.
There are other agencies in this nation, within our government, with good
conscientious people who should be saying enough is enough, it's time to
stand up.
K.M. - What can be done? What can the ordinary citizen do?
S.E. - It boils down to the people standing up and demanding their rights, the
right actions. I don't want to get my job back with the FBI. That's not what
I'm after. I'm not asking to be compensated in any way for my suffering.
I can never go back to Turkey and visit my family. I have been blacklisted
because I have committed, as any good journalist in Turkey would
automatically commit: the act of treason. Under their laws, anyone who
criticizes Turkey, or shows it under some negative light or hurts certain
official thugs there, is treasonous and should be arrested and taken to
military tribunals. All you have to do is read the Human Rights Watch
reports and see what happens to good reporters in Turkey. If they're lucky,
by the way, they will end up in a military tribunal, if not, they will end
up dead or disappear. If you look at the tens of thousands of people who
have disappeared in the past 10 years in Turkey for political reasons, the
number is astonishing for a country that is considered a democracy and a
great ally. You have tens of thousands of good activist students who have
just disappeared into thin air and nobody knows where they are. It happened
once upon a time in Argentina and Chile, but I don't know how easy it is to
say that things like that happen in a great democracy and an ally country.
But I'm not asking to be compensated, I'm not asking to get my position
back. All I have been asking is for justice to take place, for the American
people to know what's going on, and for those people who are working against
their interests to be held accountable.
Some respected, great Representatives, Democratic Congressmen, have
expressed interest in my case. The leader of that group was Congressman
Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and I briefed his staff several times, by giving
them the same details I gave five years ago to the Judiciary Committee. They
obtained the classified version of the Inspector General's report two years
ago and they were outraged. I have several letters from Congressman Waxman
saying he finds these gag orders stunning and that the Republicans were
preventing a hearing from taking place on my case. Well, in January, after
we went through the change [in Congress], Congressman Waxman is now Chairman
Waxman and there is no power within Congress that can prevent him from
holding this hearing. He has the jurisdiction, the authority to put the
hearing there, and I have already obtained the consent and names of
conscientious, good agents. One of them was the head of the Turkish
counter-intelligence operations who actually retired two years ago. They're
all willing to come forward and testify on all the issues I have been gagged
on. And that gag doesn't work in Congress during a hearing.
So in January, after the election results, especially since we have such a
great Chairman today, 30 organizations have put together this petition
addressed to Chairman Waxman saying you have been promising us for the past
five years. These are major organizations, and we call them transpartisan,
because there are organizations from the right, organizations from the left,
organizations that are whistleblower-related such as the Project on
Government Oversight (POGO), the Government Accountability Project (GAP),
the National Whistleblower Center, human rights organizations, the National
Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), civil liberties-related organizations
such as the American Civil Liberties union (ACLU). We have 30 solid
organizations. According to the ACLU, there has been no case of an American
citizen who has had so many gag orders issued on her.
We also had 15,000 citizens sign the petition, and they delivered it to
Chairman Waxman's office in March 2007, just over a month ago. And based on
the office's own report, tens of thousands of people in the past 3-4 weeks
have called to say, well, when are you going to hold a hearing?
But we have received no response and we don't know why. None of these
organizations know why because they have all the facts, they have all the
confirmation, they have the IG report, they have the executive branch's own
report saying she's credible and her allegations have been supported by
other witnesses and documents. We are not talking about allegations. We are
talking about facts, documented and witnessed facts.
And I still believe that the Americans who care about their rights can make
this happen. Maybe it hasn't happened because one of the factors that is not
present there is the mainstream media. We know the mainstream media has such
influence over the Congress. Maybe Congress is not finding it worthy of
their attention despite all these severe consequences because the media
isn't there.
The citizens can change this, the constituents of Chairman Henry Waxman in
California, in the LA area, can change that. They can say, you represent us,
you represent our interests, and you are the chairman of the Government
Reform Committee. So after not hearing back from Chairman Waxman through
this petition and 30 organizations, I'm trying to reach out to those
constituents in California, I'm trying to reach out to all citizens in this
country and say, forget about me, this is not about Sibel Edmonds. Let's go
to the core issues: What was it that I reported that caused all these gag
orders and firings and threats? What was it? What I reported had nothing to
do with me. It had to do with the interests of the American public being
stomped upon. It had to do with elected officials abusing their authority to
obtain lucrative early retirement positions afterwards as representatives of
foreign interests. And this is very important. In order to obtain it
afterwards they had to serve those foreign interests while they were working
and had those positions. In every single one of them that's how it happens.
You start serving the interests of outside influences before you obtain your
positions afterwards and say bye to your civil service career. And that is,
especially in some cases, criminal. That is not something that should be
tolerated by this country, and we need to set an example of those people.
We have the facts, we have the documents, we have the witnesses, and it's
time to do it. So stand up and call Chairman Waxman's office, keep calling
until you get an answer on when the hearing will take place. For each
citizen it may cost four minutes. But the benefit to this country, and the
number of issues that we are going to shed light on, is worth it. And if it
was not, they would not have gone this far to gag it. I have been fighting
very hard, but they have been fighting very hard, too.
This is unprecedented. If I am the most gagged woman in the history of this
country, and if they have gone as far as invoking the States Secrets
Privilege, the issue is important enough. So for anyone who may say, well,
how do I know this case is credible? I'll tell you that there is a report,
there are statements from bipartisan senators, Senator Grassley, Senator
Leahy, Congressman Waxman. And these are all on the record establishing the
credibility of the case.
