Justin Raimondo
British whistleblower Katharine Gun faces two years in jail
Mon Feb 16 19:48:48 2004
64.140.158.105

Smoking Gun
British whistleblower Katharine Gun faces two years in jail – for speaking truth to power
by Justin Raimondo

In the run-up to war, as the British were going through the motions of getting a second resolution through the UN Security Council, there was much speculation as to how the 6 non-permanent members of that body would vote. So high was the interest in this question on the part of the U.S. and British governments that a covert operation was launched to discover what the so-called Middle Six delegations were up to – and to head off any compromise proposal.

The details of the U.S./UK espionage operation were exposed last March by the brave (and beautiful!) Katharine Gun, a former employee of the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, Tony Blair's eavesdropping center. She faces up to two years in jail for leaking this memo from National Security Agency honcho Frank Koza to NSA personnel and "a friendly foreign intelligence agency," (i.e. British spooks). The memo describes a "surge" in surveillance efforts "against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters."

Mexican and Chilean officials are now revealing that a secret meeting, held at the United Nations, where such a proposal was discussed, was bugged, along with the phones used by diplomats. The Guardian reports:

"A joint British and American spying operation at the United Nations scuppered a last-ditch initiative to avert the invasion of Iraq, The Observer can reveal. …The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work. Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance."

"… We had yet to get our capitals to go along with it, it was at a very early stage. Only the people in the room knew what the document said. The surprising thing was the very rapid flow of information to [US] quarters. The meeting was in the evening and they call us in the morning before the meeting of the Security Council and they say, 'We appreciate you trying to find ideas, but this is not a good idea." I say, 'Thanks, that's good to know.' We were looking for a compromise and they [the US] say, 'Do not attempt it.'"

You'll remember that, in order to make the war more palatable to his clearly reluctant countrymen, and his own balking Labor Party, Blair made quite a show of trying to intercede on behalf of those UN Security Council members who wanted to give the invasion the stamp of legality, vowing to craft an acceptable resolution. But that was a lie….

Now we find out that Blair and his ministers were actually trying to undercut efforts at a compromise, because it would have given UN weapons inspectors more time to find out the truth: that Saddam didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. The rush to war would have been aborted – if the War Party hadn't moved quickly to quash the last hope of peace.

Ms. Gun's arraignment in the Old Bailey today means more trouble for the already beleaguered Tony Blair. As the Liberal Democrats' Foreign Affairs point man, Menzies Campbell, put it:

"If the allegations that these operations had ministerial authority are well-founded, then it could hardly be more serious for the Government. There will be understandable uproar at the UN. On the other hand, if the eavesdropping took place without Ministers knowing, then the question is, who was in charge?'"

Charged with violation of the Official Secrets Act – the British version of the U.S. "Patriot" Act – Ms. Gun, a 29-year-old Chinese language specialist, will have her trial in the fall. Her defense will be to put this illegal war on trial.

Far from betraying her country's secrets, Ms. Gun is a British patriot who exposed the extent to which Blair has been willing to subordinate his country's interests to the wishes of his American masters. Even the usually brain-dead Tories, who have long since given up the idea of British sovereignty, must be outraged at this incident, which shows that Bush's poodle is just as big a liar as his master in Washington.

It is so typical of the War Party to create and then deplore what the neocons call "anti-Americanism" – blaming those who are justifiably outraged by the U.S. government's highhandedness as if they are responsible. But this is all part of the dialectic, as anticipated by our proud unilateralists: the more the neocons can drive U.S. policy in the direction of pigheaded unreasonableness, the more they can provoke the Europeans into reacting against it. In the end, their dire warnings of an "anti-American" upsurge in Europe become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This has certain political benefits at home, where the campaign to stoke anti-French sentiment has been fairly successful in appealing to ignoramuses from coast to coast: every war hysteria needs a hate object, and the addition of the Europeans to Arab Muslims gives the neocon hate campaign a more inclusive, multi-cultural air.

