10/06/09 – Brad Friedman – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all welcome to the show, I'm stoked because I got Brad Friedman back in the studio to talk about the Sabel Edmonds case, you're all very familiar I'm sure with bradblog.com which is where you can find certainly links to all of the recent Sabel Edmonds coverage in the world as well as a lot of original reporting and blogging by Brad.
Thank you very much for joining me today, how are you doing sir?
My pleasure, great to be back in the house Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here, alright so I guess the biggest news in the developing story of Sabel Edmonds, the ever developing story, but only in some places, bradblog.com, andyward.com, American Conservative, Peter B. Collins show, everywhere else the story doesn't exist.
You've never heard of it, it's the greatest scandal you've never heard of apparently.
Isn't that strange?
Used to be coverage, made it to TV a couple of times back in the old days, before, that's really interesting, before she could talk about any of this, the media kind of loved it, 60 Minutes, Vanity Fair had an expose on it, recently I saw this video where Diane Sawyer was talking about the Sabel Edmonds story, now that she is free to talk apparently, nobody cares, what's the moral there?
Well I think as we already agreed previously and as we both talked about on our respective radio shows with Philip Giraldi, like city groups too big to fail, the story is too big to break.
It's the kind of thing that, assuming that anyone in the country actually cared, it's the kind of thing that could bring down this government basically.
Apparently it could, I mean because it is such an enormous cancer that has metastasized through so many branches of government, we're talking about current and former congress members who are involved in this, high ranking state and defense department officials, we're talking about military officials, academics at military bases, nuclear bases around the country.
Well and even the FBI, according to Sabel, part of these investigations were into domestic people where they should have had to go and get a real warrant, probable cause level, but they continue using their FISA warrants to do these basically what should have been domestic criminal wiretaps, and so they were breaking the rules there in order to do their investigations, so some of them could get in trouble just for telling their own story there.
I remember the FBI itself then, a lot of this started with Sabel Edmonds, her original allegations about one of her co-workers who was in fact a member, either a member or her husband was a member of one of the very organizations that was a target of the counterintelligence investigation that Sabel Edmonds was working on.
This is why she was fired.
Yes, because she dared to bring this up and say, hey this woman next to me keeps changing the translations, she keeps saying that this wiretap or that wiretap is not important and if it just happens to involve her husband's organization, and the FBI didn't want to hear that, and they didn't want to hear it, particularly back in 2002, they were facing a lot of embarrassment.
I spoke with actually John Cole, the 18-year FBI counterintelligence, counterespionage veteran manager, executive at the FBI, was talking about this recently to Peter B. Collins and saying that the FBI at that point in 2002 was facing so many embarrassments following 9-11, the last thing they needed, you know, was the information getting out that their very own counterintelligence department was compromised.
They needed to shut this thing down.
Right, and of course the cover-up, assuming anybody ever gets busted, it's usually the cover-up that gets them busted most, so there's even more incentive inside the FBI.
Yeah, but who's doing it?
Not only did they cover it up, but now they have to cover up that they covered up, which if you ask Peter Lance how 9-11 happened in the first place, they kept covering up all of what they could have known about all the previous attacks, so they never got to the bottom of the next one in time.
And who would be, and it is the very people who would be uncovering the cover-up who are the ones who are covering up in the first place, the FBI, Congress, and even, we learned from the new Sabella Edmonds interview with Phil Giraldi in American Conservative, that even the media themselves were corrupted, were a part of this scheme.
So, you know, she talks about Mark Grossman, who was the third highest official in the Bush State Department, actually sending over, writing articles, sending it over to the New York Times, faxing it over to them so he would brag on these wiretaps, and they would print it as is, put somebody else's name on it, a different reporter's name on it, print it as is.
So the New York Times is compromised here.
Are we going to count on the New York Times to get to the bottom of this scandal and uncover this cover-up?
Probably not going to happen.
That's the real problem we face here.
Jason Blair is the worst reporter they ever had, and let's just leave it at that, okay?
Yeah, that's it.
Now, you mentioned this guy, John Cole, and this is the developing story.
This is what's the most important thing that's happened recently in the Sabella Edmonds case, is that this former FBI counterintelligence official from Washington, D.C., has said what?
Well, a couple of things.
First, he's called for a special counsel to look into this.
He has come out, confirmed a number of the most important allegations that Sabella has made, essentially that Mark Grossman, who, as I mentioned, the third highest in the State Department- Former ambassador to Turkey.
And coincidentally, the former ambassador to Turkey, was involved in espionage on behalf of Turkey, on behalf of Israel, and that there was what he calls a decade-long investigation into this guy that was ultimately buried and covered up.
Those are direct quotes from John Cole, who had been working on these investigations at the FBI for years.
He has since now come out and expanded on that confirmation, both of Sabella Edmonds' credibility here in this matter, and on the fact that this ongoing investigation was going on for years, looking into Turkey's attempts to influence the American government through various illegal means.
And he said, enough is enough.
This has gone on for too long.
We need to have accountability here.
A special counsel needs to come in and look at this.
And maybe that is the only hope at this point, a special counsel, because all those other bodies we had just run through there are themselves compromised.
So if you can find a special counsel who is in some way not compromised here, good luck there.
But that may be our only hope.
I nominate Brandon Mayfield, the lawyer from Washington State that they tried to frame up for the Madrid train bombing.
