So, there's this lady named Cybele Edmonds, and she lived in Iran and in Turkey and moved to the United States, became a United States citizen, and after the attacks of September 11th, she heard FBI agents on TV saying, you know, we need translators, we need help here.
We're at war against the enemy and so forth, and we need to be able to translate what they're saying to each other on the telephone.
So she did her patriotic duty and went down there to volunteer.
It was actually, they already had her application from before, and had lost it in the paperwork or something, so they fast-tracked her right into the translation department.
And my best understanding, I think she only worked in the translation department as a contractor for the FBI translation department between just a couple of weeks after September 11th through the early spring of 2002.
That was it.
Not even half a year, I don't think.
And yet, apparently, during the time that Mrs. Edmonds spent there working at the FBI doing these translations, she found out some things that people with power would prefer that she hadn't found out.
Now, there's big news, which is she's ready to spill her guts, defy her gag order, and tell everything she knows to any major TV outlet in the United States who will sign a contract with her promising to air the entire segment unedited.
And here to discuss this is my friend Luke Ryland.
He goes by Luke Ry out there in the blogosphere, and he runs LetSabelEdmondsSpeak.blogspot.com.
You can sometimes find him posting up at my blog, The Stress Blog, as well.
Welcome to the show, Luke.
Are you there?
Hey, Scott.
How's it going?
Oh, yeah.
I forgot.
See, Luke is in Tasmania on the other side of the planet Earth, so there will be a little bit of delay here, I think.
Welcome to the show.
Yeah.
Not only that, it's also 3.30 a.m. here, Scott.
Just put a stomach out of bed, so that might also cause a delay for you.
I hope you took a couple of shots of coffee, and you're ready for us here.
All right.
Well, I appreciate you staying up all night to come on the show today, Luke.
Why don't you tell us, basically, about Sabel's offer to the TV news networks and their response so far?
Well, you gave a pretty good introduction there to Sabel's case.
I think you and I have discussed it before, and you've had Sabel on your show three or four or five times.
He's done a great job covering her story.
The problem is that nobody else has covered her story very well.
So since April of this year, I think it was the last time I spoke to you, Scott, we have been trying to get Henry Blackstone of the House Government Reform Committee to hold hearings to give her a case.
He had promised, according to Sabel, he had promised to hold hearings into her case for the last couple of years, when he was in the minority, and he kept saying, well, just wait to we're in the majority, and, you know, first thing, we'll do is hold hearings into your case, because it's very important.
Henry Wexman has, I believe, read the Department of Justice's classified report into Sabel's case, and was horrified at the things that were contained in that report.
So we've been trying to get him to honor that promise of his since April, with various petitions, and there are 30 different government organizations, good government organizations, that signed a petition asking him to make sure that he's fulfilled on his promise, that he decided, he really dropped off the planet and refused to even answer anybody's phone calls or anything.
After almost desperation, I would say, Sabel has decided that, well, she can't get her hearings in Congress, she can't get any hearings in the court, she was blocked from having her case heard in the Supreme Court a couple of years ago, she decided, well, maybe we should just go straight to the mainstream media.
She was on 60 Minutes in October 2002, a short story about her, a short segment about her story, and the mainstream media really hasn't been covering her story, so she's decided that if any of them made the network want to carry her story, then she will give an interview to them that they need to carry pretty much either live or unedited, so that she can get the main elements of her case across to the American public.
And what have their responses been so far?
Well, there are a couple of nibbles that I think, we only ran this story for the first time just yesterday, and I believe there are a couple of phone calls from some people, some of them made the network, but of course, as often happens with Sabel's case, a lot of the foreign media is interested, foreign media I think in Britain and Japan and a whole bunch of other countries are desperate to jump on the phone and try and get Sabel to tell the story, but the US media again is pretty much silent as far as I can tell, and it's only 24 into the cycle since we released this news, so hopefully we'll have some other news today, but it's been, since Sabel used the term, frustratingly funny that the only people that we hear from are foreign media outlets.
