Author: Lisa Arbercheski•May 8, 2012
Tags:911, classified, corbett, edmonds, fbi, intelligence, james, report, sibel, story, ungagged, whistleblower, woman
Despite the remarkable efforts to suppress the story, or perhaps because of them, the narrative of what Sibel Edmonds had to say finally began to emerge, less due to the occasional efforts of mainstream media organizations or supposed whistleblower organizations than through the diligent, painstaking efforts of independent journalists, radio hosts and documentary filmmakers who were willing to persist despite overwhelming odds.
by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
8 May 2012
By the time the ACLU immortalized FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds as the “most gagged person in the history of the United States of America” for the unprecedented lengths that the government went to to suppress her story, she had already been fighting for years to bring her remarkable tale to the attention of the government’s own supervisory and investigative bodies.
When she brought the story of the malfeasance, gross misconduct, and foreign infiltration she had witnessed in the FBI’s Washington Field Office translation department to the attention of her FBI supervisors, she was harassed and eventually hounded out of her position.
When she brought her story to the Justice Department’s Inspector General, they delayed their report on the criminal conduct of the FBI for over two years. When it was finally finished, the entire report was classified.
When she tried to pursue her case via the courts, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege and filed a motion to dismiss the case because “the litigation creates substantial risks of disclosing classified and sensitive national security information that could cause serious damage to our country’s security.”
When she turned to Senators Grassley and Leahy to help draw attention to her case, the DOJ retroactively classified anything that any member of Congress or the House had said or written on the case, including material that was on their websites, or statements they had made and had been published by media organizations like CBS or The Washington Post.
Despite these remarkable efforts to suppress the story, or perhaps because of them, the narrative of what Sibel Edmonds had to say finally began to emerge, less due to the occasional efforts of mainstream media organizations or supposed whistleblower organizations than through the diligent, painstaking efforts of independent journalists and documentary filmmakers who were willing to persist despite overwhelming odds.
After a decade of bringing this remarkable story out, however, Sibel Edmonds finally came to the decision to publish the details of her story in a memoir. Joining independent radio host Peter B. Collins on air earlier this month, Edmonds recounted the narrative of how and why she came to this decision.
Given the shocking details of Edmonds’ story and the viciousness with which the DOJ has attempted to keep that story under wraps, it should come as no surprise that the publication of the book has been doggedly (and illegally) opposed by the FBI.
Edmonds submitted her manuscript for FBI pre-publication clearance in accordance with established procedures on April 26, 2011. According to the applicable regulations, the FBI has 30 days to review the submission. Over one year later, the FBI still has yet to comply with the law and clear the book.
On top of this, it was discovered that the employee contract that the FBI required its employees to sign at the time of Edmonds’ hiring is in fact illegal and unconstitutional. Rather than allowing the FBI to censor books written by its employees based on the classification of the relevant material, the FBI instead required employees, including Edmonds, to allow the Bureau to censor them on issues of policy.
Stephen M. Kohm, Edmonds’ lawyer and the Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center, explained the case in a television appearance last month.
In the end, Sibel Edmonds made the decision to self publish her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, for the precise same reasons that she started the Boiling Frogs Post website: because the technology and the means to do so are in the grasp of the ordinary citizen, perhaps for the first time in human history, and because all of her experience has proven that waiting for someone else to come along and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is a futile endeavor.
In this brief window of opportunity, whistleblowers like Edmonds can circumvent the entire government/media/NGO conglomerate that has dominated the entire institutional infrastructure of “approved whistleblowing” by doing an end run around these institutions and self-publishing. In many ways, books like these can be seen as a proof of concept: if it can be done and the information can be disseminated, whistleblowers, mavericks and truthtellers of all types will perhaps have the best shot at a level playing field in the modern media environment that they are ever likely to get. If it fails, then the window of opportunity will close and stories that truly challenge the mainstream will be safely swept under the rug, effectively memory holing the citizenry’s last hope of combating the 21st century Orwellian Big Brother state.
Surely there have been times like this before, moments during which truly incendiary information was made public. But never before has the public been directly responsible for the success or failure of this form of whistleblowing. In the past, the public would have had to passively accept what little information they could from the scraps that came out of the opaque processes of court proceedings or governmental oversight bodies, been thankful for the occasionally successful efforts of the officially sanctioned Beltway-insider “watchdog” NGOs, or dutifully paid the big-name publishers for the pleasure of reading the stories of those “whistleblowers” who were able to make it through the editorial vetting process. Even in the WikiLeaks model, what information comes to the public is completely at the whim of those in charge of the process, including the time and manner in which the information is released, and how it is released (usually in conjunction with the very same mainstream media entities like The New York Times that have so long been so visibly in bed with the political institutions they laughably claim to be holding accountable).
But now for the first time, individual whistleblowers and authors are able to make their stories widely and instantaneously available all around the world for relatively little cost. And now it is up to the public to ask themselves whether they are willing to put forth the negligible time and effort to familiarize themselves with the information that the government has been fighting for years to suppress in any and every way possible.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Sibel Edmonds story will finally be able to break through the walls that have kept it from the public for so long, although this time the wall is not a bureaucratic one, nor even one of censorship, but a wall built by the public’s own apathy.
In a play on the old adage about the tree falling in the forest, one might well ask: If Sibel Edmonds blows the whistle in a media forest and no one is there to read it, will that whistle make a sound?
