08/26/09 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

It doesn't necessarily only go to Turkey or Israel, but they sell it to the highest bidder.
That's how they operate.
All right, that's Cybele Edmonds, former FBI contract translator, whistleblower, from her August 8th deposition.
You can watch the video of the entire thing at bradblog.com, and you can read the PDF of the transcript there.
Or if you just go to antiwar.com slash blog, you can find the links to all your source material for that.
And joining us on the show again is Phil Giraldi.
He's a former DIA and CIA officer.
He writes for Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, for the American Conservative Magazine, and for us every week at antiwar.com in his column Smoke and Mirrors.
Welcome back to the show, Phil.
And now you've written quite a few articles, or two or three anyway, about the Cybele Edmonds case over the years.
I wonder if you've had a chance to go over this transcript yet?
Well, it's quite lengthy, as you know.
Yes, it is.
I went through it this morning.
I admit I read it fairly quickly, but there's some amazing material in it.
Indeed.
Well, let's go ahead and talk about that.
I think for the most part you could say that she still, even though this is under oath in this deposition, she still is not allowed to break her secrecy obligations as far as releasing classified information, but I guess it was like one big antiwar radio interview for three or four hours there where she really got to pretty much tell her whole story, I think.
What were the surprising revelations that you learned there?
There weren't any tremendous surprises.
I think probably the only real news story in my reading of it was the Valerie Plame story where she says that in fact the cover company, Brewster Jennings, was shut down in 2001 because the FBI apparently had been listening to the conversation of the State Department number two guy, Mark Grossman, who had tipped off the Turks to the fact that this was a CIA cover company.
As far as I know, we were not aware that the cover company was known to be compromised at that early date and shut down, so that was kind of news.
Right, because the story is, you know, Time Magazine version, right, is that Robert Novak did the damage to Valerie Plame's company, Brewster Jennings, against the CIA front company in charge of investigating nuclear black markets in the world and so forth in, what, 2003, right?
That's right.
Novak has been blamed for this, and of course he died last week.
Too bad he didn't live another week to be in a way vindicated.
But yeah, that's been the classic interpretation of what took place and how this all played out, but it turns out that actually they were aware of the Grossman leak, if you want to call it that, as early as 2001 when it occurred.
Wow.
So I guess let's go over this story basically from the basics here.
We have a lady who, right after September 11th, she goes and gets a job as a contract translator for the FBI, but apparently she was pretty good at it and worked pretty closely with all these different special agents, and on these cases involving an FBI investigation into the Turkish and Israeli lobbies in the United States and their overt and covert activities, which apparently is some pretty serious stuff.
I guess give us the overview and we'll try to get through some more of the details in the follow-up.
Well, I mean, it's a hugely complex story, but basically you have the outline of it right.
She was a translator, but don't dismiss, I know you don't dismiss the fact that she was a translator, because translators work very intimately with investigators, both at CIA and FBI.
It's routine procedure, and they have to work together to get the nuances of what they're listening to.
So anyway, she was involved with investigating several Turkish groups that are active in the United States and had discovered that they were involved in a lot of illegal activity, including bribery of congressmen, and of course these groups in particular were discovered to be very closely linked with Israeli groups that were doing basically the same sort of thing.
And Sybil had, in the course of her work, come up with a lot of information, naming names, implicating very senior U.S. politicians, and demonstrating that they had been taking money in return for giving information, for doing favors, the whole gamut of corruption that we've seen so much of over the last ten years.
Wow, so, I mean, this is the thing though, this is almost the caricature, the ultimate corruption.
American officials, you said, the number two guy at the State Department, other high-level congressmen, involved in stealing and selling nuclear secrets, Bill?
It's astonishing, but Sybil is a credible witness on all this.
