We still haven’t heard whether any of the networks will take her up on her offer – not surprisingly, most of the interest she has had so far has been from mainstream media outlets in other countries.
In the meantime, I gave a 45 min interview to Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, who has done a superb job covering this case. The audio is crappy, and our phone connection was crappy, and it was 3am here in Australia, so my voice was crappy – so I transcribed the interview, hopefully the text isn’t crappy!
Scott Horton: There’s this lady named Sibel Edmonds, and she lived in Iran and Turkey and moved to the US, became a US citizen and after the attacks of September 11 she heard FBI agents on TV saying ‘We need translators, we need help here, we’re at war against the enemy and so forth and we need to be able to translate what they’re saying to each other on the telephone.’
So she did her patriotic duty and volunteered. Actually, they already had her application from before and had lost it in the paper work or something, so they fast tracked her right into the translation department, and, my best understanding, I think she only worked in the translation department as a contractor for the FBI translation department between September 11 to early spring of 2002. That was it. Not even half a year.
Yet, apparently, during the time that Mrs. Edmonds spent there, working at the FBI, doing these translations, she found out some things that people with power would prefer that she hadn’t found out. Now, there’s big news, she’s willing to spill her guts, defy her gag order, and tell everything she knows to any major TV outlet in the US who will sign a contract with her, promising to air the entire segment unedited, and here to discuss this is my friend Luke Ryland, he goes by ‘Lukery’ in the blogosphere, and he runs Let Sibel Edmonds Speak. blogspot.com. You can sometimes find him posting up at my blog, TheStressBlog as well. Welcome to the show, Luke.
Luke Ryland: GDay Scott.
SH: Luke is on the other side of planet earth in Australia, so there might be a bit of a delay here.
LR: Not only that, it’s also 3.30am here and I’ve just stumbled out of bed, so that might also cause some delays.
SH: Why don’t you tell us basically about Sibel’s offer to the TV news networks, and their response so far.
LR: Well, you gave a pretty good introduction there to Sibel’s case. You and I have discussed it before, and you’ve had Sibel on your show a number of times. You’ve done a great job covering her story. The problem is that nobody else has covered her story very well.
Since April of this year, we have been trying to get Henry Waxman of the House Government Reform Committee to hold hearings into Sibel’s case. According to Sibel, he had promised to hold hearings into her case for the last couple of years, when he was in the minority. He kept saying ‘Just wait until we’re in the majority and the first thing we’ll do is hold hearings into your case because it’s very important.’ Henry Waxman has, I believe, read the Department of Justice’s classified report into Sibel’s case and was horrified at the things that were contained in that report. So we’ve been trying to get him to honor that promise since April with various petitions – there were 30 different ‘good government’ organizations who signed the petition – asking him to fulfill his promise, but he since has really dropped off the planet and refuses to even answer any phone calls or anything.
In an act of almost desperation, I would say, Sibel has decided that she can’t get a hearing in Congress, she can’t get any hearings in the courts – she was blocked from having her case heard in the Supreme Court a couple of years ago – she’s decided that maybe she should go to the mainstream media. She was on CBS 60 Minutes in October of 2002, but the mainstream media hasn’t really covered the story, so she has decided that if any of the major networks want to carry her story, she will give an interview to them, but they need to carry the story either live or basically unedited so that she can get the main elements of her case across to the American public.
SH: And what has the response been so far?
LR: Well, (laughs) there have been a couple of nibbles. We only ran this story for the first time yesterday, and I believe that there were a couple of phone calls from the major networks – but as often happens with Sibel’s case, a lot of the mainstream foreign media is interested, from Britain and Japan and a whole bunch of other countries. They were desperate to jump on the phone and try to get Sibel’s story, but the US media is largely quiet so far – but we’re only 24 hours into the cycle since we released this news, so hopefully we’ll have some other news soon. Sibel used the term ‘frustratingly funny’ that most of the interest is coming from foreign media outlets.
SH: I want to reiterate before we get into the media and the reluctance to cover this story, I want to first cover the fact that the reason why it’s taken so long for her to make this offer – this gag order is serious business, she could face serious prison time if she comes out and tells this story – and basically, correct me if I’m wrong, she’s been covering all of her legal bases.
