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.

Exclusive Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds
By Khatchig Mouradian
The Armenian Weekly
August 21, 2009

On April 23, 2007, I sat down in Washington, D.C. with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds for an extensive interview, which was published in the Armenian Weekly and on ZNet and widely circulated. On Aug. 18, 2009, I conducted a follow-up phone interview with Edmonds, who was visiting New Zealand. The interview is an overview of what has transpired in her case since 2007, with emphasis on her deposition in the Schmidt vs. Krikorian case in Ohio earlier this month.

Edmonds, an FBI language specialist, was fired from her job with the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March 2002. Her crime was reporting security breaches, cover-ups, blocking of intelligence, and the bribery of U.S. individuals including high-ranking officials. The “state secrets privilege” has often been invoked to block court proceedings on her case, and the U.S. Congress has even been gagged to prevent further discussion.Edmonds uncovered, for example, a covert relationship between Turkish groups and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who reportedly received tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in return for withdrawing the Armenian Genocide Resolution from the House floor in 2000.

Born in Iran in 1970, Edmonds received her BA in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University, and her MA in public policy and international commerce from George Mason University. She is the founder and director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) and in 2006 received the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. She speaks Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani.

Below is the full transcript of the follow-up interview.

***

Khatchig Mouradian—I asked you in 2007 what had changed during the five years since 2002, when you first contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee to reveal the story on Turkish bribery of high-level U.S. officials. You said, “There has been no hearing and nobody has been held accountable. We are basically where we started…” Two more years have passed, we have a new president, and I have to ask the same question again. Has there been any change?

Sibel Edmonds—Nothing has changed. As far as the Congress is concerned, the Democrats have been the majority since November 2006 and I have had zero interest from Congress on having hearings—any hearings—on this issue, whether it’s the states secrets privilege portion of it or the involved corruption cases. The current majority has been at least as bad as the previous one. At least the Republicans were gutsy enough to come and say, We’re not going to touch this. But the new majority is not saying anything!

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Following Bush lead, Obama moves to block challenge to wiretapping program
New administration wants case against NSA dismissed
source: Raw Story
by Joe Byrne

President Barack Obama invoked “state secrets” to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency’s warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.

The move — which holds that information surrounding the massive eavesdropping program should be kept from the public because of its sensitivity — follows an earlier decision in March to block handover of documents relating to the Bush Administration’s decision to spy on a charity. The arguments also mirror the Bush Administration’s efforts to dismiss an earlier suit against AT&T.

The Friday brief involves a lawsuit filed by the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing the NSA for the wiretapping program. The agency monitored the telephone calls and emails of thousands of people within the United States without a court’s approval in an effort to thwart terrorist attacks.

It also stands firmly behind the telecommunications giant AT&T. AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that the company allowed the agency to install network monitoring hardware to spy on American citizens.

The Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department says, “has set forth a more than reasonable basis to conclude that harm to national security would result from the disclosure of whether the NSA has worked with any telecommunications carrier.” AT&T is specifically mentioned. Public reports have fingered AT&T, Verizon, MCI and Sprint as participating in the government’s eavesdropping efforts.

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Bush administration memos on presidential powers stun legal experts
Secret memos from the Justice Department said that only the president could set rules in the war on terrorism — which law professors say flies in the face of the Constitution.

Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington — Legal experts said Tuesday that they were taken aback by the claim in the latest batch of secret Bush-era memos that the president alone had the power to set the rules during the war on terrorism.

Yale law professor Jack Balkin called this a “theory of presidential dictatorship. They say the battlefield is everywhere. And the president can do anything he wants, so long as it involves the military and the enemy.”

By the time the Bush administration came to an end, the views within the Justice Department had changed dramatically.

But critics said that some in the Bush administration took advantage of the moment.

“This was a period of panic, and panic creates an opportunity for patriotic politicians to abuse their power,” Balkin said.

The newly released memos were mostly written between 2001 and 2003, and they gave the Bush administration broad legal authorization for fighting a new war in a new way. Their common theme was that no laws can limit the president’s power in fighting terrorists.

Congress had prohibited the use of torture by U.S. agents, and said “no citizen shall be imprisoned” in this country without legal charges. The memos said neither law could stand in the way of the president’s power as commander in chief.

A March 2002 memo, for example, said that holding prisoners in wartime “is an area in which the president appears to enjoy exclusive authority, as the power . . . is not reserved by the Constitution in whole or in part to any other branch of government.”

Duke University law professor Walter Dellinger said the Constitution gives Congress considerable power for making wartime rules.

Article I says Congress has “all legislative powers,” including the power “to declare war . . . and make rules concerning captures on land and water” as well as “regulation of the land and naval forces.”

