For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton and this is Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm the director of the national security whistleblower who worked for the FBI.
Her website is justacitizen.com and nswbc.org.
That's the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
And also James Bamford who was a producer for ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
He's the author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and A Pretext for War as well as many great investigative reports in Rolling Stone and other magazines.
And I'd like to welcome you both to the show.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.
The first question is for you, Isabel.
What is the state secrets privilege?
Well, state secrets privilege is an executive privilege that is based on common law.
It was never constitutionally or by Congress turned into a law.
And it was a privilege that was meant to be used rarely.
And that was the case up until about a few years ago before this administration came into power.
And what happens is this is when the government comes forward when there's a litigation in court and says, well, these involve these litigations or the facts involving these litigations would hurt certain state-related secrets.
They may be military secrets or intelligence related.
And as I said, this privilege has been abused repeatedly in the past five, six years.
I am the first known case for this administration for the state secrets privilege.
They evoked it in my case around October 2002.
And since then, they have been invoking it in various cases, the secret detention of al-Masri and what they did in the case of Maher Arar.
And, of course, Jim can talk about the implication of the state secrets privilege, an NSA case that took place last year.
And, Jim, I would let you actually give a more detailed description of the state secrets privilege and how it's being applied as far as these litigations are concerned.
And I'd like to add to that question, Jim.
What's the difference between this and something just being classified?
Why can't they just say, well, Judge, that's classified?
Why is this different than that?
Well, they can say that it's just, something is just classified, but that would just apply to one item in a trial.
What the administration has been trying to do is use the state secrets privilege as a sort of battering ram at the very front end of a case so that when they ask for the judge to issue a state secrets privilege order, it basically eliminates any further delving into the case.
And that's been the problem.
The problem with Sabella's case is the fact that she couldn't even get a hearing in court.
For example, when it went to the appeals court, they excluded the press from the court and they excluded even Sabella and her attorneys from the court, even though they were supposedly hearing their case.
They wouldn't let her defense attorneys hear what the prosecution was going to say.
So it's this sort of bizarre use of this privilege in order to not just take a piece of information out of a trial, but to kill a trial entirely.
Right.
And the way it was used in the case that I was involved in, which is the NSA case, was, again, the government came in and tried to have the entire case thrown out because of state secrets privilege, but indicating that there was a lot of secrets that would have come out if the case went forward, but the judge decided to hear the case anyway.
So we were able to argue our case in lower court and also in the appeals court.
So the privilege was being used very excessively during Sabella's case, and a few judges have begun to see that this was an abuse of the Justice Department and overruled the Justice Department on using it.
Okay.
Well, now for some historical perspective, what might be a legitimate use of the state secrets privilege from in the past?
Well, one legitimate use might be there was a spy case a number of years ago where somebody was arrested for espionage.
And the case is going forward, and they could have used the state secrets privilege just to remove the one piece of evidence that would have revealed some secrets of the government, how they were conducting some type of secret operation or something, take that one piece of evidence out of the case but leave the other evidence in and let the case go forward.
So that's been done in the past where they have used it selectively just to take a piece of the information out, but what the Bush administration has begun doing is using it to take the entire case out, which deprives the defendant of any right to a trial.
Well, now Sabella, is it not the case that the secrets you know would compromise national security if you were to tell us?
Well, no.
Actually, this is exactly what my attorneys, the ACLU, argued.
For example, we had this public report by the Justice Department's own Inspector General's office.
They issued an unclassified version of that report, which basically vindicated my case, and they wanted to introduce that as evidence.
And the government, they said, no, that is covered by the state secrets privilege.
Here is the report and a document that is readily available on the website of the Justice Department, but the Justice Department says we consider it state secrets privilege and classified.
Now, the same thing they did with my languages.
The languages I speak, they stamped it, they called the nature of those languages as a state secrets privilege.
They even went further.
They said where I went to school and the topics of my university studies, they were all covered by the state secrets privilege.
In fact, where I was born and where I was raised and the countries that I was raised in, they were all considered state secrets privilege, which is just absolutely bizarre.
And what is even more troubling is the fact that three judges in the appellate court agreed with it.
Here is a government coming in this class situation and claiming that my languages, my place of birth, etc., and even my date of birth, they are all covered by the state secrets privilege.
And you have three judges sitting on the bench and saying, okay, we agree with the government.
The entire case and this information is considered state secrets privilege.
Well, there is one branch of government left.
If one branch is putting the state secrets privilege on you and another is upholding it, then all that is left is the U.S. Congress.
And I see that you guys have a petition that has come out today, which has signatories from more than 30 organizations.
It's quite a list.
ACLU, Citizen Outreach, the Office of Management and Budget Watch, EPIC, that's the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Government Accountability Project, EFF, National Coalition Against Censorship, Downsize DC, glad to see them on there, September 11th Advocate, Citizen Outreach.
