02/27/07 – Luke Ryland – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
When you have an empire, you get wars without enemies and criminals in charge of enforcing the law.
That's just the way it works.
And it's really kind of an amazing story.
This poor lady was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After September 11th, she was an immigrant, a patriotic American citizen, an immigrant to this country, who decided she would go and get a job at the FBI helping them translate foreign languages in their counter-terrorism section.
And she just so happened to stumble across something near the core of the crime syndicate that controls the United States of America.
Of course, this woman's name is Cybele Edmonds and she's got a gag order and she can say some things that have already been revealed one way or another.
She can kind of reiterate them, but has never really been able to tell her full story in public.
And the story's always been of interest to me, but it's so complicated and convoluted that I always have a hard time keeping up and making sense of the story.
So, I always turn to my friend Luke Ryland.
He writes the great blog, whatisitgoodfor.blogspot.com and he's basically my walking crib sheet for cheating on the Cybele Edmonds test and keeping track of this story.
So, welcome to the show, Luke.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to be here.
It's good to talk to you, my friend.
And just so everybody knows, I think it's cool, I'm on the phone with Tasmania right now.
Luke lives on a little island on the bottom of the earth where he keeps track of the criminality of American politicians so that you don't have to, I guess.
It's a long way from you guys, that's for sure.
So, I guess let's start with the basics of the Cybele Edmonds story.
As I said, she's an immigrant, an American citizen who, after September 11th, decided that she would be a patriot and would go to the FBI and get a job being a translator.
She speaks, I guess, Farsi and Azerbaijani and Turkish and a few other languages at least.
And she went to go and be a patriotic American citizen and do her duty and, as a result, her whole world got turned upside down.
Luke, what happened?
That's right, Scott.
So, she started working at the FBI the week after September 11th.
She actually had an application into work in a different department for them.
She applied, I think, two years earlier and they had lost her application.
After September 11th, they must have run a new check and they found that Cybele's application was there and it had three languages on it.
Three non-English languages, as you say, Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Farsi.
And they thought she'd be pretty helpful in the translation unit in Washington to help them sort through a backlog of stuff that they had built up over the time.
So, she started there, I think, whenever it was, the 14th of September or so thereabouts.
And before long, she realized that there was a whole bunch of shenanigans going on in the translation department.
Including, you know, mistranslations and intentionally, translations that were intentionally being falsified to cover up a whole bunch of different criminal activity.
It wasn't long before that, I think in early December, when one of her translate-ers knocked on her door on a Sunday morning with her husband and tried to recruit her basically to be a spy for a certain criminal network.
And now, this was the infamous Melet Kan Dickerson, right?
Who was this lady?
She was married to, in fact, he's married to a guy called Major Douglas Dickerson.
I think he's had a promotion since then, whatever the next level up.
He's an Air Force major who'd been involved in weapons procurement in Turkey going back a decade.
So, the two of them turned up and tried to recruit Sabelle.
Sabelle's husband was there as well and they were just having a friendly chat and all of a sudden, Major Douglas Dickerson said, Oh, why don't you come and join this organization, the American Turkish Council?
And basically said, you know, if you work for these guys, we'll be able to get you in there and you'll never have to work again.
Basically, trying to recruit Sabelle to either mistranslate documents that were incriminating or steal other documents that were in the building and feed them out to the targets of the investigation so they knew where the investigation was going.
And so, now this lady, Melet Kan Dickerson, was really given Sabelle Edmonds' problems in the translation unit.
Is that correct?
I don't know that specifically.
I don't know whether that happened before this point or only after that point.
I think, you know, Sabelle rebuked the espionage recruiting attempt and then reported it to her boss one or two days later.
Who's her boss at the FBI that she reported this to?
Sabelle's boss was a guy called Mike Fagali.
He was in charge at that time of the Turkish theft only, I think.
Melet Kan Dickerson was also Turkish.
She actually joined the FBI after Sabelle had.
Sabelle was actually the first Turkish translator, first and only Turkish translator in the FBI translation unit when she first joined.
They didn't have anyone else there.
They didn't have anyone?
Nope.
They recruited Sabelle and then they recruited this Melet Kan Dickerson and then another guy, Kevin Takason, I think his name is.
Turns out Melet Kan Dickerson was a spy and Kevin Takason could speak neither Turkish nor English.
So it was just a disaster, the FBI field office there in Washington.
And now, what is this American-Turkish council that they tried to recruit Sabelle Edmonds to join?
