Sibel Edmonds case: The real culprits of 911

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=4362

Luke Ryland
9/11/2007

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has made a number of disturbing claims about the 911 attacks, but perhaps the most disconcerting is her oft-repeated statement that the US authorities have covered up an entire organizational layer within al-Qaeda.

In the documentary, Kill The Messenger, Sibel says:
"They haven't mentioned anybody who actually is connected to Al Qaida, in mid or higher level."
Similarly, Sibel often says:
"And I would like to give an analogy - if you take the War on Drugs, imagine if they only went after street dealers and they refused to investigate the mid-level dealers or the drug lords. This is very similar."
As we approach another 911 anniversary, it's time we learnt:

1) Who are these mid and high-level al-Qaida operatives?
2) What role did they play in planning 911?
3) What operational support did they provide?
4) Why they are still roaming free today?
5) Why did the US authorities continually exclude key participants from the official narrative?

Sibel Edmonds is the most gagged woman in US history making it a little it difficult for us, the public, to have a detailed understanding of everything she knows about al-Qaida and the 911 attacks, but she has given interviews and written a number of great articles and letters which enable us to put some of the pieces together.

Immediately after the release of the 911 Commission report, Sibel wrote an open letter to Thomas Kean and the Commission in which she chided the 911 Commission panel for ignoring important issues related to the attacks, and she also made public some of her closed-door testimony to the 911 Commission.

For example, in that letter, Sibel identified specific warnings from April 2001 that:
"1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities;

2) the attack was going to involve airplanes;

3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States;

4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months."
As we all know, this information was not included in the Commission report, and was barely mentioned in the US media even though it was confirmed in the Chicago Tribune and FBI Director Robert Mueller was surprised that he wasn't asked about it by the 911 Commission. In fact, according to Sibel,
"(A)fter 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to "keep quiet" regarding this issue."
More importantly, for today's purposes, I want to focus on this statement from the same letter:
"The public has still not been told of the intentional obstruction of intelligence. The public has not been told that certain information, despite its relevance to terrorist activities, is not shared with counterterrorism units. This was true prior to 9/11, and it remains true today. If counterintelligence receives information about terrorism that implicates certain nations, semi-legit organizations or the politically powerful in this country, then that information is not shared with counterterrorism, regardless of the consequences. In certain cases, frustrated FBI agents have cited "direct pressure by the State Department." The Department of Justice Inspector General received detailed evidence regarding this issue. I provided your investigators with an account of this issue, the names of other witnesses willing to corroborate this, and the names of U.S. officials involved in these transactions and activities."
In order to understand this, we need to understand a little bit about how the FBI operates. 'Counterintelligence' (CI) is essentially a monitoring organization which routinely investigates various groups - such as embassies, and groups like AIPAC and the American Turkish Council (ATC) - which might be involved in criminal activity, or otherwise might be able to provide valuable information. If and when CI comes across evidence of criminality, they are supposed to forward that information and evidence to other divisions of the FBI which have the authority, and responsibility, to act on the information and arrest the guilty parties. Typically the cases will be forwarded to, for example, Public Corruption, or Narcotics, or in this case, Counter Terrorism (CT).

As Sibel indicates, prior to 911, the State Department put pressure on people at FBI HQ to block the transfer of certain cases to the actionable divisions within the FBI. Outrageously, even immediately after 911, the State Department continued to refuse CI permission to pass significant information to Counter-terrorism that was directly relevant to the 911 attacks. In other words, while the Bush administration was rushing through the PATRIOT ACT, rounding up thousands of 'suspects' and gutting the Constitution, the State Department was protecting many of the key participants in the mass murder on 9/11 in order to protect 'sensitive diplomatic relations.'

Here's Sibel describing the cover-up:
"What occurred with the 911 related investigation - be it the FBI, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of State, or the CIA or the Pentagon - they choose to basically publicize the deal at the hijacker level - and completely went about covering up certain entities that they had DIRECT evidence, DOCUMENTED evidence of the support networks - be it the financial support networks, or communications, or obtaining visas - they have not touched those individuals. Those individuals are still roaming free! Today!"
And here's Sibel again, making the same point:
"I will give you an analogy, okay? Say if we decided to have a "war on drugs," but said in the beginning, "right, we're only going to go after the young black guys on the street level..." But we decided never to go after the middle levels, let alone the top levels...
It's like this with the so-called war on terror. We go for the Attas and Hamdis – but never touch the guys on the top."

Which people are Sibel talking about?
Sibel is talking about three different, though often over-lapping, groups of:

a) Those who were directly involved in planning and/or facilitating the 911 attacks,
b) Those who knowingly, specifically, intentionally provided and facilitated 'indirect' support functions for the attacks
c) Those who support and finance al-Qaeda generally.

End Part I