Introducing 9-11 Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds

Kill the Messenger (Sibel Edmonds)

Directed by Jean Robert Viallet, Mathieu Verboud (2006)

Film Review

Kill the Messenger is a French documentary about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and the organized criminal behavior she discovered inside the Bush State Department and Pentagon.

Edmonds, the daughter of a Turkish family, was raised in Iran and recruited by the FBI four days after 9-11 to translate telephone conversations they had intercepted from suspected terrorists. In addition to English, Edmonds speaks Turkish, Farsi and Azairi.

Several months after she began her job, a fellow translator named Melek Dickerson and her husband, an Air Force major named Douglas Dickerson, tried to recruit her to a Turkish interest group whose intercepts she was translating. Believing they were spies, she reported the incident to her superiors, as well as FBI director Frank Mellor. The FBI responded by firing her and threatening to charge her under the State Secrets Privilege Act if she spoke to anyone else (including a lawyer) about the incident.

Other than filing suit for unlawful dismissal and breech of freedom of speech (which went all the way to the Supreme Court, who refused to review it), Edmonds spoke to no one about it until a 9-11 families group encouraged her to reveal what she knew about the Dickersons to the 9-11 Commission Bush appointed in 2003. This would lead Major Dickerson and his wife to be transferred out of the country.

When the 9-11 Commission Report failed to address Edmond’s evidence, she collaborated with Vietnam whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to found the National Security Whistleblowers Network. Approximately 100 whistleblowers joined who had been tracking Middle East jihadists for years and whose warnings about 9-11 were ignored by the Bush administration.

Although Edmonds herself never disclosed the name of the group that attempted to recruit her, several journalists have identified it as the American Turkish Council. As they all report, the ATC, which has all the main US arms manufacturers on its board, first started to be wiretapped by the FBI in 1997 because they were illegally smuggling embargoed US weapons systems to Turkey.

As Giraldi writes inThe American Conservative, the ATC worked closely with pro-Israel White House insiders Douglas Feith and Richard Perle to illegally smuggle nuclear triggers to Pakistan via South Africa.

As the filmmakers point out the same pro-Israel Bush advisors blew CIA agent Valerie Plame’s cover in 2003. Plame’s main assignment was investigating ATC involvement in illegal nuclear proliferation.

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*Farsi is widely spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
**Azeri is the official language of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

The Neocon Myths Behind Afghanistan and Iraq

The Power of Nightmares

Directed by Adam Curtis

BBC (2003)

Part 3 Shadows in the Cave

Film Review

Part 3 concerns the mythology the neoconservatives created around international terrorism to justify the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US Invents al Qaeda

The final video starts with the car bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. These were the first attacks Bin Laden and Zawahiri organized against US interests as part of their new international jihad (see How the CIA Funds Jihad). They recruited four bombers from training camps Abdullah Azzam started during the Soviet occupation.

Contrary to the myth promoted by the neocons, these camps were exclusively dedicated to training Muslims to conduct jihad in their own countries (e.g. Uzbekistan and Chechnya). Their leaders wanted absolutely nothing to do with international terrorism or Bin Laden’s jihad against the US. They allowed Zawahiri and Bin Laden to recruit from these camps because he was financing them. Nevertheless, even members of Islamic Jihad opposed what they were doing.

In Jan 2001 the US government brought the embassy bombers to trial in the US. They also tried Bin Laden in absentia. To charge him under existing US law, federal prosecutors had to prove an organized group he commanded carried out the bombings. Because no such group existed, they invented one. The name al Qaeda came from a paid FBI informant.

9-11

Immediately following his election George W Bush, like his father, totally rejected the neoconservative’s insistence that the US should invade other nations and “dictate how to run their countries.”

9-11 would change all this, propelling Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld to international power with four terrifying myths:

1. That Bin Laden was responsible for the 9-11 attacks (according to official FBI accounts, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was responsible for the “plane operations).”*
2. That “al Qaeda,” a phantom organization the neocons latched onto for propaganda purposes, was a genuine international entity running sleeper cells in 50-60 countries.
3. That “al Qaeda’s” ultimate goal was to force the US to live under Islamic fundamentalism.
4. That the invasion of Afghanistan was essential to destroy the heart of “al Qaeda.”

During the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the US and NATO allied themselves with the Afghan Northern Alliance. The latter hated the foreign Muslims who came to came to Afghanistan for training and received a generous bounty for handing them over to US troops. Nearly all of them ended up in Guantanomo, despite having no connection with bin Laden or international terrorism.

The Role of Hollywood

Following the US invasion, the neocons invested two new myths. The first was that bin Laden was hiding out in a sophisticated bunker built into the Torah Borah caves on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The second was that the US was harboring a vast network of terrorist sleeper cells preparing a new attack on US soil. Although both were totally discredited by mid-2003, these myths would be solidified in the public mind by dozens of TV dramas about hidden terrorist sleeper cells in major US cities.

A popular theme of these dramas was the dirty bomb*, which according to actual DD tests was unlikely to kill anyone because the radiation produced by a dirty bomb was so dispersed.

So-called “dirty bombs** featured prominently in most of these productions, despite numerous Pentagon tests demonstrating dirty bomb radiation is too widely dispersed to kill anyone.

World Leaders Rush to Sign On

Inspired by the immense power this ideology of fear gave political leaders, other western leaders quickly signed on to the terror agenda. When the neocons began circulating the new mythology in mid-2002 that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda and 9-11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair became one of its most vocal proponents. Despite knowing from the outside that the war on Iraq was based on fabricated evidence.

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*This video was produced in 2003, when it was still widely believed that 19 Muslim hijackers were responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers. This version of events is now totally discredited.
**A dirty bomb is an explosive device made from nuclear waste combined with conventional explosives – with the intent of spreading radioactive material over a widely populated area
***This revelation is all the more remarkable given that Curtis made this documentary prior to Dr David Kelly’s so-called “suicide” in 2003. Kelly worked for the British Ministry of Defense and was a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003, when a BBC journalist published an-off-the record discussion about the British role in fabricating evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He died under extremely suspicious circumstances in later that month. A group of British doctors is demanding a fresh investigation into Kelly’s death: Doctors Claim Cover Upl

http://vimeo.com/84421510