Police Reject UK Rendition Claims YET Picture Proves 'Torture Flights' Are STILL Landing In The UK

On the day Tony Blair lectured Vladimir Putin about human rights, democracy and the Litvinenko murder, his own government was accused of colluding in breathtaking lawbreaking. The report said the CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania for two years. Britain provided logistical support by letting the agency’s aircraft use UK civilian and military airports dozens of times....

Taken from The Mail, UK, 10th June 2007
By GLEN OWEN

The row over CIA 'torture flights' using British airports has deepened following fresh evidence that a plane repeatedly linked to the controversial programme landed in the UK just days ago.

The plane was logged arriving at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk last weekend, and watching aviation experts said the aircraft, piloted by crew clad in desert fatigues, was immediately surrounded on the runway by armed American security forces.


This flight was spotted landing at a UK airport - proof that 'rendition ' flights are still taking place

Its registration number, clearly visible on the fuselage, identifies it as a plane which the European Parliament says has been involved in 'ghost flights' to smuggle terrorist suspects to shadowy interrogation centres abroad.

Records show the plane is owned by Blackwater USA, a CIA contractor described as "the most secretive and powerful mercenary army on the planet". An eyewitness, who previously worked as an RAF electronic warfare expert, said that as the plane - a CASA-212 Aviocar - taxied to a stop on the runway it was met by a US military Humvee.

The vehicle contained four US security policemen armed with M16 assault rifles, who accompanied the camouflaged crew to the airport terminal.

The man, who did not want to be identified, added: "I thought it was curious that they would give a civilian plane an armed guard."

Another spotter, who took the picture of it landing, recorded it touching down at 4.36pm on Saturday.

The disclosure follows damning findings by the Council of Europe human rights organisation, which accused Tony Blair on Friday of colluding in a CIA operation to run secret prisons in Poland and Romania by allowing the agency to use UK airports.

The study was contradicted on the same day by a report from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), which concluded that there was no evidence to support the claims.

But the director of the human rights group Liberty revealed that ACPO had admitted it restricted its inquiry to a review of media reports on the issue.

She accused them of rushing out their ‘cursory’ findings as part of a politically-motivated 'spin' operation.

The US plane's arrival was also logged by Touchdown News, a group of enthusiasts who record the movements of military aircraft at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath.

The group said the plane used its civilian call sign when talking to air traffic control and took off again early on the morning of Sunday June 3, flying east.


The path that the 'torture flight' took

A report last November by a European Parliament committee placed the plane - registration number N964BW - on a list of "companies and aircraft used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition flights". The plane was previously registered with the Bolivian army, and has been pictured on the ground in the Afghan capital Kabul within the past year.

The American Federal Aviation Authority lists the plane as being operated by two companies, Aviation World Wide Services and a sister company, Presidential Airways.

The European Parliament report describes these as shell companies operating as subsidiaries of Blackwater USA, "an important contractor for the CIA and the US military" which bases the planes in Malta.

Research by a further group, The American Centre for Media and Democracy, claims that flight-tracking internet technology shows the plane landed at least twice in the first six months of 2006 at Camp Peary, the U.S. naval reservation in Virginia known as The Farm and widely alleged to be a CIA training facility.

Tracking technology shows that the plane was en route from Canada to Greenland two days before it was sighted at Mildenhall: the internet software does not extend beyond American airspace, but the expert explained that its route would be consistent with a refuelling stop in the Arctic - it only has a range of about 2,000 miles - followed by a further refuel in East Anglia, before heading to Malta.

From there it could 'leapfrog' from US bases in the the former Soviet states bordering Afghanistan on to Kabul.

A recent book on Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, an American author, described the company as the world's "most secretive and powerful mercenary firm", carrying out quasi-military operations on behalf of the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and within the U.S.

It was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former elite Navy Seal and fundamentalist Christian millionaire who bankrolls far-Right causes.

