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February 9, 2005

AN EMBEDDED JOURNALIST--IN BED WITH THE ENEMY

Topics: Middle East News and Perspectives

Yet again we see another journalist accused of being in bed with the enemy. Although this time it's NBC, the record of journalism's anti-American activities is becoming legend. The Associated Press has already been thought to be in bed with terrorists after the 19 December, 2004, incident in Baghdad in which three terrorists dragged three election workers from a car and then murdered them. By the strangest of coincidences an Associated Press photojournalist was present to take a sequence of photographs of the atrocity.

From Michelle Malkin, did you catch this?

A part-time cameraman who worked for NBC found out the hard way that "Akbar," the international broker he had met on eBay, wasn't really looking to ship stolen night-vision lenses to Iran.

Instead, the broker was a federal customs agent, and the cameraman, Erik Kyriacou, 24, of North Babylon, found himself in a Philadelphia courtroom Monday pleading guilty to four federal counts, including trying to export technology to an "axis of evil" country...

...Kyriacou was arrested last April after offering four Astroscope night-vision lenses for sale in a public auction on eBay, then privately negotiating an $8,000 sale price with the undercover agent, court records show. He shipped them to an address in Vienna, Austria, in January 2004, according to the court papers.

He had stolen them from NBC, where he worked as a news camerman, Welsh said.

The federal customs agent posing as broker told Kyriacou before he sold the lenses that they would be headed to Iran, and that there was no license to ship them there, the court documents say.

A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday that there had been "a large number of cases over the years" of representatives from Iran being caught trying to buy forbidden technologies, especially spare airplane parts.

 A USAO statement and link to Kyriacou's criminal indicment are here.

Kyriacou faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine, although his attorney, Robert Welsh, told Newsday he expected his client to receive a far less severe sentence.

Hat tip - Michelle Malkin

Posted by Hyscience at February 9, 2005 7:52 PM

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