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FBI Burying Doc Showing US Officials Stole Nuclear Secrets?
BoingBoing is reporting that the FBI may be burying the existence of a document that proves US officials stole nuclear secrets for eventual sale to 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.'"
Government agency lies; news at 11.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
... try the original Times article..
The BoingBoing writeup is so irritatingly fragmentary it's hard to tell what it's even saying. Which is a good description of BoingBoing in general, actually.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Maybe if CNN or another major news outlet picked this up it would gain the attention it deserves.
Go Illini!!!
If you think this is scary, try to imagine all the things that we don't know about.
7. Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies.
8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called "divine manipulation of the threads." It is the sovereign's most precious faculty.
9. Having local spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district.
10. Having inward spies, making use of officials of the enemy.
11. Having converted spies, getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes.
12. Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.
13. Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy's camp.
14. Hence it is that which none in the whole army are more intimate relations to be maintained than with spies. None should be more liberally rewarded. In no other business should greater secrecy be preserved.
Oh yeah, we're so stupid that we're going to let some reporter just find this filing we're trying to hide... NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
The Art of war has been around since 5 BC, misinformation has been around longer than that...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
So it's up to the foreign press, in this case the Times Online. (Makes my head hurt that a Murdoch-owned outlet counts as the best source of investigative, or at least reportive, journalism.)
"The FBI has been accused of covering up a file detailing government dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.ece
Which was itself a follow-up to
"For sale: West's deadly nuclear secrets" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece
Basically, the story was that Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator listening to comm intercepts looking for Middle Eastern "terrorists," discovered evidence of a network of US, Israeli, Turkish and Pakistani nuclear weapons secrets trading. She's told the FBI - they fired her. She told Congress - they placed her under a gag order and threatened to jail her if she talked about it. She's even agreed to tell the story to any American media outlet (which means she's willing to go to jail so people can know), as long as the outlet agrees to tell the whole story, and not edit it to hide the truth. So far, all American sources have refused to cover the story.
Interesting tidbit - the CIA front company, "Brester Jennings," for which Valerie Plame worked before she was outed by Cheney and company, had as its mission tracking nuclear weapons activity in the ME. Outing Plame meant the Brewster Jennings cover was completely blown, like a wiretap being discovered. Which means that Plame's outing, with its supposed rationale as payback for exposing Bush's lies about Iraq and uranium, may have been nothing more than a convenient two-fer with a great cover story, when the real goal was to take out CIA assets who were getting too close to something far more important.
Sibel Edmonds' web site is http://www.justacitizen.com/>here.
"I'd say what she has is far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers." - Daniel Ellsberg
I'm going to guess that we have a fundamental disagreement on what constitutes the best interests of national security.
I would imagine that a great many of those items classified as "matters of national security" are items that would damage the bureaucratic class, and would more or less do no harm to the security of the American people. Or, perhaps this abuse, if it exists, actually harms the people, by failing to show us what government truly is, and by keeping us ignorant and placated. After all, the bureaucratic class is damaged only by our indignation at its existence, no?
The specifications of advanced military technological research (i.e. the Manhatten Project), and the identities of covert operatives are the only two things off the top of my head that justify being classified. Note that this does NOT include the amounts spent on or general focus of military research, nor the purpose and spending on covert operations. I want to know what my government is doing, even in these areas, ESPECIALLY in these areas, because it is here that the greatest potential for abuse lies, in my opinion.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
The assertation is not that the FBI stole the secrets. The story alledges that the FBI covered up evidence that "high ranking US government officials" did the deed.
Won't someone at least hint at who those officials were, so that I can start making my ideological prejudgments on the credibility of the allegations?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I read about this the other day on fox so although you didn't see it on CNN other news sites apparently did.
People on slashdot haven't mentioned yet the reason for the gag order apparently is cause they want to investigate the officials and see whats going on.
I know its a good knee jerk reaction to yell conspiracy but if you caught a spy in your midst wouldn't you want to counter intel back instead of just firing him and posting the paperwork? This whistle blower might have blown an investigation for all we know.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Anyone on this thread should drop what they're doing and check out 'Kill the Messenger', a documentary produced for Canal+ Television by some French guys. They followed Sibel Edmonds around for a while and spelled out the basic scene here. Its an hour long on googlevideo:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1991080575212848283&q=kill+the+messenger&total=348&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
Also i have a special section on my website dedicated to the subject, tho the page is pretty half assed: http://www.hongpong.com/sibel_edmonds_9_11_the_turkish_spy_scandal
Essentially here is my understanding of what this weird scandal means:
Sibel edmonds was hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11 to digest the backlog of foreign-language wiretaps run by the counter intelligence division. However Sibel also could listen to English-language conversations recorded on those lines. Within three months she heard extensive conspiracies involving the American Turkish Council, which were being actively covered up by Melek Can Dickerson, who was working alongside Sibel in the translation unit.