This newspaper first cast doubt on the Government's claim to have no knowledge of the CIA’s activities 18 months ago when we published pictures of three planes at Scottish airports which had been linked by human rights activists to rendition.

Flight records showed the planes had been given landing rights by the MoD, despite there being no record of passenger lists or details of the purpose of the flights.

The Council of Europe dossier, compiled by Swiss senator Dick Marty, said the U.S. had used Britain's help to establish a "global spider's web" of jails and airports to pursue a war on terror without rules.

It claimed the secret centres had been set up so it could use interrogation techniques amounting to torture which are illegal in the US.

These include "waterboarding" – the dunking of blindfolded suspects so they believe they are drowning – solitary confinement, shackling in confined cells and exposure of naked captives to extremes of heat, cold and noise.

Separately, the Washington Post newspaper has reported that mercenaries working for Blackwater were at the centre of an infamous firefight in Iraq in April 2004 when guarding the U.S. headquarters in Najaf - despite never having applied to operate as a private security company in the country, The report said that in the battle, footage of which circulated on the internet, the troops had opened fire on Shia Iraqi civilians protesting outside, unleashing rounds so rapidly they had to pause every 15 minutes to allow their gun barrels to cool down.

In his book, Scahill claims that the Blackwater employees in the country are using "experimental ammunition' made of 'blended metal, which shatter on impact to create untreatable wounds".

Shami Chakrabati, the director of Liberty, alleges that 210 CIA flights carrying terrorist suspects for possible torture have entered Britain since 2001.

She called for a full investigation, claiming the ACPO probe was unsatisfactory.

"ACPO have admitted to me in a private letter that their investigation amounted to little more than a cursory review of reports on the issue – which they issued, 18 months after I requested it, to coincide with the Council of Europe’s report," she said.

"Maybe now The Mail on Sunday has produced this photographic evidence they will conduct a proper inquiry."

An ACPO spokeswoman said: "These planes could be empty - there is no evidence that prisoners were on board."

She denied Liberty’s claim that their inquiry had been limited and driven by spin.

"There has been a full examination to see if there was any evidence to suggest criminal activity, and there wasn't," she said.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We have been through the records, and there is no evidence of detainees being rendered through the UK since 1997."
No one at RAF Mildenhall was available for comment.

European Report Gives Details on CIA Prisons

NATO Pacts Exploited, European Probe Finds

Taken from The Washington Post, June 9, 2007; A01
By Molly Moore

The CIA exploited NATO military agreements to help it run secret prisons in Poland and Romania where alleged terrorists were held in solitary confinement for months, shackled and subjected to other mental and physical torture, according to a European investigative report released here Friday.

PDF: Dick Marty's second report on secret detentions and illegal transfers [532KB]

Some of the United States' highest-profile terrorism suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, considered the prime organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, were detained and interrogated at the facility in Poland, according to the 72-page report completed for the Council of Europe, the continent's human rights agency.

Dick Marty, a Swiss lawyer hired by the council, said the CIA conducted "clandestine operations under the NATO framework," providing military intelligence agencies in member countries -- including Poland and Romania -- the cover to assist the agency in disguising the use of secret flights, operations and detention facilities from the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks until the fall of last year.

Officials speaking on behalf of the CIA, NATO, Poland and Romania on Friday criticized the report's findings. Both Poland and Romania have denied that the CIA established secret prisons on their soil.

"The CIA's counter-terror operations have been lawful, effective, closely reviewed, and of benefit to many people - including Europeans - by disrupting plots and saving lives," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. "Our counter-terror partnerships in Europe are very strong." He described the report as "biased and distorted."

Disclosure of the existence of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, but not the specific countries where they were located, by The Washington Post in 2005 triggered widespread anger in Europe. The Council of Europe commissioned Marty to find out all he could about the program.