Oh, that guy.
I think he'd be great.
That's just me personally.
We're accepting nominations.
Okay.
Now listen, I'm reading bradblog.com at this moment, in fact.
Very good.
It's excellent.
It's got links to all kinds of interesting things, particularly on the Sabella Edmonds case.
I wanted to directly quote here some of the stuff you're referring to.
I'm fully aware of the FBI's decades-long investigation of Mark Grossman, he said.
He said that the FBI's counterintelligence probe, quote, ultimately was buried and covered up, that he believes it is, quote, long past time for an investigation to bring about accountability.
He says, somewhere in here is the term 100% something.
I wanted to find that and then ask you something about it.
Everything he has heard from Sabella to date has been 100% on the money, on the mark.
He said everything that he has heard of her saying.
Yep.
Wow.
And this comes, by the way, following his interview.
Now let me ask you this.
This is my real question.
Did he say at any point, I don't know about that part.
That doesn't quite sound right to me.
Or did he just, that was it?
She's telling the truth.
I'm telling you.
I'm not asking you.
I know.
I'm the FBI guy and I'm telling you, it's all right.
I want to give credit here to our friend, Peter B. Collins, radio journalist who did a lengthy interview with John Cole and looked at, you know, and really went into detail on a number of these things.
What Cole said was that, in this interview, these comments he made came after this interview that was in the American Conservative with Edmonds.
He said he looked at all of that.
He said he wasn't aware of all of those things, but that, in fact, a lot of the things that he heard in this interview not only rang true, but also helped him with a lot of the cases that he had been working on and actually filled in some of the details and some of the holes, in essence, on many of the cases that he had worked on over the years.
It made those cases make sense once he heard what Sabel had to say.
That's a pretty tall endorsement from somebody like that.
And listen, at this point, honestly, I think she's telling the truth.
Obviously, there's been plenty of credible people who say that she's telling the truth, and I'm kind of tired of beating a dead horse about her credibility.
But what we're talking about, of course, are the highest profile, should be at least, type accusations about, ultimately, treason in some cases, certainly espionage and bribery and corruption of the highest orders.
There's treason in almost every case, actually, from what I understand.
And again, I guess we should have said, well, and again, you can go to bradblog.com and find links to all of this stuff, particularly the American Conservative Magazine interview by Phil Jirali is the primary footnote of importance here for anybody who wants to read about this.
Remember, she's not been able to talk for, you know, for folks who don't know the story.
She had been gagged for like seven years under the Bush administration who invoked the state secrets privilege, keeping her from talking about these things at all publicly.
Now, she had talked with certain congressmen, senators and representatives.
She spoke to the 9-11 Commission for something like three hours.
All of that testimony was subsequently classified.
So publicly, this is the first time she's really been able to speak out on the record.
She did so under oath on August 8, 2009 in a deposition.
And then in this follow-up in this interview.
So there's a lot of information now coming out for the first time that we've only really been able to speculate about over the years or that has come out in bits and pieces here and there.
Well, I think this is the source of the problem.
In a lot of people's minds, the bits and pieces seems like they all seem new each time they hear something that they don't know about or whatever, but that's part of the problem of state secrets privilege and all the classification and everything else.
And there was another point that Cole, and actually I didn't mean to cut you off if you had a point there.
No, go ahead.
There was an important point that Cole made.
You may have that quote in front of you, but he talked about back in 2002 when this stuff originally began to break, when Sabella Edmonds filed her initial complaint with her superiors about what was going on.
He read about it, Cole read about it back in the Washington Post when they used to give a damn about the story.
He went in the next day, he explains in the interview, to the seventh floor, which is apparently where all the executives are at the FBI building, and he asked an executive assistant director about this, who is this Sabella woman?
And she said to him, she is absolutely right about everything, and this material can't get out.
The Bureau is going to have to do something about Sabella, because everything she had to say was true.
And this is going back to 2002, John Cole was a primary source for this information back in 2002.
Well, let me ask you about that.
Her bosses, not in the translation department, but the people that she was working for in the actual counterintelligence unit doing the translations, was he their boss?
Or was he in a separate chain of command in a different time and place from that?
John Cole?
Yeah.
No, I don't think...
He did not know her back then.
Well, I mean, I'm asking if he was the boss of her bosses, of the guys that she was working with, was he on that case at that time?
You know, I'm not sure about how that chain of command worked.
Because he was a higher level manager, not the local guy that she would have been working with.
He was not a field agent, the translators, which is what she was, I don't know if we said that.
But we're not clear on whether he was actually involved in that particular case at that time.
Right.
I think he would be overseeing them overall.
She was working instead on the ground directly with the field agents, listening to these wiretaps from 1996 to 2002, translating them.
I'm just saying, as far as I know, there's 10 different counterintelligence departments or something, and he's in charge of one and she's working for different people on something entirely different.
I'm making that up.
I have no idea.
That's my point.
And there may be 10 different or more counterintelligence divisions.
At least there's certainly 10 or more different counterintelligence investigations going on.
Certainly.
There are thousands of them at any given time.
The one that she was working on, when she was brought into the FBI after 9-11 on September 15th, 2001, apparently there was no Turkish translators in the FBI, period, at that time.
So she was tasked with going back and looking at seven years of wiretaps in this Turkish investigation that was ongoing, but there was nobody to listen to the wiretaps to figure out what the hell they were talking about.
