Robert Fisk: Stay out of trouble by not speaking to Western spies - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent

That La Clinton should want her State Department slaves to play secret agents on the poor old UN donkey – the beast that forever clip-clops on stage to mop up America's failed policies in the Middle East, this decrepit skyscraper on the East River packed with enough asbestos to kill a nation of peacekeepers, this bureaucratic shambles with its pathetic Secretary-General whose English is still in need of vast improvement – shows what an utterly worthless institution the US State Department has become. They were supposed to spy on the encryption details of delegates, credit card transactions, even frequent flyer cards. But who would want to read the nonsense that the UN's overpaid staff write, or how much they spend on lunch at Nobu's with the Nicaraguan consul, or who paid for whose mistress to fly to Havana on the shavings of his UN flights? And why spy on the UN when they are the most leak-prone organisation on the globe?