Democracy Now interview with Sibel Edmonds

She says the FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11 and calls Condoleezza Rice's claim the White House had no specific information on a domestic threat or one involving planes "an outrageous lie." [includes rush transcript]

"We had not one, but we had many specific informations."

"Attorney General Ashcroft on October 18, 2002, personally asserted State Secret Privilege in my case. I would read two sentences here: 'To prevent disclosure of certain classified and sensitive national security information, Attorney General Ashcroft today asserted the State Secret Privilege in Sibel Edmonds' case. This assertion was made at the request of the F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller,' in papers filed today, and they are citing the reason that because this case would create substantial risks of disclosing classified and sensitive national security information that could cause serious damage to our country's security. They are citing that this privilege is very rare and is asserted to prevent certain information getting -- becoming public or hurting diplomatic relations. I would underline this phrase, diplomatic relations several times."

"You see, after September 11, these people -- people from the F.B.I., came forward and they blamed everything on shortage of budgets and shortage of personnel. And they said, we failed, and these were the major causes. These were the reasons. That is not accurate. We were told during the time that these people were going on TV and they were begging for people to apply for translation positions because we had this shortage, what was going on behind the scenes was exactly opposite. We were being asked not to do these translations, and let the documents pile up, because within a month or so, they were scheduled to go in front of the Senate and Congress and ask for increased budgets. In doing so, they needed to give numbers of pages, numbers of documents and audios that they were not translated due to the shortage, and needed to be translated, and that they were urgent, and in order to do so, we had to increase that number, the number of pages and the number of audio. "