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News :: Government Secrecy : International Relations |
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UK Spies Bugged UN Chief, Claims Clare Short |
Current rating: 0 |
by John Deane
(No verified email address) |
26 Feb 2004
|
Ms Short was asked whether she believed that British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Kofi Annan.
She replied: "Yes, absolutely." |
British agents spied on the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraqi war, the former International Development Secretary Clare Short claimed today.
Ms Short - who quit the Cabinet in protest against the war - made the claim while being interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today program about the implications of the collapse of the case against GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun.
Asked whether British agencies had been involved in spying activities against Mr Annan, Ms Short said: "I know, I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's conversations.
"Indeed, I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking 'Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying'."
Ms Short was asked whether she believed that British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Kofi Annan.
She replied: "Yes, absolutely."
Ms Short was asked whether she knew about such operations when she was in Government.
She said: "Absolutely, I read some of the transcripts of the accounts of his conversations."
Asked whether she believed that was legal, she said: "I don't know, I presume so. It is odd, but I don't know about the legalities."
Asked about the Gun case, Ms Short said on the Today program: "This centers on the Attorney General's (Lord Goldsmith) advice that war was legal under resolution 1441, which was published, but was very very odd.
"The more I think about it, the more fishy I think it was. It came very, very late. He came to the Cabinet the day Robin Cook resigned, sat in Robin's seat, two sides of A4, no discussion permitted.
"We know already that the Foreign Office legal advisers had disagreed and one of them had said there was no authority for war."
Ms Short went on: "My own suspicion is that the Attorney General has stopped this prosecution because part of her (Mrs Gun's) defense was to question the legality and that would have brought his advice into the public domain again and there was something fishy about the way in which he said war was legal."
She added: "The major issue here is the legal authority and whether the Attorney General had to be persuaded at the last minute, against the advice of one of the Foreign Office legal advisers who then resigned, that he could give legal authority for war and whether there had to be an exaggeration of the threat of the use of chemical and biological weapons to persuade him that there was legal authority.
"I think the good old British democracy should keep scrutinizing and pressing to get the truth out.
"The tragedy is that Iraq is a disastrous mess. Ten thousand Iraqis have died, American troops are dying, some of our troops have died, the Middle East is more angry than ever.
"I'm afraid that the sort of deceit on the route to war was linked to the lack of preparation for afterwards and the chaos and suffering that continues, so it won't go away, will it?"
© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://news.independent.co.uk |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Spy Case Casts Fresh Doubt on War Legality |
by Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
26 Feb 2004
|
Dramatic new evidence pointing to serious doubts in the government about the legality of the war in Iraq was passed to government lawyers shortly before they abandoned the prosecution of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun.
The prosecution offered no evidence yesterday against Ms Gun, a former GCHQ employee, despite her admitting that she leaked information about an American spying operation at the UN in the run-up to the war.
She said she acted to try to prevent Britain illegally invading Iraq. But the prosecution at the Old Bailey said there was no "realistic prospect" of convicting her. She was arrested nearly a year ago and charged eight months later under the Official Secrets Act.
The leading prosecutor, Mark Ellison, said it would not be "appropriate" to go into the reasons for dropping the case.
But the Guardian has learned that a key plank of the defense presented to the prosecutors shortly before they decided to abandon the case was new evidence that the legality of the war had been questioned by the Foreign Office.
It is contained in a document seen by the Guardian. Sensitive passages are blacked out, but one passage says: "The defense believes that the advice given by the Foreign Office Legal Adviser expressed serious doubts about the legality (in international law) of committing British troops in the absence of a second [UN] resolution."
It is understood that the FO legal team was particularly concerned about the lack of a second UN resolution authorizing the use of force and pre-emptive military action.
Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a former deputy head of the legal team at the FO, has confirmed publicly for the first time that she resigned last year because she was unhappy with the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith's legal advice to the government on the legality of the Iraq war.
He argued that the series of consecutive UN resolutions provided a legal basis for the military action. But Ms Wilmshurst told the Guardian: "Some agreed with the legal advice of the attorney general. I did not." She refused to discuss the details of the advice.
She left on the eve of the war after 30 years on the FO's legal team, and deputy legal adviser since 1997. She is now at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, specializing in the legality of military intervention.
Yesterday James Welch, a solicitor for the civil rights group Liberty and Ms Gun's lawyer, said the final decision to abandon the case was taken after they had warned the prosecution that they would demand the disclosure of the attorney general's advice on the legality of the war.
"Our case was that any advice the government received on the legality of war was relevant to Katharine's case and we were prepared to go before a judge and argue for it to be disclosed," he said.
Ms Gun, 29, said after her brief appearance at the Old Bailey: "I have no regrets and I would do it again."
In an interview with the Guardian she described her reaction when she first saw the US National Security Agency email asking for GCHQ's help in bugging the offices and homes of UN diplomats.
"I thought, 'Good God, that's pretty outrageous'."
She felt she had no choice but to do what she did. The UN was being undermined. She thought about the destruction of people's lives in Iraq.
"I didn't feel at all guilty about what I did, so I couldn't plead guilty, even though I would get a more lenient sentence," she said.
She remembered her husband telling her: "Do nothing and die, or fight and die."
But the prospect of a criminal trial, "of having the whole government machine after you", was scary, she said.
Asked at a press conference what her advice would be to anyone responding to the recently announced recruitment to the intelligence services, she said: "The intelligence services do important and necessary work, but listen to your conscience is what I would advise."
