JANUARY2007

Brussels divided on future shape of EU commission

05.01.2007 - 09:29 CET | By Andrew Rettman
The European Commission is showing signs of division on EU institutional reform, with Polish commissioner Danuta Hubner attacking German commissioner Guenter Verheugen's idea that small EU states do not need fully-fledged commissioners.

"Creating two categories of member states and accepting size as a criterion, on the basis of which a country would have the right to designate a commissioner, is groundless and, speaking frankly, unacceptable," Ms Hubner told Polish press agency PAP on Thursday (4 January.)

One day earlier Mr Verheugen - industry commissioner and commission vice-president - had suggested that small states should get deputy commissioners in key policy areas rather than full commissioners with light portfolios to create "an efficient, small and highly competent commission."

The debate comes ahead of the EU's attempt to revive its moribund treaty-reform process this year, with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in January straining the credibility of the one-state one-commissioner system after Bucharest got a new "multilingualism" portfolio, widely seen as negligible.

***This story is from The Times
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21033191-2703,00.html

MI5 rejected Hitler suicide mission

• Ben Macintyre
• January 09, 2007

A BRITISH secret agent who offered to blow up Adolf Hitler at the height of World War II was dissuaded from carrying out the assassination by MI5, according to newly released wartime archives.

The offer to kill Hitler in a suicide mission was made by Eddie Chapman, a professional criminal and safe-breaker who was trained by the Nazis as a spy and went on to become one of Britain’s most successful double agents, codenamed Agent Zigzag.

Chapman was serving a sentence in Jersey prison for burglary when the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands in June 1940. He was recruited by the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and parachuted into Britain in December 1941. He immediately defected to MI5, the British security service.

Under interrogation by MI5, the 27-year-old Chapman said that he wanted to return to Germany as a double agent, and then kill the Führer by exploding a bomb at a Nazi rally.

Files recently declassified by MI5 reveal an extraordinary conversation between Chapman and Ronnie Reed, his case officer. Reed pointed out that any attempt to kill Hitler would be suicidal: “Whether or not you succeeded, you would be liquidated immediately,” he said.

“Ah, but what a way out,” Chapman replied.

Chapman explained that his German spymaster, an Abwehr officer he knew only as “Dr Graumann”, had promised to take him to a Nazi rally if he completed his mission in Britain successfully, and place him “in the first or second row”, near Hitler’s podium, if necessary by dressing him in the uniform of a senior German officer.

“He believes I am pro-Nazi,” Chapman told Reed. “I believe Dr Graumann will keep his promise. Then I will assassinate Hitler . . . with my knowledge of explosives and incendiary material, it should be possible.”

Reed was convinced that Chapman’s offer was serious, and reported back to his MI5 superiors: “He can think of no better way of leaving this life than to have his name prominently featured throughout the world’s press, and to be immortalised in history books for all time.” Reed believed Chapman was also motivated by an intense patriotism, and a desire to make amends for his criminal past.

The offer would certainly have been brought to the attention of Winston Churchill - the British prime minister took a personal interest in the Zigzag case and asked to kept informed of developments - but for reasons that have never been fully explained, the opportunity to kill Hitler was rejected.

Professor M.R.D. Foot, the distinguished historian of World War II, believes that the decision may have sprung from a number of factors, including a longstanding government policy against assassinating foreign heads of state, and mistrust of Chapman, a notorious jailbird.

“SOE (Special Operations Executive) hatched a plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, but that, too, was rejected,” Professor Foot said. “Partly because it was believed to be impossible to get an armed agent into Hitler’s presence, and partly because it was thought that Hitler was more use alive than dead, since at that point his strategy was clearly so erratic.”

Chapman did return to Germany as a double agent, but was expressly told “not to undertake any wild enterprises” by his British spymaster, Colonel Tommy “Tar” Robertson.

Chapman convinced the Germans that he had carried out his mission on British soil and was awarded the Iron Cross for his “outstanding zeal and success”, becoming the only Briton to receive the medal. He was parachuted back into Britain in 1944, and took part in a successful deception operation to misdirect the V1 flying bombs.

MI5 has now released 1800 pages of documents from the Chapman case. The last of the Zigzag files, including information relating to Chapman’s assassination plot, was transferred to the National Archives last month.

