All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
Now Philip Giraldi is a former CIA and DIA operative and is a contributing editor at the American Conservative Magazine.
He also regularly writes a column called Smoke and Mirrors for us at Antiwar.com.
Joe Lauria is a New York based independent investigative journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Montreal Gazette, the Johannesburg Star, the Washington Times, New York Magazine, the London Times, and many other publications and has broken a great many stories.
Welcome both of you to the show today, how are you doing?
Hello Scott.
I'm fine Scott, thank you for having us on.
All right, well really appreciate it.
Okay, Phil Giraldi, you have an interview in the American Conservative Magazine, November issue I believe it is.
Please hit the stands and the website today, that's amconmag.com.
It's an interview entitled, Who's Afraid of Sabel Edmonds?
And Joe, you are the co-author of a series that ran in the London Times back in January of 2008 that you co-wrote with Jonathan Calvert and Chris Gourlay about Sabel Edmonds and her story.
Just so people know who you guys are and what's your background as far as this story goes.
And I guess we'll start with me asking you, Phil Giraldi, to please just give us in a nutshell the basic story of Sabel Edmonds, former contract FBI translator turned whistleblower, for those who aren't familiar.
Well that's a tough one Scott, I mean it's a heck of a story, there are a lot of ramifications to it.
To put it as briefly as I possibly could, she as you know was an FBI translator who turned whistleblower.
And she turned whistleblower because she had, for a couple of reasons, she was unfairly dismissed from the FBI and also the fact that she noted while she was doing transcription work that there were a number of ongoing cases that were extremely serious that no one seemed to be interested in following up on.
And that was the essence of her whistleblowing.
Basically the story she's telling is a story about high-level corruption and what some people might call something akin to treason on the part of government officials at State Department and the Pentagon in particular and also our elected officials in Congress who were taking money in return for doing favors for the Turkish and Israeli lobbies.
It's kind of a circular story, and this is the way I tried to present it in the interview that just came out, in that you have these corrupt officials enabling a process whereby foreign intelligence officers are kind of running amok within our government, corrupting other people, generating a lot of money along the way, and then this money kind of returns and goes into the pockets of various people to further enable the corruption.
That's kind of what it's all about.
All right, and now Joe, in your series for the London Times, it's For Sale the West's Deadly Nuclear Secrets, FBI Denies File Exposing Nuclear Secrets Theft, and Tip-Off Thwarted Nuclear Spy Ring Probe, you really did focus, as these titles indicate, on the angle here about the selling of nuclear secrets, and it's funny to me, actually, going back and reading this series, seeing just how thorough of a job you did and how many different stories you break in here, but I guess, first of all, can you give us basically your general sense of how credible Sabella Edmonds' information has been?
Obviously she talked to you and your two colleagues at the London Times, and then you must have done as much as you could to verify, say, talk to FBI agents, current and former, that kind of thing, to find out whether they say that what this lady is saying is right, because it seems like she is, in a sense, sort of a single source for a whole lot of accusations here.
Well, this is obviously probably the biggest question in this entire story, is this believable or not?
And it wasn't easy to corroborate that.
It's very difficult to corroborate this.
That's probably one of the reasons large publications, and I applaud American Conservative for running this piece, and I think Phil did a terrific job of the editing of it.
It's very tight.
I'll talk a little more about that later.
But I think one of the difficult things is corroborating what she's talking about.
Either Sabella Edmonds is one of the great actresses of our time, where she's got her finger on a story of immense proportions that perhaps so immense that it's scaring the hell out of a lot of people, not only people involved, but people who may be dependent on people who are involved or in all sorts of ways are tied to this activity, and lots of things we may not even know about that Sabella doesn't know about.
This is one corner of perhaps wide, who knows, activities like that, similar activities that go on in our country.
So I've spent a hell of a lot of time with Sabella, as I'm sure Phil has, on the phone, in person.
Numerous times with her husband, been in her house.
She convinced Waxman and Grassley that she was a credible person.
Every FBI agent, there were three of them, all three of them that worked with her on this case, vouched for her personally as a person who was not crazy, was not a fantasist.
They did not dismiss anything that she said.
They didn't go down the list of what she had told us and say, yes, this is true and that's not true.
This is something an FBI agent almost never will do, particularly in this case where this is a highly classified information and they can wind up in jail or losing their jobs.
The key thing to understand here is that this is an investigation that was ongoing.
There's a lot of money that was spent and time, and it was stopped.
The lead FBI agent left Washington.
He had a pretty good job there investigating government corruption.
He went out to another state out west where he's got pretty obscure cases that he's working on, but he wanted to get away from it.
The one thing I'll say, he never corroborated again directly or anything, but at one point I spoke three times with him in front of his house, and this conversation would go on 15 minutes.
One time I spent over an hour and a half inside the home of an agent, another agent, and he said at one point, I'm really surprised that your stories weren't picked up in the US.
I don't know.
I find that significant given how little else of that nature these agents were talking about.
I think she's credible, but we have to probe this more.
The way to go forward with this is to get the Justice Department, a new Justice Department, I know to hold your breath, the Obama Justice Department, to reopen this case.
I put that directly to a DOJ official, and I was in possession of this videotape of her deposition exclusively for a week, trying to sell it somewhere, just based on what we'd done on the Sunday Times.
I was given this by Sebel's lawyers, and I was unable to place the story.
That tells you something right there.
But I did talk to the Department of Justice, and they were interested, but they never answered the key question, would you even consider reopening this case?
And the only way that's going to happen, I think, is with media pressure.
