Boiling Frogs Post is an online news, editorial, analysis, and Podcast interview site covering select but significant blacked out stories and issues, while defying blinded partisanship. Each one of our partner investigative journalists brings 20+ years of investigative journalism experience in reporting controversial and daring topics. Our weekly Podcast interview series, the Boiling Frogs Show, features in depth original interviews with well-respected and controversial guests.

This site has been set up to bring together members of the irate minority club: Those who have gotten tired of the very-dependent mainstream media & and the agenda-driven and partisan pseudo alternative fluff sites. We may be the irate minority out there, but over here we are the majority, so we rule. Together we hope to increase our numbers and take back our hijacked nation.

Sibel Edmonds is the founder and president of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to aiding national security whistleblowers. She has appeared on national radio and TV as a commentator on matters related to whistleblowers, national security, and excessive secrecy & classification, and has been featured on CBS 60 Minutes, CNN, MSNBC,  NPR, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The American Conservative, and others. Her book, ‘Shooting the Messenger’, co-authored with Professor William Weaver, is forthcoming from Kansas University Press in the fall of 2010.

PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy”. She is also the recipient of the 2004 Sam Adams Foundation Award.

Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her issues have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secrets Privilege”, and the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification issued by the Department of Justice.

Ms. Edmonds began her career in 1993 as Project Director for the Rostropovich Foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organization providing medical and food aid to children of the former Soviet Union. She re-located to St. Petersburg, Russia and managed correspondence, shipments, inventory and security precautions in the largest children’s hospital in St. Petersburg. Later, she worked as the Executive Director & Co-Founder of Edmonds Industries, a Consulting and Holding Company, investing in international business and residential real estate development. Ms. Edmonds also worked as a volunteer for the Alexandria CASA program (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for abused children, and as an instructor for the Alexandria Office on Women’s Domestic Violence Program.

Ms. Edmonds has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University, and AA degree in Science from NVCC. She is certified as a Court Appointed Special Advocate and as an instructor for the Women’s Domestic Violence Program. She is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani.

Ex-FBI Translator Claims Spying at DoD
by Bryant Jordan
October 21, 2009
Military.com

After seven years of forced silence, a government whistleblower is opening up on what she learned while working as a Turkish translator for the FBI in the wake of 9/11.

In sworn testimony to attorneys on Aug. 8, Sibel Edmonds described a Pentagon where key personnel helped pass defense secrets to foreign agents or provided them names of knowledgeable officials who were vulnerable to blackmail or co-option.

And firmly rooted in this espionage program in the 1990s, according to Edmonds’ deposition, were two men who, with the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000, found themselves in the Pentagon:  Douglas Feith, who would head the Office of Special Plans, and Richard Perle, who would become chairman of the Defense Advisory Board.

“They were 100 percent directly involved,” Edmonds told Military.com. “They were not in the Pentagon [in the late 1990s] but they had their people inside the Pentagon.” One of those people, she said, was Larry Franklin, an Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans who, in 2003, passed classified information to representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Office, or AIPAC. By then Feith was leading the OSP.

Edmonds cautioned that she does not know if these practices are continuing, since she was fired by the FBI in April 2002 after pressing for an investigation into an attempt by a colleague to recruit her for an organization that was itself a target of FBI surveillance.

Perle, today a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and board member for or adviser to other think tanks, including the National Institute for Neareast Affairs and the Center for Security Policy, emphatically denied Edmonds’ claims in an interview with Military.com.

“This woman is a nutcase. Certifiable,” Perle said. “She makes wild accusations. She was fired from her job, and has been on a vendetta against … imagined demons ever since.”

Feith, in an email to Military.com, said: “What I’ve read on the Internet about Ms. Edmonds’s claims about me is wildly false and bizarre.”

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Announcing a Special Event Friday, October 16, 2009

This Friday, October 16, instead of our usual monthly video meeting at Hooked on Colfax coffee shop, we’re inviting you to attend Yankee Tavern, a play now running in Denver in which 9/11 Truth plays a significant role. We’ve secured special 2-for-1 ticket prices for Colorado 9/11 Visibility members for one night only. Who needs a video when you can go see a play?

