Earlier Wiretap Accusations

With all attention focused on the New York Times’ expose of illegal wiretapping of Americans without the benefit of a court issued warrant, that story withheld for a year, it was not the first time that accusations have come up that the NSA was indeed illegally listening in on Americans’ calls. As this article from back in April of 2005 illustrates, it appears there were some accusations by Governor Richardson of New Mexico that the NSA was monitoring his telephone calls at the request of John Bolton, then Under-Secretary of State for arms control and international security.

    Gov. Bill Richardson is concerned that some of his phone calls were monitored by a U.S. spy agency and transcripts of them were given to the president’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

    Richardson called Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, to express his concerns after Dodd revealed that Bolton had on 10 occasions asked the National Security Agency for the intercepts of phone conversations involving Americans.

    …(Richardson’s spokeman Billy) Sparks said Richardson’s call to Dodd was triggered when he read an online story by Washington journalist Wayne Madsen. The story said intelligence community “insiders” claim the NSA circumvented a ban on domestic surveillance by asserting that the intercepted calls were part of “training missions.”


In a later article in May of 2005, Wayne Madsen listed a chain of allegations of illegal wiretaps and monitoring of Americans by the NSA which no longer seem so farfetched.

    Intelligence community insiders claim that a number of State Department and other government officials may have been subject to NSA “training” surveillance and that transcripts between them and foreign officials likely ended up in the possession of Bolton and his neo-conservative political allies, including such members of Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff as David Wurmser (a former assistant to Bolton at State), John Hannah, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

    Possible affected individuals include: Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and their conversations with their counterparts and officials around the world; Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns and his telephone conversations with International Atomic Energy Agency director general Mohammed el Baradei and Britain’s top non-proliferation official William Ehrman (Bolton was frozen out of negotiations between Burns, Britain, and Libya over the stand down of the Libyan weapons of mass destruction program) (also Burns’s conversations with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al Shara over charges by Bolton that Syria possessed WMDs and conversations between Burns and former chief UN Iraq weapons inspector Hans Blix); various phone calls made by Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Brent Scowcroft; U.S. Special Envoy on North Korea Charles “Jack” Pritchard and his telephone conversations with U.S. ambassador to South Korea Thomas Hubbard, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs James Kelly, and Richard Armitage; New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and his telephone conversations with Secretary of State Powell and North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador Han Song Ryol; phone conversations between Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden and his Iranian counterpart, Majlis foreign affairs chair Mohsen Mirdamad and between Biden, his staff, and William Burns and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman; and President Jimmy Carter’s phone conversations with Cuban officials before and during his May 2002 trip to Cuba (Carter said he found no evidence to support Bolton’s claims of Cuban biological weapons development).

I suppose that since George Bush has come out and admitted he gave the order for the illegal wiretaps to be carried out by the NSA, they won’t have to use the “training mission” excuse any more. Now comes the questions about who was monitored illegally and to what purpose.

April Glaspie Redux

Remember how the justification for the US government’s permanent blockade and eventual aggressive invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on the idea that Saddam Hussein was in defiance of the cease fire agreement that ended his war with the United Nations in 1991?

For the sake of making the real point of this post, we can neglect the fact that, as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has explained,

“Within months of this resolution being passed – and the United States was a drafter and voted in favor of this resolution – within months, the President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his Secretary of State, James Baker, are saying publicly — not privately, publicly — that even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power. That is proof positive that disarmament was only useful insofar as it contained, through the maintenance of sanctions, and facilitated regime change.

It was never about disarmament. It was never about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. It started with George Herbert Walker Bush and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush administration,”

and instead focus on the question of what justified the UN war in the first place:

Why did Saddam want to invade Kuwait in August 1990? Seems he was having trouble paying off his debts from the war with Iran and Kuwait’s government was having more than their OPEC quota worth of oil produced, which was driving down Saddam’s revenues to the point where he was facing bankruptcy and perhaps the loss of his power. On top of this were allegations that the Kuwaitis were slant-drilling under Iraq’s border and stealing their oil in order to accomplish this.

Enter US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie.

As we are reminded in this piece for the Jang group by Kaleem Omar, “Is the US State Department still keeping April Glaspie under wraps?, the United States, during a meeting between Hussein and Glaspie, invited Saddam Hussein to send his army to invade tiny, defenseless Kuwait.