I want to reiterate before we get into the media and their reluctance to cover this story, I want to first cover the fact that the reason why it's taken so long for her to make this offer, this gag order's serious business, she could face serious prison time if she comes out and tells this story, and basically, my understanding, Luke, correct me if I'm wrong, is that she's been covering all of her legal bases, she's done everything she possibly could in the courts, she's done everything she could with the Republicans in Congress, she waited until the Democrats came to the majority, she's done everything she could to get the Democrats to help her in the Congress, and they won't help her, and she is now completely out of official legal avenues, and only now is she finally saying, okay, fine then, I'll risk prison, but I'll be able to at least show that I did everything I could within the so-called law to tell my story without having to resort to this, right?
That's exactly right, she's done everything that she possibly could, she's been talking to people in Congress since about 2002, so this has been going on for a long time, so that's Congress, she's got shutdowns, she couldn't get to the Supreme Court, she's had people on the government reform committee in the House, and also the Senate Judiciary Committee, House Judiciary Committee, Senate and House Intelligence Committees that she's been talking to over these years, and they keep promising her that they'll do something as soon as they're able to be in a position to be able to do something, and they haven't done a thing.
So they've been gagged with what they call the state secrets privilege, which I'm sure you'll have a bit to say about, but she was one of the first times that this was invoked in the Bush administration, but it's almost come to a point where it's a joke.
There are considerably some legitimate reasons why the government might invoke the state secrets privilege, but this particular Bush administration seems to invoke it just to cover the criminality that's going on in their own administration, and if a wiretapping scandal you're probably aware of, they invoked it there, again, not to keep quiet or to hide the sources and methods of their wiretapping, but just because it appears, if the details of the case get out, then it'll show that everybody's been acting criminally.
Same thing, I think, in the Al-Masri case and a couple of others, there's no legitimate classification of the state secrets, it's just to hide the fact that they're doing the stuff that's wrong.
Well, sure, that's the way it always is with classification.
Obviously, nobody wants the codes for the president's nuclear football to be put out there on the internet or what have you, but there's a big difference between that and just covering themselves.
But now explain to me this, Luke Ryland, why is it that every reporter in America isn't after this story?
It sounds like, from what I can tell, Pulitzer Prize winning material, from a completely uneducated point of view on the case, I would have to guess that the average reporter has looked into what Sebel has to say, and they must have decided that she's not credible.
Otherwise, why wouldn't they be running with this story and making a name for themselves?
That's a very good question that's difficult to answer, but Sebel has indeed spoken to most of the major national journalists, and I don't know them in particular, but I presume from the Washington Post and the New York Times and every other outlet, every other major outlet, and none of them has decided to run with the story for one reason or another.
And it's not because, as you mentioned in your question, it's not because she's not credible.
Her credibility has already been ascertained.
We can go through the reasons why her credibility has been ascertained, they've been already proven, but for some reason, that major media won't run with their story, really apart from this 2000 to 50 Minutes piece.
That's what Sebel has decided to run with this latest statement, she said, I want to have an interview with one of the major media outlets.
And in the statement yesterday, she said that it has to be unedited.
And the reason that she's saying that is because on a number of occasions, including the 2003 60 Minutes piece, most of the relevant, significant information is left on the cutting room floor.
And in the case of the print journalist, they just refuse to print along with what she's saying.
So one of the conditions for holding this one and only interview, broadcast interview, is that all of her major claims are actually aired.
Either she'll do it live or she'll do it pre-recorded, but she'll have third party witnesses there who will also see exactly what Sebel is saying and make sure that one of the conditions is that the mainstream media actually broadcast all of the significant bits and we'll have third party observers there to guarantee that.
Okay, now Luke, I want you to share with the audience as much as you can, as much as has been revealed so far about what we know about Sebel Edmonds' revelations, but first tell me why you think she's so credible.
Go down that list for me of reasons why people ought to take what Sebel Edmonds has to say seriously.
There are a number of, the Department of Justice's Inspector General, which is the essentially independent body within the Department of Justice, investigated her claims and reported it was an ongoing process, and I think the final version was released in 2005, they investigated their claims and they put out an unclassified report saying that a lot of her claims were serious and legitimate.
We've seen a number of Congressmen and Senators who have investigated her case including Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley and Henry Waxman who have read the unclassified version of that particular report and interviewed a number of third party witnesses to the things that Sebel was talking about, basically FBI special agents, and they all confirm what she's saying.
