New "State Secrets" Policy? More Lipstick on the National Security Pig

The New York Times reports:

The Justice Department is preparing to impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons. The practice was a major flashpoint in the debate over the escalation of executive power and secrecy during the Bush administration.

But the Obama administration believes it's enough now that any claim of "state secrets" privilege by the executive branch be reviewed now by the Attorney General. The ACLU notes with some derision that "on paper" there is some purported progress, while Marcy Wheeler at FDL reports that Center for Constitutional Rights is calling the proposed policy "smoke and mirrors." Ben Wizner at the ACLU had more to say (emphasis added):

In recent years, we have seen the executive branch engage in grave human rights violations, declare those activities 'state secrets,' and thus avoid any judicial oversight or accountability. It is critical that the courts play a meaningful role in deciding whether victims of human rights abuse will have an opportunity to seek justice. Real reform of the state secrets privilege must affirm the power of the courts to reject false claims of 'national security.

Writing also at FDL, bmaz sees the timing of the "new" policy as related to government attempts to bury the evidence of government misdeeds in the wiretapping al-Haramain case:

The al-Haramain case is a perfect storm of problems for the government, there is warrantless wiretapping, the surveillance invaded an attorney-client relationship, there is known proof in the form of the sealed surveillance log under the protective custody of the court, and at least some of the surveillance is known to have occurred during the period after the infamous "John Ashcroft hospital scene"....

Tack in the distinct possibility that the government made material misrepresentations about their data mining and warrantless surveillance to the FISA Court and that illegally information thusly obtained inappropriately made its way into the affidavit for the search warrant executed on the al-Haramain Foundation in Oregon, and you see the veritable cornucopia of problems the government could be so determined to stop inquiry into in the al-Haramain litigation before Judge Walker....

There is a lot the government has to hide in al-Haramain, and they are desperate to do just that. It would be a perfect time to whip out a ruse in the form of a "new state secrets policy". Even if there is nothing at all new about it.

The spanking new proposed policy only raised spitting disgust from civil liberties legal blogger Glenn Greenwald:

...the so-called "new state secrets policy" which the Obama DOJ is set to unveil is such a self-evident farce -- such an obvious replica of all the abuses that characterized the Bush/Cheney use of that privilege which Obama himself has spent the last eight months embracing -- that I couldn't even bring myself to write about it. It would not have altered a single one of the controversial uses and is a complete non-sequitur to the objections raised to its abuses (including, once upon a time, by Obama himself).

For those who haven't gotten the picture yet, let me draw it as simply as possible: when it come to defending U.S. military and national security interests, there's not a cent's worth of difference between the Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden administrations. Those waiting for the confirmation of Dawn Johnson to change things might as well be waiting for the Second Coming (or the Messiah, if you're Jewish).

And as an aside -- and switching topic somewhat -- those waiting for the Congressional bill to slap down Acorn as somehow being used in some sort of progressive jujitsu to bring down the entire military-industrial complex (see the Greenwald link above), let's not waste our time with such utopian fantasies. Some poor naive activists might believe it, and only demoralization results from pursuing such pipe dreams. The MIC will not be brought down by a trick.

Meanwhile, for readers pursuing other items of interest, this appears promising:

In an interview with former CIA officer Phillip Giraldi, FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds named Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle as having been wiretapped and recorded discussing plans with the Turkish ambassador in the Summer of 2001 to invade Iraq and occupy the Kurdish region bordering Turkey.

Ben Griffin Silenced by High Court on Secret Renditions

Ben Griffin, the British ex-Special Air Service (SAS) soldier who resigned over the illegalities involved in the U.S. extraordinary rendition program, and who has spoken out publicly on British troop collaboration with U.S. forces in these activities, was served with a UK high court gag order. According to yesterday's Guardian:

Ben Griffin could be jailed if he makes further disclosures about how people seized by special forces were allegedly mistreated and ended up in secret prisons in breach of the Geneva conventions and international law.

