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FBI docs confirm criminal investigation of "Turkish activities" - Ed Jewett - 19-03-2010

Official Documents Confirm Major Criminal Investigations of Turkish Operatives in Chicago

Wednesday, 17. March 2010
Newly Released FBI Documents Support Explosive Claims by Former FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds [Image: FOIAcollage2.bmp]Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI.
The documents released under FOIA are almost completely redacted, but they do support many of Edmonds’ claims, including:
There were a number of very serious FBI investigations into “Turkish activity in Chicago” involving a number of targets, including TACA
These investigations were related to “National Security” among other things.
These investigations were regarded as so sensitive that no files were to be uploaded to FBI’s computer system.
Congressional corruption was involved.
The FBI repeatedly conducted actual “physical surveillance” against Turkish and American targets.
Some of these investigations were shut down in 2001.
The documents comprise primarily of internal FBI ECs (Electronic Communications) between FBI offices. Most of the ECs are titled “Turkish American Cultural Association” although one from Feb 2000 is titled “Turkish Investigations in Chicago” which indicates that there were at least seven different pending investigations into Turkish activity in Chicago, and another later document from July 2001 indicates that there were at least ten investigations into TACA alone.
The earliest document is a November 1999 EC from the FBI’s National Security Division (NS-2D) to FBI field offices in Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles and New York (although there is a reference to a September 1999 EC from NSD.) The timing is significant. In an article in The American Conservative by Phil Giraldi, Ms. Edmonds notes that although there were investigations into Turkish activity dating back to 1996, most of that activity was being monitored by Counter-Intelligence based on FISA warrants because the main targets were foreigners, however in 1999 investigations were opened into ‘US Persons‘ and “they wiretapped the congressmen directly.”
The FBI was obviously concerned about ‘campaign donations’ being paid to Congressional Representatives by these groups. Ms. Edmonds has repeatedly referred to certain groups making “different kinds of campaign contributions – legal and illegal, declared and undeclared” to various congressional members. Two days after an EC from the National Security Division, Chicago reviewed the Federal Electoral Commission (FEC) database which contains details of donations to congressional campaigns. Chicago was apparently interested in donations made by “three individuals who attended the meeting at TACA.”
[Image: ClintonCelebi.png]The FBI was also interested in the leadership of TACA. One EC notes that TACA held elections in 2000 and provides a list of all the newly elected officials. The EC states “Most pertinent to the above investigations was the fact that REDACTED had been REDACTED.” We know that Mehmet Celebi was elected President of TACA at that meeting. Ms. Edmonds has previously referred to Celebi as a key player in the Turkish mafia in the US, noting that the Celebi family is involved in arms and heroin trafficking. Celebi was also Vice-President of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations (ATAA), another organization named by Ms. Edmonds and others as being involved in various criminal activities.
In 2008, Celebi briefly received some attention when he was key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, and was nominated as one of Clinton’s Chicago delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He was eventually kicked out of the Clinton campaign because of the scrutiny.
At the time, Ms. Edmonds said:
“In 2005, Vanity Fair reported that Dennis Hastert had been bribed by Turkish interests. If people want to investigate this further they should FOIA the FBI’s Chicago Field Office for information regarding Mehmet Celebi going back to 1997. If the FBI is honest, there will be boxes and boxes of files responsive to these FOIA requests.“
Famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg once said that “Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.”
The aforementioned Vanity Fair article, apparently trying to dodge some potential legal liability, suggested that “the reported content of the Chicago wiretaps may well have been sheer bravado, and there is no evidence that any payment was ever made to Hastert,” however a July 2001 ECregarding the “Statistical Accomplishments” of the TACA case notes that there were thirteen separate instances of actual ‘Physical Surveillance’ in the TACA case alone, suggesting that the FBI may very well have first-hand evidence of some of these crimes.
One fascinating feature of many of these documents is that many of them ominously warn about the sensitivity of the investigation. A typical warning reads:
“Extreme caution must be exercised in the handling of sensitive information contained within. No material pertaining to this investigation is to be computer uploaded. Information concerning this REDACTED investigation is not to be shared with CID (Criminal Investigation Division) absent FBIHQ/DOJ concurrence.“
Ms. Edmonds has often stated that these investigations into illegal Turkish activity were shut down by the White House and State Department in 2001 and 2002, but that the FBI Chicago Office fought to keep them open. Two of the ten cases related to TACA were officially closed by Chicago in July 2001, however even the documents relating to these ‘closed’ cases still warned that the information required ‘extreme caution’ and were not to be uploaded or shared with CID.
Asked to comment on these new documents, Ms. Edmonds replied:
“Finally! I’ve been saying this for years, and now we finally have documented proof from the FBI of this Turkish criminal activity based in Chicago.
This is fantastic, but even this is only the tip of the iceberg. The main question is this: Why has the White House and the State Dept been so determined to shut these investigations down? They shut down these investigations at the FBI, they shut me down with the State Secrets Privilege.
What are they hiding? Chicago was the center of it all, Chicago was the center of the foreign espionage activity, and the center for money laundering, and also a major heroin distribution center. Celebi was a key player, but Dennis Hastert, Mayor Daley, Robert Creamer and other US officials also helped facilitate these activities. When will we see some accountability?“
That is the ultimate question. We now have even more evidence of these crimes – but there is still no sign of any accountability. What will it take?


