Listening to Sibel Edmonds

Listening to Sibel Edmonds
by Philip Giraldi, September 24, 2009

Sibel Edmonds, the FBI Turkish translator turned whistleblower, is the most gagged person in the history of the United States. The Justice Department under George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft twice silenced her using the rarely employed state secrets privilege. The government and the mainstream media have presented a united front against her, calling her a "kook" and a liar, even though the gag order in itself confirmed that she had a tale to tell about massive government corruption that was all too credible and would embarrass Democrat and Republican alike.

Sibel’s day in court came in early August when she was allowed to give a detailed deposition under oath in connection with a lawsuit filed in Ohio. Her deposition, naming names and providing corroborating details was predictably ignored by the mainstream media but was a sensation on the blogosphere. It led to my conducting an interview with Sibel for The American Conservative magazine, which appeared this week.

Why is Sibel’s tale important for every American and why is it being ignored by our elected officials and the Fourth Estate? The story is important because it is about massive and systematic corruption of our elected officials and senior bureaucrats with the active connivance of the media. Worse, the corruption was carried out by agents of several foreign governments and involved nuclear secrets stolen from American defense laboratories and military bases that were, in some cases, sold to the highest bidder. Some of the congressmen involved are now retired and working for those very same foreign governments that stole America’s secrets.

To those who claim that Sibel Edmonds is a fraud and that she is propagating lies for reasons of her own I would observe the following: Sibel has been interrogated by two US Senators, by the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s Office, and by suspicious fact checkers working for the television news program 60 Minutes, for the Times of London, and for Vanity Fair. She has been found to be a credible witness by everyone who has taken the time to talk to her and no one has ever been able to disprove any aspect of her story.

Could it be that Sibel Edmonds is a clever and possibly even diabolical fraud artist who has manipulated me and others? Of course it’s possible, though I would point out that she has convinced a number of skeptics that there is substance to her allegations. I for one spent twenty years in Army intelligence and the CIA listening regularly to scoundrels, liars, and thieves spin their tales. If Sibel Edmonds is a fabricator, she is a damned good one. I would also note that there is a fundamental flaw to the criticism of Sibel, which is that she claims that every single statement made by her is backed up by actual documents in FBI investigative files dealing with the activities of foreign agents who were suborning our elected officials and senior bureaucrats. She has even provided the numbers of the files. At the end of the day, either the files and the evidence they contain are there or they are not. If they are not, then the government should make its case publicly that fraud is being committed by Sibel and her supporters and take whatever legal action they consider to be appropriate. I would suggest that the silence from the government over this matter in itself confirms that the allegations are true in every detail.

Why does no one want to look into Sibel’s accusations? I would guess that it is partly because her tale involves Washington’s most powerful foreign policy lobby, that of Israel, and also the less powerful but undeniably important lobby of Turkey. But it is also due to the fact that both Democrats and Republicans are the evildoers in her story as well as senior officials in the Pentagon and State Department who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations. It is a can of worms that no one wants to touch, which is precisely why it should be opened and examined if the public is every to regain faith in government.

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