WHAT: “Yankee Tavern,” a play by Steven Dietz, directed by Chip Walton
WHERE: Curious Theatre, 1080 Acoma St at 11th Ave, Denver, one block west of Broadway
WHEN: Friday Oct 16, 8:00 p.m.
COST: Three ticket options: $18/$34/$42. 2-for-1 ticket pricing available on the $34 and $42 seats, this show only, details below.

“Yankee Tavern” — 9/11 Truth in contemporary theater

“Yankee Tavern” is a political thriller by playwright Steven Dietz, who resides in Austin. The Denver production is part of a “rolling premiere,” the third in a series of separate local productions of the play in the US this year. It runs Sept 12th to Oct 24th at the Curious Theatre in Denver.

From the Curious Theatre brochure: “From Denver native Steven Dietz comes a new play filled with mystery, conspiracy and thrills. Set in a crumbling tavern in New York City, a young man is saddled with questions about his father’s best friend, their mysterious past, and a stranger who knows much more than he should. In an instant, outlandish hypotheses become dangerous realities as surprising revelations continue to emerge in this eye-opening look at our government and the theories that have shaped our country.”

The story unfolds at an old watering hole in lower Manhattan, where an eccentric and entertaining character named Ray, who fits the stereotype of a “wacky conspiracy theorist,” holds forth with 9/11 Truth, including details of the collapse of WTC7, not hit by a plane. Then a mysterious bar patron named Palmer turns out to be more than a talker–he played a shocking real-life role on 9/11. And the owner of the bar, Adam, has some very real 9/11 intrigue unfolding in his own life. Janet, Adam’s fiancee, is the emotional center of the film, sharing a depth of feeling that will surprise you as events unfold.

Dietz doesn’t make 9/11 Truth the point of the play, so don’t expect the audience to come away necessarily persuaded. After all, Ray is not the most effective messenger with his highly charged delivery, and he undermines his own credibility by seeing conspiracies everywhere, including the 1969 moon landing, corporations making people sick to sell more Kleenex, and even the institution of marriage. Said Dietz, “I had no interest in doing a 9-11 rant, and I didn’t want to do a conspiracy theorist rant. I wanted to use those things as a backdrop for a specific story about these people.” But the play is superbly written and acted, and slips a great deal of 9/11 Truth to the audience against a dramatic backdrop. And the Palmer character directly undermines the official story. So bring your friends and let’s have a great turnout to support local theater, especially when the storyline involves 9/11 Truth!

After the play, members of the cast will bring chairs out on stage and engage the audience in a “Talkback” where there will be a chance to share thoughts and feelings and dialogue with the cast. Each “talkback” has its own theme, and the theme for October 16 is “2012/The End of Days.”

Click for Bob Bows’ review in the Denver Post and photos from the play.

2 for 1 Tickets! Offer available on regular priced tickets in Price Points A and B (tickets regularly $34 and $42), valid Friday, October 16. Use Code: 911TRUTH (in ALL CAPS) in the Discount Code box online during checkout at the Curious Theatre website or by calling the Box Office at 303.623.0524. Advance purchase is recommended as seating is limited at this small theatre.

Our regular Denver monthly meeting at Hooked on Colfax will resume Friday, November 20.

See you at the Curious Theatre!

mebeli sofiaNew Photos of Pentagon Minutes After 9-11 Attack

New photos from the day of September 11th, 2001 taken within minutes after the attack show significant debris, some of it recognizable as pieces from an American Airlines jet.   Some of the photos also show significant damage to the first floor of the structure. Click thumbnail photo for a larger version.

Open Letter to the Denver Post

To Mr. Dan Haley October 8, 2009
Denver Post Editorial Page Editor

Since we have not heard back from you after sending this letter, and after several phone calls to which you have not responded, we have chosen to publish our letter as an open letter.

You are the person who chooses which editorials are printed in the Denver Post, thus we write with the following observation, complaint, and request for a face-to-face discussion:

With Vincent Carroll’s article, “Public TV and the Truthers,” this is the third time within a few weeks of which we are aware that the Denver Post has treated the thousands of citizens of this country (and around the world) who work for a new and real investigation into 9/11 with contempt and ridicule.