Dan Ellsberg once told me that when he was peddling the Pentagon Papers, he thought he would go to the Congress first, and then if they had a hearing, it would be in the press.
And he learned that he told me that it was going to the press first that would get Congress to act.
They say, crap, we better have a hearing on this.
So I think this is really a key point.
Will the mainstream papers, if anybody has the guts, the resources, the fortitude, to look into this case?
They don't want to touch it.
They don't want to touch it.
Well, it does kind of seem, doesn't it, Phil, as though, like Citigroup being too big to fail, this story is too big to break.
I mean, you're talking about bringing down highest level people in Congress, in the state and defense departments, the cover-uppers in the Department of Justice, etc., etc.
This is the kind of thing that, you know, can cause massive high-level resignations of prosecutions if they really went after it, right?
Well, I think as Joe points out, it might be too big to succeed.
That's really the better way to look at it.
There are so many people that would be destroyed by this if the allegations are even 50% true, that everybody in the government, Democrats and Republicans alike, have a vested interest in circling the wagons.
And I would point out another thing that, you know, in reference to Daniel Ellsberg, I mean, the media was a lot different back then.
The media was quite willing to take on stories independently and pursue them to death, particularly a huge story like this.
But today's media is a lot more corporate in its mentality, and it's a lot more collectivist in the way it looks at its hand-in-hand role with the government.
So it's not quite the same world in terms of the media opening up this story.
I really think it's going to be up to us in the alternative media, places like the American Conservative and AntiWar.com, and I noticed today that this story is being picked up enormously on the Internet.
It's going to be these places that maybe force a break in the media stranglehold on not covering this story, and that the mainstream media will have to pay attention to it.
We tried to float this story, just FYI, to the Drudge website, to Matt Drudge.
He had no interest in it.
Steve Clemons at the Washington Note has no interest in it.
You know, see, these are a lot of people just like the mainstream media that have a vested interest in having cozy relationships, because these cozy relationships provide them with information, they provide them with access.
And we've got to break through that.
Well, you know, it's interesting when you bring up Steve Clemons.
I mean, I haven't discussed this with him at all, so I don't know, but it seems like it kind of brings up one of the themes in this story, which is that it's not just bipartisan in terms of Republican and Democrat, but it's also bipartisan, as we find out, I think, even more in this recent interview, Phil, that it's bipartisan in the sense of the neoconservatives as well as the realists.
We have James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Henry Kissinger.
Their names being thrown around as being involved in this.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah.
Cybele revealed, to my astonishment, that people like Brent Scowcroft and the others that you've named were very much involved with politicking with Turkey prior to 9-11.
And what they were politicking about and what they were trying to arrange was an attack on Iraq.
And the negotiations kind of broke down based on the fact that the Turks decided they wanted a big slice of northern Iraq for themselves, and they were kind of discussing where to go with this when 9-11 took place.
So here you have Brent Scowcroft, who has pretended to be someone who was opposed to the Iraq War.
In fact, when he was head of the American-Turkish Council at the time, he was very much on board dealing with the Turks in terms of getting the war started at a point when there was no 9-11, no plausible justification for going after Iraq except for the UN sanctions situation.
So everybody, I'm sure everybody's touched by this.
And I was particularly astonished by Sabel's account of people like Douglas Feith and Richard Pearl at the Pentagon actually accessing personnel files and security files of individuals to get past this information through Grossman and directly over to the Turks and the Israelis so these people could be targeted.
I mean, this is an astonishing story, and as I say, if only 50% of it is true, and like with Joe, I find Sabel completely credible.
I was an intelligence officer for 20 years, and one of my jobs, regular jobs, was of course to deal with fabricators and people who come in telling you stories, and so I'm kind of sensitive to that issue, but I don't get that feeling from her, and certainly there have been a number of other people who have testified that she's completely credible.
And in this case, we're talking about nuclear secrets, we're talking about defense secrets, we're talking about corruption in government, we're talking about a lot of amazing things.
I'd like to add that she's credible to the point where this needs to be investigated.
I'm not saying everything that she says is completely 100% accurate.
I haven't had a chance to check that out, and I need the backing of some publication to do that.
But now that she's named names, you know, most of what's in that in-your-piece, Phil, she told us without naming all the names.
We didn't use the names because we didn't, we weren't able to confirm this.
But now that all those names are out there, these are people that could be approached, and a big news organization could put pressure to try to get answers and chip away.
There's plenty to work with, whether it's all true and whether she's mixed in.
You know, Sabel's a very, very bright woman, and she's done a lot of work and research in politics, so sometimes we wondered whether what she was telling us, what you see in Phil's interview, is everything she got off tapes, or was it also mixed in with some of her research, her knowledge of Turkish deep state politics?
Joe, actually, I can answer that a little bit.
When I was doing the interview with her, she told me that most of what she was telling us was from stuff we saw on tapes.
But there is some of her story that comes from corroboration from other people within the FBI, mostly, that have spoken to her since that time.
So in a sense, you're absolutely right.
This is a, this is, there are lots of things in this story that cannot be corroborated necessarily in a direct and immediate way, unless somebody really takes this on and goes after it piece by piece.
Well now, when it comes to Brent Scowcroft, you know, this ties in, I think, with Greg Pallast's reporting that James Baker and them had a plan for what he called a coup disguised as an invasion, but basically get rid of Hussein and his sons and replace them with the next Bothis mustache in line, I think is the way that Pallast said it, and that then the neocons got more prominence and did their Iraq plan instead after September 11th.
But on the issue of Scowcroft, you know, being tied with Baker and that kind of thing, that seems very plausible to me.