So she goes back, she goes through it, she begins summarizing it, translating it, and passing on the information to the field agents who subsequently then take it to the higher ups and say, hey, we've got a problem here.
And that's what John Cole again talks about in his interview where he says that, look, these translators are like the primary source for a lot of this information.
And a lot of the information that they take from the wiretaps then goes to the field agents, is disseminated, and gets up to the level of president and policy at times.
She's explained on this show, yeah, she's in charge of marking whether it's pertinent or not, whether they need to bother looking at it.
She's the first line of- And it's one thing when she says it, it's another thing when John Cole says it.
Because obviously, we hear her saying it, and this is one of the big criticisms about her case.
She's just a translator, she doesn't know the big picture, she doesn't know what's really going on, she only hears this one thing.
Well, the translators, as it sounds like you've talked with her about as well, are very important to this process.
She says in writing somewhere, maybe even in that deposition, I forget exactly, but I believe recently she's talked about, you know, in Turkey, if a guy's from more of a secular kind of town, or he's more of a place where more religious militancy is going on, or it's more of like, I don't know, a Kurdish region or another, that wasn't her words, but something like, hey, there's context about where in Turkey this call is being made, what kind of dialect and accent this guy speaks with, what he probably means by this when he says it.
It could be a figure of speech that means one thing to a certain sort of class of people, and one thing different to someone else.
So she's providing all of this context.
She's not just saying, I understand his words, she's saying, look, let me tell you about Turkey and why what this guy is saying is, I believe, pertinent for the following contextual type stuff.
Very, very in, basically she's working hand in hand with her field agents.
Correct.
And a lot of people, yeah, it's not, you know, a lot of people think, oh, it's the field agents who, well, they're the crime fighters, they handle this entire thing.
No, they work very closely with those translators.
And now you have someone else corroborating what Sabal has been trying to explain to folks like you and me who don't understand the way this works on the inside.
That context is important.
That is crucial to the case.
So those who have been criticizing her by saying, you know, oh, she's just a translator.
She was just, you know, listening to wiretaps and writing down what they were saying on the wiretaps.
That does not give the picture.
She wasn't like a translator at the UN, you know, when you've got two guys talking to each other and they're just, you know, explaining what one guy says and what the other guy says.
There's a different role.
As a matter of fact, I think her official title was the language specialist or linguist, which goes beyond mere translator.
And I think that is something that's a sort of a crucial point here that people have misunderstood about her case and have taken it as a reason to say, oh, well, what did she know when she was talking about all she was was a contract translator.
Right.
Well, and again, here we have the manager, a higher level, more executive member of the FBI saying, yeah, that's right.
Confirming exactly what she's been trying to.
Now, let me ask you this.
Does he mention I'm sorry, I haven't had a chance to listen to this interview with Collins yet.
Does he address the her accusation that Mark Grossman outed Brewster Jennings and associates in 2001?
This is the CIA front company that, to the world's knowledge, was outed by Robert Novak on CNN in 2003 as part of Cheney and Libby's outing of Valerie Plame, who that was her front company.
And they were this basically a front for the CIA's investigation of this same sort of criminal ring, as I believe Phil said in his last interview here, of weapons of mass destruction.
Has Cole commented on that particular thing?
I don't think he was asked about that in that particular.
And let me ask you this, too, because I think oftentimes, whether in the Sebel case or otherwise, Brewster Jennings and Valerie Plame get conflated together, even though they're two different words and two different things.
And I wonder whether it's really true.
Is it true?
Is it the case that Sebel has said that Grossman outed Plame, that he mentioned her at all, or he said Brewster Jennings, as far as Valerie Plame's role goes?
It seems as though Brewster Jennings was not destroyed by this in 2001.
She continued to work there at least for a while after that, isn't that right?
At least as far as we know, Scott.
Here's the thing.
What she was doing as a NOC, an agent under non-official cover, that's beyond covert.
NOCs are the guys and the women who, if they're discovered in another country- They're disowned.
... the government.
We never heard of them.
Right.
They don't have diplomatic immunity.
Exactly.
So this is perhaps the most dangerous level of CIA work, at least as far as the work that I know.
We don't know the full context of what happened with Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings.
Brewster Jennings may have been around, for all we know, for years and years, as you said, before Valerie Plame even showed up.
I don't know that that company was created for her.
When this all came out, with Robert Novak and the trial and everything, there was only a very little bit of information that we were able to get.
I'll paint it to you this way, because some people have said, well, if Brewster Jennings was no more, was outed and destroyed as of August 2001, which is what Sobel says in her sworn deposition, then how could there still be one in 2003 or 2004 whenever Novak outed her?
Well, if we're talking about two- we could be talking about two separate companies.
Robert Novak could have gotten the name of that company wrong.
We don't know.
It seems- if he did, it seems unlikely that the CIA is then going to come out and say, no, no, no.
What Robert Novak, the company he was talking about, was this other company.
I think they followed it.
Didn't journalists follow it to its post office box and they established there was something called Brewster Jennings.
That was the correct name of it and all that, right?
Yes, but what Brewster Jennings did is still kind of murky, as I understand it.
Don't get me wrong.
I don't think- even if the CIA decided that whatever Mark Grossman said was no big deal and that they kept Brewster Jennings open as a front for years after that, I don't care.