“You can never get over how bad these opinions were,” said Dellinger, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Clinton administration. “The assertion that Congress has no role to play with respect to the detention of prisoners was contrary to the Constitution’s text, to judicial precedent and to historical practice. For people who supposedly follow the text [of the Constitution], what don’t they understand about the phrase ‘make rules concerning captures on land and water’?”

Most of the memos were written by John C. Yoo, a deputy director of the Office of Legal Counsel. This small, obscure office writes legal opinions for the attorney general and others in the government. Yoo’s memos gave legal guidance to the Defense Department and the White House.

Five days before the Bush administration came to an end, Steven G. Bradbury, the head of the office, wrote an 11-page memo “for the files” explaining how his office had gone wrong.

It reads like a “greatest mistakes” memo from one outgoing officeholder to guide his successor. Bradbury emphasized that many of the legal positions issued between 2001 and 2003 are “not consistent with the current views of OLC.” Others rest on “doubtful” propositions, he said.

david.savage@latimes.com

Original article here.

Spy chief: We risk a police state
Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has warned that the fear of terrorism is being exploited by the Government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state.

By Tom Whitehead, Home Affairs Editor
The London Telegraph
16 Feb 2009

Dame Stella accused ministers of interfering with people’s privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists.

“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper.

“It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said.

Dame Stella, 73, added: “The US has gone too far with Guantánamo and the tortures. MI5 does not do that. Furthermore it has achieved the opposite effect: there are more and more suicide terrorists finding a greater justification.” She said the British secret services were “no angels” but insisted they did not kill people.

Dame Stella became the first woman director general of MI5 in 1992 and was head of the security agency until 1996. Since stepping down she has been a fierce critic of some of the Government’s counter-terrorism and security measures, especially those affecting civil liberties.

In 2005, she said the Government’s plans for ID cards were “absolutely useless” and would not make the public any safer. Last year she criticised attempts to extend the period of detention without charge for terrorism suspects to 42 days as excessive, shortly before the plan was rejected by Parliament.

Her latest remarks were made as the Home Office prepares to publish plans for a significant expansion of state surveillance, with powers for the police and security services to monitor every email, as well as telephone and internet activity.

Despite considerable opposition to the plan, the document will say that the fast changing pace of communication technology means the security services will not be able to properly protect the public without the new powers.

Local councils have been criticised for using anti-terrorism laws to snoop on residents suspected of littering and dog fouling offences.

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Obama, the military and the threat of dictatorship

23 December 2008
by Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Web Site

With his choice of Admiral Dennis Blair as director of national intelligence, President-elect Barack Obama has now named three recently retired four-star military officers to serve in his cabinet. This unprecedented representation of the senior officer corps within the incoming Democratic administration is indicative of a growth in the political power of the US military that poses a serious threat to basic democratic rights.

As head of the US military’s Pacific command in 1999-2000, Blair was distinguished by his efforts to solidarize the Pentagon with the military of Indonesia as it carried out butchery in East Timor, effectively vetoing the half-hearted human rights concerns voiced by the Clinton administration.

Before tapping Blair, Obama named former Marine Gen. James Jones as his national security adviser and former Army chief of staff Gen. Erik Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs. It is also reported that the incoming administration may ask retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to stay on as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Washington Post last Saturday described this concentration of former senior officers in the administration as “an unusual trend for a Democratic administration and one that has surprised both political camps.”

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Court sides with ACLU, strikes down Patriot Act gag provision
by Stephen C. Webster
Published: Tuesday December 16, 2008

ACLU victorious as federal court declares Patriot Act provision a violation of the First Amendment

A federal appeals court ruling late Monday is the cause célèbre of the American Civil Liberties Union, as another provision of the Bush administration’s Patriot Act falls to the judicial system.

Until the ruling, recipients of so-called “national security letters” were legally forbidden from speaking out. The letters, usually a demand for documents, or a notice that private records had been searched by government authorities, were criticized as a cover-all for FBI abuses.

“The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients,” said the ACLU in a release. “The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders – provisions that required the courts to treat the government’s claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch.”

Because of the ruling, the government will now be forced to justify individual gag orders before a court, instead of casually wielding the power of a blanket gag as the Bush administration has done since the blindingly fast passage of the Patriot Act in Oct. 2001.

In Sept. 2007, a federal judge ruled unconstitutional provisions within the Patriot Act which allowed the government to obtain search warrants without probable cause.

The ACLU’s complete press release follows.