However, there was also evidence that the FBI was tracking an international criminal network that includes the big name neocons (Feith and Perle among others) which was funnelling and covering for nuclear secrets pilfered from the national nuclear laboratories (ever notice their shitty security?) and routed to brokers in Pakistan, Turkey and Israel.
Additionally the Turks were caught by the FBI wiretaps doing cash/secret handoffs from the ATC to the State Department. Once 9/11 occurred, it seems that then-State Dept official Marc Grossman was helping get foreign spies who had foreknowledge of 9/11 out of the United States, after the FBI had become very interested in talking to these guys. The wiretaps and intelligence fragments finger real people - and Kill the Messenger details how Sibel was momentarily a famous 9/11 whistleblower because of this. 60 Minutes ran a special with very heavily edited footage and has never released the raw footage of the interview. (yes in fact even the highly controversial Israeli art student 9/11 conspiracy theory appears to fit here)
Finally, this criminal network was deeply opposed to the CIA's counter proliferation operations - attempting to block turkey and pakistan from getting more nuke bits. So therefore Scooter Libby fits in quite differently than widely known. He used to be a lawyer for billionaire israeli-american fugitive Marc Rich, the moneyman for arms trafficker Viktor Bout. These guys seem to roughly be part of this same network. There is apparently an FBI recorded conversation of Marc Grossman tipping off the Turks/and/or Pakis to Brewster Jennings' status as a covert front company. This was certainly treasonous!
Also there is an important revolving door dimension: lobbyists, retired generals, military industrial complex. Turkey is able to convert laundered drug money into funding for the military industrial purchases - its something like 25% of GDP.
this is all a great example of an orwellian cryptocracy getting tangled up in all the criminal evidence it observes. oops. kinda like the federal reserve logging all that drug money moving around.
i realize all of this sounds quite bottom-of-the-barrel everything and the kitchen sink kind of super conspiracy. But hey, it does in fact have odd threads that go back to the weirdest events of the Bush administration - and before. Sorry. I'm offering this stuff in good faith: there is just too much material to ignore.
--hongpong.com
It wasn't "inadvertent". That's the point.
Plame was never outed because of an attempt to use a charge of "nepotism" to discredit Joe Wilson. That cover story never made any sense. Who cares if the guy's wife was at the CIA and suggested him for the Niger investigation? It only barely made more sense if the concept was that the CIA was somehow deliberately sabotaging the Iraq war - which also never made any sense.
Plame was outed because her organization was investigating the nuclear black market including the A. Q. Khan network and its connections to Iran. That investigation would have inevitably led back to the people in the US State Department and the US nuclear agencies who were on the payroll of the black marketers. So Plame's operation had to be shut down.
Keep in mind that Scooter Libby was once Marc Rich's attorney - and Rich is supposed to be one of or the money man behind this operation. Exactly how deep Dick Cheney's involvement is unclear at this point, but there is no doubt that Marc Grossman at the State Department was involved in the outing, and it is likely that Libby got his information from him.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I believe the case of faked documents you are referring to was not directed at Iraq but at Iran and is not related to the FBI case document under discussion in the Times article.
The CIA recruited a Russian scientist to deliver faked nuclear design documents to Iran. Most of the documents were genuine, but there were flaws in the design.
The problem was that the Russian scientist quickly identified the flaws and realized that not only would the Iranian scientists see them quickly, too, destroying the idea that they were legitimate, but that the rest of the design would be valuable to the Iranians. He pointed this out to his CIA handler, who dismissed the concerns as not important.
So the Russian, before delivering the designs to his Iranian connection at the IAEA, added notes to them pointing out the flaws in an effort to make the documents more believable. He did this without the knowledge of his handler, apparently.
It is clear from this that the intent as explained to the Russian of trying to fool the Iranians into building a flawed design was ITSELF a cover story. The real purpose was simply to get the plans into Iranian hands, thus justifying the concept that Iran had a nuclear weapons program (for which there is zero evidence other than a laptop the providence of which no one can ascertain, and which is very likely a forgery along the lines of the Niger documents.)
The document under discussion is totally different. An anonymous letter sent to The Liberty Coalition, a DC-based transpartisan civil and human rights watchdog organization. A subsequent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, asking for information referring to that case number, resulted in a denial from the FBI that such a case exists. The letter referred to the FBI case document. The FBI case document, the contents of which Edmonds knows, was described by her as follows:
"The case in question, she told The BRAD BLOG, careful to avoid categorical defiance of her gag order, "concerns 1996 to 2002 information, targeting Turkish counter-intelligence, and it involves U.S. officials both appointed and elected."
What Edmonds has alleged, based on what she knows from documents she translated at the FBI, is that Marc Grossman, a State Department employee, tipped off the nuclear black marketers that Valerie Plame's organization was in fact a CIA operation. The anonymous letter which is referred to above also made this claim,
The document in question is an FBI case file, not a CIA operation. So it is not the same as the Iranian false flag operation.
Edmonds has made it clear that there is no "national security" involved in this situation. What is involved is the intent to protect certain elected and appointed government officials from charges of treason, which at the same time would embarrass several national governments such as Turkey, Israel, and others.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!