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27 February 2004

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U.N. Raped

Mid-East Realities - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 27 Feb 2004:
      What are the right adjectives here?
    Tricked, deceived, maniupulated...true but not strong enough.
      Lied To...that's correct. But it's much worse.
      Raped - politically, morally, historically. That's what the U.S. and the U.K. have really done to the United Nations, and thus to the world community.
      Where's the accountability?   Where's the forum for trial?    Where's the outrage? Where are the resignations?
       Of course the responsibility, the penalties, the approbation, should primarily fall to the U.S. and the U.K. They must be held accountable one way or another
        But what about the United Nations itself?    Just imagine what the White House would be doing and saying if the Russians, or the Chinese, or the U.N. for that matter had infiltrated the deliberations of the President or the National Security Council and then transcribed the most secret of deliberations and distributed them to foreign leaders to read and use against the U.S.   Just imagine what the American press would be saying and advocating!
        Why has not Kofi Annan even begun a thorough investigation?   Who did it and how?   Who are the U.S. and U.K agents and spies at the U.N. who made this possible?   For how long was everything said and done by the Secretary General and the top Ambassadors at the U.N. Security Council spied on?   How many people who trusted and confided in the United Nations were compromised and harmed?
   Is Kofi Annan afraid to seriously investigate what has happened? It was his responsibility to safeguard the U.N. building and its procedures and activities. Who is responsible for the failure and how was it allowed to happen?    Is it even possible, in view of how Annan got the job in the first place, that he himself is somehow implicated?
         And what about the Security Council? It's integrity and deliberations have also been hijacked and, yes, raped.   How can that body expect the world to take them seriously and believe in the credibility of their processes and findings under these circumstances?    They have no army; and the United States has always made them cower. But now, unless they do something, unless they at the very least strongly and formally condemn what has happened -- both the spying and the lying -- they too will be seen in a most negative cloud.   They in a sense are the rape victim, and so they need to have the courage and the guts to come forward.
        Indeed, had it not been for two courageous British women -- one a resigned Cabinet Secretary the other a Chinese Mandarin Translator in British intelligence-- the prior suspicions about all this would still not be confirmed.   But now, in the past few days, the U.S. and the U.K. have so-to-speak been caught red-handed this time.
       Now just what is the United Nations, representative of the world community, going to do about it?   They failed to prevent it. They failed to undercover it.   They failed to protect themselves and those who confided in them.     Now are they also going to fail to do something real and serious about it?

Britain Accused of Spying on U.N.'s Annan

Feb 26, 3:48 PM (ET)
By ED JOHNSON

(AP) Prime Minister Tony Blair answers questions from members of the media in Downing Street, London,...
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LONDON (AP) - Britain spied on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the build up to the Iraq war, a former Cabinet minister said Thursday, triggering yet another postwar crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair refused to confirm or deny the accusation and branded his former international development secretary, Clare Short, "deeply irresponsible" for commenting on sensitive security issues.

For Blair, the allegation is another potentially damaging aftershock of the Iraq invasion, following controversies over Britain's prewar intelligence dossiers, the death of a weapons scientist, the coalition's failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the collapse of a court case on alleged U.S.-British bugging of the United Nations.

But in a bravado performance at his monthly news conference, the prime minister insisted British spies always acted within international law.

(AP) U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is shown at the United Nations in this March 13, 2003, file photo...
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The United Nations said any spying on Annan's office would be illegal.

"Such activities would undermine the integrity and confidential nature of diplomatic exchanges. Those who speak to the secretary-general are entitled to assume that their exchanges are confidential," U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

The opposition was quick to criticize Blair's government.

"I'm afraid the situation now seems to be a complete mess. It's about time the prime minister got a grip on it and sorted it out," said Michael Howard, leader of the main opposition Conservative Party.

Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said Blair "must come clean" and "reassure the British people that his government was not involved in spying on Kofi Annan."

(AP) Former International Development Secretary Clare Short, foreground, who has claimed that Britain...
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Short, who has repeatedly embarrassed Blair since she quit the Cabinet in May over the war, said she read transcripts of Annan's conversations while she was a member of the government.

"The U.K. in this time was also getting, spying on Kofi Annan's office and getting reports from him about what was going on," she said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"These things are done. And in the case of Kofi's office, it's been done for some time," added Short, who has accused Blair of being "reckless" and misleading the country, and has repeatedly called on him to resign.

Asked explicitly whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Annan, she said: "Yes, absolutely."

She made no comment on the method of spying on Annan.

(AP) Katharine Gun, a former Mandarin translator with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters...
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Blair refused to comment directly on the allegation, and stressed his silence was not an indication it was true.

"I'm not going to comment on the operations of our security services," he said. "But I do say this: we act in accordance with domestic and international law, and we act in the best interests of this country, and our security services are a vital part of the protection of this country."

It is not the first time Britain has been accused of spying on foreign diplomats.

In December, Pakistan asked Blair's government to respond to a newspaper report that British intelligence agents had attempted to plant listening devices at its embassy in London. President Pervez Musharraf said Britain's failure to respond strained relations between the two countries.

The European Union revealed last March that bugging devices planted by an undisclosed country were found on phone lines of several nations - including Britain - in the building used for EU summits.

(AP) Katharine Gun, a GCHQ whistle blower during a news conference at the human rights group 'Liberty'...
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Short's allegation came a day after the collapse of a criminal case against a British intelligence agency worker who admitted leaking a document disclosing a U.S. appeal for British help in monitoring phones and e-mail traffic of members of the U.N. Security Council, when the two countries were seeking the council's backing for war.

Opposition politicians have questioned whether the government intervened to drop the case against Katherine Gun, fearing a trial would probe the legal argument for going to war.

Gun, 29, a former Mandarin translator with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters listening station, leaked a Jan. 31, 2003 memo from U.S. intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the U.N. Security Council in advance of a key vote on Iraq.

In preparing her defense, Gun's lawyers demanded the government disclose the advice it received from Attorney General Lord Goldsmith on the legality of going to war.

Goldsmith told the House of Lords the decision to drop the case was made solely on legal grounds and "free from any political interference."

The government said Thursday it would review the working of the Official Secrets Act, under which Gun was charged, saying it was disappointed with the collapse of the case.

Blair's decision to back President Bush caused his popularity to sag. Despite the swift fall of Baghdad, his personal ratings show little signs of recovering.

British intelligence dossiers claiming Iraq had an active and growing program of weapons of mass destruction - Britain's principle rationale for joining the conflict - have not been validated by evidence on the ground.

The government's bitter row with the BBC, over a report that it "sexed up" the threat posed by Iraq, ensured months of negative headlines and the worst crisis of Blair's career when a weapons scientist at the center of the allegations committed suicide.

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