http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01072008.html
Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb
A Real 9/11 Cover-Up?
By DAVE LINDORFF
If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.
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
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512283/counterpunchmaga> .
His n book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512984/counterpunchmaga> "
is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's newest book is "The
Case for Impeachment
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312360169/counterpunchmaga> ",
co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@...