01/21/08 – Luke Ryland – The Scott Horton Show

You guys have seen, hopefully, we've been running them on antiwar.com and running Brad Blog's articles about them as well.
I've been trying to promote this story for years and years now.
So finally, looks like it's breaking through.
The Sunday Times in London has run two major pieces yesterday and two weeks ago about the case of Sabel Edmonds, the FBI contractor, translator turned whistleblower, who's, according to the ACLU, the most gagged witness in the history of the United States of America.
She's been forbidden by what the government calls the State Secrets Privilege, as though this was England or something, from telling us what it is that she knows, or at least thinks that she knows.
And, well, the reason it's really interesting is because the kind of stuff that she was overhearing and the kind of stuff that she's apparently trying to blow the whistle about is, well, treason on the highest order, it seems like, from people in the State Department and the Defense Department in this country.
And there's a man named Luke Ryland, who lives in Tasmania, where it's right now 4.20 in the morning, who is very kindly up late to talk with us today.
He is really the world's expert on the Sabel Edmonds case.
And I'm really glad to have you back on the show, Luke.
How are you doing?
G'day, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
It's really good to have you here, and this is a hell of a thing, and I've got to give you a lot of credit.
I think, you know, probably you're the leading expert on Earth, keeping track of this story basically every day for us and all its new developments.
So I'm glad I have you here to help explain.
The websites are letsabeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com and lukery.blogspot.com.
So I guess my first question is this.
A couple of months ago, Sabel Edmonds said, alright, that's it, I'm willing to go to prison.
Somebody in America, put me on TV, I'll tell you everything I know, and if they want to put me in prison, fine, I'm ready to spill my whole guts.
And nobody answered her.
And now we see these articles coming out in the London Times.
So did she go ahead and spill her entire guts to the London Times, or is this her continuing to just tell the kinds of things that she's been able to get away with telling in the past, and then the Times is further developing the story from there?
Yeah, it's more the latter, Scott.
As you say, in October, Sabel put out that offer that she'd spill the beans on the US broadcast network if anyone would have her on.
Of course, she didn't hear from anyone in the US, but she did hear from media outlets from around the world.
The Sunday Times in London was working on this story and contacted her just about the nuclear black market side of the story.
And as you say, they ran that piece two weeks ago, which was a blockbuster, outlining the efforts of this criminal Turkish and Israeli criminal network to penetrate all the agencies of the United States to steal their nuclear secrets and sell them off to the highest bidder.
Since that article, a number of other people have come forward, and there have been a number of other developments that have enabled the Sunday Times to move the story forward again.
And that's the story that we saw here on the weekend.
The Times got an anonymous letter sent recently, I believe it was sort of a month ago or so, that the Times got their hands on.
And that letter detailed some of the allegations in Sabel's case, but the key thing here is that it referred to a specific case file that the FBI had on Turkish counterintelligence dating back to 1996.
And with that anonymous letter, the Times and a number of other organizations put in a freedom of information request with the FBI, asking for information about this particular case file.
Now the FBI replied that there was no such case file.
So that was sort of the FBI's big mistake, because when they denied that that case file existed, another leaker from the FBI came out with a document, an official FBI document, stamped by the FBI, and with an FBI official's signature on it that refers specifically to this case file.
So now we know that the case exists that Sabel's been trying to tell the story about for five years, and we know that the FBI is now lying about it to cover it up.
So that's the latest development.
Okay, so now this is the answer to the question, why the Sunday Times then, right?
Is it because they're the ones who happened to get their hands on the letter?
They got it through another organization actually called the Liberty Coalition, which is an American organization.
There's no indication of where that came from.
That letter hasn't been published yet.
I believe it will be.
Again, that's an anonymous letter, so it didn't really prove anything.
But what it did do is enable the Liberty Coalition and the Sunday Times to put in this information request with the FBI.
And then they lied about it.
So that sort of blown the case right open.
Because that then subsequently brought this extra letter, an official FBI letter, which disproves the FBI's claims that the file doesn't exist.
Now the FBI is either lying that the file doesn't exist, or they've gone and destroyed all the evidence.
That's at least a five-year counterintelligence program implicating Turkish interests, Israeli interests, and also a number of high-level U.S. officials in the State Department and the Pentagon at least.
They're lying that the case file doesn't exist, or they've destroyed all that evidence, including all the audio tapes and all the documents that Sabel translated, and all that sort of thing.
