Any remaining doubt that the American MSM (Mainstream media) has degenerated into the functional equivalent of Pravda and Izvestia in the late Soviet Union — submissive oracles of Orwellian obfuscation--has been banished by the recent case of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in January of this year.
A U.S. citizen and former Turkish language translator hired by the FBI after 9-11, Ms. Edmonds turned whistleblower after reading intercepts indicating a network of foreign intelligence agents was dealing with corrupt U.S. State department and intelligence officials in narcotics trafficking and smuggling of American nuclear secrets to Middle Eastern figures with connections to 9-11. Like any bureaucracy, the FBI fired her and denied her allegations. Edmonds filed suit, and presented her case in unclassified hearings before Senators Charles Grassley (Rep.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy, (Dem.). Both have publicly attested to her credibility, along with several knowledgeable FBI officers. And a senior official of the Justice Dept., Glenn Fine has stated: "We found that many of Edmonds' core allegations relating to the [espionage allegation] were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.”
In 2002, Attorney General Ashcroft slapped Ms. Edmonds with a “states secret privilege” gag order, and In 2004 took the unprecedented step of retroactively classifying all the documents and testimony that she had given the Senate Judiciary Committee.
There are legitimate national security motives for keeping FBI and CIA employees from becoming blabbermouths, but the Sibel Edmonds scandal trumps these concerns morally and legally — a treasonous and criminal rogue enterprise embedded in our government that may have transmitted nuclear know-how into the hands of Middle Eastern terrorists needs to be exposed and investigated. For the last seven years, her case has been widely disseminated in alternative newspapers, magazines, books, websites, and the blogosphere. Like Erin Brockovich, the heroine of the eponymous true-story film, Ms. Edmonds has refused to be intimidated, shut up, and go away.
And it may take Hollywood to tell her story, because the MSM has gagged itself and erected an iron curtain of silence around her revelations.
In January 2008, the major media blackout finally lifted when the London Sunday Times published an article thoroughly laying out her case, including some of the information she was prohibited from discussing by Ashcroft — that the smuggling-spy ring included citizens of Turkey, Pakistan and Israel, and that prior warnings from FBI agents about an imminent terror attack by Osama bin Laden had been suppressed. She also named an American official — former undersecretary of State Marc Grossman — as a central figure in these machinations (he denies all).
Another central figure is former Pakistani ISI General Mahmoud Ahmad, infamous (except in the U.S.) for wiring $100,000 to lead 9/11 hijacker Muhammed Atta shortly before the attacks, and who was in Washinton visiting top American intelligence and political figures the week before. As Libertarian writer Justin Raimondo asserts, “The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds' testimony.”
The London Times story was picked up by newspapers in many countries, including Ha’aretz in Israel, The Daily Times in Pakistan, and The Daily News in Turkey — all nations whose agencies were implicated in the story, and some where freedom of the press is a far more restricted and dangerous affair than, ostensibly, in the cradle of free speech itself, the United States, where the sum total of major media coverage remains absolute zero. The NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, none of the second or third tier papers, CNN, MSNBC, Fox... a perfect vacuum, excepting the unbridled reporting on Antiwar.com, BradBlog.com, and the online editions of the foreign newspapers above.
There is something rotten to the core here, and it’s not in Ankara, Islamabad, or Tel Aviv.
Edmond’s allegations are directly related to the accounts of other FBI whistleblowers — Colleen Rowley, Robert Wright — who have implicated high-level FBI bureaucrats in spiking field investigations that were homing in on the 9/11 plotters. So far, none of them have suffered even a slap on the wrist — rather, a few have even been promoted. In the face of patent negligence, malfeasance, and perhaps worse — outright treason involving the security of our people against terrorism — it is up to the Fourth Estate to take up where habitual government secrecy and bureaucratic CYA stymie the necessary housecleaning. But it appears the press in Turkey, Israel and even Pakistan is more honest and vigorous than our pathetic lapdogs.
Those who believe we are getting anything resembling the truth about the crucial dangers threatening our society — from electoral fraud to nucelar proliferation — from our press lords are as deluded as the babushka who trusted Pravda to give an honest accounting of Uncle Joe and his KGB thugs. For inquiring minds hungry for the uncensored news about the United States, the online editions of British and foreign newspapers, and many websites publishing these feeds, are the only fully reliable sources. But I have found one good use for the Washington Post , New York Times and other major dailies — excellent tinder for my fireplace.
See these online articles for more complete information about Sibel Edmonds:
For sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets, London Times
Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11, Antiwar.com
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