Do you know this woman?

Coincidentalists - the Warren Report Loyalists, the Kean Commission Deadenders - love their conspiracy theories. And I do mean theirs.

It would be positively uncanny, if it wasn't as predictable as bombing Tehran, how on the rare occassions the media addresses alternative readings of 9/11, it's the no-plane-hit-the-Pentagon chestnut which invariably gets roasted. To mass infotainment's passive consumer, that's about as good as it gets for hearing a contrary interpretation of the events of September 11.

In part, this is can be ascribed to institutional laziness. We shouldn't discount this; media laziness is profound. Going for the cheap, sensational hook is always the default option. After all, "it was a missile!" doesn't require much exposition. And the visuals!

But there is something else going on, and it has to do with strawmen. Provide an airing for the most outlandish theorizing, knock it down ("Gerald Posner joins us now..."), and consider all alternative views debunked. It's always been an important step in bleaching legitimacy out of "conspiracy theory." Sometimes, the strawmen are constructed by useful idiots who are indiscriminate with the facts, and make unwitting conduits of disinformation. And sometimes, they know precisely what they're doing. (By the way, Mark Robinowitz has an excellent resource here re: the muddying of the 9/11 waters with bogus claims.)

So yes, they love conspiracy theories. But try raising conspiracy facts - complex dirty business like BCCI, the CIA's drug trafficking, and Sibel Edmonds - and they're suddenly as scarce as a Senator's son in Iraq.

So, since the blog's drawing a number of new readers, I thought I'd ask: do you know this woman?

This is Sibel Edmonds, a 9/11 whistleblower, formerly of the FBI translation department. She speaks English, Farsi, Turkish and Azerbaijani. She does not speak Arabic.

She is someone the Department of Justice doesn't want you to know. She is subject to an extraordinary "State Secrets Privilege" gag order, which prohibits her going public with her classified testimony. The DOJ even retroactively classified her public testimony. Quietly, it recently also admitted the validity of her claim of espionage in the translation department, just so you know we're not talking about a crazy woman here.

Edmonds is prohibited from speaking in detail - naming countries, business, names - but she's still been able to tell us much. She has hinted that people ought to look behind administrations, to the confluence of state, business and criminal interests. Including big oil, and big drugs.

From an interview Edmonds gave Jim Hogue of The Boston Chronicle:

JH: I understand why you can't say anything about this, but there are several books out about the Bush ties to the Saudis and the bin Ladens in particular. And in David Griffin's book, The New Pearl Harbor, there is a very good synopsis of the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. He shows the direct connections between the CIA, the ISI, and Mohamed Atta. He makes a very convincing case that the Pakistani ISI had been helping to plan 9/11 for a long time.

I don't imagine that you are allowed to say much about that.

SE: You are correct. But I can tell you that the issue, on one side, boils down to money--a lot of money. And it boils down to people and their connections with this money, and that's the portion that, even with this book, has not been mentioned to this day. Because then it starts touching some people in high places.

JH: Can you explain more about what money you are talking about?

SE: The most significant information that we were receiving did not come from counter-terrorism investigations, and I want to emphasize this. It came from counter-intelligence, and certain criminal investigations, and issues that have to do with money laundering operations.

You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one. In certain points - and they (the intelligence community) are separating those portions from just the terrorist activities. And, as I said, they are citing "foreign relations" which is not the case, because we are not talking about only governmental levels. And I keep underlining semi-legit organizations and following the money. When you do that the picture gets grim. It gets really ugly.... I can tell that once, and if, and when this issue gets to be, under real terms, investigated, you will be seeing certain people that we know from this country standing trial; and they will be prosecuted criminally.

Wait a sec - The ISI? Money laundering? Drugs? I thought we were talking about 9/11 here - when do we get to the missile part?

What Edmonds tells us lies in the deep background of 9/11 - money laundering, narcotics, arms dealing and covert terrorist support - corroborates the testimony of other whistleblowers like Indira Singh and Michael Springmann, and the work of investigative journalists such as Daniel Hopsicker and Michael C Ruppert. It begins to look a lot like what the late Danny Casolaro described, before it took his life. It looks like Casolaro's Octopus.

Yeah, I know; it sounds crazy. Crazy spooky. It sounds like tinfoil hat time. And yet John Ashcroft justified her gag order by pleading with the courts that what she knows could grievously harm national security. Are fabrications so dangerous?

Would it surprise you to learn the Kean Commission Report doesn't mention any of this?

Yet if you don't know this woman, you don't know what you're talking about when you talk about 9/11.