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Today's
Stories
February 26, 2004
Virginia Tilly
The Deeper Meaning of the Wall
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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February
26, 2004
Bugging Kofi Annan
UN
Spying and the Evasions of US Journalism
By NORMAN SOLOMON
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,"
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 executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy in
San Francisco. He is co-author of Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. (Context Books,
2003).
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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