AP | International Herald Tribune

Government lawyers say the ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks could be compromised if the airline industry is allowed to seek more information from the FBI to defend itself against lawsuits brought by terrorism victims.

In papers filed late Tuesday, the government urged a judge to block aviation companies from interviewing five FBI employees who the companies say will help them prove the government withheld key information before the 2001 attacks.

The lawyers said it would be impossible to interview the employees without disclosing classified or privileged material that could “cause serious damage to national security and interfere with pending law enforcement proceedings.”

“The harm described is not hypothetical and cannot be lightly dismissed,” according to the court papers submitted by the office of U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia. “Investigators continue to seek out those parties responsible for the 9/11 attacks who remain at large.”
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William F. Jasper | TheNewAmerican.com

For six years, Sibel Edmonds has been carrying out an heroic crusade to protect her adopted country from national security threats within the top levels of the American government. Hired as an FBI translator in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, Edmonds, a Turkish American, threw herself into the daunting task of translating thousands of hours of recordings of backlogged intercepts in Turkic, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. What she heard on the tapes was alarming: Turkish agents in the United States bribing high-level U.S. officials and obtaining our military and intelligence secrets. What she witnessed at the FBI was even more appalling: translators who were intentionally filing false translations and passing information to foreign powers; and, what’s even worse, FBI superiors who did nothing about it when these serious breaches were brought to their attention.

Unwilling to settle for the bureaucratic “don’t rock the boat” response she faced from immediate supervisors, Sibel Edmonds decided to take her concerns higher up the FBI chain of command. The result? She was fired, and those she tried to have investigated got off scot-free; some fled the country to avoid potential prosecution, while others continued their alleged criminal and treasonous activities. Some of the FBI colleagues who blocked her efforts were promoted.

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Carrie Johnson and Christopher Lee | WashingtonPost.com 

Nearly two dozen federal agents yesterday raided the Washington headquarters of the agency that protects government whistle-blowers, as part of an intensifying criminal investigation of its leader, who is fighting allegations of improper political bias and obstruction of justice.
Agents fanned out yesterday morning in the agency’s building on M Street, where they sequestered Office of Special Counsel chief Scott J. Bloch for questioning, served grand-jury subpoenas on 17 employees and shut down access to computer networks in a search lasting more than five hours.

Bloch, who was nominated to his post by President Bush in 2003, is the principal official responsible for protecting federal employees from reprisals for complaints about waste and fraud. He also polices violations of Hatch Act prohibitions on political activities in federal offices.Bloch has long been a target of criticism, some of it by his agency’s career officials, but the FBI’s abrupt seizure of computers and records marked a substantial escalation of the executive branch’s probe of his conduct. Retired FBI agents and former prosecutors called the raid an unusual, if not unprecedented, intrusion on the work of a federal agency.

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Ryan Singel | Wired.com

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive “blanket” administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit  released Thursday.

Top officials at the FBI’s counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas “retroactively to justify the FBI’s acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests,” the Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine found.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine’s 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.

With the flawed follow-up letters, the Counterterrorism division attempted to provide retroactive legal justification for telephone data the division had gotten on 3,860 phone numbers, gotten either through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests.

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TheBlotter | ABC NEWS | Justin Rood Reports:

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago.  But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn’t keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn’t generally like to talk about it.  (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)

But if the ACLU’s figure isn’t accurate, it’s also unlikely to be off by that much.  Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.

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Larisa Alexandrovna | rawstory.com

Hijacker had post-9/11 flights scheduled, files say

 Newly-released records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request contradict the 9/11 Commission’s report on the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and raise fresh questions about the role of Saudi government officials in connection to the hijackers.The nearly 300 pages of a Federal Bureau of Investigation timeline used by the 9/11 Commission as the basis for many of its findings were acquired through a FOIA request filed by Kevin Fenton, a 26 year old translator from the Czech Republic. The FBI released the 298-page “hijacker timeline” Feb. 4.The FBI timeline reveals that alleged hijacker Hamza Al-Ghamdi, who was aboard the United Airlines flight which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, had booked a future flight to San Francisco. He also had a ticket for a trip from Casablanca to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.Though referenced repeatedly in the footnotes of the final 9/11 Commission report, the timeline has not previously been made available to the public.The FBI timeline is dated Nov. 14, 2003 but appears to have been put together earlier (since the last date mentioned in the document is Oct. 22, 2001) and was provided to the 9/11 Commission during its 2003 investigation. The final Commission report cites the FBI timeline 52 times. Read the rest of this entry »

In Turkey
CNN Turk.com

ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı, ABD’nin nükleer sırlarının, aralarında Türklerin de bulunduğu bazı casuslar tarafından, İran gibi ülkelere satıldığı yönünde, eski bir FBI çalışanının iddialarına ilişkin, İngiliz gazetesi Sunday Times’ta çıkan haberi sert bir dille yalanladı.

ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı’nın son brifinginde bir Yunanlı gazeteci, İngiliz Sunday Times gazetesinde 6 Ocak’ta yer alan bir haberi hatırlatarak Washington’ın görüşünü sordu.

ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı sözcüsü Tom Casey, “Haberi gördüm. Şunu söylememe izin verin, o haber tamamiyle saçma, yanlış ve temelsizdir” dedi.

Casey, İngiltere’nin böyle saygın gazetelerinden birinin, “tamamen çöpe ait” bir haberi yayınlamasının “utanılacak bir durum” olduğunu belirterek, “Haberin hiçbir geçerliliği yok, doğru değil” diye konuştu.

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By Kevin Poulsen | wired.com 

The FBI sought approval to use its CIPAV spyware program from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in terrorism or foreign spying cases, THREAT LEVEL has learned.

Officials processing a Freedom of Information Act request from Wired.com have turned up some 3,000 pages of FBI documents about the CIPAV, according to an FBI FOIA official. They date back to at least 2005. Some 60 - 75 percent of them are internal e-mails. Others are technical documents and legal filings.

Among the legal filings are affidavits submitted by the FBI in other criminal cases, and affidavits submitted to the secretive FISC, a court based in the Justice Department’s headquarters that approves surveillance orders and covert entries in cases involving national security, including terrorism probes. The court was created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

FISC hearings are closed and the decisions secret.

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From Kelli Arena and Carol Cratty | cnn.com CLARKSBURG, West Virginia (CNN) –The FBI is gearing up to create a massive computer database of people’s physical characteristics, all part of an effort the bureau says to better identify criminals and terrorists.

The FBI wants to use eye scans, combined with other data, to help identify suspects. But it’s an issue that raises major privacy concerns — what one civil liberties expert says should concern all Americans.The bureau is expected to announce in coming days the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information — from palm prints to eye scans.

Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI’s Biometric Services section chief, said adding to the database is “important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbors, our children so they can have good jobs, and have a safe country to live in.” But it’s unnerving to privacy experts.”It’s the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time and all your movements, and eventually all your activities will be tracked and noted and correlated,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project.

The FBI already has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, the bureau wants to compare palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns, and facial shapes.
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by Philip Giraldi | The American Conservative

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.”

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Luke Ryland | DissidentVoice.com 

In the last few weeks, London Times has run a series of articles about the so-called ‘Sibel Edmonds case’: (For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets,’ FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft‘ and ‘Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe‘)

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds stumbled into a world of espionage, nuclear black market, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and corruption at the highest levels of the US government.

I interviewed Sibel on Sunday regarding the current investigation and reporting by the Times, the failures of the US media, and last week’s decision by the Bush administration to legalize the sale of nuclear technology to Turkey, in an apparent effort to exonerate prior criminal activity by officials in his administration.

Sibel also has some urgent ‘action items’ so that we can stop these dangerous nuclear proliferation activities. I urge you to act on her suggestions.

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Who is stealing our nuclear secrets – and why are they being shielded by the authorities? 

Justin Raimondo | antiwar.com  

The Valerie Plame case is, by journalistic standards, ancient history, and naturally any follow-up on a once-important story is considered bad form. Yet there is an interesting – and rather scary – new twist to the narrative. It turns out that Scooter Libby and friends weren’t the first to “out” CIA agent Plame, whose alleged employer, a company known as Brewster Jennings, was really a cover for a CIA unit investigating nuclear proliferation issues.

The London Times reveals that a former top U.S. State Department official tipped off Turkish agents about Brewster Jennings’ CIA connection, according to Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator assigned to produce English-language transcripts of intercepted conversations of Turkish targets – in this case recordings of Turkish embassy officials and a top State Department official discussing, among other things, Brewster Jennings’ relationship to the CIA.

As the Times reports, the recordings were made “between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West’s nuclear secrets and technology. Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ‘father of the Islamic bomb,’ who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.”

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The FBI now has more than 100 task forces devoted exclusively to fighting terrorism. But is the government manufacturing ghosts?

GUY LAWSON | rollingstone.com

“So, what you wanna do?” the friend asked. “A target?” the wanna-be jihadi replied. “I want some type of city-hall-type stuff, federal courthouses.”

