For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our next guest is Luke Greiland.
He's been following the Sabella Edmonds case very closely for a great many years now.
He used to keep the great blog, Whatisitgoodfor.blogspot.com.
I don't think that one's there anymore, but you can find LetSabellaEdmondsSpeak.blogspot.com.
And right now I'm looking at Sabella Edmonds' site, boilingfrogspost.com.
And the top headline reads, Official documents confirm major criminal investigations of Turkish operatives in Chicago.
Welcome back to the show, Luke.
How are you?
Hi, Scott.
Good morning from the other side of the world.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to say the most, well, not the most, but an interesting thing is that you literally are on the other side of Earth right now.
And by virtue of really the warfare state's high-tech satellite system and fiber optic cables and so forth, I'm able to literally speak to you from L.A. on a radio station in Austin, Texas, while you are literally in Tasmania, which is, I think, down there by where the penguins live and the southern polar ice cap there.
That's exactly right.
It's not exactly polar weather this time of year, but it's 4.30 a.m., so that sort of proves that we're on the other side of the planet.
It's nice and dark.
Yeah, certainly.
And, you know, I only have a flat map in here.
I really need to get a globe so I can see.
I guess when I was a kid I heard that if you just dug straight through the ground, at least from Texas, you'd end up in China.
But maybe that just is kind of the default, you know, assumption.
I wonder exactly where's Tasmania.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I wonder if I'd come out, you know, like right in between in the ocean and drown.
Anyway, so, welcome to the radio show.
I appreciate you joining us from Tasmania today, Luke.
Great.
Thanks.
I haven't been on for a while.
Things have been pretty quiet on Sibel's case for, well, for, I can't remember how long, Yeah, well, hey, just because she came forward and spilled her entire guts, all the things that she'd been holding back under the threat of persecution and prosecution all those years, just because she told everything to Phil Giraldi and then came on this show and followed up even more, doesn't mean that there's anything newsworthy for any of the mainstream media to make a big deal out of, or certainly, you know, nothing for them to further investigate.
So, what developments could there possibly have been for me to interview you about, Luke, this whole time?
Well, as you mentioned, there was a fantastic article by Phil Giraldi in the American Conservative a few months ago, and that was on the heels, in fact, of a deposition that Sibel gave in a court case involving Congresswoman Jean Schmidt.
So, that was the first time that Sibel had been put under oath.
And she's been asking for, you know, six, seven, eight years now to be able to have a chance to say what she wants, you know, to say what she knows under oath, under the threat of, you know, the punishments associated with not telling the truth under oath.
So, she was, she gave that deposition for five or six hours or something.
So, that was, you know, there was a lot of information came out there.
And as I say, there is still no follow-up in the mainstream media, apart from the article by Phil Giraldi.
But the latest news, about 18 months ago or a year ago or something, I filed some FOIA, Freedom of Information requests with the FBI regarding a number of the different issues around Sibel's case.
Sibel, for years, has been going through the courts trying to get her various Freedom of Information requests, you know, allowed.
But they kept shutting that down using the state secrets privilege and a bunch of other things.
So, I took a different tack and rather than asking about her case directly, tried to sort of get in the side door by asking about some of the organizations that she has been referring to.
Now, I'm sorry, let me stop you right there and forgive me, because I want to let you get into all the FOIA, all the FOIA stuff, everything you found in the documents, what they released to you, and let you go.
We've still got 20 minutes.
But I kind of am negligent here in not really explaining anything to the audience as the setup here.
For people who aren't familiar with this case, I've got to say at least something here, is that while it may even ring a bell, the Sibel Edmonds, Sibel's name or the case, going back, she was a contract linguist who worked for the FBI, a translator, but worked with the, more than just a translator, worked with the FBI agents in their investigations.
And then she was basically run out of there, I think specifically for pointing out foreign agents in the translation unit.
But then she became a whistleblower on a great many subjects, including things that she heard on the various wiretaps and learned from the various FBI agents she worked with on the cases that were shut down for political reasons after September 11th, major cases that never went anywhere.
And the ACLU has called her the most gagged person in American history.
And for years and years she was forbidden, in fact in some cases from even her and her lawyers, were forbidden from even being in the courtroom when the prosecutors explained to the judge why he had to dismiss her entire case under the state secret's privilege.
And so then a lot of what she's talked about is international drug running, the Turkish lobby, and major corruption going on there and criminal neocons inside the U.S. government, major FBI investigations that were shut down and so forth.
And now, as Luke said, she testified under oath last August, September, something like that, told her whole story to Philip Giraldi in the American Conservative magazine.