The new evidence suggests that the German spymaster “Dr Graumann”, whose real name was Stephan von Gröning, may have been deliberately setting Chapman up as an assassin. Like many Abwehr officers, he was secretly a bitter opponent of Hitler. His offer to smuggle Chapman into a Nazi rally suggests he knew what Chapman had in mind, and that the two men may have been in league.

Chapman survived the war, feted by both sides, and received an unofficial pardon for his numerous prewar crimes. He died in 1997.

One factor in the decision not to use Chapman as an assassin may have been the horrific reprisals that followed the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s potential successor, by British-trained Czech partisans in May 1942. But in the end, the idea may have been quashed because Chapman - “an associate of thieves” in the words of one MI5 officer - was simply not the sort of person to be deployed on such a mission. “There was a feeling in the British Establishment that you don’t trust someone who has been in jug,” Professor Foot said.

Deep in Le Carré country, the remote Polish airport at heart of CIA flights row

Former director tells how planes were met by vehicles from nearby military base

Nicholas Watt in Szymany
Thursday January 4, 2007
The Guardian Excerpts

Tucked away at the end of a pot-holed country lane which runs through a dense forest, Szymany airport would be the perfect setting for a John Le Carré novel. A shabby control tower looks out over a long runway which appears slightly out of place next to a modest terminal building.

Until last year, when it was mothballed in a row over funding, the former Warsaw Pact military airbase enjoyed a brief renaissance as a regional airport for tourists visiting the picturesque Warminsko Mazurskie area of north-eastern Poland. German tourists on hunting trips, or sailors holidaying on the nearby lakes, were the typical passengers who flew into Szymany on small propeller planes.

But the tranquillity of the airport, which is now disturbed by no more than the sound of migratory birds heading for the lakes, belies its place at the centre of an international row about CIA "rendition flights" of terror suspects. Human rights activists and MEPs investigating the flights have long suspected that many detainees passed through Szymany airport on their way to a secret US detention centre at the nearby Stare Kiejkuty military base.

These suspicions were recently hardened when the airport's former director confirmed that numerous alleged CIA flights touched down at Szymany, where they were met by military vehicles from Stare Kiejkuty. The evidence from Mariola Przewlocka, who was sacked from her job last year for "political reasons", prompted MEPs to make the first official claim that terror suspects may have been detained on EU soil.........................................

Ms Przewlocka, who was under instructions not to approach the aircraft, added: "Two military vans went out to meet the 737, but it was impossible to see what happened because the planes always parked in a way that blocked our view." It was impossible to see who drove the military vehicles, which headed off in the direction of the military base at Stare Kiejkuty, or which passengers they carried, because they had tinted windows. But procedures for the "international flights" were enough to rouse suspicions.......................................

Had more witnesses been around they would have seen the military vans, with darkened windows, head to the Stare Kiejkuty military training centre about 12 miles north of the airport, according to Ms Przewlocka.

Jaroslaw Jurczenko, chairman of the airport board, who was its director when the first Gulfstream jet landed in December 2002, is in no doubt about the base's link to the nine "international" flights which passed through Szymany. "We were informed that people from the 'unit' would meet the flights," he said.

Laughing, Mr Jurczenko added: "They did not say which unit. But there is only one unit nearby - at Stare Kiejkuty."

QUAERO - I SEARCH
Luke Harding in Berlin
Thursday December 28, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

The war waged by French president Jacques Chirac against “Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism suffered a blow today when the Germans announced they were pulling out of a rival European search engine to Google. Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for “I search”, but which was swiftly dubbed “Ask Chirac”.

Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the €400m (£270m) project. Senior officials in Germany’s economics and technology ministry said they had decided to dump Quaero because they had been sceptical it would ever be able to challenge the might of Google and Yahoo!Cooperation with France had “not been simple,” they said. Asked today what had gone wrong, a ministry spokeswoman told the Guardian: “There were disagreements. The French wanted a search engine. We wanted something else.”

Instead, Germany has now decided to launch its own national search engine, Theseus. Named after the character in Greek mythology who escaped from the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Theseus would help German internet users navigate the sometimes treacherous web, the ministry said. It would not be a search engine as such but an “information and technology service”.

