Antiwar.com Blog
Fri Jan 06, 2006
Libby, Franklin, the OSP and Sibel Edmonds – What’s It All About?
For all those who have been trying to keep up with (and make sense of) the story of Sibel Edmonds, the woman who learned terrible things while translating for the FBI, blew the whistle and was promptly fired and gagged with the court invented “state’s secrets privilege,” there is good news.
Lukery, proprietor of the excellent blog wot is it good for?, has put in the time and gray matter to piece together what we can learn from what she can say around her gag order. (Which was recently upheld by the Supreme Court without comment.)
It seems clear at this point that the many scandals of the neoconservatives who lied us into Iraq, as Edmonds told me last August 13, are connected together. It seems more and more likely that her half-told portion is the puzzle piece to hold them all together, though many questions indeed remain.
Lukery’s excellent summary is here.
Notes from his interview of her here.
More from him on the subject here, here, here, here and here.
Christopher Deliso’s interviews of Sibel are here and here.
His 3 latest articles on all this here, here and here, my December 17th interview of him on the subject here.
Sibel’s website, the notorious Vanity Fair article, and the transcript of my most recent interview of her here, mp3 here.
Posted by: Scott Horton on Jan 06, 06 | 2:06 am | Comments? | link
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2597
Embedded links above

Posted by: crone | Jan 7 2006 2:08 utc | 4

For me, someone remote from the play and who has always steered well clear of the Sibel Edmonds story-primarily because she draws such a long bow, Ms Edmonds strikes me as a pretty much par for the course whistleblower.
That is her actions reveal the same sort of ‘back story’ as a lot of other whistleblowers that I have come across, sometimes as their union advocate at disciplinary hearings, and other times people I have read of or met socially.
She has a history of not playing the bureaucratic people game well. That is, she expects people to relate to each other very formally as laid out in some manual somewhere and is disappointed and offended when they do not. These disappointments that whistleblowers suffer usually come to a head around promotion/job allocation issues or relationships with a supervisor who the whistleblower considers to be their inferior academically, professionally or ethically.
Now of course none of these points have anything at all to do with the veracity of the whistleblower’s allegations but they do make it difficult for the whistleblower to ‘prove their point’ when the allegation is contentious.
The chief reason for this is, whether they like it or not, most people are ‘team players’. That is they tend to want to get along with their neigbours, the people they work with, as well as those whom they do business with.
On the other hand the whistleblower has probably suffered a degree of pressure even harassment before his/her allegations have become public and may have personalised the issue to the point where what were initially just allegations or suppositions that they believe need to be looked into have become ‘facts’ that the whistleblower is obliged to prove in order to regain his/her credibility.
The trouble with that is that we are all human and so it quickly becomes apparent that here is a person with a heavy investment in the suppositions being proven.
When that happens all the accused have to do is find the promotion/supervisory issue that put the accuser offside with their client in the first place. They then show it to the independent third party who in the interests of justice has no choice but to consider the possibility of revenge as a motive for the accuser to be ‘beating up’* the story.
This creates a reasonable doubt, and that, along with the informant’s possible ‘prickly personality’, means that those pursuing a clearly defined outcome such as an end to the slaughter in Iraq or getting the corrupt elites out of the political process, should tread very carefully.
Even if the whistleblower is correct, pushing their story too hard can tar the objective with the same brush as the whistleblower.
*beat up is an Australian term for the media’s penchant for turning a molehill into a mountain. Not to be confused with ‘cover-up’ which the opposite process. That is a mountain is reduced to a molehill by the media. eg the numbers of breaches of safety regulations that the West Virginia mine in which 12 people were killed last week had been cited for.
I’ve included a couple of examples of usage of ‘beat up here and here.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 7 2006 6:32 utc | 6

Hannah has been following the Sibel Edmonds story from the beginning, perhaps she/he can provide a quick rundown of what has happened so far.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 7 2006 10:25 utc | 8

From the Bull dog Manifesto:
All the anthrax used in the various anthrax attacks in 2001 came from a United States military base. They all came from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland. But there were two separate mailings of anthrax letters. One batch of letters was mailed on or about September 18, 2001. This batch went to various media outlets and contained cutaneous anthrax (Ames Strain).
G. Matsumo’s article in Science (2003) shows that the anthrax must have been made in a bioweapons lab – which one is impossible to say.
I’m no expert, but don’t think this article is a cover up of any kind. It’s content corresponds to what I heard / read experts thought in 2002.
Science – **PDF**

Posted by: Noisette | Jan 7 2006 16:32 utc | 10

Oh and that will be 300 dollars. I’ll spend them right in the bar.

Posted by: Noisette | Jan 7 2006 18:05 utc | 12