Recently deceased Ed Bradley interviewed Sibel Edmonds way back in September 2002 for 60 Minutes.
In many ways it was a very flawed report, and much of the interview was left on the cutting room floor - but it is now available online for the first time.
Here it is (about 15 mins in four parts):
1.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xxV7UGvadbw2.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YB6M4xEBvHQ3.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5iFH2k0aS344.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7svXI7_QEfALet's remember that this was an early interview (Sep02) - and a lot of the stuff that we now know was secret at the time - therefore this interview doesn't touch on many of Sibel's claims. The interview mostly frames the problem as 'poor management' at the FBI translation unit - we know that is simply not true.
Much has been made of Senator Grassley's claim that Sibel is 'credible' - here we have the full context: Grassley says:
'She's absolutely credible - and the reason that she's credible is that a
lot of people in the FBI have corroborated her story'
Sibel's co-worker Jan Dickerson features in the segment.
We now know that she was a mole who tried to recruit Sibel into an espionage ring. Prior to her joing the FBI, Jan Dickerson worked for the American Turkish Council - which was being monitored by Brewster Jennings. Dickerson's husband is a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force and is also a player in this espionage ring - but the 60 Minutes segment doesn't mention him.
In the interview, Bradley asks Sibel what kind of information Dickerson 'mistranslated.' Sibel answered:
"
Activities to obtain US military and intelligence secrets"
The 60 Minutes story didn't mention any of the other elements of Sibel's story, for example, that Hastert got '
suitcases of cash... knowing that a lot of that is drug money.'
David Rose raised some of the issues about Hastert
being bribed in
Vanity Fair last year. He was on
Democracy Now last week discussing his latest article "Neo Culpa" about Perle and other neocons distancing themselves for the Iraq war and the Bush administration:
AMY GOODMAN: David Rose, you wrote an earlier piece, and we had you on at the time, the question of, did Speaker Hastert accept Turkish bribes to deny Armenian Genocide and approve weapons sales.
[]
Any further thoughts on that issue and a summary of the investigation that you did earlier?
DAVID ROSE: Well, that, of course, was an article published last year about the case of Sibel Edmonds, who was a translator who worked for the FBI after 9/11, who listened to wiretap recordings made of a number of individuals, wiretaps of various targets who were working in the Turkish embassy and elsewhere that the FBI thought might be a threat to national security or involved in criminal activity. Now, what the article reported was that one of the investigations that she was asked to work on involved recordings made of individuals who claimed that they had bribed Speaker Hastert, with both covert campaign donations and using other methods to transfer money, in favor for his withdrawing the Armenian Genocide resolution, which at that stage was about to pass through the House. It had passed through two preliminary stages.
Now, I think the extraordinary thing about that story is that it has not ever been contested that there was an FBI investigation, which did pick up allegations made by these Turkish targets, targets who, you know, were judged to be security risks by the FBI making these allegations about Speaker Hastert. I have never claimed that those allegations had substance, that they were true, because I simply cannot say. It's impossible to prove it one way or the other. But it is clear that there were recordings made by the FBI in which individuals claimed to have given illegal payments to the Speaker in return for political favors. And I was always slightly surprised and, indeed, again disappointed that the rest of the American media didn't pick up on that and didn't perhaps try to take it further, because it does seem to me to be an important issue.
I've been told that the American corporate media won't touch Sibel's story because 60 Minutes has already done a segment on the story. Are you satisfied with that?
I'm not.
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You can see the trailer for the new movie about Sibel at her
website- and keep up to date with her story at
sibeledmonds.blogspot.com