So hopefully with this new revelation, a number of other people who are familiar with the case will come forward.
Obviously somebody's leaking to the Sunday Times.
And Daniel Ellsberg, who I think has been on your show a couple of times, he wrote a fantastic op-ed just today that is being featured over at AntiWar.com, asking for more people to come forward like Dan Ellsberg and Sabel have done in the past.
Yeah, it's interesting, in that op-ed he actually asks, you know, if I was coming forward with the Pentagon Papers today, would the Post and the Times even publish them?
Right, and the answer's pretty self-evident, I think.
The answer's no, because they haven't touched this story.
Mind you, even though we've just had these breaking developments over the last two weeks or whatever, Sabel's story has been out there since October 2002 at least, when it was featured in a 60-minute segment.
So the media in the US have been aware of this story, and I believe that a number of FBI officials have tried to take the story to the Post and the New York Times and whichever other organizations in the past to try and get this story printed.
I believe they have even produced documents, I'm not sure about that.
So the US mainstream media has been sitting on it for the best part of five years.
Yeah.
Hey, let me ask you this.
There's a blogger that I respect very much, who's a very well-connected guy too, I think, who wrote on his blog that the reason that he doesn't delve into the Sabel Edmonds case much is because he thinks that she must have been far too compartmentalized to really have found out all the things that she found out, and that what she says about, for example, Mark Grossman in the State Department, Richard Perl and Douglas Fyfe in the Pentagon, that this must have been taken out of context.
That she must have misunderstood, been compartmentalized into one part of a sting operation, but doesn't know the whole story, or something along those lines, because the whole story, as he can tell, she's saying, doesn't seem to make sense to him.
So how do you answer that?
Right.
You're talking about Steve Clemons at the Washington Note, which I agree is a good blog, and Steve is very well-connected.
And he's a very reasonable guy too.
Reasonable guy, yeah, as far as I can tell.
It's interesting that this story has just been floated now.
Six years later, or five years later, people are now just starting to float this story.
And I wrote about this today on my blog.
It seems that the powers that be at the State Department, let's say, and probably the Pentagon, have now decided to put out this story that, oh, Sabelle was just working on a small compartmentalized case, and she doesn't know what she's talking about.
After five years, this is the best they can come up with.
And the easiest way to debunk that, for example, is when Sabelle went to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June and July of 2002 with her claims, the first thing that Senators Grassley and Pat Leahy did was to call in the appropriate officials at the FBI and the Pentagon and ask whether this was the case, and ask whether it was some covert operation and whether there were any double agents in operation here.
And they got the definitive answer, no, there's no covert action here, no double agents.
Go ahead and proceed with the hearings.
So, I mean, that just takes that argument, pulls the rug out from under that argument.
Well, I'd agree with that, but in fairness to Steve, I don't think he was saying that, you know, he's been contacted by people who told him that.
He was just saying that was what it seemed to him.
Well, it coincides with a number of other reporters saying to Sabelle in the recent past, you know, we've been told that this is a secret operation, so we're not going to write about it.
So it's consistent with that broader story that she's hearing.
But now, what you're telling me is, when she went and talked to Senator Chuck Grassley, that he, as part of his duties as a senator, when he's hearing this stuff, is he had to make sure, by checking with the FBI, the CIA, State Department, Defense Department, whoever, to make sure that this wasn't a covert operation before he, you know, really delved into it in the first place.
Precisely.
And also, you pointed out, I think, on your blog, that the idea that the State Department and Defense Department would be this deeply involved in an FBI undercover operation or something like that is just, it's too much.
Right.
Well, I don't know everything about the intelligence community, but I would imagine that it would be the CIA who would be running that sort of operation.
However, it's the State Department, particularly, who is stamping on all these investigations.
Now, tell me about this guy, Mark Grossman.
Because when you say to me, Richard Perle and Douglas Fyfe, I know that they're lobbyists for Turkey, I know that they're allied very closely with the Likud party in Israel, I know that they have an agenda for America that would certainly include them doing all kinds of criminal things.
I wouldn't doubt it for a minute.
But this guy, Mark Grossman, if I understand right, is sort of just a career government bureaucrat type, rather than an ideological neoconservative.
Is that right?
That's correct.
He was a career diplomat for, I think, five different presidents.
He started off in Pakistan in his early days, and then he was the ambassador in Turkey, 1994-1997.
It was his official time there as ambassador.
I think he did a previous stint there as a lower-level employee.
