Jury Finds FBI Agents Framed Former Cop

January 24, 2005

Jury Finds FBI Agents Framed Former Cop
By MIKE ROBINSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2005/jan/24/012401318.html?fbi%20framed%20cop

CHICAGO (AP) - A former policeman who served 14 years in prison was awarded more than $6.5 million in damages Monday after a federal jury found that two FBI agents had framed him for murder and kidnapping.

Steven Manning, 54, spent eight years on death row in Illinois before his murder conviction was reversed, and several more years in prison in Missouri before charges in that state were dismissed.

He claimed in his civil suit that the agents framed him after he tried to stop working as an informant, according to his attorney, Jon Loevy.

Federal officials issued a statement saying they "respect the jury system, the work of this jury and its verdict." But they said they were "confident that the agents who were sued did not engage in any misconduct." Both agents remain with the FBI.

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Richard K. Ruminski of the Chicago FBI office declined further comment.

Manning appeared relieved Monday. "It's a long, long way from death row to complete vindication," he said at a news conference.

Manning had left the Chicago police force and was working as a limousine driver and security guard when he was arrested.

He was convicted in 1992 of taking part in the 1984 kidnapping of two reputed Kansas City drug traffickers and was sentenced to two life terms plus 100 years. The next year, he was convicted of the 1990 murder of suburban Chicago trucking company owner Jimmy Pellegrino and was sentenced to death.

FBI agents Gary Miller and Robert Buchan investigated the Illinois case, and Buchan investigated the Missouri case.

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Ex-Death Row Inmate Wins Suit Against FBI Agents
Reuters - Jan 24, 2005
FBI agents Robert Buchan and Gary Miller were found liable of concocting evidence to frame their one-time informant Steven Manning in the murder of Chicago ...
Jury finds agents framed former cop, awards him $6.5 million WLS
Jury believes ex-Chicago cop framed by FBI Chicago Tribune (subscription)
Framed ex-cop wins lawsuit against FBI Edmonton Sun
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Celebrating 9/11 at the FBI
By Paul Sperry
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 11, 2004

When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.

She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:

"It's about time they got a taste of what they've been giving the Middle East."

She found out later that it was her supervisor's wife who helped organize the office party there at the bureau's Washington field office, just four blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

"This guy's wife brought the date-filled cookies for the celebration," Edmonds, 33, recalled.

At the time, the supervisor, Mike Feghali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Beirut, was in charge of the FBI's Turkish and Farsi desks.

But he's been promoted since then, and now also runs the all-important Arabic desk, which is key to intercepting the next al-Qaida plot.

It gets worse.

The language service squad is the front line in the FBI's war on terrorism, collecting all foreign language tips, information and terrorist threats to homeland security. Agents act on what the squad translates and reports. The sooner they get the information, the sooner they can thwart terrorist attacks. Investigators had missed clues to both the 2001 and 1993 World Trade Center attacks because they were buried in a backlog of untranslated wiretaps and documents in Arabic.

Despite the backlog, Feghali told Edmonds and other translators to just let the work pile higher, according to Edmonds. Why? Money. She says Feghali, who has recruited family and friends to work with him at the high-paying language unit, argued that Congress would approve an even bigger budget for it if they could continue to show big backlogs.

"We were told to take long breaks, to slow down translations, and to simply say 'no' to those field agents calling us to beg for speedy translations so that they could go on with their investigations and interrogations of those they had detained," said Edmonds, who was fired without specified cause by the FBI after she reported breaches in security, mistranslations and potential espionage by Middle Eastern colleagues.

She claims Feghali actually tampered with her work to slow her down.

"My supervisor went as far as getting into my work computer and deleting almost completed work so that I had to go back and start all over again," she said.

Edmonds, a Turkish-American who is not a practicing Muslim, made the allegations last month in a 9-page letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

She also claims that Feghali threatened to sue the bureau for racial discrimination, but dropped the suit once the bureau promoted him, says Edmonds and other sources. The FBI, which like the army suffers from a severe shortage of Arabic translators, instated a bureau-wide Muslim-sensitivity training program after 9-11.

Reached by phone at his Maryland home, Feghali was brusque and refused to talk about the allegations.

"I'm not at liberty to discuss this thing, OK?" he said before abruptly hanging up.

The spokesperson for the FBI's Washington field office, Debbie Weierman, did not return repeated phone calls.

Feghali, who holds several foreign language degrees, has been an FBI language specialist for several years. He was a key translator in the government's case against al-Qaida operatives charged in the U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya, and even testified in court.

Sources say he is planning to move back to Lebanon.

A key player in the 9-11 plot and the likely pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, the suicide plane that crashed apparently en route to the U.S. Capitol, was Ziad Samir Jarrah, a Lebanese.

Edmonds has also complained about Feghali and other Middle Eastern translators to the Justice Department inspector general.

And on Wednesday, she is scheduled to give a detailed briefing to members of the 9-11 commission in a secure room here.

She claims terrorist "investigations are being compromised," and has demanded an independent probe of the FBI's language department.

"If there were, and are, persons within the language department that either intentionally prevented translation because of their agendas, or persons who were, and are, not qualified to properly translate, it is likely that terrorist communications prior to 9-11 were missed; and it is likely that current and future terrorist communications will likewise be missed," Edmonds wrote Justice's Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a Jan. 5 letter. "I have alleged, and the FBI has confirmed (to Senate investigators), that there are in fact such persons in the language department."

Fine still has not released the findings of his internal probe, even though Edmonds first filed her complaint with his office almost two years ago. Speaking for Fine, Justice official Carol Ochoa said the investigation is "still ongoing."

"We are working hard to complete it expeditiously," she said in a Jan. 6 letter to Edmonds.Paul Sperry, formerly of Investor's Business Daily, is Washington bureau chief of WorldNetDaily.com and author of the new book "Crude Politics." He is also a Hoover Institution media fellow.
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