Hyperpower and Hypocrites

Christian Science Monitor reports that it's put up or shut up time for the Euro-weenies who have been clamoring for us to shut down Guantanamo. The prospect of having to actually follow up their lofty and sanctimonious words with actual actions has thrown the continent into a diplomatic dither.

It sounds like Europe's dream scenario. Yet European states are not rushing to take detainees, a step considered essential to closing the camps.

Rather, on the eve of a Jan. 26 meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels that takes up the question, there's more temporizing than unity – and a possibility that some states that say they will take inmates considered wrongly detained may hide behind bureaucratic moves to tie such help to a collective EU agreement. Such agreement may be difficult.

Lets see what perfidious maneuvers and diplomatic arabesques Olde Europe employs to keep from repatriating some of the tanned and well-rested terrorists that their societies have spawned.

Will men with strong British names like Mohammad and Farook ever play darts on the old sod again? A certain Herr Al-Jihadi, of the old and venerable Hamburg Jihadis, fears he may never again cast his murderous, bushy-browed gaze upon the land of Beer and Bratwurst.

Think I'm being too hard on our cowardly continental cousins?

Try this on for size. Remember rendition? You know, secret CIA flights (probably in black planes with meat hooks hanging from the ceiling) that carried to their doom poor innocent men who accidentally stumbled onto the battle field with grenade launchers in their hands? Remember talk about how the US had turned the world into our own global Gulag Archipelago? Why aren’t we hearing about that anymore?

Here’s your answer: Old Europe was complicit all along.

A new EU assessment of how the guidelines are being applied acknowledges that some governments have accused the Union of double standards because some of its member states have been implicated in the so-called extraordinary rendition scheme operated by the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, confessed in February that two CIA planes used in the kidnapping and torture programme had landed in Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean, in 2002. This was a reversal of previous denials by the London government that CIA flights had landed on British territory.

Several other EU governments, including Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Ireland and Italy have been accused of allowing their countries be used by the CIA for covert operations. Poland and Romania have both been criticised by the European Commission for their reluctance to provide information about claims that the CIA ran secret detention centres on their soil.

Here's another tidbit: Italy's intelligence service cooperated willingly with the nefarious Bush-Cheney global torture plan carried out illegally by the US Gestapo, also known as the CIA:

MILAN, Italy (AP) - An Italian judge has suspended a kidnapping trial linked to the CIA's extraordinary rendition program after the government said testimony could be a threat to Italy's national security.

The Milan trial involves 26 Americans and five Italian intelligence agents charged in the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric. Most of the Americans are CIA agents.

The judge on Wednesday suspended the trial until March 18 in the expectation that Italy's Constitutional Court would have resolved the national security issue by then. A ruling from the high court is due March 10.

Both Premier Silvio Berlusconi and his predecessor Romano Prodi have warned testimony in the case could compromise operations between Italian spy services and the CIA.

So what do we do with this human debris we've scooped up from GWOT battlefields?

I think we should turn them over to the men and women in powdered wigs at the Hague. They could then make a shambles of international justice like Slobadon Milosevic did with long-winded angry tirades. Remember that? The Euros stood around looking helplessly at one another and flapping their arms futilely in response.

Anyway, I think the Hague is the perfect place to wrap this whole debacle up. Wasn’t it Karl Marx who said something about history repeating itself, first as tragedy, secondly as farce?

Links:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0123/p05s01-woeu.html
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/202927,nine-prisoners-released-from-guantanamo.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/16/AR2006101601339.html
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42218
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D94R7LI00&show_article=1&