Published on May 8, 2012
Despite the remarkable efforts to suppress the story, or perhaps because of them, the narrative of what Sibel Edmonds had to say finally began to emerge, less due to the occasional efforts of mainstream media organizations or supposed whistleblower organizations than through the diligent, painstaking efforts of independent journalists, radio hosts and documentary filmmakers who were willing to persist despite overwhelming odds.
by James Corbett
BoilingFrogsPost.com
8 May 2012
By the time the ACLU immortalized FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds as the “most gagged person in the history of the United States of America” for the unprecedented lengths that the government went to to suppress her story, she had already been fighting for years to bring her remarkable tale to the attention of the government’s own supervisory and investigative bodies.
When she brought the story of the malfeasance, gross misconduct, and foreign infiltration she had witnessed in the FBI’s Washington Field Office translation department to the attention of her FBI supervisors, she was harassed and eventually hounded out of her position.
When she brought her story to the Justice Department’s Inspector General, they delayed their report on the criminal conduct of the FBI for over two years. When it was finally finished, the entire report was classified.
When she tried to pursue her case via the courts, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege and filed a motion to dismiss the case because “the litigation creates substantial risks of disclosing classified and sensitive national security information that could cause serious damage to our country’s security.”
When she turned to Senators Grassley and Leahy to help draw attention to her case, the DOJ retroactively classified anything that any member of Congress or the House had said or written on the case, including material that was on their websites, or statements they had made and had been published by media organizations like CBS or The Washington Post.
Despite these remarkable efforts to suppress the story, or perhaps because of them, the narrative of what Sibel Edmonds had to say finally began to emerge, less due to the occasional efforts of mainstream media organizations or supposed whistleblower organizations than through the diligent, painstaking efforts of independent journalists and documentary filmmakers who were willing to persist despite overwhelming odds.
After a decade of bringing this remarkable story out, however, Sibel Edmonds finally came to the decision to publish the details of her story in a memoir. Joining independent radio host Peter B. Collins on air earlier this month, Edmonds recounted the narrative of how and why she came to this decision.
Given the shocking details of Edmonds’ story and the viciousness with which the DOJ has attempted to keep that story under wraps, it should come as no surprise that the publication of the book has been doggedly (and illegally) opposed by the FBI.
Edmonds submitted her manuscript for FBI pre-publication clearance in accordance with established procedures on April 26, 2011. According to the applicable regulations, the FBI has 30 days to review the submission. Over one year later, the FBI still has yet to comply with the law and clear the book.
On top of this, it was discovered that the employee contract that the FBI required its employees to sign at the time of Edmonds’ hiring is in fact illegal and unconstitutional. Rather than allowing the FBI to censor books written by its employees based on the classification of the relevant material, the FBI instead required employees, including Edmonds, to allow the Bureau to censor them on issues of policy.
Stephen M. Kohm, Edmonds’ lawyer and the Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center, explained the case in a television appearance last month.
In the end, Sibel Edmonds made the decision to self publish her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, for the precise same reasons that she started the Boiling Frogs Post website: because the technology and the means to do so are in the grasp of the ordinary citizen, perhaps for the first time in human history, and because all of her experience has proven that waiting for someone else to come along and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is a futile endeavor.
In this brief window of opportunity, whistleblowers like Edmonds can circumvent the entire government/media/NGO conglomerate that has dominated the entire institutional infrastructure of “approved whistleblowing” by doing an end run around these institutions and self-publishing. In many ways, books like these can be seen as a proof of concept: if it can be done and the information can be disseminated, whistleblowers, mavericks and truthtellers of all types will perhaps have the best shot at a level playing field in the modern media environment that they are ever likely to get. If it fails, then the window of opportunity will close and stories that truly challenge the mainstream will be safely swept under the rug, effectively memory holing the citizenry’s last hope of combating the 21st century Orwellian Big Brother state.
Surely there have been times like this before, moments during which truly incendiary information was made public. But never before has the public been directly responsible for the success or failure of this form of whistleblowing. In the past, the public would have had to passively accept what little information they could from the scraps that came out of the opaque processes of court proceedings or governmental oversight bodies, been thankful for the occasionally successful efforts of the officially sanctioned Beltway-insider “watchdog” NGOs, or dutifully paid the big-name publishers for the pleasure of reading the stories of those “whistleblowers” who were able to make it through the editorial vetting process. Even in the WikiLeaks model, what information comes to the public is completely at the whim of those in charge of the process, including the time and manner in which the information is released, and how it is released (usually in conjunction with the very same mainstream media entities like The New York Times that have so long been so visibly in bed with the political institutions they laughably claim to be holding accountable).
But now for the first time, individual whistleblowers and authors are able to make their stories widely and instantaneously available all around the world for relatively little cost. And now it is up to the public to ask themselves whether they are willing to put forth the negligible time and effort to familiarize themselves with the information that the government has been fighting for years to suppress in any and every way possible.
It remains to be seen whether or not the Sibel Edmonds story will finally be able to break through the walls that have kept it from the public for so long, although this time the wall is not a bureaucratic one, nor even one of censorship, but a wall built by the public’s own apathy.
In a play on the old adage about the tree falling in the forest, one might well ask: If Sibel Edmonds blows the whistle in a media forest and no one is there to read it, will that whistle make a sound?
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