Saturday, April 10, 2004

This seems to be a story the US press is trying mighty hard not to report:
The sensational story of Sibel Edmonds illuminates the world of difference between the international online media and the U.S. press.

Edmonds is a 33-year-old former FBI translator whose February allegations to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks directly challenge the credibility of the commission's star witness, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. In an April 2 interview with the Independent of London, Edmonds said she read intelligence reports from the summer of 2001 that al Qaeda operatives planned to fly hijacked airplanes into U.S. skyscrapers.

"There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks," she said. She added that specific cities with skyscrapers were mentioned.

Edmonds said that she had provided the commission's staff with "specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."

Edmonds took issue with Rice's assertion in a March 22 Washington Post Op-Ed piece that the United States had no intelligence warning of al Qaeda's tactics. "That is impossible," she said.

~snip~

Edmonds's story has been almost uniformly ignored in the U.S. daily press. Her allegations have been detailed in the online magazine Salon and several liberal sites are playing them up. The Independent's story was mentioned briefly on Monday in Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing blog on washingtonpost.com. Tim Russert briefly quizzed the Republican and Democratic heads of the 9/11 commission about Edmonds during Sunday's "Meet the Press" program on NBC. Former Clinton White House aide Paul Begala mentioned it last week on CNN's "Crossfire." But the only U.S. newspaper to give Edmonds any extended coverage was the Washington Times. In January, a page-one New York Observer article on Edmonds's complaints about lax security in the FBI's translation office did not include the allegations that first appeared in the Independent.

Link via the always entertaining American Leftist.
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