It's still- and then the question is the context of how he- of how it was exactly that he leaked.
They accidentally leak it.
Was he overheard by somebody else?
Did he directly call foreign spies and warn them?
Well, two points.
One, my point is we don't necessarily know all of what was going on under that cover, okay?
And I don't think the CIA has gone out of their way to clarify- Well, it's been credibly reported that they were working on Iran's- trying to buy in the nuclear black market and the AQ Khan network and that kind of stuff generally anyway, no?
No, yes.
We have a general sense of it, but if there was different companies, if Brewster Jennings was a cover for a cover, these are the sort of details that we don't necessarily know and we may never know.
The second point that you made- Well, and I was just wondering whether- when Sabel is telling this story rather than the telephone game and all that, because this stuff gets real confused, especially the Plame story is a big story and everybody knows already a bunch of other things about it and whatever, so things get conflated, right?
And I'm just saying, has she ever said that Grossman outed Plame?
Or she only said that he named Brewster Jennings to somebody.
So she wasn't- Sabel is not saying, as far as you know, that Plame had earlier been outed, just that Brewster Jennings had been earlier outed.
That was my understanding from my recollection.
That's what I thought, too.
But I thought I'd read otherwise in a couple of headlines, places, I don't think on your blog, I forget.
No, no, we get it right on my blog.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, of course.
There you go.
On BradBlog.com there.
Thank you.
Yeah, you like that.
Good.
No, actually, I don't- my recollection is she has always claimed it, and by the way, we're talking about what she has claimed.
Right.
Neither you or I know if she was accurate, even in many cases, if she's telling the truth.
I see no real reason for her to lie.
The fact that there was an FBI investigation and a Grossman, if anything, implies he's innocent.
Hell.
Right, you're right.
Well, it seems kind of stupid for her to come out and say something like, oh, Brewster Jennings was no more as of August 2001.
Seems kind of dumb for her to come out and say that in August of 2009 with all this countering information unless she had a reason to believe that that was true and that was accurate.
That means either it was true and it was accurate, or she got it wrong, or she misheard it.
These are the things that we don't know.
This is why there needs to be an investigation of this case.
There is enough information here.
There is enough troubling information here.
There is enough information that has not been rebutted, has not been debunked, you know, by anybody.
Dennis Hastert has never revealed who gave him some $300,000, $500,000, I can't remember how much it was, in donations that were of $199 or less.
And because they're less than $200, we don't have to disclose the name of the contributor.
He's never come out and said who those people were.
And so he hasn't come out and said, no, no, I didn't take money from these Turkish interests.
Essentially he said, oh, it's none of your business, and he, you know, threw a lot of smoke and mirrors out there.
Well, it shows you how worried he is about it, that he went and got a job making how much?
$35,000 a month working for Turkey as a foreign agent lobbying for Turkey.
So that's how concerned the former Speaker of the House is about all this coming out about him.
Well, he's not.
Well, I mean, hell, couldn't he have got the Turks to get him a job with the Georgian lobby or something?
Just to throw off the scent a little bit.
I mean, come on.
You're right.
Apparently he doesn't seem to be worried.
I mean, actually, I think I got an email from Sabel Edmonds like the day that that broke the news.
Like, look, Hastert got a job at the Turkish lobby.
Can you imagine?
That's what they call chutzpah right there, right?
And she had been predicting that for years.
She said he's going to leave Congress and he's going to get a job working with Turkey.
I mean, and this is what, by the way, John Cole also corroborated.
He said, this is how these guys are paid off.
You know, quite often they'll just get lucrative jobs working for the for the country.
That is, you know, part of this espionage that they're involved with.
He says he sees this all the time.
He says that, you know, what she had to say rang absolutely true to nearly 20 years working in counter espionage.
Well, so this is, to me, the most important part of the thing.
I think is Doug Fyfe and Richard Pearl.
She levels accusations that they were.
I don't know if illegally or not, but at least they were collecting everybody's personnel files and using them for blackmail and bribery purposes.
I don't think I know this for a fact, but I've at least read or heard a couple of times that Douglas Dickerson, who's the husband of the lady you mentioned earlier, the colleague translator, a member of the organization being investigated, interestingly enough, worked for Douglas Fyfe, who was the deputy secretary of defense for policy and was the head of the Office of Special Plans, the guys that collected the lies that led us into war about Iraq and al-Qaeda and as well as all about the weapons of mass destruction.
I think they made up pretty much everything but the aluminum tubes.
Those guys, that was the CIA in there.
And so, another employee, and I'm not trying to get too crazy here or whatever, but it seems relevant to me, of that same Office of Special Plans was a guy named Larry Franklin, who was convicted, pled guilty, was convicted of passing secrets to Israel by way of AIPAC.
And two AIPAC employees were to go on trial for that until the judge basically made the bar so high that it was basically no longer a prosecutable case and so it was forced to be dropped.
It's the same judge, isn't it?
Reggie Walton?
Isn't that his name?
Or what's the guy's name?
Ellis.
Ellis.
Where did I get Reggie Walton from?
Reggie Walton was the judge in the Spell case that agreed to the state secret privilege to put the guy in court, and he was also the judge in the Valerie Plame case.
See, I was confusing him with this guy, Ellis.
Is that it?
I was thinking they were the same guy.
There's another judge.
