A Real 9/11 Cover-up? Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb

A Real 9/11 Cover-Up? Sibel Edmonds, Turkey and the Bomb

By Dave Lindorff

Created Jan 8 2008 - 7:46am

If a new article just published Saturday in the Times of London based upon

information provided by US government whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a

37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, is correct, we

have not only solid evidence of prior knowledge of 9-11 by high up US

government officials, but evidence of treasonous activity by many of those

same officials involving efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America's

enemies, even including Al Qaeda.

The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called "accidental" flight

of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52 that flew last

Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Shreveport,

Louisiana.

The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts have

been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media in American news

media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British paper a month ago after

reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda leader had been training some of the

9-11 hijackers at a base in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the

Turkish military.

Edmonds, who was recruited by the FBI after 9-11 because of her Turkish and

Farsi language skills, has long been claiming that in her FBI job of

covertly monitoring conversations between Turkish, Israeli, Persian and

other foreign agents and US contacts, including a backlog of untranslated

tapes dating back to 1997, she had heard evidence of "money laundering, drug

imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons

technology." But the Turkish training for 9-11 rang more alarm bells and

made her decide that talking behind closed doors to Congress or the FBI was

not enough. She had to go public.

Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence of moles

within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the nuclear weapons

establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets for cash, through Turkey,

to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI,

agencies within the Bush administration were actively working to block

investigation and to shield those who were committing the acts of treason.

Pakistan's ISI is known to have had, and to still maintain close contacts

with Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Times notes that Pakistan's nuclear god-father,

General Mahmoud Ahmad, was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to

Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

Edmonds claims, in the Times article, that following the 9-11 attacks, FBI

investigators took a number of Turkish and Pakistani operatives into custody

for questioning about foreknowledge of the attacks, but that a high-ranking

US State Department official repeatedly acted to spirit them out of the

country.

Edmonds was fired from her FBI translating job in 2002 after she accused a

colleague of having illicit contact with Turkish officials. She has claimed

that she was fired for being outspoken, and in 2005 her position was

reportedly vindicated by the Office of Inspector General of the FBI, which

concluded that she had been sacked for making valid complaints.

One of those whom Edmonds claims in the Times report was being investigated

in connection with the nuclear information transfers was Pentagon analyst

Lawrence Franklin. Franklin was convicted and jailed in 2006 for passing US

defense information to American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists

and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. Franklin, in

2001, was part of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, a kind of shadow

intelligence unit set up by the Bush administration inside the Pentagon

whose job it was to gin up "evidence" to justify a war against Iraq. In that

capacity, he (along with several other OSP members and arch neocon schemer

Michael Ledeen) was also identified by Italian investigative journalists

working for the newspaper La Republican, as having been at a crucial meeting

in December 2001 in Rome with the Italian defense and intelligence service

ministers. La Republicca reports that at that meeting a plan was hatched to

fob off forged Niger embassy documents as evidence that Iraqi strongman

Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger.

If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish

government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government

officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear

information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the

mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52

Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against

all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with

six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.

That incident only came to public attention because three as yet

unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military

Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were

picked up by other US news organizations.

An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary

Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an

"accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience

in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and

argue that there had to have been a chain of orders from above the level of

the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.

Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included

several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel

occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six

150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no

Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.

Yet in view of Edmonds' story to the London Times, alleging that there has

been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents

of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and

even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the

American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those

efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.

Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story to keep an

army of investigative reporters busy for years. So why, one has to ask, is

this story appearing in a highly respected British newspaper, but not

anywhere in the corporate US media?

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson