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 Times reports:
"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.
Edmonds contends 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.
GOTO
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