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9-11 Cover-Up, Treason and
The Bomb
Dave Lindorff
Op
Ed News
Tuesday January 8, 2008
In a new article just published Saturday in the Times
of London based upon information provided by US government
whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language
translator for the FBI, we have not only solid evidence of prior
knowledge of 9-11 by high up US government officials, but evidence
of treasonous activity by many of those same officials involving
efforts to provide US nuclear secrets to America’s enemies,
even including Al Qaeda.
The story also casts a chilling light on the so-called “accidental”
flight of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard an errant B-52
that flew last Aug. 30 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale
AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The Sunday Times reports that Edmonds, whose whistleblowing efforts
have been studiously ignored by what passes for the news media
in American news media, approached the Rupert Murdoch-owned British
paper a month ago after reading a report there that an Al-Qaeda
leader had been training some of the 9-11 hijackers at a base
in Turkey, a US NATO alley, under the noses of the Turkish military.
Edmonds, who was recruited by the FBI after 9-11 because of her
Turkish and Farsi language skills, has long been claiming that
in her FBI job of covertly monitoring conversations between Turkish,
Israeli, Persian and other foreign agents and US contacts, including
a backlog of untranslated tapes dating back to 1997, she had heard
evidence of “money laundering, drug imports and attempts
to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.”
But the Turkish training for 9-11 rang more alarm bells and made
her decide that talking behind closed doors to Congress or the
FBI was not enough. She had to go public.
(Article continues below)
Edmonds claims in the Times that even as she was providing evidence
of moles within the US State Department, the Pentagon, and the
nuclear weapons establishment, who were providing nuclear secrets
for cash, through Turkey, to Pakistan’s intelligence agency,
the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, agencies within the Bush
administration were actively working to block investigation and
to shield those who were committing the acts of treason.
Pakistan’s ISI is known to have had, and to still maintain
close contacts with Al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Times notes that Pakistan’s
nuclear god-father, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was accused of sanctioning
a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers,
immediately before the attacks.
Edmonds claims, in the Times article, that following the 9-11
attacks, FBI investigators took a number of Turkish and Pakistani
operatives into custody for questioning about foreknowledge of
the attacks, but that a high-ranking US State Department official
repeatedly acted to spirit them out of the country.
Edmonds was fired from her FBI translating job in 2002 after
she accused a colleague of having illicit contact with Turkish
officials. She has claimed that she was fired for being outspoken,
and in 2005 her position was reportedly vindicated by the Office
of Inspector General of the FBI, which concluded that she had
been sacked for making valid complaints.
One of those whom Edmonds claims in the Times report was being
investigated in connection with the nuclear information transfers
was Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin. Franklin was convicted
and jailed in 2006 for passing US defense information to American
Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists and sharing classified
information with an Israeli diplomat. Franklin, in 2001, was part
of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, a kind of shadow intelligence
unit set up by the Bush administration inside the Pentagon whose
job it was to gin up “evidence” to justify a war against
Iraq. In that capacity, he (along with several other OSP members
and arch neocon schemer Michael Ledeen) was also identified by
Italian investigative journalists working for the newspaper La
Republican, as having been at a crucial meeting in December 2001
in Rome with the Italian defense and intelligence service ministers.
La Republicca reports that at that meeting a plan was hatched
to fob off forged Niger embassy documents as evidence that Iraqi
strongman Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger.
If Edmonds’ story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid
of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with
the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain
nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts
an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained
incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at
the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and
regulations of 40 years’ standing, loaded and flew off with
six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
That incident only came to public attention because three as
yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter
at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories
about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.
An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense
Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing
had been an “accident,” but many veterans of the US
Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons
say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there
had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the
base commander for such a flight to have occurred.
Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which
included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and
base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after
the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for
36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no
FBI investigation into what happened.
Yet in view of Edmonds’ story to the London Times, alleging
that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by
both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan,
to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there
are treasonous moles at work within the American government and
nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely
at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.
Meanwhile, there is enough in just this one London Times story
to keep an army of investigative reporters busy for years. So
why, one has to ask, is this story appearing in a highly respected
British newspaper, but not anywhere in the corporate US media?
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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