Might be, not ringing a bell, but it is Reggie Walton who did both Valerie Plame and Sabel Edmonds by way of complete coincidence.
I think it was Ellis in the Franklin case.
Anyway, okay, I'm sorry.
I was thinking it was the same guy over and over again.
But anyway, the point is that, yeah, yeah, my point that I'm getting here to is not that, well, that these investigations, apparently these FBI investigations, Larry Franklin, of course, has said the FBI was asking about all of his buddies at the Office of Special Plans, all the neocons in the Pentagon.
And so, you know, apparently this investigation, in a way dovetailed with Sabel's, she's at least claiming, you know, Pearl and Fyfe up to these nefarious activities.
I don't know, she doesn't outright say on behalf of a foreign power, just only on behalf of whatever Richard Pearl thinks is right, or whatever, right?
Or what he wants to do, anyway.
Well, she talks about the fact that the Turkish investigation and the Israeli investigation often crossed paths, and that essentially AIPAC, on behalf of Israel, and ATC, on behalf of Turkey, are modeled after each other, at least ATC is modeled after AIPAC.
These are their K-Street lobbies, basically.
Well, right.
There's, you know, public advocacy organizations, lobbyists, theoretically, but that they're both operating similarly, that a lot of the same people are involved with both of these groups.
And, you know, this has been another area where, you know, people who have been skeptical about Sabel's case have been, I think, really off the mark when they come out and say, well, Turkey, why would Turkey be doing all of this?
They're our ally as well.
And it's like, well, so is Israel.
And when we heard about, I don't know about you, but when I heard about this Larry Franklin case originally, I was like, well, what the hell is going on here?
Why is Israel spying on us?
We are their best friend, right?
We'll give them whatever they want.
What the hell do they need to spy on us for?
Well, apparently they do.
Apparently, again, John Cole gave an interview, I think some years ago, a couple years ago, to Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly and talked about hundreds of investigations into Israeli spying going on in our country.
The same thing is true with Turkey.
Just because they're our ally, and it is...
Maybe even more so because they're our ally.
Well, they're able to get away with a lot more, that's for sure.
Well, in the Franklin case, supposedly the paperwork that he had ran off with and given to the Israelis was about internal discussions at the cabinet level about American policy toward Iran.
And it's been clear that Likud and then Kadima and now Likud again have had it on their agenda to try to get America to bomb Iran for them this whole time.
And apparently, I think, at least according to the interpretation I believe in the indictment, this is what the paperwork was about.
It was about Israel better positioning itself in the internal argument of the Americans to better be able to convince us to get in a war.
So they have at least as much incentive to have spies all over D.C. as the Russians have or any other country that we might consider sort of an adversary.
I think to the average Joe listening on chaos in Texas or listening to anti-war, although not really average Joes at anti-war or either of those places actually, but to the average Joe who hears the story, I think it doesn't add up to them.
It doesn't make sense to them.
From the jump, they say, why would Turkey be spying on us?
They are our allies.
But that's a very key element to this entire story, and I think it's going on, at least if we are to trust not just Sabel Edmonds, but John Cole, Phil Giraldi of the CIA, who also corroborated elements of this story.
It's going on a hell of a lot more than we understand.
It's not like we're out there trying to keep the Soviet Union out, trying to keep Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Al-Qaeda out, and apparently, at the heart of the Sabel Edmonds story, we're talking about selling nuclear secrets, taking them out of military bases, selling them not just to Turkey and to Israel, but also to the enemies, to the quote-unquote enemies, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and potentially even Al-Qaeda.
These are shocking allegations that even people who do understand them, who do understand that our allies spy on us, who do understand that a translator like Sabel Edmonds is not just a translator, but she's key to these investigations, even those people take a look at these charges and say, my God, this is so huge, it either can't be real, or it's so huge, I don't know what the hell, you know, there's nothing we can do about it at this point.
They have gotten away with it.
Well, and as you said at the beginning of this interview, we're, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, not too big to fail, too big to bust.
Right, and too big in the sense that State Department, Defense Department, Congressmen, I mean, we're talking about not Congressmen going to jail for, you know, taking a fake bribe from an undercover FBI Arab, right?
We're, you know, the Ab-whatever-the-hell-scam.
Ab-scam.
Yeah, remember that?
You know, this is, we're talking about, you know, potentially Dennis Hastert and, was it Robert Livingston, both former Speakers of the House of Representatives, you know, possibly going to prison.
We can see right here that, just, you mentioned Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly, in his reporting about John Cole back in the day, he's the guy that broke the story about Jane Harmon, who, according to Jeff Stein at Congressional, no longer, unfortunately, at Congressional Quarterly, he broke the story that she was caught completing a crime, in the words of the FBI, in accepting a bribe extortion-type deal with an Israeli agent, not a member of AIPAC or something like that, an actual Israeli Mossad agent, apparently.
A quote that was caught on a wiretap.
And now Phil Giroldi, Phil Giroldi, again on this show, commented on this and said, listen, this is how a spy hooks somebody.
Remember that time I did you that favor that you would get in trouble for if anybody knew I did it for you?
Well, now you get to do whatever I say forever.
It's like paying protection to the mob or anything else.
Once they get their hooks in you, you're hooked.
