Sibel Edmonds
Sibel Edmonds
Sibel Deniz Edmonds is a former translator who worked as a contractor for the Federal Bureau of Investigationand founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Edmonds gained public attention following her firing from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March 2002. She had accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals, alleged serious security breaches and cover-ups and that intelligence had been deliberately suppressed, endangering national security. Her later...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
CountryUnited States of America
However, the names of people from other countries, and semi-legit organizations from other countries, to this day, have not been made public.
In March 2002 I took this issue to the Senate Judiciary Committee and also I filed it with the Department of Justice Inspector General's office.
I started working for the Bureau immediately after 9/11 and I was performing translations for several languages: Farsi, Turkish, and Azerbaijani.
I'm taken back by seeing the mass media's reaction to this. They are the window to our government's operation and what are they doing?
The most significant information that we were receiving did not come from counter-terrorism investigations, and I want to emphasize this.
When you think of al-Qaeda, you are not thinking of al-Qaeda in terms of one particular country, or one particular organization.
You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one.
And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.
I see people detained for simple INS violations.
And I have been campaigning for the past three months trying to get the Senate Judiciary Committee that has the oversight authority and responsibility to start its own public hearings.
And I am saying, how about the other two branches? And putting the pressure on our representatives in the Senate and the Congress, and the court system. They should be counter-acting this corruption, but they are sitting there silent.
On the other hand I have seen several, several top targets for these investigations of these terrorist activities that were allowed to leave the country - I'm not talking about weeks, I'm talking about months after 9/11.
At that point, which would be around February 2002, they came and they confiscated my computer, because, they said, they were suspecting that I was communicating with certain Senate members and taking this issue outside the Bureau.
I understand the Saudis have been named because fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.