It's called Who's Afraid of Sabel Edmonds?
And now Luke filed some Freedom of Information Act requests, and who was it?
The Chicago or the Washington, D.C. office actually answered you and gave you some files.
What happened?
Yeah, that's right, Scott.
Thanks for that good background there.
Yes, Sabel has mentioned a number of different groups that are involved in some of the nefarious activities that you just sort of gave an overview regarding drug running and corruption of the U.S. political system, basically, from bribes and all sorts of other favors, blackmail and sexual blackmail and other activities.
And the trading of U.S. national secrets to Israel and Pakistan and Turkey, as well as stealing technology, primarily nuclear, but other weapons technology from various laboratories.
One of the groups, there are three main groups that Sabel has mentioned that have been involved.
You mentioned the Turkish lobby.
Three main groups that comprise the Turkish lobby that she has been referring to.
One is the American Turkish Council.
Another is the ATAA, which I think stands for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations or something like that.
I'll have to get that exact name.
And another is called TACA, the Turkish American Cultural Alliance.
Now, TACA was basically a defunct body that essentially didn't really exist for a long time.
But they came back on the radar when Sabel started talking about them.
So I filed a request about TACA for different FBI officers.
And as you say, the information that I got came back from Chicago.
And what they show, I think there's about 15 different documents that I received.
Most of it's all blacked out.
But what these documents do show is that there were a number of serious investigations involving national security and other criminal activity based in Chicago related to this group, TACA.
And again, this is just a major vindication of what Sabel has been saying all these years.
Because all of this information is blacked out in the freedom of information request, but also printed, stamped on these or written into these documents, these basically emails from one part of the FBI to another.
It says, you know, do not upload this information.
Extreme caution is required in putting any of this information into electronic form.
And, you know, do not share with anybody.
And, you know, do not share with anybody, including other parts of the FBI.
So that just highlights how serious these investigations were.
Now, we don't learn a whole lot from these documents by themselves, but what we can glean from them, they point to all of the things that Sabel was talking about.
They talk about, for example, in one document, there was a meeting at TACA.
And immediately after the meeting, the FBI went and searched the FEC database, that's the Federal Election Commission database, which has all of the details about who was giving money to, you know, who donates money to various political campaigns.
So that's something that Sabel has often talked about, that there were, you know, legal and illegal campaign donations being delivered by these guys, the Turkish gangs, basically, to bribe US Congress people.
Now, Sabel's mentioned a number of them.
Dennis Hastert is sort of at the top of the list, but there are others like Tom Lantos and Roy Blunt, Jan Schakowsky, also from Chicago, Stephen Solars, Bob Livingston, and there's one other, Dan Burton.
So Sabel has always said that these guys were getting bribed from the Turkish gangs.
And what we see in these electronic, you know, in these emails, basically, within the FBI, is that they were investigating TACA, and wiretapping their meetings and having physical surveillance, actual physical surveillance against a lot of this activity.
And then they would go back and cross-check that against the FEC database, the state databases.
So it's pretty easy to imagine that in these meetings, TACA promised to raise funds for various Congress people, and then after the meeting, that was delivered on, and the FBI were checking on this in these databases.
So that's pretty significant.
Yeah, well, and there was something else too, where Daniel Ellsberg said a few years back, I think on Democracy Now!
, that part of this was people bringing, I don't know, briefcases, or giant sacks of money with dollar signs on them, or what, to Dennis Hastert, at that time the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
In the Vanity Fair article, and this is mentioned on boilingfrogspost.com today, the Vanity Fair article said, well, you know, she heard some spies saying, ha ha, I bribed Danny Boy and brought him a bunch of money, but I think she told Giraldi, and I think said on this show as well, that no, there was more to it than that, because the FBI agents, it wasn't just that this was overheard.
The FBI agents went and did surveillance, and saw it all go down.
Now, these documents don't prove that quite, but what do they show about that, Luke?
Well, these documents show, just if I can step back a bit, they show that there were investigations, at least, let me see, I think it was eight investigations into various, what they call, the title of the electronic communication was Turkish activity in Chicago.
So under this broad umbrella, Turkish activity in Chicago, again, this document is from National Security Division, it's not from one of the field offices, so there's something significant, obviously, just in that fact.
So under Turkish activity in Chicago, the umbrella, there are at least eight different investigations.
One of those is into this group that I've been talking about, TACA, and presumably the others are into these other groups that I'm talking about.
And then within the TACA investigation, we see there are at least 10 different case IDs.
So there's a broad range of active surveillance going on.
