Over the weekend, the London Observer broke a story suggesting that the Bush administration had engaged in “dirty tricks” by conducting surveillance on members of the U.N. to get a better read on how they planned to vote on a possible second resolution. The story is huge overseas. Anyone seen it around here?

This is one of those reasons why the average American can’t understand why the world at large is sort of disgusted with us — the average American doesn’t always know what’s going on.

Actually, I've seen this in any number of sources.

My first reaction (and the reaction of most folks I suspect heard this) was a shrug. We're trying to monitor the communications of UNSC members and diplomats? Of course we are. And they're monitoring our communications as best they can, too. That's the way the game is played, and everyone knows it, and people only get in a huff when it occasionally spills into the public view.

"I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling going on here!"

What's interesting about this story is that some have suggested that the whole thing was a hoax by the Observer. I tend not to lend much credence to accusations of hoaxes, from either side, but it's not beyond possibility.

I've seen it.

The story was kind of messed up, names made up, security code and secret level stuff that is fictional.

I was in Den Haag in the summer of '94, my cousin was a lawyer at the US-Iran Claims Tribunial there. We had lunch one day and we talked politics, he said, "You know the people that work in emabssies? Ours, theres, whoevers, 80% of the people that work in and out of there, the ones who report there are all spies. We spy on the Dutch, the Dutch spy on us. Theres a spot about 200 meters from the front of the embassy here, and there is almost always a Dutch tourist there with a telephoto lens taking pictures of who goes in and out. I know that because I've gone drinkin' with the American tourist who stands outside the Chinese embassy here and takes pictures of who goes in there. That is what embassies are for, spying, we spy on thier industry and technology and they spy on ours."

The US/UK/Canada/New Zealand and Australia all share technology, and alot of it is used for corporate stuff. Boeing got a huge contract for the Saudi National Airline because a Lacrosse signals intelligence bird heard guys from Airbus saying what the Airbus bid was going to be for A-340s, Boeing underbid and sold 747s and 777s.

If it's true, and the article was dodgy to say the least, isn't news.

BTW - it was plastered on drudgereport Sunday morning.

And there's some additional "where's the story?" stuff here.

Just as a side note, I am Doyce's sister and have been reading his page for a very long time and I think it is safe to say that Clovis really knows way more than he should.... way, too, much.

Heh. Well, she's not wrong :)

That said, I think people did sort of miss my point (probably because I didn't really make it very well) -- what I was paying more attention to was the fact that the main networks didn't cover this story in any real way -- not so much the story of "we did something spy-like" but the story "the world is running a big story about our day to day espionage activities and acting like it's a big deal and getting worked up about it" -- the spy story itself is not news, as everyone here has pointed out, but the fact that people abroad seem to be getting somewhat incensed about it is -- the biggest story of the day? No. Noteworthy? Yes.

That everyone here had heard about doesn't really mean it was common knowledge, since I'd say that the folks commenting on it are far above average in their personal knowledge of international events.

Probably true.

There is an image of Americans being rubes who watch game shows and don't pay any attention to the world outside of thier subdivision while the great enlightened Western European is a student of world events. The American is torn between Wheel of Fortune and re-runs of Star Trek on the new TNN while our cousins over across the Atlantic read about the CIA's latest ploy to make W God-King for Life.

I don't buy it, because I've been over there and because I follow the news, I'm a news crack-head, and Europe isn't any more enlightened that Joe-Bob who is watching Nascar on Sunday.*

The Italian daily newspaper, La Stampa, published a cartoon showing a tank bearing a Jewish star with its gun pointed at a baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?" - That's enlightened European news, even the worst tabloid in the States couldn't get away with that.

Then in the spring of 2002 there was the great firestorm of European media after the IDF moved into Ramallah.

"I saw the bodies, killed by a shot to the head"
"Without mercy: Israelis execute Arafat's elite guards"

These events never took place, there was fighting, but almost all the eye-witnessed events as discribed by the Observer in March-April of 2002 were fabricated. The UN report on Jenin and Ramallah found nothing happened beyond the scope of legal warfare.

French weekly Novel Observateur recently prints copied from a British newspaper, according to which IDF soldiers were raping Palestinian women to cause their murder by members of their families, because the family honor had been sullied. - It was retracted in the face of hate-crime charges by a French Jewish group.

Der Spiegel, Germany's leading newsmagazine, published an editorial comparing the policies of the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to those pursued by Adolf Hitler.

Columnists write "I'm fed up being called an anti-Semite" column, and then refer to Israel as "shitty" and "little" over and over again.

When French Ambassadors are reported in the press as being Anti-Semites, the are defended in the Guardian while those that tell the story are branded "arch-Zionist"

Those are some examples of the "enlightened" European news, I went with the anti-semitic focus because when I'd just read about the Italian cartoon.

* - I watch Nascar, I like the closed wheel racing opposed to open wheel, and it's more physically demanding on the drivers.

BLECH!

NASCAR...

Just a bunch of Rednecks driving around in a circle!

Give me the GT Circuit or F1 any day.

Wow... look at that topic veer off the race-course.

I think the perception of an uneducated public is, per capita, no more true in the U.S. than it is abroad -- Clovis, ***Dave, heck, any of us are probably in the top percentile of any country we'd choose to live in when it comes to International News Awareness (excepting myself, of course).

But that's per capita -- maybe the same percentage of Americans are closed-off about world politics in the U.S. as are in French, but while it's the same percentage, that amounts to many more actual people who don't know what's going on in the world theatre -- that means more essentially ignorant Americans, which in turn means a higher chance that, when meeting an American, they will be unaware of the vagaries of international politics.

That, in turn, fuels the misconception.

I don't know. It's a circular debate and I'm not sure there's any great insight at the end of it.

I suspect there's a certain perception of the US as still being an uncivilized, frontier, dare-I-say cowboy country, and thus unsophisticated and uninformed.

Certainly I didn't find the British newspapers as a whole any more informative than the Rocky back home -- and the Rocky doesn't try to sell itself based on the topless babe on page 3.

Back to the original story, I suspect that if someone purported to publish a story showing how French intelligence was spying on US diplomats in Paris, there'd be a similar outcry here (and Gallic shrugs from the French). So perhaps it is just a matter of local perspective.