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Sibel Edmonds Case: FBI files "formal complaint" with Sunday Times
By Luke Ryland (about the author) Page 3 of 5 page(s)
Horton: There is a whole list of her "Rogues Gallery" and so forth there at justacitizen.com, but particularly when we're talking about the State Dept, the accusations, and this is obviously the guy that your article centers around is Marc Grossman, and then she says Perle and Feith at the Defense Dept, right?
Lauria: Well I can't comment on the names
Horton: OK, well, anyone can Google that and look it right up. OK, secondly, as far as her credibility goes, because there is a State Secrets Privilege gag, and she has only been able to say so much, you said you've talked to these three FBI agents just a couple of months ago in June who confirmed some of this story for you. Obviously you had other sources besides Sibel for the series in the Sunday Times, I wonder if you could elaborate on that, maybe the Inspector General's report, statements of various senators, that kind of thing, so that people understand that when you're talking about. You know, we're talking about American moles, and Turkish moles, and Pakistani moles, and America's nuclear program, this is some pretty out-there kind of stuff, so I want people to understand that what they're hearing is not some comic book. This is actually real!
Lauria: Well, a lot of... journalism is a credibility game, so we have to believe, first of all, our source, and we do believe Sibel. The issue then becomes corroborating what she says, because we need facts. You can't just go on whether we believe someone or not, and then the people we speak to we have to be able to believe them. And as I pointed out, there are not that many people who are aware of what is going on. There are the participants in the ring, who are never going to speak, of course, and there are the investigators in the FBI, and in the CIA - I didn't bring that up, we could talk about the Valerie Plame connection that we uncovered in this story too - and then there are analysts like Philip Giraldi, the former CIA station chief in Istanbul, I believe, who knows Sibel, knows a lot about the case, who can provide on-the-record points of view that allow the reader to understand that this is not a comic-book episode, that this is very, very plausible, and totally within reason that this story that Sibel is telling us could happen - that high-level government officials could be involved in facilitating this.
And you go back to AQ Khan's network in the 70s and the Reagan administration, you can even go back further to the Carter administration when they tried to go after the Pakistanis to try to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon. Then when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, they needed Pakistan to help arrange the payment and the training of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, so they suddenly turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear program. And the Reagan administration almost actively helped them do this because the Chinese were giving information to Pakistan, and they wanted the Chinese nuclear business for Westinghouse, it's obvious that the administrations starting from Carter and all the way has helped the AQ Khan network - at least by either protecting it, or even actively helping it, so this is just another phase of it. This story is not off-the-wall, if you started from the 70s you could start a direct line - Sibel just came in and heard what was going on from 95 to at least 2002 and possibly still today.
So as I was saying, we have the three types of sources: there's Sibel who has gone on the record at great risk to herself, although I don't think they want to move on her because that would create the US media attention that our stories have not been able to create. There are those who are directly involved in the investigation - the FBI and CIA - and there are the analysts. So we've got analysts on the record saying things, but we need really FBI and CIA people to corroborate the details of what she is telling us, which we believe. We believed enough to write it in our stories without a lot of direct corroboration, because we believed that we should put her claims out there, and those FBI agents that I spoke to at length, and I got into the home of one for an hour and a half, and I spoke several times in front of the homes of another one.
The FBI made a formal complaint with the Sunday Times to keep me away from his house - why would they do that? Why was Sibel gagged if what she was saying is true? But the fact that these FBI agents spoke in general terms to me about her, made claims that she's not crazy, that she was not a fantasist, but that they could not go into details for the reasons I describe, may fall short perhaps of where we'd like to be, because we have a lot more stuff that she has given us, but we have not run the stories. I'm happy that a lot of the bloggers in the US and the foreign press has picked up on these stories, it has been total silence in the US, and there are people eager maybe to see more stories coming out in our series, and we're eager to get them out there, but we need more corroboration on the slew of more details that Sibel has given us - names, dates, places - that we believe but we cannot confirm yet because we can't get sources within the FBI to go on the record - even off the record, we don't need them to go on the record - we just need to know that they're giving us what they know, and I believe they know this, and I believe they want to talk, they would like to, they are just afraid, and you can hardly blame. You have to put sometimes - and this may sound corny - the good of the country and real national security, not the phony stuff that the Bush administration is talking about and all the false fears that cover-up operations just like this. And they can not go on the record for the reasons we've been saying, and so that's where we are right now in terms of corroboration.