And now, so we actually have right now, right now, ladies and gentlemen, there is a burned spy, again, burned at CQPolitics.com, all over the web, burned the next day on the front page of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
They each covered it once because you can't ignore Jeff Stein.
He's too high profile for that.
And and and then that was it.
There was a burnt foreign asset, right?
Not agent, a burnt foreign asset.
Well, that's why you are Congress right now.
And nobody even cares about that.
So why would they care about Sabella Edmonds and all these other congressmen who also ought to be in prison?
I think the moral here, and this is perhaps where Jack Abramoff went wrong.
He bribed only Republicans.
If you're smart, and apparently the Turks and the Israelis here have been smart.
Oh, absolutely.
You get both the Republicans and the Democrats because no matter who's in charge of Congress, no matter who decides, you know, what they are going to investigate, the Republicans are not going to investigate this because the Democrats will say, hey, you guys, you know, are dirty in this.
The Democrats are not going to investigate it because the Republicans will say the Democrats are dirty in this.
Right now, one of the people sort of named in this is actually Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat who happens to be the chair of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
She's not going to look into this, is she?
Isn't that the first person you'd compromise if you were a Turkish spy, too?
You'd try.
It works out pretty smartly.
Now, mind you, at the time that she was supposedly involved with this and Sabella has gone out of her way to say that she doesn't know if Schakowsky actually committed any wrongdoing here, she says she was involved in an affair with a Turkish agent, blah, blah, blah.
And that was before Schakowsky became the chair of that committee.
But now that she is the chair of that committee and whether she did any wrongdoing back then other than having a lesbian affair, as Sabella tells it, doesn't really matter because if she did, now she is compromised.
And even if she didn't do anything wrong back there, now she's compromised.
If I was Jan Schakowsky, I would not hold hearings on the Sabella Edmonds case or the Jane Harman case, for that matter.
And so far, Jan Schakowsky has done a very good job of not holding hearings on either of those cases.
Yeah.
Which can be said for anybody on any committee of any kind of oversight of any of those things as well.
If there's a possibility that they're compromised...
And by the way, and it's important here, right, because it is just a possibility at this point.
We do have one woman's word that this is true and a competing word by the person who supposedly implicated, who absolutely, adamantly says it is false.
And Sabella Edmonds, who's making the, leveling the charges...
She says it's total fantasy.
Oh, there you go.
Close enough.
Yeah.
I was paraphrasing.
Sabella's had to walk back her accusation against Schakowsky to a degree, at least.
So why don't you explain that?
I don't know that she's walked it back.
She disagrees vehemently with some of the fact issues and we can get into the weeds here.
But in the testimony, well, a combination of Sabella Edmonds' deposition and in her interview with Giraldi, essentially, she talks about this Congresswoman who was hooked by a Turkish agent because she's bisexual, as Sabella says, that Schakowsky's married, but she's secretly bisexual and that she was seduced, if you will, when she was in a sensitive state after her mother died.
Now, Schakowsky's office says, well, her mother died 13 years earlier.
So this couldn't possibly be true.
On the other hand, her mother could be...
Wait, wait.
And at that point, Sabella wrote back, oh, the mother.
The mother, which I've since asked Sabella about and she talks about it.
You called it walking back.
I don't know that I would call it that.
Well, she originally said her mother.
Her mother means her mother.
The mother is all of a sudden, at least some percentage of gray added to...
We're not talking about Jane Schakowsky's mom anymore.
I thought that's what she said.
I will leave it to you or a court of law or anybody else to press her on that point.
I think that's a good point.
She has said that there's a difference in the languages, that in Turkish, there is no her, essentially.
It is the mother.
Now, even if it was her mother, and we don't know that it was, but even if it was her mother, there's other mothers.
There's mothers-in-law.
Jane Schakowsky has two of them, in fact.
So the question about when they died is still an open matter.
There's other areas to look into.
Sabella has said, I agree, there's stuff to look into, Congresswoman Schakowsky.
Let's have hearings in your subcommittee, which should be looking at this.
In lieu of that, let's take a polygraph test, because Sabella said, I will stand by my words on a polygraph test if you'll answer the same questions on a polygraph test.
Schakowsky has not chosen to do that.
Sabella has further said, if you still disagree, then please sue me for libel.
She says she welcomes that suit so that the facts can come out.
I'm convinced that Sabella wants the facts to come out.
And I'm not here to defend her or what she said, because I don't know either, any more than you do, what she actually heard, the original material.
But Sabella has said, release the tapes, release the transcripts, release the case files.
She said she would like all of this to come out.
She would like other people to testify about what was there.
I've seen her up until now be pretty fearless about this.
I haven't seen her guard this information personally, other than when she had to guard it under penalty of going to jail, potentially, when she was under the gag orders from the Bush administration, the state secrets privilege.
And even then, she went through the proper steps.
She talked to folks in Congress, senators, Congress members, have, you know, she tried to go to court.
She tried to go to court.
She tried to go all the way to the Supreme Court with her case.
But she was not allowed to argue her case because of the state secrets privilege.
And because of it, she wasn't even allowed to be in the courtroom before we get too far from it.
I just want to argue their case.
I just want to emphasize one more time that Sabella has said explicitly and repeatedly, as you just said, I'm not saying you didn't say, I'm just saying it twice here, that she doesn't have any indication that this lady did anything wrong other than that some Turkish spies targeted her and, according to Sabella, succeeded in targeting her.
