Ellsberg, Sibel Edmonds & The Secret Team

by Fintan Dunne, BreakForNews.com
30 Aug, 2005

No decoding of an intelligence operation such as 9/11 is complete without analysing the intelligence agencies themselves. Uncovering their lies today depends on understanding their lies in the past.

New lies instruct us about old lies. And vice versa.

For those still coming to terms with the scope of our CIA Internet Fakes list, an extract from L. Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team" gives some indication of the lengths to which a secret intelligence service will go to cover it's tracks.

Even without necessarily endorsing Prouty, the issues he raises illuminate the real world subtleties of how intelligence services work.

One chapter has some stimulating stuff on Ellsberg that seems quite relevant:

The tremendous pressures in this country that have built up during the long tragic years of the conflict in Indochina are driving researchers, politicians, and other concerned Americans to search for the origins and sources of responsibility for that disaster.... This pressure is now forcing Agency and ST (Secret Team) supporters to begin a serious program of rewriting history, in a massive effort to protect and shield the Agency while shifting the search into other avenues.

We have already said that the work of Daniel Ellsberg and the number of people who helped him may have been the first major step in this effort. The released Pentagon Papers do much to portray the CIA as it is supposed to be, while doing all it can to shift any censure of the CIA as an organization primarily concerned with clandestine operations, to the military, the National Security Council, and the White House.

Read more in the Forum here. It's a valid criticism of Ellsberg, no matter what your attitude to Prouty. All the more relevant because this Vietnam-era issue has modern echoes in relation to 9/11, as the agency dons a public cloak of ineptitude to cover it's much-suspected culpability.

But, this time there's too much blame to shift. Some must be taken on board -even if under the guise of incompetence.

In that light it hardly seems surprising that a man who --unwittingly or not-- shifted blame from the agency's reputation in the past, has teamed up with a lady who is today helping to spread yet more blame away from the agency.

In one fell swoop Sibel Edmonnd has offloaded blame from the CIA --and spread it across the FBI, the State Department; an unnamed (i.e. Mossad) foreign intelligence operation; and a non-terrorist criminal network.

Quite a feat.

In an interview with me (her first recorded interview, by the way), Edmonds alleged that the US State Department had blocked investigations showing links between criminal drug trafficking networks and the attacks on 9/11.

"Certain investigations were being quashed, let's say per State Department's request, because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain business relations with foreign organizations," she said. (Interview)

Edmonds also said the pre-9/11 US intelligence system had been penetrated by a drug-linked, semi-legitimate criminal intelligence network, operating with seeming impunity inside the FBI. She claimed a fellow translator with top security clearance tried to recruit her, but when Edmonds reported the recruitment approach to her superiors she was fobbed off.

The post-9/11 intelligence 'failures' she said, included the willful quashing by the government, of investigations tracing those criminal networks.

At the time, I wrote:

If that's a limited hangout, God help us. The truth must be awful.

The "limited hangout" was, of course, 100% pure LIHOP. But with a twist. Edmonds was publicly all LIHOP, but assured everyone that her private, gagged testimony went much further. Either way, Ellsberg seemed convinced by Edmonds, as he too hammered home the LIHOP.

"I'm not an expert on all this," he told me. "But I am increasingly open to the explanation that people in the administration did see this coming... and may have indeed reduced some obstacles.., or opened the door, in effect. I haven't been absolutely convinced on that, but it does seem to me to be an open question that deserves investigation."

"Now beyond that... it seems to me quite plausible that --plausible, that's all I'd say-- that Pakistan was quite involved in this, and that many Saudis were well informed on this," said Ellsberg in a recorded interview.

"And to say that. To say Pakistan-- is to me, to say C.I.A. Because I think the relations between the Pakistan I.S.I. [intelligence service] and CIA were very close from the beginning. And it's hard to say that the I.S.I knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of... But, I wouldn't say that I have been yet been thoroughly convinced by any alternative." (Interview)

In those prevarications, Ellsberg both has his cake and eats it. Smearing with one hand and wiping away with the other.

Between them, Ellsberg and Edmonds spread the blame across the Saudis, the Pakistanis, the CIA, the State Dept., the FBI, the Mossad, a drug-linked criminal gang and the implicit villians: Al-Qaida.

Soon, from miles away in Florida, Daniel Hopsicker, with help from Atta's girlfriend Amanda Keller was insisting that Edmonds' story dovetailed with his discoveries of a drug network linked to 9/11. His list of Florida-based villians is as exhaustive as that of the dynamic duo in D.C..

If you buy that whole array of LIHOP spins, then buy it.

I didn't buy it then or now, but I kept my convictions to myself as I reported her tale. I was playing dumb and playing the long game for a bigger payoff: the whole truth on 9/11.

You can't get anywhere investigation 9/11 from web material alone. I figured that some misdirection of my own would get me closer to the truth.

It did. And then some.

