Will we ever know the truth Sibel?

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TRIES TO SILENCE FBI TRANSLATOR

The translator, Sibel Edmonds, says she has evidence of warnings before 9/11 that terrorists were planning to attack the US using airplanes.

Gee, I wonder why the Bush administration is trying to silence her?

Bush administration bids to silence intelligence failure witness

The Bush administration will today seek to prevent a former FBI translator providing evidence about September 11 intelligence failures to a group of relatives and survivors who have accused international banks and officials of aiding al Qaeda.

Sibel Edmonds was subpoenaed by a law firm representing more than 500 family members and survivors of the attacks in New York and Washington to testify that she had seen information that proved there was considerable evidence prior to September 2001 that al Qaeda was planning to strike the US with aircraft.

The lawyers made their demand after reading the comments Mrs Edmonds had made to The Independent.

But the US Justice Department is seeking to stop Mrs Edmonds from testifying, citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".

Today in a federal court in Washington, senior government lawyers will try and gag Mrs Edmonds, claiming that disclosure of her evidence "would cause serious damage to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States".

Mrs Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who had top secret security clearance while working for the FBI, claimed earlier this month that information she had seen while working in the bureau's headquarters in Washington proves senior officials knew of al Qaeda's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.

She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".

Mrs Edmonds has declined to publicly reveal the specific information she says she has but she has provided sworn testimony to the independent panel appointed by President Bush to investigate the circumstances surrounding 9-11.

She was subpoenaed by the law firm Motley-Rice, which is representing hundreds of families who are taking civil action against a number of banks and two members of the Saudi royal family for allegedly aiding al Qaeda.

Mrs Edmonds would be in contempt of court if she refused to respond to the subpoena.

Last night her lawyer, Mark Zaid, said: "The FBI wants to shut her up completely.

They don't want her to say anything. "He said it was ridiculous to claim that everything Mrs Edmonds knew had national security implications.

Rather, he said, the FBI was seeking to silence his client to save its embarrassment.

"There is no doubt that what she knows is hugely embarrassing to the bureau," he said.

The Bush administration has been put onto the back foot by allegations that senior officials - and perhaps even Mr Bush himself - were provided considerable intelligence information warning of an imminent attack by al Qaeda and that they failed to act.

The accusations were first levelled by Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism official who claimed that his warnings about the threat from al Qaeda were repeatedly ignored.

Mrs Edmonds said yesterday: "What are they are afraid of? If I am not allowed to give evidence the families will not get the information I have -that will be that."

She said it was wrong for the Bush administration to claim it wanted a full investigation.

"If there is transparency there is going to be accountability and that is what they don't want."

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Lost In Translation
June 6, 2004

This is the story of hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign language documents that the FBI neglected to translate before and after the Sept. 11 attacks because of problems in its language department - documents that detailed what the FBI heard on wiretaps and learned during interrogations of suspected terrorists.

Sibel Edmonds, a translator who worked at the FBI's language division, says the documents weren't translated because the divison was riddled with incompetence and corruption.

Edmonds was fired after reporting her concerns to FBI officials. She told her story behind closed doors to investigators in Congress and to the Justice Department. Most recently, she spoke with the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

She spoke with Correspondent Ed Bradley in October 2002.

Because she is fluent in Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages, Edmonds, a Turkish-American, was hired by the FBI soon after Sept. 11 and given top-secret security clearance to translate some of the reams of documents seized by FBI agents who have been rounding up suspected terrorists across the United States and abroad.

Edmonds says that to her amazement, from the day she started the job, she was told repeatedly by one of her supervisors that there was no urgency - that she should take longer to translate documents so that the department would appear overworked and understaffed. That way, it would receive a larger budget for the next year.

“We were told by our supervisors that this was the great opportunity for asking for increased budget and asking for more translators,” says Edmonds. “And in order to do that, don't do the work and let the documents pile up so we can show it and say that we need more translators and expand the department.”

Edmonds says that the supervisor, in an effort to slow her down, went so far as to erase completed translations from her FBI computer after she'd left work for the day.

“The next day I would come to work, turn on my computer and the work would be gone. The translation would be gone,” she says. “Then I had to start all over again and retranslate the same document. And I went to my supervisor and he said, ‘Consider it a lesson and don't talk about it to anybody else and don't mention it.’

"The lesson was don’t work, and don’t do the translations."

Edmonds put her concerns about the FBI's language department in writing to her immediate superiors and to a top official at the FBI. For months, she said she received no response. Then, she turned for help to the Justice Department's Inspector General and to Sen. Charles Grassley, whose committee, the Judiciary Committee, has direct oversight of the FBI.

“She's credible,” says Sen. Grassley. “And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.”

