Last week, a remarkable article about FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds appeared in Vanity Fair magazine. She's been put until a severe gag order so we don't know all of what she's not allowed to say. But now we know a lot more, thanks to this article. She talks about bribery and espionage involving Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, other Congresspeople, State Department officials, and Pentagon officials. This story should be HUGE, but most people still don't seem to know about it, even at DU.
Now, you can read the entire article on line, here:
http://www.wanttoknow.info/sibeledmondsvanityfairSome snippets:
Sources familiar with (Sibel Edmonds') testimony say that, in addition to her allegations about the Dickersons, she reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with a very senior politican indeed - Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surrepititious payments in exchange for political favors and information. "The Dickersons," says one official familiar with the case, "are only the tip of the iceberg."
Edmonds had time to listen to numerous calls (to the Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC) before the Friday meeting, and some of them sounded important. According to her later secure testimony, in one conversation, recorded shortly after Dickerson reserved the targets' calls for herself, a Turkish official spoke directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They agreed that the State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed time to the American-Turkish Council office, where he would be given $7,000 in cash. "She told us she'd heard mention of exchanges of information, dead drops - that kind of thing," a congressional source says. "It was mostly money in exchange for secrets."
Another call allegedly discussed a payment to a Pentagon official, who seemed to be involved in weapons-procurement negotiations. Yet another implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. reserch institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.
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Please read the whole thing now, if you haven't already, and spread the word! The mainstream media has completely ignored the story. Don't let it fall into oblivion, like so many other Bush Administration scandals!