SEOUL, July 26 (Yonhap) — The ruling Saenuri Party on Friday boycotted a hearing on the state spy agency’s alleged meddling in last year’s presidential election as it wrangled with opposition parties over whether the meeting should be open to the public.

The ruling party has argued that the hearing should be held behind closed doors because it is likely to touch on sensitive intelligence issues as lawmakers question National Intelligence Service (NIS) chief Nam Jae-joon and other officials of the spy agency in connection with the scandal.

Opposition parties have insisted that the hearing be open to the public so as to ensure its transparency.

The scandal centers on allegations that former NIS chief Won Sei-hoon ordered an online smear campaign to sway public opinion in favor of the ruling party ahead of last December’s presidential election.

A parliamentary probe has been under way since early this month to determine the truth behind those allegations.

Friday’s hearing was supposed to be the first time for the parliamentary investigative committee to question NIS officials in connection with the case.

Earlier this week, the committee held hearings with the Ministry of Justice and the National Police Agency over the scandal.

The hearing opened with only the opposition parties’ investigative committee members in attendance. NIS officials were also absent from the meeting.

The opposition members immediately held a press conference condemning the boycott, saying they will charge Nam for boycotting the hearing without permission and take steps to impeach him.

Yonhap News Agency July 26, 2013 5:35am

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Copyright Yonhap News Agency, 2013.

YSEOUL, July 25 (Yonhap) — Rival parties clashed Thursday over whether the police tried to cover up the state spy agency’s alleged meddling in last year’s presidential election, leading to a brief suspension of a parliamentary probe into the scandal.

The probe, which began early this month, aims to uncover the truth behind allegations that former National Intelligence Service (NIS) chief Won Sei-hoon ordered an online smear campaign to sway public opinion in favor of the ruling Saenuri Party ahead of last December’s presidential election.

Kim Yong-pan, the then Seoul metropolitan police chief, has been accused of downsizing a police investigation into the scandal and covering up its results.

Both Won and Kim were indicted last month on charges of meddling in the election.

On Thursday, the parliamentary probe committee questioned National Police Agency (NPA) chief Lee Sung-han and other senior police officials in connection with the case.

Rep. Jung Chung-rai of the main opposition Democratic Party, who serves on the investigative committee, showed CCTV footage of what he claimed was a meeting at the NPA headquarters on Dec. 15.

That footage backed allegations that the police had tried to cover up and destroy evidence of the spy agency’s alleged smear campaign against the opposition party’s then-presidential contender, Moon Jae-in, he claimed.

Ruling party members on the committee walked out of the room in protest of Jung’s claims. The meeting was suspended for about 20 minutes before the rival parties agreed to resume the probe.

Yonhap News Agency July 25, 2013 9:33am

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Copyright Yonhap News Agency, 2013.

SEOUL, July 24 (Yonhap) — A parliamentary probe into the state spy agency’s alleged meddling in last year’s presidential election began Wednesday with a hearing attended by justice ministry officials as rival parties questioned the legitimacy of a now-complete prosecution investigation into the scandal.

The parliamentary probe aims to uncover the truth behind allegations that former National Intelligence Service (NIS) chief Won Sei-hoon ordered an online smear campaign to sway public opinion in favor of the ruling Saenuri Party ahead of last December’s presidential election.

Last month, prosecutors indicted Won and former Seoul metropolitan police chief Kim Yong-pan on charges of meddling in the election.

Kim has been accused of downscaling a police investigation into the scandal in its early stages.

The ruling party claims that the alleged smear campaign was in fact an attempt by the NIS to eliminate pro-North Korea opinions on the Internet ahead of the election.

“Was the NIS’ psychological warfare staff using their status as public officials when posting anonymous comments on websites and clicking on ‘recommend’ or ‘disapprove?'” Rep. Kim Do-eup of the ruling party said during the hearing at the National Assembly.

Justice Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn said not all of the NIS’ psychological warfare activities are classified as illegal, but the charges against Won were related to certain illegal elements that were found in the spy agency’s activities.

Rep. Jung Chung-rai of the main opposition Democratic Party defended the prosecution’s decision, claiming Won illegally intervened in the election and influenced the vote.

hague@yna.co.kr
2013/07/24 15:19

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Copyrights Yonhap News Agency

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) is now taking the center stage in the controversy over the Northern Limit Line (NLL) in the West Sea of Korea, as the real the origin of all disputes. As the search for 2007 North-South Summit Minutes at the Presidential Archives finally ended in vain, the full text kept by the NIS has practically become the ‘only copy’ at present.

It means that the sources of current and recent debates must have been exposed by the NIS.
Suspicion seems to be turning into certainty: it seems now almost certain that the NIS leaked the ‘minutes’ material, which has been allegedly used by then-candidate Park Geun-hye’s campaign in the 2012 presidential election. The current situation tells us that the NIS is the one and only source of the information on NLL, which has been shared among and used by the ruling party in its political attacks last year.

Right before the 2012 presidential election, the ruling Saenuri Party strengthened its attacks regarding former President Roh Moo-hyun’s alleged ‘remarks on abandoning the NLL.’ On October 8, 2012, at National Assembly inspection on the Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee, Rep. Chung Moon-hun disclosed that there existed confidential minutes. According to him, “Former President Roh said, ‘The NLL is a trouble for us. It is a line arbitrarily drawn by the United States in its efforts to win more territories뻞ence the South will not claim the NLL in the future.'”

A voice-recording file containing the words by Kwon Young-se, ambassador to China and former chief of campaign operations for Park Geun-hye, was unburied. In this voice-recording on December 10 last year, Kwon said, “It is no problem to get the material [minutes]. The source [of the material] will be either Cheong Wa Dae or the NIS. And we will open [go public with] it once we come to power.”

Rep. Kim Moo-sung, former director of Park’s campaign, made a comment in this regard while canvassing in Busan on December 14: “Former President Roh said, ‘Regarding the NLL issue, there is no evidence in terms of international law; nor is there any logical ground. This is not a constitutional matter, either.'” Rep. Kim’s expressions exactly correspond to the full text revealed by the NIS, to almost every letter and punctuation.

All these circumstances demonstrate the possibility that the minutes leaked before the presidential election last year, to be used by Park’s campaign.

A high level official of the ruling party also gave a statement on what happened prior to 2012: “Cheong Wa Dae under Lee Myung-bak government was reported of the full text of the minutes in 2009 and the excerpts in 2010, by the NIS.”

At the National Assembly inspection on the Office of President conducted on October 25 last year, Chun Young-woo, then-presidential secretary of foreign affairs and national security gave a testimony, which can be summed up as the following: “Two years ago, not long after I was appointed to be the presidential secretary [in October 2010], I have seen [the minutes maintained by the NIS].”

Suspicion gets stronger here: no matter what channel they went through, the minutes managed by the NIS must have been disclosed and then transferred to the presidential election campaign organized by the Saenuri Party.

This is why the opposition parties are looking at the NIS from a new angle, for being behind the leakage of the minutes at the time of 2012 election and behind the ruling party’s consequent political assails.

Rep. Park Ji-won of the opposition Democratic Party had an interview on the SBS radio on July 23 and said, “In the first place, the real problem is that the record in the custody of the NIS has leaked during the presidential election, to be taken advantage of by the Saenuri Party in the campaign.”

