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Sibel Edmonds,
Turkey and the Bomb
A
Real 9/11 Cover-Up?
By DAVE LINDORFF
07/01/08
"Counterpunch" -- -- If a
new article just published Saturday in the
Times of London based upon information provided by US
government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former
Turkish language translator for the FBI, we have not only solid
evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government
officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those
same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets
to America's enemies, even including Al Qaeda.
The story also casts a chilling
light on the so-called "accidental" flight of six nuclear-armed
cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last Aug. 30
from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport,
Louisiana.
The Sunday Times reports
that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts have been studiously
ignored by what passes for the news media in American news
media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month
ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had
been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a
US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.
Edmonds, who was recruited by
the FBI after 9-11 because of her Turkish and Farsi language
skills, has long been claiming that in her FBI job of covertly
monitoring conversations between Turkish, Israeli, Persian and
other foreign agents and US contacts, including a backlog of
untranslated tapes dating back to 1997, she had heard evidence
of "money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire
nuclear and conventional weapons technology." But the Turkish
training for 9-11 rang more alarm bells and made her decide that
talking behind closed doors to Congress or the FBI was not
enough. She had to go public.
Edmonds claims in the Times that
even as she was providing evidence of moles within the US State
Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons establishment,
who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey, to
Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence,
or ISI, agencies within the Bush administration were actively
working to block investigation and to shield those who were
committing the acts of treason.
Pakistan's ISI is known to have
had, and to still maintain close contacts with Al-Qaeda. Indeed,
the Times notes that Pakistan's nuclear god-father, General
Mahmoud Ahmad, was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire
payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately
before the attacks.
Edmonds claims, in the Times
article, that following the 9-11 attacks, FBI investigators took
a number of Turkish and Pakistani operatives into custody for
questioning about foreknowledge of the attacks, but that a
high-ranking US State Department official repeatedly acted to
spirit them out of the country.
Edmonds was fired from her FBI
translating job in 2002 after she accused a colleague of having
illicit contact with Turkish officials. She has claimed that she
was fired for being outspoken, and in 2005 her position was
reportedly vindicated by the Office of Inspector General of the
FBI, which concluded that she had been sacked for making valid
complaints.
One of those whom Edmonds claims
in the Times report was being investigated in connection with
the nuclear information transfers was Pentagon analyst Lawrence
Franklin. Franklin was convicted and jailed in 2006 for passing
US defense information to American Israel Public Affairs
Committee lobbyists and sharing classified information with an
Israeli diplomat. Franklin, in 2001, was part of the Pentagon
Office of Special Plans, a kind of shadow intelligence unit set
up by the Bush administration inside the Pentagon whose job it
was to gin up "evidence" to justify a war against Iraq. In that
capacity, he (along with several other OSP members and arch
neocon schemer Michael Ledeen) was also identified by Italian
investigative journalists working for the newspaper La
Republican, as having been at a crucial meeting in December 2001
in Rome with the Italian defense and intelligence service
ministers. La Republicca reports that at that meeting a plan was
hatched to fob off forged Niger embassy documents as evidence
that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium
ore from Niger.
If Edmonds' story is correct,
and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and
Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government
officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and
nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker
shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last
August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot
strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and
regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six
unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
That incident only came to
public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force
whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times
newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which
were picked up by other US news organizations.
An Air Force investigation into
that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident,"
but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience
in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is
impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or
orders from above the level of the base commander for such a
flight to have occurred.
Incredibly, almost five months
after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet
unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring
in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six
150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been
no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into
what happened.
Yet in view of Edmonds' story to
the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing,
active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of
two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons
secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at
work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy
aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major
public inquiry is called for.
Meanwhile, there is enough in
just this one London Times story to keep an army of
investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask,
is this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper,
but not anywhere in the corporate US media?
Dave Lindorff is the author
of
Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal. His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's newest book is "The
Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
He can be reached at:
dlindorff@yahoo.com
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