10 yrs ago the NSA was spying on the UN Security Council.

Katharine Gun and the Deja Vu of NSA Secret Ops

by Marcia Mitchell

“It’s déjà vu all over again.” It was Yogi Berra’s classic observation in 1947, and one eminently appropriate for Edward Snowden more than a half century later. Only the subject now is NSA secret operations, not baseball. Specifically, the déjà vu observation refers to an earlier leak of that agency’s secret operations. And this time, unlike before, America is taking notice.

(Photo: Andy Hall/ The Observer)Clandestine snooping by the National Security Agency? A member of an intelligence agency leaking secrets? All that’s new here is the abundant attention focused on this latest example of NSA’s enormous power to play by whatever rules it establishes—or by no rules at all.

Last time around, it was the London Observer revealing NSA’s clandestine operation. This time it’s the Guardian. British press lighting the stage, illuminating an American cast.
Entering into the heated, certainly contentious, discussion about the Snowden disclosure is a panoply of concerns. National security versus civil rights, the extent and powers of the Patriot Act, the sharing of secrets, hero versus criminal, whistleblower versus leaker. All hot topics.

Here’s the déjà vu aspect that deserves our attention: Exactly ten years ago, this same all-powerful agency launched an illegal spy operation against representatives of six members of the UN Security Council in an attempt to convince those members to vote in favor of a US-UK resolution legitimizing the invasion of Iraq. It doesn’t take rocket science to determine just how personal information about the six could be used to influence their vote—according to NSA’s secret memorandum—“to obtain results favorable to US goals.” In the ten-year-old case, newspapers worldwide (except in the US) ran banner headlines reading, “US Dirty Tricks at the UN.” Readers wondered about a game of high-stakes blackmail.

Katharine Gun, a British Secret Service office stationed at GCHQ in Cheltenham, England, received a copy of NSA’s invitation to join in the illegal UNSC operation, and made the same decision as did Snowden. She leaked the information. She was 27 at the time. Snowden is 29.

Within a matter of weeks, Katharine was arrested for high crime against her country, George W. Bush and Tony Blair withdrew the controversial proposed resolution, and we went to war.

Later, looking back, Michael Hayden, the agency’s director at the time, told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb that the NSA works only within the confines of the law, within “what’s legally permitted.” This would not be the only time he would insist that everything the NSA did was in compliance with the law. But spying on the UN was not legal. One of the questions that will not go away, especially with the present attention focused on the Snowden case, is what US intelligence can do legally and what it cannot.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/14-10