But you know, I reread David Rose's piece from Vanity Fair in September 2005 about Sobel last night.
And he mentions there in context of Scowcroft that, at least the way David Rose puts it in the article, is that Sobel said that she assumed that Scowcroft didn't have anything to do with this stuff, as far as all this criminality and espionage and so forth, that this was, he was the chair on the board or something like that.
But all this stuff was going on at the American Turkish Council on a much lower level, something like that.
I wonder, Phil, do you think that her opinion has changed about that, or that these discussions that Scowcroft had about Iraq and Turkey weren't necessarily, didn't necessarily have anything to do with the lower level criminality stuff?
Well, I think that, yeah, we're talking about two different things here, I think.
I'm reading a little bit into the story.
But the fact is that what Scowcroft and Baker, being a former Secretary of State, and these people were doing, they were negotiating at a very high level, nation to nation, essentially.
They were representing, in a sense, the United States, even though they had no legal authority to do so.
The other stuff, the basic level criminality, yeah, I would be awfully surprised if Scowcroft and people like that would get their hands dirty with that sort of thing.
So I think we're looking at two different levels.
There were a lot of people in ATC that were involved in this process who were implementers and who were kind of spear carriers, the Mark Grossmans, the people at the Pentagon.
And then there were people like Scowcroft who were kind of above the fray.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Philip Giraldi, that was him talking just there, from the American Conservative Magazine.
And Joe Lauria, who's an investigative reporter who participated in a three-part series for the London Times in January 2008 about the Sabel Edmonds story.
And I wanted to ask you, Joe, about one of the things that you guys cover in your story is how, after September 11th, this unnamed State Department employee, who I think everybody knows who you're talking about, but Sunday Times rules there, had called the Justice Department, was it, to have four Turks who had been rounded up after September 11th, which I guess in John Ashcroft's Roundup of Innocence, I don't know, and that this State Department employee had these four men released, I think, before they spill the beans was the words in the article.
But the question that I had was about what?
Does this imply, was I to understand, that these men knew something about the attacks or that just that they'd been rounded up and they could spill the beans about the rest of this espionage and so forth that they'd been involved in?
Well, Sabel never said, she doesn't know, but you can make the assumptions that you've just made.
I don't know what the means.
Grossman is the man, obviously, that we're talking about here, because that's all out now.
She said on, you know, on the road, and he wouldn't talk, he's obviously not going to talk, at least on the first couple of phone calls.
And we don't know the names of the four people who were released.
So that was a story that we ran, but, you know, we don't know much more about than what we said, actually.
And whether it happened or not, you know, Sabel, it all comes down to whether you believe her and whether this is stuff that had to be further investigated.
And I think that it does, obviously, and it's not happening, and that's troublesome to me.
And I don't wonder how far this American conservative piece by Phillips would go.
What they're also coming up against is this idea of American exceptionalism, I think.
I think it's really shocking for a lot of Americans in the media to think that anybody at Americans could behave this way, that government officials could behave this way.
And it's against the interests, ultimately, of their own country.
They just can't believe this.
I think that's a big hurdle to get over.
I had an interview with the foreign minister of India yesterday, S.M. Krishna.
I'm covering the General Assembly here in New York.
I'm inside the U.N. right now, where Mr. Obama was earlier.
And I told him and his ambassador here about Phillips' piece, and I sent it to them, and they were quite keen to learn more, particularly, obviously, about the AQCon network connection, which we wrote about pretty extensively in the Sunday Times series.
And they are convinced that his network is still up and running, and they want to know as much as they can about how it may have reached inside the U.S.
That's just one aspect of this large activity of corruption, that they bought everything from Mozart and his Armenian Genocide Resolutions to nuclear secrets, and everything in between.
It's funny that she didn't mention the Valerie Plum issue to you, Phil.
Did she get into that, or did she just...
Yeah, actually, she did, but there were a couple of issues we had no room for.
We ran out of words.
Well, and this is a story that you covered in your series for the London Times there, was the Brewster Jennings & Associates, the CIA front company that the famous Valerie Plum worked for.
Yeah, well, what we think we understand is that Brewster Jennings, that Valerie Plum was doing the same investigation on the CIA side, out of the country, as the FBI was doing inside the country, looking into the same smuggling ring.
And if it was, in fact, this high State Department official who was involved, and he knew what Valerie Plum was up to, he alerted this Turkish company that was a front company for this ring, that wanted to engage Brewster Jennings to get information, not knowing that Brewster Jennings was the CIA front itself, it was two front companies colliding.
So he, according to her, Sabal, and a memo that we received that we were never able to identify who sent it, warning that it was this number three guy in the State Department that warned this Turkish group not to deal with Valerie Plum because she was actually CIA.
So in that sense, that was really the first outing of Valerie Plum, not publicly, the way it became a circus later, a media circus.
And years before, years before Bob Novak there.
Now I wanted to ask you about this too, this letter that you mentioned.
You say in your article, I think, that one of the reasons that you find this letter credible is because it sounds so much like what Sabal Edmonds is saying, and yet it's clearly not by her, and it was received by whoever originally received it before she came public with her story.
Is that right?
Well, I mean, we didn't, I hate, you say it's clearly not by her, and we didn't rule out any possibility about where this came from.
Okay.
I mean, that was one possibility.
But even if that, I mean, she did not, did you ask her if it was from her?
Yes, I think we did, yeah.
I mean, of course she said it wasn't from her.
I don't believe that it was from her, but we don't know who wrote it.
I mean, she would have to do a lot more to make up her story than just one letter that was sent to a small NGO in Washington that got this letter.
But I'm trying to remember what one of the FBI agents told me about that.