But she doesn't know of any further developments in Schakowsky's story after that.
It seems like everybody ought to be hounding Pearl and Fyfe.
They ought to be hounding everybody but the player in this, who Schakowsky has got the least to do with.
And for the record, again, she's completely denied this.
And you know, to me, I'm not, you know, I'm whatever, dude.
I'm just saying I want the most important allegations of people stealing nuclear secrets and bribing and blackmailing the highest levels of our government to do the business of foreign governments.
I want the people who she says she knows did something that's illegal on the books.
Not everybody's caring about the paying attention to the lady who there's the least accusation against out of all of the charges.
I think you need to look.
And there was a reason that for a long time, this lady's face was a question mark on Sabella Edmonds rogues.
Sabella has even said that she does not know if not only does she not know if she did anything wrong, she doesn't even know if Schakowsky was ever informed that she was being videotaped in this act.
So they may have never even tried to spring a blackmail on her.
As far as she knows, she doesn't know.
But it's not.
You're right.
She's won a player.
So let's leave that for now.
That's covered.
So let's talk about Al-Qaeda.
You mentioned Al-Qaeda.
Let me give you a few other.
And the truthers are going to kill me if I don't get back to you on that.
I'll get to you in a sec.
But I just want to say, because you said Pearl, Fyfe, we also need to look at Grossman.
We mentioned Hastert, Bob Livingston, Roy Blunt, who is currently sitting in Congress, going to be running for Senate in Missouri, Dan Burton, Tom Lantz, as we mentioned, but he's now deceased, Stephen Solars from New York, Democrat.
So there are a lot of people and all of those people, by the way, she says have been corrupted, have committed crimes.
All of these people need to be investigated.
It's very difficult to say, oh, this is more important than that.
It is such a metastasized cancer.
Well, I got to cut out the whole thing here.
It's just a bummer when the only video and the only developing part of the story seems to be the lady who's not accused of doing anything wrong, rather than all the rest of the people you just named.
You know what I mean?
Like somebody go after this Solars guy.
That's the real point.
Let's go after them all right now.
There's just me and you, Scott, and a couple, a handful of other people.
That's what I'm saying.
We need to go after all of these guys, get explanations for this stuff, because this thing stinks to high hell.
And if I believe it was on your show, I think as you were talking with, was it Giraldi and Joe Lauria from the UK Sunday Times, he did a great expose on this in the United Kingdom.
Nobody gave a damn about it back here.
I think it was either Lauria or Giraldi who said that even if 50% of these things are true, this is the largest scandal in the history of this country.
So where the hell is the media?
Come in here and investigate this stuff.
And as you and I have talked about before, there's a lot of other people who know about this inside the FBI who worked on this investigation.
These guys, John Cole has come forward.
There are more folks who know about this, who are working on this case firsthand.
They need to step forward, because Sabella Edmonds has been batted around for years.
In the meantime, she formed the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition to help support them.
She's been supporting these guys for years.
They need to come forward and now corroborate her story, or even debunk it.
But come forward, come public, and let us know what's going on instead of leaving Sabella Edmonds' ass hanging out there flapping in the wind at this point.
So I applaud John Cole for doing that.
These other FBI guys, I know they're scared, and I understand that, but A, it's the right thing to do, and B, they're FBI guys.
They know how to do this without going public.
They know where my address is on the side of every, my snail mail address on the side of every page of Bradblog.
If they want to send some documents without identifying who they are, send the documents, the documents that corroborate these points, so that people can stop beating up on, you know, cynics, critics, who don't know what the hell they're talking about, can stop beating up on Sabella Edmonds.
It's one thing, if you've got material to counter what she says, great, bring it forward.
But I'm tired of this crap that, oh, she's not credible.
She was only a translator at the FBI.
She's making things.
You know what?
If you've got evidence to debunk it, bring it forward.
Otherwise, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
But there are a lot of people out there who do know what she's talking about, and now is the time for those people to step forward, as far as I'm concerned.
All right, cool.
And now we're going to have to leave with this.
I know you've got to go, but you did bring it up, and it is an important point.
I believe I can set this up a little bit by saying there's already a ton of reporting about Bill Clinton's support for the Mujahideen in the war in Bosnia and the war in Kosovo, all the way up until 1999.
That was where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earned his stripes, man, fighting for Bill Clinton and that thing.
And there was also at least, I forgot who reported this, I'm sorry, but I believe it was not the Daily Mail, but like an actual real newspaper in England that reported about how the British Secret Service guys tried to recruit al-Qaeda, not just Mujahideen types, but al-Qaeda, like Egyptian and Saudi friends of Osama, to try to murder Gaddafi in 2000, or maybe that was in the year 2000 even.
And so what Sabella Edmonds has said, I believe in an interview with you, filling in on the Mike Molloy show, and then again she said, I think something about this also in the deposition, in the interview with Phil Giraldi, but it's very limited what she said, but something to the effect, and I guess Phil elaborated on what he thought she was talking about a bit there, of the CIA, officially and unofficially, people like Grossman on the criminal level, but also official CIA covert operations, were cooperating, working with the Mujahideen, apparently Chechnya, throughout Turkic countries, something about financing Madrasas in all the Turkic countries, above Iran there, between Turkey and Pakistan basically, all the stans.