Would that have been the same time that Douglas Fyfe was running International Advisors, Inc. and lobbying for Turkey?
Bingo.
Exactly right.
I see.
So there's an overlap there.
In fact, when Mark Grossman was ambassador there, one of his subordinates was investigated for taking bribes from various people.
That guy's name is Major Douglas Dickerson, who, back in 2001, tried to recruit Sabel into this criminal network, he and his wife.
His wife was a translator-slash-spy at the FBI translation unit in Washington, D.C., with Sabel.
So Mark Grossman's fingers are sort of across this, and have been for a long time.
He was then promoted after Turkey.
I think he went to NATO for a stint.
Then he was promoted to the number three guy at the State Department, below Colin Powell and Richard Armitage.
So he kept getting promoted, and that's how he had all that power to shut down all these investigations.
Of course, the investigations were into him, so it was kind of handy for him to be able to do that.
Yeah.
Well, they'll police themselves, I guess.
Here's another thing that's very interesting about this story, Luke, is that to the world, we believe that the CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, was outed by Robert Novak when he outed Valerie Plame, the wife of the guy that debunked the Niger uranium rumors that they had been selling yellow cake to Saddam Hussein.
When they outed her, they outed her front company at CIA, Brewster Jennings.
But what you're reporting here is that Sabel Edmonds overheard Mark Grossman outing Brewster Jennings, long in advance of Valerie Plame's outing by Robert Novak and Scooter Libby and the guys.
That's right.
That was in the summer of 2001, I believe, which was two years, as you say, prior to Valerie Plame being outed.
So Brewster Jennings was the CIA operation that was doing a number of things, one of which was running a counterintelligence operation against Turkey, a counterproliferation exercise against Turkey.
And one of the key institutions that was being used as a front in the United States was an organization called the American Turkish Council.
Now, Sabel's operation, the operation that she was working on, was also a counterintelligence operation, this time for the FBI, but they were also investigating the American Turkish Council.
A lot of activity was going on between the Turkish embassy and the American Turkish Council.
So in the summer of 2001, Mark Grossman apparently told his associates there, probably Turkish military and diplomatic personnel, to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they are a CIA front organization.
In fact, if you go back and look at Valerie Plame's case, she was told, she had to deny all of her history, and she's starting, I think, in her book, she could only talk about from, I think, the 1st of January 2002.
So you can see from that that the outing of Brewster Jennings predates that.
Brewster Jennings had been shut down immediately when Mark Grossman blew the cover.
And now, isn't Mark Grossman the same guy who gave the name Plame to Scooter Libby before he started distributing it around?
That's a funny coincidence, isn't it?
So I do have that right, then?
You have that right.
Grossman ordered up a memo, and that memo included Plame's name.
So then that went to Scooter Libby and everywhere else.
I see.
But he's right in the thick of it.
Yeah, everybody wants to focus on Dick Armitage and Karl Rove, but as Justin Raimondo wrote, who leaked to the leakers?
How did they get the story?
It was from Libby and the neocons.
Right.
And Chris DeLiso, who writes for anti-war.com, and has also been a guest on your show a number of times, he's done some fantastic work into Sobel's case.
He wrote an article called, I think, The Lesser Neocons of the Plame Affair.
And he had Grossman in there as well, so he's done a good job.
So Grossman's fingers have been over this for a long time.
Now, one of the key things in the article in The Times two weeks ago, about the nuclear black market, Grossman was facilitating, he was working for this criminal network, and he was facilitating security clearances and probably visas and whatnot to get moles from the criminal network placed into the U.S. nuclear lab, so that they could then go and steal all this information.
So, you know, he's been involved with some serious crimes.
Well, now, see, you know, I was going to ask you who's afraid of AQ Khan, because, I mean, on one hand, you know, you're talking about theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos, or what have you, you know, that's important stuff.
But then again, it always seemed like all AQ Khan ever gave anybody, I mean, you know, whatever, Pakistan having stuff they shouldn't have is one thing, but the AQ Khan underground criminal network, you know, selling nuclear technology to rogue states and all that kind of stuff, it was all a bunch of first generation crap, basically.
I mean, when Libya made their deal that they'd been trying to make for years, but after the war, Bush finally let Qaddafi suck up to the West, and they opened up their warehouse, and they just had a bunch of stuff in crates.
They hadn't even tried to put it together, because their scientists took one look at it, and said, yeah, let's not even bother.
