LarryFlint.com
Feb 18 2010
SIBEL EDMONDS: THE TRAITORS AMONG US
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
SIBEL EDMONDS HAS NAMED NAMES. WHY ISN’T THE MEDIA REPORTING THE STORY?
by Brad Friedman
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE ` March 2010
SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following
government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason.
They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy
Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three
members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul
Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?
`Absolutely, she’s credible,’ Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told
CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. `The reason I
feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have
corroborated a lot of her story.’ Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of
bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft
of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush
Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds
from telling the American people what she knew’up until now.
John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and
Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon
officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. `Well,
the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,’
Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, `because
they don’t want this to go out and become public.’
But they couldn’t `work something out with Sibel’ because, it seems,
she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to
expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration
of the U.S. government by foreign spies. They were enabled, Edmonds
claimed, by high-ranking U.S. officials and insider moles planted at
nuclear weapons facilities around the nation.
`Everybody at headquarters level at the Bureau knew what she was
saying was extremely accurate,’ Cole said recently. `They were trying
to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet because they
didn’t want Sibel to come out.’
Her under-oath testimony for the Ohio Election Commission, given in a
recent videotaped deposition, is both shocking and horrifying.
(Edmonds was the star witness for Congressional candidate David
Krikorian in connection with a formal complaint initiated by
Representative Jean Schmidt [R-Ohio]. Challenging her in 2008, a
Krikorian flyer had accused Schmidt of accepting `blood money’ from
Turkish interests to help block a House bill recognizing Turkey’s
genocide of Armenians in 1915.) The deposition was allowed to proceed
by the Obama Administration, which chose not to invoke the draconian
and little-known `State Secrets Privilege’ to gag her, as the previous
administration had done, twice.
Edmonds testified that Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), a
former Speaker of the House, was involved in `several categories’ of
corruption on behalf of Turkish agents, according to information she
claims to have heard while translating and analyzing FBI
counterintelligence wiretaps recorded from 1996 through 2002. She
mentioned his `acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or
laundered cash’ coupled with the ability `to do certain favors¦make
certain things happen for¦ [the] Turkish government’s interest.’
Edmonds also alleged, on the public record, Hastert’s use of a
`townhouse that was not his residence for certain not very morally
accepted activities’ and said that `foreign entities knew about this.
In fact, they sometimes participated in some of those¦activities in
that particular townhouse.’
The allegations against Hastert include accepting some half-million
dollars in bribes. While several FBI sources have corroborated
Edmonds’s account, the best Hastert’s attorneys could do was offer a
nondenial denial to the charges. But the proof, as they say, may be in
the post-Congressional pudding. As Edmonds had predicted years
earlier, Hastert’who left Congress in 2007’now makes $35,000 a month
lobbying his old colleagues as a registered foreign agent for the
Turkish government.
Former Congressman Bob Livingston (RLouisiana), who was set to become
Speaker prior to Hastert until evidence of a sexual affair was
revealed by Larry Flynt, was described in Edmonds’s deposition as
having participated in `not very legal activities on behalf of foreign
interests’ before leaving office in 1999. Afterward, she said,
Livingston acted `as a conduit to¦further foreign interests, both
overtly and covertly,’ and also became both a lobbyist and `an
operative’ representing Turkish interests.
According to Edmonds, Representative Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)’likely to
run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010’was `the recipient of both legally
and illegally raised¦campaign donations from¦Turkish entities.’
Edmonds also claimed that hard-right Representative Dan Burton
(R-Indiana), who was instrumental in the impeachment of President Bill
Clinton, carried out `extremely illegal activities’ and covert
operations that were `against the United States citizens’ and `against
the United States’ interests.’
Edmonds named allegedly traitorous Democrats too. She said that former
New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, now also a lobbyist, `acted as
conduit to deliver or launder contributions and other bribe[s,
including blackmail] to certain members of Congress.’ And, according
to Edmonds, the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California) was said to
have been involved in `not only¦bribe[ry], but also¦disclosing [the]
highest level protected U.S. intelligence and weapons technology
information both to Israel and to Turkey [and] other very serious
criminal conduct.’
The most overtly salacious of the allegations involved Representative
Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is `married with¦grown children, but
she is bisexual,’ according to Edmonds. The FBI whistleblower
described how Schakowsky was `hooked’ by Turkish agents into having a
lesbian `sexual relationship with one of their spies,’ and `the entire
episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire
house¦was bugged¦to be used for certain things that they wanted to
request.’