Rep. Jung Chung-rae, the opposition secretary in the Special Committee of the National Assembly Inspection, remarked, “We can determine later whether [the minutes kept by the Presidential Archives] is really absent or just evaded our search this time. What became clear now is the fact that the one and only source of leakage is none other than the NIS.” He added, “Nam Jae-joon, director of the NIS also said that the NIS version is the original and authentic copy. What [Reps.] Chung Moon-hun and Kim Moo-sung read must have been revealed to them by the NIS. This issue will be closely examined at the special committee of the national assembly.”

By Kim Jin-woo, Shim Hye-ri
Posted on : 2013-07-24 10:24

Find this story at 24 July 2013

Copyright (C)1996-2014 Kyunghyang Shinmun

During last year’s presidential election, a team of South Korean intelligence agents allegedly flooded the Internet with several thousand political comments, including some describing left-leaning candidates as North Korea sympathizers.

Then, while that scandal has continued to play out, another drama has unfolded, as the spy agency last month declassified a 2007 transcript that showed then-president Roh Moo-hyun, a liberal, pressing to create a peace zone along a maritime border disputed with the North.

Conservative lawmakers say the transcript proves Roh preferred to cooperate with Pyongyang than protect security. Liberal lawmakers say the spy agency, instead, was manufacturing one controversy to distract from the other.

The two events are convoluted, but both have dominated headlines for weeks in the South. They also have a common thread: South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), which some analysts here say has turned into a political provocateur, using its power to champion conservative causes and widen a partisan divide.

Because of its Stalinist neighbor, the South has long defined itself along Cold War lines, with political ideology here linked in part to one’s sentiment about the North. But in the 2012 election, that had appeared to be changing. On the campaign trail, conservative Park Geun-hye and liberal Moon Jae-in shared similar visions for social spending and tentative engagement with the North. When Park won by 3 percentage points, she vowed to unify the nation.

Silence on spy agency

In the six months since her victory, that hasn’t happened, and Park’s opponents criticise her for staying quiet about the spy agency’s actions, rather than condemning them.

Only in late June did she first discuss the alleged election-meddling – the first parts of which came to light last December – saying she had was neither connected to nor a beneficiary of the agency’s potential misdeeds.

“I don’t think this allegation puts her legitimacy in question,” said Kang Won-Taek, a right-leaning professor of political science at Seoul National University. “How many people’s opinions could have been affected by some Internet postings? But it’s true that it’s not a pretty scene for Park” to deal with.

Her approval rating remains high – above 60 percent, according to most polls. But opposition lawmakers have seized on the election-tampering charges to raise questions about Park’s victory, and small groups of protesters have gathered in recent days in cities across South Korea to demand an investigation and a greater response from Park.

The NIS, South Korea’s version of the CIA, is supposed to remain politically neutral. But prosecutors say its former leader, Won Sei-hoon, indicted last month on charges of election meddling, believed that “leftist followers of North Korea” were trying to regain power in the South.

He ordered his agents to post comments not only criticising Park’s opponents, but also lauding Park, prosecutors say. Won resigned earlier this year, having served under the previous president, Lee Myung-bak. If found guilty, Won would face as long as five years in jail.

“It is grave – a big deal. It’s all about dividing the country into two parts – the patriots, and those who sympathise with North Korea,” said Pyo Chang-won, who hosts a current affairs Internet television show and has spoken at protests. “The NIS is supposed to be politically neutral, but it has used its intelligence force to attack half the nation.”

Left-leaning lawmakers say the problems at the NIS have continued under Won’s successor, Nam Jae-joon, who they say unilaterally released a document that shouldn’t have been made public for decades.

At a closed-door meeting of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, Nam was grilled about the release, according to South Korean media, and asked whether he had any intention to resign. (He said he didn’t.)

Dubious history

South Korea’s intelligence agency has gone by several names since the Korean War 60 years ago, but it has a dubious history.

Former authoritarian leader Park Chung-hee, who seized power in a 1961 military coup, used the agency as a tool to crack down on student protests. In 1979, Park was assassinated by his own spy chief.

After South Korea’s democratisation in the late-1980s, the agency officially became apolitical. But opponents say the agency is now helping Park Geun-hye in much the way it helped Park Chung-hee, her father. Monday, the Hankyoreh, South Korea’s major liberal newspaper, printed a cartoon showing Park, in a military outfit, surrounded by cronies holding computer keyboards and mouses.

The image was modeled after a photo of Park Chung-hee, flanked by top military officials, after his coup.

Analysts say the alleged election tampering is far more serious than the debate about the 2007 transcript. But that controversy, too, has provided weeks of fodder for South Koreans.

Touchy issue

The transcript showed the conversation between Roh and then-North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Il during a summit meeting in Pyongyang. Interest in the specifics of what Roh told Kim dated back to last year, when some conservative lawmakers suggested that Roh had offered to surrender parts of South Korean maritime territory in an undisciplined effort to make peace with the North. The charge was potent, because the liberal running for president last year, Moon, had once served as Roh’s chief of staff.

According to the transcript, while discussing the maritime border, Roh said that it “should change.” But he also said, presciently, that the issue was touchy. “The problem is that whenever the [maritime border] is mentioned, everyone rises and make noises like a swarm bees,” Roh said.

In the closest she’s come to taking a side on the issue, Park, one day after the transcript’s release, told her cabinet that the South should never forget the “blood and deaths” that occurred in defense of that border.

Published: July 8, 2013 – 11:43AM

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Copyright © 2014 Fairfax Media

In one of the latest revelations based on the leaks of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency spied on foreign governments before and during the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. An internal NSA document says its analysts and foreign partners briefed U.S. negotiators on other countries’ “preparations and goals,” saying, “signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the two-week event.” We speak to Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re still joined by Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth USA. Erich, I wanted to ask you about the recent reports that the National Security Agency spied on foreign governments before and during the 2009 U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. An internal NSA document says its analysts and foreign partners briefed U.S. negotiators on other countries’ preparations and goals, saying, quote, “signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the two-week event.” Your response?

ERICH PICA: Shocking, but not surprised, as we hear more and more about what the National Security Agency has been doing. You know, the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen was supposed to be this convening of the world leaders to take us into the future of climate negotiations and carbon pollution reductions. And, you know, the United States, throughout those negotiations, had a smug reality to their negotiating stance and was—can be blamed for the collapse of those talks. And kind of hearing through the Snowden documents that NSA was spying on the countries and the negotiators kind of explains many things about why those talks collapsed, because it seems that the United States wasn’t really interested in negotiating just like other countries should be. They were just interested in listening to what was going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of those talks. I remember very well in Copenhagen when Friends of the Earth was kicked out.

ERICH PICA: Yeah, no, we were—we were kicked out for protesting within the U.N. confines. And so, those talks, you know, those 2009 talks, were really about how does the world come together to solve this great issue, which is how to reduce our carbon pollution and save the planet and our society from global warming. And, you know, a lot of countries from around the world, and heads of state, more importantly, came to Copenhagen to try to hammer out an agreement that would have taken us into the future over the next 20 years. And unfortunately, the United States led the—you know, several countries, including Canada, who we were just talking about, in basically destroying the goodwill that these talks had created, to the point where we’ve been now in these negotiations over the last four years, which have really gone nowhere.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you expect from the coming talks? We’ve just come out of Warsaw. Then they’re moving on to Lima, and the binding discussion is supposed to take place in Paris, France, in 2015.

ERICH PICA: Yeah, in Paris. Yeah, well, it’s not a good sign when you’re trying to build trust with other negotiators, other countries, and it comes out that, you know, the United States was spying on those negotiations. There’s already been a level of mistrust and distrust between the United States and countries around the world, particularly those developing countries. And so, you know, where we’re going in Paris, who knows? The United States has not been forthcoming with their negotiating stances. They have not been—we have not been aggressive in reducing our climate change emissions and putting out an offer that the rest of the world can accept. And we haven’t been terribly generous with funding to help these less-developed, these poorer countries in adjusting to both adapting and mitigating the climate impacts that are already happening to them.

