Sibel Edmonds, For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets

Well sir, treason season started early this year....
- Kent Brockman, The Simpsons

I have posted before about the case of Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI Turkish translator subject to a gag order under the State Secrets Privilege. It now appears she has broken that gag, revealing some of her story to The Sunday Times of London:

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month 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.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US 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 US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

I know a lot about this case. This story could end up a political scandal on scale with Watergate, or it could not get any legs in the US media and die-off. Needless to say if these revelations are proven true, it marks a sad day for our nation. The following are my comments are parts of the article:

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US 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.

The name of this official is also known to Bourbon and Lawndarts, who unlike The Sunday Times of London is not subject to the UK's notorious libel laws. The official in question is Marc Grossman, who was the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2001 to 2005, a former ambassador to Turkey, and is currently the Vice President of The Cohen Group.

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.

The Sunday Times again does not name names, and again B&L has names. Starting with the household names Richard Perle and Douglas J. Feith come right off the bat.

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attach's in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

More specifically Mahmoud gave the $100k to Omar Saeed Sheikh a British born militant who once attended the London School of Economics. Omar Sheikh sent the money to Atta to finance the rest of the operation, then right before 9/11 Atta sent the remainder back to Omar. Sheikh worked with AQ, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Those last two groups are Kashmir related organizations that wage terrorist attacks against India. Sheikh is known to have contacts with the ISI, and was involved in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

By the way, Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad was is Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, he had met with Marc Grossman a few day before.

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

It's Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, AL. Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson is likely the source of the stolen information. To bring this full circle, Malek Can Dickerson - the Major's wife - was also an FBI Turkish linguist with Sibel. The Dickerson's tried to recruit Sibel and her husband into the network on December 2, 2001.

Ebooks

I have uploaded some ebooks on international relations and terrorism studies. This page lists them and will be updated.

Recently added:

Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World, by Peter Bergen

Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf, by Bruce Bongar (Editor)

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor, by Daniel Byman

The Rise and Decline of the State, by Martin van Creveld

Hezbollah-Changing-Face-of-Terrorism.pdf, by Judith Palmer Harik

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing, by Michael Scheuer

The Term Islamofascism

AntoniusBlock at Strategy and National Security Policy blog has a great post on the term Islamofascism:

30 December 2007

On the Word "Islamofascism"

As I've pointed out here, I cringe when policymakers, pundits, and political candidates use the word "Islamofascism." It's inaccurate (fascism was a political and economic theory defined by hyper nationalism, militarism, corporatism, and a concentration of political power in a single person. The ideology of bin Laden, et. al has none of these characteristics.) More importantly, it sends the message to Muslims, who we hypothetically are trying to influence in a "war of ideas," that we are clueless. Rather than understand bin Laden's ideology (which is difficult for Westerners), we insist on stuffing it into a familiar box (a political ideology).

But I saw what I thought was a most excellent way of making this point on the smallwarsjournal.com discussion board. A poster asked how it would be taken in the United States if Muslims started analyzing the threat they faced from "Christofascism" or (and this is my addition, not the discussion board poster's), "Jewofascism"? I thought that really put it in perspective.

I know AntoniusBlock's real name, believe me - his insight is world class. And I am looking forward to the release of his new book.

"The choice is simple: Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge."

In an opinion piece in the Times Magazine the great Peter Maass discusses oil and corruption. I blogged about this matter last week.

December 23, 2007
Phenomenon
The Fuel Fixers
By PETER MAASS

James Giffen likes to share the wealth. His generosity to friends is said to have included $180,000 for jewelry, $30,000 for fur coats, a luxury speedboat, two snowmobiles and lots of cash. Overall, according to prosecutors in New York, Giffen gave more than $78 million to senior officials in Kazakhstan, for which he was indicted on federal bribery charges in 2003. What makes his case most remarkable, however, is not the startling amount of supposed corruption. Nor is it Giffen’s unindicted co-conspirator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan.

What truly sets Giffen apart is that he has claimed in his defense that he was an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. As a close adviser to President Nazarbayev, who in the 1990s agreed to a series of large oil contracts with American firms, Giffen says he was moonlighting for the American government as, basically, our man in Astana. Giffen’s lawyers have called him a patriot who helped ensure that Kazakhstan’s reserves of oil and natural gas would be controlled by American rather than Chinese or Russian companies. And they have noted an oddity — after their client was indicted on charges that could land him in jail for the rest of his life, his supposed partner in bribery, President Nazarbayev, was welcomed not only at the White House but also at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport.

The case raises a number of questions, including this one: in an era of scarce oil, can America afford to punish anyone who cuts corners to win deals for American firms? In 2003, when oil sold for less than $30 a barrel, it was possible to believe we could have our anticorruption statutes and our cheap gasoline. Four years later, with oil going for $95 a barrel, it’s not so clear. The British government, citing-national security concerns, has called off an investigation into bribery of influential Saudis. Delays in Giffen’s case suggest that some federal agencies may be more concerned with protecting secrets than with seeing the prosecution go forward. Much of the pretrial evidence has been sealed, but what is known is that Giffen’s lawyers have asked for sensitive documents that they contend will show official approval of their client’s activities.

As an instrument of resource control, bribery has been the recourse of corporate executives and government officials the world over. In the 1970s, after American firms admitted to spending hundreds of millions of dollars bribing foreign officials, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to put an end to these antics. For many years, the F.C.P.A. was not aggressively enforced and many companies outsourced bribery to middlemen or joint-venture partners. But as the corporate social-responsibility movement grew its baby teeth, the Justice Department began to show more interest in corporate bribery overseas. About 60 F.C.P.A. cases are now being investigated or prosecuted. Belatedly, American oil firms are being asked to, well, refine themselves.

Is it too late? The F.C.P.A. was passed when these firms were colossi in the energy world. Today, Congress and Exxon Mobil cannot set global norms on their own. They have to deal with a range of masters, competitors and rogues including Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hu Jintao, Gazprom, Lukoil, Sinopec and Eni. Desperate buyers — and this category now includes the United States — must compete against one another as they try to fulfill the wishes and needs of the autocratic sellers of petroleum.

I saw this firsthand when President Chávez signed an accord in Caracas with a Chinese company that would launch a satellite for Venezuela. Chávez delivered a lengthy and rambling speech, during which he flapped his arms in the air like a loon and raved about the beauty of Chinese women, the greatness of Chairman Mao and the evils of free enterprise, warning that “capitalists are generating death.” The Chinese on the stage, who seemed unlikely to share all of their host’s notions, slightly nodded their heads in the quiet approval that was required.

By lending support to the particularly dubious regime in Sudan, China clearly puts its energy needs above moral concerns. But the American government cannot avoid the contradictions of needing oil but wanting to get it, or at least be seen to get it, in moral ways. This predicament has been evident for a long time in our dealings with dictatorships in, for instance, Saudi Arabia and Angola. The Giffen case is a timely iteration as we fret on the threshold of $100-a-barrel petroleum. The choice is simple: Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge.

Peter Maass, a contributing writer, is working on a book about oil.

Conversations with History - Trita Parsi

Sy Hersh on the Iran NIE

Snoopy's Christmas

Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel was one of my favorite books growing up. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays from Bourbon and Lawndarts.