Thursday, April 1, 2004Former FBI Translator: U.S. Had Details Before 9/11
A former FBI translator told Salon.com the U.S. should have had an "orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available."
The wiretap translator, Sibel Edmonds, who has been labeled "very credible" by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told the online magazine she testified before the 9/11 commission that the FBI had detailed information regarding a terrorist attack involving planes before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Edmonds also said she was offended by Condoleezza Rice's recent Washington Post op-ed on March 22, in which she said the White House lacked foreknowledge of the type and manner of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11.
"Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie," Edmonds told Salon.
An American of Turkish descent, Edmonds, who speaks fluent Farsi, Arabic and Turkish, passed a polygraph exam administered by the FBI.
She was assigned to the bureau's 9/11 investigation, as well as other counterterrorism cases. There, she translated documents captured by agents who had been rounding up terrorist suspects for a year.
"She says those tapes, often connected to terrorism, money laundering or other criminal activity, provide evidence that should have made apparent that an al-Qaida plot was in the works. Edmonds cannot talk in detail about the tapes publicly because she's been under a Justice Department gag order since 2002," Salon reported.
"President Bush said they had no specific information about Sept. 11, and that's accurate," Edmonds told the Web site. "But there was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should've alerted the people to the threat we're facing."
Edmonds first made headlines in 2002 by blowing the whistle on the FBI's translation department.
In 2002, Sen. Grassley was asked during a "60 Minutes" segment looking into Edmonds' initial charges against the bureau if she was credible.
"She's credible, and the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story," the Republican senator said.
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