AMY GOODMAN: Erich Pica—

ERICH PICA: And so the United States has very little trust in these talks.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, president of Friends of the Earth USA, as we turn right now to Michigan.

ERICH PICA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

Monday, February 3, 2014

Find this story at 3 February 2014

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

The National Security Agency was spying on foreign governments’ communications before and during the 2009 United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, a new document released by whistle-blower Edward Snowden reveals.

The Huffington Post, partnering with Danish newspaper Information, has the exclusive:

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners [the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship] will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

“[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document reads. The NSA’s plan, Information adds, was to get the scoop on those private discussions in order to brief U.S. officials and give them an advantage in negotiations of CO2 reductions, which had the potential to harm U.S. (and other nations’) economic interests:

The general theme of the document is a set of risk assessments on various effects of climate change that the entire intelligence community was working on. However, the document suggests that the NSA’s actual focus in relation to climate change was spying on other countries to collect intelligence that would support American interests, rather than preventing future climate catastrophes. It describes the U.S. as being under pressure because of its role as the historically largest carbon emitter. A pressure to which the NSA spies were already responding:

“SIGINT (Signals Intelligence, ed.) has already alerted policymakers to anticipate specific foreign pressure on the United States and has provided insights into planned actions on this issue by key nations and leaders.”
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A National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the document, but said in an email that “the U.S. Government has made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.”

The ultimate outcome of the Copenhagen talks is mostly seen as a disappointment: an agreement to keep warming below 2 degrees C, but one that was non-binding and that allowed each nation to develop its own plans for doing so. While a number of factors undoubtedly contributed to this, these new revelations signal a bad turn for future efforts to reach an international accord on fighting climate change. As HuffPo puts it, in a bit of an understatement, “The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.”

Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on all things sustainable. Follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com

Thursday, Jan 30, 2014 03:38 PM +0100

Find this story at 30 January 2014

Copyright © 2014 Salon Media Group, Inc.

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

“Second Party partners” refers to the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship. “While the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference remains uncertain, signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the 2-week event,” the document says.

The Huffington Post published the documents Wednesday night in coordination with the Danish daily newspaper Information, which worked with American journalist Laura Poitras.

The December 2009 meeting in Copenhagen was the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which brings together 195 countries to negotiate measures to address rising greenhouse gas emissions and their impact. The Copenhagen summit was the first big climate meeting after the election of President Barack Obama, and was widely expected to yield a significant breakthrough. Other major developed nations were already part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set emissions limits, while the United States — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases when the protocol went into effect in 2004 — had famously declined to join. The two-week meeting was supposed to produce a successor agreement that would include the U.S., as well as China, India and other countries with rapidly increasing emissions.

The document indicates that the NSA planned to gather information as the leaders and negotiating teams of other countries held private discussions throughout the Copenhagen meeting. “[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document states. The information likely would be used to brief U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama, among others, according to the document.

The document does not detail how the agency planned to continue gathering information during the summit, other than noting that it would be capturing signals intelligence such as calls and emails. Previous disclosures have indicated that the NSA has the ability to monitor the mobile phones of heads of state. Other documents that Snowden has released indicate that the U.K.’s intelligence service tapped into delegates’ email and telephone communications at the 2009 G-20 meetings in London. Other previous Snowden disclosures documented the surveillance of the G-8 and G-20 summits in Canada in 2010, and the U.N. climate change conference in Bali in 2007.

The document also refers to some intelligence gathered ahead of the meeting, including a report that “detailed China’s efforts to coordinate its position with India and ensure that the two leaders of the developing world are working towards the same outcome.” It refers to another report that “provided advance details of the Danish proposal and their efforts to launch a ‘rescue plan’ to save COP-15.”

The Danish proposal was a draft agreement that the country’s negotiators had drawn up in the months ahead of the summit in consultation with a small number key of countries. The text was leaked to The Guardian early in the conference, causing some disarray as countries that were not consulted balked that it promoted the interests of developed nations and undermined principles laid out in previous climate negotiations. As Information reports, Danish officials wanted to keep U.S. negotiators from seeing the text in the weeks ahead of the conference, worried that it may dim their ambitions in the negotiations for proposed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

The Danes did share the text with the U.S. and other key nations ahead of the meeting. But the NSA document noting this as “advance details” indicates that the U.S. may have already intercepted it. The paragraph referring to the Danish text is marked “SI” in the Snowden document — which most likely means “signals intelligence,” indicating that it came from electronic information intercepted by the NSA, rather than being provided to the U.S. negotiators.

That could be why U.S. negotiators took the positions they did going into the conference, a Danish official told Information. “They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if they knew about our document,” the official said. “They made no constructive statements. Obviously, if they had known about our plans since the fall of 2009, it was in their interest to simply wait for our draft proposal to be brought to the table at the summit.”

Members of the Danish delegation indicated in interviews with Information that they thought the American and Chinese negotiators seemed “peculiarly well-informed” about discussions that had taken place behind closed doors. “Particularly the Americans,” said one official. “I was often completely taken aback by what they knew.”

Despite high hopes for an agreement at Copenhagen, the negotiations started slowly and there were few signs of progress. Obama and heads of state from more than 100 nations arrived late in the second week in hopes of achieving a breakthrough, but the final day wore on without an outcome. There were few promising signals until late Friday night, when Obama made a surprise announcement that he — along with leaders from China, India, Brazil and South Africa — had come up with the “Copenhagen Accord.”

The three-page document set a goal of keeping the average rise in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius, but allowed countries to write their own plans for cutting emissions — leaving out any legally binding targets or even a path to a formal treaty. Obama called the accord “an unprecedented breakthrough” in a press conference, then took off for home on Air Force One. But other countries balked, pointing out that the accord was merely a political agreement, drafted outside the U.N. process and of uncertain influence for future negotiations.

The climate summits since then have advanced at a glacial pace; a legally binding treaty isn’t currently expected until 2015. And the U.S. Congress, despite assurances made in Copenhagen, never passed new laws cutting planet-warming emissions. (The Environmental Protection Agency is, however, moving forward with regulations on emissions from power plants, but a new law to addressing the issue had been widely considered as preferable.)

The revelation that the NSA was surveilling the communications of leaders during the Copenhagen talks is unlikely to help build the trust of negotiators from other nations in the future.

“It can’t help in the sense that if people think you’re trying to get an unfair advantage or manipulate the process, they’re not going to have much trust in you,” said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists and a seasoned veteran of the U.N. climate negotiations. Meyer said he worried that the disclosure might cause the parties to “start becoming more cautious, more secretive, and less forthcoming” in the negotiations. “That’s not a good dynamic in a process where you’re trying to encourage collaboration, compromise, and working together, as opposed to trying to get a comparative advantage,” he said.

Obama has defended the NSA’s work as important in fighting terrorism at home and abroad. But the latest Snowden document indicates that the agency plays a broader role in protecting U.S. interests internationally.

National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment directly on the Snowden document in an email to The Huffington Post, but did say that “the U.S. Government has made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.” She noted that Obama’s Jan. 17 speech on the NSA “laid out a series of concrete and substantial reforms the Administration will adopt or seek to codify with Congress” regarding surveillance.