The ATC, the American-Turkish council, is basically a mini APAC.
In fact, it was set up using the APAC model, I believe, and had the same people on the board, common members, etc.
It was basically the Turkish version of the APAC, the Israeli lobby.
The people on the board there, the ATC was basically, as Sabelle says, it was an association in name and in charter only.
The reality is that the ATC, the affiliated associations, are the US government, lobbyists, foreign agents, and the military industrial complex.
The board members include people like the CEO of Lockheed and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing I presume, I'm not sure.
So it's basically a lobbying group for the military industrial complex.
I see.
And there's a lot of common interests there.
You can see, I guess, what they call the iron triangle or the revolving door where the politicians get jobs working at the firms and the regulators and the lobbyists.
And they all go back and forth in these little circles.
And also internationally, you keep bringing up Turkey here and the American-Turkish council.
It makes sense when you think of the fact that America has been a NATO ally with Turkey really since World War II and has armed them and supplied them all along that the American contractors basically are, I guess what you're saying is, this is their forum where they make their connections to make sure that Turkey buys American planes with American dollars and specifically from their corporations and that kind of networking, right?
Exactly.
And there's a Turkish component there as well in terms of the membership at the ATC.
Yeah, but what's criminal about that, Luke?
I mean, this is the American way, buddy.
There's nothing criminal about that per se, although there was an article in Vanity Fair by David Rose last year called An Inconvenient Patriot, a 10-page article about the Bell story where the ATC is described as a front activity.
So it's not so much what the, you know, there are ostensibly appropriate activities going on there and there are also a bunch of illegal activities that are operating under the guise of the ATC, according to Vanity Fair and a few other articles that we can point to.
And what kind of illegal activities are we talking about then?
Well, Seth, it's important to understand or have a better understanding of Turkey so that we can appreciate what's going on at the ATC.
Turkey is ruled by, I'll call it, a governing elite that's known as Deep State in Turkey, which is basically a collection of drug dealers, the Turkish military, Turkish police, and the ostensibly elected politicians.
The reason we know about the Turkish Deep State is because there was a car crash a decade ago in 1996 at a place called Tsusiluk.
Are you familiar with Tsusiluk?
No, not at all.
It sort of blew apart the entire Deep State, exposed it for everyone to see.
There was a car crash in the middle of the night at a place called Tsusiluk and Tsusiluk is now the shorthand, really, for explaining the Turkish Deep State.
I think I do remember a little something about this.
All the different people in the car were people who should not have all been in the same car together.
Is that right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
And who was it?
They refer to it now as Turkey's Watergate.
There was an MP, police chief, a beauty queen who was also an assassin, and her lover, who was a top Turkish gangster and hitman.
His name's Abdullah Katli.
I think I've seen that movie.
Right.
It's a bit of a joke, but it sounds like a joke.
In the car, they found all these machine guns and whatnot, plus false diplomatic passports for the terrorists and the drug traffickers.
It was a real mess.
Someone gave an American analogy.
He said, imagine a car accident at a hotel in West Virginia.
Several people were killed, including, say, Jeff Gannon, Doug Fee, Warren Christopher, and a farmer, Bin Laden.
Yeah.
That's sort of the equivalent.
I told Sabal that once.
He thought it was hysterical.
Yeah, so basically what you're saying is that the regime in Turkey is no less corrupt than the regime in the United States, and that basically military thugs run the place, dope dealers run the place, right?
Right.
And not the good kind of dope.
We're talking heroin here.
Heroin.
Turkey is the major transit point, but Afghanistan's heroin, a lot of it goes through.
Five tons a week or something.
Now, I remember, Luke, in the 1990s that Bill Clinton took the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which were nothing but basically Osama bin Laden tied narco terrorists in Kosovo.
Is that not right?
That is correct.
And now, this is that same pipeline of drugs that they talked about back then, right?
The golden crescent, where it's all grown in Afghanistan and then it ships across Central Asia into Southern and Central Europe and up through Bosnia and to the rest of Western Europe and the United States, right?
Correct, except you left out Turkey.
Oh, well, yeah, yeah.
90% of it goes through Turkey.
That's the bridge between Central Europe and Central Asia there.
Right.
It is either blessed or cursed by geography.
That's for sure.
Well, and you know, part of that is that, well, part of the result of that geography, I guess, is that the Turks are in a way kind of Western.
You know, as previously mentioned, they're members of the NATO alliance.