Yeah, I was going to ask you, cops and intelligence agents, have they confirmed her?
The people at who she was working under, absolutely.
The other thing about Sebel's case is that it's all documented, she was a translator, and so there are wiretaps and documents and whatnot that exist, that typically exist.
She's not making this stuff up, she's got the document numbers there.
She's been saying that her case can come to Congress but she doesn't need to testify because all of those documents, all of the translate, all of the phone calls between the people that she's talking about all still exist and they can easily be subpoenaed and presented in court.
So people say, well, coming back to your question, maybe she's not credible, maybe she is, maybe she isn't but she's put everything out on the line, she's willing to testify under oath, she can point people to the right document numbers and everybody that's she's spoken about her case says that she's absolutely credible.
Alright, now I fear that we've spent too long talking about why we should listen to this lady and not enough time talking about what it is she has to say that's so important for the people who've never heard of Sebel Edmonds before today.
They heard me explain she was a translator, a contract translator for the FBI after September 11th.
What is it that she stumbled into that's so important, Luke?
As you mentioned in the introduction, she only worked with the FBI for six months, the first six months after September 11th and her special language, her three primary languages are Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijan, mostly in Turkish.
One of the key targets of the operation that she was working on was a lobbying group similar to APAC called the American Turkish Council.
This is a lobbying group there in DC that was in fact set up by the people who run APAC.
She heard a lot of discussions about terrorism, this is immediately after September 11th, terrorism and drug trafficking, but most importantly illegal arms sales.
The American Turkish Council, the ATC, is a lobbying group, as I said, and the people that it represents are basically the Turkish government, including the Turkish military, on the Turkish side and on the American side, ex-politicians that are lobbyists and the heads of the military industrial complex, so in fact Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
The ATC is where basically Turkey's military interests and America's military interests meet and then hash out plans to send American weapons to Turkey and to other places of course, and there are a lot of ex-politicians and ex-generals and secretaries of state, for example, who are also represented strongly at the ATC, they work as the lobbyists.
The real big scan in her case is that a lot of this money comes in from various places into the ATC and then gets flushed into the slush funds of the lobbyists, basically former temporary house speaker Bob Livingston, former Secretary of Defense, Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cole and then a couple of others, they then start splashing the military industrial complex money around and basically briden politicians, so people like Dennis Hastert, for example, one person has come up as being bribed by this group for helping, well for a whole bunch of reasons really, and there are, Sibel has mentioned in her press release yesterday that there are two or three other congressmen who are literally on the, have been bribed by this group of people, primarily for their votes so that they can redirect military spending to Turkey and also some of the former, some of the Central Asian states.
Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Tajikistan, so they're the ones that are getting all the money at U.S. tax, getting all the money and military hardware from Lockheed, etc., at the U.S. taxpayer's expense.
Right, okay, now let me make sure I understand here, basically what you're saying is this, Sibel Edmonds went to work as a contractor translator for the FBI and what she overheard basically was the outlines of this criminal underworld that is legitimate in some senses at places like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, at the American Turkish Council, obviously Lockheed is a publicly traded company and so forth, but that basically the arms deals, basically the American military spending in the Turkic countries of Central Asia and including Turkey itself is all interconnected with black market trade and criminal enterprises.
That's right, I think the primary outcome of a lot of this is that you get legitimate U.S. government spending on legitimate weapons to legitimate customers in that region, but once you start, as I understand it, once you start bribing certain people in Congress and elsewhere then you get a certain level of scope to partaking illegal activities as well because it's basically a criminal network, a criminal enterprise, so once you start bribing people in the Defense Department, the American Turkish Council also has spies in the Defense Department and the State Department that help them pull the strings on these matters and once bribing these people then it becomes a little bit easier to ask for favors and what not.
For example, often time they'll bribe say somebody at the State Department to get some of their criminal friends visas, for example, to go and work at the Nuclear Energy Labs from where they can steal secrets or they'll bribe someone at the State Department to get some of their criminal friends visas into the U.S. for various other reasons, so it becomes a slippery slope really and Sebel has apparently heard all of this documented on the wiretap, so the Nuclear Department, the Nuclear Lab issue is a really significant one.
