Equality What’s the Deal With Sibel Edmonds?
by James Ridgeway
WASHINGTON, D.C.–The latest rebuke to Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who has been trying unsuccessfully to make public what she knows about the FBI’s 9-11-related operations, comes from the Supreme Court.
It has declined to hear her court case, thereby letting
stand decisions of the lower courts that enforce a
silence imposed upon her by the federal government.
The ACLU represented Edmonds. “Sibel Edmonds is a true patriot who deserved her
day in court,” said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann
Beeson, in an official statement. “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not see the ongoing danger of allowing the FBI to
hide its blunders behind the ‘states secrets’
privilege.”
Even though its own inspector general has found much
of what Edmonds has to say to be correct, the Justice
Department–first under Attorney General Ashcroft and now under Attorney General Gonzalez–have invoked the arcane States Secrets law to shut her up. The department simply declared everything in her case secret, in the interest of national security.
Here are some of the revelations the government is
trying to cover up, gleaned from earlier interviews:
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.
translations of documents–translations she had never
seen before.
Guantanamo Bay to translate detainee interviews. For example,
one Turkish Kurd was dispatched to interpret Farsi, a
language he did not speak.
reported on Afghanistan, told FBI agents in
April 2001 of al Qaeda’s plans to attack the U.S.
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.