She continued: "I know it's very difficult and people don't want to jeopardize their careers or lives, but if there are things out there that should really come out, hey, why not."
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ |
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UN Spying and Evasions of American Journalism |
by Norman Solomon
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
26 Feb 2004
|
Tony Blair and George W. Bush want the issue of spying at the United Nations to go away. That's one of the reasons the Blair government ended its prosecution of whistleblower Katharine Gun on Wednesday. But within 24 hours, the scandal of U.N. spying exploded further when one of Blair's former cabinet ministers said that British spies closely monitored conversations of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq last year.
The new allegations, which have the ring of truth, are now coming from ex-secretary of international development Clare Short. "I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's conversations," she said in an interview with BBC Radio. "In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking 'Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.'" Short added that British intelligence had been explicitly directed to spy on Annan and other top U.N. officials.
Few can doubt that some major British news outlets will thoroughly dig below the surface of Short's charges. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the journalistic evasion on the subject of U.N. spying has been so extreme that we can have no confidence in the mainstream media's inclination to adequately cover this new bombshell.
For 51 weeks -- from the day that the Observer newspaper in London broke the news about spying at the United Nations until the moment that British prosecutors dropped charges against Gun on Wednesday -- major news outlets in the United States almost completely ignored the story.
The Observer's expose, under the headline "Revealed: U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War" (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0302-01.htm), came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq began. By unveiling a top secret U.S. National Security Agency memo, the newspaper provided key information when it counted most: before the war started.
That NSA memo outlined surveillance of a half-dozen delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security Council, noting a focus on "the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy-makers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals" -- support for war on Iraq. The memo said that the agency had started a "surge" of spying on U.N. diplomats, including wiretaps of home and office telephones along with reading of e-mails.
Three days after the story came out, I asked for an assessment from the man who gave the Pentagon Papers to journalists in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg responded: "This leak is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers. ... Truth-telling like this can stop a war."
But even though -- or perhaps especially because -- the memo was from the U.S. government and showed that Washington was spying on U.N. diplomats, the big American media showed scant interest. The coverage was either shoddy or non-existent.
A year ago, at the brink of war, the New York Times did not cover the U.N. spying revelation. Nearly 96 hours after the Observer had reported it, I called Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale and asked why not. "We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting," Smale replied. She added that "we could get no confirmation or comment." In other words, U.S. intelligence officials refused to confirm or discuss the memo -- so the Times did not see fit to report on it.
The Washington Post didn't do much better. It 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 emphasizing from the outset that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are "long-standing." For good measure, the piece reported "some experts suspected that it could be a forgery" -- and "several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the memo's authenticity."
Within days, any doubt about the memo's "authenticity" was gone. The British media 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 in the mainstream U.S. press had disappeared. In fact -- except for a high-quality detailed news story by a pair of Baltimore Sun reporters that appeared in that newspaper on March 4 -- there isn't an example of mainstream U.S. news reporting on the story last year that's worthy of any pride.
In mid-November, for the first time, Katharine Gun's name became public when the British press reported that she'd been formally charged with violating the draconian Official Secrets Act. Appearing briefly at court proceedings, she was a beacon of moral clarity. Disclosure of the NSA memo, Gun said, was "necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed." And: "I have only ever followed my conscience."
A search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database finds that for nearly three months after Katharine Gun's name first appeared in the British media, U.S. news stories mentioning her scarcely existed. When Gun's name did appear in U.S. dailies it was almost always on an opinion page. News sections were oblivious: Again with the notable exception of the Baltimore Sun (which ran an in-depth news article about Gun and Ellsberg on Feb. 1), mainstream U.S. news departments proceeded as though Katharine Gun were a non-person. She only became "newsworthy" after charges were dropped.
"Mr. Blair's spokesmen were conspicuously silent on Wednesday, apparently hopeful that the case would disappear from the public agenda," the New York Times reported in Thursday's paper. But the case had never been on the public agenda as far as the Times news department was concerned.
(Background about the Gun case has been posted at www.accuracy.org/gun, a web page of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where my colleagues and I have worked to make information available about the U.N. spying story.)
Overall, the matter of Washington's spying at the United Nations has been off the American media map until February. Whether the major U.S. news outlets will do a better job on the subject this spring remains to be seen. But it would be a mistake to assume that they will.
Although the prosecution of Gun has ended, the issue of U.N. spying has not. At stake is the integrity of a world body that should not tolerate intrusive abuses by the government of its host country.
We can assume that Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a former Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, did not speak lightly when he made a strong statement that appeared in an Associated Press dispatch from Mexico City on Feb. 12: "They are violating the U.N. headquarters covenant." He was referring to officials of the U.S. government.
That statement now resonates more loudly than ever. With British and American intelligence agencies working closely together, both have been locked in a shamefully duplicitous embrace. In the interests of war, their nefarious activities served as direct counterpoints to the deceptions coming from 10 Downing Street and the White House. In the interests of journalism, reporters should now pursue truth wherever it might lead.
Norman Solomon is co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." |
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NPR's Careful Spin |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
26 Feb 2004
|
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It's interesting that NPR, which has been reporting all day on this story, carefully avoids all mention of the fact that U.S. spying is at the core of the allegations, while constantly repeating the implicit canard that this is exclusively an affair of the British. NPR is not unique in that, as Norman Solomon's commentary points out. But it does show how accurate he is in his analysis. |
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