http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-05-09/eu%E2%80%99s-out-control-intelligence-services-don%E2%80%99t-exist-officially
Submitted by testosteronepit on 05/09/2013 12:39 -0400
We had our discussion with the shocking centralized power
The EU’s Out-Of-Control Intelligence Services (That Don’t Exist, Officially)
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
Brussels, the center of gravity of the European Union and seat of NATO Headquarters, not only teems with lobbyists, diplomats, military personnel, bureaucrats, politicians, Americans, and other weird characters from around the world, but also with spies.
“Brussels is one of the largest spy capitals in the world,” said Alain Winants, head of the Belgian State Security Service VSSE. He guesstimated that there’d be “several hundred” plying their trade at any one time, chasing after a broad array of topics, from trade issues to security policies.
Yet officially, the EU itself doesn’t have an intelligence service of its own. It’s dependent on the national intelligence services of the member states that supply it with “finished intelligence.” Officially. In reality, it has been building an intelligence apparatus of six services so far, some of them brand new, populated already by 1,300 specialists. But because they’re officially not conducting directcovert operations – though they do go overseas, including to Libya during the Arab Spring! – they simply deny being intelligence services.
Thus, four of them have finagled to escape democratic oversight and control by the European Parliament. Even in the US, the Intelligence Community is accountable to the Congress. Not so in the EU. As everything else in the EU bureaucracy, these services – the newest dating back to 2011 – are constantly growing, assuming more functions, responsibilities, and power, with vast and ever expanding databases at their fingertips, tied into a dense network of other intelligence services. And it’s just the beginning.
Some Members of Parliament are getting antsy and want to rein them in. Martin Ehrenhauser, independent MP from Austria, and member of the Subcommittee on Security and Defense Policy, is one of the ringleaders; and in his blog post, he details some of the issues.
Since its founding, the EU has been building its own spy programs, often triggered by specific needs, in an “ad-hoc” manner “without strategy” and without a “coherent concept” about its structure, methods, and people, he writes. This “EU intelligence community” saw its first steps in 1993 with the founding of Europol, the only intelligence service established by treaty, and thus the only one with a legitimate basis. Between the prolific years of 2000 and 2004, four additional intelligence units were cobbled together by the unelected European Council. And another one in 2011.
Parliament, emasculated by design in the hyper-democratic manner of the EU, was never given an opportunity to be involved. The logic? Since these entities receive only “finished intelligence” from national services, democratic oversight would rest with national parliaments, not with the European Parliament. Alas, these EU intelligence services are gathering their own intelligence to an ever greater degree. Hence, Ehrenhauser writes, the idea that the EU receives 100% of its information from national intelligence services is a “fallacy.”
The EU intelligence services function similarly to their national counterparts: they collect information, often overseas, analyze it, and transmit it to policy makers. These products can be classified EU TOP SECRET. The mere fact that they might not use covert operationsdirectly to obtain the information, Ehrenhauser writes, is “not sufficient to deny the very existence of the intelligence services and therefore the necessity of democratic controls by the European Parliament.”
Of the six services, only Europol (intelligence and law enforcement) and Frontex (external borders) are subject to some parliamentary oversight. The remaining four – the Intelligence Analysis Center (IntCen), the Satellite Center (SatCen), the Intelligence Directorate (IntDir), and the Situation Room (crisis monitoring) – are beyond democratic controls.
All four have been rolled into the European External Action Service (EEAS), which itself was founded in 2011. Some of them don’t even publish their budgets. Though they’re still small, given their youth, they’re destined to grow just like Europol has been growing over its 20 years of existence. They’re already getting tangled up in “ever more complex decision-making structures with diffuse responsibilities,” Ehrenhauser writes, and they’re making “sweeping decisions far away from the voter.”
So he demands oversight by the European Parliament “at all levels.” It’s not like they haven’t tried. Well, one tiny bit. While Parliament – unique among democracies – can’t initiate legislation, it does have some control over the purse strings. So there was an initiative in the budget committee to force EEAS to disclose the budgets of these four entities. It would have provided a modicum of say and transparency. But it was voted down in the committee.
What kind of Parliament decides to abrogate its responsibilities? What kind of lawmaker votes for continued ignorance and powerlessness in face of what someday will be a massive intelligence apparatus with unknown budgets, ill-defined limits, and the mission to serve its master, the European Council? Monsters have been created on this basis. Another victory for unelected Eurocrats and their armies of functionaries that plod forward in their unsteady manner, hell-bent on implementing their vision of a mega-state encumbered only slightly by the somewhat inconvenient veneer of democracy.
Meanwhile, hunger is spreading from its traditional strongholds in the global south to depression-hit Southern Europe. In Greece, reports are growing of children having to scrounge for food from classmates, while in Spain city dwellers have become inured to the spectacle of people rummaging in trash cans for a bite to eat. But there’s a reason. Read....Starving the World for Power and Profit: The Global Agribusiness Model
http://www.infowars.com/al-qaeda-now-in-control-of-cias-covert-war-in-syria/
Al-Qaeda Now in Control of CIA’s Covert War in Syria
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 9, 2013
Infowars.com
May 9, 2013
The Guardian reported Wednesday that the CIA’s Free Syrian Army is losing mercenaries to a better equipped, more disciplined and religiously motivated al-Nusra.