And within one of these TACA cases, we see that the FBI actually went out and did physical surveillance on 13 different occasions over, I think it was an 18-month period.
This would tend to support the idea that agents were actually getting in cars and going out to witness these transactions going down.
It's broadly supportive of that.
It doesn't say specifically that we saw has to do this, but as Sabal has been saying, what Vanity Fair said, that maybe it was just sheer bravado, but we now know that there was evidence of physical witnessing of these certain transactions.
Now, having talked to Sabal over the years, what would happen is that they wiretap various things, various conversations.
And if something significant comes in, then I guess they just say, well, we need to go and have somebody watch to make sure that particular event happened.
And another few occasions, he's talked about various specific various cash payments being delivered, not only to HASTIT, but to people at the State Department for $15,000 here or whatever.
And she's talked about various Turkish businessmen selling technology, CDs with technology to Saudi or Pakistani, either criminals or political types, I'm not exactly sure.
So what I gather happens is that when there's talk of that, they say, okay, well, I'll meet you on Thursday at 6 o'clock and bring you this bag full of cash.
Then the FBI sort of gets more organized and sends people to actually go and witness it.
I guess they videotape the event or I'm not really sure.
And so what we see, and I don't know how often that happens, by all accounts, they don't just sort of physically surveil people all the time.
They wait for a particular trigger event that they know is coming and then go and send people to watch it.
And so in this particular Tucker case, we see that there are 13 examples of physical surveillance.
So there's a strong indication that what Sobel's been saying all along is that this stuff isn't mere scuttlebutt.
It's actually definitive proof of many of these events that she talks about.
Well, and this is the thing, too.
If you go back now, here's the spring of 2010 and all that, or I don't know what season it is in Tasmania.
But anyway, here it is, March 2010, and you think back to how this was, how this played out in 2003, 4, 5, etc.
There was a massive effort to threaten this lady with prison time if she went past the line and saying too much about what she knew from what she learned working as a translator, linguist, contract linguist for the FBI.
And then, wow, it really worked.
I guess the model is just you put it off, and you put it off, and then you just ignore it.
And so now Sobel Edmonds has spilled her whole guts to Phil Dorale and the American Conservative Magazine and confirmed even more on this radio show.
And here now we have a successful freedom of information.
I mean, I guess you said it's completely covered up in black magic marker, no surprise there.
But still, you got some documents that prove that there certainly were major FBI investigations into Turkish lobby activities in Chicago, the very ones that she was obviously referring to here, and that they were all shut down and none of them ever went anywhere, and no surprise because as anybody who's looked at the Sobel Edmonds story knows, pretty much everybody that she's accusing of doing anything nefarious is way too powerful for the law to apply to them.
So it had to be covered up.
What are you going to do, prosecute the Speaker of the House, the former head of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, Dan Burton?
You know?
Exactly, exactly.
And Sobel gave an interview just yesterday or the day before to somebody called Jim Corbett, I think his name is.
And she said, you know, they just have so many resources, and they know that if they can step on the investigation and just stonewall it and stonewall it, and it doesn't matter what comes out eventually, by then it's all sort of old news.
Yeah, 1996.
1996, you know, we have listeners who were born in 1996 probably.
You know, that's ancient history.
That's like black and white olden days.
Right, exactly.
So, you know, I've been on this case for so many years now that I'm not necessarily confident that anything new will come of it, but, you know, hopefully somebody will get interested in it again and will start pursuing it.
I know you've done more work than anybody on the case, and Phil Geraldi's done a bunch of good work.
So, you know, hopefully just sort of something else happens.
Although, as I say, I'm not very confident.
You know, Sobel went under oath, as we said, and said some remarkable things just eight months ago or whatever, under oath, and they didn't prosecute her.
She told some remarkable stories, you know, had some remarkable things to say there.
And anybody can watch that footage at thebradblog.com.
That video of her deposition is there at the Bradblog, or not the, just bradblog.com.
I encourage everybody to go and look at that.
And, yeah, you're right, you know, there's never going to be accountability for Dennis Astert.
He can do whatever corruption in the world he wants in exchange for heroin money, and nobody's going to really, you know, nobody with power is going to do anything about that.
But at the very least, I think it's important for, you know, regular Americans to understand that, oh, yeah, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is, you know, basically a heroin dealer, as corrupt as a politician could possibly be, and that's a symptom of having a world empire.
I mean, after all, if the Turks didn't have bazillions of dollars at stake, well, maybe I'm overusing the term bazillions today.
If they didn't have tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of American welfare at stake for their military industrial complex over there and all that, then they wouldn't spend the money on being a Turkish lobby in the United States.