“In particular, he issued a new Presidential Directive that lays out new principles that govern how we conduct signals intelligence collection, and strengthen how we provide executive branch oversight of our signals intelligence activities,” Hayden said. “It will ensure that we take into account our security requirements, but also our alliances; our trade and investment relationships, including the concerns of our companies; and our commitment to privacy and basic liberties. And we will review decisions about intelligence priorities and sensitive targets on an annual basis, so that our actions are regularly scrutinized by the President’s senior national security team.”

Posted: 01/29/2014 9:17 pm EST Updated: 01/30/2014 12:59 pm EST

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‘The policy was devised in secret … within the confines of the Africa Unit. At its heart was François Mitterrand.’ Photograph: Brian Harris/The Independent/REX

The trial this week of a Rwandan genocide suspect in a Paris courtroom is a well-earned victory for the French human rights groups who lobbied so hard and so long for justice. The milestone trial signals the end of France as a safe haven for génocidaries. But more than this, the trial is likely to see intense public scrutiny of one of the great scandals of the past century – the role of France in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda, which for 20 years journalists and activists have tried so hard to expose.

Pascal Simbikangwa, the defendant in Paris, is said to have been a member of an inner circle of power in Rwanda that devised genocide as a planned political campaign. Developed by Hutu ideologues, it was intended to prevent a power-sharing system of government that was to include the minority Tutsi. The genocide claimed up to a million lives.

A captain in the Rwandan gendarmerie until 1986, when he was paralysed in a car accident, Simbikangwa – a fanatic who hoped to create what was known as “a pure Hutu state” – worked for the security services in the capital Kigali. He was eventually found hiding out in the French department of Mayotte, an island group in the Indian Ocean, with 3,000 forged identity papers – more than enough for the hundreds of Rwandan fugitives still at large. He denies all the charges, and his lawyer says he is a scapegoat.

Until now there has been a complete absence of will in Paris to bring to justice any of the estimated 27 Rwandan genocide fugitives who live on French soil. The country was a staunch ally of the Rwandan government which planned and perpetrated the genocide. The trial may well show the French electorate just how appalling its secret policy towards the central African state really was.

The policy was devised in secret, with no accountability from press or parliament and largely determined within the confines of a special office in the president’s Elysée Palace known as the Africa Unit. It operated through a network of military officers, politicians, diplomats, businessmen and senior intelligence operatives. At its heart was President François Mitterrand, who had operated through senior army officers: General Christian Quesnot, Admiral Jacques Lanxade and General Jean-Pierre Huchon.

The prosecution testimony in the trial will be unprecedented in the detail it will provide about the genocide. The evidence combines the results of investigations into the Simbikangwa case at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and details from investigations carried by Rwandan authorities. Never before, not even in the courtrooms of the ICTR, has such an impressive array of witnesses assembled. It is hoped that their combined testimony will put paid to a campaign of denial waged by defence lawyers at the ICTR who claimed the killing in Rwanda was not the result of a conspiracy but was somehow “spontaneous”.

Simbikangwa’s prosecutors are concentrating on his role during the killing, when he allegedly encouraged the murder of Tutsi by Interahamwe militia on roadblocks and provided them with weapons. The roadblocks and the Interahamwe were an integral part of the planned killing mechanism and ensured the speed and scale of the slaughter.

But the impact of the Simbikangwa trial will be felt far beyond the courtroom. It is hoped that for the French public the nature of the genocide will be laid bare, and that at long last a debate about France and Rwanda will begin. Twenty years too late, a true reckoning may at last be possible.

Linda Melvern
The Guardian, Wednesday 5 February 2014 19.11 GMT

Find this story at 5 February 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

President acknowledges that ‘errors’ were made but stops short of formal apology

President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted yesterday that French “errors” had contributed to the Rwandan genocide which killed an estimated 800,000 people in 1994.

On the first visit by a French leader to Rwanda for 25 years, Mr Sarkozy did not formally apologise. Nor did he accept allegations that France had played an active role in training and arming the Hutu militias and troops who led massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

But he suggested that the entire international community – and France in particular – should accept that its response had been culpably weak. “What happened here is a defeat for humanity,” Mr Sarkozy said. “What happened here left an indelible stain. What happened here obliges the international community – including France – to reflect on the errors which prevented us from foreseeing, or stopping, this appalling crime.”

Previously France has always insisted that it could not have foreseen the genocide and that the intervention of its troops helped to save many Hutu and Tutsi lives. Mr Sarkozy’s visit to Kigali, and joint press conference with the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, were the most dramatic symbols to date of efforts to repair relations. Diplomatic ties were restored in November, three years after they were severed amid mutual recriminations and allegations.

In 2006, a French investigating judge issued international arrest warrants for eight Tutsi officials close to President Kagame, suggesting that they had deliberately provoked the genocide of their own people by assassinating a moderate Hutu president in May 1994. The accusations brought renewed allegations from Mr Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government that France had armed and trained Hutu militias and soldiers knowing that genocidal attacks were likely or possible.

In 1998, a French parliamentary investigation rejected these accusations but admitted that the late President François Mitterrand and the then centre-right government in France had been blinded by supposed French interests in the region into siding with radical, and eventually murderous, Hutu groups.

The eight arrest warrants against Kagame aides are still active but the Rwandan government now accepts that they were drawn up by an independent investigating magistrate and not the French government.

Before his press conference with President Kagame, Mr Sarkozy was taken on a tour of Kigali’s genocide museum. On two occasions, the official guide made references to alleged French complicity in the massacres, including a photograph of a French military vehicle driving past armed Hutu civilians. President Sarkozy ignored the remarks.

He later placed a wreath on a memorial to the dead and said that “in the name of the people of France” he “bowed” to “victims of the genocide of the Tutsis”. “Errors of appreciation, political errors, were committed here which had consequences which were absolutely tragic,” Mr Sarkozy said. Although he spoke of the cumulative guilt of the international community, the implication was clear. France was – for the first time – admitting that its own actions had contributed to the calamity.

On his way to Rwanda, Mr Sarkozy visited Gabon and made an unscheduled stop in Mali to greet a French aid worker, Pierre Camatte, released this week after almost three months as the hostage of an extreme Islamist group.

By John Lichfield in Paris
Friday, 26 February 2010

Find this story at 26 February 2010

© independent.co.uk

Is the defendant’s dock at the International Criminal Court reserved for leaders of small and poor countries that defy the West? Not if Rwanda has its way. It wants to charge some of France’s most celebrated leaders of the 1990s as collaborators in genocide.

Last week the government of Rwanda issued a damning 500-page report documenting France’s participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This marks a remarkable turnaround in the deeply politicized world of human rights reporting. Usually, such reporting takes the form of governments or human rights groups based in the West condemning poor countries for having political or social systems that do not meet Western standards.

Now a wretched African country has turned the table.

All who study the Rwandan genocide, as I did while researching a book about that ill-fated country, come away stunned by what they learn about French support of mass murder. France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support” and “directly assisted” its genocidal campaign.

The report names 33 present and former French politicians and military officers as conspirators, among them the late President François Mitterrand and other well-known figures like former foreign minister Alan Juppé and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

The report, commissioned by the government and prepared by a panel that heard from more than 150 witnesses, is not only a devastating account of France’s eager participation in mass murder. It is also the most provocative example in modern history of a victimized nation pointing a credible finger of blame at the supposedly virtuous West.

France armed Rwanda’s murderous regime, sent soldiers to support it as the genocide was unfolding, and accepted some of its most heinous perpetrators as “refugees” after rebels forced them from power. Later, France helped the genocidaires regroup in the Congo and launch a savage cross-border campaign aimed at retaking power so they could complete their murderous work.