They're extremely friendly with the Israeli government, and even though they're a Muslim country, they're kind of, well, again, the bridge, figuratively in this case, between East and West, right?
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
So no matter who you are, if you're the Arab powers or if you're Israel or the United States or the European Union or Afghanistan drug lords, it's all about Turkey, really.
It's all about Turkey.
And the Turkish military and the MIT, which is the intelligence operation there, the intelligence agency there, pretty much know exactly what's going on.
I'm not sure it would be right to call it a police state, but when you're moving that sort of amount of heroin through the place, you know, they're basically in control, aware of and in control of and actively participating in the distribution of heroin through the place, through the country.
Didn't you tell me that the Turkish generals are even really in control of the drug trade all the way back to Afghanistan?
It's not like they're just receiving it in Turkey, that they're basically in charge of the whole operation from the poppy field on?
Perhaps not from the poppy field.
Well, not from the farmers directly, but, you know, one or two levels above, you know, the small aggregators that run around and collect the stuff from the farmers, yeah.
But on the ground in Afghanistan?
As I understand it.
Yeah.
As I understand it.
And then it either goes through Iran and Pakistan and into Turkey, or it goes up through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan around that way and then into Turkey.
And that's where all the wholesaling is done and the manufacturing of the product and the packaging and warehousing, all of it is done there in Turkey.
Turkey supplies think about 80% of all European heroin and 15% of American heroin.
How much money are we talking about every year?
That's $40 billion worth, more or less.
That's street prices.
$40 billion a year.
Right.
So there's a fair margin in there for the people involved.
And again, this is the deep, as we were saying, this is the deep state that controls this business.
How close is the tie then between these Turkish heroin dealing generals and, say, the American Turkish Council back here in the States?
Well, if we consider that the Turkish guys at the ATC in the US are basically the generals.
They're the guys that are representing and dealing with the military industrial players like Lockheed Martin, etc.
In other words, they're basically the same people.
So the ATC is basically a front organisation that is running basically this heroin operation as well.
And they're also being played by the military contractors.
You know, Stu Gereldi, he's an ex CIA agent.
He used to work in Turkey.
He used to be based in Ankara.
He wrote a terrific article recently in the American Conservative magazine.
Have you seen that one?
Yeah.
Right.
Oh, you've got a post-it on your site.
Yeah.
In fact, I actually interviewed Phil about the Sebelle Edmonds.
Not exclusively, but that was one of the topics we covered in one interview before.
Yeah.
I'm not familiar with that, I don't think.
In any case, he wrote an article about Sebelle's case, I guess maybe six months ago perhaps.
Sebelle said this sums up her case very well.
It nails it 100%.
And Gereldi goes on to describe how Sebelle's case provides an insight into how the neo-cons distort the US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time.
I was just going to say, he talks about the way that the military industrial complex and the neo-cons get together at places like the American Turkish Council and deal with the Turkish General Staff.
Right now, when I interviewed Sebelle Edmonds before, she told me that she thought the AIPAC scandal and even like the Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame, and that her story basically were all just one onion and we just got to peel off the layers and figure out what's going on.
That's right.
And I think the reason that she said that is because, as Phil Gereldi mentions in his article, Richard Pearl and Doug Feith are agents of, literally agents of Turkey, they were registered lobbyists for them for five or so years.
Now Larry Franklin of course worked under Doug Feith in his office there.
So I think that's perhaps how she connects that AIPAC case.
And similarly, she basically says that AIPAC and ATC are essentially the same organization or have the same role but with the same people.
So I think that's part of the analogy that she's drawing there.
Now which powerful Americans from the Bush administration whose names we'd recognize are members of this American Turkish Council, Luke?
From the Bush administration.
Well, there are a bunch of people at the ATC that cover generations.
Brent Scowcroft is the chairman there.
I can't really think off the top of my head who else is involved.
Turkey has a bunch of, I think it's just about basically everyone.
Now Pearl and Feith and Grossman and all those guys are members, right?
Grossman's a member, in Phil Giraldi's article he talks about other friends, neo-con friends of Turkey.
I'm not sure how many of them are literally members of the ATC but they all give speeches there for example.
He points to Pearl and Feith as we've mentioned, Mark Grossman as we've mentioned.
Mark Grossman was a former number three at the State Department under Richard Armitage.
Eric Edelman is there.
He now has Feith's old job as the Under Secretary for the Defense of Policy.
