On Jan 9, 1:01 am, Ramabriga <Ramabr...@gmail.com> wrote:

January 7, 2008
Nukes, Spooks, and the Specter of 9/11
We're in big trouble if even half of what Sibel Edmonds says is true...
by Justin Raimondo

"The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack," averred
ABC's Charles Gibson at Saturday night's Democratic presidential debate.
"The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would
we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day
after?"

It's a question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no
easy answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most
seemed baffled. Hillary Clinton made sure she used the word "retaliation"
with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she would
retaliate against "stateless" terrorists nevertheless insisted that she
would indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to
have a "haven" somewhere within a state.

Yes, well, that's not necessarily true, but what if that "haven" is...
right here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?

Say what?

Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel Edmonds, a former
translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of telephone
intercepts and has now told the London Times that several top U.S.
government officials conspired with foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear
secrets and sell them on the black market. The Timesreports:

"Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the
support of U.S. 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 U.S. 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. However, Edmonds
said: 'He was aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing
them highly classified information, not only from the State Department
but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political
objectives.'

"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."

Edmonds brought all this to the attention of lawmakers, as well as the
American media, and several news organizations filed reports - until a
federal judge issued an unprecedented gag order. Edmonds' story was
deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed to know what she
knows, according to our government, America's national security would be
severely impaired. Yet now she is speaking out, and what she has to say
is unsettling, to say the least.

Edmonds has named at least one of the officials: he is Marc Grossman, a
former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for
European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of
state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice chairman
of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton's defense
secretary, William S. Cohen.

Edmondscontends that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated
with the intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been
permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she
claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign
governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out its
activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and
espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.

As a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many
hours of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and
Pakistanis, Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI's
counterintelligence unit. Thousands of hours of intercepted calls
revealed a network of moles placed in various military installations and
academic venues dealing with nuclear technology. Edmonds gives us the
details, via the Times:

"Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every
month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. 'The network
appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the
United States,' she said.

"They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department
official [Marc Grossman] who provided some of their moles - mainly Ph.D.
students - with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research
facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New
Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the U.S. nuclear
deterrent."

And "while the FBI was investigating," says Edmonds, "several arms of the
government were shielding what was going on." An entire wing of the
national security bureaucracy, associated with the neoconservatives, has
long profited from representing Turkish interests in Washington: this
group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief
intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president;
former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith's
successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon
whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to
resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser.

Edmonds draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish,
Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S.
nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the
black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.
The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and
sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

This was no "rogue" operation, but a covert action executed by Gen.
Mahmoud Ahmad, the chief of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, at
the time. The Turks were used as intermediaries because direct ISI
intervention would have roused immediate suspicion. Large amounts of cash
were dropped off at the offices of Turkish-American lobbying groups, such
as the American Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly
picked up by at least one top U.S. official.

This Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their
respective embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for
potential moles, compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the
Times, "contained all their 'hooking points,' which could be financial or
sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff
they had access to." Nice work, there.

This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted spy Larry
Franklin worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel
Franklin and pass it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former
Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon; Naor Gilon, the former political officer
at the embassy; and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And
there is indeed a connection to the Franklin case, according to the
Times,

"One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a
former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense
information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an
Israeli diplomat. 'He was one of the top people providing information and
packages during 2000 and 2001,' [Edmonds] said."

Franklin delivered his "packages" to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and
Keith Weissman and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but
others, such as Grossman - according to Edmonds - did it for money.
Grossman angrily denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash
transactions were recorded on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S.
officials were heard selling the nation's nuclear secrets. As the Times
relates:

"Well-known U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal
U.S. nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent
overheard on a wiretap discussing 'nuclear information that had been
stolen from an air force base in Alabama,' in which the agent allegedly
is heard saying: 'We have a package and we're going to sell it for
$250,000.'"

A vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign
intelligence agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials,
including some "household names" - if true, it's the story of the decade.
Yet that isn't all. The really scary aspect of this labyrinthine network
of foreign agents, and their American dupes and collaborators, is its
connections to terrorist organizations, specifically al-Qaeda.

To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected of having wired a large amount of
money into Mohammed Atta's Dubai bank account shortly before the 9/11
terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times reports: "Following 9/11, a
number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI
on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks."

Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in
the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that's the first I've heard of it.
However, the U.S. authorities did round up a large number of Israelis,
including these guys, and held them for several months before extraditing
them back to their home country.

Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times with the
story, "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."
That's a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the
career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka, who claims to have
trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp situated outside Istanbul
in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.

Now that's curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country
run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate
such activities. As the Times puts it: "Turkish intelligence were aware
of unusual militant Islamic activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka
had set up his camps. But they posed no threat to Turkey at the time."

Not a threat to Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists' target was the
U.S. The al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by
the top leadership of al-Qaeda - i.e., bin Laden - to carry out the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That they were nurtured and
steeled for their mission under the noses of our NATO allies in Ankara
seems bizarre - until one begins to take Sibel Edmonds seriously. Then
the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into place.

The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out
in Edmonds' testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world's foremost expert on the
Edmonds case, writes:

"The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago.
Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of
being involved with the attacks - including four associates of key
targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets
tell Marc Grossman: 'We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't
afford for them to spill the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their
release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without
further investigation or interrogation.

"Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept.
facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of
targets of the FBI's investigation."

Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of
government - America's nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive
scale, and sold to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged
foreign "friends," while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our
country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians scare us
into going along with the program - if even half of what Edmonds alleges
turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big trouble.

In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to reconsider the
implications of the question Charles Gibson opened with during the ABC
Democratic debate:

"The day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, what would
we wish we had done to prevent it and what will we actually do on the day
after?"

Perhaps congressman Henry Waxman, who solemnly pledged to launch a public
investigation into the allegations made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept
his promise. Maybe even the national news media, which has been offered
this story repeatedly, by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they
had covered it.

Fortunately, we don't need the "mainstream" media to get the truth out to
the American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we can
do an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:

As Edmonds says, "we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the
witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the
intercepts - put out the truth."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cm-uRQmfUU

If a nuke ever goes off in an American city, it will probably have been
stolen from our own arsenal - once the American people wake up to that
scary fact, the rest will follow automatically.

There have been so many wake up calls for idiot America from the
idiot
US Press, since nuclear technology was first developed, that most
are
now merely called back-burners, after the idiots restarted their
electonic,
bio-weapons, cell phone, Hollywood programs again.

Find this article at:http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166

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