She was directly involved with the investigations, and, you know, if these people that she named, and she named a whole bunch of them this time, without any equivocation at all, Dennis Haster, we kind of knew about, Dan Burton we knew about, Bob Livingston we knew about, there was Stephen Solarz, a Democrat, Tom Lantos, who is of course now deceased, also a Democrat, Roy Blunt, and then she reiterated what we suspected all along about people that were at the Pentagon, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Mark Grossman at State Department in a very senior position.
So, the names are out there now, and what astonishes me, and I'm sure it astonishes you, is that where's the mainstream media on this story?
Yeah, I don't know.
You know, I got an email from a guy who said he emailed Josh Marshall, so whatever, it's hearsay and everything, he didn't forward me the email, but he said he emailed Josh Marshall and he said, hey, you've got to cover this, right?
And he emailed back, well, Sabelle Edmonds is a known crackpot, and so that means, forget about it, it doesn't matter that she's under oath in this, that this is sworn testimony, that it would seem to be such shocking news, it's basically not to be trusted, or even to be considered interesting at all.
While you're a former CIA covert operative, you seem to think that it's credible.
Is he right, that there's something wrong with Sabelle Edmonds, and that's why this is justification for not being an interesting story to even somebody like Josh Marshall, who after all doesn't have a show on MSNBC or anything?
Well, you know, the issue is here, Sybil is making very specific charges.
They're either true or they're not.
I'm not going to say they're one or the other, because I don't know and you don't know, but the fact that she's making very specific charges, and if they're not true, somebody in the government, in the FBI, responsible for these investigations that she's talking about, should come forward and say, no, none of this is true, but nobody's done that.
And her stories are quite credible, and as far as I know, nobody has ever been able to disprove anything that she's said.
Do you know of any instances of that taking place?
I don't know of any.
No, I don't know either, and in fact the story just gets broader and broader.
I mean, she mentions in this thing, and I don't think I already knew this, but she at least claims she was involved in interrogating 9-11 suspects, and Turkish ones.
That's right.
There are a lot of stories here, and it seems to me that, well, it boggles the mind in a way, that the mainstream media, nobody in the mainstream media, seems to be interested in picking up on this.
But you know, again, you could say that the conspiracy that she is talking about is a much broader conspiracy, and it includes the media.
They have a conspiracy of silence, and things that they don't want to talk about, things they don't want to get into.
Well, and you know, it's kind of, it's the bipartisan nature of the thing too, where there's no political advantage when you have Brent Scowcroft at the head of the American-Turkish Council, and you have the whole establishment, basically the whole American-Turkish Council sponsored by Lockheed and Exxon and things, right?
That's right.
Most people making money off of the relationship are the sponsors of it, and people like Scowcroft are making lots of money off it too.
His consulting firm does work for the Turks.
Mark Grossman, who leaked the information about Valerie Plame, works for the Turks.
I mean, it's just, you know, this criminality that we see out there, and this corruption, is just absolutely astonishing.
I would give the Obama administration at least one good mark in that they did not move to stop Sebel from testifying in this case.
They could have invoked the State Secrets Act to stop her, and they didn't.
So now we have a lot of very specific charges with a lot of very specific names out there on the table, and I guess it's going to be up to anti-war and the American conservative and people like that to carry the story forward, but to me, that's a pathetic failure by our media.
Well, you know, I've always suspected, Phil, that the reason Sebel didn't just, you know, make a YouTube or talk to one journalist and tell everything that she has to tell, classified or not, state secrets or not, and risk prison over it, is, you know, I put myself in her position.
She probably figures she could do that, and still nobody would care, and then she'd go to prison.
I think that may well be the way that she interpreted the...
I mean, the way it should work is that she spills her guts in 60 minutes and everybody just covers it to the nth degree, and so they can't prosecute her, right?
But no, in fact, they could just continue to ignore it, just like, you know, whatever.
It's not like she makes an interesting news story for television or anything like that, so we'll just continue to ignore it and, you know, lock her up.
Why not?
Well, of course, and, you know, and if we really think about this hard, I mean, I hate to keep coming back to what sounds like the same song, but, you know, this is about Israel, and nobody in Congress, apart from the ones who are taking money, really care about Turkey.
