Sunday, 9 March, 2003

Trickery trickery One Web Sprite that never grew the legs I figured it would was the story of the leaked memo outlining the US Government's desire to ramp up information gathering on UN security council delgations - particularly the undecided ones. And by information gathering what is meant is spying, phone tapping wire tapping, communications, cars, rooms, elevators etc. What few mentions I saw of it early on tried to portray it as a hoax on the British newspaper that broke it or somehow or other not true. At mid-week Jack Tapper of Salon took it on, but could only say that the Independent had answered the hoax issues and was standing by the story and that while the story was not being taken up by the US press, it was not being denied just given "no comment" by the Government. I was surprised to see in the News roundup at the bottom of an online Observer/Guardian article yesterday that this story had its own section with seven stories and some others spilling over to other categories. I had accepted the notion that this was a non-story and that the UN is a den of mutual interception that would make Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs found in a Bathtub (ISBN 0156585855) seem like a understated nursery tale. If you read the memo, one thing which stands out is the language is not the language of dispassionate professional intelligence collection but something altogether more clumsy, arrogant and amateurish. You can be certain that this did not help the administration in its efforts to bring swing votes onboard. That and the remarkable degree to which this story has been suppressed in American media is the real story here. 2:50:15 PM    comment [];

© Copyright 2003 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 4/03/03; 23:26:04.