She’s done everything she possibly could in the courts, she’s done everything she could with the Republicans in Congress, she waited till the Democrats came to the majority, she’s done everything she could to get the Democrats in Congress to help her, and she’s now completely out of official legal avenues, and only now is she finally saying ‘OK, fine, I’ll risk prison but I’ll be able to at least show that I did everything I could within the so-called law to tell my story without having to resort to this.’ Right?
LR: That’s exactly right. She’s done everything that she possibly could. She’s been talking to people in congress since about 2002 – so this has been going on for a long time. She got shut down in Congress, she couldn’t get to the Supreme Court, she’s had people on the House Government Reform Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, House Judiciary Committee, Senate and House Intelligence Committee, that she’s been talking to over the years, and they keep promising her that they’ll do something as soon as they are in a position to be able to do something, and they haven’t done a thing.
Sibel has been gagged with what they call the State Secrets Privilege, and she was one of the first occasions that this was invoked by the Bush administration, and it’s almost come to a point that the State Secrets Privilege is a joke. There are presumably some legitimate reasons why a government might invoke the State Secrets Privilege, but this particular Bush administration seems to invoke it just to cover criminality. They invoked it in the NSA wiretapping scandal, not to hide ‘sources and methods’ of the wiretapping, but just because, it appears, if the details of the case get out it will show that everyone has been acting criminally. And the same thing in the al-Masri case and a couple of others – they’re not legitimate invocations of the State Secrets Privilege, it’s just used to hide the fact that they’re doing stuff that is wrong.
SH: Well sure, that’s the way it always is with classification. Obviously nobody wants the codes for the President’s nuclear football to be put out there on the internet or what have you, but there’s a big difference between that and just covering themselves. Now explain to me this, Luke Ryland, why is it that every reporter in America isn’t after this story? It sounds like, from what I can tell, Pulitzer prize-winning material, from completely uneducated point of view on the case, I’d have to guess that the average reporter has looked into what Sibel has to say and they must have decided that she’s not credible. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they be running with this story and making a name for themselves?
LR: That’s a very good question that’s difficult to answer. Sibel has, I presume, spoken to many of the major journalists, I don’t know that particularly, but I presume from the Washington Post and the New York Times and the other outlets and none of them have decided to run with the story for one reason or other, and it’s not because, as you mention in your question, it’s not because she’s not credible, her credibility has already been ascertained – we can go through the reasons why her credibility has been ascertained, that’s already proven – but for some reason the major media won’t run with the story, really, apart from this 2002 60 Minutes piece.
That’s what Sibel has decided to run with, in this latest statement, she wants to have an interview with one of the major media outlets, and in the statement yesterday she said it has to be unedited – and the reason that she’s saying that is because on a number of occasions, including the 2002 60 Minutes piece, most of relevant, significant information is left on the cutting room floor. And in the case of the print journalists, they just refuse to print a lot of what she is saying. So one of the conditions of holding this one and only broadcast interview is that all of her major claims are actually aired – either she’ll do it live, or she’ll do it pre-recorded, but she’ll have 3rd party witnesses there who will also see exactly what Sibel is saying, and one of the conditions is that the media outlet actually broadcasts all of the significant bits, and we’ll have 3rd party observers there to guarantee that.
SH: Ok, Luke, I want you to share with the audience, as much as you can, as much as has been revealed so far, about what we know about Sibel Edmonds’ revelations, but first, tell me why you think she’s so credible. Go down that list for me of reasons why people ought to take what Sibel Edmonds has to say, seriously.
LR: There are a number of reasons – the Dept of Justice’s Inspector General, which is the ostensibly independent body with the DoJ, investigated her claims, and put out an unclassified report, saying that that a lot of her claims were serious, and legitimate. We’ve also seen a number of congressmen and senators who have investigated her case, including Patrick Leahy, Charles Grassley and Henry Waxman who have read the classified version of that particular report, and interviewed a number of 3rd party witnesses to the things that Sibel has talked about – basically FBI Special Agents – and they all confirm what she is saying.
SH: Right – I was going to ask you – cops and intelligence agents, have they confirmed her?
