cov·er-up
Function: noun
1 : a device or stratagem for masking or concealing
; also : a usually concerted effort to keep an illegal or unethical act or situation from being made public
“Four 9/11 Moms Watch Rumsfeld And Grumble” by Gail Sheehy, March 30, 2004, New York Observer:
The Moms had tried to get their most pressing questions to the commission … but their efforts had foundered at the hands of Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director. Indeed, it was only with the recent publication of Richard Clarke’s memoir of his counterterrorism days in the White House, Against All Enemies, that the Moms found out that Mr. Zelikow … was actually one of the select few in the new Bush administration who had been warned, nine months before 9/11, that Osama bin Laden was the No. 1 security threat to the country. They are now calling for Mr. Zelikow’s resignation. …
They point out that it is Mr. Zelikow who decides which among the many people offering information will be interviewed. Efforts by the families to get the commission to hear from a raft of administration and intelligence-agency whistleblowers have been largely ignored at his behest. And it is Mr. Zelikow who oversees what investigative material the commissioners will be briefed on, and who decides the topics for the hearings. Mr. Zelikow’s statement at the January hearing sounded to the Moms like a whitewash waiting to happen: “This was everybody’s fault and nobody’s fault.”
“We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001,” by Eric Boehlert, March 26, 2004, Salon.com:
… She was assigned to the FBI’s investigation into Sept. 11 attacks and other counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases, where she translated reams of documents seized by agents who, for the previous year, had been rounding up suspected terrorists. … Edmonds cannot talk in detail about the tapes publicly because she’s been under a Justice Department gag order since 2002. …
This week Edmonds attended the commission hearings and plans to return in April when FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify. “I’m hoping the commission asks him real questions – like, in April 2001, did an FBI field office receive legitimate information indicating the use of airplanes for an attack on major cities? And is it true that through an FBI informant, who’d been used [by the Bureau] for 10 years, did you get information about specific terrorist plans and specific cells in this country? He couldn’t say no,” she insists. …
As a result of her reports, Edmonds says she was harassed at the FBI. She was fired in March 2002. Litigation followed, and in October 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss the Edmonds case, taking the extraordinary step of invoking the rarely used state secrets privilege in order “to protect the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.” …
During a 2002 segment on “60 Minutes” exploring Edmonds’ initial charges of FBI internal abuses, Sen. Grassley was asked if Edmonds is credible. “She’s credible and the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story,” he said. The Inspector General’s office then launched an investigation into Edmonds’ charges and told her to expect a finding in the fall of 2002. The report has yet to be released. …
“Spectators attend 9-11 hearing for a variety of reasons,” by Marta Lillo Bustos, Scripps Howard Foundation Wire, March 28, 2004:
The former FBI translator said she is prohibited from giving details. “They offered me a raise, they offered me a full-time position, to just drop the case,” Edmonds said. She said she has been threatened with jail if she speaks about the specifics.
“Whistleblower Coming In Cold From the F.B.I.,” by Gail Sheehy, January 25, 2004, New York Observer:
… Shortly after her dismissal, F.B.I. agents turned up at the door of the Ms. Edmonds’ townhouse to seize her home computer. She was then called in to be polygraphed—a test which, she found out later, she passed. A few months after her dismissal, accompanied by her lawyer on a sunny morning in May 2002, Ms. Edmonds took her story to the Senate Judiciary Committee. …
After her meeting, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican vice-chair of the Judiciary Committee to whom Ms. Edmonds appealed, had his investigators check her out. Then they, along with staffers for Senator Patrick Leahy, called for a joint briefing in the summer of 2002. The F.B.I. sent a unit chief from the language division and an internal security official. In a lengthy, unclassified session that one participant describes as bizarre, the windows fogged up as the session finished; it was that tense, “None of the F.B.I. officials’ answers washed, and they could tell we didn’t believe them.” He chuckles remembering one of the Congressional investigators saying, “You basically admitted almost all that Sibel alleged, yet you say there’s no problem here. What’s wrong with this picture?” …
The translator had filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on March 7, 2002. She was told then that an investigation would be undertaken and she could expect a report by the fall of 2002. Twenty-one months later, she is still waiting. She also filed a First Amendment case against the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. And a Freedom of Information case against the F.B.I. for release of documents pertaining to her work for the Bureau, to confirm her allegations. The F.B.I. refused her FOIA request. Their stated reason was the pending investigation by Justice, which, her sources in the Senate tell her, will probably be held up until after the November election.