They wouldn't work so hard to have their close alliance with the Israelis, which benefits them in terms of their representation in Congress and so forth.
It's, you know, if we weren't an empire, we wouldn't have Dennis Astert as Speakers of the House.
So maybe there's, you know, at least a lesson that people can learn about the real nature of power in the United States as opposed to what they teach us in school about, you know, you go vote every two years and everything's fine.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, Dennis Astert has been out of office for, what is it, four years now.
But the important thing is that there are – one important thing is that there are a number of people that Sabel names who are still active in the U.S. government.
And another point that I'll make, I mean, you're right about the Turkish military industrial complex and whatnot.
But to a large extent, these issues aren't national.
Some of these people are Turkish by virtue of the fact that they're Turkish, but it's not necessarily Turkish state policy that a lot of this stuff is happening.
A lot of the funding seems to come from, let's say, the American military industrial complex.
It's in their interest that Turkey keeps, quote-unquote, buying – Turkey and Israel keep – Right, it's all the American people's money.
It goes around, yeah, absolutely.
Now it turns out that Turkey is a major transit spot for heroin coming out of Afghanistan.
So that, you know, sort of it's a matter of geography to a large extent.
All right, now we talked about Phil Giraldi's, you know, basically definitive interview there in the American Conservative Magazine.
But why don't you recommend some other places where people can read, say, the very best stuff?
Because you know how it is, Luke.
It is such a giant case.
It's played out over so many years.
And there's so many different facets and categories of information going on there and different scandals that she's talked about.
Where can people really go to, you know, read the Sabel Edmond story in half an afternoon or something?
That's a good question.
I would highly recommend the interviews that you've done, you and Sabel have done.
And also Chris DeLiso for Anti-War.
They were some of the groundbreaking work.
And I've transcribed most of them.
So they're available either at your website or at mine.
The, as you say, Phil Giraldi's piece, Who's Afraid of Sabel Edmonds, I think it's called.
That's a terrific one.
There was a Vanity Fair article called Patriot something.
Inconvenient Patriot.
Inconvenient Patriot, yeah.
So that was a good article as well.
And then if you look at my website, that's got basically everything from everywhere.
So that's sort of as central a repository as you can find.
And that's letsabeledmondspeak.blogspot.com.
Correct.
And sort of separate to that, you know, Sabel has a website, as you say, Boiling Frogs Posts, isn't really involved in her case particularly, although if somebody writes a piece about her case like I did for this one yesterday, you know, she'll post that there.
But there is a lot of, at Boiling Frogs Post, it covers a lot of the same issues broadly in terms of civil liberties and national security and whatnot.
So I highly recommend that people head over there and check out the fantastic work she's doing over there.
Yeah, the home of the irate minority, she calls it.
I'd count as that, I think.
Yeah, that's right.
Sorry, and the deposition that we mentioned, I think it's four or five hours of video.
That's probably of interest to some in its entirety, but a lot of the context isn't perhaps apparent.
You know, you can't watch five hours of that sort of thing without learning a whole lot.
But I think Brad Friedman at bradblog.com probably has some video highlights there.
Right.
So he's done some pretty good work on the case too.
And actually, though, it is pretty good, even from a starting point, because the lawyer who I think is doing all the questioning, maybe it's one or two or something, but they're kind of new to the case, just learning about it and saying, so do I understand this right, and you're saying this and that?
And so, you know, there's a lot of the whole story in there, you know, if not all of it.
Right, okay.
I'll take your word for it.
I haven't seen it for so long, I'm not sure.
Yeah, well, that's what I remember about it anyway.
All right, well, we're all out of time.
Thank you very much for yours.
I really appreciate it.
All right, Scott, have a good day.
That's Luke Ryland from letsabellaedmon speak.blogspot.com.
And check out boilingfrogspost.com.
Hey, everybody, just wanted to make sure you know about the new time change for the live show.
I'm back at 11 to 1 Texas time on Chaos Radio Austin, 95.9 FM, chaosradioaustin.org.
And you can also find the archives of the whole show's there as well.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here for libertystickers.com.
Admit it, our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
So stop by libertystickers.com.
We've got more than 1,000 anti-government, anti-war stickers for you to choose from, including The Right is Wrong, The Left is Stupid, Iraq, America's West Bank, Detain Eric Holder, Only Liars and Cowards Want War with Iran, Empire, Welfare for the Rich, War for the Poor.
I wish I could go back in time to murder Woodrow Wilson.
The Right, New Left, unite against Empire.
And steroids are good when cops take them.
Fight back while you still can.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