Besides Mr. Carroll’s article, there was Joanne Ostrow’s article, “KBDI pushes limits on controversial pledge tie-ins,” and even Mike Littwin gave a hostile jab saying the “truthers” are more weird than the “birthers.”

As shown below, the articles fail to meet the Posts’s own published ethical standards for journalism such as the requirements of intellectual honesty, to present all sides, to be fair and even-handed, and to avoid loaded phrasing. None of the authors has attempted to present any facts or a reasoned analysis for their dismissal of these citizens. They instead have all stooped to ad hominem attacks, displaying a striking and perplexing lack of curiosity as to why a new investigation is supported by 45% of American citizens (2006 Zogby poll). Thus, the overall tone of each piece is that of propaganda and not news or journalism.

Besides ignoring the evidence and facts which sustain this growing worldwide movement (see postscript below for a number of examples), you are also failing to inform your readers about the four mothers from New Jersey who were widowed on September 11th (aka “the Jersey girls”) who went to Washington and waged a battle with the Bush administration to bring about the original 9/11 Commission. Those widows, who merely sought accountability and answers, ultimately concluded that the Commission served to cover up the issues rather than address them. They are now supporting the voter petition that has been signed by 80,000 New York City residents to put the issue on the ballot this November (see nyccan.org) and create a new 9/11 investigation in New York. You are completely missing this human interest story.

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FBI Veteran Executive Calls For Special Counsel Investigation, Prosecutions in Sibel Edmonds Case

Details panic inside the Bureau, executive effort to ‘keep this whole thing quiet’ when matter first came to light in 2002. Further confirms FBI translator/whistleblower’s allegations, credibility…
Brad Blog

An 18-year Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Manager for the FBI has called for a Special Counsel to be appointed to investigate the allegations of FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. John M. Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, made his comments during an audio interview released late last week with radio journalist Peter B. Collins.

He also offered a detailed insiders look at the concerns among high-level officials inside the Bureau as Edmonds disturbing allegations began coming to light back in 2002, before they would be quashed for seven long years by the Bush Administration’s unprecedented use of the so-called “State Secrets Privilege” to gag her.

Earlier last week, following the publication of a remarkable American Conservative magazine cover story interview with Edmonds — detailing a broad bribery, blackmail and espionage conspiracy said to have been carried out between current and former members of the U.S. Congress, high-ranking State and Defense Department officials and covert operatives from Turkey and Israel, resulting in the theft and sale of nuclear weapons technology to the foreign black market — Cole had been quoted by the magazine confirming one of Edmonds’ key allegations.

“I am fully aware of the FBI’s decade-long investigation of” Marc Grossman, he said in response to the AmCon article/interview. Grossman had served as the third-highest ranking official in the Bush State Department and was alleged by Edmonds in the interview, and in a sworn, video-taped deposition a month earlier, to have been the U.S. ringleader for a massive Turkish espionage scandal reaching through the halls of power and into top secret nuclear facilities around the country to the benefit of allies and enemies alike. Cole said that the FBI’s counterintelligence probe “ultimately was buried and covered up,” and that he believes it is “long past time” for an investigation of the case to “bring about accountability.”

In his subsequent interview with Collins last week (audio and text excerpts posted below) Cole elaborated on those comments in much greater detail, noting that Edmonds has been “one hundred percent right on the money, on the mark” and confirming the existence of an “ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States” through various illegal activities.

“Yes, I can confirm that,” Cole told Collins, “That’s true.”

The FBI veteran executive also offered an insider’s account of the panic that ensued inside the highest echelons of the Bureau following Edmonds first disclosure of information in 2002, recounting how an executive assistant director admitted to him at the time, just after the story first broke, “Well, all I know is that everything that Sibel is stating is true. I read her file. Everything she stated is, in fact, accurate.”

Cole further describes how the concerns about Edmonds ultimately led to the Bush Administration’s two-time use of the draconian “State Secrets Privilege” in hopes of keeping her extraordinary information from becoming public. “Everybody at headquarters level at the bureau knew that what she was saying was extremely accurate.”

