NSA Spied on U.N. Diplomats in Push for
Invasion of Iraq
Yahoo News/Huffinton Post
December 27, 2005
Despite all the news accounts and punditry since the New York Times
published its Dec. 16 bombshell about the National Security Agency's domestic
spying, the media coverage has made virtually no mention of the fact that the
Bush administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before
the invasion of Iraq.
That spying had nothing to do with protecting the United States from a
terrorist attack. The entire purpose of the NSA surveillance was to help the
White House gain leverage, by whatever means possible, for a resolution in the
U.N. Security Council to green light an invasion. When that surveillance was
exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream U.S. media winked at Bush's
illegal use of the NSA for his Iraq invasion agenda.
Back then, after news of the NSA's targeted spying at the United Nations
broke in the British press, major U.S. media outlets gave it only perfunctory
coverage -- or, in the case of the New York Times, no coverage at all. Now,
while the NSA is in the news spotlight with plenty of retrospective facts, the
NSA's spying at the U.N. goes unmentioned: buried in an Orwellian memory
hole.
A rare exception was a paragraph in a Dec. 20 piece by Patrick Radden Keefe
in the online magazine Slate -- which pointedly noted that "the eavesdropping
took place in Manhattan and violated the General Convention on the Privileges
and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United
Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, all of which the
United States has signed."
But after dodging the story of the NSA's spying at the U.N. when it mattered
most -- before the invasion of Iraq -- the New York Times and other major news
organizations are hardly apt to examine it now. That's all the more reason for
other media outlets to step into the breach.
In early March 2003, journalists at the London-based Observer reported that
the NSA was secretly participating in the U.S. government's high-pressure
campaign for the U.N. Security Council to approve a pro-war resolution. A few
days after the Observer revealed the text of an NSA memo about U.S. spying on
Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance
of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more
important than the Pentagon Papers." The key word was "timely."
Publication of the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by
Ellsberg's heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War
had been underway for many years. But with an invasion of Iraq still in the
future, the leak about NSA spying on U.N. diplomats in New York could erode the
Bush administration's already slim chances of getting a war resolution through
the Security Council. (Ultimately, no such resolution passed before the
invasion.) And media scrutiny in the United States could have shed light on how
Washington's war push was based on subterfuge and manipulation.
"As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq," the
Observer had reported on March 2, 2003, the U.S. government developed an
"aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and
office telephones and the e-mails of U.N. delegates." The smoking gun was "a
memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency -- the
U.S. body which intercepts communications around the world -- and circulated to
both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence
agency." The friendly agency was Britain's Government Communications
Headquarters.
The Observer explained: "The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target
of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola,
Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the U.N. headquarters in New
York -- the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought
over by the pro-war party, led by the U.S. and Britain, and the party arguing
for more time for U.N. inspections, led by France, China and Russia."
The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, 2003, outlined the wide scope of the
surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war
resolution through the Security Council -- "the whole gamut of information that
could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S.
goals or to head off surprises."
Noting that the Bush administration "finds itself isolated" in its zeal for
war on Iraq, the Times of London called the leak of the memo an "embarrassing
disclosure." And, in early March 2003, the embarrassment was nearly worldwide.
From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big
mainstream news. But not in the United States.
Several days after the "embarrassing disclosure," not a word about it had
appeared in the New York Times, the USA's supposed paper of record. "Well, it's
not that we haven't been interested," Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale
told me on the evening of March 5, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the
story. But "we could get no confirmation or comment" on the memo from U.S.
officials. Smale added: "We would normally expect to do our own intelligence
reporting." Whatever the rationale, the New York Times opted not to cover the
story at all.
Except for a high-quality Baltimore Sun article that appeared on March 4,
the coverage in major U.S. media outlets downplayed the significance of the
Observer's revelations. The Washington Post printed a 514-word article on a
back page with the headline "Spying Report No Shock to U.N." Meanwhile, the Los
Angeles Times published a longer piece that didn't only depict U.S.
surveillance at the United Nations as old hat; the LA Times story also reported
"some experts suspected that it [the NSA memo] could be a forgery" -- and
"several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the
memo's authenticity."
But within days, any doubt about the NSA memo's "authenticity" was gone. The
British press reported that the U.K. government had arrested an unnamed female
employee at a British intelligence agency in connection with the leak. By then,
however, the spotty coverage of the top-secret NSA memo in the mainstream U.S.
press had disappeared.
As it turned out, the Observer's expose -- headlined "Revealed: U.S. Dirty
Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War" -- came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq
began.
From the day that the Observer first reported on NSA spying at the United
Nations until the moment 51 weeks later when British prosecutors dropped
charges against whistleblower Katharine Gun, major U.S. news outlets provided
very little coverage of the story. The media avoidance continued well past the
day in mid-November 2003 when Gun's name became public as the British press
reported that she been formally charged with violating the draconian Official
Secrets Act.
Facing the possibility of a prison sentence, Katharine Gun said that
disclosure of the NSA memo was "necessary to prevent an illegal war in which
thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed."
She said: "I have only ever followed my conscience."
In contrast to the courage of the lone woman who leaked the NSA memo -- and
in contrast to the journalistic vigor of the Observer team that exposed it --
the most powerful U.S. news outlets gave the revelation the media equivalent of
a yawn. Top officials of the Bush administration, no doubt relieved at the lack
of U.S. media concern about the NSA's illicit spying, must have been very
encouraged.
This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book "War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN
Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in
favour of war against Iraq.
Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves
interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates
in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer
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