Even as the genocide was unfolding, reports of France’s support for it began appearing in French newspapers. French soldiers who arrived in Rwanda believing that they had come to protect victims soon realized that they were, in fact, protecting killers, and several communicated their disgust to French journalists.

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac of France made a remarkably honest confession of his nation’s guilt. “France … delivered protected people to their horrors. These dark hours have sullied our history forever and are an insult to our past and our traditions.”

Unfortunately Chirac was not speaking about Rwanda, but about France’s delivery of French Jews to the Nazi murder machine during World War II. His statement suggests that it takes nations at least half a century before they can apologize for their misdeeds. Doctors Without Borders declared in 1998 that it was “high time the French government broke its traditional silence on its shameful role in the genocide.”

Foreign Minister Juppé responded indignantly that no one could question the “good intentions of our humanitarian intervention of that era,” and that the government would not consent to “investigating an action we should be proud of.”

Parliament eventually did convene an investigation, but it predictably absolved France of all guilt.

France, though, has never forgiven the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, for deposing a French-backed regime and pulling Rwanda out of the Francophonie. In 2006 a French judge charged Kagame with assassinating his predecessor; Rwanda responded by breaking diplomatic relations with France.

The report last week is another volley in what has become one of the world’s most bitter diplomatic battles.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry rejected the Rwandan report as “unacceptable.” That was a mistake. The report should be an occasion for French leaders to reflect on their country’s history in ways Western nations seldom do. Perhaps they could even break with the longstanding pattern of denial that has shaped so much of modern history.

Like all countries, France is built on national myths. If it can admit the evil that has pervaded its role in Africa, perhaps other countries could follow by confronting the sins of their past. That would be an admission that people who, in Joseph Conrad’s words, “have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves” are not the only ones guilty of the 20th century’s great crimes.

Stephen Kinzer is author of “A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It.”

By Stephen Kinzer

Find this story at 15 August 2008

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Rwanda has accused France of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994, in which about 800,000 people were killed.

An independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators.

The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings.

It named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted. France has previously denied any such responsibility.

Among those named in the report were the late former President, Francois Mitterrand, and the then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Two men who went on to become prime minister were also named – Alain Juppe, the foreign minister at the time, and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin.

The French foreign ministry told the BBC it would only respond to the fresh allegations after reading the report, which was released on Tuesday afternoon.

Checkpoints

Earlier this year France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner denied French responsibility in connection with the genocide, but said political errors had been made.
The Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice

Rwandan justice ministry

Report raises issue of motive

Some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias in just 100 days in 1994.

The report says France backed Rwanda’s Hutu government with political, military, diplomatic and logistical support.

It accuses France of training Hutu militias responsible for the slaughter, helping plan the genocide, and participating in the killings.

“French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis… French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors,” said a statement from the justice ministry cited by AFP news agency.

“Considering the seriousness of the alleged crimes, the Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice,” the statement said.

It further alleged that French forces did nothing to challenge checkpoints used by Hutu forces in the genocide.

“They clearly requested that the Interahamwes continue to man those checkpoints and kill Tutsis attempting to flee,” it said.

Testimonies

The BBC’s Geoffrey Mutagoma in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, says the commission spent nearly two years investigating France’s alleged role in the genocide.

It heard testimonies from genocide survivors, researchers, writers and reporters.

The 500-page document was presented to the Rwanda’s government last November, but was not made public until now.

Rwanda has repeatedly accused France of arming and training the Hutu militias that perpetrated the genocide, and of dragging its feet in co-operating with the investigations that followed.

France has maintained that its forces helped protect civilians during a UN-sanctioned mission in Rwanda at the time.

The two countries have had a frosty relationship since 2006 when a French judge implicated Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the downing in 1994 of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane – an event widely seen as triggering the killings.

President Kagame has always denied the charge.

He says Mr Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed by Hutu extremists who then blamed the incident on Tutsi rebels to provide the pretext for the genocide.

Page last updated at 17:25 GMT, Tuesday, 5 August 2008 18:25 UK

Find this story at 5 August 2008

BBC © 2013

Het boek True Believer, over de jacht op een Amerikaanse die twintig jaar lang voor Cuba spioneerde, toont tevens het failliet van geheime diensten aan.

In de discussie rond het massaal afluisteren van internet en telecommunicatie door de Amerikaanse National Security Agency (NSA) lijkt het niet om de effectiviteit te gaan, maar om de grootschaligheid. Nu was die digitale verzamelwoede al tientallen jaren bekend, al waren er nog geen documenten beschikbaar die dit ook onderschreven. Data verzamelen en die ook zinvol toepassen, zijn echter twee verschillende dingen.

In de Amerikaanse senaat zijn grote twijfels gerezen over de effectiviteit van de digitale hooiberg die de NSA aanlegt. Of deze informatie aanslagen voorkomen heeft, is volstrekt onduidelijk. De Cubanen kunnen zich geen miljarden verslindende digitale stofzuiger veroorloven en leggen zich vooral toe op Humint, menselijke bronnen. (lees: infiltranten en informanten.) Hiermee lijkt het straatarme Caribische eiland de Amerikanen te slim af.

artikel als pdf

On issues from domestic inequality to foreign policy, President Obama delivered his fifth State of the Union with a vow to take action on his own should Congress stonewall progress on his agenda. But will Obama’s policies go far enough? We host a roundtable with three guests: Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” and senior investigative reporter at First Look Media, which will launch in the coming months; Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow with Demos; and Lorella Praeli, director of advocacy and policy at the United We Dream coalition.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Jeremy Scahill—his film, Dirty Wars, has just been nominated for an Oscar; Bob Herbert with us, former New York Times columnist, now with Demos; and Lorella Praeli with the United We Dream coalition. Nermeen?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re continuing our coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union address. During Tuesday’s speech, he announced an executive action to raise the minimum wage for some federal contract workers from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: In the coming weeks, I will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour, because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you should not have to live in poverty.

Of course, to reach millions more, Congress does need to get on board. Today, the federal minimum wage is worth about 20 percent less than it was when Ronald Reagan first stood here. And Tom Harkin and George Miller have a bill to fix that by lifting the minimum wage to $10.10. It’s easy to remember, 10-10. This will help families. It will give businesses customers with more money to spend. It does not involve any new bureaucratic program. So join the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Bob Herbert, can you respond to that, the significance of this raise for some federal workers?

BOB HERBERT: Sure. I think it’s symbolically significant. So, it’s not going to take effect until new contracts come up, so federal contract workers will have to be paid at least a minimum of $10.10 an hour. The reason I think it’s symbolically significant is because it keeps a spotlight on the issue of the minimum wage, on the issue of employment going forward.

You know, to Jeremy’s point about the State of the Union essentially being a propaganda speech, which is absolutely true, what you didn’t hear there was really what the state of the economy is for ordinary Americans, for working people in this country. You didn’t hear anything about poverty, for example. So, for years now, the American people have made it clear, in poll after poll and in other ways, that employment is their top priority. I mean, people need jobs. But neither party, presidents from either party and Congress, whether it’s in the control of the Republicans or the Democrats, have had a sustained, effective job creation program in this country. And the United States is never going to get out of its morass until it’s able to put people back to work.

We now have nearly 50 million people who are officially poor in the United States, according to federal guidelines. Another 50 million people are just a notch or two above the official poverty rate. That’s nearly a third of the entire population that’s poor or near poor. One out of every three black children in the United States is poor. If you just walk a few blocks from this studio, every day you will see enormous lines wrapped around the corner for soup kitchens and that sort of thing. And that’s the case in places across this country. None of that was addressed. And none of the initiatives that the president has offered, and nothing that the Republicans have offered in years, would begin to address this state of distress among American working people and among the poor.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Just to give us an idea, Bob Herbert, how many employees does the federal government have through contractors?

BOB HERBERT: Well, it’s interesting. It was actually Demos that—it was a Demos initiative that put the spotlight on this $10.10 initiative, because Demos was the first organization to point out that the federal government, through its contractors, employs nearly two million low-wage workers, which is more than Wal-Mart and McDonald’s combined. So, if you could get this initiative expanded to cover all of the workers who are contracted to work for the federal government, then you would help an enormous number of people.

AMY GOODMAN: Mention of unions? I saw Richard Trumka in the audience.

BOB HERBERT: You know, get me started on unions. One of the reasons American workers are in such a deep state of distress is because they have no clout in the workplace. They are not organized, and they are not represented, so they cannot fight for their own interests. Corporations are organized every which way from sundown, and they have tremendous amounts of money. They have a lot a political clout and that sort of thing.

Workers go to work. You know, it’s just one man or one woman, you know, against an employer in a terrible job market. So you’re afraid to even ask for a raise, even if you deserve a raise, because you think the employer is going to say to you, “Take a hike.” And then you go out there in this terrible job market, and there’s no jobs to be had. If workers were organized, then they would be able to have clout. You’d be able to bring pressure not just on employers, not just on corporations, but also on the federal government to get legislation passed that would be beneficial to workers.

And one of the most important things you could do is to just enforce the laws that are on the books that have to do with labor organizing. I mean, so, if you’re in an organization, a corporation, a plant, that sort of thing, where workers are not organized, do not belong to a labor union, they want to organize—the majority of the workers want to organize—the corporations fight you every step of the way. And they use a tremendous number—amount of unfair tactics. That’s illegal, but the federal government has not enforced the laws.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about international trade policy and how that relates. In his State of the Union, President Obama also sought fast-track authority to give lawmakers an up-or-down vote on the trade deals such as TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When 98 percent of our exporters are small businesses, new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help them create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment, and open new markets to new goods stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” Listen, China and Europe aren’t standing on the sidelines. And neither should we.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in his fifth State of the Union address. We just returned from Japan, Bob Herbert. There, there’s a huge discussion about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Here, most people, if you asked them, they wouldn’t even know what it is.

BOB HERBERT: Well, one of the things that’s a problem in this country is because the economic situation has been so stagnant for most people for so long and because the government has been—the government in Washington has been so dysfunctional, that Americans have really tuned out. And also, I don’t think that the press has done a good job at all on trade agreements, if you go all the way back to NAFTA in the 1990s. So people essentially don’t even understand these agreements. But what they do understand is that they have not been helpful to the vast majority of workers over all these years. So…

JEREMY SCAHILL: Can I just make a comment?

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, you know, what Obama was doing there—in his last major address that he gave, he—at the United Nations General Assembly, he laid out this sort of forceful defense of American empire, and even went so far as to say that the U.S. will use its military might to continue to secure energy resources. In this speech, it was a pretty forceful defense of a neoliberal economic agenda. And, you know, what Bob is saying about corporations resonates on a foreign policy level, as well.

What is widely being considered to be the most moving part of last night was when this U.S. Army Ranger was addressed in the crowd and who was severely wounded and had done 10 tours. Think about that for a moment—10 tours in these war zones. You know, this young American spent his entire adult life in these combat zones. And, you know, the issue of how veterans are treated in this country is one thing, but at the end of the day, did he benefit from these wars? Does the average American benefit from the continuation of these wars? No. Who benefits? That’s the most important question we all have to ask. It’s corporations.

BOB HERBERT: Exactly.

JEREMY SCAHILL: War corporations, the Halliburtons of the world, the Boeings. John Kerry, yesterday it was announced, is giving these awards for corporate excellence around the world. He’s giving them to Citibank, to Apache, to Boeing, to Coca-Cola. And so you have this neoliberal economic agenda, which is sort of the hidden hand, in many ways, of the U.S. empire, and then you have this iron fist of U.S. militarism that is being sold to the American public, and increasingly to the world, as national security policy.

And so, you know, when I see that Army Ranger who’s wounded like that, the first thing that just occurs to me is: Who has benefited from all of this? When corporations control our political process in this country through a legalized form of corruption that’s called campaign finance, what does that say about the state of our democracy? In a way, there already has been a coup in this country, but it’s been a silent coup. And it reminds me of that famous line from the great movie The Usual Suspects. At the end of it, Kevin Spacey’s character says the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. In many ways, a coup has happened, and the brilliance of it is that it’s not sparking major uprisings because we’ve been pacified and taught to just accept this as how things work. We have two parties in this country, the minimum wage is going to be the minimum wage, and corporations are in control, and these wars are fought in our name, but without our consent.

BOB HERBERT: And the flipside of who benefits is the suffering that is so tremendous out there among the warriors who have been sent over to fight these wars since late 2001. And so, you just have hundreds of thousands of people who have—men and women, who have come back from the combat zones, who have terrible, disabling injuries, who are going to have to be cared for—we have an obligation to care for them—in many cases, for the rest of their lives. We have to pay, as a society, to care for these folks. You know, it’s probably—Joe Stiglitz has estimated that now these wars are probably going cost cumulatively $4 trillion or more. None of this has been really explored clearly or properly explained to the American public.

JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, just a small sort of side point on this, you know, when we talk about the U.S. withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, the conventional military, a story that very seldom gets attention is the connection between a paramilitarization of law enforcement inside of the United States and increasing use of what they call counterterrorism tactics on SWAT-style operations in the U.S. The military is donating a lot of its equipment to local police agencies and other so-called law enforcement agencies, and the communities that are most at risk here are communities of color and poor communities. Everything is about war—the war on drugs, the war on crime.

BOB HERBERT: Right.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And war requires some kind of a militarized response. And that’s what we’re seeing. This is deeply connected to the wars abroad, the wars at home, as well.

BOB HERBERT: And this is actually going into our public schools, where you have that type of militarized behavior going on actually in public schools. That’s how you get the school-to-prison pipeline that people are talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: On Afghanistan, President Obama said, “If the Afghan government signs a security agreement that we have negotiated, a small force of Americans could remain in Afghanistan with NATO allies.” But the latest news says the Pentagon has proposed up to 10,000 troops remaining behind, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, and if you look at what sort of various senior anonymous military officials have been saying for several years now, they’ve known that the withdrawal is not really going to be a withdrawal. Yes, we’re going to see the Marines pull out. We’re going to have this thing where journalists can ride on the tanks, like they did out of Iraq. But at the end of the day, this is an Afghanization of a U.S. policy. So, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to have these advise-and-assist squads of highly trained U.S. special ops and CIA personnel accompanying Afghan units, and they’re going to try to have the Afghans do the fighting and dying and killing on behalf of U.S. policy. But what I think should be of greater concern to the American public is that you are going to have these strike forces in place. It’s taken as conventional wisdom now that the U.S. is out of Iraq. Actually, the U.S. has a massive paramilitary presence inside of Iraq and is going to continue to have one inside of Afghanistan. So, these wars are going to continue on for at least another generation, albeit on a sort of covert, hidden-hand manner of doing it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what’s the justification, Jeremy, for keeping troops in Afghanistan?

JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, there is no counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan anymore. I mean, no one wants to talk about this, because you’re going to be accused of being sympathetic to the Taliban. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization with global aspirations. The Taliban has a constituency, has a greater constituency than the U.S., arguably than Hamid Karzai, who the U.S. recognizes as the president. And I think the Taliban is a morally reprehensible group of individuals, but they do have indigenous support. And the reason that they’re fighting right now is because the U.S. and NATO are in their country. And so, to sort of imply that what we’re doing there is countering terrorists, when in the first months of the Obama administration his own national security adviser said there are less than a hundred al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, we should be asking that question that John Kerry asked in 1971: Who wants to be the last to die for this failed war? What do they tell the families of the soldiers who die from here until they pull out the conventional military?

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the significance of that, for people who don’t remember, John Kerry, who is the secretary of state and formerly senator, was—fought in Vietnam, and when he came home, he was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam, and he testified before Congress asking that question.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, I’d love to see 1971 John Kerry questioning, you know, 2014 John Kerry at a hearing about all these policies that he’s having to sell as secretary of state around the world.

Find this story at 29 January 2014

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Bit by bit, with deep and understandable reluctance, the CIA has been opening its archives. Only fragments of its view of the Falklands War are currently available, but they are still worth close study.

Intelligence material often plays a large part in the formulation of foreign policy, sometimes a decisive one, but it is almost always held back far longer than other government information, creating a structural weakness in our understanding of the recent past.
the cia’s declassified files: the crest database

CIA Director’s angry memo to almost everyone re: the leaks that caused Argentina to change its cypher, 9 Jun 1982

Around 40 CIA documents on the war have been released through the agency’s “CIA Records Search Tool” database (CREST). These are items more than 25 years old that the agency has been obliged to release by a Clinton-era Executive Order (EO 12958/13256), rather than responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, which probably gives this mini-collection a little more coherence and completeness than it might otherwise have. One of the great problems with relying on FOI to produce historical information is that the selection of things released is dependent on the interests of the persons or organisations who made the original request, and their interests probably won’t be the same as yours, indeed are likely to be different – and might be completely crazy. You generally won’t know why one document has been released and not another, since the terms of the original requests are not themselves released alongside each document.

Even so, there is much about this CIA collection that is obscure. While you can sometimes work out in Presidential Library files what part of the whole has been released and what not, and roughly why, in the case of these CIA documents that is all but impossible. What we are looking at here might be a fifth of the whole, or a fiftieth. It might contain much of what they knew about the Falklands, or the merest fraction. It might be representative, it might be completely the reverse. One obvious element is definitely missing: there is no signals intelligence here. But we know that the US had broken Argentinian military codes, until leaks in the US press caused the Argentinians to change their cypher, of and it would be a surprise if it wasn’t reading diplomatic traffic as well.

Some of the CREST documents are so heavily redacted that they resemble a kind of two-dimensional Swiss cheese. Redacting becomes so compulsive an activity that even unclassified documents get redacted sometimes. Generally though the Falklands documents have been released without too much of this kind of semi-shredding. Unhelpfully, you need to visit in person to use this database, which is stored at National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, and print out what you find. They give you free paper at least. The team at margaretthatcher.org has done the work and now uploaded the Falklands material. There is more useful information available in the library section of the CIA’s excellent website, including a number of additional Falklands documents, and we have added in a handful also from the official-sounding but resolutely independent “National Security Archive”, based at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

This CIA material includes twice-daily situation reports at the very beginning of the war, some satellite image interpretations, as well as high-level internal papers updating the Director and Deputy Director. It includes too a number of the “National Intelligence Daily” (NID) intelligence summaries circulated only to senior officials in the White House and Cabinet Members, the CIA’s ‘newspaper’, printed in tabloid form and some “Monthly Warning Assessments” (MWA).

Given the fragmentary picture these documents provide of the agency’s knowledge and outlook, conclusions are best presented as a series of points rather than a connected story, with suitable warning that they are incomplete and that possession of the full record would require them to be amended.

The earliest document is a memo from CIA Director William Casey to Secretary of State Al Haig, copied to the White House, providing a “Quick Intelligence Assessment on Falkland Affairs (April 2, 1982)”. This helpfully reminds one how useless intelligence reports can sometimes be. Forced to make snap judgments without much hard information, the interpretation inevitably tended towards the bland. The British, Casey solemnly suggested, would be hoping to use the UN Security Council “to put Argentina in the dock as an ‘aggressor'”. He explained that “British economic options are limited” and suspected that the Argentinians would be likely reinforce the islands before the British Task Force arrived. And so on: there are pages of this. Any averagely well-informed reader would have been tempted to skip large chunks of it in the hope of finding something seriously useful further on. More interesting was the point that many of the ships in the Argentinian fleet were 40 years old – i.e, dated from WW2 – and would need to be withdrawn as soon as possible from the wintry southern seas. “We also do not believe they would fare well in a full-scale naval engagement with the British”. How Argentina’s actions had been received in Latin America is nowhere touched on in the document, but must surely be in the redacted sections. The memo wraps up with Cold War aspects – Cuba likely to make trouble if it thought Argentina might win, though only rhetorically, the Soviets likely to supply surveillance information on the British Task Force to the Argentinians as part of a general strategy of ingratiating themselves with Buenos Aires, but no more. Almost the most telling point in the memo is the reminder that the post-Afghanistan US grain embargo on the Soviet Union, 1980-81, had created a big new trade between Argentina and the USSR, the former supplying no less than 10 per cent of the latter’s imports, though this was hardly classified information. The CIA was wrong, however, in thinking that Moscow would work with Argentina to block British attempts to persuade the UN Security Council to condemn the invasion by Resolution, “threatening to veto it”. This might have seemed a safe bet, but in fact there was no Soviet veto, to Argentinian disappointment and general surprise, UNSCR 502 passing easily on 5 April. This early success anchored the British diplomatic position from the beginning of the conflict, because almost no one could be found to defend Argentina’s first use of force.

The Argentinians understood, of course, the centrality of the Cold War to US perceptions and were themselves playing the Soviet card with Washington from the beginning of the war – warning the US that the Soviets were watching and waiting (CIA sitrep, 3 Apr). Later they threatened to turn to them for arms supplies (MWA, 28 May). Of course, this was a familiar move in third world diplomacy. It is not clear how seriously the CIA took it in early April, but by the time the junta faced defeat – indeed “military humiliation”, in the agency’s eyes (MWA, 26 May) – they were watching closely. On 28 May Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Gates told the CIA Director, William Casey, that a special memo had been prepared for the White House on Cuban assistance to Argentina and Casey himself was specially briefed on Soviet responses prior to a meeting with Haig. The movement of the Soviet ELINT satellite into orbit above the South Atlantic is noted in the 30 Apr 1982 NSC meeting on the previous page. But anxieties settled after the war. An Interagency survey of the “Prospects for Soviet Arms Deliveries to Argentina” in July 1983 concluded that: “Only as a last resort would the Argentines move to major purchases that would involve a long time arms relationship with the Soviets”.

The CIA debated the possibility that the Galtieri junta might be replaced by a “highly nationalistic military regime” (MWA, 30 Apr) – as if it wasn’t one, or not much of one. One has the sense that Galtieri was their preferred strongman, a caudillo in the making maybe, and that change was thought unlikely to be an improvement from a US perspective.
apr – jun 1982: the military campaign

The agency saw major difficulties for a British assault on the islands and thought at one point we were underestimating Argentine forces (NID 19 May), but consistently, and from early on, it believed a British victory was ‘likely’ (eg, MWA 30 Apr). Several times they revert to Casey’s initial point that much of the Argentine navy was clapped out.