I can't believe that, but this is an Israel issue, and I think that's why we have this conspiracy of silence coming from both political parties and also from the media, and I would love to know a lot more about what Sabel knows, and maybe we will be able to get this story completely out in the next few months.
I'd like to hope that we can.
Well, talk about that.
What exactly is the connection?
Because, you know, as far as I can tell, and maybe I just didn't key in on it, she didn't make much of a connection other than to say, well, you have the Israelis and the Turks and the Pakistanis and various people that work for them and these different lobbies and some of its secret agents, and it's all kind of very vague.
Tie it up for us.
Well, I, specifically tying up the Turkish and the Israeli connection, Turkey is Israel's key ally in the Muslim world.
The Turkish military in particular is very fond of the relationship with Israel because it gives them access to U.S. technology, military technology.
It gives them access to a friendly Congress in the United States because they're friendly with Israel, and the Israelis have cultivated this relationship and the Turks have cultivated this relationship.
It's a very strong bilateral relationship that has very definite objectives in terms of the security of the two countries and in terms of the national interest.
But the dark side of this, of course, is that the people who are involved in this are also on the make and they're involved with the various things that Cybele has outlined in terms of access to military technologies which they then sell down the road to people who aren't supposed to have it and various other things.
Clearly, there's a huge story to be told here and we don't really, at this point, know who the end users are on this, who winds up with the technology and the things that are stolen, although I think Cybele has hinted at one or two points that the Chechens received some of this stuff and a number of Central Asian countries, including Pakistan, have.
So there's a big story with a lot of holes still in it, but hopefully this is something we can find out more about.
Well, you know, she says that, and this is something that was given not much detail, but it was asserted a few weeks ago, I guess, on her blog or in an interview, and that was that kind of along those lines that the CIA was supporting the Mujahideen.
As we know, Al-Qaeda were basically Bill Clinton's allies in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and that this relationship was cultivated because the CIA was basically continuing the Cold War against Russia and using Islamic radicals and funding all these madrasas throughout Central Asia in order to basically destabilize these countries, I guess, or make them difficult for Russia to control, and that that relationship continued up until September 11th, she says.
Well, of course, that was an interesting story.
That was a separate interview prior to this court case, but yeah, I mean, absolutely, that's an amazing story, and again, if she's making this up, hey, U.S. government, come up and tell us.
If she's not making it up, this should be something that people are looking into and that are concerned about, but that to me is the core of the civil admin story.
If this woman is a lunatic and if she's making all this stuff up, then for God's sake, let's see somebody credible come up and tell us where she's lying, what she's making up, and why she's doing it, and what is taking place here, but I haven't seen anybody do that, and this has been going on for how many years now?
Five years?
Yeah, something like that, anyway.
Well, and you know, she says, and I think this kind of dovetails with Richard Sales reporting in UPI, that this is one big investigation, this is really the tie between the Israel lobby and the Turkish lobby, is that it's one FBI investigation into all of them, and it reminds me of what Larry Franklin was saying in one of his interviews, I forget if it was the Washington Times or in Haaretz, where he said that the FBI guys wanted Wolfowitz, and they wanted Feith, and they wanted, I guess, Pearl?
I'm not sure if he says Pearl by name, but they were going, in his words, after every Jew in the Pentagon, saying that they were anti-Semitic was his point, but his real point was that he was the little fish, they were really going after the bigger guys, the FBI was.
Yeah, well now Sybil has said in this court case that these guys, Feith, Wolfowitz, and Grossman, were all very much involved in this, they're all very closely tied to Turkey, all very closely tied to Israel, and you know, if you're an FBI officer and you're starting an investigation, you follow where the evidence goes, and this is where the evidence apparently went.
Yeah, the transmission belt of treason is what Justin called it a long time ago.
Absolutely, and you know, it's absurd that we have a country that proclaims itself as operating under a rule of law, but it obviously isn't.