I don't think, I think we asked him and he said it did not sound like her.
So we don't know where that came from.
And by the way, because you get to, again, you bring up talking to some of these FBI agents.
I wanted to mention here that as far as her credibility goes, Cybele in the past has appeared on this show with Frederick Whitehurst, the former supervisor, I forget exactly his position at the FBI crime lab, who was a whistleblower, with Daniel Ellsberg, previously mentioned, and with James Bamford, the great intelligence reporter.
She's really compiled a pretty good list of heavy hitters who seem to think that she's not making this up, at least as far as that goes.
Again, what we need, right, is the New York Times to, I don't know, hire a real reporter or something and then give them the budget to really solve this thing.
Or Scott, we need the government to come clean on it.
I mean, Cybele has said that everything she has said has been, is verifiable from FBI files, and she even provided the numbers of the files.
So if the Justice Department is serious about looking at this, they can go straight to the files, and I understand if some of this involves ongoing investigations, they won't be able to tell us any of that information, and that probably some of the older material, some of the stuff goes back to 1996, some of the older material will have to be purged of possible sources and methods and that kind of thing.
I understand all that.
But the fact is, the core of her story has to be there, or perhaps it isn't there, if she indeed is a clever fabricator.
And I think the government at this point, and the Justice Department, owes it to the public to say one way or another whether this is a true story or this is a fabrication.
What we haven't brought up is the fact that they allowed her, the Obama administration, to go ahead with this deposition.
Right.
There was a suspense before that, that she would be gagged again, and they didn't do it.
And I spoke to the Justice Department several days before, and the woman I spoke to there, I don't think she had any idea how Edmonds was, which they do now, and it was a decision made, they did try to stop her from doing it, letters exchanged, but they didn't stop her.
And I think that might tell you that they realize that nobody's gonna pick this story up.
I think that it's safely embedded in the blogosphere, where, let's face it, I mean, the thing about the blogs are they take stories that the major papers won't take it for a variety of reasons.
But they really don't have the training or the skill to bring it out in a credible way that a big paper can.
That's why we're in such a bind here.
Both will lose in both ways, I think.
It's one thing at least to get it out, but it would be another thing if the New York Times wrote about it, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Well, and it'd be another thing, too, if you could get Chris Matthews or any of these goofballs on TV to talk about it.
I mean, here, ladies and gentlemen, drumroll, please.
There's a sex scandal in here, and now, not only has Cybele Edmonds said, yes, indeed, there was a congresswoman who was, you know, basically entrapped or set up by the Turkish lobby or these spies, whoever they were, but to you, Phil, she actually named the congresswoman.
I mean, I hate to have somebody's personal life smeared like that over a political case, but I'm really just getting to the point that isn't that what Contessa Brewer and all these goofballs on MSNBC are for, is taking a sex scandal and running with that?
Can we not at least get coverage of this one aspect here?
Scott, I mean, I would say that it's not a sex scandal, it's a corruption scandal.
And the sex aspect of it and the blackmail, the potential blackmail is just one aspect of the corruption.
And that's really what we're talking about.
If this weren't a corruption story, we wouldn't be interested in the sexual aspect.
And yes, indeed, Cybele did name the congresswoman, and we reported it in the story.
Well, and she has also said that she has no information whatsoever that this congresswoman ever did anything due to being compromised at all.
And we should say that out loud.
That's right.
She didn't name her at first.
In the deposition, she didn't name her for that reason.
She doesn't know whether she took the bribe or not, did anything for it.
That's correct.
Then let's assume she didn't.
This is where I would call as a reporter, try to get in touch with her or her husband was named in Phil's piece, and try to gently talk to them and see whether it's true or not.
Well, now, Joe, what about going back to the Sunday Times?
Well, we have.
We did.
I felt that the story wasn't advanced enough by the deposition and the transcript that we got at the deposition.
I must say, reading Phil's piece here, I mean, it is so well put together, because almost all of that, but not all, there were new things in there for me as well.
We'd heard from her in very disjointed conversations over the space of months.
But there was all the pieces were very well put together, and I think the whole picture emerges.
And the Sunday Times felt that they had read it on the story.
There may have been legal questions in there, too, about whether I don't think it got that far.
So I don't know whether there was, whether that, and they're over in London.
I'm here in New York, and they don't share that with me anyway.
I mean, I don't know what the decision were, the exact reasons.
But they didn't want to run the story anymore.
I thought it was vindication in a way, that she now was on the record under oath saying the same things and more than we had reported earlier.
And they didn't want to do it.
And I don't know exactly why.
They just felt it wasn't exciting enough.
I don't know.
That's something I heard.
I don't know the reason.
Well, now, you know, one of the reasons that this interview is so thorough is, quite unlike myself, because you, Phil, know exactly which questions to ask.
You have the experience to interview this lady just right and make the right connections.
And part of that is because, as a CIA officer, you were stationed in Turkey for a while.
You were the station chief of at least one city or another or something, right?
I was in Istanbul, yeah.
And how long were you a CIA agent in Turkey, Phil?
I was there for three years.
And so do you have, that means, I guess, that you have, you know, all this insight into how the state in Turkey really operates and what its real relationship is with the United States and NATO and Israel and everything else, huh?
Well, I certainly have enough of an insight where it, when Sibel said certain things relating to Turkey, I knew whether they were plausible or not.
And I knew where I could go with the story based on what she was saying.
So yeah, that was quite a lot of it.
And also, of course, I know how an intelligence operation is run.
And when you get to the bottom of it, this whole influence and corruption business, this is kind of an intelligence operation.
