Kill the Messenger: Sibel Edmonds

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. You wrote a piece for Vanity Fair. Today, Americans are making a decision, basically, about whether Dennis Hastert will run the Congress. They will decide the balance of the House of Representatives, and if Democrats win, he will no longer be Speaker of the House. 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.

# posted by lukery @ 11/08/2006 06:25:00 AM