Great Britain has never been a free country, and today it is less so than ever. Omnipresent cameras record the moves of ordinary people in an Orwellian society where anything dubbed "hate speech" is outlawed, along with speech that exposes the mendacity of the all-powerful Big Brother Blair. It is a country where the columnist Taki Theodoracopoulos is "investigated" and threatened for writing a newspaper column that did not fit into the proper boundaries of political correctness; where the libel laws are so stacked against the defendant that even the renown terrorist supporter and war profiteer Richard Perle can confidently threaten to take a journalist to court there for exposing his sleazy machinations to public view.

Under Britain's Official Secrets Act, the government can quash any speech, and hold any person indefinitely, for breaching the citadel of government "official secrets," i.e. anything that might harm the interests of those in power. There is no British Bill of Rights, no formal legal basis to oppose such tyranny – nothing but the unbroken spirit and sheer orneriness of the British people – which is, come to think of it, not an inconsiderable factor.

Gun's defense could be a replay of the case of Clive Ponting, a British official at the Ministry of Defense who gave a Member of Parliament documents proving that Maggie Thatcher and her ministers lied to Parliament about details of when and where the Argentinian ship General Belgrano was sunk during the Falklands War. As Time magazine points out, "Ponting confessed, and the judge virtually ordered the jury to convict, but they honored his act of conscience and acquitted him."

It's funny how events on one side of the Atlantic have their mirror image on the other: while the trial of Katharine Gun is going on in London, another sort of trial may be in progress in Washington, only this time it will be the War Party that's in the dock.

Yes, I'm talking about the trial of whomever "outed" undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband's very effective and high-profile opposition to the Iraq war. Former Ambassdor Joseph C. Wilson was sent to Africa to investigate "intelligence" that the Iraqis were trying to procure uranium in the African nation of Niger, as Bush claimed in the infamous "16 words" of his 2003 State of the Union address. It was bogus, from top to bottom, and based on a crude forgery, to boot – that's what Wilson said, in public and in print, and the War Party struck back by "outing" his wife, telling Robert Novak, among others, that it was the wife who ensured his mission to Niger. Now the investigation into who related Plame's job description to the media is before a grand jury, and, as the Financial Times reports:

"Washington is alive with talk that [the White House] is readying for another assault on its integrity: indictments from the CIA leak investigation."

The investigation has focused on Dick Cheney's office. One-by-one, aides to the Vice President have filed in to testify before the grand jury: Mary Matalin, Cheney's former press secretary, now advising the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, deputy press secretary Claire Buchan, and Adam Levine, who previously worked in the White House communications site. According to the Financial Times:

"There have also been 'tip-offs' that indictments are in the offing. The names are circulating of senior staff in Mr Cheney's office."

Which means You-Know-Who is in prosecutors' sights.

Who lied us into war – and why? That is the question Iraq war revisionists have been asking since before the first shots were fired, and now the rest of the country – and the whole world – is asking it. The answers will be found in these twin trials, where the illegal and unethical machinations of the American government and their British enablers will be exposed for all to see. If Katharine Gun is convicted, and Scooter Libby & Co. go free, then what is this great "democracy" we are trying to export to the rest of the world – and what is it worth?

You can send a message to Tony Blair demanding an end to the prosecution of Katharine Gun. A letter addressed to the Prime Minister at: 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA, Great Britain.

Or send a fax to him at:
44-207925-0918

(preceded by 011 from the U.S.)

Or at 020-7925-0918 from within the United Kingdom. This will have the biggest effect, but you can also send an electronic message to Blair at: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page4345.asp

Send copies of your message to the Department of Constitutional Affairs: general.queries@dca.gsi.gov.uk

To Gun's former employer, the Government Communications Headquarters: pressoffice@gchq.gsi.gov.uk
To the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.: washi@fco.gov.uk
And to Gun herself at: KatharineG@liberty-human-rights.org.uk

The campaign to exonerate Katharine Gun is vitally important, because, as Daniel Ellsberg pointed out:

"Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me. Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake."