It's people who are agents of foreign governments who are penetrating the United States, both the bureaucracy and our legislature, and are doing it for the benefit of those foreign governments.
And so to me, it was not unfamiliar turf, let's put it that way.
And so now let's talk about these neocons, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
These are two very powerful men.
They helped write the Clean Break policy for Benjamin Netanyahu back in 1996.
Of course, Dick Cheney hired them, Perle to the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board, and Feith became the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for, no, not the deputy, just the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush Jr. administration.
And these are two of the men who really helped lead us into war in Iraq.
And now she has really elaborated, I think, for the first time on what exactly she's accusing these guys of.
Phil, can you...
Phil, listen.
Yeah, this to me was one of the most amazing parts of her story, that these people, Doug Feith and Richard Perle, were, because of their history at the Pentagon, there were times in this story when they were actually working there, and times in this story when they were not, when they were behind the scenes.
But because they had access to the Pentagon, they were able to obtain personnel files and to obtain security files on people.
When I say a security file, I mean that every few years, if you work for the government in a sensitive position, they check your background, they check up on you, and they determine things like, yeah, you're going through a nasty divorce, you've become an alcoholic, you're taking drugs, these kinds of things.
And so these people were able to gain access to this kind of information, and they were passing this information through Mark Grossman, in many cases, apparently, on to the Turks and the Israelis, so that these people could then be targeted to bring them on board, basically, as agents.
So to me, I mean, that's an absolutely incredible concept, that they were doing this and they were cooperating to that extent.
And to the extent that they were successful or not successful is difficult to say, but certainly there was, Sybil was able to detect that there was a very definite flow of information out of defense labs and out of military installations and stuff like that, that was going back to Turkey and Israel.
So to a certain extent, obviously, they were successful.
Well, what do you think that has to do with Larry Franklin?
We all know he was convicted for passing classified information to Israel and that he worked for Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Plans.
Well, Larry Franklin was giving information to AIPAC, and AIPAC, of course, is the godfather of the American-Turkish Council.
They worked hand-in-hand on a lot of these things, and Sybil claims to have reviewed or made transcripts of telephone calls in which these two groups were talking together to plan strategy and tactics.
So there's a very intimate relationship between all of this.
Sybil has said a number of times, and I think also to you, Scott, that this is all one story.
This all comes together.
And that's what she's referring to.
And she still has a wealth of information we haven't even tapped.
My interview with her was a couple of hours long, and there are 10 hours there, 12 hours, maybe 100 hours of things that she has an amazing memory.
And there are things that we could pursue, there are stories, storylines within the story that we could pursue.
And as Joe is suggesting, a major media outlet would have maybe the resources to follow up on that.
But the U.S. government has the resources to follow up on it, too, if they're interested.
Well, they have the investigation half done already, don't they?
I mean, that's the point here, that this was an ongoing thing that was stopped.
Well, and you have copies of the files that the FBI says don't exist, right, Joe?
I think we got a document that proved that this document exists.
I didn't see the document.
I just saw a document that proved the document exists, which they said does not exist.
Let me rephrase that.
The document existed.
So it is possible they destroyed the document, then they'd be telling the truth.
But they said it doesn't exist now.
When there was a FOIA done, they said, it had the file number on the one Phil referred to.
They said, this file number doesn't exist.
There's no such file.
But I have a document that has the, it's an official FBI document that has the file number on it.
But it's not a, not a document that has a lot of details, but it does have the number on it.
So look, there's all this circumstantial evidence that proved to us that she was credible enough to run that series.
We need to go further in this.
And you know, she's credible.
This is, and if you do a preliminary investigation, as the police do, as the International Criminal Court's doing, that they're doing right now in Afghanistan, you gather evidence in a very preliminary way to see whether it's worth committing the resources and having a formal investigation.
I think we're definitely at the point where we need a formal investigation that doesn't convict anybody or prove anything that she said to be completely true, but it's either given mapping, it reaches the threshold of saying, look, we've got to look into this, but it's, it's too much.
It's too dangerous for too many people.
And it kind of depresses me why I think I'm going to go ahead with journalism anyway, if this is the story that I'm not allowed to cover somehow.
What is the point?
What is the point of not putting out these stories?
I mean, it's almost like a cover for, this is the real deep state too.
This is the deep politics of America.
And the media unfortunately often just presents factual information that doesn't get anywhere near that.
Well, and that's the real point, isn't it?
You know, you were saying earlier that most of these people, even in the media, they just can't imagine.
They say, they think, Oh, American democracy works great and what have you, but it really is more like a Douglas Valentine posted up on my Facebook page earlier.
He said, this is just business as usual.
This is nothing different than it always is.
Well, that's somebody who understands American history and knows American character that we're as capable of committing these crimes as any other country is.
We're not better than other people.
We're just the same, unfortunately.
We can commit war crimes.
I mean, in the sense that American, Americans can't commit a war crime, they're very nervous because the international criminal court may actually investigate American airmen over Afghanistan if the Americans don't investigate some of these bombings of wedding parties of those fuel tankers, that a collateral damage could rise.
The prosecutor of the court, Luis Romero, a cop who told me the other day that he might start an investigation because he thinks that that might be war crimes, collateral damage.
If the U.S. doesn't investigate themselves, the ICC might because Afghanistan is a party to the treaty.
But this concept that Americans could commit a war crime is, it's impossible to most people.
They just cannot conceive.
Only the bad guys do that.
We don't do that.
We're the bad guys sometimes.
You've got to grow up.
I think it's about being an adult and understanding that commerce has, since the days of Mark Twain earlier, has been bought by big power products from the very beginning.