LR: Yep, the people who she was working under – absolutely. And the other thing about Siibel’s case is that it’s all documented. She was a translator, so there are wiretaps and documents and whatnot that exist, they physically exist, she’s not making stuff up, she has the document numbers etc. Basically, her case could come to congress and she doesn’t even need to testify because all those documents, all of the phone calls between the people that she’s talking about, all of them still exist, and they can easily be subpoenaed and presented in court. So if people say, coming back to your question, that maybe she’s not credible, well, maybe she is, maybe she isn’t (laughs), but she’s put everything out on the line. She’s willing to testify under oath, she can point people to the right document numbers, and everybody who has spoken about her case say that she’s absolutely credible.
SH: Ok – I fear that we’ve spent too long talking about why we should listen to this lady, and not enough time talking about what it is that she has to say that’s so important for the people who’ve never heard about Sibel Edmonds before today. They heard me explain that she was a contract translator for the FBI after September 11, what is it that she stumbled into that is so important, Luke?
LR: Well, as you mentioned in the introduction, she only worked with the FBI for 6 months after September 11, and her three primary languages are Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani, but mostly Turkish.
One of the key targets of the operation that she was working one was a lobbying group, similar to AIPAC, called the American Turkish Council (ATC), which is a lobbying in DC that was in fact set up by the people who run AIPAC. She heard a lot of discussions about terrorism, this was immediately after September 11, so terrorism, drug trafficking, but most importantly, illegal arms sales.
The ATC is a lobbying group, and the people represented there are the Turkish government, including the Turkish military, on the Turkish side, and on the American side, ex-politicians who are now lobbyists, and the heads of the Military Industrial Complex – firms like Lockheed and Raytheon, Northrop Grumman. So the ATC is basically where Turkey’s military interests and America’s military meet, and then hash out plans to sell American weapons to Turkey and to other places of course. And there are a lot of what Sibel calls – actually, I won’t say what she calls them (laughs) – ex-politicians and ex-generals and Secretaries of State, for example, who are also represented strongly at the ATC, they work with the lobbyists.
The real big scandal in her case is that a lot of this money comes in from various places into the ATC and gets into these slush-funds of the lobbyists – basically, former temporary House Speaker Bob Livingston, former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen and a couple of others. They then start slushing around the money of the Military Industrial Complex and basically bribing politicians. People like Dennis Hastert, for example, is one person whose name has come up as being bribed by this group, for a whole bunch of reasons, and Sibel mentioned in her press release yesterday that there are two or three other congressmen who have been bribed by these people, primarily for their votes so that they can, you know, redirect their military spending to Turkey, and some of the Central Asian states – Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan – so they’re the ones that are getting all the money, and military hardware from Lockheed etc, at US taxpayer expense.
SH: Ok. Let me make sure that I understand here. Basically what you are saying is this: Sibel Edmonds went to work as translator at the FBI and what she basically overheard was the outlines of this criminal underworld that is legitimate in some sense, at places like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, at the American Turkish Council, obviously Lockheed is a publicly traded company, and so forth, but basically the arms deals, basically the American military spending in the Turkic countries of Central Asia, including Turkey itself, is all interconnected with black market trade, and criminal enterprises.
LR: That’s right. I think that the primary outcome of a lot of this is that you get legitimate US government spending, on legitimate weapons, to legitimate customers in that region, but as I understand it, once you start bribing certain people in Congress and elsewhere, then you get a certain scope to partake in illegal activities as well, because it basically becomes a criminal enterprise, so once you start bribing people, in the Defense Dept… The American Turkish Council also has spies in the Defense Dept and the State Dept who help them pull the strings on these matters, and once you start bribing these people it becomes a little bit easier to ask for favours and whatnot. For example, oftentimes they’ll bribe, say, someone at the State Dept to acquire visas, for example, for some of their criminal friends, to work and some of the nuclear labs from where they can steal secrets. Or they’ll bribe someone at the State Dept to get visas for their criminal friends for various other reasons – so it becomes a slippery slope, and Sibel has apparently heard all of this documented on the wiretaps.
