The unholy trinity of electronic snooping: Bolton, Negroponte and Hayden

[struggle4progress]

By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

May 5, 2005—As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to vote on the nomination of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, further details are emerging from within the U.S. Intelligence Community on unofficial and back channel intelligence operations directed over the past four years from neo-conservative cells in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Agency (NSA).

The three key participants who have emerged as orchestrating the misuse of NSA and other U.S. intelligence resources to conduct surveillance of those who opposed neoconservative plans to invade Iraq and ratchet up tensions with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, the Palestinian Authority headed by the late Yasir Arafat, and the former government of Haiti are Bolton; NSA's director and the new Deputy Director for National Intelligence General Michael V. Hayden; and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Iraq and current National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Hayden served alongside Condoleezza Rice in the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush.

In the lead up to the Iraq War, Negroponte, Bolton, and Hayden, as well as other leading neoconservatives in the Pentagon and White House, directed an e-mail and telephone surveillance campaign against UN Security Council delegates to determine the voting intentions of wavering countries on the council's resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. The targeted delegations were Angola, Cameroon, Chile, China, France, Mexico, Guinea, Pakistan, and Russia.

A January 31, 2003, Quick Response Capability memo sent by Frank Koza, the chief of the Regional Targets group within NSA's National Security Operations Center (NSOC), to NSA's counterparts in the Echelon communications intelligence monitoring tasking system—Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—authorized a "surge" telephone and e-mail intercept operation on the offices and homes of government officials of UN Security Council members and "non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms." The latter included UN officials such as Secretary General Kofi Annan, Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohammed El Baradei, and Pope John Paul II (who was lobbying African and Latin American Security Council members against the U.S. Security Council war resolution). <snip>

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/050505Madsen/050505madsen.html

[Eloriel]

1. I remember that. Just another in a long, long list of

scandals that Bush Administration has gotten away with.

[struggle4progress]

3. As Dimson's ratings plummet, it might be productive to remind ...

... friends and neighbors about some of those scandals ...

[jean]

2. neo-con 'cells' - that's what they are all right, terrorist cells