In the report, Marty expressed deep disapproval of U.S. practices with the prisoners. "We must banish forever the Bush Administration mindset that effectively says, 'if it is illegal for us to use such a practice at home or on our own citizens, let us export or outsource it so we will not be held to account for it,' " the report concluded.

The report was also critical of European governments for having allowed the prisons or the transport of prisoners through their airspace. Many did not cooperate with the investigation, the report said, nor did NATO or the United States.

Investigators relied primarily on sources they did not identify in the report, but Marty said they spoke to more than 30 serving or retired members of intelligence services in the United States and Europe as well as civilians performing contract work for intelligence agencies.

The report provided new details about the CIA's purported methods of operation, detention tactics and detainees in the secret facilities. The report said evidence indicated that in order to bypass civilian authorities the CIA used emergency provisions approved by the NATO alliance after the Sept. 11 attacks to partner with European military and intelligence agencies.

"The CIA's clandestine operations in Europe - including its transfers and secret detentions of HVDs [high-value detainees] - were sustained and kept secret only through their operational dependence on alliances and partnerships in what is more traditionally the military sphere," the report said.

The secret "high-value" prisoner program was given the NATO classification of "Cosmic Top Secret," according to the report.

The report said the NATO-oriented arrangement was particularly effective with two of the alliance's newest members, Poland and Romania, which were eager to assist the United States and strengthen their ties with Washington.

A facility at Poland's Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base was used to detain and interrogate the most important CIA suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, a suspected senior al-Qaeda operative, the report said. By its account, both men were "held and questioned using 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' " described in the report as a euphemism for torture.

The report said that based on flight documents and information provided by intelligence sources, "it is likely" that Mohammed, who was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, was transferred to Kabul, then flown on March 7 to the Szymany military airport in Poland.

Sources told investigators that when a CIA flight approached the Szymany airfield, Polish operatives would order all Polish personnel to leave the area of the runway. An American "landing team" usually waited at the end of the runway "in two or three vans with their engines often running."

When the aircraft came to a stop, the vans would race toward the plane. American officials would board the craft, then hustle the detainee into one of the vans, usually out of the line of sight of the Polish control tower.

The vans would then speed through the airport's front security gates, using high beams that blinded Polish guards, then drive down a paved road "lined by thick pine forests on both sides" and follow an unpaved road along a lake, eventually reaching the entrance to the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base, where prisoners were held and questioned, the report said.

The report went on to describe conditions in the CIA secret detention cells, based on interviews with "former or current detainees, human rights advocates, or people who have worked in the establishment or operations of CIA secret prisons." The report said the descriptions were not based on a single prisoner or cell, but on a compilation of accounts. It did not specify which country's prison was being described.

According to those accounts, detainees were often kept naked in their cells for several weeks and endured up to four consecutive months of "solitary confinement and extreme sensory deprivation in cramped cells, shackled and handcuffed at all times." Temperatures in the cells were often kept at extreme levels: "sometimes so hot one would gasp for breath, sometimes freezing cold."

The Council of Europe is Europe's official human rights watchdog. It has limited power to enforce human rights regulations.

US Accused Over 'Ghost Detainees'

Taken from the BBC, 7 June 2007

Human rights groups have asked the US to reveal the whereabouts of 39 people who have allegedly been held in secret CIA-run prisons. A report compiled by six human rights groups listed the names of people who remain unaccounted for after having passed through US custody.

The groups urged the US to stop using secret prisons for terror suspects.

The US last year admitted the existence of such prisons in its "war on terror" but said they were no longer in use.

President George W Bush said last September that all secret prison sites were "empty".

THE HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
# Amnesty International
# Cageprisoners
# Center for Constitutional Rights
# Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
# Human Rights Watch
# Reprieve

The groups says they compiled their report, entitled Off the Record, from government and media sources and from interviews with former prisoners.

"It's time for the US government to come clean," said Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve, one of the groups involved in the appeal.

