US/UK spying wrecked last minute attempt to avoid Iraq invasion

[G_j]

www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0215-01.htm

Published on Sunday, February 15, 2004 by the Observer/UK

British Spy Op Wrecked Peace Move

by Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Jo Tuckman in Mexico

 A joint British and American spying operation at the United Nations scuppered a last-ditch initiative to avert the invasion of Iraq, The Observer can reveal.

Senior UN diplomats from Mexico and Chile provided new evidence last week that their missions were spied on, in direct contravention of international law.

The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.

Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance. 'When they found out, they said, "You should know that we don't like the idea and we don't like you to promote it."'

...more..

[displacedtexan]

1. Why isn't this BFEE spying/hacking juicy enough for the media?

Oh, yeah. I forgot. If allegations were made against Dems, they'd be all over this.

[Octafish]

7. Seems to go back a ways.

November 22, 1963 seems to me to be an important date to most Americans, but not to the Reich wing -- the owners of the same media.

What's a little treason among fiends?

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. Guess who gave the orders to bug the UN?

Condi Rice.

[G_j]

4. Condi...Condi...Condi...

..."in direct contravention of international law."

Did you plan on becoming an international criminal when you grew up?

[Blue_Tires]

3. ttt

[JohnyCanuck]

5. We can help the UK Whistleblower Katharine Gun.

Justin Raimdo at www.antiwar.com has an article today about the arrest and arraignment of the British whistleblower Katharine Gun. Katharine Gun was also mentioned in the Common Dreams article.

The revelations follow claims by Chile's former ambassador to the UN, Juan Valdes, that he found hard evidence of bugging at his mission in New York last March. The new claims emerged as The Observer has discovered that Government officials seriously considered dropping the prosecution against Katharine Gun, the translator at the GCHQ surveillance center who first disclosed details of the espionage operation last March.

According to Whitehall sources, officials feared the prosecution would leave the Government and the intelligence services open to embarrassing disclosures. They were known to be concerned that the 29-year-old Chinese language specialist would be seen as a patriotic young woman acting out of principle to reveal an illegal operation rather than as someone who betrayed her country's secrets. They are also known to be worried that any trial would force the disclosure of Government legal advice on intervention in Iraq, described by one source as 'at best ambiguous'.

At the end of his article "Smoking Gun" (URL below) Raimondo supplies contact info including snail mail and web based email addresses and fax numbers for Tony Blair and various other UK government officials and suggests that readers make their feelings known about the Blair government's attempt to scapegoat and railroad this courageous woman.

You'll remember that, in order to make the war more palatable to his clearly reluctant countrymen, and his own balking Labor Party, Blair made quite a show of trying to intercede on behalf of those UN Security Council members who wanted to give the invasion the stamp of legality, vowing to craft an acceptable resolution. But that was a lie….

Now we find out that Blair and his ministers were actually trying to undercut efforts at a compromise, because it would have given UN weapons inspectors more time to find out the truth: that Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. The rush to war would have been aborted – if the War Party hadn't moved quickly to quash the last hope of peace.

Ms. Gun's arraignment in the Old Bailey today means more trouble for the already beleaguered Tony Blair. As the Liberal Democrats' Foreign Affairs point man, Menzies Campbell, put it:

<snip>

Far from betraying her country's secrets, Ms. Gun is a British patriot who exposed the extent to which Blair has been willing to subordinate his country's interests to the wishes of his American masters. Even the usually brain-dead Tories, who have long since given up the idea of British sovereignty, must be outraged at this incident, which shows that Bush's poodle is just as big a liar as his master in Washington.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/

This link will probably only be good for a day or two after which the article moves to the archives, but they're easy enough to access from the main link above, just look to the sidebar on the right.

[G_j]

6. I had read the article at commondreams

this women deserves thanks not persecution.
Thanks for this recent article.
I hope people will write in support.

[JohnyCanuck]

8. This is the URL for the antiwar.com article with the gov.uk info

Now that it is in the archives at antiwar.com

Smoking Gun


You can send a message to Tony Blair demanding an end to the prosecution of Katharine Gun. A letter addressed to the Prime Minister at: 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA, Great Britain.

Or send a fax to him at:
44-207925-0918

(preceded by 011 from the U.S.)

Or at 020-7925-0918 from within the United Kingdom. This will have the biggest effect, but you can also send an electronic message to Blair at: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page4345.asp

Send copies of your message to the Department of Constitutional Affairs: [e-mail]

To Gun's former employer, the Government Communications Headquarters: [e-mail]
To the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.: [e-mail]
And to Gun herself at: [e-mail]

The campaign to exonerate Katharine Gun is vitally important, because, as Daniel Ellsberg pointed out:

Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me. Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake."

Government whistleblowers have a key function in a democratic republic, and in America they are supposedly protected by law, albeit inconsistently. In Great Britain, however, which is fast descending into the morass of soft totalitarianism, there are no similar constitutional guarantees. I am glad to see that Liberty, the British organization of civil libertarians, is taking up Ms. Gun's cause, along with a number of prominent American liberals, including the actor Sean Penn. Now is the time for British conservatives and libertarians to join in the campaign to Free Katharine Gun – and free England from the grip of an increasingly authoritarian form of socialism.

Smoking Gun

This is the email message I submitted to Tony the BLIAR on the gov.uk web site. I also emailed it to Ms. Gun and all the gov.uk addresses listed above.

Dear Mr. Blair

I am writing you from my home in Canada to ask you to stop the unjustified prosecution (and persecution) of an honourable, conscientious and patriotic British citizen, Katharine Gun. The moral fibre of honest and conscientious citizens like Ms. Gun is the last bastion of defense for the rest of us against corrupt, immoral and illegal activities on the part of officials in high places who apparently operate largely at will in the shadows and away from the scrutiny of the media and the public.

Her prosecution for acting on her conscience and revealing the immoral and illegal activities of your government in attempting to stall a UN compromise to allow more time for UN inspectors to prove, as many of us had suspected, that Iraq did not have WMD and was not a threat to the US, Britain or neighboring countries in the Middle East, would be a travesty of justice and further proof, if any more is needed, that the main threat to our Western democratic traditions is not coming from shadowy Middle Eastern terrorist organizations, but from within our own governments.

Ms. Gun deserves a medal not our censure.