Quaero had been a pet project of Mr Chirac’s for some time. In a speech a year ago at the Elysée Palace, he spoke of the need to “take up the global challenge posed by Yahoo! and Google”. But the project ran into difficulties almost immediately. It has so far not got off the ground, with the European commission yet to rule on whether the money originally earmarked for the search engine project by Paris and Berlin amounted to unfair subsidy. The French government has hinted it will continue to develop Quaero without the Germans. “The aim of Quaero is less to replace Google than to offer new search possibilities for multimedia, particularly for audio video,” Jean-Luc Gauvain, the director of France’s Computer Sciences Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences told the German news website Spiegel online.

In November the Sunday Times broke with the news:Blair hit by Saudi 'bribery' threat

SAUDI ARABIA is threatening to suspend diplomatic ties with Britain unless Downing Street intervenes to block an investigation into a £60m “slush fund” allegedly set up for some members of its royal family. A senior Saudi diplomat in London has delivered an ultimatum to Tony Blair that unless the inquiry into an allegedly corrupt defence deal is dropped, diplomatic links between Britain and Saudi Arabia will be severed, a defence source has disclosed.

The Saudis, key allies in the Middle East, have also threatened to cut intelligence co-operation with Britain over Al-Qaeda.
They have repeated their threat that they will terminate payments on a defence contract that could be worth £40 billion and safeguard at least 10,000 British jobs.

The Saudis are furious about the criminal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into allegations that BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence company, set up the “slush fund” to support the extravagant lifestyle of members of the Saudi royal family. The payments, in the form of lavish holidays, a fleet of luxury cars including a gold Rolls-Royce, rented apartments and other perks, are alleged to have been paid to ensure the Saudis continued to buy from BAE under the so-called Al-Yamamah deal, rather than going to another country. Al-Yamamah is the biggest defence contract in British history and has kept BAE in business for 20 years.David Leppard

On Tour of the ME and maybe hoping to repair his "mistake"..., but Blair was dangerously off target, - in his condemnation of Iran, and "blundered around without much purpose."

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday December 24, 2006
The Observer

Two things occurred last week, apparently unconnected. In the first, Tony Blair, at the end of his tour of the Middle East and the Gulf, issued a thunderous denunciation in Dubai of the 'threat' posed by Iran. He painted a scary picture. (Doesn't he always?)

Iran, he said, was 'at war' with the 'moderate' Arab world and Western forces trying to bring peace and stability to the region. If it was not for evil Iran, Blair implied, Iraq and Afghanistan could become holiday hotspots for tourists, following the example set by Dubai, which has had more than a million British visitors this year. Iran at war with the Arab world? The last statesman who framed it in that ugly context was ... Saddam Hussein.

In reference to the second event Anti-Ahmadinejad sentiment was visible in elections for the Council of Experts - 86 clerics who monitor Iran's supreme leader and choose his successor. There, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani polled the most votes of any Tehran candidate to win re-election to the assembly. Also re-elected was Hasan Rowhani, Iran's former nuclear negotiator whom Ahmadinejad has accused of making too many concessions to the Europeans.

So what will Blair's comments have achieved? Certainly they will not have bolstered Iranians like the students who recently heckled Ahmadinejad for his poor record on jobs and confrontational attitude to the West. Instead, Blair's comments fit precisely into Ahmadinejad's narrative of 'them and us'.

...Blair's performance in Dubai was the inept conclusion to a clumsy trip that seemed to break the fundamental rule of prime ministerial diplomacy - only to go on these kinds of tours when there is something to achieve. Instead, Blair blundered round without much purpose. He met a cool welcome in Egypt and later a rebuke from Turkey over Palestine. And if his trip was calculated to prove to Muslims, particularly at home, that Britain does care about the plight of Palestinians, that too spectacularly backfired.

