In April 2004, Edmonds stated she had provided information to the panel investigating the
September 11 attacks in February of that year. Although she started work shortly after 9/11 and worked for just over six months, she said knowledge of information circulating within the FBI during the spring and summer of 2001. The session was closed and over three hours long, she said. Reportedly, she told the commission that the FBI knew of a planned attack months away and the terrorists were in place. She stated, "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used, but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers." On the 26th, a deposition of Edmonds was quashed under the state secrets privilege. On May 13, 2004, Ashcroft submitted statements to justify the use of the
state secrets privilege against the planned deposition by Edmonds, On June 23, 2004, the retroactive reclassification was challenged in a suit filed by the Project on Government Oversight, citing fear that the group might be retroactively punished for having published the letters on its website. The Justice Department tried to get the suit dismissed, and the Justice Department explicitly approved their release to the Project on Government Oversight. The reclassification did, however, keep Edmonds from testifying in the class action suit as well as her own whistleblower suit. The latter decision was appealed, and Inspector General Glenn A. Fine released a summary of the audit report, stating "that many of her allegations were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough, and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services. Rather than investigate Edmonds's allegations vigorously and thoroughly, the FBI concluded that she was a disruption and terminated her contract." In August 2004, Edmonds founded the
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), which exists to assist national security whistleblowers through advocacy and reform. In September 2005, Edmonds said in
Vanity Fair that a price was set for
Dennis Hastert to withdraw support for the
Armenian genocide resolution. That the "... Turkish Consulate ... claimed in one recording that the price for Hastert to withdraw the resolution would have been at least $500,000." In September 2006, a documentary about Edmonds's case called
Kill the Messenger (
Une Femme à Abattre) premiered in France. The film discusses the Edmonds case and offers interviews with various involved individuals. Edmonds gave testimony in August 2009 and gave information that had twice previously been gagged under state secrets privilege. On February 1, 2011, Edmonds published a story on her own website, adding details of events she described as taking place in April 2001. The account is of another translator's description of meetings with an Iranian informant months before 9/11, and FBI agents' reaction to it: :Bin Laden's group is planning a massive terrorist attack in the United States. The order has been issued. They are targeting major cities, big metropolitan cities; they think four or five cities; New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco; possibly Los Angeles or Las Vegas. They will use airplanes to carry out the attacks. They said that some of the individuals involved in carrying this out are already in the United States. They are here in the U.S., living among us, and I believe some in US government already know about all of this. Edmonds said that two agents with whom this other translator had worked reported this information to a "Special Agent in Charge (SAC)" months before the attack. After the attack, one of them told their translator that the SAC "called us into his office and gave us an order; an absolute order [that] we never got any warnings. Those conversations never existed; it never happened; period. He said this is very sensitive…and that no one should ever mention a word about this case; period.'" ==
Classified Woman ==