I mean, the Virginia planters and New England merchants.
But this is the way our Congress is the problem.
If we don't confront it, we're never going to become a better country.
It's just going to stay like this or get worse.
And I think this is a great opportunity to confront that, that most of these guys are out of government now.
So, I mean, there's no reason why the Obama, but we've seen they won't, Obama won't investigate.
I mean, this CIA investigation that Holder's doing, I'm holding my breath because I'm afraid that Ray McGovern had a great piece the other day on that.
I'm afraid that that might not continue.
Well, they've already narrowed it down to just a couple of instances of actual murder.
Forget the tortures already out.
Yeah.
And they're only focusing on the lowest level people as always.
You can't be a democracy without looking into this.
It's just not possible.
You cannot keep covering this stuff up.
And you know, maybe there's nothing there, but why are they afraid?
All right.
Well, let's talk about the maybe wildest part of this or the newest part.
There's been kind of implications here and there, but Phil Giraldi, Sabella Edmonds said on I believe it was Brad Friedman's radio show a few weeks back, mentioned this.
And then again, in her interview with you, she talks about American covert cooperation with support for the Mujahideen as they called them then, she says, Al Qaeda all the way up until September 11th.
I kind of wish you'd followed up a little more on that in the interview.
What exactly is going on there?
Yeah, well, I must admit that that part of it was kind of blurry even for me.
Basically what Sabella said was that she came across evidence in the course of her work that indicated that there was considerable covert support going on for what were referred to in the transcripts and in the documents that she saw, the Mujahideen.
And the Mujahideen, of course, were the radical Islamists that we referred to as Al Qaeda among others.
And she says that the material she saw indicated that there was considerable material support being provided to these groups in Bosnia, among other places.
And she also mentioned activity in Central Asia and various places, and that this was ongoing and this was also connected with a lot of corruption in that NATO planes were used to support these endeavors and the NATO planes involved.
And I guess this is how the FBI got their hooks into it, were involved with flying drugs across national lines and eventually, I guess, distributing these drugs and that sort of thing.
So there was a criminal aspect to it.
There was also a policy aspect to it in terms of supporting Muslims in places like Bosnia.
And there was an intelligence aspect to it in terms of supporting radical Islamist groups that eventually resulted in blowback in terms of what we experienced on 9-11 and subsequently.
And according to Sabel, this all continued right up until 9-11.
Well, now, in the conversation there, too, you ask, and I'm not exactly sure the wording, I guess I could page down and find it, but something to the effect of, you know, she's saying Grossman was running this thing.
And you ask her, well, did the government know about this?
And she says, yes, 100%.
But what exactly does that mean?
That the FBI was overhearing it and that's the government knew about it?
Or that this was a covert operation that Grossman had, you know, official, you know, there was a finding somewhere or something that said he was allowed to break the law and do these things?
Specifically, her answer to that question was, when I asked her, did the government know about it?
It was specifically, did the FBI know about it?
Were they aware of this was going on?
Okay, so this was not a covert action.
It was espionage, it was basically treachery on the part of Grossman, rather than something that, you know, Bill Clinton had signed a finding authorizing or something like that.
Well, I think there are a couple of aspects to it.
I think that we didn't, as you know, we didn't go into this terribly deeply at the time.
But the fact is, there clearly was a covert operation going on in support of the Bosnian Muslims, and this involved the Mujahideen, it involved supporting them.
So this was a government operation.
But the point is, this is a case where one part of the government, which is in law enforcement, kind of comes across the trail of another part of the government, which is intelligence.
And they discover what the intelligence people are kind of up to, because there's a, meanwhile, a criminal element kind of going on in through the middle of this, which is where Grossman was involved.
Well, you know, you reminded me of Loretta Napoleone's book, Terror, Inc., where she says that, you know, what we call Al-Qaeda basically represents hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe trillions of dollars in the world economy every year, that there are, you know, massive farms in Sudan, there's massive heroin running, there's, you know, honey bee, you know, collection places, you know, there's, it's a massive part of the world economy, the underground black market terrorist financial network, basically.
Well, I think you have to recognize that the way terrorists operate are the way criminals operate.
And that's why you very often, this is part of Cybele's story, I believe, that essentially criminal and something other than criminal, if you want to call it terrorism, whatever you want to call it, they all come together in this kind of gangster milieu where governments are involved, carrying out dark deeds, and you have criminal groups that are making money and you have terrorists in the middle, all this kind of stuff comes together.
And again, this is going back to what she was saying, this is all one story.
All right.
And now, forgive me for leaving you on hold for a minute longer here, Joe Lauria, but I wanted to follow up on one more angle here with Phil, and that is the last name Bin Laden.
She tells you in this transcript, Bin Laden's, plural, is she talking about Osama, that he was actually working with the American, whoever these people are in running drugs and whatever right up until 9-11, because you understand, I'm skating near the whole conspiracy theory, which is that ultimately Al-Qaeda works with the CIA on all kinds of things, and always did, and he got General Mahmoud from the ISI, sent $100,000, while his AIDS daughter is working with Cybele translating things in the department and whatever.
Are we to the wink-wink stage here yet, guys, or what's going on?
Well, what specifically she was referring to was the fact that Bin Laden, it was not just Bin Laden, it was Bin Laden and his family, that his sons and others who were involved and sons-in-laws and daughter-in-laws and so on and so forth, so it was kind of a family cooperative that was involved in a lot of this, and of course it extends even further into more, shall we say, distant relationships and that kind of thing.
So she was referring to the fact that names of a number of Bin Ladens and Bin Laden relatives and associates were showing up in the material that she was seeing.