And this petition is demanding hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Is that right?
Correct.
And it is very good to see that you have these various groups.
Some of them are active within the civil liberties communities.
The others are considered whistleblowers organizations.
There are organizations that deal with privacy issues.
And all of these organizations have come together and they are considering this case as a very important case that needs to have public hearings on.
Because, as I said, it's very troubling.
Here you have an Inspector General's report out there that came out a year and a half ago.
And you have already congressional offices that four or five years ago issued reports and statements confirming the case, saying that it involved criminal activities by certain people within the government.
And the fact that this case needs to become public because the public has the right to know.
And, therefore, they are demanding the Congress to hold, again, I'm going to emphasize this word, they are demanding to have a public hearing on this.
Not the closed hearing because I have testified before various committees, before various offices, inside this gift, behind closed doors, and these places they act like these black holes.
You know, you go into these black holes and the information remains there.
And what we want right now is we want to have this open, this public hearing, where we can put witnesses on the stand under oath.
Because there are several agents, these are veteran agents, who are willing, who want to come forward and testify.
Because I was not the only person who reported these issues.
These other agents reported these cases to the Justice Department's Inspector General's office, to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility.
And most of these agents also have gone to the various offices in the Congress.
They have gone to Senator Grassley and Senator Leahy, for the Judiciary Committee.
Some of these people have come forward and provided information to Congressman Waxman's office.
So, we want to have these witnesses stand there and tell the American public, tell the representatives, what really has been happening within these agencies and the criminal activities that have been taking place there.
Now, it's my understanding that the Senate really has a lot more investigative power than the House when it comes to things like this.
Why are you not going straight to the Senators who have already publicly said that you're telling the truth, who are now in control of the Senate?
In fact, the petition was delivered today by these organizations to both the Senate, and this is the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the House, and this is the House Government Reform Committee under Chairman Henry Waxman.
And what is interesting is that we have had far more support from the House than the Senate.
I don't know if you remember, Scott, but four years ago, Senator Grassley came out, and this was during CBS' 60 Minutes segment, and he was outraged about this case.
And he said, she's credible, Ms. Edmonds is credible, because even the people within the FBI have come forward and corroborated her case, her allegations, her reports, and we need to turn the FBI upside down.
Yet, suddenly they went silent.
As you know, in May 2004, then the Attorney General Ashcroft came out and invoked this retroactive classification, and basically put the Senate under this gag order, which was issued illegally, because you cannot retroactively classify documents and statements that have been public for two years.
And instead of fighting it, the Senate basically, they went out and they took these documents off of their website, and since then they have been quiet.
And this is true both for the Democrats, and that is Senator Leahy's office, and the Republicans, because one of the disadvantages of my case is that it is not a partisan case, because the case involves the time period between 1997 and 2002, and the issue somehow is not perceived, because it shouldn't be perceived, it's not a partisan issue, and that actually lessens the amount of support you receive, because Congress tends to jump into cases that one party sees an advantage to bash another party, and fortunately and unfortunately this case doesn't fall into that category.
Right.
Now in terms of trying to get hearings, I know you've been as loud as you're allowed to be this whole time in trying to get an official public investigation, so the American people can find out about this, but now is pretty good timing it seems like.
We have this new FBI agent coming forward, Gilbert Graham, who's made some allegations concerning the very wiretaps that you listen to, Sebel.
James, can you tell us a bit of the background of this guy, Gilbert Graham, who he is and what's important about what he's now finally come out and said publicly?
Well, I think he's a very courageous whistleblower.
He worked at the FBI in the counterintelligence and counterterrorism area, and he worked on a very sensitive political investigation involving Turkey and corruption within the Bush administration and people that were dealing with Turkey and money being passed and so forth.
The FBI was investigating this, and he realized that the FBI was asking for warrants that were known as the foreign intelligence surveillance warrants.
These warrants, known as FISA warrants, are very easy to get.
It doesn't require much in the way of evidentiary information to get them.
And they were using those very easy to get FISA warrants in order to avoid having to show probable cause to get a regular warrant, a criminal type of a warrant.
So he complained to the Inspector General's office that this was illegal, and it is.
That was the whole reason that they originally set up those two types of warrants.
You have an easier warrant, the FISA warrant, in order to get intelligence information, but if you're trying to look into a criminal case, you need this probable cause warrant.
And the FBI decided to try the easy warrant to avoid going the legal route.
So he complained about that, and that was part of the case that Sebel was involved in.
So what makes it very interesting is the fact that the government used the state secrets privilege to try to hide what was going on, which was obviously illegality, and used it against Sebel so she couldn't bring any of that illegality out in her case.
Right, and we see why it's so difficult then to get this story out.
All sides agree to go ahead and use this state secrets privilege on her because the FBI agents who have criminality on the part of the people they were investigating, they were breaking the law in order to get that evidence.
