Remember Sibel Edmonds? She’s the whistleblower who exposed Bush administration ineptitude and malfeasance inside the FBI –
When she was hired by the FBI as a translator after 9-11, Edmonds, a Turkish American born in Iran and fluent in Farsi and Turkish among other languages, discovered an odd network within the FBI where, among other things, relatives of foreign diplomats were working as interpreters. They were translating FBI wiretaps of foreign diplomats suspected of spying. As it turned out, these suspect family members were relatives of the translators–in other words moles working in the translation section.
Edmonds found her own initials forged on improper translations of documents–translations she had never seen before.
Edmonds was startled when what she considered ill-trained and incompetent interpreters were sent to Guantanamo Bay to translate detainee interviews. For example, one Turkish Kurd was dispatched to interpret Farsi, a language he did not speak.
Edmonds learned that a longtime reliable FBI asset who reported on Afghanistan, told FBI agents in April 2001 of al Qaeda?s plans to attack the U.S.
In the course of her work, Edmonds discovered Islamic terrorists might well have become entangled in ongoing international drug and money laundering. She suspects that this knowledge was one of the reasons the Justice Department classified everything in her case.
When Edmonds sought to protest these and other irregularities to her superiors in the FBI, she was called a ?whore? by her supervising agent, who told her he would next see her in jail. She was dismissed and escorted out of the FBI building. Edmonds never got a hearing before the 9-11 Commission, though she did have a chance to tell her story, sort of, on the side. A recent federal appeals court hearing on her case was made secret in the interest of national security. All in all, she was cast out as an enemy of the state. To fight back, she has launched a new organization to protect other government whistleblowers.
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The US government is pulling out all the stops to ensure Edmonds’ story is not made public.
In June 2002 the FBI itself acknowledged the truth of some of Edmonds’ allegations, and US Senators Grassley and Leahy wrote to the Justice Department Inspector General asking specific questions about Edmonds’ allegations – they say that the FBI has confirmed many of her allegations in unclassified briefings but that the letter stating this was later retroactively classified in May 2004. Members of congress have also published documents related to her case on their websites, only to be ordered to remove them on national security grounds.
I have often wondered why there seems to be a preponderance of women whistleblowers? Katherine Gun, Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins, Colleen Rowley , Sarah Keays… it can’t be that women are more honest or fair minded than men. It’s only a personal theory, but it may be that as women tend to be kept outside the overwhelmingly male power structures within the average large organisation, they are already alienated, which might make coming forward less of a moral dilemma. Whatever the motivation, or gender, whistleblowers need support.
Edmonds has now gone online with her website, Just A Citizen. She has a petition to get rid of the gag order and requests that people link to her site to ensure the information stays out there. She is worried, and I can hardly blame her – these are not good people and they’ve shown few scruples so far. We owe it to principled whistleblowers to help, and we particularly owe it to women whistleblowers. They’re not just fighting organisational corruption alone, but as women, they have to fight doubly hard to be heard.
I urge you to link to the site and sign the petition. Let’s get the information out there. They can’t gag us all.
