Oh man, am I going to get flamed!
Sorry to rain on the parade, but I can not let this go without comment.
There is a reason why a mainstream media outlet has decided to hold its nose and wade into the cesspool that is the Sibel Edmonds muzzled whistle blower story, and it has nothing to do with wanting to see greater transparency in our government and everything to do with weaving yet another Big Lie, one which will go something like “Bill Clinton’s Penis is the Reason Pakistan Has Nuclear Weapons.” And we all know what Big Media Lies during presidential election years are for.
They are meant to help Republicans get elected.
I am not accusing Ms. Edmonds of being a co-conspirator. She just wants her story told. After all these years of trying desperately to get someone to listen, she will accept any publicity. And she does not particularly like Hillary, so it is not going to bother her much if there is some collateral damage. Two years ago, as New Yorkers prepared to decide on the fate of Senator Hillary Rodam Clinton, Sibel Edmonds wrote this along with William Weaver
In her six years as senator she has done nothing but attempt to position herself for the presidency, done nothing but avoid acting out of principle and justice, done everything to offend no one. We respect our opponents in much greater measure than we respect Senator Clinton, for with our opponents at least the fight is joined; at least they have the courage of their convictions, at least they place their bets in public. But Senator Clinton, by trying to be something to everyone ends up being nothing to anyone. Where she cannot act safely, she does not act. The current times call for politicians to act with conviction and intelligence, not with cynical, calculated action in response to what opinion polls indicate. … Such a person has no business representing the people of this country. Nothing stirs her soul except for her own selfish ambitions; ambitions that she places in front of the nation’s welfare.
http://www.nswbc.org/Op%20Ed/ClintonOpEd-Aug28-06.htmSibel Edmonds has not endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate, but I am going to take a wild guess and assume that Hillary Clinton is her last pick of the three front runners.
We all know whom Rupert Murdoch wants (or rather wanted) for president. Saint Rudi of 9/11 was the anointed one who is supposed to keep NewsCorp growing like the Creeping Blob.
“This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp.’s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions,” the court papers say.
http://mikk2.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/rudy-wants-us-to-forget/Rudi’s presidential ambitions may have sunk like a lead balloon under the weight of the accusations about his ties to mafia, terrorist and Fox News executive ties, but Rupert Murdoch still knows what kind of FCC his news empire needs for financial success—a Republican one. The GOP members of the Bush FCC have favored unlimited telecommunications expansions and mergers, and that is what makes companies like Murdoch’s lots of money.
So, when his British newspaper
The Times chose to feature a story that the United States press had been burying out of deference to the George W. Bush administration about official corruption, bribery, spying and treason, you have to wonder why more people did not ask
How does Rupert Murdoch plan to influence the 2008 presidential election with this news? Here is the politically relevant (from NewsCorps.’ point of view) story with the important bits in bold
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology… A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets…. In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network…. Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”… One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defense information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. “He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said…. In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.” … One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said. 1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: “I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it”
Within a few days the story had metamorphosed in the
American Conservative to this:
Her allegations are not insignificant. Edmonds claims that Marc Grossman—ambassador to Turkey from 1994-97 and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-05—was a person of interest to the FBI and had his phone tapped by the Bureau in 2001 and 2002. In the third-highest position at State, Grossman wielded considerable power personally and within the Washington bureaucracy. He had access to classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department. On one occasion, Grossman was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a cash bribe of $15,000 from an ATC contact. The FBI also intercepted related phone conversations between the Turkish Embassy and the Pakistani Embassy that revealed sensitive U.S. government information was being sold to the highest bidder. Grossman, who emphatically denies Edmonds’s charges, is currently vice chairman of the Cohen Group, founded by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly earns a seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing Turkey.
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_01_28/article1.htmlGrossman is also accused of outing Valerie Plame’s CIA cover company, helping 9/11 suspects escape questioning and planting moles in the US. He is the first suspect named by name, the only person presented with a laundry list of crimes, the only one “charged” in the article. Republicans like Richard Perle and Dennis Hasturt are mentioned as people of interest, their names dangled in front of Democrats like tantalizing morsels to draw us into the story but without any facts or substance to back up the accusations. You can already predict that they will quickly be dropped from the tale “for lack of evidence.” Grossman’s association with Bill Clinton’s administration could not be made any more glaring if they changed the guy’s name to “Former Clinton Ambassador Grossman”
Just for grins, I checked to see what kind of articles the “American Conservative” runs. There is one about the likely political strategy that Republicans will use against Obama if he is the Democrats’ nominee (the magazine sees Obama as a pushover, especially for the “Obama is a Black Muslim” narrative though they do not call it that). There is another about how Huckabee’s conservative populism can be put to good use by the Republican Party.
There is some pretty serious Republican campaign strategizing going here. And the Sibel Edmonds piece is more of the same.If these two journals were serious about covering Edmonds' story, they would focus on the identities of the Bush administration officials who engaged in the cover up.
That is the most serious crime here. Foreign agents wanted U.S. nuclear secrets and not only did U.S. citizens help them acquire them, but when they were caught,
people within the Bush administration launched a cover up to protect the traitors and spies. There have been plenty of traitors in the U.S. before. And it is almost a given that foreign nationals--even our friends--will try to acquire our military secrets.
But how often does our government try not to do anything about it?Look at
The Times story again. Is it full of outrage at the way that the Bush-Cheney administration protected Turkish, Israeli and Pakistani spies and their U.S. counterparts? No. It is a sensationalized story about a spy ring uncovered in the US.
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
The American Conservative has more outrage.
Congress has refused to act.
That's because that is where Hillary holds court.
Ok. Flame away. However, it is possible to create a political attack out of half truths just as easily as it is out of lies. Just wait. It should not take more than a few weeks before some right winger puts two and two together and comes up with “if Bill Clinton had not been mired down in Monica-gate, he would have noticed that someone was stealing our nukes, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about Al Qaeda getting nuclear weapons from Pakistan.”