The nuclear labs issue is a really significant one – these people are criminals, working, at some level, in conjunction with terrorists, and they are placing their people into nuclear labs to steal American nuclear secrets, and selling the secrets – it’s not State espionage that we’re talking about – they’re selling the stuff to the highest bidder, which could very well be somebody like Osama bin Laden.
SH: So you’re telling me that people within the American government are selling nuclear secrets on the black market?
LR: Yes.
SH: And you mentioned two former speakers of the House of Representatives – Bob Livingston and his replacement Dennis Hastert – can you back that up, or what’s their involvement in this?
LR: Bob Livingston was a temporary speaker of the House, he was involved in a sex scandal just as he was moving into that position. He has a lobbying company called The Livingston Group, The Livingston Group is on the board of the ATC. He is widely known to be one of Turkey’s biggest agents, I don’t know the exact numbers, but I think he’s received something like $13 million for lobbying for, basically the ATC, over the years. So he’s one, there are a couple of others – ex-Democratic congressman Stephen Solarz is also one of their lobbyists, and William Cohen, ex-Clinton Secretary of Defense, is another of Turkey’s major lobbyists.
Now, there’s a lot of question around who is in fact paying these lobbying companies – there’s an enormous amount of money flowing to them, and all of those lobbyist groups have filed, with the appropriate US govt filings, that the Turkish government is paying them, but it turns out that isn’t the case. The FBI is in fact still looking at where this money is coming from. The money appears to come from the ATC, and it’s flowing somehow into these lobbying groups, but it’s all illegal.
SH: Now what else do we know about Bob Livingston other than there’s unaccounted for money in his bank account? What else do we know about his involvement with this?
LR: He, and the others, it appears, are the channel to get the money from the ATC into various campaigns, particularly congressional campaigns. As you know, in the US, to the amazement of the rest of the world, it takes an enormous amount of money to finance election campaigns and whatnot, so guys like Livingston have various mechanisms for getting money into campaigns, both legitimate and illegitimate. So we see Livingston and others throwing around money just recently into political campaigns to get congress people to change their minds on the Armenian Genocide resolution – and they also use a lot of illegal means, for example, you mentioned Dennis Hastert.
There was a ten page article in Vanity Fair, 2005, that mentioned Hastert’s involvement in some of these activities. He was bribed in 3 different ways – one, there were illegal campaign contributions flowing into his campaign, two, there were a bunch of envelopes being passed to him, $7000 here, $10,000 there, by these lobbyists, as far as we can tell, and thirdly, there was a half million dollar suitcase, delivered to his house in Chicago. Now, it appears that the mechanism for getting this money to the politicians, including Hastert, is these lobbying firms – Livingston, Cohen and others.
SH: Terrorism. What’s the link to terrorism? Basically it’s this one criminal underworld with these nuclear secrets and drug running and terrorist financing, is it all one big underworld?
LR: That element is a little bit less understood, as it pertains to Sibel’s case. Obviously heroin is a big financer of guys like the Taliban and Al Qaida, and a lot of the heroin that is being produced in Afghanistan gets moved through Turkey before it gets to the UK and the rest of Europe. Al Qaida and the Taliban, as we now know earn a commission of various sorts from both protecting poppy farmers in Afghanistan and also moving the heroin from one place to the other, so that whole industry supports people like Osama bin Laden. And the US government has done a superb job turning a blind eye to that particular problem. That’s the main intersection with Sibel’s case.
SH: I think she may have even said this to me, I know that she’s said it in other interviews, and I know that you have written about this on your blog as well, that she compares the war on terrorism to the war against drugs, where they arrest the street dealer but ignore the kingpin, and she seemed to be saying that bin Laden and Zawahiri are middle management, rather than the people in charge, and I wonder if I understood that correctly, and if that is true, then who are the real managers, the real bosses of al Qaida?