"These 39 people have been missing for years, and the evidence shows they were in US custody at some point. Where are they and what has been done to them?"
Rendition flights

A spokesman for the CIA told the BBC News website that the CIA acts "in strict accordance with American law".

"Our counter-terror initiatives - which are subject to careful review and oversight - have been very effective in disrupting plots and saving lives," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano.

The US administration has faced criticism from legal experts and human rights activists over its policy on detentions of terrorism suspects.

The human rights groups say that people have been arrested in countries including Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia and flown in "extraordinary renditions" to secret US prisons.

A report approved by a European Parliament committee earlier this year said more than 1,000 covert CIA flights had crossed European airspace or stopped at European airports in the four years after the 9/11 attacks.

Last month, a US civil liberties group sued a subsidiary of Boeing for allegedly helping the CIA fly suspects to secret overseas detention centres where it says they were subjected to torture and abuse.

Three of the organisations - Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Human Rights Clinic of New York University School of Law - have filed a lawsuit under the US Freedom of Information Act for information on the missing people.

'Tough' interrogation
Human Rights Watch and Cageprisoners are the other two organisations seeking information on the 39 "ghost detainees".

The groups fears the missing people may have been moved to countries where they might be at risk of torture.

They say children as young as seven are among those detained.

"The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question," said Claudio Cordone of Amnesty International.

"But seizing men, women and even children, and placing people in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards for any detainees most definitely is."

In September 2006, Mr Bush said 14 detainees had been held at secret CIA prisons that used interrogation methods that were "tough" but "lawful and necessary".

He said the prisoners had since been transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the CIA was not holding any more terror suspects.

EU Accused Of Artificially Inflating Its Aid Figures

You hear stories of millions of pounds given to foreign countries in terms of aid and you wonder what happens to all this money, why do these countries not improve themselves? Well here is the answer...

Taken from The Independent, UK, 11 May 2007
By Jerome Taylor

European countries are artificially inflating the amount of aid they claim to be donating to poor countries and nearly half of those surveyed have not even met their promised aid targets, according to a damning new report released today.

Charities across Europe have accused their governments of making "misleading claims" about their aid figures by including items which should not be counted as development aid, including debt relief and money spent on foreign students and refugees.

The problem is so widespread that the report calculates at least one third of all the aid Europe gives to the developing world is not genuine aid but "inflated aid".

"One way or another half of the donor countries are missing their genuine aid targets," said Jasmine Burnley of ActionAid, one of the charities that helped compile the report.

"The fact that items such as debt relief and refugee costs are allowed to be counted is a problem with aid accounting and needs to be addressed."

In 2002 the 15 member states that belonged to the EU at the time committed to substantial increases in the amount of aid they would give to poor countries and set a target of donating at least 0.39 per cent of their gross national income (GNI) by 2006. That pledge was then reiterated in 2005 during the run-up to the Gleneagles G8 summit which placed reducing poverty in the developing world at the top of its agenda.

The EU claims it has already met its 2006 target but today's report, which was compiled by more than 1,800 NGOs across Europe, argues that once inflated aid is taken away, genuine aid actually fell far short of the target, only reaching 0.31 per cent. If the current trend continues poor countries will have received €50bn (£34bn) less from Europe by 2010 than they have been promised.

Four countries, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy, failed to even reach their promised 2006 targets in the first place. Italy remained the smallest contributor of foreign aid in Europe despite being a G8 member.

Meanwhile Germany, France and Austria, three of Europe's largest economies, only managed to meet their 2006 targets with the help of inflated aid, the report revealed.

France and Austria were named as the two worst offenders for exaggerating their aid figures, with "inflated aid" accounting for at least half of the amount of money they give.

Official figures show the UK has met its promised targets but campaigners yesterday criticised the Government for continuing to include foreign debt, which includes debt relief to Iraq, in its annual aid figures. "If you go down that road then one day military assistance will end up being counted as aid," said Marco Serena from the development charity BondUK. "Aid should be aid that reduces poverty. Full stop."