Edelman was previously in 2004 and 2005 the ambassador in Turkey.
That's a role that Grossman also had in the past.
Now wasn't Grossman, this guy Douglas Dickerson who he and his wife tried to recruit, Sebelle Edmonds, wasn't Mark Grossman his boss for a long period of time?
Yeah, in Ankara in fact.
When Grossman was the ambassador there in Turkey, Douglas Dickerson worked under him in weapons procurement.
Dickerson was in fact suspected of being corrupt back in those days as well.
There was an investigation into him but that didn't go anywhere for one reason or another and Dickerson went on to get promoted again and again.
Same thing that seems to happen to a lot of these people.
In fact, there are a couple of others that Giraldi mentions in his article.
Paul Wolfowitz is now at the World Bank as you know and former Congressman Steven Salas.
He's a lobbyist for Turkey as well.
Is it that you think, Luke, these people, Grossman, Feith, Pearl, that they're involved in, well for example, dealing heroin and such?
Let me put it this way.
The broad outline of Sebelle's case that she's repeated again and again is that her case involves illegal arms trafficking, heroin smuggling, money laundering and terrorist activity.
And she says that you can't look at those elements separately.
It's basically the same group of people involved in each of those different elements once you get high enough up the food chain.
So if we take that as gospel, then guys like Feith and Pearl are involved in the heroin distribution, the heroin smuggling business at one level or another.
I'm imagining something like maybe they're doing some arms dealing and the money is being laundered at the same place with a lot of drug money and then a lot of that money is ending up in the hands of terrorists.
Is it more direct than that?
Well, I'm sure they know how to keep their hands clean generally, yeah.
But as Sebelle says, it's those same people that are involved in each of those activities and they're all at the core of their case.
Exactly which task they personally have, I don't really know.
But we know in Turkey, for example, it's all the same people.
It's the Turkey state that's running the shop.
Well, one thing that we know too, even though we haven't heard all that Sebelle Edmonds has to say, we do know that the Department of Justice Inspector General's office says that she's telling the truth and I believe Senators are on the record as saying, well, they've heard what she has to say in private during secret session and they believe every word of it.
Yeah, exactly.
And the reason they believe it, they say, is because everyone at the FBI tells them that it's true and because it's all documented and they've seen the documents that back up exactly what she said.
Right.
So this is all corroborated even though we don't have our hands on it.
By hearsay, we are to understand that it's corroborated, I guess.
Right, exactly.
One of my buddies, Miguel, wrote a post.
I have a separate blog for the one you mentioned earlier called sebelleedmonds.blogspot.com and one of my buddies there wrote a post that you can see, it's almost at the top of the blog at the moment, called The Incredibly Credible Sebelle and he lists in that post all of the reasons why we should believe what she says, including quotes from the two senators that she's dealt with the most, Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican, Senator Pat Leahy as well, have all verified her story.
She's told her story to the Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee and also, of course, to the 9-11 Commission, all behind closed doors.
And as you say, there's also the Inspector General's report and a bunch of other things.
There's a new movie about Sebelle's case, as you know, particularly the nuclear black market side of it called Kill the Messenger and in the movie they talk to a former FBI veteran counter intelligence agent called John Cole who is in charge of Afghanistan, Pakistan, you know, in charge of counter-terrorism for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran and he tells a story that he spoke to, he heard about Sebelle's case and he investigated sort of internally with the FBI and he says in the movie, he says he's 100% accurate.
So that's just another point of validation that's coming from him.
Obviously, because she's gagged and because we have to sort of put the pieces together a little bit piecemeal, when you get my version of it, it might not be exactly the same as her version of it because I sort of have to fill in the gap a little bit.
So I can't tell you what I'm telling you is 100% accurate, but everyone says that what she says is 100% accurate.
Well, and I'm glad you brought that up too because, you know, this is the United States of America and around here the government is supposed to recognize that all human beings are naturally born with the right to say whatever the hell they want to and the fact that the courts have invoked a state secrets privilege that exists nowhere in law that is directly contrary to the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
That's why you and I are sitting here having to basically sound like a couple of conspiracy kooks connecting a bunch of disparate dots because we can't just ask her to tell us the story.
They won't let her.
They'll put her in prison if she does.
They'll put her in prison for talking.
That's right.
That's right.
There have been a couple of good articles that have come out recently that do shed a lot of light on her case.
One is the Phil Duraldi article that I mentioned earlier.