British attacks on the mainland of Argentina were thought a real possibility, though one that diminished significantly once troops were landed safely on the islands (which happened on 21 May). It was believed that British submarines might attack the Argentine navy, particularly its carrier (the former HMS Venerable), even within the country’s coastal waters (ie, 12 mile limit), if there were big losses during landing of forces. If the troopship Canberra was hit, the agency believed landings would have to be aborted.

After the landings the agency judged (NID 24 May) the British were planning a speedy campaign and were willing to tolerate high casualties to wrap things up quickly, warning that “serious reverses” would create big political pressures at home and perhaps open the way to a Pym government. If on the other hand the campaign was quickly successful, “chances would increase dramatically for an election as early as next spring, with a major Tory victory likely”. That Goose Green would be attacked ahead of Port Stanley, rather than bypassed, was correctly predicted.

There were believed to be 17 US citizens on the Falklands at the outbreak of the war. Efforts were made through the Argentine occupying forces to persuade them to leave before the Total Exclusion Zone was declared (29 Apr – TEZ was the following day).

Judging from the junta’s efforts to acquire new equipment and supplies even as its forces faced defeat on the Falklands, the CIA thought it was planning to fight a campaign of long-term resistance (MWA 28 May) and that the Argentine government regarded its Falklands garrison as ‘expendable’ (Watch Committee 26 May).

There is limited military analysis in the CREST documents and there is a dearth of material from the Department of Defense on the Falklands War. The CIA predicted an outright British assault on Port Stanley led by Scorpion light tanks, but of course the Argentinians surrendered following a series of small battles in high ground outside the town so no assault on the town itself was needed. The analysts noted the effectiveness of Argentine air force attacks after the landing at San Carlos, but were unaware apparently of the failure of some of their bombs to explode. They doubted the Argentines could keep up their rate of air attacks, and questioned also whether Britain was being truthful about the number of Harriers it had lost (NID 29 May). The role of EXOCET missiles was discussed, but a redaction obtrudes, perhaps touching on Argentine efforts to buy more of these effective missiles.

The CIA Director, William Casey, sent a sharp memorandum to Cabinet Officers and a wide range of agency heads (but not the White House) regarding “Unauthorized Disclosures on the Falklands Situation” (9 Jun). He warned of the “seriousness of leaks compromising sensitive collection sources and methods” and urged investigations to determine whether leaks should be referred to the Attorney-General – i.e., considered for criminal prosecution. The 30 Apr meeting above noted that press stories had caused the Argentines to realise the US was reading their military codes and to change their cipher, locking the US out (for a time at least). ABC Nightline had broken the story on 14 Apr, but the 15 Apr New York Times article mentioned on the previous page pops up in the CREST database when you search for ‘Falklands’: plainly, it drew the agency’s special attention.

The US had no satellite over the South Atlantic at the outbreak of the war and took some time to reposition one. Observation conditions were less than perfect, with the southern hemisphere moving into winter, so the CIA analyses of 28 May of images over Port Stanley and southern Argentina may be the earliest they got. Even then they note problems with cloud cover. These photographs showed increased defensive preparations around Port Stanley, while a series of images of mainland military installations in north and south of the country showed the Argentine navy safely tied up in port, aircraft carrier, submarines and all. Given that signals intelligence was available, apparently in some abundance, it is unlikely on this showing that satellite intelligence played anything like as significant a role in the war. Many, of course, thought otherwise at the time. A State Department telegram of 4 May shows that the Embassy in Buenos Aires was unable to kill the story that a US satellite had given the British the position of the General Belgrano, whereas the British Official History of the Falklands War, by Lawrence Freedman (vol.2, p285) credibly explains that it was an intercepted and decrypted signal from Admiral Lombardo late on 1 May that showed the British that the Argentine navy was planning a coordinated strike against the Task Force the following day, information that led directly to the decision to sink the ship, which had first been found when the British nuclear submarine south of the islands got a sonar trace of the Argentine tanker sent to refuel it. One cannot safely assume that the signals intelligence came from the US side to the British either: we had our own formidable listening and decrypting capability, and it was only the day before the crucial signal that Inman was telling his colleagures that the US had been locked out.

News of the Argentine surrender was circulated as a “CIA late item” in the National Intelligence Daily deriving the information straight from MT’s office (NID 15 Jun).
jun 1982 – jul 1983: after effects – damage to U.S. Interests in south america judged ‘manageable’

Almost immediately the war was over Casey requested briefing on the impact of the war on global high technology transfers (Gates memo, 18 Jun).

The agency pointed out internal divisions in the Argentinian army resulting from recriminations over the war and saw in them a potent threat to the successor regime of General Reynaldo Bignone (NID 29 Jul). Returning soldiers from the garrison were expected to have unhappy stories to tell, with possibly radicalising results.

Long-term fallout from the war in the form of anti-US sentiment in Latin America was a genuine concern for the US, but swiftly diminished. This was apparent even at the most difficult moment, days after the Argentine surrender on 14 June.
The CIA prepared a lengthy intelligence appreciation for the President and other senior figures on 18 June, “Short-Term Prospects for Central America”. This commented: “The circumstances of the Falklands war will doubtless reduce the readiness of some Latin American states to support US initiatives concerning Central America. The direct adverse impact in Central America, however, is not likely to be substantial”.
The State Department took a longer look later in the year, as part of an inter-agency review of “US Policy Towards South America in the Wake of the Falklands Crisis”. This study concluded: “Aside from Argentina, crisis-induced damage to U.S.-Latin American relations has varied widely from country to country and appears manageable on most matters”. Actions to “restore and assert US influence in South America” included a resumption of arms sales to Argentina (and Chile) by end 1982 – much upsetting MT, but the President was firm – and a decision to maintain “its diplomatic position on the fundamental Falklands issues as it was before the crisis: U.S. neutrality on the question of sovereignty over the islands and support for negotiations or other peaceful efforts to resolve this dispute”. An important distinction was drawn between US opposition to Argentine first use of force, “which was widely accepted in Latin America”, a region of many territorial disputes and small countries scared of bigger ones, and US support for the British military campaign “which was just as widely resented”. “Fortunately for us, Argentina’s reputation for arrogance, and the collapse of its forces on the ground, helped to cushion reactions”. Argentina’s nuclear weapons programme was the region’s most sophisticated and attracted a wary intelligence eye.
Amongst the handful of Pentagon documents on the war is a characteristically clear-eyed assessment of the “Military Lessons from the Falklands” from Caspar Weinberger, written for the President on 19 July. “In the final analysis, the battle for the Falklands appears to have been a closer call than many of us would believe. The British won primarily because their forces, inferior in numbers at first, were superior in training, leadership and equipment”. “But luck also played a significant part”. Unlike the CIA he was well-aware that Argentinian bombs had failed to explode.
Assessment of the war was an early task at the NSC for Marine Colonel Oliver North, who served there from 1981-86. This role perhaps explains an event a few years later, on the eve of MT’s visit to Camp David in December 1984, when the then National Security Adviser, Bud McFarlane, suggested to the President that he sound her out on “steps they could take to assist the Nicaraguan resistance. Through intermediaries we have been advised that the Chilean government is prepared to provide up to 48 BLOWPIPE surface-to-air missiles to the freedom fighters”. These British missiles had been “staged in Chile during the Falklands War”.
The probability of a long-term Argentinian tilt towards Moscow was judged low, as already noted above from the Interagency Study of 1 July 1983.

Find this story at January 2014

Copyright © Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2014