What If the FBI Hired Someone Honest to Look into 9-11?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ope...e_fbi_hire.htm

by David Swanson
3/13/2007

It did. Her name was Sibel Edmonds. This is her story, as she told it to me. Edmonds discusses what she knows, whom it implicates, and what she's been through and what hope there is in the new Congress to start an investigation.

Here's the audio.

Swanson: This is David Swanson with Sibel Edmonds. It's great to talk with you, thanks for being here.

Edmonds: Thanks for asking me for this interview, David.

Swanson: So I should ask, I guess, before I start, are you under any gag order? Are there things that you can and cannot talk about?

Edmonds: Well - that's a very interesting question, David, because when the government invoked the State Secrets Privilege, it was specifically for the court procedures, so there won't be any court hearings, and as far as the courts are concerned, my case is gagged and classified.

Separately, they invoked the retroactive classification order on Congress and this was for the Senate Judiciary committee in May 2004 - and the way the imposed this gag order - and I have to emphasize that this gag order was illegal, because in order for them to retroactively classify congressional investigations, the Attorney General for the Justice Department had to meet three criteria and he did not. But even though the gag order was illegal, at that time in May 2004, the Senate Judiciary committee complied with it, they complied with an illegal gag order.

But I've never had a gag order placed on me as far as the public statements, or any other investigative procedures are concerned, but as you know they have declared everything in my case, including my languages, and what I did for the FBI, classified. Now the question is whether this classification that they're using is even legal, or justified. As you know the executive branch has complete control over the classification.

Swanson: So you are not allowed to discuss what languages you speak? You're forbidden to say that?

Edmonds: Well - that's what they have ordered, and that's what the court has actually ruled in their favor - but the interesting this is if you were to go and just google my name, you will see everywhere that my language skills are all listed there - because it's public information. I mean, take a look at the implications of this, based on this classification, I can't even have my resume out there because when you put your resume, and you put your language skills, that would be violating classification. But my resume has been out there, and the government has not come to me and told me to pull my resume.

They have been playing this game because they can get away with it in court, and Congress - but as you can see, this information is readily available - it's public. The same thing is true with my university degrees - the government specifically declared my Masters degrees, my undergraduate degrees, and the topics of those studies as classified! This is the Kafkaesque thing that I have been trying to point out to people, and we haven't had much media attention on this - when they can go, in this ridiculous way, in this ludicrous way, to invoke 'privilege' and classification - even on information that is readily available in public.

Swanson: For those who still don't know what your story is, and what you did, and why the government would be taking these sorts of actions, why don't we start at the beginning and just go very briefly, but maybe if I say a couple of things, tell me if I’m wrong...

You were hired by the FBI just after September 11 when they decided that it would be a good idea to hire translators who knew foreign languages - and the foreign languages that you were hired to work on were Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. And your background is one of having lived in Iran, Turkey and the US - and having had struggles in those previous countries with repressive governments and censorship and corruption and having thought, somewhat hopefully, about the US when you came here as being a country of freedom and transparent government. Am I on the right track?

Edmonds: Absolutely. I was a believer and I took my citizenship oath in 1995, I really took that oath, as you take any oath, seriously, and I was so proud to become a citizen of this country and have the constitution, and all the principles, and the bill of rights applying to me. As you know, those rights are non-existent in countries such as Turkey and Azerbaijan and Iran - in most places in the world, people are not even allowed to write about those rights, forget about even demanding them.

Swanson: What made you inclined to take a job with the FBI as a translator?

Edmonds: There needs to be a brief explanation - three years before I took that job, I was doing my studies in forensic science and criminal justice, and I had applied for an internship position with the FBI, not a full time or permanent job position, and at that point they were interested in my language skills, but they basically messed it up. I sent them the application, I took the polygraph test for that internship position for their language department, and somehow in 1999 they lost all that information - not only mine, but from 150 other applicants they had for language specialist positions. These documents, these files were lost within the FBI - or at least that's the explanation they gave to these applicants.

