Here are several important Sibel Edmonds' links.
http://baltimorechronicle.com/050704SibelEdmonds.shtml
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=2917
http://www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/230904_edmonds.html
http://www.antiwar.com/edmonds/
There is a good reason that the Justice Dept. is putting a muzzle on former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds.
Chris Deliso: Hmm, well I know you can't name names, but can you tell me if any specific officials will suffer if your testimony comes out?
Sibel Edmonds: Yes. Certain elected officials will stand trial and go to prison
Edmonds has made several damaging accusations. She has questioned many facets of the Translations Department operation at the FBI. She has questioned the hiring practices, the qualifications of employees, the accountability procedures and much more. She also claims that the FBI had a lot of advance warning that 9/11 was coming and should have issued major FAA warnings no later than spring of 2001.
And she claims that certain well known politicians in this country have been receiving illegal campaign contributions from organizations involved in drugs and arms trafficking, and terrorism.
That is a lot of information to process. But the most important, or interesting, fact about Sibel Edmonds is that she does not speak Arabic.
Chris Deliso: So you were in the first category, a full linguist?
Sibel Edmonds: For Turkish and Azerbaijani I was, yes. But since I hadn't been practicing Farsi for practically 25 years, I was just allowed to be a monitor in that language. I passed all the FBI exams in written Farsi, but not all for speaking. So I didn't do, say, live interviews.
Edmonds was hired after 9/11, but one her first jobs was to look at previously untranslated (backlogged) intercepts and documents that might shed light on the 9/11 plot. These documents would not have been in Arabic, since she didn't know Arabic. Some might have been in Farsi (Persian/Iranian), but she was not qualified as a full linguist in that language. The bulk of them would have been in Azeri (Azerbaijani) or in Turkish. Edmonds claims to have been the only full linguist in Turkish on staff at the FBI.
(Pertaining to the FBI sending an unqualified Turkish translator-Kevin- to Guantanomo):
Sibel Edmonds: Aside from sending Kevin, the FBI had only two options, neither of them good for them. They could send me, as I was the only qualified Turkish linguist, but this raised a red flag considering that I had already started to make a fuss about how the game was being played. Their other choice was to humbly ask the NSA or DIA or another agency to borrow a Turkish-language translator. But they couldn't do this because there is all this intra-agency competition.
From other comments she has made, it is clear that she was only the second full linguist on staff in Azeri.
From the preponderance of the evidence, I believe that she discovered evidence of the 9/11 plot in the Azeri language. Why would that be?
In August 1998, the Azerbaijani branch of the "Islamic Jihad" organization, which by then had merged with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda, reportedly coordinated the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people and wounded nearly 4,600. The FBI was able to trace about 60 phone calls made from the satellite phone used by Bin Laden to his associates in Baku and from them to operatives in East Africa. The U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan also feared an attack, but as a local radical claimed, they did not attack the Embassy so as "not to spoil their good relations in Azerbaijan" (Zerkalo 7/22/00; Bill of Indictment in U.S.A. vs. Bin Laden et. al. 4/01; Washington Post 5/3/01; Ekho 8/28/01).
By 1998, Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization (Egyptian Islamic Jihad) had taken up residence in Baku, Azerbaijan. It also merged with bin-Laden's organization that year and issued a fatwa targeting American civilians. Zawahiri had spent time in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Albania, Bulgaria and Poland. All of these places are major transit lines for the heroin trade from Asia into Europe.
That fact is extremely important because Edmonds claims that she discovered evidence of the 9/11 plot in intercepts that were not part of counter-terrorism investigations, but that were part of counter-intelligence investigations related to money laundering. And that money laundering was for cleansing the proceeds from arms and drug smuggling.
Most likely, she was translating intercepts of Azerbaijani businessmen or politicians that were involved in laundering large quantities of cash raised by Afghan heroin smuggling. She has also made clear that the drug dealers and the arms dealers are mixed up together and that the divisions become blurred between these organizations.
So, what kind of people have experience in money laundering, arms smuggling, and drug smuggling, but who also are known to have been involved in Azerbaijan?
The most famous Americans with such experience are the veterans of the Laos war during Vietnam. Many of them were later implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, which, of course, involved money laundering, arms, and drug smuggling. Among these crafty spooks are such veterans as Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, Farhad Azima and Richard Armitage. To this list, we must also add a little known charlatan named Gary Best.
Do any of these folks have any interest in Azerbaijan? In fact, yes, they all do. They also have links to the mujahideen from the Soviet-Afghan War.
For the links between Secord, Aderholt, and Best, see Spooks in Azerbaijan
For the links between Richard Armitage, Farhad Azima and Azerbaijan see:
U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
Please note the other political luminaries that are members of the USACC.
But do any of these folks have any relationship to the 9/11 hijackers? Good question. Yes, they do.
The owner of the Flight School where Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained is Wallace J. Hilliard. And Wally Hilliard seems to be an acquaintance of Farhad Azima, as we can see here:
Business Partners
less than three weeks after hijackers Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi began flying lessons on July 6, 2000... A Lear jet belonging to "the true owner of Huffman Aviation, financier Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, Fla., was seized by federal agents at the Orlando Executive Airport after they discovered 43 pounds of heroin onboard." -Green Bay Press Gazette 3-22-2004
More in the next episode...