But a spokesman for Britain's Department for International Development defended the inclusion of debt relief in its aid figures.

"Debt relief frees up reserves to improve health care and education. For example, the debt deal agreed at Gleneagles has helped Zambia provide free healthcare for thousands of people," he said.

A breakdown of the EU's debt relief also revealed that the vast majority of the debt written off by European countries last year was almost entirely in relief for just two countries, Iraq and Nigeria - €8bn out of €10.5bn in 2006.

The report's authors are particularly scathing about the way European countries use debt cancellation to top up their aid figures. "Aid is about providing new resources to solve current problems," the report states, "not about clearing European balance sheets to rectify mistakes of the past - mistakes that were often a shared responsibility of lender and borrower."

Last year European governments marked spending on foreign students and refugees inside their borders as an aid expense, adding at least €2.7bn to the total inflated aid quota.

Anger As Serbia Becomes Rights Watchdog

Well you couldn't make this up Part 1.....

Taken from The Times, UK, May 12, 2007
By Richard Beeston

Serbia took over the chairmanship of the Council of Europe yesterday, raising concerns that the Continent’s main human rights watchdog will be led by a country with a decidedly chequered past.

Despite disquiet among some Western European countries, Serbia took up the chairmanship unopposed. Vuk Draskovic, the Serbian Foreign Minister, will chair the council’s committee of ministers, the main decision-making body. The post is rotated every six months among the 47 member states in alphabetical order.

The move came as Serbian pro-democracy parties negotiated a new coalition government, so preventing the feared resurgence of ultranationalist parties loyal to late leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Nevertheless, the appointment remained controversial, with worries that a Serbian chairmanship would diminish the standing of the Council of Europe, which is supposed to uphold rights across the Continent.

The main charge against Belgrade is that it has failed over the past decade to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is responsible for trying war crimes suspects from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Belgrade has been accused of shielding Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, and General Ratko Mladic, his military commander, who was indicted on charges of genocide for ordering the murder of more than 7,000 men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. Only three months ago Serbia was found to have breached the Convention on Genocide by failing to apprehend General Mladic.

Carla Del Ponte, prosecutor for the tribunal, wrote to the Council of Europe that it was “rather embarrassing that a state which is harbouring these fugitives” should preside over it.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also written to Belgrade demanding that the Serbian authorities uphold the commitments that they made on joining the Council of Europe in 2003.

“Serbia is the only country ever judged to have violated the Genocide Convention, and it’s persisting in that violation by not turning over Ratko Mladic,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Programme of Human Rights Watch.

Terry Davis, Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, defended Serbia’s chairmanship, insisting that it was the right of all member states to have their turn at running the organisation.

“The real question is, should Serbia be a member of the Council of Europe? I say yes,” he said.

New Europeans Use Imaginary Cattle To Milk EU Subsidies

Last week was the 50th anniversary of the European Union. There have been many benefits to the citizens of the European Union but one aspect that most European hate is the Common Agricultural Policies where sometimes farmers of member countries are paid vast amounts of money to do nothing. Here is an interesting story...

Taken from The Times, UK, October 25, 2006
By Rory Watson in Brussels

Auditors have refused to sign off accounts for the 12th year

LIVESTOCK farmers in Slovenia, only two years after joining the European Union, are proving as imaginative as Italian olive growers when claiming Brussels subsidies. Inspectors found that half the cattle that Slovene farmers said they owned, so qualifying them for special EU cow and beef grants, did not exist.

A quarter of their sheep and goats were equally invisible.

Discrepancies between farming fact and fiction, which are equally strong among the older members of the EU, cost almost €1 billion (£670 million) last year — about 2 per cent of the agriculture budget.

