Sibel Edmonds Case: the untellable AIPAC Case, part 2.

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2272244

Sibel Edmonds Case: the untellable AIPAC Case, part 2.
Posted by lukery on Tue Nov-13-07 11:23 AM

In my recent post, " Sibel Edmonds Case: the untellable story of AIPAC," I made the case that the so-called 'AIPAC Case' - the trial of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman - is only the tip of the iceberg.

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds wants to tell us what she knows about various criminal and treasonous activities that she became aware of that involve high level US officials, the embassies of Israel and Turkey, and lobbying groups associated with those two countries - primarily AIPAC and the American Turkish Council.

In this post, I want to discuss a few extra items that I didn't mention in my post last week.

***
(cross-posted at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak)

In my previous post, I quoted from a September 2004 Washington Post article which stated:

"Reports on the (Larry Franklin) investigation have <strong>baffled</strong> foreign policy analysts and U.S. officials because the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon already cooperate on intelligence matters and share policy views. "

As I've argued, the reason that these people might be 'baffled' is because the larger case (Sibel, AIPAC, ATC etc) is not about "simple state espionage," it's literally about criminal activities - including illegal weapons sales, the nuclear black market and money laundering - for personal enrichment. The case has nothing to do with 'Turkey' or 'Israel' - or even 'The Pentagon' or 'Neoconservatism.'

That 2004 Washington Post article - incidentally by Susan Schmidt and Robin Wright - had a lot of great reporting, much of it buried. The lede and the headline was that the 'AIPAC' investigation was "more than two years" old, and that Franklin was only a side-show. If you remember at the time, there was a lot of confusion (much of it intentional, apparently) about when the investigation began. The formulation later changed to something like '<strong>at least</strong> since 1999.' I don't know exactly when this particular 'Israeli' investigation began, but the 'Turkish' counter-intelligence operation, the investigation into Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, dates back to 1996. In fact, as discussed last week, it was Perle and Feith (and their associates at AIPAC and JINSA) who established the ATC in an attempt to create a legitimate cover for their activities when some external pressure forced the closure of their 'lobbying' company, International Advisors Inc.

Given that the 'Turkish' and the 'Israeli' counter-intelligence operation was essentially the same operation, targeting the same people, I suspect that the 'Israeli' operation also dates back to the same time frame.

Incidentally, I'm not sure what to make of media reports that the FBI was 'surprised' that they 'stumbled upon' Larry Franklin's involvement in the AIPAC case. Franklin was a regular feature at the ATC, long before his first 'overt act' in the AIPAC indictment in 2002.


The Washington Post article then states:

"The FBI is examining whether highly classified material from the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic intercepts of communications, was also forwarded to Israel"


That sentence is carefully constructed, but a possible alternative construction might read something like "The NSA has been infiltrated by foreign spies." As we know from Sibel's case, the FBI's translation unit was also infiltrated by spies - even though the spies were engaged in criminal espionage, not state-based espionage. Given what we know, it's certainly possible that the same is true for the infiltration of the NSA.

In fact, Sibel's boss at the FBI translation unit, a guy called Mike Feghali, was apparently complicit in the espionage that Sibel describes. Feghali is now head of the entire Arabic translation desk at the FBI. Feghali's wife works for the NSA as a translator, and she translated the 9/11 "Tomorrow is zero hour" intercepts.
More from the 2004 Washington Post article:

"National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, were apprised of the FBI counterintelligence investigation of AIPAC as a possible conduit for information to Israel more than two years ago"


That is, after Rice and Hadley had been told that the FBI was investigating AIPAC for espionage (and probably also about the ‘ whole ball of wax), AIPAC was trying to place Franklin inside Rice's NSC so that their "israeli mole" (to quote CBS
) would be "by the elbow of the President." Did Rice and Hadley tell the FBI that they had been approached by Rosen about giving Franklin a job? Did they object? Was Franklin the only person that AIPAC tried to place at the NSC?

Of course, both Hadley and Rice (and many others involved in Sibel's case) have both been subpoenaed to appear in the Rosen/Weissman trial - apparently to argue that this was all business as usual. And, by all accounts, it apparently was - not in the sense that the USG regularly uses lobbyists and a compliant media as 'back-channels' to launder leaks, but because there's apparently an implicit agreement to 'tolerate' spies and traitors in high places - apparently because the only people who might be sufficiently powerful to do anything about it are also compromised.

Maybe that sounds a little hyperbolic, but consider everyone in the USG who knows the details about Sibel's case - her case has been confirmed repeatedly, denied by none, and yet no action is ever taken.

Youtube – Everybody Knows

Of course, it's difficult to understand all of the different reasons that everyone wants Sibel to just STFU. Some want her to shut up because they are complicit, others want her to shut up for CYA reasons. The important thing is that the collective silence is dangerous for all of us. As just one example, when Sibel reported that there were spies in the FBI and Pentagon who had tried to recruit her, the claims were investigated and found to be valid. The FBI responded that they wouldn't do anything about the existence of foreign spies in the FBI because


"Who knows how many more (spies) would fall out if they were to come and shake up the Dept?"