It was astonishing just yesterday when the new administration announced that they would be looking into this CIA case of torture, and you know, because the Justice Department ultimately decides, and the President, decides what they're going to go after, and if there's something that they consider to be too politically sensitive, they're not going to go after it.
Well now, I wanted to ask you about that.
You're a former CIA guy, and I guess I'd like to ask you to try to do your best to speak for your colleagues who are still at the CIA.
The word on the street and on the TV is that you guys will all have your feelings hurt if some people are prosecuted, that it'll hurt everybody's morale, and the last thing that anybody at the CIA wants is for torture laws to be enforced against any of them.
Yeah, well, I think that's probably true of current CIA officers.
The sentiment among former CIA officers probably runs a little bit differently.
People like myself who believe that they never should have gotten into this kind of stuff in the first place.
And most of us, most of the people that I talk to, were very much opposed to a lot of the coercive policies that came out as a result of 9-11 as we were becoming aware of them, and are very much against them now.
But, you know, obviously if you're still there and you're working, the way you're looking at it is that the small fry are going to hang on this.
It's the guy who was hired as a GS-12 and went off and did the dirty work of the interrogation and was told that this was all perfectly legal.
This is the guy that's going to hang.
They're not going to go after George Tenet.
They're not going to go after Jim Pabbitt, who was director of operations.
They're not going to go after Culver Black, who headed the Counterterrorism Center and ordered all this stuff.
And they're certainly not going to go after Dick Cheney and George Bush, who ultimately approved these procedures.
So, you know, I can see where they're coming from.
Maybe their viewpoint is parochial, but at the same time, let's establish real accountability in terms of what occurred in CIA torture, and let's not just go for the guy that was caught at the end of it.
Yeah, well, maybe they can just prosecute Lindy England again and say it was all her idea.
Yeah, yeah, she's becoming respectable now.
I guess she's just done a book or something.
Yeah, something like that.
Well, you know, I read one article where she is just saying, yeah, I don't care, I'm not sorry, just in the most crude way, which, you know, is just a symptom of the larger thing.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, that's, you know, I tend to think as long as we have a prosecution system in this country on the federal level, the first people it ought to apply to is government employees who break the law, and that includes anybody at the CIA who broke the law, whether they had a memo or not.
But of course you're right that it is, you know, horribly unfair that it's all the lowest-ranking people who could even possibly be subject to indictment, who, you know, I don't see any reason to believe that anyone will be indicted at this point.
Yeah, I don't think so either.
And I think when CIA people are looking at this situation, they think of Abu Ghraib, and who got hung out to dry at Abu Ghraib?
Basically the lower-ranking people who actually did the nasty stuff and not the other people who were kind of giving him a green light to put pressure on these IRAPs.
Well, so, I don't know.
I guess if I was just the average TV victim driving around in my truck and I heard this, I might be confused.
You write for the American Conservative magazine, and your problem with the torture investigation is that it's not broad enough.
Yeah, well, I mean, there are conservatives.
There are conservatives.
Basically, you know, the conservatives that I speak for are the ones who are traditional conservatives who have long been nervous about interventionist policies around the world and nation-building and that sort of thing that the U.S. government has been enamored of now, certainly ever since Bill Clinton.
And, you know, many conservatives have seen the failure of U.S. foreign policy over the last ten years or even longer, you can go back to Clinton, as symptomatic of this country being on the wrong road.
And those are the conservatives I speak with.
Well, and speaking of that, your recent article, Vanishing Liberties, is about the crossroads between the lawlessness of our current era, the high technology and the rapid pace of its development and implementation, and our status of permanent warfare and all the fear and justifications, at least ad hoc ones, that go along with that.
It's a very good piece.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You know, I think in some ways it was not the best or most cohesive written article I've ever done for any war, but I think it might be the most important because I think what I was trying to say, and I'd like to say to your audience, is that there's a shifting dynamic here, that people don't appreciate that in addition to an increase in actual laws that restrict the rights of citizens, we also have leaps forward in technology that enable the government, any government, to basically monitor its citizens 24-7.