Nine payments worth €2 billion to olive oil producers in Spain, Greece and Italy last year were either inflated or wrong, according to the annual report of the European Court of Auditors, the EU spending watchdog. In the case of Italy, it went even further, describing two cases as irregular.

The auditors discovered that two thirds of the 95 EUfinanced regional projects that they examined, which include new roads and bridges, contained “material errors”. These ranged from a lack of proper invoices for expenditure being reclaimed to declaring costs that had no relation to the scheme being funded. There are also considerable variations in the way that national authorities apply EU rules.

Last year Poland simply gave a warning to anyone who did not apply good farming practices. Under EU law, they should have been fined almost €1 million. In Greece, farmers’ unions input agricultural data into insecure computer systems that can be modified externally at any time.

After investigating how the €105 billion EU budget was spent last year across a range of policy areas, the auditors identified “a material level of error in underlying transactions and weak internal control systems”. As a result, for the 12th year in succession, they refused to sign off the accounts, giving them only qualified approval.

They did, however, note that in 2005 the Commission moved to an accruals-based accounting system that should make the flow of EU funds more transparent.

The auditors also concluded that administrative expenditure on EU staff and premises and aid to new member states before they joined the union was “legal and regular”. They welcomed the new integrated control system that now applies to large parts of the Common Agricultural Policy and is proving effective in stamping out fraud.

Presenting the findings, Hubert Weber, the Court of Auditors’ president, said: “The underlying reason why most errors occur is that beneficiaries — farmers, local authorities, project managers — claim more than they have the right to claim.” They did so, he added, either through neglect, error or attempt to defraud.

Siim Kallas, the Administrative, Audit and Anti-fraud Commissioner, reacted angrily to the auditors’ criticism, attacking the way in which the court interpreted any errors that it found. He pointed to a German project, where the auditors rejected all the expenditure involved, although they had examined only 5 per cent of it.

“The work of finding errors by auditors is normal and eternal. What is not normal in our case is that the errors in filling formulas feed high-profile political judgment. Everything is mixed into one pot,” he said.

He also pointed out that the auditors failed to attach sufficient importance to the Commission practice of clawing back from national budgets any EU funding, especially farm payments, that had been spent fraudulently or incorrectly. Last year he claimed that this raised €2.1 billion.
However, David Bostock, the British member at the court, disputed the benefits, pointing out that this simply transferred the financial burden.

“The effect is to shift the cost of disallowed transactions from the European taxpayer to the national taxpayer,” he said.

3 Italians Arrested In EU Corruption Scandal

Taken from The International Herald Tribune, March 28, 2007
By Dan Bilefsky

Three Italians, including a senior European Commission official and an assistant to a former Italian soccer star, have been arrested for alleged corruption involving kickbacks that included free home renovations in connection with €30 million in contracts.

Jos Colpin, a spokesman for the Brussels public prosecutor's office, said Wednesday that the charges against the suspects included corruption and forgery. He said the Italians, all residents of Brussels, appeared to have been part of "a very big case of corruption" that had continued for more than 10 years.

A three-year investigation by the European Anti-Fraud Office culminated in dozens of raids Tuesday in Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and France involving 30 EU buildings, including the commission's headquarters in Brussels, as well as banks and company offices.

Prosecutors said that those arrested included Giancarlo Ciotti, 46, an official in the European Commission's external relations department; Sergio Tricarico, 39, an assistant to Giovanni Rivera, an Italian member of the European Parliament and a former AC Milan soccer player; and Angelo Troiano, 60, a director of several property companies.

Some EU officials questioned Wednesday why a kickback investigation that appeared to amount to a few hundred thousand euros out of the EU's total €127 billion, or $169 billion, budget had taken three years to uncover and had justified raids in four countries that involved 150 police officers and 30 anti-fraud personnel.

Hans Peter Martin, an independent member of the European Parliament from Austria, who sits on the Budgetary Control Committee, said he believed the anti-fraud investigators had overreacted. "This is a classic case of an overzealous" investigation unit trying to prove its anti-corruption credentials, he said. "They have a history of using a cannon to shoot at little birds instead of going after the really big animals."

