Results tagged “whistle_blower” from SpyTalk

Ex-FBI Translator Tests Justice Dept. Again

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Sibel Edmonds may never get her day in court - or at least the kind she wants.

The former FBI translator has spent seven years trying to get a court to hear her allegations that foreign agents, in particular Turkish intelligence, had penetrated her unit, the State Department, the Pentagon and Congress.

This weekend she's going to try again.
You'd think that the nation's number one domestic counterterrorism agency would have better things to do than yap at authors and publishers about using the bureau's official seal on their books.

But I.C. Smith, a retired senior FBI counterintelligence agent who wrote a very critical book about the bureau in 2004, just found out otherwise.

A few weeks ago an FBI lawyer instructed Smith that he had to remove the FBI seal from his Web site, including one on the jacket of his 2004 book, "INSIDE: A Top G Man Exposes Spies, Lies and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI."    

The G-lawyer also told Smith that the publisher of his book, Thomas Nelson, Inc., would also be instructed "that if the book is reprinted, the cover be redesigned to remove the FBI Seal."
In the continuing cacophony over what torture is and whether it "works," an important point has gone missing, say current and former counterterrorism operatives.

The CIA's reliance on repeated, and brutal, "enhanced" interrogation techniques shows how few spies the spy agency had before and after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

That made the agency's reliance on squeezing new information out of captured terrorist suspects all the more desperate, many say.
Ilana Sara Greenstein, a highly praised CIA operations officer for six years until quitting in disgust in 2008,  says she was punished for complaining about gross mismanagement in the agency's Baghdad station, which CIA censors are still trying to suppress.

"What I witnessed there was nothing short of disastrous--operationally and ethically," says Greenstein, who in 2005 was cited by the U.S. military command in Baghdad for work that "directly saved lives"--the only CIA staff employee to be so honored.