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Committing To Sibel
Posted May 30, 2005 |
Most of us never know when our day
in the sun will come. We live out our lives with a
vague sort of expectation that some day we will
"make it"--that we will have some degree of
happiness or comfort that will make all of our
effort and sacrifice up to that point worth it. For
people like Sibel Edmonds, those sacrifices have
instead resulted in punishment. Let me explain why
you should care.
 Shortly
after September 11, 2001, Sibel Edmonds began
working for the FBI as a translator. She had
actually applied back in 1998, but one of their
processing centers lost her application. When they
finally found it and read it, they discovered that
in addition to her other qualifications, she could
speak Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani fluently.
Since Turkic languages and Farsi are the dominant
languages in Iran and Afghanistan, Ms. Edmonds was
quickly hired as a linguist.
Most of her part-time duties
involved working with FBI special agents and her
coworkers to decipher pre-9/11 intelligence that had
been neglected up to that point. She seemed to enjoy
her work, but quickly discovered that others in her
department didn't quite share the same enthusiasm
for finding the truth: several translators had been
hired without the proper qualifications due to
family connections in the office; translators were
told to work slowly in order to justify funding
requests to deal with the backlog; and they had
actually let suspected criminals infiltrate the
department as well.
This last development was what
most worried Edmonds. While at her home one night,
fellow translator Jan Dickerson and her husband
Major Douglas Dickerson, stopped by to pitch Edmonds
and her husband on an exclusive "front" organization
that they were members of. The exclusivity of this
"semi-legitimate" institution intrigued Edmonds'
husband, but Edmonds knew that it was currently
under FBI investigation and that she couldn't
comment on either the organization or the
Dickerson's invitation to join it. The membership
price you might ask? Simply the tacit agreement that
Edmonds agree to become an information conduit into
the FBI.
 To
her credit, Edmonds reported all of these
irregularities to her superiors at the FBI.
Unfortunately, nothing was ever done about the
bureaucratic efficiencies and anecdotal evidence
suggests that they all still exist. The criminal
activities, however, were addressed simply by firing
Ms. Edmonds in the spring of 2002. She quickly filed
a lawsuit against the Department of Justice and held
meetings in June and July 2002 with representatives
of the FBI and Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).
Although the FBI allegedly
corroborated Edmonds' allegations in front of
Senators Leahy and Grassley, the meeting did nothing
to bolster her case as it slowly worked its way
through the justice system. By the time the large
class actions suits being driven by the 9/11
families decided to subpoena Edmonds, the DOJ
finally did do one thing: they retroactively
classified everything Edmonds had previously said in
testimony as a "state secret." In other words,
Edmonds case, the facts of it, and her own personal
testimony, became classified and could not be
publicly transmitted in any way. Effectively, this
was a gag order, and it prevented the Edmonds case
from seeing the light of day until May of 2005, when
it was dismissed yet again by an Appellate Court.
In a
letter from Senators Leahy and
Grassley to Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI
Director Robert Mueller, and DOJ Inspector General
Glenn Fine, they put a finer point on the problem
behind the gagging of Ms. Edmonds:
"While the needs of national
security must be weighed seriously, we fear that
the designation of information as classified in
some cases serves to protect the executive
branch against embarrassing revelations and full
accountability. We hope that is not the case
here. Releasing declassified versions of these
reports, or at least portions or summaries,
would serve the public’s interest, increase
transparency, promote effectiveness and
efficiency at the FBI, and facilitate
Congressional oversight. To do otherwise could
damage the public’s confidence not only in the
government’s ability to protect the nation, but
also in the government’s ability to police
itself."
Now, without the ability to
publicly talk about her case in detail, Sibel
Edmonds is on the search for one brave senator who
can legally ask her to discuss her case in a secure
room. Then, with her knowledge having been shared,
that senator can decide to ignore it, reveal it,
hold hearings, or press charges. Although we may
never know what Ms. Edmonds knows, she has already
revealed the following:
- The FBI, DOJ, and State
Department are all aware of criminal activity on
the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and
do nothing about it.
- Organized crime is involved,
foreign governments are involved, and key U.S.
officials are involved.
- Specific officials, if and
when exposed, would certainly face a trial and
prison.
- The networks of terrorism,
the drug trade, the arms trade, and money
laundering are all very similar. Nobody wants to
expose or stop one of these networks for fear of
hurting the rest.
- Sibel Edmonds appears to have
uncovered enough of the apparatus of these
networks to easily demonstrate their players and
mechanisms to the public.
This case is really cut and dry.
By playing his hand so bluntly, Ashcroft made
Edmonds the golden witness. It is almost impossible
to believe that she doesn't know something valuable,
otherwise, we would already have heard it or the DOJ
would have simply smeared her publicly. By instead
keeping her at bay with a 10-foot pole for three
years, the DOJ has practically admitted that she was
onto something. Let's take Leahy and Grassley's
advice and see what kind of "embarrassing
revelations" come into play and if anyone will take
"full accountability." Not in our country I'll
wager. However, we do need the one bold senator to
come forward and hear what she has to say. Please?
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