Max Strotmann, the spokesman for Siim Kallas, the EU's anti-fraud commissioner, defended the inquiry, saying that the arrests showed that the union's anti-corruption drive was working.

"Complicated cases like this with a trans-national dimension can take a long time to investigate," he said. "The EU has a zero tolerance approach to fraud and this case serves as a warning that fraud, no matter how much money is involved, is taken very seriously."

EU officials said the Anti-Fraud Office began investigating the case in 2004 after a Finnish company complained that it had been unjustly denied an EU contract in New Delhi. There were further allegations in 2005, one official said, that Ciotti had been receiving kickbacks to ensure that Troiano won contracts related to EU delegations abroad. The kickbacks allegedly included the renovation of Ciotti's Brussels home, the official said.

Johannes Laitenberger, the European Commission spokesman, said the case was specifically related to the rental and acquisition of furniture and security installations for EU delegations in the 27-member bloc. "There is a suspicion of corruption and manipulation of public markets .

The real question is to what degree were prices increased," he said.

He added that the inquiry had been initiated by the European Commission itself, which had alerted the anti-fraud unit.

An official said Troiano, the Italian businessman, was alleged to have set up several rival construction companies - all under his control - that bid for the same EU contracts, not all of which were publicized. The alleged involvement of Tricarico, the parliamentary assistant, was unclear, but the official said investigators had unearthed evidence that he had fraudulently used European Parliamentary stationery as part of the scheme.

Rivera, who on Wednesday was planning to give a speech to the Parliament on fraud in European football, was not implicated in the investigation, an official said.

The anti-fraud unit, which has an annual budget of €62 million and employs 600 people, including 160 investigators, was set up in 1999 after financial scandals that culminated in the resignation of the European Commission. The unit, which is part of the commission but which conducts its investigations independently, has been struggling to establish its credibility after a series of critical reports about its management.

Two years ago a report by the EU court of auditors concluded that the unit was disorganized, unaccountable and took too long to conduct investigations. "Files take a very long time to process, the reports submitted are inconclusive and the results are difficult to identify," the report said.

In May 2005, it was accused of mishandling an inquiry into the case of a Brussels-based journalist, Hans-Martin Tillack of Stern magazine, whom it accused of bribing officials to obtain information. Tillack had exposed a scandal at Eurostat, the EU's statistics arm, in which millions of euros disappeared into secret bank accounts.

At the time, the EU ombudsman investigating the Tillack case, which resulted in raids by the Belgian police at Tillack's home and seizure of 20 boxes of his files, said that the inquiry had been mishandled.

Israel's European Pipe Dream

Desire to join EU won't materialize unless we renounce Jewish State's essence

Taken from Ynet News, Israel, 23.02.07,
By Sharon Pardo

Seventy five percent of Israelis are interested in joining the European Union, according to a survey undertaken by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Israel. Quite a few leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu, Silvan Shalom, Avigdor Lieberman and others, are also talking about Israel joining the EU in the future. Meanwhile, some in Europe itself, including Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and the Transnational Radial Party in the EU parliament, are engaged in a campaign for full-fledged Israeli membership.

This is an amazing phenomenon, where citizens and senior policymakers in Israel are clinging to an idea that not only has no chance of materializing in the foreseeable future, but can also gravely undermine the essence of the country.

The support for the notion of Israel joining the EU completely ignores the contradiction between Israel's essence as the Jewish State and the Jewish people's country, and the basic idea the EU is premised on – turning the continent into an open, united space, devoid of internal borders, where there is no significant difference between the citizens of member states.