This is a bunch of garbage, and the Iranians, of course, all they ever got from the Pakistanis, first generation centrifuges.
The North Koreans, they bought stuff from AQ Khan, but all they ever did to make their nuclear bombs was use plutonium harvested from their Russian nuclear reactors.
They didn't even bother trying to enrich uranium with the stuff he gave.
So it sort of seemed to me like the AQ Khan thing was a bunch of hoorah about nothing.
Well, that's true, but there's also a dozen countries that we don't know about, but they haven't yet been named.
Saudi Arabia is probably one of them.
Turkey is probably another that was buying stuff off the Khan network.
And, of course, the Pakistan nuclear program is being restocked as we speak.
I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago.
There was one company in New Jersey called Giza Technologies.
Giza Technologies, they're shipping out nuclear hardware all the time.
Well, let me put it this way.
They're shipping out hardware, weapons technology.
So that goes from Giza, and there are other American companies that are involved.
They send stuff to, for example, South Africa or Dubai or Turkey, and then it gets trans-shipped from those, I guess the trade-free zones or whatever they call them, to the end customer.
So that's still happening.
How do you know that that's still happening, that company, Giza?
I mean, if Sabel Edmonds overheard stuff and pointed you toward that evidence, that's one thing.
How do you know that they're still involved in this stuff?
Well, for starters, they haven't been shut down.
There was an article in 2004 by a guy called Josh Meyer in the L.A.
Times that detailed some of the mechanics here.
And, you know, one of the big mysteries is why they haven't been shut down.
One of the investigative journalists, a guy called Joe Trento, who's been doing a lot of work on this story, says he thinks that it's a CIA front organization.
So he's got that, and there are a couple of other companies in Turkey, for example, that the CIA and the FBI have been watching all this time, that are allowed to continue operating despite their acknowledged known participation in this network.
So, you know, it gets pretty dark, because as soon as the CIA are allowing them to do that, then there's a whole lot of other illegal activity that can go on as soon as these organizations are given a carte blanche to do whatever they want.
Well, see, this is confusing, because didn't, like, if we go back to the 1980s and stuff, didn't AQ Khan, didn't the CIA allow him to go ahead and steal a bunch of stuff from the European companies before he went back to Pakistan in the first place?
I mean, I have to wonder, you know, when you talk about Pakistani intelligence and all this stuff, Brewster Jennings and this and that, you know, I wonder to what degree the Americans really are running covert operations and helping these people, wittingly or unwittingly, rather than actually working to thwart them.
Well, yes, I have been watching Khan since 1976, when he first stole the blueprints from Urenko in Holland.
Oh, what's that, back in 76?
I'm sorry, I thought it was in the 80s, but I'm sorry, go ahead.
Well, that was when he first stole them, yeah.
And you're right, the CIA has been watching it ever since.
Now, the problem is, you know, what have they got out of it?
They've been watching it for 30 years, and in that time, Pakistan's got the bomb, Iran's about to get the bomb, it appears, or at least they're a long way down towards having that technology.
And, you know, the CIA haven't, even if they've been watching it as some sort of covert operation, they haven't had any successes, and they've been allowing it to happen for all this time.
Back in the late 80s, a guy called Richard Barlow was, you know, the CIA's top expert on Pakistan's nuclear program, and he was running around arresting people in the US, you know, people who were buying stuff for Pakistan's ISI.
Well, he was having the FBI arrest them, or what?
He got the approval of all of his superiors, but they kind of missed a couple of arrests, and they worked out why.
As soon as they told the State Department that they were about to make an arrest, the State Department would just go and tip off the Pakistani guys, and everyone would skedaddle.
So they worked out that the only way they could make these arrests and try and put a stop to the program was not to tell the State Department.
Brian Hirsch wrote a terrific article on this back in 1993, so it's been going on for that long.
Now, you're telling me this CIA guy was, what, working with the FBI in having these people arrested?
He was engineering them.
I don't know the exact mechanics, but it was happening in the United States.
Okay, I just wanted to clarify, because, you know, supposedly at least the CIA doesn't have the power to go around arresting people in America, maybe kidnapping people, but not arresting them.
Right.
Well, there was an intergovernmental group, a high-level, top-secret intergovernmental group that was carrying this out.
So I presume the FBI were involved.
I don't specifically know.
All right, now let's focus on the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, and his little smithers, Douglas Fyfe.
Well, tell me everything you know.
What do they have to do with the Sabel Edmonds case?
Well, as we mentioned earlier, they had a lobbying company, a secretive lobbying company that was on the Turkish project back in the late 80s called International Advisors, Inc.
You know, obviously both of those guys are known to be friends of Israel, so it's somewhat surprising to hear that those and a lot of other neocons are really keen on Turkey.
By all accounts, there was some heat turned up on International Advisors, Inc., their company, so they shut that down.
But one of their recommendations was it appears to establish this American-Turkish council.
It's basically Turkey's version of AIPAC.
So they established, with a couple of other organizations, with the help of AIPAC and JINSA and a couple of other Jewish organizations, they established this ATC, and it has turned into this front for the criminal operation that Sabel's talking about.
Well, and it's the military-industrial complex as well, right?
It's a joint venture between primarily the American military-industrial complex and what we call the Turkish deep state, the military and intelligence officials from Turkey who are running a whole bunch of operations.
So in the Times article two weeks ago, Sabel talks about, or the article talks about how the operation works, which is the Turkish guys or the criminal network would call someone in the Pentagon and ask for, you know, they'd say, oh, we want this particular piece of information or this particular technology.
Who do we speak to?
And Pearl and Feith apparently had a cheat list, but they listed all of their officials, you know, in the Pentagon and the State Department, listed what access to technology and secrets they had, and then they had a third column in the list, what were their weaknesses, what are their sexual weaknesses, what are their financial weaknesses.
So Pearl would say, oh, you go and talk to, for example, Larry Franklin.
His weakness is that he's broke or that he, you know, likes to date boys or whatever, and so the Turkish and Israeli guys would then approach Franklin, set him up presumably in some sort of sting relevant to whatever his particular weakness was, and then hook him that way.
So apparently Pearl and Feith are running these operations, and that has enabled the Turkish and Israeli criminal network to penetrate, you know, every agency in the United States.
So now it's interesting, like, this deep state you talk about in terms of Turkey, I guess that means what, the real power behind the throne there?
Exactly.
Exactly, which includes, at least in the recent past, a lot of the high-level government officials, including, you know, one of the previous prime ministers, and the military and also a whole bunch of gangster mafia types that run, for example, the heroin business pretty much around the world.
Afghanistan now produces something like 90% of the heroin around the world, but most of it, or until recently at least, was processed through Turkey.
So they would import it from Afghanistan to Turkey with the help of the military, process it there and then distribute it into Europe, the UK and the US.
So that's the sort of, that's the deep state.
People who were doing that, you know, they would get diplomatic passports and they'd go and silence any opposition, etc.
Yeah, well, and it sounds like it's not just in Turkey, it sounds like we have a deep state here and a deep state in Pakistan and that this is all just one big deep state, these guys.
That's true.
That's true, there's a specific term, deep state, referring to Turkey, but as you can see, the tentacles go, perhaps emanating from Turkey into all of the embassies around the world, and we can see from Sabal's case, it goes into the embassies and then into the defense departments and the state departments so that they can do whatever they want.
Now, when you see Pearl and Fyfe, you know, helping this crime ring compromise people and bring in new recruits and get access to classified information and all this kind of stuff, you see them as acting as agents of a foreign power or they're just members of a criminal syndicate making money?
That's a good question.
A little bit of both, I guess.
A little bit of both.
Sabal's case, people hear Turkey and Israel and they think, oh, okay, it's state-based espionage, but Sabal goes out of the way to make note that it's not as simple as that.
So there's certainly a criminal network there, and the people who they're working with aren't working particularly or necessarily for the states of Israel and Turkey.
Yeah, I guess at the end of the day, everybody's an individual.
They're working for themselves.
Exactly.
There's a film about the nuclear black market element of Sabal's case called Kill the Messenger.
You've been asking me to get you a copy for I don't know how long.
Phil Giraldi, who I think is a friend of your show, is in that movie, and he says that if you ask anyone in the intelligence community about Richard Perle, he says that the standard answer is that he's an agent of Israel.
So that might add to your understanding as well.
Well, now, see, I'd really like to see that movie as an agent of influence to some degree, but it's always seemed like the neocons actually are usually, in terms of policy, they're kind of to the right and to the crazier side than the right wing in Israel and have their own interests, and I see him sort of as a de facto representative of Israel's interests just because he seems to identify their interests with America so much and that sort of thing.
Boy, I sure would like to get a copy of that movie, Luke.
Right.
If I can clarify something, I think I said that Phil Giraldi said that Perle was an agent of Israel.
You put it better, I think, and that was Giraldi's exact words, that he was an agent of influence for Israel.
Oh, I see.
I'm not sure if there's a difference, but I don't want to get Mr. Giraldi in trouble for misquoting him.
Right, and I don't know exactly what the difference is either.
It's a defense contractor business, and that's what we see with Turkey.
Turkey has received $10 billion worth of equipment from the U.S. in the last few years.
Perle and Pfeiffer are both closely connected to defense companies in Israel, and so you've got this bizarre triangle with Turkey, Israel, and the U.S., and the military contractors in each of those places.
And, you know, people making money off getting a commission offered, you know, whichever way the traffic goes.
So it's a good setup for them.
Yeah, I guess basically what you have is these states create these black markets.
I mean, it's illegal to trade in nuclear secrets and heroin and so forth, but then it's the people who run them who end up making all the money, running the crime ring themselves.
That's right, and it also distorts the foreign policy of each of those countries quite significantly, because let's say it was appropriate, for example, for Turkey to get $5 billion worth of military hardware, for example.
When you have these people in high positions profiting from the flow of funds and weapons in that direction, then all of a sudden, you know, that number doubles to, say, $10 billion.
And the same thing can very probably be said with Israel.
Now let me get you back to the FBI investigation here.
I guess it's now confirmed for a fact, because it was in the Sunday Times, that this investigation does in fact go back to 1996, that Sabel Edmonds basically just came in on the tail end of something that the FBI had been working on for a long time, right?
That's right.
Sabel started at the FBI in 2001, but three-quarters of her work was going back through this pre-existing counterintelligence operation.
There was the Turkish counterintelligence operation, which was primarily focused on watching the Turkish embassy and the consulate, and the communications traffic between there and the American-Turkish Council, and some other groups.
And there was a parallel investigation that was running between the Israeli embassy and AIPAC, and associated groups.
And there was a lot of voice traffic between, and that includes the Pakistanis as well.
And there was a lot of communications traffic between those organizations as well, as we saw in the recent Times article.
When the Pakistani General Amoud was in the U.S., he'd be on the phone to the Turks all the time in the embassy.
Well, and you talk about, or the Times article talks about a U.K. angle on the investigation.
Somebody in their custom service or something, Atif Amin, who's he?
That's right.
He was a customs official, and he was investigating the AQ Khan network in, I think, Dubai, back in 2000 or 2001.
And he got fairly deep into that investigation, and as happened in Sabel's case, the equivalent of the State Department, called the Foreign Office, I believe, stepped in and stomped on his investigation.
That was back in, as I say, 2000 or 2001.
There was a new book out a couple of months ago by Joe Trento, who I mentioned earlier, detailing this case of Atif Amin.
And apparently Amin wasn't the source for the book.
The book was just about him.
But the U.K. government has stamped on Amin now, and in Sabel's case they've used the state secret's privilege to shut her up.
In the U.K. they actually have an official act called the Official Secrets Act, and there are reports they're trying to use the Official Secrets Act to shut him down.
So the similarities between the two cases are quite strong.
And when all this is happening in the U.K. and in the United States, there's a giant paper trail being created at the Department of Justice, at Scotland Yard, etc., and that's what apparently the Times has decided to try to get to the bottom of and get some of these documents.
When the FBI lied and said, oh, I'm sorry, that document doesn't exist or never has existed, what exactly was that document?
I mean, was this the whole FBI file they were suing for, or this was just one page of information that would have been a clue to lead to others, or what?
There was a letter that the Times got that had the case file number on it, and the Times and the Liberty Coalition asked the FBI, via a Freedom of Information Act request, about that case file.
And the FBI said that it doesn't exist, which is a lie, and they're not allowed to lie.
They can hang it up in court or refuse to answer it or whatever, but they're not allowed to lie.
So either they're lying about the case, they're lying about the fact that it doesn't exist, or they've destroyed all of that evidence, you know, five or six years of counterintelligence evidence, presumably to protect the US officials.
Now, back in, I mentioned earlier, in June and July 2002, Sobel had these hearings with Senators Grassley and Leahy.
They were both appalled at the situation, and they specifically wrote to John Ashcroft, who was the then Attorney General, and also the Inspector General, Glenn Fine.
So the Senators specifically wrote and said, Please do not destroy any evidence in this case.