####

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2008

NEW YORK – A federal appeals court today upheld, in part, a decision striking down provisions of the Patriot Act that prevent national security letter (NSL) recipients from speaking out about the secret records demands. The decision comes in an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the FBI’s authority to use NSLs to demand sensitive and private customer records from Internet Service Providers and then forbid them from discussing the requests. Siding with the ACLU, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the statute’s gag provisions violate the First Amendment.

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8 part series continues…

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4th Amendment: Rest in Peace
By Cindy Sheehan

4th Amendment
b. December 15, 1791
d. June 20, 2008

22/06/08 “ICH” — -

The 4th Amendment to the US constitution is just one more thing that has been murdered since bloody Emperor George took office in 2001: Over 4000 US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan; over one million Iraqis and Afghanis and many of our brothers and sisters in this country who have been either killed or devastated by catastrophic climate change and other violence that has become rampant.

Among the things that have been murdered in George’s quest to be the emperor of a vast US corporate-military empire are many aspects of our constitution.

The First Amendment has been obliterated with “free speech” zones; the arrests of thousands of activists trying to express their freedom of speech; the destruction of the “freedom of the press” clause began during the Reagan years and it’s untimely demise was hastened during the Clinton regime; the US technically has no state religion, but Christianity has been informally shoved down our throats with the Emperor getting revelations from his demented God that tells him to go on crusades against Muslim countries.

“Torture memos” written by law professors; torture camps; and extreme rendition slaughtered the 8th Amendment that prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishment. The Military Commission and Patriot Acts dealt the deathblows to the 8th Amendment.

When Congress gave Emperor George the power to invade sovereign countries without a declaration of war from Congress—the Emperor’s loyal and obedient servants destroyed two clauses of the Constitution: the Supremacy Clause (Art. VI, Clause 2) which states the treaties are the “Supreme” law of the land and the enumerated power of Congress to “declare war” (Art. I, Section 8).

Art. II, Section 4 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to remove a criminal administration, but the Queen of the Imperial rubber stamp arm of the empire, Nancy Pelosi, took that clause “Off the table.” When I hear that phrase, I envision a long table with lords and ladies pigging out on a banquet while the peasants starve because justice is not on that table and economic equality is out of the question.

Now, with the new law granting immunity to telecom companies and granting the federal government wide discretionary powers in spying on our communications (which has become far simpler in this electronic day and age), the Imperial rubber stamp arm of the federal government has brutally murdered another of our precious rights: the 4th Amendment which states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The centuries old right of habeas corpus which protected us from arbitrary state action through unlawful detention was also destroyed, so the US has returned to pre-Magna Carta “jurisprudence” and not one of us is safe from the arbitrary crimes of the police-empire that has replaced our representative republic.

Even thought the 4th Amendment was 217 years old, it died a violent and untimely death.

I am calling for a memorial service for the 4th Amendment on Tuesday, June 24th. We in San Francisco will be gathering at City Hall at 3pm and having a solemn funeral procession to the Federal building at 3:30 pm. We will then eulogize the 4th Amendment and give it a proper send off. It served us well. Many of our brothers and sisters have never felt its presence, though, even though they have been working for civil rights for generations.

Wear black. We are a nation in mourning for our rule of law.

If you can’t join us in San Francisco, please organize a memorial service of your own.

For more info: call 415-621-5027 or email: – contact@cindyforcongress.org

Legislating Tyranny
by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton

Posted at Lewrockwell.com

June 7, 2008

The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with an assault on U.S. civil liberty that Bush justified in the name of the “war on terror.” The government assured us that the draconian measures apply only to “terrorists.” The word terrorist, however, was not defined. The government claimed the discretionary power to decide who is a terrorist without having to present evidence or charges in a court of law.

Frankly, the Bush administration’s policy evades any notion of procedural due process of law. Administration assurances that harsh treatment is reserved only for terrorists is meaningless when the threshold process for determining who is and who is not a terrorist depends on executive discretion that is not subject to review. Substantive rights are useless without the procedural rights to enforce them.

Terrorist legislation and executive assertions created a basis upon which federal authorities claimed they were free to suspend suspects’ civil liberties in order to defend Americans from terrorism. Only after civil liberties groups and federal courts challenged some of the unconstitutional laws and procedures did realization spread that the Bush administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights is a greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.

The alacrity with which Congress accepted the initial assault from the administration is frightening. In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act passed by a vote of 98 to 1 in the Senate and by 357 to 66 in the House. The act was already written and waiting on the shelf before the 9/11 attack. Indeed, the FBI and Department of Justice have tried for years to introduce PATRIOT Act provisions into the law. That act was introduced immediately after the attacks, and few members of Congress read its contents prior to passing it.

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