Gail Sheehy
Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.
Sun Jan 25 15:20:26 2004
64.140.158.84

January 25, 2004|11:40 AM
9/11 Witness Says She Exposed Infiltration, Tells Kean Committee She
Lost Bureau Position; Sen. Grassley Sees `Potential Espionage Breach'

Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.
by Gail Sheehy - gsheehy@observer.com
http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage1.asp

Sibel Edmonds says she was shocked at the lack of security in the
F.B.I.'s counterintelligence squad when she went to work there
shortly after Sept. 11. But when she spoke up, she was canned. Gail
Sheehy tells her story.


Last Friday, the four women from New Jersey who have faced down the
F.B.I. on its failures in preventing the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, that claimed their husbands' lives were personally invited
to the bureau's Hoover Building offices in Washington, D.C., for a
second visit. Their host was none other than F.B.I. director Robert
Mueller.

Cordial and fully engaged, Mr. Mueller introduced the newly appointed
head of the Bureau's Penttbom investigation (Pent for Pentagon, Pen
for Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the four planes
that the government was forewarned could be used as weapons—even
bombs—but ignored).

The new Penttbom team leader, Joan-Marie Turchiano, politely
suggested the widows present their questions.

"O.K." said Kristin Breitweiser, the group's hammerhead, "have you
solved the crime yet?"

The Penttbom leader said they had been investigating the 19 hijackers
and had run down every connection. Ms. Breitweiser recalls her next
words indelibly: "As far as our investigations are concerned, we can
say the hijackers had no contacts in the United States."

But the scathing 800-page report on intelligence failures produced by
a joint congressional investigation had already revealed that the
F.B.I. had open investigations on four of the 14 individuals who
allegedly had some kind of contact with the hijackers while they were
in the U.S.

The Four Moms from New Jersey, or "the girls" as they refer to
themselves, waste little time on niceties these days. They were the
firecrackers behind the creation of the 9/11 commission, which after
a year of meager progress, is finally ready to call key
administration officials to testify in public hearings on some of the
most important questions we have before us as a nation.

But White House delays and circumventions have hampered the effort,
and the four moms see the commission flagging in its use of subpoena
power to call in key Clinton and Bush administration officials for
their testimony. Personal connections between commission members—like
executive director Philip Zelikow and national security advisor
Condoleezza Rice—undermine the commission's purported independence.
As the commission's work draws close to its May dissolution, it
appears the main question they were tasked to answer will remain
unanswered: Did our guardians of national security have enough
information to prevent 9/11? Why did all of our officials who swore
an oath of office to lead, protect, and serve, fail to do so on the
morning of 9/11?

Last Monday Ms. Breitweiser, along with three other members of the
Family Steering Committee, met with commissioner John Lehman about
the need for an extension of the Commission's May deadline-after
House Speaker Dennis Hastert had already declared such an extension
dead in the water. Exiting the meeting, the family members were
hopeful that he would join the majority of commissioners—all five
Democrats, chairman Thomas Kean and one other Republican, Slade
Gorton—in supporting a postponement. More recently, as Democratic
presidential candidates burnish their credentials in intelligence and
national security issues against Bush's 2004 campaign, the extension
of that deadline is becoming a heated issue.

While fighting a mostly losing battle for a transparent
investigation, the Moms are winning on another score: Whistleblowers
from agencies culpable in the failures of 9/11—long silent—are being
attracted to their mission.


Sibel Edmonds read an article published in these pages last August
about the 9/11 widows' bold confrontation with Director Mr. Mueller
in a private meeting last summer, and recognized kindred spirits.

"This was the first time I'd heard anybody ask such direct questions
to Mr. Mueller," said Ms. Edmonds, a Turkish-American woman who
answered the desperate call of the F.B.I. in September, 2001 for
translators of Middle Eastern languages. Hired as contract employee a
week after 9/11, without a personal interview, Ms. Edmonds was given
top-secret security clearance to translate wiretaps ordered by field
offices in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities by agents who were
working around the clock to pick up the trail of Al Qaeda terrorists
and their supporters in the U.S. and abroad. Working in the F.B.I.'s
Washington field office, she listened to hundreds of hours of
intercepts and translated reams of e-mails and documents that flooded
into the bureau. In a series of intimate interviews, she told her
story to this writer.

When she arrived, her enormous respect for the F.B.I. was initially
confirmed.

"The field agents are wonderful, but they were terribly exasperated
with the D.C. office," she said.

