National Security Watch: FBI whistle-blower petitions high court

U.S. News & World Report
Aug 5 2005

Linda Spillers/Getty Images
Former FBI linguist Sibel Edmonds poses for a portrait at her home in
Alexandria, Virginia.

Posted 8/5/05
By Danielle Knight

Lawyers for Sibel Edmonds, the former translator for the FBI, have
petitioned the Supreme Court to hear her case. Edmonds claims that
she was fired in retaliation for reporting security breaches and
possible espionage within the bureau. The FBI hired Edmonds, who is
fluent in Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani, shortly after the 9/11
attacks. She was fired in 2002 and filed a lawsuit later that year
arguing that her firing was in retaliation for blowing the whistle
on other FBI officials.

In its defense, the Justice Department is using the “states secrets
privilege,” an argument that information related to Edmonds’s case
is highly classified and cannot be disclosed without endangering the
nation’s security. The states secrets privilege is an executive power
that is not a law, but based on a series of legal precedents. In July
2004, a federal district court ruled in favor of the government’s
use of this privilege in Edmonds’s case. In May 2005 the D.C. appeals
court upheld the district court’s opinion.

If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, the court’s decision
could influence the fate of several other lawsuits involving national
security and intelligence in which the administration has used the
states secrets argument. The government has relied on this argument
in several high-profile federal cases, including that of Maher Arar,
the Canadian citizen who claims the U.S. government interdicted him
at JFK Airport in New York in 2002 and sent him to be interrogated
in Syria, where he alleges he was tortured.

“We are urging the Supreme Court, which has not directly addressed
this issue in 50 years, to rein in the government’s misuse of this
privilege,” says Ann Beeson, associate legal director at the American
Civil Liberties Union, who is one of the lawyers representing
Edmonds. The states secrets privilege, she says, “should be used
as a shield for sensitive evidence, not a sword the government can
use at will to cut off argument in a case before the evidence can
be presented.”

Edmonds told U.S. News that she and other whistle-blowers from the FBI,
CIA, National Security Agency, and Department of Homeland Security are
so furious with the lack of congressional oversight on intelligence
and national security that they plan to launch an advertising campaign
targeting government officials who have allegedly endangered national
security. The newspaper ads, which could be launched as early as two
months from now, would name officials, their titles, their salaries,
where they work, and their alleged or documented wrongdoing, says
Edmonds. The campaign would be funded by private donations and would
be coordinated by the recently formed advocacy group she heads,
the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

Edmonds is the subject of a 10-page story in September’s Vanity
Fair released this week. The article reveals some new details of the
wiretaps Edmonds translated that involved conversations by members of
Turkish associations and the Turkish Consulate in Chicago as part of
an FBI counterintelligence investigation. According to the wiretaps,
the article claims that members of these Turkish groups had arranged
for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to the campaign funds of
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, in small checks
under $200, so they wouldn’t have to be itemized in public campaign
filings. Hastert’s voice was never heard in the recordings, however,
and his office denies knowing anything about this.

The article says that the wiretap recordings contained repeated
reference to Hastert’s flip-flop in 2000 on a congressional proposal
to designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923
a genocide. At first he supported the idea, but later he withdrew
the proposal. Hastert explained that he changed his mind because
President Bill Clinton was concerned about the resolution harming
U.S. interests abroad. But the Chicago wiretaps, according to Vanity
Fair, revealed that “a senior official at the Turkish Consulate is
said to have claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to
withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000.”

The article cautions, however, that “the reported content of the
Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no
evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert or his campaign.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress