"American Pravda:" Sibel Edmonds

With Turkey in the news, it's worth taking another look at Sibel Edmonds' charges about a corrupt cabal linking Turkey and the U.S. government. Ron Unz writes in "American Pravda" in The American Conservative:

During the mid-2000s I began noticing references on one or two small websites to a woman claiming to be a former FBI employee who was making the most outlandish and ridiculous charges, accusing high government officials of selling our nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign spies. I paid no attention to such unlikely claims and never bothered reading any of the articles. 

A couple of years went by, and various website references to that same woman—Sibel Edmonds—kept appearing, although I continued to ignore them, secure that the silence of all my newspapers proved her to be delusional. Then in early 2008, the London Sunday Times, one of the world’s leading newspapers, ran a long, three-part front-page series presenting her charges, which were soon republished in numerous other countries. Daniel Ellsberg described Edmonds’s revelations as “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers” and castigated the American media for completely ignoring a story that had reached the front pages of newspapers throughout the rest of the world. Such silence struck me as rather odd. 

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official who regularly writes for this magazine, suggested he investigate her charges. He found her highly credible, and his 3,000-word article in TAC presented some astonishing but very detailed claims.

Edmonds had been hired by the FBI to translate wiretapped conversations of a suspected foreign spy ring under surveillance, and she had been disturbed to discover that many of these hundreds of phone calls explicitly discussed the sale of nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign intelligence organizations, including those linked to international terrorism, as well as the placement of agents at key American military research facilities. Most remarkably, some of the individuals involved in these operations were high-ranking government officials; the staffs of several influential members of Congress were also implicated. On one occasion, a senior State Department figure was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a bag containing a large cash bribe from one of his contacts. Very specific details of names, dates, dollar amounts, purchasers, and military secrets were provided. 

The investigation had been going on for years with no apparent action, and Edmonds was alarmed to discover that a fellow translator quietly maintained a close relationship with one of the key FBI targets. When she raised these issues, she was personally threatened, and after appealing to her supervisors, eventually fired. 

Since that time, she has passed a polygraph test on her claims, testified under oath in a libel lawsuit, expanded her detailed charges in a 2009 TAC cover story also by Giraldi, and most recently published a book recounting her case. 

Judiciary Committee Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy have publicly backed some of her charges, a Department of Justice inspector general’s report has found her allegations “credible” and “serious,” while various FBI officials have vouched for her reliability and privately confirmed many of her claims. But none of her detailed charges has ever appeared in any of America’s newspapers. 

According to Edmonds, one of the conspirators routinely made payments to various members of the media, and bragged to his fellow plotters that “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.” 

At times, Congressional Democratic staff members became interested in the scandal, and promised an investigation. But once they learned that senior members of their own party were also implicated, their interest faded.

[The original article has lots of links to documentation.)

I've looked into Sibel Edmonds' charges a couple of times and they seemed not unreasonable. Thus, they ought to be pretty interesting to Americans, but, evidently, they're not.

Unfortunately, I couldn't think of any way to either validate them or falsify them. 

I could also dream up scenarios in which the U.S. government activities she apparently stumbled upon weren't the blatant corruption they seemed, but were actually a Byzantine plot to furnish somebody the U.S. government doesn't like with disinformation on nuclear weapons in return for cash. Maybe the mainstream media has ignored the Sibel Edmonds story because they've been privately told by government officials that it's really a U.S. operation.

But how could you tell who is telling the truth?

Here's a question I've always wondered about: Exactly how do the back channels between the U.S. government and the commanding heights of the national media work? Does the editor of the New York Times have a phone number to call to find out if a story is okay to run with or they'd better spike it? Does it also work the other way: does the government call up the NYT and tell them here's this week's Biggest Story in the History of the World, like, say, the Epidemic of Military Rape? Or is it all much more poorly organized?

I haven't been reading enough spy thrillers lately, so I'm out of the loop on how this sort of thing works.