At least hundreds of Afghans and Iraqis have been swept up in the program run with British and American special forces, and sent to prisons in countries often thousands of miles away to face torture and indefinite detention. Other European countries, including most recently Romania and Poland, have been implicated in the rendition program.

At a press conference February 25, before the court banned his free speech, Griffin spoke out more specifically about how the joint U.S.-UK operation worked (emphasis added):

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 this joint US/UK task force appeared. Its primary mission was to kill or capture high value targets. Individuals detained by this Task Force often included non-combatants caught up in the search for high value targets. The use of secret detention centres within Iraq has negated the need to use Guantanamo Bay whilst allowing similar practice to go unnoticed.

As UK soldiers within this Task Force a policy that we would detain individuals but not arrest them was continually enforced. Since it was commonly assumed by my colleagues that anyone we detained would subsequently be tortured this policy of detention and not arrest was regarded as a clumsy legal tool used to distance British soldiers from the whole process.

During the many operations conducted to apprehend high value targets numerous non-combatants were detained and interrogated in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of civilians in occupied territories. I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.

Griffin joins U.S. whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in being gagged from speaking about what they know about illegal activities by their governments or their agents. It's clear that the U.S. and their allies are ratcheting up the machinery of governmental repression against those who would oppose their criminal policies. This story has failed to make a stir in either the U.S. mainstream or alternative press or blogosphere. In the world of American Empire, those who would speak out against blatant transgressions of justice and human decency are silenced. It is only a matter of time until they become non-people, a process already begun with the implementation of off-the-books "ghost prisoners," such as those the CIA held at Abu Ghraib, and the hundreds or thousands more who have been sent without hope of appeal to foreign dungeons around the world.

I can only hope that this story, and others like it, are picked up by those who still have the freedom to voice their opinions. Without at least that, the brave men and women who speak for justice and freedom, and against torture, have -- no matter what Obama says -- no hope.

Exposed: FBI Cover-Up on Nuclear Spying by U.S. Officials

The cover-up is of the Sibel Edmonds revelations about a nuclear secrets ring wherein high U.S. officials sold information on nuclear weapons technology via Turkish intermediaries to foreign countries, most notably Pakistan. It has been covered by bloggers for years, but was first reported in the mainstream press by the British Sunday Times. Daniel Ellsberg recently excoriated the U.S. press for its suspicious quietude:

For the second time in two weeks, the entire U.S. press has let itself be scooped by Rupert Murdoch's London Sunday Times on a dynamite story of criminal activities by corrupt U.S. officials promoting nuclear proliferation. But there is a worse journalistic sin than being scooped, and that is participating in a cover-up of information that demands urgent attention from the public, the U.S. Congress and the courts.

The second time? Ellsberg is referring to yesterday's second article on the Sibel Edmonds revelations reported in the Sunday Times: FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft. The article exposes an FBI cover-up of a crucial document in the investigation of the nuclear secrets ring.

According to the Sunday Times, the Liberty Coalition made a Freedom of Information request from the FBI for a document, labelled "203A-WF-210023." According to a Sibel Edmonds, this document "refers to the counterintelligence programme that the Department of Justice has declared to be a state secret to protect sensitive diplomatic relations." The FBI responded to the FOIA request by saying the file did not exist.

But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file.

Edmonds believes the crucial file is being deliberately covered up by the FBI because its contents are explosive. She accuses the agency of an “outright lie”.

“I can tell you that that file and the operations it refers to did exist from 1996 to February 2002."

The Valerie Plame Connection

Just as explosive are the assertions of the anonymous tipster to Liberty Coalition that a U.S. official warned members of the Turkish network to steer clear of the Brewster Jennings company "because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market." Of course, Brewster Jennings was in fact such a CIA front, and the operational cover for Valerie Plame, which was outed by a number of White House operatives back in 2003. This new information corroborates the suppositions of the blogger Lukery, who contended Marc Grossman outed Brewster Jennings as early as 2001. (Grossman was named by prosecutor Fitzgerald as passing information on Valerie Plame to convicted perjurer I. Lewis Libby. He worked in Bush's State Department, and was Clinton's Ambassador to Turkey in the late 1990s.)

