Monday, January 28, 2008

What They Talk About Elsewhere



Do you ever listen to the BBC news? If you do, you are familiar with the odd feeling one gets when the news about the U.S. they discuss are partly not the same as the news we get from the U.S. media or are at least weighted differently. The same is true of foreign newspapers.

Take this article from the U.K. Times about the Sibel Edmonds case:

AN investigation into the illicit sale of American nuclear secrets was compromised by a senior official in the State Department, a former FBI employee has claimed.

The official is said to have tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.

The firm, Brewster Jennings & Associates, was a front for Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent. Her public outing two years later in 2003 by White House officials became a cause célèbre.

The claims that a State Department official blew the investigation into a nuclear smuggling ring have been made by Sibel Edmonds, 38, a former Turkish language translator in the FBI's Washington field office.

Edmonds had been employed to translate hundreds of hours of intercepted recordings made during a six-year FBI inquiry into the nuclear smuggling ring.

She has previously told The Sunday Times she heard evidence that foreign intelligence agents had enlisted US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

I'm pretty sure that Edmonds was under a gag order about all this, but the case seems not to attract much curiosity here.