Horton: OK - now, this has come up - the Tinners you brought up in talking about the corroboration, the people kind of shared with you the history of America's relationship with the Pakistani nuclear program, please provide me with some clarity - the AQ Khan network - well, as you said, they sort of at least turned a blind eye to it in the 1980s because they needed Pakistan's help with the war against the Russians in Afghanistan and that kind of thing, does that last all the way through? Was Sibel over-hearing people who were actually part of a secret mission to co-operate with the AQ Khan network? And she mistakenly thinks they were being criminals when actually perhaps it was just officially-sanctioned criminality?
Lauria: No, we've never seen anything she told us as official US policy, but more of high-ranking US officials acting in an individual capacity in a rogue way. We don't have any evidence, nor did she provide any evidence that this has been official US policy, but we do know that the Turkish and Israeli students getting this information, turning it over to Turkish businessmen, who then sold it - and everybody was getting paid along the way here - don't forget it's about money - including some of the high ranking US officials - they turned it over to ISI.
One of the reasons that they used the Turks is because it would not look good for the Pakistan intelligence to be working inside the US. You know, it's interesting, another point of view with the Bush administration suddenly turning against the ISI for some reason in the last few weeks - but certainly they have worked closely with the CIA for Afghanistan, and also inside the US here in getting this information into the hands of the ISI, and AQ Khan worked obviously very closely together. So why don't you drop these new designs, new parts, new information was sold - Iran, Libya, North Korea, perhaps, with the help of US Government officials. Now if this were a sting operation, as we understand, I've heard second hand that some correspondents in Washington have been told by their intelligence sources to stay away from this Sunday Times series because this is a big sting going on, and if you publish this you'll ruin the thing - but I mean, as Dan Ellsberg pointed out to me, and I think he's probably said to your show earlier, if that were the case, well they did a bad job, because Iran, North Korea, Libya - so-called enemies of the US got that bomb, or that information about the bomb, and they didn't move early enough to do that. So this is obviously not true - I don't believe that it was a sting. I think that is not true, I think that these officials were facilitating this.
Horton: There's a sort of an assumption there that if the CIA was working with this AQ Khan network that it would have to have been in order to stop them, but - like you said - they've been helping these guys since the 1970s. What indicates that they would want to stop them?
Lauria: Well, who in the CIA and the FBI? Not every rank and file FBI agent and CIA agent is told that we're protecting these guys because we want them to have the weapons, we want to enrich ourselves, or for other strategic reasons, but only top officials who were implicated will put a stop on the investigations so we saw Valerie Plame working, investigating, just as the FBI agents I spoke to were investigating this same nuclear ring that Sibel has laid out for all of us, and when Valerie Plame got too close at the American Turkish Council - again, the nexus of this operation in the US, and where she met her husband Joe Wilson - she was there and this high-ranking US government official...
In an anonymous letter that we got through a think tank in Washington said that this high-ranking government official - and it names him - he alerted a Turkish front company called White Energy that was part of the nuclear procurement network inside the US to stay away from Brewster Jennings, which was the CIA front company - that this Turkish front company wanted to hire...
Horton: Ah - and this is long before Robert Novak said anything about it on TV
Lauria: Yeah, yeah. Look, there are two parts to the Valerie Plame thing, we believe. The first part is this is in August 2001 that this high-ranking US official told the Turkish company to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they were actually investigating this ring. That blew the cover of Brewster Jennings and it happened to be that Valerie Plame was an important agent within Brewster Jennings that was in the ATC - so in effect, it blew Valerie Plame's cover amongst the people that she was investigating, not publicly. What happened with Novak is that it became public knowledge when he wrote it in his column - that very much may have been motivated it seems by Cheney's office to punish her husband because he tried to reveal that the evidence for the war in Iraq was phony - but that was a separate angle. The mainstream press was very very happy about the Novak story, they think they've got it, and they're not interested in going back to when Valerie's identity was first revealed, more seriously, than by Robert Novak.
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