Edmonds noted, however, that she didn’t `know if she [Schakowsky] did
anything illegal afterwards’ since Edmonds was fired by the FBI before
learning what came of that particular setup. The Turks, she said,
intended to get at Schakowsky’s husband, lobbyist Robert Creamer, who
in April 2006 began serving five months in prison (and 11 months of
house arrest) for check-kiting and failing to collect withholding tax.
Schakowsky’s office has vehemently denied the allegations. As head of
the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and
Investigation, Schakowsky might be expected to hold hearings on any of
the former FBI employee’s revelations but she has not. She has also
refused Edmonds’s challenge to take a polygraph test and has not yet
sued her for libel, as the whistleblower has challenged her to do.
Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against
high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration.
Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds
told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi’a 17-year CIA
counterterrorism officer’very specific details of alleged traitorous
schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As
already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and,
perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc
Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State
Department.
Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break
Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She
also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to
blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to
help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and
Turkey’and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the
technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan,
Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.
Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to
Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish
diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame
Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three
years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak.
That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of
treason carried out by `the most insidious of traitors.’
Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s
disclosures to me in blunt terms: `This was a massive coordinated
espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets
engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior
government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that
simple.’
According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice
Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are
`credible,’ `serious’ and `warrant a thorough and careful review by
the FBI.’
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key
element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of `the
FBI’s decade-long investigation’ of the State Department’s Grossman.
Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for
the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added,
`ultimately was buried and covered up.’
Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force,
not only finds Edmonds `very credible,’ but also confirms the `ongoing
and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United
States’ through a number of illegal means.
`Turkish individuals would ask for favors’ya know, `You help me out,
and I’ll help you out”and basically what would happen is the elected
official would either receive money or some kind of gift,’ Cole
explained. `Or, if it was a government employee, I’ve seen it where
after they retired, they get these very lucrative positions with a
Turkish company, or whatever the country may be.’
As noted, Hastert now works for Turkey, and Grossman now works for a
Turkish company and as a lobbyist’no doubt raking in a pretty penny
from both. Hastert and Grossman repeatedly ignored requests to comment
on these charges.
The mainstream U.S. media, however, apparently remain uninterested in
investigating any of it. Not even after Cole himself called for a
`Special Counsel’ to investigate and prosecute. So what the hell is
going on here?
Giraldi believes that, as with companies such as AIG and GM becoming
`too big to fail,’ the size and success of this massive national
security espionage scandal has simply become too big to bust.
He told me, `You have to look at Marc Grossman being part of a much
bigger operation in terms of the Israelis and the Turks obtaining
influence over our legislators and over a number of senior government
officials at the Pentagon and State Department. Because this thing was
so big, and it affected both Democrats and Republicans, I think the
U.S. government is terrified of opening up this Pandora’s box.’
Giraldi added, `The people in Congress and in the Justice Department
who should be investigating this¦and also in the media’because the
media is tied hand and foot to government’this is all part of one big,
you know, conspiracy, if you want to look at it this way. And,
essentially, this is a story that they don’t want to get out.’
So why, exactly, isn’t the media covering Sibel Edmonds, whom the ACLU
once described as `the most gagged person in the history of the U.S.,’
now that she is finally able to tell her story? It’s a story, after
all, that the legendary 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has deemed
`far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers.’
`If we had an effective mainstream media that was going after this
story, that would make it come out,’ Giraldi noted. `But we don’t have
an effective media.’ He then pointed out one more reason for the
media’s reluctance to dig into this story: `According to Sibel,
Grossman actually bragged that he would get from the Turks the
information that they wanted to appear in an article. He would write
it up, and he would fax it over to the New York Times, and they would
print it just as he had written it under somebody else’s byline.’
Guess we won’t expect any coverage of this scandal from the New York
Times, `the paper of record,’ any time soon. And if a story isn’t
covered by the Times, and thereafter picked up by everybody else, did
it really happen? Given the complicity of the media with regard to
Sibel Edmonds, it would appear the government never even needed to
invoke the `State Secrets Privilege’ in the first place.
As of this writing, HUSTLER stands to be the largest, most `corporate’
U.S. outlet in which these startling, now-public, on-the-record
disclosures have been reported. The moral: Pull off a large enough
crime, and it becomes too big to do anything about.