This, from the Sunday Times of London, is a story that has to be bats**t crazy, because if it's true, it's terrifying. It's about treason high up in the US government. Excerpt:
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.
However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”
She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.
“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.
Edmonds was sacked after six months for complaining about this sort of thing internally, the Times reports. The newspaper further says that the Office of Inspector General investigated her firing, and validated her complain that she'd been let go for being a bona fide whistleblower.
I'm skeptical of the Times story because it relies on a single source. But there is this at the end:
In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.
Well, what is "overlapping corroboration"? We need to know a lot more. Still, the story is fascinating, and it hasn't gotten any play in the US, perhaps because American reporters can't find corroborating sources, and given the incendiary accusations by Edmonds, quite rightly don't want to go to print based on her word alone. Brian Doherty at Reason's blog cites a provocative column from the leftie muckrakers at CounterPunch, which suggests that there may be a connection with the mysterious case of the missing B-52 last year:
If Edmonds' story is correct, and Al-Qaeda, with the aid of Turkish government agents and Pakistani intelligence, with the help of US government officials, has been attempting to obtain nuclear materials and nuclear information from the U.S., it casts an even darker shadow over the mysterious and still unexplained incident last August 30, when a B-52 Stratofortress, based at the Minot strategic air base in Minot, ND, against all rules and regulations of 40 years' standing, loaded and flew off with six unrecorded and unaccounted for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.That incident only came to public attention because three as yet unidentified Air Force whistleblowers contacted a reporter at the Military Times newspaper, which ran a series of stories about it, some of which were picked up by other US news organizations.
An Air Force investigation into that incident, ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, claimed improbably that the whole thing had been an "accident," but many veterans of the US Air Force and Navy with experience in handling nuclear weapons say that such an explanation is impossible, and argue that there had to have been a chain or orders from above the level of the base commander for such a flight to have occurred.
Incredibly, almost five months after that bizarre incident (which included several as yet unexplained deaths of B-52 pilots and base personnel occurring in the weeks shortly before and after the flight), in which six 150-kiloton warheads went missing for 36 hours, there has been no Congressional investigation and no FBI investigation into what happened.
Yet in view of Edmonds' story to the London Times, alleging that there has been an ongoing, active effort for some years by both Al Qaeda and by agents of two US allies, Turkey and Pakistan, to get US nuclear weapons secrets and even weapons, and that there are treasonous moles at work within the American government and nuclear bureaucracy aiding and abetting those efforts, surely at a minimum, a major public inquiry is called for.
The truth is out there...
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"Overlapping corrobration" could only mean that some or all fo the whistleblower's account can be confirmed. But again, it's tough to say how far that goes-fully confirm, or simply confirm contacts between the traitor and the Turks. And could the contacts have been entirely innocent. But what would give me pause is 2 FBI guys and 2 CIA guys know that when they're so quoted on background, it's going to be touted as well beyond innocent or incidental and likely much more criminal and and traitorous.
There aren't any nuclear secrets - atomic weapons are 1940's technology.
By my (admittedly limited) understanding of nuclear weapons technology, this statement is only partly true. The basics of nuclear weapons design are (at the very least) accessible to someone with enough education in physics & engineering; see the '60s-era "Nth Country Experiment".
Nuclear weapons design has advanced considerably since Fat Man & Little Boy, however. E.g., boosted fission & H-bombs. Much engineering has also gone into making nukes lighter & more compact. IIRC, it's the details of these later developments that are considered "secret".
As to the B-52 incident, a conspiracy is always _possible_, but in the absence of convincing evidence to that effect, I'll stick with my default presumption tends to be, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Even people handling nuclear weapons can make mistakes.
As to the B-52 incident, a conspiracy is always _possible_, but in the absence of convincing evidence to that effect, I'll stick with my default presumption tends to be, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Even people handling nuclear weapons can make mistakes. ... and then many die of strange unexplained accidents or suicides over the next few weeks.
But they're just very very accident-prone there. Some of the one who would have been involved in the process and could have noticed something was wrong even managed to die in the weeks before. It's like a lethal Three Stogies movie over there in the nuclear device handling area, people were dropping like flies.
The B-52 thing is one of those literally insane X-File things that absolutely everyone was assuring couldn't happen by accident, but no one ever managed to explain it.
It's one thing accidentally fail to do something, it's another to go to where the nukes are stored, which isn't anywhere near anything else, pick them up without being challenged in anyway, which should be impossible, ignore the warnings all over them, and drive them to the plane and install them. Planes don't normally fly around in the US with even live conventional bombs. This is somewhat akin to 'accidentally' disassembling someone's car and reassembling it in their dorm room.
Check it out, people, if you don't know what happened with that B-52, it is the freakish thing we've ever heard, and all the deaths on top of it make it even weirder and are clearly a cover up of some sort, and no one ever even managed to come up with a plausible explanation of what was even being attempted.
..until now.
DavidTC wrote, "and no one ever even managed to come up with a plausible explanation of what was even being attempted."
I'll bite. I'd say that the six warheads were already missing, and they were replaced somewhere between Minot and Barksdale.
I'll bite. I'd say that the six warheads were already missing, and they were replaced somewhere between Minot and Barksdale.
Well, yes, if we assume that people high up in the government and military are stealing nuclear secrets, then, yes, it looks like we've been flim-flammed and what actually happened is that in all this nuke movement, twelve of them were used and six of them were actually stolen. Or, alternatively, six of them were going to be stolen, but the plan was foiled.
Before we knew about apparent traitors in the government, the sanest explanation is that this was some sort of secret planning for a military strike, although that made little sense, as there are plenty of nukes already on aircraft carriers.
The fact that the Bush administration is actively attempting to cover this up by silencing this person looks REALLY bad. I won't just to the conclusion that many people will, that they are behind this entire thing, but covering up treason and the attempted or actual theft of nuclear devices so you don't look bad is...I'm actually out of negative superlatives to describe this administration, but I'll come up with something eventually.
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