LR: That’s a good question. Sibel appeared, I think, for five hours in front of the September 11 Commission because there were some things that she heard on the wiretaps, not just relating to the ATC, but wiretaps of other targets as well, that were related to Sep 11. I wrote about some of it recently on the anniversary of Sep 11 just a month ago. If we go back to your earlier statement, you said that Osama and Zawahiri are middle management, I don’t think that’s true, I think that Sibel is saying that there is a level of management between those head guys at al Qaida and the highjackers. For example there were people organizing visas and money transfers, a middle management layer of al Qaida, and they haven’t been touched, intentionally, by the US government. People bribing embassy officials in the Middle East to get visas for the highjackers and so on – and the US Govt, not just the FBI, but the Pentagon and State Dept knows exactly who these people are, and they’ve refused to touch them. Some of them were in the US, some of them were in fact even picked up and put in jail after Sep 11, but they all, for various reasons, were allowed to escape the country.
SH: Again, I’m talking with Luke Ryland from Let Sibel Edmonds Speak.blogspot.com. He’s on the phone from Australia right now. I just want to make sure that I heard you right – that you were correcting me when I was saying that her implication was that there were people running al Qaida above bin Laden that aren’t talked about, and you said ‘No – she’s talking about people between bin Laden and the highjackers, below bin Laden, but people who helped the highjackers along with their plot and they’ve been protected by this government?’
LR: For various reasons, and the US Government likes to talk about ‘sensitive foreign diplomatic relations,’ – yes, there is a layer of people – I say a ‘layer,’ I don’t know how many it is, it might be 2, it might be 20, probably just a handful of people between bin Laden and the highjackers that the US government has refused to touch. In Sibel’s case, they like to use the excuse of ‘sensitive foreign diplomatic relations,’ – from that construct that they are using, what they are saying is, I believe, that there are people from countries that we don’t want to criticize, and I believe that those countries are places like Turkey, for example, and, who knows, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, places that the US govt wants to either sell weapons to, or keep as allies in the ‘War on Terror’ depending on which part of the argument you want to believe. There are entire countries that the US Govt has gone out of its way to wipe clear from the record of involvement in those attacks.
SH: What you’re telling me is that they’re willing to even cover up actual participation in the attacks because some of the participants are from Turkic countries, some of these ‘Stan countries between Turkey and Afghanistan – the heroin pipeline and so forth – who we want good relations with, we want to put military bases in their countries, expand our empire even further, and so our government is willing to cover up their involvement in the actual attacks of Sep 11.
LR: Yeah – I’m not sure I’d go all the way with that, but it is documented that there are people who were involved in the planning and organizing of Sep 11 that the US government has decided not to pick up. That’s just fact. Sibel has documented this again and again – she wrote an open letter to the 911 Commission after she’d testified, after the report came out, where she mentioned two or three specific examples of people who hadn’t been touched, despite their direct involvement in the network that supports the people who pulled off the attacks.
SH: Something else that’s come up over and over again in this story is the connection between the Israel Lobby and the Turkish Lobby and the Military Industrial Complex – we all know how that works – the American taxpayer pays to give foreign countries Lockheed weapons and that kind of thing, but over and over the names Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and a State Dept guy named Marc Grossman have come up. What’s the involvement of the neocons in this mess?
LR: That’s a good question. The neocons – people like Perle and Feith – are, I believe, the people who set up the ATC. They jointly had a lobbying firm called International Advisors Inc back in the mid-to-late 80s that was being paid by the Turkish govt to build up relations between the US and Turkey. So they’ve had their hand in the cookie jar, particularly Perle and Feith since way-back-when.
There’s a strange tri-lateral relationship between US, Israel and Turkey that’s been going on for a couple of decades, and it appears that the glue that is holding it together is the Military Industrial Complex – because as the money flows from one group to the other, everyone seems to win. On the Israeli side, I think that they say that it helps to have an ostensibly Muslim-but-secular country in the relationship, so there’s that reason.
