160519
The Intercept has run an interesting story from its trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden. This one is about the seemingly innocuous matter of the staff newsletter at the NSA. One item jumped out at me - a story about the British and American ambassadors offering their congratulations to the NSA about the intelligence it had gathered on deliberations about Iraq at the UN Security Council before the 2003 invasion.
The British ambassador mentioned in the story is my former boss, with whom I worked for several years. I suspect it's little news to anyone that the UK and US monitored the communications of other Security Council members at the UN. Obviously, it's no news to me. But I'm not sure that I've seen an official - if unauthorised - admission like this. I also guess that few will be particularly bothered that we were spying on the likes of Russia or China - they were certainly doing the same to us.
The newsletter appears to have been published in April, some time after the failure of the so-called "second" resolution which was intended explicitly to authorize the invasion (and whose failure thus implies that the subsequent invasion was indeed illegal). The tone of the report is strikingly self-congratulatory when there was really nothing to congratulate themselves about. The UK-US diplomacy at the UN Security Council was a total disaster. The inability to secure sufficient support for the second resolution signalled to the world that the impending invasion had scant political support, and lacked legal authority. More shamefully still, the demise of the second resolution forced the UK to claim that despite the Council's unwillingness to authorize the use of force, the UK nonetheless believed the invasion legal - in direct contradiction to what it had claimed during the negotiations for the second resolution. If I had still been at the mission, this would have been my job. But I was nonetheless in New York at the time, with many friends and former colleagues on the Security Council and in UNMOVIC (the weapons inspections body I helped set up). They told me what was being said behind closed doors.
The newsletter mentions none of this. It's as if it was written in a parallel universe. That universe is called government where most of the time is spent talking to people who are paid to agree with one another. If you want a little example of how people in government delude themselves, you need look no further.
This week, by coincidence, GCHQ launched its own twitter account, presumably in order to burnish its public image, much tarnished post-Snowden. I took a look at GCHQ's website which makes much of its antecedent of Bletchley Park, the English manor house where Nazi codes were broken during the Second World War. My grandfather worked at Bletchley Park for several years. He spoke not a word of this work until his death and only recently have I begun to find out what he was doing (mostly German naval codes apparently, on which he wrote a handbook).
I wonder what he would have made of all this. I don't honestly know. He was patriotic but at a time when patriotism equated to standing up against fascism, not surveilling your own populace or collaborating in lies about war.