These people are ostensibly criminals working at some level in conjunction with terrorists and they're placing their people into Nuclear Labs to steal American Nuclear Labs secrets and selling the results, it's not state espionage that we're talking about, they're selling the results to the highest bidder, which could very well be somebody like a fellow bin Laden.
So you're telling me that people within the American government are selling nuclear secrets on the black market?
Yes.
And now you mentioned two former speakers of the House of Representatives there, Bob Livingston and his replacement Dennis Hastert, can you back that up, what's their involvement in this?
Bob Livingston, as you probably know, was a temporary speaker of the House, he sort of got involved in a sex scandal just as he was moving into that position.
He has a lobbying company called the Livingston Group and the Livingston Group is one of the board members on the executive board, for example, of the ATC.
He's widely known to be one of Turkey's biggest agents, I don't know the exact numbers but I think he's received something like 13 million dollars for lobbying basically for the ATC over the years.
So he's one.
There are a couple of others, ex democratic congressman Stephen Salas is also one of their lobbying firms and William Cohen, ex content Secretary of Defence William Cohen, he is a lobbying group as well.
There's a lot of question around who is actually paying these lobbying groups, there's an enormous amount of money flowing to them and all of those lobbying groups have registered, you know, in the appropriate documented filings that have to be registered with the US government, they say that Turkey's government is paying them but it turns out that's not the case.
But the FBI is in fact still looking into where this money is coming from, there's some suggesting that it comes from the ATC basically, it's flowing somehow into these lobbying groups but it's all illegal.
Now what else do we know about Bob Livingston other than there's unaccounted for money in his bank account, what else do we know about his involvement with this?
He and the others, it appears, the channel to get the money from the ATC into various campaigns, particularly congressional campaigns, you know, as you know, in the US to the amazement of much of the rest of the world, there's an enormous amount of money it takes to finance public election campaigns and whatnot.
And so guys like Livingston have various mechanisms for getting money into campaigns, both legitimate and illegitimate, you know, we've seen Livingston and others throwing around money just lately into political campaigns to get people to change their mind on the Armenian Genocide Resolution.
But they also use a lot of illegal means, for example, in getting the men to get a passport.
There was an article, a ten page article in Vanity Fair 2005 that mentioned Hastert's involvement in some of these activities.
He was bribed in three different ways, one, there were illegal campaign contributions flowing into his campaign, two, there were a bunch of envelopes being passed in, you know, $7,000 here, $10,000 there by these lobbyists, as far as we can tell, and thirdly, there was a half a million dollar suitcase delivered to his house out there in semi-rural Chicago.
Now it appears that the mechanism for getting this money to the politicians, including Hastert, is these lobbying firms, guys like Livingston, William Cohen is another one.
Terrorism.
What's the link to terrorism, basically it's this one criminal underworld with these nuclear secrets and drug running and terrorist financing, it's all one big underworld?
That element is a little bit less understood as it pertains to Sabal's case.
Obviously, heroin is a big financer of guys like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and a lot of the heroin that's been produced in Afghanistan, or has at least over the years been produced in Afghanistan, gets moved through Turkey before it gets to the UK and the rest of Europe.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as we now know, earn a commission of various sorts from both protecting poppy farmers in Afghanistan and also moving the heroin from one place to the other.
So, you know, that whole industry that supports people like Osama bin Laden, and the US government has done a superb job of turning its head away and not looking at that particular profit.
That's the main intersection with Sabal's case.
I think she may have even said this to me, I know she said it in other interviews, and I know that you've written about this on your blog as well, that she compares the war against terrorism to the war against drugs where they arrest the street dealer but ignore the kingpin, and that the way she talked, she seemed to be saying in so many words that bin Laden and Zawahiri are middle management rather than the people really in charge, and I wonder if I understood that correctly, and if that is true, then who are the real managers, who are the real bosses of Al Qaeda?
That's a good question.
Sabal appeared, I think, for five hours in front of the September 11th Commission way back then because there were some things that she heard on the wiretaps, not just with the aid of the American Church Council but I think in other places as well, or wiretaps of other targets as well, that what was involved was September 11th.
