January 09, 2008

Pakistan given nuclear secrets by U.S. officials? Foreknowledge of 9/11? (B-52 nuke "mistake")

From this:

A whistleblower has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan...

Whether this and the following are tinfoil or not isn't known. What is clear is that the U.S. mainstream media isn't rushing to look into this. While Edmonds has been featured on 60 Minutes and the NYTimes ran several articles mentioning her, the last article was in January 2005 (link). This article tries to tie this in to last year's case of the B-52 which was mistakenly/"mistakenly" loaded with live nukes last year (link); more by that same author here and here. As with another field, there appear to be a statistically-improbable number of deaths of those from Minot AFB; see the last link.

UPDATE: Ahem. Moving on, one of the suicides mentioned at the baltimorechronicle link is that of Captain John Frueh, who was reported missing and then found ten days later in an apparently remote area of Skamania County, WA. Someone visited the area to check it out here. Unfortunately, that person isn't a hiker, and I'd like the input of someone who is. Because, after doing a little research (link, link; news reports here) I can find no conceivable reason why I would ever be interested in visiting the peak that he appears to have been going for. Of course, my main interests are things like state and county highpoints or hikes involving various challenges. This doesn't appear to involve many challenges and, while they say it has a good view, there are probably plenty of other peaks with good views in the area as well. It doesn't appear to be a major destination. There are certainly many options available here: he might not have been going for the peak and that's just a circumstance, he might have gotten lost (although he was found near his car), if he was going for the peak he'd probably have at least done a little planning and would have a book or printouts or have asked rangers or others about it, etc. Perhaps someone in the area would like to shed some light on this.

Posted to Miscellania at January 9, 2008 02:07 PM