Whistleblower
the White House wants to silence speaks out
02 April
2004
A former translator for the
FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel
investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qaida's
plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the
National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was
"an outrageous lie".
Sibel Edmonds said she spent
more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing
information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001
suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in
place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a
gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".
She told The Independent
yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the
specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the
investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is
not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very
easily."
She added: "There was
general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically
about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these
sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with
skyscrapers."
The accusations from Mrs
Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish and English, will
reignite the controversy over whether the administration ignored warnings about al-Qaida.
That controversy was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism
official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings.
The issue what the
administration knew and when is central to the investigation by the 9/11 Commission,
which has been hearing testimony in public and private from government officials,
intelligence officials and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House made a
U-turn when it said that Ms Rice would appear in public before the commission to answer
questions. Mr Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, will also be questioned in a closed-door
session.
Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she
gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at
its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's
Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qaida attacks.
Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.
She said said it was clear
there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate
terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission 90 per
cent of it related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in
the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of
other things as well."
"President Bush said
they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because
he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the
use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.
To try to refute Mr Clarke's
accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qaida. But in an
opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: "Despite what
some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack
the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists
might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists."
Mrs Edmonds said that by
using the word "we", Ms Rice told an "outrageous lie". She said:
"Rice says 'we' not 'I'. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA
[Defense Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible."
It is impossible at this
stage to verify Mrs Edmonds' claims. However, some senior US senators testified to her
credibility in 2002 when she went public with separate allegations relating to alleged
incompetence and corruption within the FBI's translation department. |
