Sibel Edmonds

Have you been following the Sibel Edmonds story? You should. She is the FBI translator who has been telling the world that the administration had (or at least should have had) foreknowledge of the 911 attacks.

James Ridgeway now takes her tale into strange new areas. Apparently, the hijackers had connections to drug smugglers and money launderers in Florida, whose activities were under surveillance by the Bureau. Here's a sample:

Cybercast News Service (cnsnews.com), part of the conservative watchdog Media Research Center, reports that Mehrzad Arbane, an Iranian convicted of drug smuggling and suspected of money laundering and smuggling people from the Middle East into the U.S., told an associate who had become a government informant in October 2001 that he "may have smuggled two of the hijackers who flew planes into the towers in New York on September 11, 2001." Arbane was convicted May 13 in a Florida federal court of importing cocaine. He is expected to stand trial in New York for harboring illegal aliens, including two from Iran.

Jairo Velez, "well-known" for smuggling cocaine from Mexico and Colombia into the U.S., met Arbane in 1999, and the two went into business smuggling cocaine, according to court documents obtained by cnsnews.com. But two years later, Velez, spooked because Arbane had told him of having possibly transported the hijackers, became a government informant, providing the information used by prosecutors in their case against Arbane, according to cnsnews.com.

Whether the U.S. is tracing the connections between Arbane and the hijackers is not known. However, Ecuador is one of the countries from which Arbane is believed to have operated, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told a House Foreign Operations appropriations subcommittee in April 2002 that along the border between Ecuador and Colombia, "we have got...a bit of a problem with Al Qaeda itself and some Hezbollah elements."