The fact that Israel is a democratic, liberal country where humanistic universal values are part of the local spirit does not change the Jewish State's reality and aspirations. Israel is a unique case, which is radically different than other countries. This essential difference will prevent it from joining the EU, even if it were invited to join it. On the other hand, renouncing its uniqueness is akin to abandoning Israel's "raison d'etat," when examined through Jewish-Zionist eyes.

False hopes
It is easy to provide concrete examples, such as the contradiction that exists between the Israeli Law of Return and the freedom of movement of people in the European space. Israel's aspiration to constitute a central element in the prosperity of the entire Jewish nation is also incommensurate with the values of the European Union and its institutions.

In terms of the political reality, as EU Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner explained, Israel is not perceived by official institutions as a candidate for joining the EU in the foreseeable future. Instead, it makes do with membership in the "European Neighborhood Policy," which aims to bring all Europe's new neighbors closer to the EU.

Israeli aspirations and hopes to join the EU in its current format are therefore false both in terms of values and political reality. Instead, we should aspire to deepen our cooperation with the EU. This aspiration should be a basic point of departure to a grander strategy. It may be appropriate to reconsider this position in the long run. However, in the first half of the 21st century, and likely in the more distant future as well, Israel will not be joining the EU as a full-fledged member.

Dr. Sharon Pardo is the executive director of the Center for the Study of European Politics and Society at Ben Gurion University, which assisted in undertaking the Konrad Adenauer Foundation survey

EU Endorses Damning Report On CIA

Taken from The BBC, 14 February 2007

The European parliament has approved a damning report on secret CIA flights, condemning member states which colluded in the operations.

The UK, Germany and Italy were among 14 states which allowed the US to forcibly remove terror suspects, lawmakers said.

The EU parliament voted to accept a resolution condemning member states which accepted or ignored the practice.

The EU report said the CIA had operated 1,245 flights, some taking suspects to states where they could face torture.

The report was adopted by a large majority, with 382 MEPs voting in favour, 256 against and 74 abstaining.

Vigilance
The final version denounces the lack of co-operation of many EU member states and it condemns the actions of secret services and governments who accepted and concealed renditions.

It is unlikely, the report says, that European governments were unaware of rendition activities on their territory, something the British government, among others, has denied.

"This is a report that doesn't allow anyone to look the other way. We must be vigilant that what has been happening in the past five years may never happen again," said Italian Socialist Giovanni Fava, who drafted the document.

The parliament also called for an "independent inquiry" to be considered and for closure of the US' Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Human rights campaigning group Amnesty International welcomed the EU lawmakers' vote, but urged member states to carry out independent investigations.

Revealing facts
Although the report has no force in EU law, Mr Fava said during the parliamentary debate that the related investigation, over a year, had uncovered much new evidence.

Many of those taken from EU states were subjected to torture to extract information from them, the report said.

It said there was a "strong possibility" that this intelligence had been passed on to EU governments who were aware of how it was obtained.

It also uncovered the use of secret detention facilities used as the flights made their journey across Europe towards countries such as Afghanistan.

It was not possible to contradict evidence or suggestions that secret detention centres were operated in Poland and Romania, the report said.

'Incommunicado detention'
Centre-right MEPs - the largest group in parliament - have been highly critical of the report, saying it is primarily motivated by anti-Americanism.

EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini said the commission would act on the truth, even if it were uncomfortable or unpalatable. But he called for a relaunching of the Euro-Atlantic relationship and said Europe must continue to work with its US partners.

During the course of their investigation, delegations of MEPs travelled to countries including Romania, Poland, the UK, the US and Germany to investigate claims of European involvement in so-called extraordinary renditions.

The governments of Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal and the UK were criticised for their "unwillingness to co-operate" with investigators.

The report defines extraordinary renditions as instances where "an individual suspected of involvement in terrorism is illegally abducted, arrested and/or transferred into the custody of US officials and/or transported to another country for interrogation which, in the majority of cases involves incommunicado detention and torture".

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Further information:

Full List of Countries that took part:
Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom

BBC: Key excerpts of report