Desperately Seeking Sibel 
WHERE'S THE LIBERAL MEDIA?
Posted April 5, 2004 thepeoplesvoice.org

By: Ted Lang

Where's the "liberal" media when you really need them?  Haven't the popular talk radio shows and their anti-liberal agenda consistently offered that the media is liberal and anti-Bush?  Aren't they consistently criticized as always serving anyone and everyone that opposes the Republican Party and its sole mission to return US to constitutional government?

Now if this is true, then where is the "piling on" insofar as the charges advanced by one Sibel Edmonds, a former Bush administration FBI employee, who was requested to forge documents, and then threatened by the Republican Party's number two law enforcement man, Attorney General John Ashcroft, to "keep quiet" about it or face jail?  Intercepted al-Qaeda communiqués showed that President George W. Bush and his cabal of neoconservative warmongers were informed of the impending 9-11 carnage and elected to do nothing about it.

Where's the outrage on the part of The New York Times?  Where's the hammered follow-up on the part of CBS News, an organization that had interviewed Sibel Edmonds on one of their 60 Minutes segments?  If what Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly offer as a biased liberal press really exists, then why hasn't this liberal press jumped on this golden opportunity to hang President George W. Bush?  It is beginning to appear that a biased liberal press is far more desirable than the bought-and-paid-for-by government rubber-stamp one we are now burdened with.

After the astonishing revelation by Sibel Edmonds, amplification and additional information was virtually non-existent.  But The New York Times did finally weigh in.  Five NY Times reporters were involved in producing an article entitled, "Uneven Response Seen on Terror in Summer of 2001," dated April 4th.  The article listed reporters David Johnston and Eric Schmitt on the byline.  The article also offered that David E. Sanger, Richard W. Stevenson and Steven R. Weisman contributed their input as well.

Another article concerning the activities of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly referred to as the Kean 9-11 commission, headed by Chairman and former New Jersey Republican Governor Thomas Kean, was carried in the United Kingdom's Independent News.

It was only certain select sites on the Internet and the Independent that carried the story of Sibel Edmonds, a former translator and employee with the FBI, with a top-secret security clearance that had been desperately trying to provide input to Kean's 9-11 commission.  In an April 2nd article by Andrew Buncombe, the Independent's correspondent in Washington, entitled "I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes," Buncombe offers that Edmonds provided information to the 9-11 commission ".which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened."

And as investigative reporter Tom Flocco reported, Attorney General John Ashcroft threatened Edmonds with prison if she "talked," and reported that she was offered a bribe in the form of a permanent job with a substantial pay increase.  Why isn't this headline news?

Yet, the UK Independent provided the reader with a "heads-up" as to the next move by the Bush crime cabal in terms of the televised fiction planned for National Security advisor Condoleezza Rice's act before the 9-11 commission this Thursday, April 8th.  It would seem that the Times' article was a preview of Ms. Rice's scheduled performance; and as always, distraction and bait-and-switch is the name of the Bush game plan.

The thrust will be to admit that intelligence was available that US assets would indeed be targeted by al Qaeda, but that could be "anywhere in the world."  The next falsehood will be that the only thing suspected of possibly happening in the US prior to 9-11 with airplanes, would be a hijacking only, and that such hijackings were never suspected as intended suicide crashes into buildings.

The Independent, in another article by Buncombe on April 3rd entitled, "White House moves to defend Rice," begins, "The Bush administration has released a previously classified document about its plan to attack Osama bin Laden in an effort to protect its beleaguered National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, against claims that she failed to recognize the threat posed by al-Qa'ida.  After a week of damaging allegations that the administration failed to heed warnings that al-Qa'ida was planning to attack the US, the White House released information which showed that a week before 11 September 2001, President Bush ordered his military planners to draw up plans to strike the terror network."

What has this to do with 9-11?  Isn't it the mission of the 9-11 commission to inquire as to how the plot was drawn up, by whom, how coordinated, why the attacks were made, and when and where the attacks were decided upon? Shouldn't it be foremost to find out and document what failures existed in both our intelligence and military defense structures?  Planning pre-emptive attacks is no a substitute for answers to these questions.  And saying those in government were blindsided just aren't true.  Sibel Edmonds came forward and offered that the FBI, CIA, FAA, and the White House had intercepted documents proving al Qaeda as not only the conspiring culprits, but also documenting precisely how the attacks were going to be carried out.

It is highly doubtful that as well coordinated as those attacks were, that no mention was made in the intercepted information concerning the targets, the airports, or the cities involved.  Instead of answering Edmond's contentions, the Bush administration intends to divert the public's focus from their knowledge of the impending attack and non-action to intended attacks on al Qaeda.