That's right, yeah, that's a criminal violation to actually try to bypass the legal requirements for getting a warrant, and instead getting a FISA warrant when you're actually going after a criminal case.
So again, for an FBI agent who's been there for over 20 years, to actually write a letter like that to the Inspector General's office, that's a very big decision, and a lot of times it's a career-ending decision, so it requires an awful lot of courage.
But it also requires somebody that knows really what's going on and to feel that the American public should know that this is going on.
So there's really two elements here.
One is the illegality on the part of the FBI by going this route and getting the easier warrant when they should be getting the other one.
And the second element is the illegality of the case they were looking into, the fact that there were people involved in the Turkish government, people involved in Turkish lobbies, people involved in the Bush administration, high officials in the Bush administration who were getting payoffs, getting money, and that was what the corruption investigation was looking into.
Wow, so Sibel, it sure sounds like you just stepped into the perfect storm here.
Did you have any idea that these wiretaps, these documents you were translating, that these had come from illegal warrants?
At the time, no.
In fact, I did not find out about it until about a few months ago when our organization was contacted by several agents.
Now, we have the name for one of them, and that is Special Agent Gilbert Graham, and he retired in 2002.
And he filed his complaints with the FBI OPR and the Justice Department's Inspector General's Office.
He went to Senator Grassley's office.
He went to Senator Leahy's office.
About a few months before my case became public, it was a few months before the Inspector General's Office started investigating my case, but I was not aware of the fact at the time, and I found out about it a few months ago.
And since then, two other witnesses, and again, these are veteran agents and specialists who have come forward providing us with information.
They are willing to testify before the Congress, but they don't want to become public.
They are not after publicity.
In fact, they are trying to protect their privacy, but they are courageous enough, as Jim mentioned, to say, look, I'm aware of this, I have documentation, we know other witnesses within the FBI.
And here is another thing.
The agents themselves, we are talking about the street-level agents, case agents, these are patriotic, great guys.
So it was not these agents going and violating these rules, but it was taking place within the FBI's administrative headquarters and the higher-ups within the Justice Department.
So, no, I did not know about this until about a few months ago, and it was a revelation for me because I was like, oh, here is one other reason that everybody wanted to cover up this case by invoking the state secret privilege.
Everybody was happy in the end because, on one hand, you have corrupt congressional representatives, you have several of them, and they know who they are and they know about this case.
You have people within the State Department, you have at least one individual within the State Department, you have two, three individuals within the Pentagon, and you also have certain well-known lobbyists.
And so this was a case where the Justice Department, they didn't want their own illegal action in terms of conducting this wiretap operation to be known.
So they had their own reason of quashing this thing and wanting to basically cover it up via the state secret privilege.
You had the State Department wanting to have it covered up, you had the Pentagon, and then also you had the Congress not having the reason, the motivation, which should be representing the American people and fulfilling their obligations to the American people, not wanting to touch the case because it's a controversial case.
Another troubling aspect of this new case is the fact that we don't know what they did with this information that they obtained illegally.
Obviously they did not transfer it to the criminal division to be investigated, and so what did they do with this information?
Based on what we are getting from our sources, and these are people who have recently left the Bureau, it would not be illogical to actually consider the fact that the Bureau and the Justice Department may be using this information to actually blackmail people within the Congress.
It makes perfect sense, and it reminds me of that great article by David Rose in Vanity Fair about your case where he talked to different officials at the FBI and the congressional committees that you spoke to in secret session who implicated Dennis Hastert receiving suitcases full of cash, bribes and drug money and God knows what.
Correct.
Again, David Rose's article mentions repeatedly that the information that he obtained came from various people from within the Congress who actually were able to see certain documents and hear my testimony inside this gift.
And also from current and former FBI and Justice Department officials and the fact that he confirmed the case and got the information from those various channels.
And now you've told me before that this case goes back to 96, 97, some of these documents you were transcribing.
Is that right?
This particular operation was an ongoing operation that started towards the end of 1996, and it was officially shut down by the Justice Department in February 2002.
So you're looking at a six-year period.
All right, James Bamford, when I look into this case, I keep finding the names Douglas Fyfe, Richard Pearl, Mark Grossman, and while various people are close to AIPAC and what Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former aide, calls the Cheney Cabal.
But in a lot of cases, it seems like this story is a lot bigger than just the Cheney Cabal, that we're talking about widespread corruption throughout both parties, all different agencies.
Your comment?
Well, that's exactly right.
We're just seeing one tip of the iceberg yesterday with the conviction of Libby, and that was one of the rare instances when somebody was actually brought to trial.
What we don't see is all the stuff that went on behind the scenes, where nobody has been arrested and nobody's been brought to trial, and that's where the state secrets privilege was put into to hide.
