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FBI Translator Alleges Prior Knowledge of 9/11 Attacks

As James Ridgeway in the Village Voice writes, this likely made Ashcroft gag.

[FBI translator Sibel] Edmonds claimed to have translated testimony in criminal and counter-intelligence cases involving different FBI field offices, going back into the late 1990s. .... Among the Farsi translators working for the FBI, she said, it was common knowledge that a longtime, highly regarded FBI "asset" placed in Afghanistan told the agency in April 2001 that he had information from his contacts there that bin Laden was planning a major attack, involving the use of planes, in one or another of big American cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York among them. The agents who took down the information from the spy wrote up reports and sent them to their superiors. That was the last the agents heard of the matter.

The Justice Department has gagged her by designating her information classified--two years after the fact and using an arcane law. Here's some background:

Cybercast News Service (cnsnews.com), part of the conservative watchdog Media Research Center, reports that Mehrzad Arbane, an Iranian convicted of drug smuggling and suspected of money laundering and smuggling people from the Middle East into the U.S., told an associate who had become a government informant in October 2001 that he "may have smuggled two of the hijackers who flew planes into the towers in New York on September 11, 2001." Arbane was convicted May 13 in a Florida federal court of importing cocaine. He is expected to stand trial in New York for harboring illegal aliens, including two from Iran.

Jairo Velez, "well-known" for smuggling cocaine from Mexico and Colombia into the U.S., met Arbane in 1999, and the two went into business smuggling cocaine, according to court documents obtained by cnsnews.com. But two years later, Velez, spooked because Arbane had told him of having possibly transported the hijackers, became a government informant, providing the information used by prosecutors in their case against Arbane, according to cnsnews.com.

Sen. Charles Grassley is upset that Ms. Edmonds, whom he calls a whistle-blower, is gagged.

We have, for instance, an e-mail sent out by the chairman's office last week saying that the FBI is classifying two-year-old information that the committee got in two previous briefings. Ms. Edmonds worked for the FBI as a translator and was fired after she reported problems. As part of the committee's legitimate oversight, we looked into that. The e-mail I have is right here. And so I'm very alarmed with the after-the-fact classification. On the one hand, I think it's ludicrous, because I understand that almost all of this information's in the public domain, and has been very widely available. On the other hand, this classification is very serious, because it seems like the FBI would be attempting to put a gag order on Congress."

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