Now, as we know, destruction of evidence is a pretty serious crime.
So for those guys, way back in the early days, to recognize the possibility of that is a pretty significant tell in my book.
So they warned Ashcroft not to destroy evidence, and it appears maybe now that that evidence has been destroyed.
We're going to put out an article in the next few days, referring back to those letters from Senator Leahy and Grassley, and try and get some action from them on this front.
Well, now, one thing that came out a couple of years ago was that the FBI themselves have been using Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants for this crime ring, treating them as agents of a foreign power, and also making criminal prosecutions based on the evidence that they obtained off-limits, because this is an entirely separate standard of evidence for basically an intelligence investigation, rather than going to a regular judge and getting a regular warrant.
So, if...
Oh, and see, I think part of it, too, was it was the criminal division that was using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants.
So basically the FBI got themselves in trouble.
There's another reason they want to cover this up, is just to protect themselves from breaking the law in their investigation of these lawbreakers.
This is why you're the best interviewer on the planet, Scott.
You're absolutely right.
You might remember, maybe 18 months ago, you had Sobel and James Bamford did an interview with those two people, and that was when Sobel got her hands on another report, I think it was via Freedom of Information, again.
Immediately prior to her filing her case, it was back in, I think it was April 2002, one of the special agents, a guy called Gilbert Graham, who was leading on some of these counterintelligence programs against Turkey.
So, in other words, the exact same programs that Sobel was working on.
In fact, he was the boss of Sobel's.
He filed a complaint with whoever the appropriate bodies are, including, again, the Senate Judiciary Committee, stating that the FBI was spying, as you say, using these visa warrants to spy on high-level US officials and keeping...
So, basically, they had a dodgy excuse to get the visa warrant, and then they'd spy on the US officials and keep all of that information.
It's important.
With the FISA laws, they have what they call minimisation, and if they accidentally pick up stuff relating to American people when they're supposed to be focusing on foreign intelligence, then they're supposed to get rid of all of the stuff related to the American people.
Now, Gilbert Graham's complaint specifically says that they were intentionally spying on these American officials and keeping all of this information, and a lot of it was not, quote, you know, intelligence-related activity.
So, we come back to this other Times article from two weeks ago, and Sobel says, you know, these people had a...
Pearl and Pfeiffer and these guys had a list of all of the sexual and financial weaknesses of the people with the power and access to help the network, and it appears very much that the stuff that Gilbert Graham was talking about and what was in the Times two weeks ago is the same thing.
In other words, the people at the Pentagon and wherever were spying on US officials, particularly, specifically, so that they could find out their weaknesses and have, you know, proof so that they could then blackmail them into giving, you know, into...so that they could recruit them into the network.
It's another data point that again proves Sobel's case.
Well, there's only a one-word answer for all this.
Congress.
This is the job of the Congress.
Where the hell are they?
Well, you're right, and it might very well be that, you know, a lot of congressional people are being blackmailed as well.
It's like J. Edgar Hoover kind of thing, right?
Got dirt on everyone.
And she's been trying to get Henry Waxman to hold hearings.
He was all...he's read the unclassified...sorry, the classified version of the inspector general's report into Sobel's case, and he was horrified at what was in there.
Now, he promised to hold hearings as soon as the Dems got into power, the Democrats got into power in Congress, and then, you know, all of a sudden he just shut up and refuses to answer any calls.
There are a number of other congressmen that we know, for example, who are implicated in Sobel's case.
A couple of weeks ago, Sobel put a...what she calls a state secret privilege gallery up on her website, which is a photo gallery of 18 people.
It doesn't have any names or any description.
She's just posting photographs.
She's not allowed to talk.
The obvious implication is that those people are guilty people in her case, and there are six congressmen on that list.
All right, now, tell me quick, because I've got to go.
I've got news and I've got another interview coming up.
What'd I miss?
What's important for people to know other than the fact that they need to read For Sale West's deadly nuclear secrets and FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft in The Times, UK?
That's pretty good.
People can always go to my website, letsobeledmundspeak.blogspot.com, and get the latest there.
But the important thing now from this article on the weekend is that we have official confirmation of all of the fact that the things that Sobel talked about were there and they're being covered up by the U.S. government.
All right, thanks very much.
Luke Ryland, everybody, from Tasmania.
It's 4 in the morning over there.
Well, 5 in the morning now.
Thanks very much for staying up late to talk with us, Luke.
Thanks, Scott.
Great job.