NSA Spied on UN Diplomats in Push for Invasion of Iraq
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 27 December 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 UN 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 UN Security Council to green light an invasion. When
that surveillance was exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream US
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 US 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 UN 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 UN 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 US government's
high-pressure campaign for the UN Security Council to approve a pro-war
resolution. A few days after the Observer revealed the text of an NSA
memo about US 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 UN 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 US government developed an
"aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the
home and office telephones and the e-mails of UN delegates." The smoking
gun was "a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security
Agency - the US 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 UN
headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations
whose
votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and
Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN 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 US policymakers an edge in obtaining results
favorable to US 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 US 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 US 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 UN"
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that didn't
only depict US 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 UK 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 US press had disappeared.
As it turned out, the Observer's expose - headlined "Revealed:
US 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 US 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 had 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 US news outlets gave the revelation the
media equivalent of a yawn. Top officials of the Bush administration, no
doubt relieved at the lack of US media concern about the NSA's illicit
spying, must have been very encouraged.
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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
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