sibel: nuclear woman

Prior to the election, there were scattered reports of another 'security lapse' regarding nuclear secrets at Los Alamos. Some of these reports posited scary 'what if?' scenarios regarding the War on Terror (TM).

Fair enough. But here's the thing: Sibel Edmonds has been trying to bring attention to the fact that terrorist/criminal groups have been 'stealing' nuclear secrets from the US for years - multiple branches of the US Government are aware of this - and yet they do nothing to prevent it. And the media don't report it either.

I'm not kidding. Sibel tried to raise the issue again last week in her blockbuster White Paper.

Details downstairs.

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In October, police raided a trailer home which doubled as a meth factory - and they stumbled across a treasure trove of nuclear secrets that had somehow escaped from Los Alamos. As CBS reported:

"The recent security breach at Los Alamos National Laboratory was very serious, with sensitive materials being taken out of the facility — possibly including information on how to deactivate locks on nuclear weapons, officials tell CBS News.
[...]
Multiple sources now tell CBS News that the material includes sensitive weapons-design data.
[...]
But one federal official recently briefed on the issue says "It's devastating." If a nuclear weapon were stolen, the information "would tell the terrorists everything they need to do to get a weapon to fire.""

Is this an innocuous 'breach'? I have no idea. But I think we can all agree that drugs and nukes shouldn't be mixed.

Which brings me to Sibel Edmonds. Again.

For years, Sibel has been talking about the intersection of the nuclear black market and heroin trafficking for years - with barely a mention in the US media.

Sibel's case, however, isn't about 'breaches' or 'lapses' - Sibel's case is about the systematic, long-term, for-profit, looting of US nuclear secrets (and who knows what else) by criminal organizations who then sell the nuclear technology to the highest bidder(s) - including terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.

To make matters worse, this has been taking place with the full knowledge of the US government. I'm not kidding.

In Sibel's blockbuster article last week, she wrote:

Nuclear black-market related activities depend on Turkey for manufacturing nuclear components, and on its strategic location as a transit point to move goods and technology to nations such as Iran, Pakistan, and others. Not only that, Turkey’s status and close relationship with the U.S. enables it to obtain (steal) technology and information from the U.S.

How does she know this? Because it's on the wiretaps - probably from the American Turkish Council (ATC) which was apparently "being used as a front for criminal activity."

David Rose has already reported on this theft of nuclear secrets in his 2005 Vanity Fair article:

According to (Sibel's) later secure testimony, in one conversation... a Turkish official spoke directly to a U.S. State Department staffer. They suggested that the State Department staffer would send a representative at an appointed time to the American-Turkish Council office, at 1111 14th St. NW, where he would be given $7,000 in cash. “She told us she’d heard mention of exchanges of information, dead drops—that kind of thing,” a congressional source says. “It was mostly money in exchange for secrets...

...Yet another (conversation) implied that Turkish groups had been installing doctoral students at U.S. research institutions in order to acquire information about black market nuclear weapons. In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity...”

The FBI and the CIA had apparently been monitoring the ATC - a criminal front-organisation operating under the guise of a Turkish lobby group ("a mini-AIPAC") - for years (probably at least going back to 1996) - and they sat passively by, and watched as the ATC bribed congressmen and State and Pentagon employees, and placed spies in the nuclear labs and stole nuclear secrets (among other things).

Again, this is not State espionage, this is a criminal gang - with criminal motives - with "direct and indirect role and ties to (9/11)" And the FBI et al did nothing, and apparently continues to do nothing, about the fact that these same people are stealing nuclear secrets!

And it's not as though this was some isolated espionage within the FBI that has somehow been blocking all this from the CIA, WhiteHouse, DoJ, Congress etc. At a minimum, Sibel has testified before the Sept. 11 commission, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Select Intelligence Committee - and of course, Ashcroft has gagged Sibel, and all of Congress. Everyone knows! For example, in her recent piece, Sibel mocked Porter Goss:

Here is what CIA Director Porter Goss said bluntly before the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2004, “It may be only a matter of time before Al Qaeda or other groups attempt to use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons. We must focus on that.” And we know that he knows; has known for the longest time!

I checked with Sibel about this statement to clarify what she was saying, and she confirmed my interpretation - that:
a) Al Qaeda has attempted to procure some of these WMDs
b) Al Qaeda have succeeded in getting some WMDs, including from the US.
c) Porter Goss and other senior figures across the different departments of USG knows this.

