War on Iraq – Page 23

“Gagged But Not Dead.” Yet.

Published on December 16, 2005

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.

Copyright ? 2005 Village Voice Media, Inc.

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.

“The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking…”

Published on July 17, 20041 Comment

From Seeing the Forest:

Leading investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has told the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that videotapes were made of young boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison. The Bush administration is holding videotapes of these acts, said Hersh, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and other publications and who spoke this week at the ACLU?s annual membership conference.

“The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,” Hersh told the group, adding that there was “a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the
highest command out there, and higher.”

Seymour Herst, 1 hour and 30 minutes into the video: “America at a Crossroads,” 2004 ACLU Members Conference. (Realmedia required)

The NYT finally apologises for their role in the war built-up

Published on July 17, 2004

Better late then never, even if it’s somewhat weaselly. It’s “funny” to see how all those socalled reasonable people, quick to give Bush the benefit of the doubt were so very WRONG, yet even now are loath to admit it. I hope they’ve learned from it, but knowing the US media, probably not.

Over the last few months, this page has repeatedly demanded that President Bush acknowledge the mistakes his administration made when it came to the war in Iraq, particularly its role in misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda. If we want Mr. Bush to be candid about his mistakes, we should be equally open about our own.

During the run-up to the war, The Times ran dozens of editorials on Iraq, and our insistence that any invasion be backed by “broad international support” became a kind of mantra. It was the administration’s failure to get that kind of consensus that ultimately led us to oppose the war.

But we agreed with the president on one critical point: that Saddam Hussein was concealing a large weapons program that could pose a threat to the United States or its allies. We repeatedly urged the United Nations Security Council to join with Mr. Bush and force Iraq to disarm.

As we’ve noted in several editorials since the fall of Baghdad, we were wrong about the weapons. And we should have been more aggressive in helping our readers understand that there was always a possibility that no large stockpiles existed.

Quote Unquote

Published on July 12, 2004

We are asked now to accept that in the last few years – contrary to all intelligence -Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.”

Tony Blair, 18th March 2003.

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction “may never be found”

“I have to accept we haven’t found them and we may never find them, We don’t know what has happened to them.

“They could have been removed. They could have been hidden. They could have been destroyed.”

Tony Blair, 06th July 2004.

Beltway Kool Kids Klub goes to war!

Published on June 9, 2004

Steve Gilliard deconstructs the Beltway Kool Kids Klub’s support for the war against Iraq:

[…] But in DC, the shootings scared people beyond reason. People like Dowd and Russert were waiting for an issue to say how American they were. Their Irish Catholic upbringing made them not only moral scolds, but eager to revert to the patriotism of their childhood. Hippie politics and the questioning, challenging education promoted by New York’s Jewish intllectuals (and reflected in public school education) never sat well with them. They liked the time when they only had to believe in certain verities, like priests were good and everyone loved the USA.

The shootings, not, 9/11 made them receptive to Bush’s cowboy movie nationalism. The French, instead of providing wise counsel, were to be ridiculed. The Germans, who took a far more absolute stand, were ignored. The fact that the Blair government has never really recovered from the ramp up to war, also ignored.