I wrote about it recently on this last anniversary, just a month ago.
If you can just go back to your earlier statement, you said that Asamah and Zawahiri are middle management.
I don't think that's true.
I think what Sabal was saying that there's a level of management between those head guys at Al Qaeda and the hijackers.
For example, there were people organizing visas, money transfers, and middle management layering of Al Qaeda for the hijackers, and they intentionally hadn't been touched by the U.S.
Government, people bribing embassy officials in the Middle East to get visas for the hijackers and so on.
The U.S.
Government, not just the FBI, but I think the Department of Defense and the Department of State, knows exactly who these people are and they've refused to touch them.
Some of them were in the U.S., in fact, some of them were even picked up, put in jail after September 11th, but they all, for various reasons, were allowed to escape the country in this.
Again, I'm talking with Luke Ryland from LetSabalEdmundSpeak.blogspot.com.
He's on the phone from Tasmania right now.
I just wanted to make sure that I heard you right, that you were correcting me when I was saying that her implication was that there were people running Al Qaeda above bin Laden that aren't talked about, when you were correcting me and saying that, no, she's talking about people between bin Laden and the hijackers, below bin Laden, but people who basically helped the hijackers along with their plot, and that they've been, what, protected by this government, those middle managers?
For various reasons, and the U.S.
Government likes to talk about sensitive foreign diplomatic relations, yes, there is a layer of people between, I say a layer, I don't know how many it is, it might be two, it might be 20, probably just a handful of people between bin Laden and the hijackers that the U.S.
Government has refused to touch.
I think, in Sabal's case, as I said, they must have used the excuse of sensitive foreign diplomatic relations.
From that construct that they're using, what they're saying is, I believe, that there are people from countries who we don't want to start to criticise, and I believe that those countries are places like Turkey, for example, and who knows, it's Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, places that the U.S. Government wants to try and either sell weapons to or keep its allies in the war on terror, depending on whether you're part of the argument you want to believe.
But there are entire countries that the U.S. Government has gone out of its way to wipe clear from the record of involvement in those attacks.
What you're telling me is that they're willing to even cover up actual participation in the attacks, because some of the participants are from Turkic countries, some of these stand countries between Turkey and Afghanistan and the heroin pipeline and so forth, who we want good relations with, we want to put military bases in their country, expand our empire even further, and so our government is willing to cover up their involvement in the actual attacks of September 11th.
Yeah, I'm not interested in that, I would go all the way with that, but it is documented that there are people who are involved in the planning and organising of September 11th that the U.S. Government has decided not to pick up.
That's just fact.
That was documented just again and again.
She wrote an open letter to the 9-11 Commission after she testified, after the report came out, and she mentioned two or three specific examples of people who hadn't been touched despite their direct involvement in the network that supports the people who pulled off the attacks.
Well, now, something else that's come up over and over again in this story is the connection between the Israel lobby and the Turkish lobby and the military industrial complex.
We all know how that works.
The American taxpayer pays to give foreign countries Lockheed weapons and that kind of thing.
But over and over, the names Richard Pearl and Douglas Fyfe and a State Department guy named Mark Grossman have come up.
What's the involvement of the neoconservatives in this mess?
That's a good question.
The neoconservatives, people like Pearl and Douglas Fyfe, I believe are in fact the ones who set up the American Turkish Council.
They jointly had a lobbying firm called International Advisors Inc. back in the mid to late 80s.
That was being paid by the Turkish government to build health relations between the US and Turkey.
So they really had their hand in the cookie jar, particularly Pearl and Fyfe, since way back when.
There's a strange trilateral relationship between Israel, Turkey and the US that's been going on for a couple of decades.
And it appears that the major glue that's holding it together is the military industrial complex because as the money flows around from one group to the other, everyone seems to win.
On the Israeli side, I think they say that it helps them to have an ostensibly Muslim but secular country in the relationship, so there's that reason.
But Mark Grossman was, on the other hand, he's not widely known as a marathon, but he was an ambassador to Turkey.
And so he appeared to have had his hand in the cookie jar for 20 years or something.
He recently retired.