When Ms. Edmonds wouldn’t go away or keep still, F.B.I. Director Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to assert the State Secrets Privilege in the case of Ms. Edmonds versus Department of Justice. Mr. Ashcroft obliged. The State Secrets Privilege is the neutron bomb of legal tactics. In the rare cases where the government invokes it to withhold evidence or to block discovery in the name of national security, it can effectively terminate the case. …
She was one of three Turkish translators working on real time wiretaps, e-mails, and documents related to 9/11 investigations.
…it was her other colleague who gave her the greatest cause for concern – and her reports to her superiors as well as an alphabet soup of government commissions and agencies remain unanswered. Melek Can Dickerson was a very friendly Turkish woman, married to a major in the U.S. Air Force. She liked to be called informally “Jan.” The account that follows, which comes from extended interviews with Ms. Edmonds, was related in testimony to the Senate Judiciary committee.
“I began to be suspicious as early as November, 2001” said Ms. Edmonds. “In conversation Jan mentioned these suspects and said ‘I can’t believe they’re monitoring these people.'” “How would you know?” Ms. Edmonds remembers saying. She said Dickerson told her she had worked for them in a Turkish organization; she talked about how she shopped for them at a Middle Eastern grocery store in Alexandria. Ms. Edmonds has told the Judiciary Committee that soon after, Ms. Dickerson tried to establish social ties with her, suggesting they meet in Alexandria and introduce their husbands to each other.
When Sibel invited the visitors in for tea, she said, Major Dickerson began asking Matthew Edmonds if the couple had many friends from Turkey here in the U.S. Mr. Edmonds said he didn’t speak Turkish, so they didn’t associate with many Turkish people. The Air Force officer then began talking up a Turkish organization in Washington that he described, according to the Edmondses, as “a great place to make connections and it could be very profitable.”
Sibel was sickened. This organization was the very one she and Jan Dickerson were monitoring in a 9/11 investigation. Since Sibel had adhered to the rule that an F.B.I. employee does not discuss bureau matters with one’s mate, her husband innocently continued the conversation. Ms. Dickerson and her husband offered to introduce the Edmondses to people connected to the Turkish embassy in Washington who belonged to this organization.
“These two people were the top targets of our investigation!” Ms. Edmonds said of the people the Dickersons proposed to introduce them to. …
These are classic “pitch activities” to get somebody to spy for you, according to a Judiciary Committee staffer who investigated Ms. Edmonds’ claims. “You’d think the F.B.I. would be jumping out of their seats about all these red flags,” the staffer said.
The targets of that F.B.I. investigation left the country abruptly in 2002. Later, Ms. Edmonds discovered that Ms. Dickerson had managed to get hold of translations meant for Ms. Edmonds, forge her signature, and render the communications useless.
“These were documents directly related to a 9/11 investigation and suspects, and they had been sent to field agents in at least two cities.” By accident, Ms. Edmonds discovered the breach—up to 400 pages of translations marked “not pertinent”—and insisted that those classified translations be sent back so she could retranslate them. “We discovered some amazing stuff,” she remembered.
The first half-dozen translations were transcripts from an F.B.I. wiretap targeting a Turkish intelligence officer working out of the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. A staff-member of the Judiciary committee later confirmed to this writer that the intelligence officer was the target of the wiretap Ms. Dickerson had mistranslated, signing Ms. Edmonds’ name to the printouts. Ms. Edmonds said she found them to reveal that the officer had spies working for him inside the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon—but that information would not have reached field agents unless Ms. Edmonds had retranslated them. She only got through about 100 more pages before she was fired. …