I should add that I asked the Foreign Minister of India yesterday about that very thing you mentioned, this idea, this story, that the head of the ISI had sent money or contacted Muhammad Ata, and he dismissed that as absolute rubbish, so the Indian, a very high-level Indian government official, doesn't believe that story.
I always wondered whether anybody had ever really nailed that down, because I never found it, if they did.
No, there was one paper in India that reported that, but the attribution was fishy.
Yeah, the civilized never said that.
I think you're right, it's a story that is single-sourced and that basically came from a source that might have fabricated it.
So here again, I'm not really of an inside-job kind of way of looking at 9-11, isn't really my thing, but clearly there was a massive cover-up about all the prior knowledge and how they could have, would have stopped it if they'd been doing their jobs.
And clearly, when you have all this kind of interconnectedness between all these black market players, I think, you know, as Greg Pallast pointed out, Prince Bandar and Prince Turkey al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia had paid protection money to Bin Laden on the order of millions of dollars, not to attack America, but just to not attack Saudi Arabia for a little while, please.
And this is the kind of stuff you have to cover up.
I mean, Prince Bandar is George Bush Sr.'s best friend.
You can't have a real investigation of 9-11 when what it turns up is, well, the kind of thing that you need to black out 27 pages of if you're Congress, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, I think Joe is absolutely right.
I mean, I think there's this sense of American exceptionalism which blinds us to the fact that we're just like anybody else, and basically people in this country are quite as capable of being corrupt.
The corruption is very often the kind of a soft kind of corruption, like the Bush family and their relationships with Saudis and people like that, where people do favors and they do things for you, but it's still corruption.
And we lose sight of this, and the problem is when you get into the mindset of doing these sorts of things, of making cozy deals and cozy arrangements, which all these people, the bakers and the people that were high up in the Bush 1 administration and so on and so forth, and the people around Clinton, it's all the same kind of corruption.
It's the same kind of thing.
And eventually, you know, this kind of stuff will come back and bite you, because corruption is corruption, and a lot of people don't know where to draw the line anymore.
Look at some of the congressmen that Sybil has named.
These people were taking money from the Turks while they were in office, and now they're working for Turkish companies, or they're working as lobbyists for Turkey.
And some of these guys, they couldn't spell Turk if they tried.
They don't know anything.
Well, and Phil, two of these guys are former speakers of the House of Representatives, Hastert and Livingston, both, and then Dan Burden's name has now come up.
He was the chair of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.
Absolutely.
So what does that tell you?
I mean, if only a fraction of this is true, there should be people out in the streets right now screaming and waving around signs.
But they're not.
So there's something fundamentally wrong with our democracy, and with our media, and with our government, that we can't see what's right in front of us.
I don't know if Joe agrees with me on this.
I'm getting a little emotional.
I agree 100%.
And, you know, you pointed out how these guys get jobs with the Turkish lobbying company.
They were not paid off, Sybil pointed out to me, while they were in office very much.
It's just too obvious you're getting in trouble.
I promise when you leave office, you might be given, and I'm not naming any names, because I don't really know what happened with these individual people, but in general, it seems that that's the way it happens.
Why did they not, why did they gag, or why did these guys wind up with these jobs with the Turks?
These are questions that have to be asked.
I just want to make clear that I'm not, as, you know, another guest you want to have on hadn't reported on this, or you didn't want to speak about it.
I haven't reported on a lot of what she said, either.
I report enough to know that she's credible enough to want to look into it, but the main point I'm making here is this can't be left out there, not to be investigated, and the pressure has to be put on the Justice Department to do it, and the only one who I think can do it is major media, or somebody, a courageous person inside Congress, somebody, she went to a couple people like that, but they dropped her, you know, and that's unfortunate, because if you have a senator who won't stand up and say, this is outrageous, we've got to look into this.
But as Kerkorian, David Kerkorian, who has not been mentioned yet, he's part of this term because he was sued by Gene Schmidt, a representative from Ohio, he's running against her, he ran against her, he's running again against her for the House the next election.
He accused her of taking Turkish blood money.
She sued him for slander or libel, and this court case ensued in which he got Sabel to testify on the record in which he named all this, he named all these names and explained all this information that was put together very well by Phil so that anybody could really understand it.
But all that stuff mostly came out in the videotaped deposition, and the fact that this is not being looked into, I mean, I don't understand that, that's the thing I don't understand.
It really is incredible, because here it is, I mean, she's been, as we kind of talked about before, she's been kind of telling a little bit of this and a little bit of that and not really, hasn't really been able this whole time, especially because of the persecution by the Bush administration, to really tell the whole story.
Here she is under oath on video for hours going through the whole thing, and I mean what we have represented in Who's Afraid of Sabel Edmonds, this interview by Phil Durali, is getting down to the real details of this, but it's the same story that she says under oath, risking prosecution, not for telling her story like usual, but if she dares say something that's not true.
Either she's mad or she's an extremely courageous woman.
Well, you know, I want to get back to the heart of this, and this is what you guys focus on in your series for the London Times that was published in January of 2008, Joe Lauria, and that is, we're talking about nuclear secrets here, the accusations, again, not proven, but again, credible allegations, so what we have is widespread espionage in terms of pilfering nuclear secrets from the National Laboratory, Sandy and Lawrence Livermore, right?
From MIT and major universities and God knows what.
And we're talking about these nuclear bomb secrets going to Pakistan, for example.
Well, I mean, things like that happened before, didn't it, during the Cold War?
So it's not far-fetched.
I don't think it is.
