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Posts tagged US national security
Letters: EU turns the screw on Greece
Feb 17th
Gary Younge compares democracy in the European Union unfavourably to the US (Compared to Europe, the US can at least make a pretence of democracy, 15 February).
But the facts of the matter are these. The imposition of strict EU conditions on the management of the Greek economy is sanctioned by the elected heads of government of 27 member states (not excluding, for all his protestations back home, Greek prime minister Mr Papandreou). EU powers to act like this derive from the Lisbon treaty adopted unanimously by the 27 states and supported by the directly elected European parliament. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, is accountable to all the central bank governors of the EU plus the European parliament, to whose economic and monetary affairs committee he regularly reports.
Greece has failed to undertake its long-standing commitments to reform its economy by cutting its public sector and by opening its economy to EU competition. It has also cooked the books, spends far too much on its armed forces, and allows its rich businessmen to evade taxes. The tolerance of Greece’s fellow eurozone members has come to a stop.
The EU has the power and the will to help Greece avoid default – but only if it recognises its duty to fiscal rectitude and European solidarity. That is what being a member of the EU is all about.
Constitutional affairs spokesman, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe
• Whatever one’s views on the relationship between globalised markets and democracy as discussed by Gary Younge, there is more to say about the “democratic deficit” at EU level than he suggests. His quote from a book by Sue Wright, published in 2000, states the European parliament “has little power”; this was not true then and is even less true now, particularly since the ratification of the Lisbon treaty.
Last week the European parliament used its new powers under the treaty to throw out the EU-US Swift agreement, which would have allowed millions of personal financial transactions to be tracked as part of a programme of measures to counter terrorism. Your report (MEPs block US security access to personal banking data, 12 February) mentions Hillary Clinton and Timothy Geithner’s lobbying of MEPs ahead of that vote. This suggests they too might take issue with Mr Younge on the level of influence of the European parliament.
It is also wrong to suggest that the head of the ECB “will face no cross-examination by elected representatives”. The treaty specifically provides for him to appear before the European parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee, where MEPs can hold him to account.
Michael Shackleton
UK office of the European parliament
• Why must the workers take wage and benefit cuts to extricate Greece from its financial crisis? The country’s main problem is that the rich evade taxes and keep their money in Swiss bank accounts.
Peter Crookston
London
• It is a concern that international issues that even those sceptical of the EU want to see tackled – people trafficking, drug trafficking, serious organised crime, cyber and hate crime and international terrorism – should become a key ideological battleground for a possible incoming Conservative government (Tory plans to cut joint EU policing would threaten Britain, say critics, 15 February).
As a former Europol rapporteur, I know the agency is, and will remain under the Lisbon treaty, a surprisingly small intelligence-sharing organisation, increasingly scrutinised by the European parliament. As cross-border crime affecting the UK reaches “phenomenal” levels, according to the CPS, people increasingly make the links between organised crime, drugs and gun crime and their cross-border origins.
Voting against Eurojust (which the UK uses disproportionately) and Europol, and against greater parliamentary scrutiny of both, on the grounds that we are heading for an “EU FBI”, is not credible and illustrates how a blanket Eurosceptic approach should be a dividing line when voters look at the political parties’ attitudes to EU issues that matter.
Claude Moraes MEP
Labour, London
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China: Internet censorship and cyber heists
Feb 15th
When Google threatened to quit China, most of the focus was on human rights and the country’s extensive system of internet censorship, the Great Firewall. China rebuffed such criticism. Countries that censor political speech on the internet are quick to point out that western nations also have laws governing content online, some of it political. Germany bans neo-Nazi symbols on German internet sites. The state of South Australia recently attempted to ban anonymous political speech online in the lead-up to elections. China said it was its sovereign right to set limits on internet activities. However, less attention was paid to Google’s claims that hackers had also stolen corporate secrets in addition to targeting human rights activists.
