A little over two weeks ago, the Times of London ran the most comprehensive article on the case of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds to date, an article for which Ms. Edmonds (the most gag-ordered individual in US history, or so they claim) provided new evidence, effectively breaking the court orders for the first time.

It was a shocker.

Last Sunday, they followed up with an article basically accusing the then number 3 at the State Department (gee, could that be Marc Grossman?) of passing on state secrets and basically blowing the cover of the CIA operation Valerie Plame fronted for (Brewster Jennings) to the Pakistani ISI a full two years before Robert Novak’s infamous set of articles.

When the first article appeared in the Times, I wondered if anyone in the US media would pick up the story.

Naturally, the MSM is much too busy reporting every burp out of former President, Bill Clinton to even notice what broke across the Atlantic (and, since, around the world)

It tells us something when the only people writing about the scandal and it’s deeper, horrific implications are left-wing whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg and, wait for it, The American Conservative magazine.

Edmonds was an FBI translator assigned to work on ongoing taps of phones used by The American Turkish Council. As Philip Giraldi reports in his excellent article in the current issue:

The ATC, founded in 1994 and modeled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was intended to promote Turkish interests in Congress and in other public forums. Edmonds refers to ATC and AIPAC as “sister organizations.” The group’s founders include a number of prominent Americans involved in the Israel-Turkey relationship, notably Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and former congressman Stephen Solarz. Perle and Feith had earlier been registered lobbyists for Turkey through Feith’s company, International Advisors Inc. The FBI was interested in ATC because it suspected that the group derived at least some of its income from drug trafficking, Turkey being the source of 90 percent of the heroin that reaches Europe, and because of reports that it had given congressmen illegal contributions or bribes. Moreover, as Edmonds told the Times, the Turks have “often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract attention.”

Over nearly six months, Edmonds listened with increasing unease to hundreds of intercepted phone calls between Turkish, Pakistani, Israeli, and American officials. When she voiced concerns about the processing of this intelligence—among other irregularities, one of the other translators maintained a friendship with one of the FBI’s “high value” targets—she was threatened. After exhausting all appeals through her own chain of command, Edmonds approached the two Department of Justice agencies

with oversight of the FBI and sent faxes to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. The next day, she was called in for a polygraph. According to a DOJ inspector general’s report, the test found that “she was not deceptive in her answers.”

One of the first politicans to fall from revelations triggered by Edmonds case may have been Chicago Rep and former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastart. There was talk of large bribes from the ATC, then some shuffling and, suddenly, poof, the otherwise imposing figure of Rep Hastart had been sidestepped out the chamber door and into history.

The substance of the issues raised by Edmond’s evidence suggest the largest breach of national security EVER. That it was elements in our own State and Defense departments who, for reasons of personal gain and ideological fervor, betrayed secrets to state entities like Israel, Turkey and Pakistan with alarming regularity. That, in fact, elements within our own government colluded with the transfer of nuclear secrets to our good friends in Pakistan. (Which might explain why we a) pretended to be “shocked” (like Claude Reins in Casablance) when the AQ Khan network was “exposed” in 2002, and why we have never sought to Question Dr Khan or pressure Pakistan to submit to anything like the IAEA inspections we have routinely demanded from Iraq and Iran.

This story needs to be dealt with, urgently, for if the allegations are true (even just a part of them) they may go a long way to explaining the increasingly incoherent floundering that has been passed off as “policy” in the region these past few decades.

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