As she said, it nails her case 100%.
And the other is a two-part article that she wrote called Hijacking of a Nation.
I recommend that people go and read that one.
It's available, particularly the part two of it, which really lays out a lot of the things I've just been talking about in terms of the heroin dealing in Turkey.
She basically lays out as much of her case as she can.
So I really recommend people go and read.
That's available at nswbc.org.
I guess it's on the front page there.
I'm not sure.
That's the National Security...
That's the organization, the National Security Missile Blowers Coalition.
Okay.
And give that website one more time.nswbc.org.
All right.
And now what am I going to have to do to see a copy of Kill the Messenger?
Luke, when is it playing in Austin, Texas?
You'll have to be patient, my friend.
I'm sorry.
I keep hearing that.
I keep getting that request every day.
Unfortunately, I don't really have a timeframe for when it's going to be rolled out.
Now, so it hasn't been...
I have a copy of it.
It's terrific.
Oh, good.
Has it already played in New York and D.C. and things like that?
It's played a couple of weeks ago.
Sebel had a private screening with a couple of whistleblower groups, et cetera.
They had a hundred people in D.C. and they had a panel there after the movie with James Banford, the directors of the movie, Robert Parry, and a couple of others talking about how tragic it is that you can't say it, that she's gagged, and also discussing the appalling U.S. media that has been completely absent from her case and completely doesn't understand it as well.
Right, which is part of the reason why they haven't paid any attention is because they don't have the slightest idea what it means.
They don't know what to do with it.
I'm not exactly sure why they haven't touched her story.
It might have something to do with the fact that it's...or it might be similar to the fact that it's difficult to criticize, for example, Israel in the U.S. press.
Similarly, it's difficult to criticize Turkey.
The good news is that the U.S. media is going to get a chance to prove itself again.
And how's that?
There is likely to be some new information that's related to Sabal's case that will be released next week as I understand it.
Sabal tells me that it's newsworthy, so hopefully your famous media agrees and will actually see some articles about it.
Although, heavens knows, given the way her story has been covered up so far, I wouldn't be surprised if we don't read anything about it.
Now, do you have any indication of what this news is about?
No, no.
But as I said, she says it's going to be newsworthy and she's going to be talking about her being gagged a minute ago.
She's going to be, if there's any coverage in the media next week, she's going to use that momentum on her case to announce a new call, a new petition calling for her case to be reopened.
She wants to have public open hearings in the Senate.
And so that call will go out, I believe, in the next week or two.
She has a lot of supporters that have signed up who want to all agree that it should be brought out in the open.
Well, you can see how that would be problematic, Luke, if her story basically is that the United States is run by a bunch of terrorist financing heroin dealers.
That is a problem.
That's the truth.
It's the truth, isn't it?
Because as we discussed, she's already told a number of senators and committees, including the 9-11 Commission, and they all know exactly what's going on.
So we either have all of Congress knowing this and doing nothing or we have open hearings and force them to change.
That's kind of the way it happens with some of these stories is they're too big to ever get into because if you really got into it, you'd have to tear down the government of the United States and start over again.
That wouldn't be a bad thing, Scott.
Yeah, well, get no argument from me, pal.
I know I'm not supposed to agree with foreigners about stuff like that, but what the hell, Luke?
Well, Sabelle is not a foreigner and she calls it treason, as you know.
I think she's called it treason on your show on more than one occasion.
So if that's what's going on at the highest level in the State Department, if nothing's done about it, then the whole national security is at risk, right?
Absolutely.
And in fact, that's a good segue somewhere in there to the Valerie Plame-Jo Wilson connection to all this.
What the hell do they have to do with the American Turkish Council, Luke?
I believe Valerie Plame works for an organization called Bruce De Jennings, which is a CIA front company, as you know, that was doing due diligence trying to work out what the hell was going on, particularly in relation to weapons of mass destruction.
Bruce De Jennings, going back to when Sabelle was working at the FBI and even going back years before then, as I understand it, probably back to 1996 were investigating the American Turkish Council and Turkey.
Valerie Plame went to Turkey a number of times.
So the ATC was being scoped by Bruce De Jennings, and I guess that's how they have all the wiretaps and stuff that Sabelle translated.
She only joined the FBI translation just immediately after 9-11, as we just discussed.
75% of the documents that she used were from the archives going back to 1996.
So they have a whole body, five years' worth of information detailing all of these crimes that have been going on.