It was late November 2006, and twenty-two-year-old Derrick Shareef and his friend Jameel were hanging out in Rockford, Illinois, dreaming about staging a terrorist attack on America. The two men weren’t sure what kind of assault they could pull off. All Shareef knew was that he wanted to cause major damage, to wreak vengeance on the country he held responsible for oppressing Muslims worldwide. “Smoke a judge,” Shareef said. Maybe firebomb a government building.

But while Shareef harbored violent fantasies, he was hardly a serious threat as a jihadi. An American-born convert to Islam, he had no military training and no weapons. He had less than $100 in the bank. He worked in a dead-end job as a clerk in a video-game store. He didn’t own a car. So dire were his circumstances, Shareef had no place to live. Then one day, Jameel, a fellow Muslim, had shown up at EB Games and offered him shelter. Within hours of meeting his new brother, Shareef had moved in with Jameel and his three wives and nine children. Living together, the pair fantasized about targets in Rockford, a Midwestern city of 150,000, with a minuscule Muslim population and the lone claim to fame of being the hometown of Cheap Trick.

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by Joshua Frank | antiwar.com

According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, there is a vast black market for nukes, and certain U.S. officials have been supplying sensitive nuclear technology information to Turkish and Israeli interests through its conduits. It’s a scathing allegation which was first published by the London Times two weeks ago, and Edmonds’ charge seems to be on the verge of vindication.

In likely reaction to the London Times report, the Bush Administration quietly announced on January 22 that the president would like Congress to approve the sale of nuclear secrets to Turkey. As with most stories of this magnitude, the U.S. media has put on blinders, opting to not report either Edmonds’ story or Bush’s recent announcement.

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timesonline.co.uk

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets.
The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency’s investigation of the network.

Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it 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”.
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By LARA JAKES JORDAN | WASHINGTON (AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI’s lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

RELATED

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1 Billion Project to Include Images of Irises and Faces

By Ellen Nakashima/Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 22, 2007; A01

CLARKSBURG, W. Va. — The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.
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It’s been out for a few days now. Putting prior versions to rest, Final Cut is definitive proving beyond a resonable doubt the official story can not be true. Demand a new investigation
Official Site.

The Evidence
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Ken
November 8, 2007
WeAreChangeSeattle.org

For an hour today, Thom Hatmann had a productive and well represented debate about the generalized two major different conspiracy hypotheses:

• al-Qaeda (aka the Mujahadeen) planned and executed all events of the attacks of 9/11 and our military and federal agencies all failed in their duties.
• al-Qaeda (aka the Mujahadeen) played some unknown measure of a role in the attacks of 9/11 along with some unknown measure of a role also being enacted by elements within the U.S. federal government and possibly other national government(s).

Mr. Ryan was patient and tried to keep on pertinent points and often times took Mr. Shermer by surprise at the direction of the discussion. Why is this? In past debates, where Mr. Shermer was involved, he or others who are supportive of “the official story” get to both setup/frame the direction of the debate and then typically get the last response, enabling them to end each point of discussion further framing it and often smearing or scoffing at the other side of the debate. Mr. Shermer also seemed specifically surprised that the discussion went to non-strawman and non-hypothetical discussion. In fact, Mr. Shermer often made unfounded hypothetical judgements, theoretical statements and strawman arguments, a fact which he was called on once or twice by Mr. Ryan.

It quickly became clear that this pillar supporter of “the official story”, Mr. Shermer, has built his entire set of arguments around assertions no serious person in the Truth Movement asserts, though he (and others) pretend they do, and that he cannot counter simple logic, simple science and physics nor address geo-political and economic issues surrounding the 9/11 cover-up. Mr. Shermer has officially been discredited. Who ever has the next 9/11 debate, please get a stronger debater to parrot “the official story”, someone with some intelligence who can actually debate coherently when not allowed to steer the debate to his strawman talking points.

Following are two mp3s, the first hour is the debate and the second hour includes many callers to the show with their responses to the debate from the previous hour.

The Debate mp3

The Callers mp3

It is interesting that, as mentioned in Rep. Kucinich’s impeachment documents for bringing justice to VP Cheney (refer to video at 22:53 in), apparently our government is currently supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan enabling them to launch attacks on Iranian police and military troops along the border (a proxy war). So, if our creation turned against us on 9/11, why are we still working with them?

By Ryan Singel     08.29.07 | 2:00 AM

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

It’s a “comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems,” says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

Slideshow
Snapshots of the FBI Spy Docs

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.

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