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blufiveThe Observer is reporting that the NSA is mounting an aggressive surveillance operation against the wavering security council members, with the aim of feeding any discoveries back to the US's negotiators.
As the article points out, many embassy staff act like they're being bugged much of the time anyhow, but even so...
The US will no doubt bleat something about "all's fair in love and war", but it's another example of the sort of bad faith that causes the rest of the world to distrust them.
later edit:
Several people out there are claiming that it's a fake, based on spelling of the word "favourite" and on the format of the date in brit-style dd/mm/yy rather than US-ian mm/dd/yy. To take them one a time:
favo[u]rite So the reporter at the (British) Observer newspaper ran it through a (British) spellchecker, like they're probably required to do on most of their copy. Duh.
date Email clients the world over display dates in formats determined by the locale settings of the machine they're running on. If the reporter had copied the actual message source, it would look something like this: "Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 16:13:40 -0000", and there would be a huge spew of other message headers, very possibly revealing his source. So the reporter just transcribed what appeared on screen.
I will end on the further observation that most of the people questioning the veracity of the document are people who want it to be fake (of course, many of those supporting it want it to be true, too)
As the article points out, many embassy staff act like they're being bugged much of the time anyhow, but even so...
The US will no doubt bleat something about "all's fair in love and war", but it's another example of the sort of bad faith that causes the rest of the world to distrust them.
later edit:
Several people out there are claiming that it's a fake, based on spelling of the word "favourite" and on the format of the date in brit-style dd/mm/yy rather than US-ian mm/dd/yy. To take them one a time:
favo[u]rite So the reporter at the (British) Observer newspaper ran it through a (British) spellchecker, like they're probably required to do on most of their copy. Duh.
date Email clients the world over display dates in formats determined by the locale settings of the machine they're running on. If the reporter had copied the actual message source, it would look something like this: "Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 16:13:40 -0000", and there would be a huge spew of other message headers, very possibly revealing his source. So the reporter just transcribed what appeared on screen.
I will end on the further observation that most of the people questioning the veracity of the document are people who want it to be fake (of course, many of those supporting it want it to be true, too)