Now didn't David Rose in the Vanity Fair article, didn't he verify with other agents that indeed there was this investigation, that that was the transcript she was reading were part of, and yes, it did go back nearly to the mid-90s, and that that investigation had been shut down for political reasons?
The investigation of the ATC, I'm not sure, Scott, but there was an investigation through 1996-97, I think, where the FBI picked up all of this information about guys like Dennis Hastert.
Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.
In 1999, Sabelle says, they agreed to, Clinton tried to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the case.
The case was in to Hastert and a few other people that we don't know specifically by name.
That case was shut down in 2001 when Sabelle started reporting her findings.
I don't think that Clinton ever got around to appointing a special prosecutor because at the time of the impeachment, as I understand it, and then George Bush was elected, or became president at least, and Ashcroft shut down the case.
The Hastert element is just one small part of the story.
As I said earlier, the main parts of Sabelle's story really are the weapons trafficking, which has really three components, the weapons trafficking and the heroin trafficking, and the money laundering, and the terrorism, and where those things intersect.
I was just going to run through the specific claims that, when you put it in terms like that, it sounds like a pretty big puzzle for everyone to put the pieces together.
But there are really three elements of the weapons trafficking, so we'll go through each of those.
Yeah, do that.
As we sort of mentioned earlier with the Giraldi article, there's a sort of what I might call the quote, legal weapons trafficking.
We've got organizations like the ATC who are lobbying Congress to provide Turkey with military funding.
I think Turkey, in fact, is second only to Saudi Arabia in terms of military aid.
Most of it comes in the form of grants from the U.S. taxpayer.
I think 80% of it comes from the U.S. taxpayer.
Done everything?
How do they do?
Right, exactly.
Now, they'll talk a lot about the lobbying with former members of Congress and lobbying that goes on at the ATC.
I suspect that a lot of the way that Turkey gets all of this military aid is because there are people at the ATC that are bribing Congressmen, forcing them to vote for these weapons.
So that's the first one.
The second one is that both Israel and Turkey, once they get U.S. weapons technology, they re-export it to other countries who aren't allowed to have U.S. technology.
How they do that, as Giraldi outlines, is that the defense ministries in both of those countries just create what he calls false end-user certificates.
It basically says that it's okay to get the technology from the U.S. and then sell it to countries like China and India and other countries that are ostensibly enemies of the U.S.
Now, do the Americans who are selling these weapons know that that's what's going to happen to them at the end?
I presume they know and don't care.
I don't really know.
I see.
Okay, and then now there's a third aspect, too, left, right?
Right, and this is the focus of the movie Killer Messenger.
That's the nuclear black market, and that has a couple of components.
One, you know, we have – Sebel's case ties into the A.Q.
Khan network for a number of different reasons.
There's a company in New Jersey called Giza Technologies that are basically a supplier to the A.Q.
Khan network.
Sebel apparently heard some wiretaps from these guys.
The head of the organization, the CEO, a guy by the name of Zeki Billman, he exported the stuff to – I think they were detonators – to South Africa.
And the minute they got to South Africa, his agent over there would turn around and send it to A.Q.
Khan in Pakistan.
So that's one problem.
The company, Giza Technologies, is still floating along completely without a hiccup.
Sebel says, you know, it seems as though somebody wants to protect this guy and enable him to continue to sell these things into the A.Q.
Khan network.
He does business there.
He's going, you know, great.
There's just boatloads of stuff going in every day to South Africa and Dubai, I think, and other places.
Now let me stop you right there, Luke.
For people who don't know anything about the A.Q.
Khan network, basically what we're talking about is Pakistan's heroic rogue scientist, quote-unquote rogue scientist, ran this basically nuclear black market ring from the late 1980s all the way through the early 1990s, and it's through him that the Iranians got a lot of their equipment and the Libyans as well, right?
Correct, and North Korea.
And North Korea, right, although North Korea never did enrich uranium with anything they got from him, despite all the accusations to the contrary.
But still, so what you're saying is that American companies are involved in selling nuclear technology to countries where the technology is getting diverted immediately, or was, into this A.Q.
Khan black market network, that ultimately American officials are in on this, you know, bribed to look the other way and so forth, and America is putting nuclear weapons technology in the hands of our presumed enemies, basically.
Correct.
And now, is this why Sebelle Edmonds is throwing around the word treason?
Is she talking about, you know, these household names, these high-level people in the state and defense departments involved in this?
Well, again, yes, basically.
