Sibel Edmonds: Translator caught in web

When Sibel Edmonds was a young girl, her father, a physician in Iran, was asked to falsify an autopsy finding. Angrily, he refused, daring the authorities to retaliate.

At home, he told his family: "Things like this do not happen in truly democratic civil societies - like America."

Sibel still clings to her father’s words, but her Kafka-esque encounter with the U.S. government is challenging her faith.

She wanders a wonderland of classified documents and covert hearings, waiting to see if the Supreme Court will take her case and lift the curtain of secrecy that the Bush administration has self-protectively wrapped around it.

Sibel’s offense? She was a patriot who blew the whistle on incompetence, security breaches and alleged wrongdoing in the U.S. government’s counter-terror operations.

For that, she was fired.

When Sibel challenged her dismissal in court, she became one of several Americans to be penalized in recent months by the government’s "very broad and radical use" of an old legal rule known as the "state secrets privilege," says her attorney, Ann Beeson, an associate legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The administration, which is supposed to cite the rarely-invoked rule only to protect national security interests, has been "invoking the privilege to cover up its own negligence," Beeson says.

Jeffrey Sterling, an African-American employee of the CIA, sued the agency, claiming that it practices racial discrimination in its hiring and promotion policies. The government invoked its state secrets privilege, and the federal courts dismissed the case.

The state secrets privilege has also been used by the government as a defense in the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian who says he was snatched by U.S. officials in New York, never charged with a crime, but covertly "rendered" to Syria to be tortured and imprisoned.

"This is not just legal theory. It affects real people’s lives," says Beeson. "They have learned secrecy is powerful."

Sibel’s family moved to Turkey when she was a girl, and she attended college in the United States. She became a U.S. citizen and, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, went to work for the FBI, which was in dire need of Middle Eastern translators.

Sibel was over-qualified, but felt the call of duty, she says. "Remember where I came from: countries where you could be arrested for just dreaming about these rights."

But at the FBI, Sibel got a disillusioning look at the management failures, case backlogs, turf battles and bureaucratic gold-bricking that have since been confirmed by several high-level government investigations of the government’s counter-terror operations.

The Justice Department’s own inspector general - in a January 2005 report the government tried for years to keep classified - has confirmed the validity of Sibel’s specific complaints. In one particularly grievous instance, a translator with ties to a suspect organization was put in charge of the wiretap transcripts from that same group.

"I was asked and later ordered to refrain from reporting these cases," Sibel says. "I went by the book. I went by the rules. ... I was retaliated against, and fired."

When Sibel challenged the government in court, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft personally certified that "everything regarding my case and allegations were regarded as state secrets," she recalls.

Her case was dismissed by a U.S. district court. A federal appellate court agreed.

Some of the government’s actions seem downright surreal. In the summer of 2002, for example, FBI officials met with Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and acknowledged the accuracy of some of Sibel’s complaints. The senators then wrote to Justice Department officials, asking for an investigation.

After Sibel filed her suit the government declared that the briefing, the FBI comments, and even the senators’ letters were to be retroactively classified and removed from public scrutiny.

Last April, the federal appeals court here excluded the press and public from Sibel’s hearing. At one point, even she and her lawyers were told to leave the room so government attorneys could confer in secret with the judge.

"So much for finally having my day in court," Sibel recalls. "My attorneys and I were barred from being present in my own court hearing."

The Supreme Court is "my last hope," Sibel says. But if the justices let her down, she won’t lose her faith in the United States. She still believes it is the "truly democratic civil society" her father revered those many years ago.

Except now, Sibel says, she is a wiser American. One who doesn’t take her liberties for granted.

"I thought it was enough to pay taxes, to vote, to be a good citizen," she says. Now she knows the real price of freedom: "Eternal vigilance."

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_3073261