The FBI has conceded that some people in the language department are unable to adequately speak English or the language they're supposed to be translating. Kevin Taskasen was assigned to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to translate interrogations of Turkish-speaking al Qaeda members who had been captured after Sept. 11. The FBI admits that he was not fully qualified to do the job.

“He neither passed the English nor the Turkish side of the language proficiency test,” says Edmonds.

Critical shortages of experienced Middle Eastern language translators have plagued the FBI and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community for years.

Months before the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, one of the plotters of the attack was heard on tape having a discussion in Arabic that no one at the time knew was about how to make explosives - and he had a manual that no one at the time knew was about how to blow up buildings. None of it was translated until well after the bombing, and while the FBI has hired more translators since then, officials concede that problems in the language division have hampered the country's efforts to battle terrorism.

According to congressional investigators, this may have played a role in the inability to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. The General Accounting Office reported that the FBI had expressed concern over the thousands of hours of audiotapes and pages of written material that have not been reviewed or translated because of a lack of qualified linguists.

“If they got word today that within, in a little while, the Hoover Dam was going to be blown up, and it takes a week or two to get it translated, as was one of the problems in this department, you know, you couldn't intervene to prevent that from happening,” says Grassley.

In its rush to hire more foreign language translators after Sept. 11, the FBI admits it has had difficulty performing background checks to detect translators who may have loyalties to other governments - which could pose a threat to U.S. national security.

Take the case of Jan Dickerson, a Turkish translator who worked with Edmonds. The FBI has admitted that when Dickerson was hired the bureau didn't know that she had worked for a Turkish organization being investigated by the FBI's own counter-intelligence unit.

They also didn't know she'd had a relationship with a Turkish intelligence officer stationed in Washington who was the target of that investigation. According to Edmonds, Dickerson tried to recruit her into that organization, and insisted that Dickerson be the only one to translate the FBI's wiretaps of that Turkish official.

“She got very angry, and later she threatened me and my family's life,” says Edmonds, when she decided not to go along with the plan. “She said ‘Why would you want to place your life and your family's life in danger by translating these tapes?’”

Edmonds says that when she reviewed Dickerson's translations of those tapes, she found that Dickerson had left out information crucial to the FBI's investigation - information that Edmonds says would have revealed that the Turkish intelligence officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon.

"We came across at least 17, 18 translations, communications that were extremely important for the ongoing investigations of these individuals,” says Edmonds. “She had marked it as "not important to be translated."

What kind of information did she leave out of her translation?
“Activities to obtain the United States military and intelligence secrets,” says Edmonds.

She says she complained repeatedly to her bosses about what she'd found on the wiretaps and about Dickerson's conduct, but that nobody at the FBI wanted to hear about it. Not even the assistant special agent in charge.

“He said ‘Do you realize what you are saying here in your allegations? Are you telling me that our security people are not doing their jobs? Is that what you're telling me? If you insist on this investigation, I'll make sure in no time it will turn around and become an investigation about you,’” says Edmonds.

Sibel Edmonds was fired. The FBI offered no explanation, saying in the letter only that her contract was terminated completely for the government's convenience.

But three months later, the FBI conceded that on at least two occasions, Dickerson had, in fact, left out significant information from her translations. They say it was due to a lack of experience and was not malicious.

Dickerson quit the FBI and now lives in Belgium. She declined to be interviewed, but she told The Chicago Tribune that the allegations against her are preposterous and ludicrous. Sen. Grassley says he's disturbed by what the Dickerson incident says about internal security at the FBI.

Does the Sibel Edmonds case fall into any pattern of behavior, pattern of conduct on, on the part of the FBI?

“The usual pattern,” says Sen. Grassely. “Let me tell you, first of all, the embarrassing information comes out, the FBI reaction is to sweep it under the rug, and then eventually they shoot the messenger.”

Special agent John Roberts, a chief of the FBI's Internal Affairs Department, agrees. And while he is not permitted to discuss the Edmonds case, for the last 10 years he has been investigating misconduct by FBI employees. He says he is outraged by how little is ever done about it.

“I don't know of another person in the FBI who has done the internal investigations that I have and has seen what I have, and that knows what has occurred and what has been glossed over and what has, frankly, just disappeared, just vaporized, and no one disciplined for it,” says Roberts.

Despite a pledge from FBI Director Robert Mueller to overhaul the culture of the FBI in light of 9/11, and encourage bureau employees to come forward to report wrongdoing, Roberts says that in the rare instances when employees are disciplined, it's usually low-level employees like Edmonds who get punished and not their bosses.

“I think the double standard of discipline will continue no matter who comes in, no matter who tries to change,” says Roberts. “You, you have a certain, certain group that, that will continue to protect itself. That's just how it is.”

Has he found cases since Sept. 11 where people were involved in misconduct and were not, let alone reprimanded, but were even promoted? Roberts says yes.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minutes/main526954.shtml