Call Chairman Waxman and write to him and do not stop until we have this
hearing in place, and we have the agents testifying. I'm going to emphasize
two things here: a) that they testify on oath, and b) that the hearings be
public. I have had some hearings, and they have been behind closed doors in
the Congress. I have briefed them. They already have this information. It's
the American public's turn to hear about this.
It's possible that in light of the Chairman's decision to hold a hearing,
the government comes in and says it has to be in close session and not in
public because these are classified issues. But they're not. If that
happens, we won't get anywhere because then it's futile. I would not even be
willing to testify because I have already done so. Five years ago I gave
them testimony behind closed doors. So did other witnesses. It's time to
have open, public hearings and have people under oath. I will testify under
oath, and the consequences of lying are severe.
So let's make this happen, and let's say that when all channels we rely
upon - be it the courts and the Congress and the executive branch and the
mainstream media - fail us, we still should move forward and not stop, and
reach out to the American public, and make it happen. I hope we can do it,
because not being able to do it sends a very bad, awful message to our
children and our grandchildren, to say that active citizenry is dead in this
country.
Contact Chairman Henry Waxman by calling (202) 225-3976 or writing to 2204
Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515.
If you are in the LA area, call (818) 878-7400 or write to 8436 West Third
Street, Suite 600, Los Angeles, CA 90048.Leave a comment:
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Life as a State Secret
Sibel Edmonds
WHISTLE BLOWN ON: FBI
ALLEGATION: Bureau infiltrated by spy
REWARD: Fired
UPSHOT: $285,000 legal bill
Fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azeri, Sibel Edmonds was hired in the fbi's translation unit shortly after 9/11. Just six months later, after reporting her suspicions that her department had been infiltrated by a Turkish intelligence operation, she was abruptly fired.
The department's inspector general later found many of her allegations to be well founded and concluded that the fbi displayed "an unwarranted reluctance to vigorously investigate these serious allegations." The report offered eight recommendations for improving the fbi's translation service. None were implemented. Edmonds sued the Justice Department for unfair dismissal; former Attorney General John Ashcroft mounted an unprecedented defense, invoking the State Secrets Privilege to essentially classify any information regarding the case and even barring Edmonds and her lawyer from hearing the government's arguments to the judge. The suit was dismissed and Edmonds was left with a $285,000 legal bill. "Five years of fight, and it's like, 'Why do we even blow the whistle?'" she says. "It didn't fix the system."Leave a comment:
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Sibel Edmonds awarded
NEW YORK (AP) — A novelist from Turkmenistan who has been barred from leaving his home country for more than two years traveled to the United States for the first time to accept an award for his work defending freedom of expression. Rakhim Esenov, 78, a writer and freelance correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was allowed to leave Turkmenistan to attend Tuesday evening’s PEN American Center Gala in New York, after the U.S. Embassy and others protested the Turkmen foreign minister’s refusal to let him make the trip.
“It is very noble and humane to fight for someone you don’t know and to see them as a human being,” Esenov said through a translator in his acceptance of the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award at the American Museum of Natural History.
The PEN American Center advocates free expression, defends writers in legal disputes and sponsors literary programs. Esenov was arrested in February 2004 on charges that he incited social, national and religious hatred through the mass media. His novel “The Crowned Wanderer” was banned from publication by the country’s president, who said it was historically inaccurate. In an interview before the dinner ceremony, Esenov said he coped with the restrictions placed on him by “working, working, working.”
“I am by nature an optimist, and that helped me, too,” he said through a translator. He said he planned to stay until Saturday, and hoped to meet with publishers while he was in New York. The same award also went to Algerian newspaper publisher Mohammed Benchicou, who has been jailed since 2003. Benchicou published Le Matin, an independent French-language newspaper critical of the Algerian government.
He is serving a sentence for violating a law governing the transfer of money, viewed by many international press advocates as a trumped-up charge.
The PEN American Center said Benchicou was being held in a prison that was infested with lice and xxxxroaches and that did not provide medical care. The center honored the two men with the intention of applying pressure to their respective countries to lift the penalties against them.
Also honored Tuesday was Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who was fired from her job in March 2002. Edmonds has said the FBI terminated her contract after she complained about the quality of translations of terrorism-related wiretaps and reported that another translator was leaking information to targets of investigations. The Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI did not take her complaints seriously enough and fired her for lodging complaints about the translation unit. A lawsuit she filed against the FBI was dismissed after the government said it would not release materials supporting her case for security reasons.
Edmonds won the $20,000 (€16,300) PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. She said before the dinner that she thought her receipt of the award would help others see whistle-blowers as “freedom fighters” rather than “disgruntled employees.” Also Tuesday, Mohamed Hashem, owner of Merit Publishing House, an independent publisher in Egypt, was honored with the Association of American Publishers’ International Freedom to Publish Award.Leave a comment:
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Agreed - he has the knack for making people look pretty silly...Charlton Heston comes to mind...Originally posted by Joseph View Post
Agreed - the current admin seems to be very active in supressing this...one wonders just why eh? (no need to wonder)Originally posted by Joseph View Post
Unfortunatly I wouldn't count on it. Remember they are just (arguably) the lesser of two evils...they are still politicians (which in my book means the assumption of corruption unless otherwise proven to the contrary)...Originally posted by Joseph View PostLeave a comment:
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