But Sebel says that he's been, Mark Grossman has since been promoted into the military industrial complex outside of the US government, and he's making something like two million dollars a year, I think, some of it with William Cohen's lobbying company, but he's also getting paid 1.2 million dollars a year from some allegedly shady Turkish company.
And Sebel says, and likes to reiterate, that all these people, Pearl, Fyfe, Grossman and others, the reason they get these big jobs, these big salaries after they leave the government is because they've been doing their duty, selling out their services to these companies in advance.
While they're working for the US government, they sell out their, the US government interests and basically quote, earn their enormous salaries once they leave the US government by selling secrets, for example, along the way, or leaking documents about which country the US is going to invade next, or what the negotiations are, what negotiations are taking place regarding them, say military sale to Turkey.
So they leak all of that information purely for money, just so that they can line their own pockets.
Sebel calls it treason, I wouldn't argue with that.
I'm interested in Eric Edelman's role, he's the guy that replaced Douglas Fyfe as the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and he's a former ambassador to Turkey as well, isn't he?
Yeah, he's a lesser known, but also an important one.
He was ambassador to Turkey, I think he was sent there, in fact, he was at the, I think in the bowels of Dick Cheney's office leading up to the Iraq invasion, I can't remember his title, but he was, I think there's one level below student living in those guys, so really deep at the heart of Dick Cheney's office.
And for some reason, and I'm not exactly sure why, immediately after the invasion, between the invasion of Iraq, he was sent to become the Turkish ambassador.
He was hated there, I think he only lasted one or two years, and then he was essentially kicked out of Turkey and landed back in, as you say, Douglas Fyfe's office in the Department of Defense.
I believe he came up in the wiretaps of somebody who was involved in some of the shenanigans in Sabal's case, but I don't know if that's actually true, but he certainly appears to be important in regards to Sabal's case.
He was sent to Turkey, in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, to try and calm them down after the Armenian Genocide vote, so he's still a big player there, even though he was hated by just about everyone when he was there.
Well, it's interesting you brought up the Armenian Genocide bill, the Vanity Fair piece by David Rose a couple of years ago talked about information Sabal Edmonds had that, if I remember right, David Rose confirmed separately with sources on the congressional committees and with FBI agents and so forth, that Dennis Hastert was implicated in taking a significant cash bribe in order to kill a vote to condemn the Armenian Genocide back in the 1990s.
Do I have that right?
That is, as David Rose reported in Vanity Fair, Sabal listened to the wiretaps, according to Vanity Fair, where some people were, some of the FBI targets were celebrating or mentioning the fact that they had bribed Hastert with half a million dollars to make sure that that Armenian Genocide bill didn't get to the floor of the House of Representatives.
I think in some of Sabal's comments, it seems as though she thinks for various reasons that the half a million dollars was not for pulling that bill.
But there's certainly a lot of lobbying that goes on by guys like Livingston and Cohen and others on behalf of Turkey's interest to make sure that that Armenian Genocide resolutions don't get voted on.
I think you mentioned there was one just a couple of months ago in the House of Representatives in the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee where there was a vote just in the subcommittee, and it was remarkable that it even got to that level, but within days, Livingston and these other guys were running around bribing a whole bunch of congressmen to make sure that they changed their votes, and Nancy Pelosi, the current House Speaker, Democrat House Speaker, had promised Bill would go from the subcommittee to the full floor of the House.
The Turkish lobbyists went into overdrive and got a whole bunch of people who had announced that they'd support the resolution to back down, and Pelosi appears to have pulled the bill entirely.
I'm not sure of the exact status on that, but it's certainly changed their mind, and Pelosi hasn't announced when it will come to the floor.
Again, it's the military-industrial complex problem.
Jack Murtha, who's a Democrat, was leading a charge to get the resolution pulled as well, and he's, I think, the biggest recipient of lobbying funds from the military-industrial complex, so it's not surprising it's the same thing that we thought.
The problem, as always, is a lack of accountability.
Here you have a woman who stumbled across, basically in her contractor job as a translator, stumbled into criminality at the highest levels of power, and rather than there being grand juries convened and trials and accountability, instead they put the state secrets privilege on her, and they're basically trying to make a criminal out of her for just telling the truth to you and me.
