Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11
We're in big trouble if even half of what Sibel Edmonds says is true…
by Justin Raimondo
"The next president may have to deal with
a nuclear attack," averred ABC's Charles Gibson at Saturday
night's Democratic presidential debate. "The day after a nuclear weapon
goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent it and
what will we actually do on the day after?"
It's a question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no easy
answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most seemed
baffled. Hillary
Clinton made sure she used the word "retaliation"
with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she would retaliate
against "stateless" terrorists nevertheless insisted that she would
indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to have
a "haven" somewhere within a state.
Yes, well, that's not necessarily true, but what if that "haven"
is… right here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?
Say what?
Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel
Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of
telephone intercepts and has now told the London Times that several top
U.S. government officials conspired with foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear
secrets and sell them on the black market. The Timesreports:
"Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the
support of U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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."
Edmonds brought
all this to the attention of lawmakers,
as well as the American media, and several news organizations filed reports
– until a federal judge issued an unprecedented
gag order. Edmonds' story was deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed
to know what she knows, according
to our government, America's national security would be severely impaired.
Yet now she is speaking out, and what she has to say is unsettling, to say the
least.
Edmonds has named
at least one of the officials: he is Marc
Grossman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state
for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of
state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice chairman of
The Cohen Group,
a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton's defense secretary, William S. Cohen.
Edmondscontends
that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the intelligence
agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been permitted to operate in the
U.S. with impunity. Our government, she claims, knew all about it yet, in order
to placate the foreign governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise
to carry out its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking,
and espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.
As a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many hours
of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and Pakistanis,
Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI's counterintelligence unit.
Thousands of hours of intercepted calls revealed a network of moles placed in
various military installations and academic venues dealing with nuclear technology.
Edmonds gives us the details, via the Times:
"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
[Marc Grossman] who provided some of their moles – mainly Ph.D. 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 U.S. nuclear deterrent."
And "while the FBI was investigating," says Edmonds, "several
arms of the government were shielding what was going on." An entire wing
of the national security bureaucracy, associated with the
neoconservatives, has long profited from representing Turkish interests
in Washington: this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul
Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank
president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas
J. Feith; Feith's successor, Eric
Edelman; and Richard
Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique
ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign
his official capacity as a key administration adviser.
Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish, Pakistani,
and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S. nuclear secrets and
technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the black market nuclear network
set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q.
Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around
and sold his nuclear assets to North
Korea, Libya, and Iran.
This was no "rogue" operation, but a covert action executed by Gen.
Mahmoud Ahmad, the
chief of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, at the time. The Turks were
used as intermediaries because direct ISI intervention would have roused immediate
suspicion. Large amounts of cash were dropped off at the offices of Turkish-American
lobbying groups, such as the American
Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly picked up by at least
one top U.S. official.
This Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their respective
embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for potential moles,
compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the Times, "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." Nice
work, there.
This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted
spy Larry Franklin
worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel Franklin and pass
it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former Israeli ambassador Danny
Ayalon; Naor
Gilon, the former political officer at the embassy; and Rafi
Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And there is indeed a connection
to the Franklin case, according to the Times,
"One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin,
a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense 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,' [Edmonds] said."
Franklin delivered
his "packages" to AIPAC officials Steve
Rosen and Keith
Weissman and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but others,
such as Grossman – according to Edmonds – did it for money. Grossman angrily
denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash transactions were recorded
on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S. officials were heard selling
the nation's nuclear secrets. As the Times relates:
"Well-known U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal
U.S. nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard
on a wiretap discussing 'nuclear information that had been stolen from an air
force base in Alabama,' in which the agent allegedly is heard saying: 'We have
a package and we're going to sell it for $250,000.'"
A vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign intelligence
agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials, including some "household
names" – if true, it's the story of the decade. Yet that isn't all. The
really scary aspect of this labyrinthine network of foreign agents, and their
American dupes and collaborators, is its connections to terrorist organizations,
specifically al-Qaeda.
To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected
of having wired a large amount of money into Mohammed Atta's Dubai bank account
shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times
reports: "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."
Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that's the first I've heard of it. However,
the U.S. authorities did round up a large
number of Israelis,
including these
guys, and held them for several months before extraditing them back to their
home country.
Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times with
the story, "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."
That's a reference to this
Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda
kingpin, one Louai
al-Sakka, who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a
camp situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.
Now that's curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country
run by a fanatically
secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the
Times puts it: "Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant
Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps.
But they posed no threat to Turkey at the time."
Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists' target was the U.S.
The al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top leadership
of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin
Laden – to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That
they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our NATO
allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel Edmonds seriously.
Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into place.
The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in
Edmonds' testimony. As Luke
Ryland, the world's foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:
"The
Times article then notes something that I reported
18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected
of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets
of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman:
'We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't afford for them to spill
the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects
immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.
"Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated
the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's
investigation."
Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of government
– America's nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold
to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign "friends,"
while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog
of fear, and warmongering
politicians scare us into going along with the program – if even half of
what Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big
trouble.
In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to reconsider the implications
of the question Charles Gibson opened with during the ABC Democratic debate:
"The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what
would we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the
day after?"
Perhaps congressman Henry
Waxman, who solemnly pledged to launch a public investigation into the allegations
made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept his promise. Maybe even the national
news media, which has been offered this story repeatedly,
by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they had covered it.
Fortunately, we don't need the "mainstream" media to get the truth
out to the American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we
can do an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:
As Edmonds says, "we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the
witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the intercepts
– put out the truth."
If a nuke ever goes off in an American city, it will probably have been stolen
from our own arsenal – once the American people wake up to that scary fact,
the
rest will follow automatically.
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