Marc Grossman, on the other hand, is not widely known as a neocon – he was an ambassador to Turkey – and he appears to have had his hand in the cookie jar for 20 years or something. He recently retired, but Sibel says that Marc Grossman has since been promoted into the Military Industrial Complex, outside of the US government, and he’s now making something like $2 million a year, I think. Some from William Cohen’s lobbying company, but he’s also getting paid $1.2m per year from a shady Turkish company, and Sibel says, and likes to reiterate, that all these people – Perle, Feith, Grossman and others – the reason that they get these big jobs, big salaries, after they leave the govt is because they have been doing their duty, selling out their services to these companies in advance, while they were working for the US govt, they sell out the US govt interests, and basically, quote ‘earn’ their enormous salaries once they leave the US govt, by selling secrets, for example, along the way, or leaking documents about which country the US is going to invade next, or what negotiations are taking place regarding, say, military sales to Turkey. So they leak all of that information, purely for money, so that they can line their own pockets. Sibel calls it ‘treason’ – I wouldn’t argue with that.
SH: I’m interested in Eric Edelman’s role, he’s the guy that replaced Douglas Feith as the Secretary of Defense for Policy, and he’s a former ambassador to Turkey as well, isn’t he?
LR: Yeah, he’s a lesser known neocon, but also an important one. He was deep in the heart of Cheney’s office leading up to the Iraq invasion, I can’t remember his title, but I think he was just one level below Scooter Libby. So, for some reason, and I’m not exactly sure why, immediately after the invasion of Iraq, he was sent to become the Turkish Ambassador. He was hated when he was there. I think he only lasted one or two years, and then he was essentially kicked out of Turkey and landed back in Douglas Feith’s position in the Pentagon. I believe that his name came up in the wiretaps as somebody who was involved in some of the shenanigans in Sibel’s case, but I don’t know whether that is actually true. He certainly appears to be important in regards to Sibel’s case. He was sent to Turkey, in fact, just a couple of weeks ago to try to calm them down after the Armenian Genocide vote – so he’s still a big player there, even though he was hated by just about everyone when he was Ambassador.
SH: It’s interesting that you brought up the Armenian Genocide bill – the Vanity Fair piece by David Rose a couple of years ago talked about information Sibel Edmonds had – if I remember right David Rose confirmed separately with sources on the congressional committees and FBI agents and so forth that Dennis Hastert was implicated in taking a significant cash bribe in order to kill a vote to condemn the Armenian genocide back in the 1990s – do I have that right?
LR: That is as David Rose reported it in Vanity Fair. According to Vanity Fair, Sibel listened to some wiretaps where some of the FBI targets mentioned the fact that they had bribed Hastert with $500,000 to ensure that the Armenian Genocide Bill didn’t get to the House floor. Listening to some of Sibel’s comments since, it appears that the half a million dollars was not for pulling that bill, but there’s certainly a lot of lobbying that goes on by guys like Livingston and Cohen and others on behalf of Turkish interests to make sure that that Armenian Genocide resolution doesn’t get voted on.
As you mentioned, there was one just a couple of months ago in the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee where there was vote, and it was remarkable that it even got to that stage, but within days, Livingston and these other guys were running around bribing, I presume, a whole bunch of congressmen to make sure that they changed their vote.
Nancy Pelosi, current Democrat House speaker had promised that the issue would go from the subcommittee to the full floor of the House – but Turkey’s lobbyists went into overdrive and got a whole bunch of people who had announced that they supported the resolution to back down, and now Pelosi appears to have pulled the bill entirely. I’m not sure of the exact status, but everyone seems to have changed their mind. Again, this is a Military Industrial Complex problem. Jack Murtha, Democrat, was leading the charge to get the resolution pulled, and I think he’s the recipient of the most funds from the Military Industrial Complex, so it’s not surprising.
SH: And the problem, as always, is a lack of accountability. Here you have a woman who stumbled across, in her job, stumbled into criminality at the highest levels of power, and rather than there being grand juries convened, and trials, and accountability, instead they put the State Secrets Privilege on her, and basically they’re trying to make a criminal out of her, for just telling the truth to you and me.
LR: That’s right, and she’s a very brave woman. She’s been trying to do the right thing for 5 years. She’s been through every possible legitimate channel and now she’s willing to face criminal charges, by going on air and talking about these problems. She’s a remarkably brave woman, she’s been trying to get out the truth for all this time – and who knows what will happen if she does it? She might go to jail for the rest of her life, which is a horrible thought, but she really doesn’t know what alternatives there are.