But the targets of the A.Q.
Khan, the clients of A.Q.
Khan, as I mentioned, the DPRK and Iran and Libya, they're the three that we know about.
It appears they're another eight different countries that were involved, and a possible client.
And so, you know, we don't really know, we don't publicly know, at least, who else has got this technology.
Okay, now I know you haven't published it yet, and so I hope it's okay for me to mention that.
You told me you have a new interview with a former CIA guy stationed in Pakistan who's told you that the CIA and the American government knew all about A.Q.
Khan all along.
Luke, is that right?
That's correct.
Now, what does that mean, all along, starting when?
Starting from, I think, 1976, when A.Q.
Khan first stole his designs from Holland.
A.Q.
Khan first stole his designs from Holland in 1976, and at that point, the CIA began watching him?
Perhaps even before he first stole them, yeah.
So, you know, it's problematic, but, you know, if you look at Sabal's case, they're saying exactly the same thing.
These guys, Giza Technologies, are supplying the network, and nobody does anything.
And then we've got other companies who are major members of the ATC, major Turkish companies, who are literally manufacturing components for A.Q.
Khan and sending them either to Pakistan or direct, you know, sending them to Pakistan via Dubai, so they just sort of repackage them so that they can get past the import restriction.
Okay, now help me, Luke, help tie me to these things together here.
This company in New Jersey, what does it have to do with the ATC or with these neo-Khan's?
I don't specifically know, other than, A, Sabal overheard wiretaps with the CEO of this company in New Jersey, talking about exporting stuff to Pakistan to A.Q.
Khan's network, and the CEO is still walking free.
I see.
So we have at least that information.
Right, and then you're saying other companies are also involved in this that you can tie to the American Turkish Council, is that right?
Correct, correct.
There are at least two companies.
Sabal mentions them in the Hijacking of the Nation article, part two.
One's called EKA, and I can't think of the name of the other one, but Sabal mentions them there and mentions the guys.
They're actually friends of A.Q.
Khan.
They were shipping stuff to him or shipping it straight to Libya.
It was found in the Libya bust in 2003.
And so, again, all this stuff has been going on for God knows how long, and the U.S. government is doing nothing.
I was just going to say there's a third element in the nuclear black market stuff that Sabal talks about, and that is Turkish companies placing doctoral students at the nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos, I guess, and Sandia and whatever other, so that they can steal secrets.
Really?
And this is something that she knows from overhearing on these FBI wiretaps?
I can only assume.
I can only assume that's where she knows.
Didn't she only work as a contract employee for the FBI for just a few months?
Did she just stumble right into the rat's nest, or what?
It's a hell of a story, isn't it?
I think the answer to that, because she did uncover so much, some people are a bit skeptical, but she could have possibly overheard all of that while she was there.
That's the reason why, as I understand it, the reason why she uncovered all of this important information is because the agents that she was dealing with knew that they were getting shoddy translations in the past, and so they pointed Sabal to particular documents where they expected, just by the participants in the phone call, for example, where they expected to find something significant, and when they got their translation in the first instance, the translation said, oh, there's nothing important here.
Let's say a translation of a phone call between, I'm just using this as an example, Osama bin Laden and President Bush, and the agent would get it back saying, oh, there's nothing interesting here, they were just talking about having coffee or something.
So when Sabal got there, again, this was immediately after 9-11, so the agents were running around desperate to try and put the story together.
Right, these aren't the spin masters, the political agents at the top, these are the actual cops who want to solve a case.
Exactly.
And Sabal says that they are all terrific.
They turned to her and said, wow, you speak all these languages, help us out, can you tell us what this says, what that says?
And she said, wow, I would have marked this important.
Exactly.
In fact, this other woman that we were speaking about earlier, Malik Jan Dickerson, even before Sabal reported her to her boss as a possible espionage issue, the field agent that was working, I think his name is Dennis Packer, had also complained about, or suspected that Malik Jan Dickerson was involved in espionage.
So for one reason or other, he knew that the stuff that she, the product that Dickerson was turning out was wrong.
So that's why I presume he pointed Sabal to it and said, hey, you'd better go and have a look at this, because I think the stuff I'm getting is nonsense.
Now, is it the case that one of the things she overheard was a call from the American Turkish Council to American officials to have some 9-11 suspects safely removed from the country?
Yeah, a lot of people think that Sabal has the holy grail to 9-11, but that's not the case according to her.