That's right.
She's a very, very brave woman.
She's been trying to do the right thing for five years.
She's been through every possible legitimate channel, and now she's willing to face criminal charges by going on air and talking about these problems.
And she's remarkably a brave woman.
She's been trying to get out the truth for all her time, and who knows what will happen if she does it, she might go to jail for the rest of her life, which is a horrible thought, but she really doesn't know what alternatives there are.
If somebody like Henry Waxman or any other congressman can say to Isabelle, hey, why don't you come in and talk to us in Congress, that, I think, as far as I know, immunizes her from any facts that she gives there under oath.
That would be the responsible thing, I think, for any congressman, and I hope that Henry Waxman or somebody else steps up and gives her that opportunity, because that's the fact she's been trying to do the right thing, and she might go to jail for God knows how long if she follows through with this offer that she gave out yesterday to appear on broadcast TV and give her a version of events.
And the other beauty is, if somebody in Congress will do it, then they can subpoena the document and subpoena other witnesses and prove that everything that she says is legitimate.
You said that she could be facing as much as life in prison for violating her gag order, is that right?
Well, I don't know how long it will be, Scott, but it's the state's biggest privilege, and I don't know what the implications are of that, but it's certainly, I was exaggerating when I said life, I think, but I don't think anyone's ever been charged with facing the state's biggest privilege, and so I'm not sure there's any proof in it that they could put her in jail for a long time, let me put it that way.
Wow, well, I hope she doesn't go on 60 Minutes, because they only have, I think, 20 minute segments, and there's no way she could fit any of this in 20 minutes.
What do you expect her to reveal, or along, I don't mean secrets-wise, but just along what lines do you expect her to elaborate specifically, Luke?
To pick up on your point about 20 minutes, I think that's probably all she needs, 20 minutes to get out the key points, and I think one of the things that she will do is, I'm not sure that I can answer that for her, but there are, one of the things that she mentioned yesterday is that she will name names of other Congressmen who have been bribed, I think some of them are still sitting there in the House of, you know, in Congress today, or she can name those names.
She's been saying for years that if she gets a chance to talk, then a number of high-level Americans will be charged and go to prison, including Richard Perle and Doug Sees, Dennis Hastert, and these other, there are some unnamed, as yet unnamed, Congressmen, but it's a difficult story to tell, and if she only had 20 minutes, it would be interesting to see how she gets around, you know, how she covers it.
It's a difficult story for us to describe in shorthand, but maybe, you know, because we've got some missing pieces, so maybe she has those missing pieces, and she might be able to cover that, you know, cover that pretty efficiently, who knows, but it'll be an outrage.
I think most observers who look at the case argue that it's on the surface much worse than Morphgate, for example, so it is basically compelling television.
Yeah, it sounds like it should be, it sounds like it should have been this whole time.
All right, tell me this, Luke Ryland, proprietor of LetSabelEdmundSpeak.blogspot.com.
Now for those people in the audience who want to read more about this and understand as much as they can before they see whichever network finally puts this story on the air, what do you suggest they read?
There's your blog, LetSabelEdmundSpeak.blogspot, there, I know she wrote, The Hijacking of a Nation, part one and two are very good, very comprehensive, can you recommend some more reading for us?
Yeah, right, The Hijacking of a Nation, those two pieces are fantastic, the Vanity Fair article is also terrific, there's the link to that on my blog, Phil Gireldi has had a good piece of that in the American concern and both of those in my blog as well.
In the first one, he told the fact that there's, he names the fact that a lot of the Turkish, the people who are interested in Turkey, Douglas Fyfe and Richard Pearl, Wolfowitz and Edelman and Mark Grossman and a couple of others and he describes some of the process that's about talking about and then in his second piece, he talks about the fact that Waxman refuses to hold hearings and he speculates a couple of the reasons why, so that's another good article and I would recommend, really Scott, people listen to, particularly those two great interviews that you did with Isabelle and also the one that, one or two that Chris De Lisa did, both for antiwar.com, they were both fantastic.
Alright everybody, that's Luke Ryland, LetSabelEdmondsSpeak.blogspot.com, thanks a lot, Lukery.
Good to speak to you Scott.