And so what's going on there, I guess there's also I think other reporting too, from other angles about the attempt to kind of provoke jihadi extremism in those Central Asian countries to try to weaken Russia's influence over them, in the lead up to 9-11.
She says in the thing, in all these things we just mentioned, the footnotes there, that this cooperation went on up until 9-11, but is she implying, Brad, do you think that Osama bin Laden actually was working for the CIA, or that the 9-11 operation she thinks was a CIA operation, or she's saying that, well we were working with these guys and then they punched us in the face really hard and we've been killing them since then, or what is she saying?
She has said essentially, she has said, and this sort of began as you said in the Mike Molloy show, when she told me that the intimate, she said that certain forces, and she didn't identify the CIA, she said certain forces in the U.S. had very intimate relations with Osama bin Laden and Mujahideen.
She said they did not, they didn't call them al-Qaeda at all, around at least where she worked in the FBI, up until September 11th, but that they had very close relations with Mujahideen, with Osama bin Laden, up until 9-11.
A little history here, thousands, tens of thousands of people fought against the Russians, and Mujahideen means a lot of things.
Mujahideen was the Saudi and Egyptian friends of Osama and Zawahiri, the former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, they never met, I guess the credible estimates are somewhere between 150 and 300 members of al-Qaeda as it existed at the time of September 11th.
So Mujahideen does not necessarily mean Osama, but she does bring up the last name bin Laden, and she says bin Laden is plural, but she doesn't say Osama, and we all know there's a lot of bin Ladens, but she is talking about holy warriors here, so people, you know, what are we talking about?
She seems to be talking about bin Ladens, she says bin Ladens plural, that that was the discussion with the bin Laden family, she talks about planes filled with bin Ladens going out, I don't know if it was NATO planes or CIA planes, whatever it was, going out with bin Ladens on them and drugs coming back on them.
Well, that sounds about right.
Yeah, well listen, it's an open secret that the U.S. was obviously supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan for years, as you said, to keep the Russians out.
We don't talk a lot about that, but the notion that we suddenly stopped supporting them after the Russians left, I mean, we were friends with the Taliban, we were ready to allow the Taliban, remember, to stay in power right up until the day that we attacked in Afghanistan.
We said, hey, if you give us Osama bin Laden, you guys can stay in.
We weren't in there arguing against the Taliban, oh, you guys aren't allowing women to go to school, oh, you're doing these terrible things, they were our buddies.
So I think there's a lot of history being rewritten when all of a sudden, you know, oh, we've been against al-Qaeda for years, no, we weren't at all.
And so she talks about some of those points, she talks about other whistleblowers who have come forward who she helped to get to the 9-11 Commission to give their testimony about intelligence that supposedly came in.
The Iranian informant you warned in the spring about a plane attack.
They were very specific about flying planes into buildings as early as April of 2001.
You know, I don't know that she has some sort of a smoking gun concerning 9-11 that, you know, a lot of the 9-11 truth folks have suggested she has.
If she has, I haven't heard it, but she does underscore the very close relationship that it seems that either our government or, quote, forces in the U.S. had with these guys for many years, right up until 9-11.
The fact is, where the 9-11 truth folks are, I believe, absolutely right, is that the investigation that we have had has been covered up and that we deserve, for the greatest disaster, I don't know what we call it, attack, you know, on our homeland, that German word, in the history of our nation, we deserve to know what happened.
And in truth, we don't know what happened.
And even commissioners, I interviewed the senior counsel from the 9-11 commission who says that they were lied to, John Farmer, who says that the government and the military lied to the commission.
He's the senior counsel on the commission.
He says they lied to the commission, the public, and the media.
Now, I've since talked to Farmer, and he still kind of backs up the general story of the 9-11 commission.
Nonetheless, you've got a commissioner here saying, we weren't told the truth, for anybody else.
You know, covert operations where the CIA is close with the Mujahedin all the way back.
Who wants to have a congressional hearing about that?
Nobody in D.C. wants to.
Again, too big to fail, too big to bust.
You know, we're talking, and I forget your exact words, but this is how we began this interview, was that the corruption, it may be too late, the hold has already completely been taken, whether it's foreign spies, or whether it's Lockheed, or whether it's whoever, the D.C. imperial court is simply up for grabs for whoever can manage to get their hands on it.
I mean, again, Harmon is still sitting in the house like nobody even noticed.
The bad guys have had a very successful several decades, and that's what we're dealing with.
We can say it's too late, and it may be, but frankly, as long as there are people who have a voice in the media like you, Scott, and like me, I think we're going to keep digging for the truth and try to raise hell and make noise, and I don't give a damn what the corporate media says.
I don't care what the PAC journalists say.
I don't care what the PAC bloggers say, and a lot of, you know, my peeps in the progressive blogosphere, you know, they'd rather talk about the latest Rush Limbaugh scandal or, you know, whatever nonsense.
You know, I'm going to keep reporting what I think matters.
I think you're going to do that.
I used to say, you know, we got your news agenda right here, and that's what I'm going to follow, and by the way, I want to thank you because you have been following that same news agenda, your own, the things that you think are important for many years.
That's why you've been on the Sabell Edmonds story, and I'll stay on it if you will.
Hey, you got a deal, pal.
Thank you, brother.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Brad Friedman.
You can find his great blog at, fittingly, bradblog.com.
Thanks again, man.
My pleasure, brother.