The most gagged person in US history

#146437Wed 21/11/07 11:13

Daniel Ellsberg says Sibel Edmonds case "far more explosive than Pentagon Papers"

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5260

Ellsberg, the former defense analyst and one-time State Department official, knows well the plight of whistleblowers. He himself was prepared to spend his life in prison for the exposure of some 7,000 pages of classified Department of Defense documents concerning Executive Branch manipulation of facts and outright lies leading the country into an extended war in Vietnam.

"From what I understand, from what she has to tell, it has a major difference from the Pentagon Papers in that it deals directly with criminal activity and may involve impeachable offenses," Ellsberg explained. "And I don't necessarily mean the President or the Vice-President, though I wouldn't be surprised if the information reached up that high. But other members of the Executive Branch may be impeached as well. And she says similar about Congress."

An Iranian-born American citizen, the linguistics expert Edmonds has been described by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America" since filing her original complaints at the FBI, where she had been hired in late 2001 to translate a backlog of pre-9/11 wiretaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibel_Edmonds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

#146437Tue 08/01/08 19:39

For Sale: West's Deadly Nuclear Secrets

The Sunday Times (January 6, 2008)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece

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.

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds's story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. 'We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,' the source said.

Report at BradBlog:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5518

#146437Sun 16/03/08 15:22

US journalists ignore Sunday Times scoop on FBI nuclear scandal

Roy Greenslade -- January 22, 2008
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/greenslade/2008/01/us_journalists_ignore_sunday_t.html

Harry Shearer, one of the voices behind The Simpsons, has used his own blogging voice to ask a pertinent question. Why has a story broken by the Sunday Times over here about nefarious goings-on in the States failed to take off in the American media? He isn't alone in his concerns. Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers some 35 years ago, is even more outraged.

He writes: "For the second time in two weeks, the entire US press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch's London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt US officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the US Congress and the courts."

The dynamite story, headlined "FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft", was a follow-up to its January 6 revelation, "For sale: West's deadly nuclear secrets". It looks to me as though the Sunday Times has landed a genuine world exclusive that should surely have been broken ages ago by US-based reporters.