She wrote a letter when the 9-11 commission report came out, an open letter to Tom Kean and the commission, and she says that basically all of the information that she knows about 9-11 is contained in that document.
She outlines a few things.
One is the corruption there involving Dickerson and her boss, Mike Fagali.
Second thing that she mentioned in the open letter is the fact that the FBI had information in April of 2001 that they had a long-term informer.
He used to be an Iranian intelligence agent that was in charge of Afghanistan for a long time.
The FBI had been using him for at least a decade, and he came in and gave the FBI this tip that Osama bin Laden – this is in April of 2001 – Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five cities, said that the attack was going to involve airplanes, that some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the U.S., and that the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.
So they had all of this terrific information and did nothing with it, apparently.
Now isn't that the case over and over again?
It seems like the pile of leads leading to those hijackers was getting pretty thick by the time those planes crashed, doesn't it, Luke?
It certainly was.
I do know that this information was passed up at Thomas Freels, at least at that level, immediately after the interview with this Iranian guy took place.
And now who's he?
I have to get that title for him.
I think he was the counterterrorism guy in Washington, I'm not really sure.
I don't know, as I mentioned before, so they'll testify to the 9-11 Commission.
And she told them all of this information and none of it got in the report.
The report, as I understand it, listed a bunch of missed opportunities, but they didn't include the fact that they were told that Osama bin Laden was about to use planes as weapons, hijack planes and use them as weapons in four or five cities in a few months, and that the hijackers were already in place.
That's the sort of thing that sounds like a missed opportunity, right?
Sure does.
But they didn't include that.
There was other information that they didn't include that the bell reported to them.
And now what about that specifically about somebody at the ATC called Mark Grossman at the State Department and said, hey, I need you to spring my buddies from jail?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I'll have to check.
It was either they called Mark Grossman, again, I'm not sure, it was on a wiretap.
I'm not sure whether it was a guy from the ATC necessarily, or perhaps it was some other targets that they were listening to.
And it might have been a conversation between two targets that said, hey, we need to call Grossman and get him to spring our buddies.
Basically, yes, there was three of their buddies, two Turkish guys and an Uzbek who were jailed immediately after 9-11, as presumably a suspect for one reason or another.
And Grossman, because these guys requested it, Grossman called up whoever he needed to call up and got the guys out of jail immediately.
Well, now, Ashcroft rounded up all kinds of people.
Is there anything that says that these guys actually knew anything or were in on any of this?
Not that I know.
Apart from it's outrageous that Grossman can do that.
Yeah.
And let me repeat, these people that were having the conversation, the targets of the investigation, we can presume that there's at least some suspicion on them already and let them get their friends out of jail pretty dodgy.
There was something about blueprints being sent overseas.
Was that blueprints of the World Trade Center towers?
This is also from Sabal's article, from Sabal's open letter.
In, I think, June of 2001, there was an Iranian guy who was in jail for some drug charges.
I'm not sure exactly what.
And they were concerned, whoever was monitoring, was concerned that he was involved with more than narcotics.
And they were wiretapping his phone calls that he made from jail.
He called one of his friends, as I understand it, and asked his buddy to send blueprints, pictures, and the details of the building composite, what the buildings are made of, for a number of different skyscrapers and send those blueprints to somewhere in the Middle East.
And did that include the World Trade Center towers?
I think the description that I have from Sabal is that the buildings were over 100 stories tall.
Okay, so there's not too many of those.
Right.
Well, so is she just being coy there?
The gag order gets in between her and saying the names of the buildings?
I presume she would have told me.
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
But there aren't, you know, as we say, there aren't many.
I think fierce towers over 100 stories.
But any case, so this detail was being sent to the Middle East.
And, you know, again, none of this information was included in the 9-11 submission report, for one reason or another.
Right.
It's crazy.
All right, well, we're pretty much out of time here.
Is there anything really important I'm missing here, Luke?
I think that's about it, Scott.
Other than, as of next week, hopefully we can get everyone to support this new call for these new hearings.
I'll have the details on my blog, of course, and I presume you will as well.
I hope you will as well.
Let me put it that way.
Yeah, well, I will, as long as you send me an email and remind me.
I certainly will.
Hopefully we'll see it on the front page of the major newspapers in the country.
Everybody check out Luke Ryland's blog.
It's whatisitgoodfor.com.
It's got some really great analysis of all the news of the day there.
Thank you very much, my Tasmanian friend.
You're welcome.
Take care.