http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2010/03/17/official-documents-confirm-major-criminal-investigations-of-turkish-operatives-in-chicago/



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Ex-FBI Translator Claims Spying at DoD

October 21, 2009
Military.com|by Bryant Jordan




After seven years of forced silence, a government whistleblower is opening up on what she learned while working as a Turkish translator for the FBI in the wake of 9/11.
In sworn testimony to attorneys on Aug. 8, Sibel Edmonds described a Pentagon where key personnel helped pass defense secrets to foreign agents or provided them names of knowledgeable officials who were vulnerable to blackmail or co-option.
And firmly rooted in this espionage program in the 1990s, according to Edmonds’ deposition, were two men who, with the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000, found themselves in the Pentagon: Douglas Feith, who would head the Office of Special Plans, and Richard Perle, who would become chairman of the Defense Advisory Board.
"They were 100 percent directly involved," Edmonds told Military.com. "They were not in the Pentagon [in the late 1990s] but they had their people inside the Pentagon." One of those people, she said, was Larry Franklin, an Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans who, in 2003, passed classified information to representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Office, or AIPAC. By then Feith was leading the OSP.
Edmonds cautioned that she does not know if these practices are continuing, since she was fired by the FBI in April 2002 after pressing for an investigation into an attempt by a colleague to recruit her for an organization that was itself a target of FBI surveillance.
Perle, today a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and board member for or adviser to other think tanks, including the National Institute for Neareast Affairs and the Center for Security Policy, emphatically denied Edmonds’ claims in an interview with Military.com.
“This woman is a nutcase. Certifiable,” Perle said. “She makes wild accusations. She was fired from her job, and has been on a vendetta against … imagined demons ever since.”
Feith, in an email to Military.com, said: “What I’ve read on the Internet about Ms. Edmonds’s claims about me is wildly false and bizarre.”
Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh declined comment, saying any investigation into such allegations would be carried out by the FBI. An FBI spokesman said the bureau’s policy is not to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.
Edmonds, who has degrees from George Washington University and George Mason University, speaks Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. She got into the world of FBI investigations and counter-intelligence after 9/11, when the FBI contacted her about coming to work as a Turkish translator. In short order she was on the job and translating documents going as far back as the mid-90s, as well as assisting special agents in the field who were monitoring both “foreign entities” and the public officials linked to them.
But not long after she joined the bureau another Turkish translator came on board – Malec Can Dickerson. And in December 2001 Dickerson and her husband, Douglas, then an Air Force major, tried to recruit her to join American Turkish Council -- an organization that was actually being monitored by the FBI.
Edmonds reported the attempted recruitment, but no action was taken. She said she soon found evidence that Malec Can Dickerson included false information on her FBI job application. Again, no response from officials, she said.
When the FBI finally did act, in March 2002, it was to fire her. When she appealed her termination and eventually sued, the Justice Department, then under John Ashcroft, invoked a “state’s secret’ privilege to prevent her from talking about what she knew. When Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, looked into her case and found it credible, Ashcroft invoked the same gag order on them.
The Justice Department’s own Inspector General’s report was barred from release by Ashcroft, though when an unclassified version finally became available in 2005 it concluded that “many of Edmonds’s core allegations relating to the co-worker [Malec Can Dickerson] had some basis in fact and were supported by either documentary evidence or witnesses other than Edmonds.” And though the Justice Department’s IG found the evidence didn’t prove that the co-worker had disclosed classified information, it said the FBI should have investigated the claims more thoroughly.
Since being fired, Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, made up of current or former federal employees or contractors who have exposed waste, and abuse in government operations.
Edmonds made her testimony in connection with a complaint filed with the Ohio Elections Commission by U.S. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, against her 2008 opponent, David Krikorian. Krikorian, who ran as an independent, claimed in a political ad that Schmidt took “blood money” from the Turkish government to deny the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in the first part of the 20th century. Krikorian’s lawyers wanted Edmonds to testify about pressure that Turkish lobbyists have brought to bear in the U.S. to keep politicians from discussing the attempted genocide.
Earlier this month the commission concluded that Krikorian’s “blood money” allegation showed a reckless disregard for the truth, since there was no evidence that money donated to Schmidt by a Turkish-American political action committee came from the Turkish government, according to a report by The Associated Press.
