US officials help place foreign spies in sensitive military and Nuclear positions

[Guest Always Red]

If this story is true. The guilty individuals should be hanged.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle3137695.ece

 

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

 

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

 

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

 

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

 

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

 

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

 

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

 

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

 

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

 

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.

 

Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.

 

She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act.

 

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

 

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

 

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

 

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

 

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

 

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

 

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

 

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

 

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

 

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

 

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

 

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

 

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

 

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

 

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

 

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

 

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

 

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

 

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

 

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

 

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

 

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

 

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

 

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

 

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

 

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.

 

Edmonds said: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.”

 

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

 

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

 

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

 

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

 

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing.

 

She was able to discuss the case with The Sunday Times because, by the end of January 2002, the justice department had shut down the programme.

 

The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds’s allegations: “If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.”

 

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

 

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

 

How Pakistan got the bomb, then sold it to the highest bidders

 

1965 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, says: “If India builds the bomb we will eat grass . . . but we will get one of our own”

 

1974 Nuclear programme becomes increased priority as India tests a nuclear device

 

1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, steals secrets from Dutch uranium plant. Made head of his nation’s nuclear programme by Bhutto, now prime minister

 

1976 onwards Clandestine network established to obtain materials and technology for uranium enrichment from the West

 

1985 Pakistan produces weapons-grade uranium for the first time

 

1989-91 Khan’s network sells Iran nuclear weapons information and technology

 

1991-97 Khan sells weapons technology to North Korea and Libya

 

1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: “I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it”

 

2001 CIA chief George Tenet gathers officials for crisis summit on the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to other countries

 

2001 Weeks before 9/11, Khan’s aides meet Osama Bin Laden to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device

 

2001 After 9/11 proliferation crisis becomes secondary as Pakistan is seen as important ally in war on terror

 

2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists

 

2004 Khan placed under house arrest and confesses to supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with weapons technology. He is pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf

 

2006 North Korea tests a nuclear bomb

 

2007 Renewed fears that bomb may fall into hands of Islamic extremists as killing of Benazir Bhutto throws country into turmoil

[Guest The virus called humankind]

By BILL FERGUSON

 

 

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I've realized that you are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus." --Agent Smith, from "The Matrix"

 

Scientists believe there have been five major extinction events in the earth's past. A major extinction event occurs when sudden, severe changes to the physical environment cause the extinction of a large number of species in a relatively short period of time.

 

 

The most recent, which occurred about 65 million years ago, killed off the last of the dinosaurs and is believed to have been caused by sudden climate changes that beset the planet after it was struck by one or more large meteorites.

 

It now appears that we may be in the midst of the sixth major extinction event, and this one isn't being caused by anything extraterrestrial. It looks as if humanity, with its insatiable desire to breed, dominate and consume, is in the process of changing the planet so dramatically that we may eventually prove more lethal to other forms of life than any of the previous large scale extinction events.

 

The trouble started for non-human life forms almost as soon as we figured out how to sharpen sticks to make weapons. Even in his most primitive state, man has a way of remaking his habitat to suit his purposes. Game species are hunted to extinction. Vegetation that is useful to man is cultivated and what is not is cleared away.

 

 

Still, the footprint primitive people left on their ecosystem was extremely light compared to the havoc we began to wreak with the onset of industrialization. As more and more landscapes are leveled and covered with concrete and fossil fuels are burned on a large scale to power our great machines, the changes to the global ecosystem and the resulting rate of extinction for other species have increased exponentially.

 

Although the extinction of species is considered a natural part of the evolutionary process, the current rate of extinction is without precedent. Scientists estimate that a distinct species disappears about every 20 minutes, and half of the life forms in existence today could be just a memory in the next 200 to 300 years.

 

We have hit the Earth like a giant asteroid, or, as Agent Smith said, like a virus. Life managed to survive the previous extinction events and eventually made a strong comeback. But in those cases, the events that led to the extinction dissipated over time. Earth had time to recover and rejuvenate before the next calamity struck.

 

But there is no relief in sight from the virus called man. Barring a change of heart and a reordering of priorities on our part, the carnage seems destined to last until we make the environment inhospitable even to ourselves.

 

Perhaps by then we will have sufficiently mastered space travel so that we can leave this world and seek out a new one to swarm over and consume, locust-like, in our quest for survival on our terms.

 

If you'd like to learn more about mankind and mass extinction, or if you just feel like getting good and depressed, you can find more information at the following Web site: www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html

 

 

Bill Ferguson is a columnist for the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph.

[Luke_Wilbur]

This video is quite interesting and scary.

 

 

 

Edmonds claims that during her time at the FBI (September 20, 2001 to March 22, 2002) she discovered that intelligence material had been deliberately allowed to accumulate without translation; that inept translators were retained and promoted; and that evidence for traffic in nuclear materials was ignored. More shockingly, she charges that Grossman arranged for Turkish and Israeli Ph.D. students to acquire security clearances to Los Alamos and other nuclear facilities; and that nuclear secrets they acquired were transmitted to Pakistan and to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father of the Islamic bomb," who in turn was selling nuclear technology to Libya and other nations. She links Grossman to the former Pakistani military intelligence chief Mahmoud Ahmad, a patron of the Taliban who reportedly arranged for a payment of $ 100,000 to 9/11 ringleader Atta via Pakistani terrorist Saeed Sheikh before the attacks. She suggests that he warned Pakistani and Turkish contacts against dealings with the Brewster Jennings Corp., the CIA front company that Valerie Plame was involved in as part of an effort to infiltrate a nuclear smuggling ring. All very heady stuff, published this month in the Times of London (and largely ignored by the U.S. media)… Oct. 18, 2002: Attorney General John Ashcroft invokes the State Secrets Privilege (requested not by Justice Department but by State department) in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security, and asked that her wrongful termination suit be dismissed. In effect places Edmonds under a gag order. … Dec. 11, Attorney General Ashcroft again invoking the State Secrets Privilege, files a motion calling for Edmonds' deposition in Burnett v. Al Baraka case be suppressed and for the entire case to be dismissed. The judge, seeking more information, orders government to produce any unclassified material relating to the case. In response, Ashcroft submits further statements to justify the use of the State Secrets Privilege.

 

 

2004 - Grossman achieves Foreign Service's highest rank when President Bush appoints him to rank of Career Ambassador.

 

 

Patrick Leahy calls for investigation; Sen. Orrin Hatch, Republican Chairman of the Senate, blocks it.

 

 

May 13: Ashcroft retroactively classifies all material that had been provided to Senate Judiciary Committee in 2000 relating to Edmond's lawsuit, as well as the senators' letters that had already been posted on line by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

 

 

June 23: POGO files lawsuit against Justice Department for classifying material it had published; Justice Department fails to get the case dismissed.

 

 

2005 - …Feb. 18: Justice Department under new attorney general backs away from claim that documents posted by POGO were classified. …

 

http://pogo.org/p/government/w-nswhistleblowers.html

[Guest Sentry]

Over 120 Israelis were detained after 9/11, some failing polygraph tests when asked about their involvement in intelligence gathering. But they were not held or charged with any illegal activity but rather deported. As former FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has revealed, there was a curious failure of the government before 9/11 to act upon intelligence pertaining to an al-Qaeda attack.

[Guest Researcher]

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11 Fear & the Selling of American Empire