While the news was full of reports of heaps of untranslated material
languishing inside the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism unit, Ms. Edmonds
has claimed that translators were told to let them pile up. She said
she remembers a supervisor's instructions "to just say no to those
field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations" so that the
department could use the pileup as evidence to demand more money from
the Senate. Another colleague she recalls saying bitterly, "This is
our time to show those assholes we are in charge."

F.B.I. translators are the front line for information gathered by
foreign-language wiretaps, tips, documents, e-mails, and other
intercepted threats to security. Based on what they translate and the
dots they connect, F.B.I. field agents act against targets of
investigation-or fail to act-in a timely manner. As an agent later
told the Judiciary Committee which oversees the F.B.I., "When you
hear a suspect say `The flower will bloom next week,' you can't wait
two weeks to get it translated."

During her six months of work for the Bureau, Ms. Edmonds said she
grew increasingly horrified by the lack of internal security she saw
inside the very agency tasked with protecting our national security.

In papers filed with the F.B.I.'s internal investigative office, the
Department of Justice, the Senate Judiciary Committee, and most
recently with the 9/11 Commission, she has reported serious ongoing
failures in the language division of the F.B.I. Washington Field
Office. They include security lapses in hiring and monitoring of
translators, investigations that have been compromised by incorrect
or misleading translations sent to field agents; and thousands of
pages of translations falsely labeled "not pertinent" by Middle
Eastern linguists who were either not qualified in the target
language or English, or, worse, protecting targets of investigation.

Nothing happened. Undaunted, Ms. Edmonds took her concerns to upper
management. Soon afterward she was fired. The only cause given
was "for the convenience of the government." The F.B.I. has not
refuted any of Ms. Edmonds' allegations, yet they have accounted for
none of them.

On the morning Ms. Edmonds was terminated, she said, she was escorted
from the building by an agent she remembered saying: "We will be
watching you and listening to you. If you dare to consult an attorney
who is not approved by the F.B.I., or if you take this issue outside
the F.B.I. to the Senate, the next time I see you, it will be in
jail." Two other agents were present.

"I know about my constitutional rights, but do you know how many
translators would be intimidated?"

Shortly after her dismissal, F.B.I. agents turned up at the door of
the Ms. Edmonds' townhouse to seize her home computer. She was then
called in to be polygraphed—a test which, she found out later, she
passed. A few months after her dismissal, accompanied by her lawyer
on a sunny morning in May 2002, Ms. Edmonds took her story to the
Senate Judiciary Committee. As her high heels glanced off the marble
steps of Congress she sensed two men ascending right behind her.
Turning, she recognized the agent walk, the Ray-Bans, the outline of
a weapon, and the deadest giveaway of all—a cell phone pointed
straight at her, transmitting. "They weren't secretive about it, they
wanted me to know they're there," she said. After being shadowed in
plain sight many more times, she said with dark humor, "I call them
my escorts."

After her meeting, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican vice-chair
of the Judiciary Committee to whom Ms. Edmonds appealed, had his
investigators check her out. Then they, along with staffers for
Senator Patrick Leahy, called for a joint briefing in the summer of
2002. The F.B.I. sent a unit chief from the language division and an
internal security official.

In a lengthy, unclassified session that one participant describes as
bizarre, the windows fogged up as the session finished; it was that
tense, "None of the F.B.I. officials' answers washed, and they could
tell we didn't believe them." He chuckles remembering one of the
Congressional investigators saying, "You basically admitted almost
all that Sibel alleged, yet you say there's no problem here. What's
wrong with this picture?"

The Bureau briefers shrugged, put on their coats, and left. There was
no way the F.B.I. was going to admit to another spy scandal only
months after being scorched by the Webster Report on one of the most
dangerous double agents in F.B.I. history, Robert Hanssen.

"I think the F.B.I. is ignoring a very major internal security
breach," said Grassley, "and a potential espionage breach."

Unlike those whistleblowers whose cause is redress of personal
grievances, Ms. Edmonds impressed Grassley as passionately patriotic.

"The basic problem is, heads don't roll," Sen. Grassley said. "The
culture of the F.B.I. is to worry about their own public relations.
If you're going to change that culture, somebody's got to get fired."
He is not optimistic, however, that Congress will act
aggressively. "Nobody wants to take on the F.B.I."

The translator had filed a complaint with the Inspector General of
the Department of Justice on March 7, 2002. She was told then that an
investigation would be undertaken and she could expect a report by
the fall of 2002. Twenty-one months later, she is still waiting. She
also filed a First Amendment case against the Department of Justice
and the F.B.I. And a Freedom of Information case against the F.B.I.
for release of documents pertaining to her work for the Bureau, to
confirm her allegations. The F.B.I. refused her FOIA request. Their
stated reason was the pending investigation by Justice, which, her
sources in the Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after
the November election.