The commission did not make any findings regarding Edmonds’ testimony.
One of Edmonds’ believers is John M. Cole, a former FBI counterintelligence analyst and author of “While America Sleeps: An FBI Whistleblower's Story.” Cole, who worked for the bureau 18 years and now works for the Defense Intelligence Agency at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., said the pattern of espionage described by Edmonds is familiar to him.
“In the 1990s I was responsible for Western Europe and Israel [counterintelligence cases],” Cole told Military.com. “We did have ongoing investigations of officials in the State Department and also the Department of Defense.” And he said cases did extend outside the Pentagon, to various Air Force Bases and the RAND Corp. – something Edmonds also stated in her testimony.
Cole said he could not identify the people investigated or detail the cases, nor could he say whether anyone named by Edmonds figured into any of his cases.
After seven years of silence, Edmonds said she was glad to be able to finally divulge some of what she had been forced to keep in, but she doubted any government agency would seriously pursue her claims. There is no indication the current Justice Department is reopening an investigation, she said, and neither politicians nor mainstream media have shown an interest.
“I did it [testified] under oath,” she said. “I have a very successful financial life, I’ve been married 18 years. I have a family, I have a daughter, I have lot to lose. I’d have to be either mentally insane or someone who doesn’t have anything to lose, [who] just makes allegations and lies under oath,” to claim these things if they were not true.
Edmonds claims that much of the Pentagon information found its way into the hands of both Israeli and Turkish operatives through the State Department, courtesy of Marc Grossman, then assistant secretary of state for political affairs, the third-highest ranking member at State. As she described in her Aug. 8 testimony, “certain people from Pentagon would send a list of individuals with access to sensitive data, whether weapons technology or nuclear technology, and this information would include all their sexual preference, how much they owed on their homes, if they have gambling issues, and [Grossman] would provide it to these foreign operatives, and those foreign operatives would go and hook those Pentagon people.”
Edmonds also noted that Douglas Dickerson had previously worked with Grossman in Turkey and, though assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency when she met him, was working for Feith’s OSP and also as a coordinator with the State Department on the Turkey Republics in Central Asia
Robert S. Tyrer, co-president of The Cohen Group, a Washington lobbying firm where Grossman is now a vice chairman, told Military.com in an email that Edmonds’ allegations against the former ambassador “are completely untrue and ludicrous.”
According to Edmonds, those sought out by Turkish and Israeli agents might actually be working outside the Pentagon. As a result, she testified, the foreign operatives managed to put on their payroll individuals "on almost every major nuclear facility in the United States, RAND Corporation and ... various Air Force labs that develop certain weapons technology."
And the Defense Department wasn’t the only power center targeted by foreign agents and their U.S. helpers, she says. On Capitol Hill, she said, the late congressman Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., disclosed “highest level” intelligence and weapons technology to both Israel and Turkey.
The foreign operatives, themselves, Edmonds told Military.com, were motivated by both nationalism and profit. After providing Israeli or Turkish interests with what they wanted from pilfered secrets, she said, they might offer what was left to the highest bidder.
“There is a black market for everything, including for nuclear-related information, weapons technology,” she told Military.com. “Of course some of these people [operatives] are ‘double-dipping.’”


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http://www.military.com/news/article/ex-fbi-translator-claims-spying-at-dod.html

FBI docs confirm criminal investigation of "Turkish activities" - David Guyatt - 19-03-2010

Quote:The documents released under FOIA are almost completely redacted...
And

Quote:We know that Mehmet Celebi was elected President of TACA at that meeting Ms. Edmonds has previously referred to Celebi as a key player in the Turkish mafia in the US, noting that the Celebi family is involved in arms and heroin trafficking.
And

Quote:In 2008, Celebi briefly received some attention when he was key fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.
which may explain why

Quote:These investigations were regarded as so sensitive that no files were to be uploaded to FBI’s computer system.
And

Quote:He was eventually kicked out of the Clinton campaign because of the scrutiny.
Does this mean only because he couldn’t stand up to scrutiny and not because he was a Turkish mafia narco-trafficker? In other words he was potentially bad PR?

Which may explain the following comments about the White House shutting down the investigations:

Quote:Ms. Edmonds replied:

“The main question is this: Why has the White House and the State Dept been so determined to shut these investigations down? They shut down these investigations at the FBI, they shut me down with the State Secrets Privilege.

What are they hiding? “

Prior involvement of former presidents and their first ladies in dirty money kickbacks perhaps?