And a lot of that involved money being passed.
A lot of this has been going on for years, and it was being used tremendously by the Republicans, who have been very big on supplying money to Turkey and very big on supplying money to people that represent Turkey.
And so that's the thing that really needs to be looked into, is where is this money going?
Where is it coming from?
Who's getting it?
How much involvement was there in the former Speaker of the House?
How much did Denny Hastert have to do with this?
Those are the issues that really could be brought out if they do have a congressional hearing.
The court is pretty much out of the picture at this point, since Sibel's case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, and it's been turned down.
So the next avenue to pursue it is by having a congressional hearing, and now that the Democrats are in power, there's a possibility of having the entire case brought out during a congressional hearing, which is something that couldn't have happened during the time when the Republicans were in control of Congress.
So that, I think, is the next stage, and I hope that's what's going to happen after Sibel's petition has just come out.
Well, if we didn't live in a bizarre world, there'd be ten Ken Stars assigned to various aspects of the criminality of this government, right?
Well, sure.
That's the amazing thing.
We've only had one, and that's the one that looked into Scooter Libby, and there should be many others.
In the case that I'm involved in, the NSA case, the judge came out last August and found in favor of the ACLU, which is bringing the case against NSA, and the judge ruled that President Bush was in violation of both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a criminal statute that carries a five-year penalty, five years in prison, which makes it a felony, and also in violation of the Constitution.
When you look back, we had a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters, and that caused a special prosecutor to be caught in during the Watergate period that led to the impeachment vote against Richard Nixon.
And then during Bill Clinton's time, the Republicans came up and thought that the fact that he may have lied on a civil affidavit regarding consensual sexual affair was enough for an impeachment and enough for a Ken Star as a special prosecutor.
So here we have a president who's been accused by a federal judge of violating a felony punishable by five years in prison, and yet there's not been a single call for a special prosecutor or a grand jury to look into it.
So it's really incredible, and also in the case involving Sebel, where there's obvious indications of illegality in the passing of money between government officials and lobbyists.
Again, there's been no call for any kind of special investigator.
All right.
Well, in the last few minutes here, Sebel, why don't you go ahead and explain your group, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
Call for support, whatever you want.
Okay.
Well, this petition is going to be posted on all these organizations that have signed on, and you named a few of those organizations.
And we have posted it on our website.
That's www.nswbc.org.
In addition, in about a few days, we are going to launch this public action campaign, and there will be a website where your listeners and our supporters, the American public, can go and send this petition to Congressman Waxman, Chairman Waxman's office, and urge him to set a date for this hearing and make sure that the hearing is a public hearing, and it's about the case and to have these witnesses to stand there under oath and testify.
And one other thing I would like to mention, and that's what you asked, Jim, about the fact that this went back to 1996, 1997, you need to realize these people were not really out of the picture because during those years, both, let's say, Richard Perle and Douglas Pike, they were registered foreign agents for the government of Turkey, and they were actively lobbying on behalf of Turkey.
And when I say Turkey, I'm not talking about Turkey, the country, certain elements, the interest groups within Turkey.
So you're looking at the same people.
Mark Grossman was the ambassador to Turkey, and then in 1997 he came and he took this fairly high-level position in the State Department in 1997.
So Grossman didn't come to this office during this administration, but he's been there.
So you're looking at the same cabal, and the fact that their tentacles were within their government agencies, even during those years, and of course it became much, much deeper and stronger during this administration.
So this is very important to remember, and so much has been public, and this is why it's important to emphasize the fact that they just can't go willy-nilly and invoke the state secret privilege and hope that the case will just go away.
This needs to come out completely, and we need to see some accountability.
And if the Congress moves forward and holds this public hearing, I can guarantee you that you're going to be seeing some major criminal indictments here, because we are not talking about light-level stuff.
We are talking about very serious criminal activities.
That's right, and in fact, if anybody wants to really delve into the background of Sabelle Edmonds' case, please go to antiwar.com and check the archives of my interview last week of Luke Ryland, who's the world's best investigator on this case, as far as I can tell.
Yes, he is.
And all right, well, we're pretty much out of time here.
Any last closing comments from either of you guys?
Well, I just want to, you know, supply my support to Sabelle's effort here.
I think she's been doing a fantastic job of trying to get this out there, and, you know, all the listeners, I hope they join in with their support.
And I'd like to add, too, that the Constitution is far from perfect, but the House of Representatives is unelected or re-elected every two years.
And what that means is each of those individual Congressmen has to do what their constituents say.
If their constituents demand that something happens, they will tend to go along.
They'll never see the light, but sometimes they can feel the heat.
So it is not a pointless task to contact your Congressmen and pressure them to hold these hearings.
This is important stuff.
And with that, I guess we'll leave it.
Thank you very much for your time, both of you, today.
Thank you, Scott.
My pleasure.