How would Grossman know about Brewster Jennings? How widespread was this nuclear secrets cabal within the U.S. government? Widespread enough to have compromised the FBI? These and other equally disturbing questions can and should be asked by politicians and the press in the United States. Yet nothing is heard from either. Why?

Ellsburg's guest op-ed over at Brad Blog explains who in American government should be following up on this:

...there must be pressure by the public on Congressional committee chairpersons, in particular Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Patrick Leahy. Both have been sitting for years on classified, sworn testimony by Edmonds --- as she revealed in the Times' new story on Sunday --- along with documentation, in their possession, confirming parts of her account. Pressure must be brought for them to hold public hearings to investigate her accusations of widespread criminal activities, over several administrations, that endanger national security. They should call for open testimony under oath by Edmonds --- as she has urged for five years --- and by other FBI officials she has named to them, as cited anonymously in the first Times' story.

From Rot to the Danger of Gangrene

The rot of greed and bankrupt great power political maneuvering is totally exposed for all to see. The Sibel Edmonds revelations about U.S. officials selling state nuclear secrets to foreign governments offers a counter-narrative to the myth of U.S. "good intentions" in the world. In fact, it reveals a destabilizing force for war and nuclear blackmail emanating from the most powerful chambers of government. Furthermore, the silence of the press and so-called progressive politicians shows that the corrosion of values and truth-telling in society has seriously degenerated, and gangrene has set in.

I put no faith in Waxman or Leahy. Even less in the New York Times or the Washington Post (who published Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers over a generation ago). The Sunday Times articles are likely the expression (on some level) of a widening breach between the U.S. and Britain, and meant by the British to tweak the beard of their more powerful American patrons (asking the latter, perhaps, not to push the Brits too hard re their commitment to Iraq or Afghanistan).

Ellsberg is right about one thing: unless the American people stand up and make their political voices heard, nothing will be done by the current people in power. And the gangrene will spread. It may already be too late.

See related articles:

*** UK Times: Official Documents Prove FBI lied to protect US officials
*** The Story We've All Been Waiting For
*** UK Sunday Times Scoops US Media Again, Confirms FBI Cover-Up of Documents in Sibel Edmonds Nuke Secrets Case

Did Robert Gates Order Iran Speedboat Provocation?

The story of the Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz that supposedly threatened U.S. warships has been pretty thoroughly debunked by now. Now Asia Times has an article that details how the disinformation was created and spread by the Pentagon, as the Pentagon planted stories with the press, starting with CBS and CNN. Even though the encounter at sea was "not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade," the Pentagon timed the news about the supposed provocation to a trip by Bush to the region.

The key line in the Asia Times piece is right at the beginning (my bold emphasis):

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

Forget the small fry, like Bryan Whitman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, who initially spread the story at an "off the record" briefing for reporters. From whence did this "broader administration policy decision" derive? Who ordered it?

A little into the AT story, we get our answer (or the first inklings of it):

Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command and navy leadership in the field".

"Leadership here", of course, refers to the secretary of defense and other top policymakers at the department. An official in the US Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defense.

So it was Gates. It's Secretary of Defense, and former CIA chief Gates's resignation we should be calling for. But, I find it hard Gates would have initiated this all on his own. He must have consulted with, if not received orders from either Cheney or Bush. -- Funny though how those three letters keep popping up whereever you look: C-I-A.

Where's a free and enquiring press when you need one? The whistleblowers on this one probably emanate from the Navy itself, as commanders in Iraq were not apparently too happy at this dangerous exercise in spin and provocation from Washington:

The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Captain David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water.... "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians....

Asked whether the navy's reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Lydia Robertson of Fifth Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."

Coming after the startling revelations in the British press by FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds that U.S. officials have been involved in a bribery scheme involving the export of nuclear secrets to countries like Pakistan (which has been suppressed in the U.S. press), the emerging truth about this latest provocation and misinformation in the Gulf, presaging war against Iran, demonstrates that the rulers of the U.S. are the most dangerous threats to the world on the planet. We can only hope, given the current political dynamic in the U.S., that Robert Wexler and Dennis Kucinich in the U.S. House of Representatives are successful in bringing impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney. Because short of that, I can't imagine what will stop them in their insane quest for war.

