Who's Afraid of Sibel Edmonds? An interview with Philip Giraldi in The American Conservative Magazine is out today and is available online. For those following her case, you are well aware she was able to finally testify under oath by deposition without interference from the F.B.I. or DOJ recently in the Schmidt v. Krikorian Case. This interview follows her long journey to get to this point. It has been a long hard road since Ashcroft made her the most gagged person in the United States
Some highlights include the following:
Read the story here: The American Conservative
The American Conservative
After all this, I think we need to ask legitimate questions of our elected officials about how this kind of activity affects our national security. We also need to question media sources and many respected well known bloggers on why they deferred from real discussion on this matter.
SIBEL EDMONDS: During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background, I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.
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Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as "Susurluk" by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.
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Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England, Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service. To keep him from testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while "most wanted" by Interpol, he came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996.