“I know they didn’t want her to go out and speak about it at all,” Cole revealed, “and I know they were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet, because they didn’t want Sibel to come out.”

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MI5 warned that bin Laden was planning attacks on morning of 9/11

MI5 warned the government that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack in the weeks leading up to September 11, including the morning itself, a new history of the Security Service discloses.

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent
The London Telegraph
05 Oct 2009

Newly published memos disclose an escalating concern about the terrorist leader right up until the moment he launched his attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington killing nearly 3,000 people.

But the files also reveal that MI5 discounted the threat from Islamic extremism just six years before the attacks and did not believe that America was vulnerable.

The author of the book, Defence of the Realm, has been given access to all of MI5’s files dating back to its foundation in October 1909 in the first authorised history of an intelligence service anywhere in the world.

In a memo from July 6 2001, MI5 said the increase in the number of reports were “sufficient to conclude that UBL [Osama bin Laden] and those that share his agenda are currently well advanced in operational planning for a number of major attacks on western interests.”

Professor Christopher Andrew, the Cambridge University historian who wrote the book, added: “Similar Security Service warnings to Whitehall of imminent attack continued at intervals over the next two months, up to and including the morning of 11 September. The intelligence received during the simmer of 2001, however, did not point either to a major attack in the United States or to an operation based on hijacked aircraft.”

But MI5 had huge gaps in its knowledge about al-Qaeda and later on the morning of September 11, Sir Stephen Lander, then director general of MI5, told Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, that bin Laden was not head of a “coherent unified terrorist structure” according to a briefing note.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Sir Stephen said MI5 had been “slow to get going” on the threat because they were pre-occupied with the IRA and that afterwards they had a “major set to, sitting around a board room table working out how to move on.”

MI5 had opened a permanent file on bin Laden in September 1995, but they believed he was a terrorist financier rather than a leader, adding the source of his wealth was a “mystery.”

In December 1995, a memo to the heads of police Special Branches, said: “Suggestions in the press of a world-wide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated…The contact between Islamic extremists in various countries appears to be largely opportunistic at present and seems unlikely to result in the emergence of a potent trans-national force.”

When Dame Stella Rimington visited the US in March 1996, a few weeks before her retirement as head of MI5, she had never heard the name al-Qaeda, the book reveals.

Nevertheless MI5 scored an intelligence triumph shortly afterwards when they became the first western intelligence agency to gain a recording of bin Laden’s voice.

But a memo from 1999 admitted: “The allied intelligence community does not have a clear view of UBL’s terrorist planning process. Even the most reliably sourced intelligence on this question usually consists of a snapshot of a proposed plan being discussed. Most of the reporting does not make clear how advanced the plan is. It is rare that intelligence has named those who are to take part in a planned attack.”

Later in the summer of 1999, MI5 reported: “Intelligence suggests that while UBL is seeking to launch an attack inside the US, he is aware that the US will provide a tough operating environment for his organisation.”

Unknown to MI5, Britain had already been targeted by al-Qaeda. It was only after September 11 that officers discovered that a Pakistani microbiologist called Rauf Ahmad, also known as Abdur Rauf, who traveled to a conference in Britain in September 2000 to try and buy pathogens from fellow delegates, was a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.

Original article here.

Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?
The gagged whistleblower goes on the record.

By Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.

A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.

John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”

But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”

* * *

PHILIP GIRALDI: We were very interested to learn of your four-hour deposition in the case involving allegations that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accepted money from the Turkish government in return for political favors. You provided many names and details for the first time on the record and swore an oath confirming that the deposition was true.

Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption. Let’s start with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department.

SIBEL EDMONDS: During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background, I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.

Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as “Susurluk” by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.

Another individual who was working for Grossman, Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, was also removed from Turkey and sent to Germany. After he and his Turkish wife Can returned to the U.S., he went to work for Douglas Feith and she was hired as an FBI Turkish translator. My complaints about her connection to Turkish lobbying groups led to my eventual firing.

Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England, Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service. To keep him from testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while “most wanted” by Interpol, he came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996.

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