Buncombe continues, "Ms. Rice's appearance - under oath and with the threat of perjury - has the potential to be hugely damaging for the Bush administration, given her previous comments. On 23 March Ms. Rice wrote in The Washington Post: 'Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles.' The panel members are likely to confront Ms. Rice with the findings of an earlier congressional inquiry that would appear to directly contradict Ms. Rice's comments. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence joint inquiry issued its report in December 2002. In its conclusions, it said: 'Beginning in 1998 and continuing into the summer of 2001, the intelligence community received a modest, but relatively steady, stream of intelligence reporting that indicated the possibility of terrorist attacks within the United States ... From at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the intelligence community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons.'" 

Buncombe elaborates on the evidence: "Sibel Edmonds, 33, said: '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.'"

The Johnston and Schmitt article in the Times offers, "On July 5, 2001, as threats of an impending terrorist attack against the United States were pouring into Washington, Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, and Andrew H. Card Jr., the president's chief of staff, directed the administration's counterterrorism office to assemble top officials from many of the country's domestic agencies for a meeting in the White House situation room."

And in the next paragraph, "Even though the warnings focused mostly on threats overseas, Ms. Rice and Mr. Card wanted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other agencies put on alert inside the United States. Ms. Rice and Mr. Card did not attend the meeting, run by Richard A. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator. When the meeting broke up, several new security advisories were issued, including an F.A.A. bulletin warning of an increased risk of air hijackings intended to free terrorists imprisoned in the United States."

It appears that it was important that the report specifies that Rice and Card "did not attend the meeting."  And it seems intended to serve as protection as well to Ms. Rice's planned testimony to focus on standard hijackings to free political prisoners - this aligns with Rice's prior statement that no one in government knew that planes would be used as suicide missiles.  Sibel Edmonds calls this an "outrageous lie."

The article goes on: "That meeting represented a peak moment in the Bush administration's efforts in the months before Sept. 11, 2001, to prevent a terrorist attack inside the United States. The issue of whether the meeting and the actions that preceded and followed it were a reasonable response to the gathering threat that summer now lies at the heart of the independent inquiry into the attacks. Ms. Rice will be questioned intensively about these matters when she appears in public on Thursday for the first time before the independent commission investigating the 2001 attacks, members of the commission said."

How did we get from standard hijackings perpetrated to free political prisoners to terrorist attacks?  How did we arrive at the conclusion that the 9-11 commission is independent when it has been shown that commission Chairman Tom Kean had a business relationship with bin Laden, and that Bush did as well?  All the members are politically connected.

The Times offers a possible defense: "The review shows that over that summer, with terror warnings mounting, the government's response was often scattered and inconsistent as the new administration struggled to develop a comprehensive strategy for combating Al Qaeda and other terror organizations.  The warnings during the summer were more dire and more specific than generally recognized. Descriptions of the threat were communicated repeatedly to the highest levels within the White House. In more than 40 briefings, Mr. Bush was told by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, of threats involving Al Qaeda.  The review suggests that the government never collected in one place all the information that was flowing into Washington about Al Qaeda and its interest in using commercial aircraft to carry out attacks, and about extremist groups' interest in pilot training. A Congressional inquiry into intelligence activities before Sept. 11 found 12 reports over a seven-year period suggesting that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons."

And then there is this from the Times: "By July, most of the 19 hijackers who later took part in the Sept. 11 attacks had arrived in the United States, as plans for the hijacking, meticulously prepared in Germany and elsewhere for nearly three years, were coming to a final phase, without the knowledge of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I."  This is a contradiction to a report not only from a German newspaper but also to what was reported by CBSNews.com, which offered a chronology of intelligence-related facts carried on their website March 30th when it was learned that Rice would testify.

CBSNews reported, " March 1999 - According to a newspaper report published in February 2004, German intelligence officials claim this is around the time they gave the CIA the first name and telephone number of hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi, asking U.S. officials to track him.  Al-Shehhi was a member of the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg and a roommate of Mohammed Atta.  The Germans say they never heard back from the U.S. officials until after Sept. 11."

The latter can easily be understood as a major foul-up; it fits the Times' obvious intent to help out the administration.  But the actions of Attorney General John Ashcroft, and his heavy-handed Nazi Gestapo approach in trying to threaten a future witness with prison for going public with obvious corruption and abuse of power charges, shows deliberate criminal intent with malice of forethought.  And the Bush administration's attempt to force Sibel Edmonds to alter intelligence evidence efforts points a very serious accusatory finger at everyone in the Bush administration.  It is obvious that a fear existed, a fear that somehow the American people would find out about what Sibel Edmonds knew.

So what did she know?  Considering that Commission Chairman Tom Kean put her off and avoided her for almost a year, along with the bin Laden/Bush family ties, things don't look very good for the truth in today's We-the-People Republik of Amerika!

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© Copyright THEODORE E. LANG 4/04/04 All rights reserved. Ted Lang is a political analyst and a freelance writer.