And I think people have to be thinking about this thing because it's no longer a simple equation of, oh, yeah, we have the Bill of Rights, and we have this, and we have that.
But when people are able to, for example, as I point out in the article, exploit hate crimes to become thought crimes, as can occur these days both in Europe and Australia and Canada and places like that, and it's probably just around the corner in the United States, then suddenly you have completely eliminated the ability of people like yourself and myself to dissent from what is going on.
You have mechanisms, technical mechanisms, and you have legal mechanisms to do that.
Well, and it seems like, you know, and I don't know if it's just human nature, if it's all our government school and TV programming or what, but most Americans seem to think that an opinion is what you think the law ought to do to people.
And there's not even a step between there, and everybody is happy to jump on board a government program to silence people, even at Bradblog, where I'm pulling up all these stories about the breaking news and the Cybele Edmonds case, in the margin it says, you know, the radio is not free speech, and they're the public airwaves, and we get to choose what you say on them, and so we're trying to use the force of government to stop Michael Savage from being such a Nazi on so many airwaves and what have you like that.
And, you know, I don't know.
I guess it's not just that the government is taking our liberties from us, but in many quarters we're actively cheering them on, believing it's for us against the other guys.
Yeah, and it's from the left and it's from the right.
That's the scary thing about it.
They all have a vested interest in controlling the agenda, and I don't know a better way to describe it.
And certainly Obama is as guilty of it as George Bush, although one would hope that he will pursue things that are somewhat more sensible than George Bush did, although he hasn't shown that yet.
So, you know, this is a scary thing.
This is our fundamental right to disagree are being challenged, and I think that most Americans are not even aware that it's happening.
And I would suggest to anyone who is serious about these kinds of issues to look what's going on in Europe and look what's going on in Australia and Canada with hate crime laws and stuff like that in terms of people, you know, being put in jail.
One Australian was put in jail because he wrote a letter to the editor complaining that the large number of immigrants coming to Australia from Africa would create social problems.
And for writing that letter, he was sent to jail for a hate crime.
Yeah, well, it certainly is headed that way, especially on the, you know, racial political correctness and so forth, which, you know, I'm an individualist.
I'm not fronting for bigotry, but the number one thing we're trying to strive for here is liberty, and that includes the right to be a bigot and say whatever stupid bigot thing you want if you want.
And, you know, the idea that tolerance means not tolerating intolerance is just silly to me, but, you know, that's the whole thing.
And as you say, it does come from both sides because the right wing is perfectly willing to use the fourth estate to shut you up and call you a traitor and, you know, say that you're aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and whatever if you disagree with them.
Yeah, that's right.
Send a military to investigate your peace group.
Yeah, and one of the interesting things I think I said in my article was that in Britain, for example, they're now using these same pilotless drones that we use in Afghanistan and Pakistan to monitor demonstrations and that kind of thing.
So you have a drone circling all overhead listening in to what is being said on the ground and also photographing the people who are involved in it.
This is in Britain.
Oh, yeah, well, and we're going to see that, too.
All the war technology come home.
You know, to get in or out of Fallujah, you've got to give an eyeball scan and you've got drones hovering around all day.
Every sheriff's department in the country is going to have a drone in a couple of years, Phil.
That's right, and this is, again, the point I'm trying to make that essentially the technology coming together with a lot of this legislation is incredibly dangerous, and these two things coming together can be exploited to do things that we can't even imagine now.
Yeah, and what's funny is, too, you could read the whole Bill of Rights in about 35 seconds, and you could get mad in one moment, and this whole society could do that, no problem, and the problem would be solved, and yet we won't.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, there you have it.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
All right, thank you, Scott.
All right, everybody, that's Phil Giraldi from the Campaign for Liberty and Anti-War.com and the American Conservative Magazine.