And then the 911 terrorist event took place and I'd turn on the TV and kept hearing the Director of the FBI pleading for language specialists - especially for the languages that I speak - because they were desperate for language specialists. And at that point it was a duty to go and say "Look - I have these skills, you need these skills for the nation, and I'm offering it to you." So I took this position as a contract language specialist for those languages and my top secret clearance was issued and I started working five days after 911.

Swanson: And they were in pretty bad shape, right? How many skilled translators of Turkish materials did they have at that point?

Edmonds: At that point they had no Turkish language specialists... In fact, they had an unofficial division for years, and they had people coming, on and off, from DOD, or the State Department on loan, and working on certain projects, but they did not even have a formal division for Turkish. They had a small division for Arabic language, and they also had a large division for Farsi - the language spoken in Iran.

As you know, because of the Cold War, most of the emphasis was placed on Russian languages - so they had a very large division for the Russian language. Since 1991, the need was not as great for those languages, and they never fortified the other divisions - so they had a lot of Russian translators, and a lot of Chinese translators, very few Arabic language specialists, and a mid-size Farsi department.

And more than the size, and this is quantity-vs.-quality, the department was not even managed, because the solid good working people (at the FBI) are mainly agents, but the language division is not managed by the agents - that division, for all these languages, is managed by administrative people. These people are former language specialists who have been promoted to supervisory positions who oversee the language division, and you have no direct involvement from the agents - so you have this layer of administrative people blocking the interaction between the agents and the language specialists. The second reason is that the language division is considered the most classified and sensitive unit in the entire FBI - so the clearance we had, and the access we had, was far more sensitive than the agents'. So even when an agent wanted to come to the division and work for a few minutes with a particular language specialist, that agent had to be escorted to the division, and watched, because everything is managed on a 'need-to-know' basis, and let's say an agent is coming to that division to talk with a Turkish language specialist, he may be exposed to some other information from, let's say, the Chinese counter-intelligence, or Arabic, for let's say Saudi Arabia. And they didn't want that to take place, so there was this great separation between the agents and the language specialists - and that itself brought a lot of problems with it - because you had these bureaucratic layers in the middle and the agents were very frustrated because they wanted to work directly with the language specialists.

You know, a lot of people consider the language specialists as like a clerical job, but you need to realize, when the information comes and you’re looking at all sorts of intelligence, whether it's counter-intelligence or criminal, related to all these different languages and countries, the first people exposed to it are the language specialists. Before that information gets transferred to agents or analysts, the first person who sees it is the language specialist in charge of that particular language - and that language specialist is in a position to decide whether or not, this particular piece of information, whether it's a wiretap or document, is important enough to be translated, whether or not it should be translated verbatim - in detail, or just a summary translation. So by the time that information goes to an analyst or an agent, it has already gone through this filter of the language specialist. So not only do they need to have language skills, linguistic skills, the translators also need to have training and enough information and knowledge to be able to make that decision in terms of what is important, and not, what is urgent, and not urgent.

Swanson: There's a saying in Italian "Traduttore traditore" which means "The translator is a traitor" - which is something that poets and authors think - and this gives new meaning to that phrase. If you have someone in that position who is not doing their job, who has other interests and loyalties, they're in a position of enormous power because no-one else has seen, or can understand the information that has come in.

So you took this job 5 days after 911 and you were not translating newspapers and public materials, so we can hope that someone at the State Department was doing that - you were translating wiretapped calls, transcripts and so forth, and by March of 2002 you were fired. Why were you fired? What happened in between?

Edmonds: Well - I'll try to answer that briefly, because so much information is already available on the net, in various publications that have come out that basically summarize the issues that I reported

Swanson: Ok - what's the best place for people to go?

Edmonds: They can go to my website - www.justacitizen.com - and there are plenty of documents there, both official documents and various interviews etc summarizing the case and there are court documents there.

End Part I