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FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators. But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.” After five years of thwarted legal challenges and fruitless attempts to launch a congressional investigation, Sibel Edmonds is telling her story, though her defiance could land her in jail. After reading its November piece about Louai al-Sakka, an al-Qaeda terrorist who trained 9/11 hijackers in Turkey, Edmonds approached the Sunday Times of London. On Jan. 6, the Times, a Murdoch-owned paper that does not normally encourage exposés damaging to the Bush administration, featured a long article. The news quickly spread around the world, with follow-ups appearing in Israel, Europe, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Japan—but not in the United States.[...] Over nearly six months, Edmonds listened with increasing unease to hundreds of intercepted phone calls between Turkish, Pakistani, Israeli, and American officials. When she voiced concerns about the processing of this intelligence—among other irregularities, one of the other translators maintained a friendship with one of the FBI’s “high value” targets—she was threatened. After exhausting all appeals through her own chain of command, Edmonds approached the two Department of Justice agencies with oversight of the FBI and sent faxes to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy on the Judiciary Committee. The next day, she was called in for a polygraph. According to a DOJ inspector general’s report, the test found that “she was not deceptive in her answers.” But two weeks later, Edmonds was fired; her home computer was seized; her family in Turkey was visited by police and threatened with arrest if they did not submit to questioning about an unspecified “intelligence matter.” When Edmonds’s attorney filed suit to obtain the documents related to her firing, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft imposed the state-secrets gag order. Since then, she has been subjected to another federal order, which not only silenced her, but retroactively classified the statements she eventually made before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 9/11 Commission....
The Fear Factory As Shareef cursed America and Jews, he was under almost constant surveillance by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for the Northern District of Illinois. Since 9/11, the number of such outfits across the country has tripled. With more than 2,000 FBI agents now assigned to 102 task forces, the JTTFs have effectively become a vast, quasi-secret arm of the federal government, granted sweeping new powers that outstrip those of any other law-enforcement agency. The JTTFs consist not only of local police, FBI special agents and federal investigators from Immigration and the IRS, but covert operatives from the CIA. The task forces have thus effectively destroyed the "wall" that historically existed between law enforcement and intelligence-gathering. Under the Bush administration, the JTTFs have been turned into a domestic spy agency, like Britain's MI5 —one with the powers of arrest. But a closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges —a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America....
Hiding From REAL ID Take the REAL ID Act, the sputtering effort to unite Americans under a common banner of department of motor vehicle regulations and porous databases. In common purpose, it has united the Amish, gun owners, and advocates for victims of domestic abuse, all of whom want to see it killed. Though severely hobbled by a state-level revolt, REAL ID is set to enter its first phase in May, when states that have not applied for extensions will be required to comply with new requirements for issuing licenses. Amish groups and other religiously sensitive groups suggest that REAL ID portends the mark of the beast, and those who receive it will be thrown into eternal abyss. Appealing as it is to view REAL ID author Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) as an agent of Satan, it is probably the victims of domestic abuse who provide the best case study in the plan’s overreach. Organizations such as the National Network to End Domestic Violence contend that stores of half-guarded data would empower stalkers, violent exes, and obsessive abusers hunting for information. Abuse survivors are living repudiations of the assumption that only criminals need seek the comforts of anonymity. But try telling that to the Department of Homeland Security....
Bush prods Congress on eavesdropping law Sternly prodding Congress, President Bush said Thursday that lawmakers are jeopardizing the nation's safety by failing to lock in a government eavesdropping law. The president signed what Congress has given him so far — a 15-day extension of the law that allows government surveillance of suspected terrorists. But he said Congress should urgently pass a permanent law, on his terms, to safeguard the country. "I expect members of both political parties to get this work done so our professionals can protect the American people," Bush said in a speech here about the threat of terrorism. The law in question allows eavesdropping of phone calls and e-mails involving people in the U.S. Bush and Congress are at odds over an update of the law, mainly whether to give legal immunity to companies that helped the government spy on customers....
Top-secret Livermore anti-germ lab opens A high-security laboratory where deadly microbes are being grown by scientists seeking defenses against terrorist attacks began operating in Livermore last week without public announcement, and opponents said Friday that they will go to federal court in an effort to close the facility down. Built inside the closed campus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the facility has been controversial ever since it was first proposed by homeland security officials more than five years ago. The facility is known as a Biosafety-level 3 laboratory where highly trained workers, high-tech airlocks and extremely rigorous safety measures are required by federal rules in order to contain any of more than 40 potentially lethal disease-causing bacteria, viruses and fungi stored inside. The National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency of the Energy Department, which oversees the Livermore site, announced Monday only that it had "granted approval" for Livermore to begin operating its new biosafety laboratory. But the announcement did not disclose that the facility had already opened and that its scientists had begun working there the previous Friday....
Freedom for thought we hate Having been removed as editor of my college newspaper at Boston's Northeastern University by the president who thought I took the First Amendment too seriously, I have been a First Amendment enthusiast ever since, including writing books about it. I can now attest that the most accurate and enlivening account of its history and often extraordinary resilience is the newly published "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate" by Anthony Lewis. Part of the title comes from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' warning of the most powerful need of the First Amendment, especially in times of national danger and epidemics of speech-suppressing political correctness: "If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate." I commend the title and the Lewis book to Sen. Ted Kennedy, who is still trying to get his expanded "hate speech" legislation to become law. It adds extra prison time not for the actual conviction for violent acts but for the "hateful" speech accompanying them as interpreted by police and prosecutors. Once our republic began, James Madison expected that no American would be punished for his "thoughts." But "hate crimes" laws vigorously and incredibly supported by the American Civil Liberties Union are what Madison feared....
Houston Prosecutor Admits He Deleted E-Mail Messages The embattled Harris County district attorney admitted before a federal judge here Friday that in violation of two subpoenas and a court order, he deleted as many as 3,500 e-mail messages sought in a civil rights lawsuit. He said he thought the messages were available on backup files. Appearing at a contempt hearing in Federal District Court, the district attorney, Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., appeared to open himself to possible perjury charges by acknowledging that in earlier sworn testimony he had provided false information about how he deleted some messages. He called his earlier testimony “an error.” Clearly irked, Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt told Mr. Rosenthal, “In fact it can be a crime to destroy documents; it can be obstruction of justice. “You prosecute people for that,” the judge reminded Mr. Rosenthal. The messages were sought as part of a lawsuit Mr. Kelley filed on behalf of two brothers, Sean and Erik Ibarra, who claim they were falsely arrested and brutalized after photographing sheriff’s deputies raiding a neighbor’s house in 2002....