by Scott Horton
Interview conducted June 12, 2008. Listen to the interview
Scott Horton: Hi, folks, this is Antiwar Radio on KAOS 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live also from Antiwar.com/radio, and I'd like to welcome back to the show Sibel Edmonds, gagged by the state secrets privilege, former contract translator for the FBI, and the best investigator and storyteller on her case, Luke Ryland, from LetSibelEdmondsSpeak.blogspot.com. Welcome back to the show, both of you.
Sibel Edmonds: Thank you, Scott. Hi.
Interview conducted June 12, 2008. Listen to the interview
Scott Horton: Hi, folks, this is Antiwar Radio on KAOS 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live also from Antiwar.com/radio, and I'd like to welcome back to the show Sibel Edmonds, gagged by the state secrets privilege, former contract translator for the FBI, and the best investigator and storyteller on her case, Luke Ryland, from LetSibelEdmondsSpeak.blogspot.com. Welcome back to the show, both of you.
Sibel Edmonds: Thank you, Scott. Hi.
Luke Ryland: Hi, Scott.
Horton: So we have some recent developments here, but first of all, I'd like to ask you Sibel, what's been going on? We heard from you last Fall, you gave your golden offer to tell your whole story, everything you know in defiance of your gag order, you would risk prison in order to tell your story on American TV if only they would let you, and apparently you had no takers. Instead, a few months later there was a three article series in the London Times, detailing various aspects of your case. I guess, Luke, if you could maybe start us off and sort of summarize briefly what was in that series in the London Times, and what sort of developments have taken place in the story since then?
Ryland: The London Times series was in January, I believe, and they focused mostly on the nuclear black market side of Sibel's case, talking about how various Turkish and Israeli embassy officials were dealing in the nuclear black market in the U.S., with the help of certain players in the U.S. government, specifically former number 3 guy at the State Department, Marc Grossman. That was a three-part series, as you say, and there hasn't been a whole lot happen in the case since.
Horton: Okay. Well, there are some new developments here, I know that you've put up a few new blog entries just in the last week, one is about Dennis Hastert, and another is about a spy scandal of some kind brewing over there in Germany and Switzerland which may in some part be tied to Sibel Edmonds' case. What's going on there? I guess, first of all, we'll save Dennis Hastert till later. First of all, tell us about this family in Germany.
Horton: Okay. Well, there are some new developments here, I know that you've put up a few new blog entries just in the last week, one is about Dennis Hastert, and another is about a spy scandal of some kind brewing over there in Germany and Switzerland which may in some part be tied to Sibel Edmonds' case. What's going on there? I guess, first of all, we'll save Dennis Hastert till later. First of all, tell us about this family in Germany.
Ryland: There's a family called the Tinner family. They are a Swiss family actually, a father and two sons. The father has been an associate of A.Q. Khan going back to the 1970s. He and his sons were one of the key suppliers to the A.Q. Khan network. A.Q. Khan is the "father of the 'Islamic bomb.'" He was the one who was running the nuclear program in Pakistan, and he was getting all of the hardware and technology from the nuclear black market to build the Pakistan bomb, and then he, or at least the network, began exporting the technology to Iran, Libya and various other places including North Korea.
Now, the Tinners were key suppliers of that network, and they were arrested when the A.Q. Khan network was officially exposed in 2004. The Tinners have been awaiting trial since 2004 – particularly one of the sons, Urs Tinner. So they've been awaiting trial since 2004 and the Swiss government has been trying to build a case so that they could prosecute the Tinners in court.
Now, the Tinners were key suppliers of that network, and they were arrested when the A.Q. Khan network was officially exposed in 2004. The Tinners have been awaiting trial since 2004 – particularly one of the sons, Urs Tinner. So they've been awaiting trial since 2004 and the Swiss government has been trying to build a case so that they could prosecute the Tinners in court.
The U.S. government has been very reluctant to assist the Swiss. They had a lot of information about the Tinners' involvement in the Khan network, but they simply refused to even respond to requests for help from the Swiss attorney general. That was through 2006 and 2007, I think, but they eventually gave some limited assistance – but now there's this big scandal in Switzerland that was announced just two or three weeks ago that the Swiss government has destroyed all of the evidence in that case, so it looks as though that prosecution won't go ahead.
The executive branch of the Swiss government destroyed all 30,000 pages of evidence in that case, and they did that in secret – they didn't tell the parliament, or the court system or anything. There's a very strong suspicion that they did that at the request of the United States, and the suggestion is that the CIA has been actively been involved, working with the Tinners going back a number of years, and that the CIA was desperate that that information not become public.
The executive branch of the Swiss government destroyed all 30,000 pages of evidence in that case, and they did that in secret – they didn't tell the parliament, or the court system or anything. There's a very strong suspicion that they did that at the request of the United States, and the suggestion is that the CIA has been actively been involved, working with the Tinners going back a number of years, and that the CIA was desperate that that information not become public.
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