Government whistleblowers have a key function in a democratic republic, and in America they are supposedly protected by law, albeit inconsistently. In Great Britain, however, which is fast descending into the morass of soft totalitarianism, there are no similar constitutional guarantees. I am glad to see that Liberty, the British organization of civil libertarians, is taking up Ms. Gun's cause, along with a number of prominent American liberals, including the actor Sean Penn. Now is the time for British conservatives and libertarians to join in the campaign to Free Katharine Gun – and free England from the grip of an increasingly authoritarian form of socialism.



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Subject:
Re: Con-Con/Gulags: From a Christian friend of ours who lives in MO; regarding the family
From:
"Sallie"
Date:
Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:02:26 -0600
To:
"Sallie"

Thanks Paul,

I'm sure Andy being a friend of yours, has his heart is in the right place, and a stellar guy. I'm so glad you brought this to my attention, so we can expose it. It's called a CON-CON = Constitutional Convention. This is exactly what we don't want! It's a trick -- Hillary tried this too for national ID. They have used every excuse imaginable to amend the Constitution. If memory serves me correctly, the last undertaking was about the flag issue.

In the spring and summer of 2001, a group of conservative legal scholars including former Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork hammered out the proposed text of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. That was followed by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) known as the Musgrave Amendment, but would not effect civil unions already legal in Vermont.

In June, the Supreme Court found anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, promoting homosexuality and the California State Supreme Court supporting pedophilia, and letting everyone out of jail. Unfortunately, those people do not get better without treatment.

So, do you really expect more from today's "bipartisan" politicians who can, but won't not go against the US Supreme Court decision and have brought us NAFTA, GATT, FTAA, Amnesty, and everything else contrary to the interest of Americans? Besides like education, marriage is a state issue, and big government is just trying to become bigger, trampling state rights using their new brand of federalism, which already has too much power. With the passage of USAPA 1 & (# 2 secretly signed by Bush), and Homeland Security the Constitution has already been abrogated and usurped.

Congress approved HR 2714 containing parts of Patriot - 2. While everyone was focused on the capture of Saddam, and Bush secretly signed HR 3439 (attached) passed by Congress and is the last nail in the coffin of the Constitution, enabling them to get their ducks in a row for martial law. "Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny." -- Edmund Burke

Over 253 cities have passed resolutions, ordinances or ballot initiatives protecting the civil liberties of their 43,497,945 residents. Hundreds more are in progress. Bill of Right Defense Committee www.bordc.org

Once they get the Constitution behind closed doors, they will change it any way they wish, and when it reappears transformed -- we won't even recognized it again. This is exact how they got the bill passed to abolish overtime. The Congress had the bill in November, and were going to vote after returning from recess in January. A couple of (R) representatives, and senators accompanied by the a couple from the Bush administration hashed it over and passed it behind CLOSED DOORS. This is highly irregular and illegal, but this is the way things are being done in secrecy -- the doors to the House are padlocked, and off limits to public scrutiny. The House members have only spent 48 hours on the floor to date, since returning from recess. They don't want the people know what is going on, and are taking orders from Bushstapo. This is what happens when you have control of all 3 branches of government executive, legislative, and judicial -- a dictator's dream, losing the checks and balances intended by the founding fathers.

"The people are masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it!" -- Abraham Lincoln.

To "Stand For Marriage" is a great and holy concept throughout the ages in every nation. But our Constitution should not be sacrificed to amended it. If anything everyone should be cautioned not to have that sacred document altered in any way, because it the only thing that offers American citizens maximum protection from the government, and the current elite wish to abolish it altogether. Until my crash, I had a copy of a new Constitution they planned to present to the public once they were able to change our present Constitution -- their ultimate goal. Politicians have a saying on the Hill, "Yes, but how are we going to get this around the Constitution?" Even Kissinger said, "The impossible we do right away, the un-Constitutional takes a little longe

• Katharine Gun Campaign Appeal — Daniel Ellsberg, Mon Feb 16 19:53