From the Navhind Times (via Drudge):
Reuters London Feb 28: Former chief United Nations weapons inspector Mr Hans Blix said today he suspected the United States bugged his office and home in the run-up to the Iraq war, but had no hard evidence.I'll save him the trouble. Yes, we did. Yes, we are right now. Yes, we will again. I'd be more than a little disappointed if we didn't.
Describing such behaviour as "disgusting", Mr Blix told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in an interview: "It feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side."Blix is making a dangerous assumption, and I don't mean about the bugging allegations.
Mr Blix said his suspicions were raised when he had trouble with a telephone connection at home.Because EVERY TIME there's trouble with a phone connection ANYWHERE, my first thought is 'The CIA's doing it.' Damn, even these guys aren't THAT paranoid.
“It might have been something trivial or it might have been something installed somewhere, I don’t know,” he said.
He said US state department envoy Mr John Wolf visited him two weeks before the Iraq war with pictures of an Iraqi drone and a cluster bomb that the former inspector believed could have been secured only from within the UN weapons office.Well, Hans, he could have told you, but then he'd have had to kill you. Otherwise, the story would get out about how the U.S. put machines in orbit that can take pictures of things on the ground. Not only that, he'd have to reveal that the U.S. actually pays people to tell us what they know about what their governments are doing, and even sometimes to get pictures! No way in hell is the world ready to hear that yet.
"He should not have had them. I asked him how he got them and he would not tell me," Mr Blix said.
Former UN secretary-general Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali and another former chief UN weapons inspector, Mr Richard Butler, said yesterday they believed they had been spied on.Like I said. We've always done it, we're doing it right now, and we'll always do it. Although I have to wonder what it is they're so worried about us finding out... Posted by Chris at March 1, 2004 08:34 AM
“From the first day I entered my office they told me: beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged,” Mr Boutros-Ghali told the BBC.
“It is a tradition that member states that have the technical capacity to bug will do it without hesitation,” he said.