Daniel Ellsberg thought this story was potentially more important than
the pentagon papers, but the only thing I heard about it on NPR was
some government apologist in the media or academia or think tank
(selected from their revolving cast of right or center-right experts)
assuring us that it was alright because the UN expects to be spied on.
Probably on one of those lame middle of the say shows like "To The
Point."
Did I miss something? Nothing this morning - there was some
latebreaking news about craft shops and a lengthy profile of a
character actor who had written three cook books (and food must be
very important to NPR listeners, because they devote so much broadcast
time to it), and the usual biased reporting on revolutionary movements
and pirate radio (NPR has always been on the side of corporate media
like Clear Channel in opposition to community and citizen-based media
- where the "public" in "National Public Radio" is escapes me) - but
nothing about this story.
December 27, 2005
Where Was the New York Times When It Mattered?
NSA Spied on UN Diplomats During Push for Invasion of Iraq
By NORMAN SOLOMON
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 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 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.
Norman Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, from which this article has been
adapted.
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