Surely that's not possible? Why doesn't the FBI launch an investigation? Why don't they stop it?

Sibel describes the cover-up mechanism thusly:

"For years and years, information and evidence being collected by the counterintelligence operations of certain U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been prevented from being transferred to criminal and narcotics divisions, and from being shared with the Drug Enforcement Agency and others with prosecutorial power. Those with direct knowledge have been prevented from making this information available and public by various gag orders and invocation of the State Secrets Privilege. Why?"

I'll add that Sibel has previously stated that another unit that counterintelligence refuses to pass information to is the counterterrorism division (which is presumably where the 'criminals stealing nuke secrets' case ought be handled):

If counterintelligence receives information about terrorism that implicates certain nations, semi-legit organizations or the politically powerful in this country, then that information is not shared with counterterrorism, regardless of the consequences.

I can imagine how that might become problematic.

One other point I wanted to raise is that the officials within the USG appear to be selling the country down the river for peanuts. It has long been a mystery to me that these people can be bought so cheaply - but perhaps Sibel has offered us an explanation. Firstly, here's Daniel Ellsberg from September 05:

...aside from that, there's a great deal of dealing of information in illicit arms trades including, (Sibel) says, nuclear information, from our nuclear weapons labs - for which cold cash is paid - to people in the labs, and to people, she says, to people in the State Department - who have essentially given 'OKs' for various trades, or have turned a blind eye - deliberately - to it.

So, there are messages in these wiretaps about people getting thousands of dollars - this is small potatoes - but in the State Department they come cheap apparently!

Small potatoes indeed - but perhaps the 'thousands of dollars' are merely down-payments - with the promise of much greater pay-offs in the future. In Sibel's latest piece she writes about Marc Grossman (former Deputy Secretary of State):

Please do not make the grave and naive mistake of assuming that Grossman found and obtained his highly lucrative and questionable positions after his resignation in January 2005. Within two months after his confident resignation, this boy got the vice chairmanship of the Cohen Group. Only six months later, Grossman ended up securing a ‘special advisory’ position for a foreign company that reported his monthly fee at $100,000 a month...

We all have a pretty good idea how long and how much work it takes to secure that level of income and those positions. Did Grossman beat the odds and get lucky as soon as he got out of the State Department? Did he hit the jackpot? Or, did he diligently and industriously work at it, while in his position as the ambassador to Turkey and as Deputy Secretary of State? Did he sell his soul while under his oath of office? Did he sell our government’s soul? Did he sell our nation and its interests? If so; for what and how much?

I'm not at all comforted by the fact that Grossman has sold everyone out for $1.2 million per annum rather than "thousands of dollars" - but at least Sibel's 'questions' help resolve that apparent mystery: deferred compensation. It would be interesting to know how explicit the 'arrangement' was.

I wonder how many current USG employees have similar deals in place, and how we can stop it. Would it be feasible to institute lie-detector tests for departing USG employees? Perhaps we could ask three simple questions:
1. Have you had discussions about future employment opportunities / business deals?
2. Who with?
3. When did these discussions begin?

These lie-detector tests probably won't be successful in the long-term for a variety of reasons, but in the short-term it might help break the vicious cycle that Sibel describes in Part One of her White Paper:

"These successful foreign entities have mastered the art of ‘covering all the bases’ when it comes to buying influence in Washington DC. They have the required recipe down pat: get yourself a few ‘Dime a Dozen Generals,’ bid high in the ‘former statesmen lobby auction’, and put in your pocket one or two ‘ex-congressmen turned lobbyists’ who know the ropes when it comes to pocketing a few dozen who still serve."

Maybe it's worth a try.

I'm reminded of the old joke, apparently true, told by George Bernard Shaw:

Winston Churchill: "My Dear, would you go to bed with me for a million dollars?"

Lady Astor: "Well, yes, I guess I would."

Winston Churchill: "How about $100?"

Lady Astor: "What kind of person do you think I am?"

Winston Churchill: "My Dear, we have already established that. We are merely haggling over the price!"

Many of the people involved in Sibel's case have already been named: Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Marc Grossman, Brent Scowcroft, Bob Livingston, Stephen Solarz, Dennis Hastert, Eric Edelman...

We've established that these people are whores - are we happy with the price they are charging to screw us?

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