Those interviews with Edmonds and Ellsberg led me to further interviews with many of the well known 9/11 skeptics -on our BreakForNews netradio shows. As the jigsaw pieces came together, person by person, website by website, the big picture emerged.

WHAT FLAVOR CONSPIRACY YOU WANT?

One big corner of that overall 9/11 picture is formed by four disparate-seeming individuals: a veteran whistleblower, an attractive novice whistleblower, a campaigning journalist and a reputed lingerie model; jigsaw peices called Ellsberg, Edmonds, Hopsicker and Keller. Ellsberg supports Edmonds, confirmed by Hopsicker --backed by eyewitness accounts from Keller. But they're all telling different flavors of the same story.

To specify which story that is, let's take a look at the popular tales of 9/11. The notorious main division is between LIHOP and MIHOP. But it's much more detailed than that. Explanations come in a full range of flavors --starting with the official story:

A. Official story:

CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush and/or Clinton were complacent.

B. Official Lame Conspiracy:

CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush/Cheney maybe let it happen; Israelis Knew.

C. Official LIHOP Conspiracy:

CIA/FBI were compromised; Bush/Cheney did let it happen; Israelis Helped.

D. Official LIHOP Wild Conspiracy:

CIA/FBI compromised; Bush/Cheney/Neocons let it happen; Israelis Did It.

E. Official LIHOP Tinfoil Conspiracy:

Israelis/Neocons/Bush/Cheney Did It; CIA/FBI looked the other way.

F. Official MIHOP 'Serious' Conspiracy:

Israelis/Neocons/CIA/FBI/Bush/Cheney/Military-Industrial-Complex Did It.

G. Official Loony Conspiracies:

Rothschilds and/or Rockefellers and/or CFR and/or Bildebergers did it.
Globalists who want to run everything in a World Government did it.
Jews and Jewish bankers -who already run everything- did it.
Satanists, Opus Dei or Reptilians did it.

It's a terrific variety of theories.
It plays out something like this:

• The mainstream media push version A; hint at B; sneer at G.
• The controlled right/intellectual media pushes version B.
• The controlled left/intellectual media pushes version C.
• The 'moderate' Fake internet sites push versions C and D.
• The 'softcore' Fake internet sites push versions D and E.
• The 'independent' Fake internet sites push version F.
• The 'loony' Fake interent sites push variations of version G.

But every single one, from A to G are OFFICIAL versions, sanctioned and promoted by the 9/11 intelligence coverup operation and their CIA Fakes network. They have a flavor for every market.

The creation of this multiplicity of explanations is a core element of the coverup. Left to their own devices, people on the Internet might have figured out the truth themselves. But with this circus in action, there is always plenty of distraction and lots of division in opinion.

The intelligence coverup is not trying to stop 9/11 conspiracy theories on the internet. It's creating them. Then playing off supporters of the different theories against each other. That's a classic Cointelpro-style tactic.

The perpetrators knew that a sizeable segment of people were going to be pretty sure 9/11 was not as it seems. They don't mind that, for now. The immediate objectives are first, to to stop these skeptical views from gaining hold in mainstream opinion. Second, to prevent a coherent view forming which could convinve a much broader number of people -particularly those on the political left.

Ellsberg, Edmonds, Hopsicker, Keller are clearly advocates for Version C. They are not the only ones.

Soon after our interview with Sibel Edmonds, Antiwar.com began carrying her story and have been her strongest promoters ever since. The Edmonds comments about a "certain" intelligence agency, sit well on that website, where lead Antiwar.com columnist Justin Raimondo, is just now yet again pushing the "Israelis Knew/Did It" angle on 9/11.

Many other CIA Fakes are heavily promoting this line, because it's a key part of what the coverup hopes will forever be the main vaguely-hinted, but unproven conspiracy theory on 9/11: Bush, Cheney, and Mossad let it happen on purpose.

The truth is far worse. But we are getting closer to it, step by step.

COMING NEXT: The Pod People and the CIA

Fintan Dunne 1st Sept, 2005

Read the extract from Prouty's "The Secret Team"
Requires actual thinking. More in an update here soon.

THE SECRET TEAM

The CIA and Its Allies in Control of
the United States and the World
L. FLETCHER PROUTY Col., U.S. Air Force (Ret.)

Chapter 8
CIA: The "Cover Story" Intelligence Agency
and the Real-Life Clandestine Operator

THE CIA LIKES TO PUBLICIZE ITSELF AS IT WISHES TO be seen; it tries consistently to maintain its cover story. These facts would not be publicly admitted by the agency; but they are facts. It is only fitting to note that when Allen Dulles died, he was writing a book about "Communism and Subversion". This was his first love, as it was J. Edgar Hoover's. This was his occupation. Intelligence was his avocation. When he was writing about Communism and subversion, he was writing, of course, about the real work of the CIA. He liked to write about the CIA and he liked to see that others wrote about the CIA... Continues here