Whatever you think about Hamas and its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, it won fairly in elections that the West insisted on. And while the Arab street has equally mixed views about Hamas, it also sees the hypocrisy of insisting on Arab democracy, then undermining the result and offering to support the losing party in something close to civil conflict. All of which leads one to conclude that something pretty terrible has happened to British diplomacy

Second Madrid Conference To Be Held
By: David Bedein, The Bulletin (A newspaper in Philadelphia USA that carries D.Pipes among others)
15th Dec.2006
www.thebulletin.us/site/news
Fifteen years after the Madrid peace conference, which convened after the first Gulf War, the second Madrid conference will be held at the beginning of next month. It will include unofficial representatives of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians, Jordan and Egypt - all the governments that participated in the first conference.
The initiative is being backed by the Spanish government and three international peace organizations: The Toledo International Center for Peace, Search for Common Ground and a three-culture institute. The governments of Denmark, Sweden and Norway are also giving sponsorship to the conference, and their three foreign ministers will attend it. King Juan Carlos of Spain, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos will receive the participants of the conference in the royal palace.
The conference will last for three days. Its goal will be to place all the peace initiatives on the table and to call upon the governments to return to the negotiating table, based on the understanding that the gaps between the parties are bridgeable.
At first, the Spanish government considered convening the second Madrid conference with the participation of official representatives, but they encountered a lack of response on the part of the governments in the region. This caused them to bypass the governments and turn by an indirect route to civil society organizations - so that they will pressure their governments to return to the negotiating table.
In the backdrop of the conference are the latest events in the Middle East, including the war in Iraq, the war in Lebanon, the Baker-Hamilton report and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's speech in Sde Boker at the memorial ceremony for David Ben-Gurion. The conference will also include American, Russian, Saudi and European representatives as observers, as well as Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa.
The senior Israeli representative participating in the initiative, who will represent Israel in the conference, is former foreign minister Prof. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is a member of the Toledo International Center for Peace.
At this stage, it is not yet known who will represent Syria or Lebanon. The Palestinians, however, have already confirmed the participation of a high-ranking delegation. At this stage, the organizers are keeping the names of the participants secret, for fear that advance publication would obstruct their participation.


Italian Guards Leave Posts At Jewish, Israeli Institutions In Rome
Italian police guards have been withdrawn, without warning, from Israeli and Jewish institutions in Rome.
About 10 days ago, without warning or explanation, the police cars that had been permanently stationed for over 10 years outside the El Al office in Rome, at Jewish community offices, the Jewish school and the synagogues throughout the city, suddenly disappeared - at all times on the eve of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's visit to the city, a visit that ended Wednesday night.
The surprising step aroused apprehension among Jews in Rome, who have not forgotten the terrorist attack at the synagogue in 1982, when a 2-year-old boy, Stefano Tasha, was killed and 40 people were injured.
Since then, the leaders and institutions of the Jewish community have had total protection - until this week. The city's Jews, who prayed last Saturday at 10 synagogues without security guards, fear that history will repeat itself and the next terrorist attack is drawing near.
The Jewish school is also a priority target for terrorism. At least that is how it was described in the Italian media only about two months ago, and after angry protests from the Jewish community, it was agreed that the guards would be restored - temporarily. The police headquarters stated that it was intended that the police guards would be returned - perhaps even Thursday morning - to all the places which they had been guarding, but parents told Ma'ariv that they were "angry and concerned" about the new security instructions.
A police car was first stationed outside the El Al office in Rome after the terrorist attack at Fiumicino Airport in 1985, when 16 people were killed and 70 wounded. For the most part, the police car prevented suspicious vehicles from parking there, and the police were instructed to keep a close watch. Now, however, there is no police car there, and it is feared that the El Al office, which is a palpable Israeli symbol, would be an easy target.
At present, the Israeli embassy in Rome does not intend to approach the Italian Foreign Ministry and turn the issue into a diplomatic confrontation between the two countries, especially in light of the cordial atmosphere Wednesday at the joint news conference of the two prime ministers. On the other hand, the security officer at El Al is expected to have a meeting with his Italian counterparts in an attempt to reach an agreement.
Asked for a reaction, the Israeli embassy in Rome said it does not discuss security matters with the media. The Italian police also refused to comment on why, in the wake of re-evaluations of the security situation by the Italian security establishment, a decision had been made to withdraw the security guards from a list of diplomatic missions, airline offices and other institutions that had been protected for decades.

©The Evening Bulletin 2006