H/T to FishOutOfWater for this story and his excellent diary on it at Daily Kos.

The Dark Nexus of the World: More on the Edmonds Revelations & the Meaning of Deep Politics

The "dark nexus" of the world is where its most secretive business is conducted, such as the bribes and secret payoffs that Sibel Edmonds recently revealed were behind a nuclear proliferation ring that involved many top U.S. officials. According to a recent compelling article by Chris Floyd (whose descriptor above I have quoted), this "shadowlands" is "where covert operations, criminal networks, terrorism, high finance and state policy mingle, and battle, in profitable murk." I believe Peter Dale Scott famously called this essential, if diabolical aspect of modern history, "deep politics."

Floyd likens the recent Edmonds tale to that of the scandal around BCCI, "the 'Bank of Credit and Commercial International,' a supposed financial group that a U.S. Senate investigation called 'one of the largest criminal enterprises in history'".

And what were the illicit activities that BCCI facilitated for its entangled crime gangs and government agents? The Senate report:

"BCCI's criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers."

The Senate investigators found that the CIA lied about is extensive, long-term contacts with BCCI, although the Kerry panel [John Kerry led the 1992 Senate investigation] often couched this flagrant falsehood in more decorous tones, e.g., "the CIA inadvertently failed" to tell the proper federal officials about BCCI's criminal activities (emphasis added). Still, much of the findings are straightforward on this point: "After the CIA knew that BCCI was as an institution a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations."

There's more... a lot more. BCCI helped funnel money to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, including money for chemical weapons and WMD. Bush Sr. squashed investigations that threatened to expose this. Then there's the links to Bush Jr. (and possibly Bill Clinton).

As Kevin Phillips points out in his devastating – and woefully ignored – book on the Bushes, American Dynasty, Bush II's first large-scale business enterprise, the Arbusto oil company, was almost certainly financed in part with investments from American frontmen for BCCI-connected Saudi grandees Salem bin Laden, older brother of Osama bin Laden and then the head of the family, and Khalid bin Mahfouz, a major stockholder in BCCI.
The failing Arbusto was later bought out by Harken Energy in a sweetheart deal that landed business failure Bush a plum spot on the Harken board and plenty of stock to play with. Bush soon worked his magic touch on Harken: the company began to tank. It was saved by an unusual infusion of $25 million from the Union Bank of Switzerland, one of BCCI's associates. The deal was brokered by long-time Bush family contributor Jackson Stephens – who, curiously enough, was also a major paymaster for Bill Clinton's political rise. In fact, in 1992, Stephens was the largest individual contributor to both Bush I and Clinton in their presidential contest.

There's much, much more, and I courteously encourage the reader to go read all of Floyd's well-written piece. (And a h/t to Inky99 over at Daily Kos, whose own article on this directed my attention to Chris's article.)
According to Peter Dale Scott, who draws conclusions in an academic sort of way (he is a professor, after all):

A deep political system or process is one which resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those sanctioned by law and society. What makes these supplementary procedures "deep" is the fact that they are covert or suppressed, outside public awareness as well as outside sanctioned political processes.
We see deep politics in imperial and post-imperial systems which are accustomed to use criminal assets to intervene lawlessly in other societies....
Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of "organized crime" arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals. In time one may arrive at the kind of police-crime symbiosis familiar from Chicago, where the controlling hand may be more with the mob than with the police it has now corrupted.

Floyd concludes his own article in a more succinct fashion, getting right to the point:

This is the way the world works. Behind the glitz and gossip of presidential campaigns, behind all the earnest "policy debates" on Capitol Hill, behind all the "position papers" and "vision statements" of think tanks and political parties, behind all the great panoply of state and our august Establishment institutions, thieves and murderers have their way, in league with the great and good.

