A Conversation with Sibel Edmonds and William Weaver
of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
The House of Death is the story of how an informant for Homeland Security, working “undercover” under the direct control of a Bush appointed United States Attorney, operated a macabre house of horrors in which more than a dozen people were tortured to death with the informant taking part. There have been a continuing series of articles at Narco News on the subject, reported by Bill Conroy, who has been a frequent guest.
Our guests are Sibel Edmonds, a courageous whistleblower who subsequently became the Director of the National Security Whistleblower’s Coalition, and William Weaver who acts as Senior Advisor to the same organization.
About the guests:
Sibel Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI’s Washington Field Office. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately 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 Ashcroft; the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice. Ms. Edmonds is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani; and has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, and a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy”.
Bill Weaver served in U.S. Army signals intelligence for eight years in Berlin and Augsburg, Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s. He subsequently received his law degree and Ph.D. in politics from the University of Virginia, where he was on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review. He is presently an Associate Professor and Associate Director of Faculty for the Institute for Policy and Economic Development and an Associate in the Center for Law and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. He specializes in executive branch secrecy policy, governmental abuse, and law and bureaucracy. His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Political Science Quarterly, Virginia Law Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Organization and other journals. He has co-authored several books on law and political theory.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
NSWBC Files a FOIA lawsuit Against
DEA & DOJ in House of Death Case
Excerpted from a new Narco News Article by Bill Conroy:
The litigation, which (Bill) Weaver says is “part of an effort by the NSWBC” to expose the truth in the House of Death, was filed under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It alleges that Washington bureaucrats are stonewalling the release of public records that promise to further illuminate the government’s role in facilitating the House of Death bloodshed.
Among the documents Weaver is seeking from the government (that the DOJ and DEA have so far refused to release) are an internal report involving more than 40 interviews conducted jointly by a team of DEA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigators as well as a tape recording made of the first murder at the House of Death.
The murder toll at the house in Ciudad Juarez reached at least a dozen over a five-month period ending in mid-January 2004. A U.S. government informant who had penetrated a Juarez cell of the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes narco-trafficking organization, arranged, and in some cases participated in, the torture and murder sessions while he was under the supervision of ICE agents and a U.S. prosecutor in El Paso, Texas.
DOJ attorneys currently have deportation proceedings pending against that informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, which if successful, would return him to Mexico and into the hands of the narco-traffickers he betrayed — setting up the informant to become yet another murder victim of the House of Death.
Weaver, in conjunction with Narco News, filed the initial Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with DEA in October 2005 seeking the release of public-record material related to the House of Death case. However, to date, Weaver claims in the lawsuit that the agency has “wrongfully withheld the requested records.”
Click here to download a PDF copy of the lawsuit
Related links:
Read Bill Conroy’s Investigative pieces on the House of Death