Somebody like Henry Waxman, or any other congressman, can say to Sibel ‘Why don’t you come in and talk to us, in Congress,’ that, I think, immunizes her from any facts that she says under oath. That would be the responsible thing, I think, from any congressman, and I hope that Henry Waxman or somebody else steps up and gives her that opportunity, because she’s been trying to do the right thing, and she might go to jail for god-knows-how-long if she follows through with this offer that she gave out yesterday to appear on broadcast TV and give her version of events. And the other thing is that if someone in congress does this, then they can subpoena the documents, and subpoena other witnesses and prove that everything that she says is legitimate.
SH: You said that she could be facing as much as life in prison for violating her gag order, is that right?
LR: I don’t know how long it will be, Scott. It’s the State Secrets Privilege and I don’t exactly know what the implications of that are – I was probably exaggerating when I said ‘life’ – but I don’t think anyone has ever been charged with breaking the State Secrets Privilege – so I’m not sure there’s any precedent. They could put her in prison for a long time – let me put it that way.
SH: Well, I hope she doesn’t go on 60 Minutes, I think they only have 20 minute segments and there’s no way that she could fit any of this in 20 minutes. What do you expect her to reveal – I don’t mean secrets-wise, but along what lines do you expect her to elaborate, specifically?
LR: First, to pick up on your point of 20 minutes, I think that’s probably all she needs to get out the key points, and I think one of the things that she will do, and I’m not sure that I can answer that for her, but one of the things that she mentioned yesterday is that she will name names, of other congressmen who have been bribed, I think some of them are still there today. She can name those names.
She’s been saying for years that if she gets the chance to talk, a number of high level Americans will be charged and go to prison, including Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Dennis Hastert, and there are some other, as yet unnamed, congressmen, but it’s a difficult story to tell, and if she only had 20 minutes it’d be interesting to see how she covers it.
It’s a difficult story for us to describe in shorthand – in part because some of the pieces are missing, but maybe, because she has those missing pieces, she will be able to cover the story efficiently. Who knows, but it will be an outrage. Most observers familiar with the case argue that, on the surface, it’s much worse than Watergate, for example, so it will make for some pretty compelling television.
SH: Yeah, it sounds like it should be, and sounds like it should have been this whole time. Ok so tell me this, Luke Ryland, proprietor of Let Sibel Edmonds Speak.blogspot.com, for those people in the audience who want to read more about this and understand as much as they can before they see whichever network finally puts this story finally on the air, what do you suggest they read? There’s your blog Let Sibel Edmonds Speak .blogspot.com, I know she wrote the Highjacking of a Nation, parts 1 & 2, are very good, very comprehensive, can you recommend some more reading for us?
LR: You are right, Highjacking of a Nation. Those two pieces are fantastic, the Vanity Fair article is also terrific, Phil Giraldi has had a couple of good pieces out in the American Conservative. In the first one he names the people who are interested in Turkey, Doug Feith, Perle, Wolfowitz, Grossman, Stephen Solarz and others, and he describes the issues that Sibel is talking about, and then in his second piece he talks about the fact that Waxman refuses to hold hearings and he speculates a couple of the reasons who, so that’s another good article, and I would recommend that people listen to, particularly, the two great interviews that you did with Sibel, and also Chris Deliso’s interviews (1, 2), both for antiwar.com, they were both fantastic.
SH: Alright everybody, that’s Luke Ryland. Let Sibel Edmonds Speak .blogspot.com. Thanks a lot, Lukery.
LR: Good to speak to you, Scott.
Hopefully we’ll have some more news to bring you in a couple of days.
Many of you, rightly, expressed doubt that a major US network would broadcast Sibel’s story. Many of you, rightly or wrongly, think that Henry Waxman is a hero. I know that Sibel would much rather appear in Congress, under oath, with subpoena power, than on a TV network.
I urge you to contact Waxman and demand that he hold hearings into Sibel’s case. And I also urge you to contact your own representatives – I believe that all of them can bring Sibel to congress and hear her testimony, and give her immunity.
Waxman can be contacted in DC:(202)225-3976 and LA:323 651-1040. The toll free Capitol switchboard number is 800-828-0498
Attention CBS 60 Minutes: we’ve got a huge scoop for you. If you want it.