This highlighted a little discussed problem. While China calls on other countries to respect its laws, it must do more to curtail internet attacks focused on foreign companies that do business there. The Chinese government denied involvement in the attempts to gain access to the Gmail accounts of human rights activists or attempts to steal Google’s corporate secrets. It is almost impossible to link attacks online to a single player, much less link the shadowy hackers to a government. Attempts to find a technical link to China in the latest round of attacks failed to uncover a smoking gun. However, security researchers have found that companies doing business in China find their networks hacked and documents relating to business there stolen. A report by US defence company Northrop Grumman last year found that attacks against the US and “many countries around the world” were “extremely focused”, not only on scientific and defence secrets but also on “China-related policy information”. The report determined that such attacks were “beyond the capabilities or profile of virtually all organised cyber-criminal enterprises” and were “difficult at best without some type of state sponsorship”. The US is not alone in its concerns. MI5 warned businesses that Chinese government officials had given British businessmen digital cameras and memory sticks loaded with Trojan horses, viruses that would give the Chinese access to their computers.
Companies doing business in China have long faced brazen attempts to steal corporate secrets. The lure of the riches that China promises has bought silence in the corporate world. That silence made Google’s announcement stand out. If China claims its extensive censorship of the internet in its borders is its sovereign right, it cannot lecture the rest of the world on respecting its laws while evidence mounts that foreign companies face sophisticated attempts to steal their secrets.
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Oil groups mount legal challenge to Schwarzenegger’s tar sands ban
Feb 14th
• Californian legislation branded ‘unconstitutional’
• Lobby group includes UK energy companies
A lobby group that includes BP and Shell in its membership has launched a legal challenge against low-carbon legislation in California that in effect rules out the use of oil from Canadian tar sands. The action by the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA) comes amid growing political, investor and consumer pressure on US oil companies not to participate in the carbon-intensive tar sands of Alberta.
A NPRA statement said the legislation was unlawful for a number of reasons, including the imposition of “undue and unconstitutional burdens on interstate commerce”.
It claimed the legislation would also have “little or no impact” on greenhouse gas emissions nationwide and would harm US energy security “by discouraging the use of Canadian crude oil and ethanol produced in the American midwest”.
The refiners are joined by the American Trucking Associations and the Centre for North American Energy Security in their attempt to overturn legislation from California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wants to cut C02 emissions from transport by 10% by 2020.
Shell’s chief executive, Peter Voser, recently announced plans to slow investment in Alberta, though he denied this was anything to do with environmental issues, saying it was a reaction to lower oil prices and a reduction in Shell’s profitability.
The company distanced itself from the NPRA legal action but did not express its opposition to it. “Shell is not represented on the committees of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association that made the decision to legally challenge the rules,” said a spokesman in The Hague. “We continue to work with the California Air Resources Board as they refine rules and address outstanding issues.”
BP also claimed it was not associated with the court challenge. A spokesman for the oil company in London said: “BP’s membership in NPRA is limited to specific issues related to the chemical industry.”
BP has started to spend tens of millions of dollars restructuring two US refineries so that they can process tar sands crude imported from its operations in Canada. There were reports over the weekend that BP is in $1.2bn talks to buy a Canadian company called Value Creation, which has substantial tar sands reserves.
Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, told the Guardian in an interview this month that he was confident tar sands would play a major role in future US energy security. He played down suggestions that the US army, one of the biggest single users of oil products in the world, might be prevented by politicians from using fuel derived from tar sands.
Tar sands have risen fast up the political agenda since the Copenhagen climate change conference last December.
The issue will also be discussed at the forthcoming annual general meetings of Shell and BP. On the agenda are resolutions from the Co-op and other investors questioning the wisdom of continuing their controversial tar sands operations in Canada.
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said he was pleased that investors were putting the oil company on the spot, adding that exploitation of the tar sands would become “a campaign battleground for years to come”.
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The war on terror: taking Jihad Jane | Marina Hyde
Mar 12th
Posted by Marina Hyde in Politics
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A civilised justice system might have seen Colleen LaRose’s eccentricities as requiring help. Instead, she may face life in prison
Without wishing to undermine her twin commitments to holy war and talking to cats, the self-styled Jihad Jane might be the war on terror’s least effective bogeywoman. In fact, let’s not be gender specific. She might well be its least effective bogeyperson, making “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, as we refer to that chap who couldn’t even set a match to his own trainers, look like the KGB’s deadliest agent.