But neither Scott nor Floyd says what has to be said (because each believes the dark political realities are almost too great to fight), that the time is now overripe for the entry of the regular people into history. When it happens, such action shatters the previous status quo, with its networks of criminals and politicians, and changes the society forever. The classic example of this was the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. The storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, backed up by the sailors of the Russian Navy, was another such moment in history.

For the "deep politics" of the criminal gangs and the titans of industry and politics that govern this world are aimed at exploiting the working peoples of the world, and the only answer to such activity must come from the heart and soul of humanity itself. Life against death: what is good in human beings against what is fearful and tyrannical.

Now, I am not advocating a storming of anything. Nor can I predict in what form any revolutionary emergence or change will take place. But the thoroughly corrupt leadership of the nation states and empires that jostle and struggle for supremacy on this globe are leading humanity to the edge of the nuclear precipice, and time is growing far too short. This blog is a minuscule voice in the shout and wild hurrah that is the eternal buzzing of the Internet. It is my stone cast into the void. It is my wish for a spark. It is a prediction awaiting fulfillment, or a drowning in the coming flood of war and holocaust, led by the greedy men and women that ply their trade in and out of the dark nexus of the world's "business."

Gagged Whistleblower Speaks: U.S. Cover-Up on Sale of Nuclear Secrets Abroad

Sibel Edmonds, a former Turkish translator for the FBI, has told the Sunday Times "how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions." These intelligence assets then sold, according to Sibel, "highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

Sibel's charges are only coming out now, even though she has given classified testimony to Congress and to the 9/11 Commission. While Edmonds and some in the FBI were tracing the transfer of nuclear technology and other secrets to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency via Turkish conduits, other elements within government were moving to shut down any investigation. As for the stolen information, it was passed on to the notorious A.Q. Khan, "father" of the Pakistani atomic bomb, and of a network of nuclear proliferation that went around the world.

The blogger lukery has put names to pictures Edmonds has posted on some of those culpable in the bribery-intelligence scandal, and they are among some of the most famous names in Bush's foreign policy apparatus, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman (supposedly the State Department official quoted anonymously in the Sunday Times article), and congressional bigwigs from both sides of the aisle, like Dennis Hastert, Tom Lantos, Roy Blount, Stephen Solarz, and others.

Given the blackout in the U.S. mainstream press, I don't know how far this scandal will become public and operational in this country. The entire story demonstrates just how dangerous and corrupt the present political order is. A cover-up of massive proportions has kept this story from coming out, fingering, as it does, major political players from both political parties in treasonous activity. Yet, treason may be one of the lighter charges, as these individuals have manipulated the most dangerous technology in the world for both profit and political exigency, thereby destabilizing the world far more than anyone like Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed.

But even beyond that the major question hangs ominously: who gave the green light to help the Pakistanis (and possibly the Israelis) get the bomb? And to spread these nuclear secrets around the globe? Could it be the same folks who refused to press for the extradition or questioning of A.Q. Khan, now under luxurious house arrest in Pakistan?

Following the story in the Sunday Times article (bold remarks are mine):

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

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. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent....

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official....

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It's not certain what this cryptic latter comment means, but I'd like to know more about what they knew about the Khan/Al-Qaeda contact. It does seem likely that the CIA is up to its ears in this business.

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan....

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks....

“A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents....

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder....

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing....

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has reportedly called the Sibel Edmonds revelations (and we don't know all of them yet) "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers. When we add these revelations to others coming out around the CIA destroyed tapes scandal, and recent publications linking CIA mind control experiments to biological warfare crimes by the U.S. government -- including the long-denied use of bacteriological warfare by the U.S. during the Korean War -- we may have the makings of a crackdown on the intelligence agencies not seen in decades.

But given the craven capitulations of a majority Democratic Congress, a U.S. media controlled by military-linked corporate interests, and a political culture enamoured of electoralism (while controlled by the aforesaid corporations), I wouldn't hold my breath. This country awaits the awakening of the population as real political actors in society, and not iPod and T.V. mesmerized participants in American Idol-like spectacles of inanity and nihilistic meaninglessness.