News Release

9/11 Commission

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SIBEL EDMONDS
Edmonds is director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, which has released a document titled “National Security Experts Censored by the 9/11 Commission.”

Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work there, she reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her issues have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secret Privilege” by Attorney General John Ashcroft; the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice.
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MELVIN A. GOODMAN
Now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, Goodman was with the CIA for 41 years, serving as a senior analyst and a division chief. He is currently working on a book titled The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Goodman said today: “The conventional wisdom that the 9/11 Commission did a successful job of exploring and explaining the intelligence community and that the Commission’s suggested reforms would lead to clear fixes for the broken community is wrong. Although the Commission had a straightforward vision — the creation of a powerful national intelligence director to enforce bureaucratic cooperation and to attract skilled personnel to the community — it had a limited understanding of the hows and whys of the community and placed too much faith in the organization of the community as opposed to the personnel.”

Goodman added: “The bureaucratic battle that led to the squelching of dissent within the administration exposed the problems within the intelligence community that have not been fixed by the 9/11 Commission or the Intelligence Reform Act of December 2004. These problems include the militarization of the intelligence community, which must be reversed; the absence of congressional oversight over a flawed intelligence product, which must be ended; and the seeming inability of the Central Intelligence Agency to tell truth to power.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167