Jihad Jane’s real name is Colleen LaRose, and in between caring for her partner’s sick father, this suburban Pennsylvanian is alleged to have put postings on YouTube in which she made herself available for any fundamentalist situations vacant. Last year she travelled to Ireland, where she met some people allegedly plotting to kill a cartoonist, before flying home and being arrested on her return. She has been in custody since, according to federal documents unsealed this week – and when the news broke, LaRose’s neighbours forewent the usual cliches about her having “kept herself to herself”, declaring instead that she talked to cats a lot. Mm. As our leaders are given to telling us, tapping their nose in reference to their security clearance: if you saw what I saw, it would curdle your blood.
Even Lars Vilks – the Swedish artist whose sensationally witty cartoon of Muhammad’s head on a dog sparked the alleged plot with which LaRose is accused of being associated – appears dismissively amused, pitching the affair as a caper movie, “with this fantastic name Jihad Jane”. Vilks described his alleged nemeses as not exactly professionals and “rather low-tech”, hitting a note of ironic understatement indiscernible in what we know of his work.
The movie Colleen was presumably thinking about as she settled on her nickname was GI Jane, in which a super-buff Demi Moore trains as a Navy Seal and has to retrieve some weapons-grade plutonium from the Libyans. As a 4ft 11 Christine Hamilton lookalike so luminously inept she’d already been warned once by the FBI before she was finally arrested, you have to marvel at Colleen’s self-delusion. However, I’d prefer for the authorities to conjure up footage of her at one of those terrorist training camps in the Hindu Kush, where disaffected westerners have to scramble under rope nets and suchlike, even though their missions are only ever going to consist of doing something antisocial in an aisle seat. As a rare woman at boot camp, Colleen would be a shoo-in for Jihad Benjamin, a winsome modern reboot of the Private Benjamin franchise.
The trailer line for the Goldie Hawn original was “The army was no laughing matter till Judy Benjamin joined it”, and you might agree that the forces of evil ranked against us were similarly mirthless until a pint-sized cat-lady brought the funny. Yet according to the US justice department, the fact that “a woman from suburban America agreed to carry out murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists, underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face”. Does it? I yield to no one in my admiration for the calibre of evildoers paraded before us in the cause of justifying ever higher anti-terrorism spending and the systematic erosion of individual liberties, but the LaRose business appears yet another instance of a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut.
Just as in the case of Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, and on a much smaller level in that of Jack Straw heckler Walter Wolfgang, one has to question the moral wisdom (and the PR nous) of deploying the full force of anti-terror laws against the demonstrably weak or eccentric. A truly strong society would have the sense merely to leave oddballs out there – partly because the world is full of them, and partly to undermine the myth of a crack network of brilliant extremists who walk among us.
Jurists have long been fascinated by the so-called doctrine of impossible attempt, the question of whether someone can really be punished for attempted crimes that have infinitesimal or no chance of succeeding. Classic examples are trying to pick an empty pocket, or an attempt to murder a man by voodoo. It remains to be seen precisely how cackhanded were LaRose’s bunglings in what she imagined to be the world of international terrorism, but it doesn’t exactly have the flavour of the Mossad’s recent trip to Dubai.
What has come to light since the news broke, however, are police records of LaRose’s 2005 suicide attempt, reports of alcohol problems, and friends’ accounts of the depression caused by the death of her father. Presumably all of this was picked up by the FBI during their lengthy surveillance of her, and in a more civilised and intelligent justice system LaRose might have been identified as a person with a case of something or other, who could be reasonably handled by a couple of hours a week with a mental health professional. Yet she now faces life in prison if convicted.
Having said all that, I see I’ve made the textbook error of ignoring the fabled deterrent argument that governments like to advance. Do forgive me. If there are any troubled catwomen out there thinking of auditioning for Ocean’s Jihad, this case will no doubt give them pause.