Yeah, and Sabel told the one story which we recounted to a certain extent in the interview about how the Turks had obtained some information from one of the national labs on nuclear developments, which they paid one of these students a couple thousand dollars for, and then they went to the Pakistanis and said that you want it, the price is $350,000, the Pakistanis decided they couldn't afford it, so the Turkish intelligence agents involved in this offered it to some Saudi Arabian businessmen, whom they then met in Detroit and sold this information to for $350,000.
I mean, to me, this is espionage at the highest level, and it's just crying out for somebody to be investigating.
Well, and as everybody knows, I think, and I think some of the danger of this has been a bit overblown, but still, at least the story goes that this guy, the people refusing to prosecute or investigate all these allegations are the same ones who say that the Pakistanis gave all their enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya.
And we know the North Koreans made their bombs out of plutonium, and that the Libyans gave up their centrifuge equipment, but we know that the Iranians are spending theirs, and that's the big bogus excuse for the next war, is that the Iranians got centrifuge technology from Pakistan, who apparently got it from Mark Grossman and them.
Or maybe, you know, I'm being facetious at that part, but you understand what I mean.
Yeah, I mean, there doesn't have to be any logical consistency to what people are alleging about people that they want to vilify, and you know, I wouldn't take that one too far, but the fact is, yeah, sure, it's the same people that on one hand are saying, yeah, this was okay because, you know, Israel was an ally, they were involved, the Turks are friendly, and sure, some of this stuff wound up in Pakistan and helped their nuclear development program.
Well, you know, but that's kind of collateral damage.
Sure, there's a lot of tap dancing going on around this, but there is, as I would put it, a central issue here, which is that this was massive, coordinated espionage directed against the United States by foreign agents in the United States, and using senior government officials and senior legislators in our Congress as the mechanism for carrying this out.
And you know, it's that simple, and if people in the Justice Department can't see that this is something that is extremely serious, I don't know how to wake them up.
I should point out that centrifuge technology was taken from the European company where IQcon worked.
You didn't get it from...
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah, I was basically just joking at that part, but you're right, thanks for clarifying that, by the way.
The thing about Grossman is, as this interview points out, if it's true, is that this started in Turkey.
This whole thing started there, it looked like, and he had to leave, according to Sabal, because of the Sosaloo scandal, and if this is true, it's interesting, and he came to the States and carried on that network into the U.S., or he helped it, if it wasn't already here.
I found that pretty interesting.
But he was, wherever this began, started there, if it's true, when he was the ambassador there.
Yeah, the other kind of interesting side story is about the New York Times, where Grossman was joking, apparently on the phone, that he could fax over to his contact at the New York Times a story that the Turks wanted to appear in just a particular form, and he would fax his account over to the New York Times, and the New York Times would print it as Grossman had drafted it.
We got a little bit more on that story, which was, basically, this was involved with helicopter sales back in the year 2000, about which there was a scandal, and anyone who can Google can figure out who the journalist was, but we didn't use it because Sabal never actually heard his name.
Oh, well, isn't that interesting?
Maybe you guys should talk amongst yourselves while I Google that real quick, I want to know.
Too bad I don't have my chatroom window open here, I bet they're finding it right now.
Yep.
Well, okay, we're basically about time to wrap this up here.
I guess I want to give you guys an opportunity to address anything I didn't ask you about, or make any closing comments, what you would like people to take from this.
Joe, do you want to go first?
Yeah, I'll go first.
I would say simply that this is a highly unusual article in a glossy magazine that resumes on newsstands in many parts of the country that I hope people read and want to know more about and start to ask their congressman about that, or write to an editor, or speak out in some way, and I obviously hope that it's picked up by media in the U.S., someone starts to, even if it's not me, I mean, somebody wants to look into this, and the thing could start snowballing, and you could put in, I mean, there has been a wrong country, we've had Watergate, it's not like things haven't been investigated, it's not like we haven't had scandals and conspiracies before, there are many here, this could be another big investigation, I don't see why not.
I don't see, except for the reasons that we were talking about, there's too many people could be hurt, but I'm hoping that this article will help break through, but I'm not certain of that, obviously, I don't think anybody can be.
I'm prepared for it to die, to be honest with you.
Yeah, well, let's not leave them with that, I mean, now's the time, everybody's got a pen, they can write a letter to the editor, they can call their local right-wing warmongering talk radio station and get a word in edgewise, they can send a tweet to their cousin that works at CNN somewhere, or something, and everybody can try to do a little bit of something with this.
Yeah, and call congressmen, no question about that, I mean, I would call them up and insist that they look at the Sybil Edmonds story, you know, I'm pessimistic too, because the story's been out a while, and really hasn't been picked up for obvious reasons, but I think that we now, for the first time, have the story in a comprehensible form, to know what the whole story is, or what the center part, the center core of the story is, and I think that's going to help.
And so we'll see where we go with this, I mean, certainly, I know the American conservative, I know anti-war are making major efforts to get this story out, and I know there are other people out there that are doing the same thing.
So we have to convince some major, you know, journalist or a media outlet that this is for real, and as I say, I'm pessimistic, but I'd like to see it happen.
Alright, thank you both very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
Alright everybody, that's Joe Lauria, you can find him at the Huffington Post, and in many other great newspapers and magazines, you can find his three-part series with Jonathan Calvert and Chris Gourlay at the Times of London, and brand new, big deal today, in the American Conservative magazine, Who's Afraid?
of Sabel Edmonds, amcommag.com, you can find the link at antiwar.com slash blog, and that's it for me today, we'll be back here tomorrow, Ron Paul will be on the show to talk about gold money.
