What's Really The Turkey Story?

Drugs, guns, cash, genocide, helicopters, state secrets, al Qaeda and 9/11 connections, corruption at the highest levels. Speakers of the House, different ones from different parties, sit on a resolution pronouncing the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians a genocide right before it's to be presented to Congress for almost certain passage.

Is Turkey where the thread starts, the one that can be pulled to unravel the whole diabolical plot? Or is it just a fantasy? More likely something in between, revelations that could expose mendacity, greed and incompetence some very important people would pay anything to just go away.

Booman speculates Dennis Hastert's imminent resignation from Congress may have something to do with it, and he cites the usually incoherent Sibel Edmonds as the connection point -- Sibel considers herself the most gagged US citizen in history. Like the man who knew too much about our seemingly sinister dealings with Pakistan, Edmonds was at the right place and the right time, knowing how to speak the right language to learn things some very powerful people don't want exposed to the light of day.

It may be even bigger than that.

Although she meanders about what she learned as a translator of wiretaps on various, nefarious Turkish characters, her revelations -- allegations against some of the most powerful people in our midst -- especially the non-action taken by our government to follow up on her evidence while taking great pains to stifle her is extremely suspicious. Too much for mere coincidence. There's something there, something the secretive Bush administration doesn't want us to learn.

She reported her story directly to investigators that Hastert, who was going forward on a genocide resolution in 2000 just like the current vote, was tabled at the last minute. The wiretaps she translated concerned the price the Turks thought necessary to get Hastert to kill the resolution was $500,000 -- but the F.B.I. classified the results of the investigation and Edmonds was further shut down by the little used state-secrets privilege invoked by the Bush administration.

What exactly are her allegations? Frankly, her rambling discourse makes is hard to nail down, but Shayana Kadidal, one of the lead attorneys on the Center for Constitutional Rights' challenge to the NSA domestic surveillance program does an admirable job:

What was it she was trying to tell her supervisors that got her fired? Among other things: that a translator sent to Guantánamo to translate Farsi detainee interviews didn't speak that language, and that foreign diplomats suspected of spying in the U.S. were having their wiretaps translated by their own relatives who worked for the FBI. Rather than let those serious national security breaches see the light of day (and perhaps become subjects of an embarrassing outside investigation), the FBI fired her, and then successfully managed to deprive her of her vindication in court, courtesy of the state secrets privilege.

Kadidal documents the evolution of the state-secrets doctrine, something so foreign to the spirit of American jurisprudence it is no surprise it was derived from foreign law, not Congressional statutes. "What has experience taught us about the privilege in practice? Sadly, five decades of living with it has shown that the privilege is frequently invoked to cover up executive mistakes." You want to talk about "activist judges?" Talk about the one's carrying water for Bush/Cheney and their efforts to keep us all mushrooms -- kept in the dark and fed bullshit. They've enabled a return to tyranny unseen since Henry IIIV.

The state-secrets doctrine is bad law. Always has been. And as the conservative jurist Edmond Burke said, "Bad Laws are the worst sort of tyranny."