As far as I can tell, the cables to Glaspie with her instructions from Secretary Baker are still classified, as Ross “welfare cheat” Perot complained in the third presidential debate in 1992, but from the transcripts of the meeting it’s pretty clear what went on:

“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

Omar continues, “On July 31, 1990, two days before the Iraqi invasion, John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, testified to Congress that the ‘United States has no commitment to defend Kuwait and the US has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq.'”

After the transcript was released and a reporter asked Glaspie, “What were you thinking?” she responded, “Obviously, I didn’t think, and nobody else did, that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”

Just some of it, huh?

I believe it is still open to question whether Bush I/Baker really intended all along to trick Iraq into the invasion so they could display the power of the UN under US leadership without the Russians in our way, or whether it was just his way of acting tough after Lady Thatcher called him “wobbly” in front of everybody.

Either way, every Iraqi life taken by the US government since then has been the victim of a criminal homicide. We better try these politicians before the global court system gets to set some more precedents of the authority of “international law” based on their crimes – precedents which would threaten the liberty of us all.

See also chapter one of Neoconned: Just War Principles: A Condemnation of the War with Iraq, “The Bogus Case Against Saddam,” by the late Jude Wanniski, his website or listen to my interview of him on the subject.

Iraqi Army Desertions

Buried away toward the bottom of this news article are a few interesting paragraphs about the morale of at least one Iraqi Army battalion:

    Meanwhile, gunmen Friday attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in the city of Adhaim, in religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province, killing eight soldiers and wounding seventeen, an Iraqi army officer said on condition he not be identified for fear of reprisal.

    “There were too many to count,” said Akid, a 20-year-old soldier from Diwanayah being treated for gunshot wounds to both thighs. “They tried to kill everybody.”

    Akid, who would only give his first name for fear of reprisal, said his battalion of about 600 men had already suffered over 250 desertions after a Dec. 3 ambush in Adhaim killed 19 Iraqi soldiers.

    “They gave up,” he said. “They said, ‘The hell with this.'”

I wonder if this is one of the Iraqi battalions cited by the Pentagon as being ready to take over from American troops. If so, it may be a very long time before our soldiers can come home.

Antiwar.com in Malaysia: Photos

At the invitation of the Perdana Peace Foundation, Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris spent the week attending their Global Peace Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We had a wonderful time and were treated royally by the staff and volunteers of the foundation and the other participating organizations and companies. We’d especially like to thank Matthias Chang (conference organizer), Ooi Eng Hong (Garris’ liaison officer), Cathy Yong (Raimondo’s liaison officer), and Steve Peter H.S. Kok (parliamentary assistant). You can read a political report on our trip here.

Here are a selection of photos from our trip, more to come. Click on each photo for a larger version. Unless otherwise indicated, all photos by Ooi Eng Hong.


Eric Garris on War, Peace, and the Net

Justin Raimondo on Naming Names
     

Eric Garris on War, Peace, and the Net

Daniel Ellsberg on the Antiwar Movement
     
The main banquet hall

Ellsberg, Garris, Raimondo visit the Menara Telecommunications Tower
Photo by Cathy Yong
     

Garris interviewed by Islamic televsion network

Former Malaysian PM Tun Dr. Mahathir
Mohammad, Perdana Chairman
     

Last 100 Years of War Deaths, a Major Theme of the Conference

Poster listing the major speakers
 
Many more photos to come!

 

Mehlis Aforethought

From the AP:

    BERLIN – The U.N.’s lead investigator in the inquiry into the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister said Wednesday he believes a spate of recent killings in the country are linked.

    “These are not isolated attacks,” Detlev Mehlis told reporters at a news conference after returning home to Berlin from the U.N. assignment. “It’s pretty clear that there are connections, even if I can’t prove it.”

    Mehlis did not elaborate on his comments, citing the ongoing investigation. He said he could not predict how long the probe would take.

This is a major self-inflicted blow to Mehlis’ credibility. Isn’t it the job of an investigator to put up or shut up? What is the purpose of such statements, other than the geopolitical equivalent of jury-tampering? And if Mehlis doesn’t feel the need to prove what he already deems “clear,” then why doesn’t he go ahead and tell us what those connections are? No need to observe formalities after a statement like that.