I know that many of you want to hear what Sibel has to say, even though you aren't familiar with all the details and think that she might be over-reaching in some of her claims. Fair enough. But we should support her anyway, and demand that she be given a forum, even if the only thing that she can prove is that the FBI translation bureau is riddled with spies and incompetent bureaucrats - and that the USG is gagging her because that would be embarrassing.

At a minimum, we can't afford for the FBI translation unit - which really is at the coal-face of any anti-terrorism effort, and at the forefront of any legitimate FISA/spying operation - to be run by any Heckuva Job Brownie.

Surely we can agree on that.

*************

Waxman can be contacted in DC: [phone] and LA:323 651-1040. The toll free Capitol switchboard number is 800-828-0498. See if you can shame him into doing something.

cross-posted at Let Sibel Edmonds Speak
( Email me if you want to be added to my Sibel email list. Subject: 'Sibel email list')

[AntiFascist]

1. Anyone notice parallels with the Vince Foster "case"?

as reported by James R. Norman:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg50320.html

who claims about his sources "Without grants of immunity, the sources risk going to prison for
violation of the National Security Act. Virtually all have demanded anonymity."

"The claim that Foster and other U.S. figures have had offshore
accounts has been confirmed by a separate high-ranking CIA source
and another in the Department of Justice."

...

"According to a heavily-redacted New Mexico FBI
counterintelligence report, Maxwell was apparently allowed to
sell two copies of PROMIS back to the U.S. weapons labs at
Sandia and Los Alamos, for what Inslaw claims was a hugely
inflated price of $37 million. That would have allowed Pollard,
if he was using the rigged program, to obtain U.S. missile
targeting data long before Israel had its own satellite
capability, thus making it <Israel?> a real nuclear threat to the Soviet
Union. Pollard was convicted of espionage and sentenced in 1986
to life imprisonment. U.S. officials have vehemently opposed
efforts to gain his early release."

...

"Foster had been a silent,
behind-the-scenes overseer on behalf of the NSA for a small
Little Rock, Ark., bank data processing company. Its name was
Systematics Inc., launched in 1967 and funded and controlled for
most of its life by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, a 1946
Naval Academy graduate along with Jimmy Carter. Foster was one
of Stephens' trusted deal makers at the Rose Law Firm, where he
was partner with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Webster Hubbell and
William Kennedy (whose father was a Systematics director).
Hubbell also played an overseer role at Systematics for the NSA
for some years according to intelligence sources."

"Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its
founding, sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations.
It is no secret that there were billions of dollars moving around
in "black" accounts - from buying and selling arms to the
Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola, and other countries to paying CIA
operatives and laundering money from clandestine CIA drug
dealing. Having taken over the computer rooms in scores of small
U.S. banks as an "out-sourced" supplier of data processing,
Systematics was in a unique position to manage that covert money
flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day
disguised as a routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction, out of
view of bank regulators and even the banks themselves. In short,
it became cyber-money."

and there's more at the link. I also discovered a Dept. of Justice letter (doing a web search) to the NSA which inquires whether this type of system was used to make laundered payments to offshore accounts of certain government officials.

[AntiFascist]

2. Here is an excellent article by Catherine Austin Fitts...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0709/S00059.htm

which legitimizes Norman's claims above, and places them in the context of drug-trafficking out of Mena Airport in Arkansas:

Those convicted and pardoned by President Bush included former Bechtel General Counsel, Harvard trained lawyer Cap Weinberger who as Secretary of Defense had presided over one of the most crime-ridden government contracting operations in U.S. history.<20> Forbes editor James Norman left Forbes in 1995 as a result of Forbes refusal to publish his story “Fostergate,” about the death of Vince Foster and its relationship to the sophisticated software, PROMIS, allegedly used to launder money, including funds for the arms and drugs transactions working through Arkansas. Norman’s story allegedly implicated Weinberger in taking kickbacks through a Swiss account from Seal’s smuggling operation. In other stories, the software was considered to be an adaptation of PROMIS software stolen from a company named Inslaw and turned over to an Arkansas company controlled by Jackson Stephens. An historical footnote to our story is that a later study of the prison industry shows that Jackson Stephens’ investment bank, Stephens, Inc., was the largest issuer of municipal bonds for prisons.

Ms. Fitts is the former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner during the first Bush Administration, a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co. Inc. and President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc.

Obviously the imprisonment of those guilty of selling the drugs trafficked by the government is also good for the prison business... but this is all a side issue. The question now is, could PROMIS software (or its descendents) also be used in heroin trafficking or the sale of nuclear technology to Arab countries? What about its role in terrorist operations? Read through the Indira Singh threads of this sub-forum, paying close attention to her testimony to Congress (Cynthia McKinney), and that should answer those questions.