When Ms. Edmonds wouldn't go away or keep still, F.B.I. Director
Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to assert the State
Secrets Privilege in the case of Ms. Edmonds versus Department of
Justice. Mr. Ashcroft obliged.

The State Secrets Privilege is the neutron bomb of legal tactics. In
the rare cases where the government invokes it to withhold evidence
or to block discovery in the name of national security, it can
effectively terminate the case. According to a 1982 Appeals Court
ruling. "Once the court is satisfied that the information poses a
reasonable danger to secrets of state, even the most compelling
necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege ._"

In interviews conducted over recent weeks with a senior F.B.I. agent
who worked closely with Ms. Edmonds, former F.B.I. counterterrorism
agents, and with current and former members of Congress involved in
national security issues, a picture emerged of the dark undercurrents
that run beneath our best counterterrorism efforts, and the
punishments meted out to those who dare to expose it.

Does Ms. Edmonds pose a danger to secrets of state? Or do the secrets
buried in the nerve center of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism squad
pose a danger to Americans living under the politics of dread?


Edmonds was seen as a jewel when the F.B.I. found her only a week
after September 11, 2001. With reports of stacks of
untranslated "chatter" from Middle Eastern suspects and their
supporters, the embarrassed Bureau couldn't wait to hire this Turkish-
American graduate student who speaks four languages, not only
Turkish, Farsi (the Iranian language) and Azerbaijani, but perfect
American-English. The graduate student was carrying five courses in
preparation for her Master's degree and was in mourning for her
father's recent death. "But I felt like I was being called to duty."

Inside the F.B.I.'s Washington field office roughly 200 translators
sit hip to hip in one large room that is a linguistic cacophony of
chatter from 185 different countries. The few Arabic translators may
be flanked by a Farsi speaker on one side, an Urdu speaker on the
other, and a translator of Chinese chatter behind them.

In a security briefing she was told that any documents marked "Top
Secret" had to be locked up when employees went to lunch. Laptops had
to be kept in a safe. Any contacts with foreign people, even social,
had to be reported. She also signed a document promising to report
any suspicious activities of other translators. She was impressed
with the stringency of F.B.I. rules.

The Translation Department is treated by the F.B.I. as highly
sensitive. Yet her badge allowed her and other translators to enter
and exit the building without passing through security, and within
the sanctum itself they could pass freely from floor to floor and to
any agent's office. Ms. Edmonds saw several different individuals
leave the building with documents or audio tapes in their gym bags.
When she called security to report it, nothing was done.

She was one of three Turkish translators working on real time
wiretaps, e-mails, and documents related to 9/11 investigations. One
of her colleagues was an unassuming immigrant whose first employment
on entering the U.S. was as a busboy. Ms. Edmonds was dismayed to
learn that he had been hired despite failing to pass the English
equivalency exam. When he was chosen to go to Guantánamo Bay, to
translate interrogations with the half-dozen Turkish detainees in
America's war on terror, she remembers with both compassion and
disgust hearing her colleague wail, "I can't do this!"

But it was her other colleague who gave her the greatest cause for
concern-and her reports to her superiors as well as an alphabet soup
of government commissions and agencies remain unanswered.

Melek Can Dickerson was a very friendly Turkish woman, married to a
major in the U.S. Air Force. She liked to be called informally "Jan."

The account that follows, which comes from extended interviews with
Ms. Edmonds, was related in testimony to the Senate Judiciary
committee.

"I began to be suspicious as early as November, 2001" said Ms.
Edmonds. "In conversation Jan mentioned these suspects and said `I
can't believe they're monitoring these people.'"

"How would you know?" Ms. Edmonds remembers saying. She said
Dickerson told her she had worked for them in a Turkish organization;
she talked about how she shopped for them at a Middle Eastern grocery
store in Alexandria.

Ms. Edmonds has told the Judiciary Committee that soon after, Ms.
Dickerson tried to establish social ties with her, suggesting they
meet in Alexandria and introduce their husbands to each other.

When Sibel invited the visitors in for tea, she said, Major Dickerson
began asking Matthew Edmonds if the couple had many friends from
Turkey here in the U.S. Mr. Edmonds said he didn't speak Turkish, so
they didn't associate with many Turkish people. The Air Force offi

• (CONT'D) Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I. — Gail Sheehy, Sun Jan 25 15:25
• EXPLOSIVE HUTTON — Gordon Thomas, Sun Jan 25 17:03
• The Lie’s the Limit? WHERE DOES IT END? — THEODORE E. LANG, Sun Jan 25 15:56