“Fighters feel proud to join al-Nusra because that means power and influence,” Abu Ahmed, a former teacher from Deir Hafer who now commands an FSA brigade, told the newspaper. “Al-Nusra fighters rarely withdraw for shortage of ammunition or fighters and they leave their target only after liberating it.”
“Fighters are heading to al-Nusra because of its Islamic doctrine, sincerity, good funding and advanced weapons,” added Abu Islam, a member of the FSA’s al-Tawhid brigade.
Jabhat al-Nusra is an al-Qaeda offshoot. In April, the al-Qaeda branch in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq, merged with al-Nusra and the group “renewed the bayaa” (oath of allegiance) to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, writes Rajeh Saeed.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri is the current leader of al-Qaeda following the death of Osama bin Laden more than a decade ago.
In December, 2012, the State Department officially listed al-Nusra as a terror group linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Treasury Department then imposed sanctions on its leaders.
“Jabhat al Nusra has claimed responsibility for numerous suicide bombings and other attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent people,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote on December 5, 2012. “Last weekend, disturbing footage emerged of one of their members slaughtering prisoners in cold blood. Extremist militants have also ransacked Christian churches and carried out sectarian beheadings.”
“Among Nusra fighters are many Syrians who say they fought with al Qaida in Iraq, which waged a bloody and violent campaign against the U.S. presence in that country and is still blamed for suicide and car bombings that have killed hundreds of Iraqis since the U.S. troops left a year ago,” David Enderswrote for McClatchy Newspapers late last year.
Niall Green writes that al-Nusra “militants, drawn to the Syrian war under the banner of Islamist jihad, are recruited from the ranks of Sunni extremist veterans of the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.”
It is a well established fact that the United States and the CIA recruited and supported Islamic fighters in the covert war against the Soviet Union and later fashioned al-Qaeda and the Taliban from their ranks. The United States and al-Qaeda have worked together in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya and elsewhere.
“Islamist militias, including those associated with Al Qaeda, have received hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and materiel from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other US-backed forces – all under the watchful eye of the CIA, whose agents oversee the flow of supplies to the Syrian opposition across the borders of Turkey and Jordan,” writes Green.
The Guardian article underscores the indisputable fact that the Syrian opposition is now almost entirely comprised of al-Qaeda terrorists. On the one hand, the United States insists it is opposed to al-Nusra, while on the other it works behind the scenes with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to fund and supply the fanatical Sunni Salafist group calling for the destruction of the United States, the creation of a pan-Islamic state under sharia law, and the installation of an Islamic Caliphate in Syria.
White House “Rethinking” Plan to Arm Syrian Rebels: Wait a Minute, Didn’t They do That Already?
May 9, 2013
By Daniel Taylor, Old-Thinker News
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hegel announced earlier this month that the White House was“rethinking” its opposition to arming Syrian rebels.
Since then, Senator Robert Menendez has introduced legislation to “…allow the U.S. to provide arms, military training and non-lethal aid to the rebels.”
But wait a minute, didn’t we hear reports of this already? The alternative media has pointed out that the Benghazi incident points to a larger operation that the Obama administration is not eager to reveal. The Wall Street Journal reported in November of last year, “The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation.”
What was this operation? According to the Business Insider, it involved sending heavy armaments including mortars, rocket propelled grenades and heat seeking missiles to Syrian rebels. Many of these fighters are openly linked to Al-Qaeda.
As a side note, take a minute to read this 2002 article from the Washington Post describing the U.S. government effort to radicalize Afghan schoolchildren from the late 80′s to early 90′s. Millions were spent on textbooks filled with radical Islamic teachings meant to militarize a generation to fight the Soviet Union. As of 2002, the books were reported to be in continued circulation.
Perhaps the White House – in “rethinking” its opposition to arming Syrian rebels – is seeking retroactive justification for what it has already done. Regardless, the operation has succeeded in planting the seeds of war which may soon force this issue into the memory hole.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hegel announced earlier this month that the White House was“rethinking” its opposition to arming Syrian rebels.
Since then, Senator Robert Menendez has introduced legislation to “…allow the U.S. to provide arms, military training and non-lethal aid to the rebels.”
But wait a minute, didn’t we hear reports of this already? The alternative media has pointed out that the Benghazi incident points to a larger operation that the Obama administration is not eager to reveal. The Wall Street Journal reported in November of last year, “The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation.”
What was this operation? According to the Business Insider, it involved sending heavy armaments including mortars, rocket propelled grenades and heat seeking missiles to Syrian rebels. Many of these fighters are openly linked to Al-Qaeda.
As a side note, take a minute to read this 2002 article from the Washington Post describing the U.S. government effort to radicalize Afghan schoolchildren from the late 80′s to early 90′s. Millions were spent on textbooks filled with radical Islamic teachings meant to militarize a generation to fight the Soviet Union. As of 2002, the books were reported to be in continued circulation.
Perhaps the White House – in “rethinking” its opposition to arming Syrian rebels – is seeking retroactive justification for what it has already done. Regardless, the operation has succeeded in planting the seeds of war which may soon force this issue into the memory hole.
http://beforeitsnews.com/economy/2013/05/world-bank-insider-western-power-structures-collapse-2518712.html
World Bank Insider: Western Power Structures Collapse – Video Report
Thursday, May 9, 2013 13:42
This story from Investment Watch Blog is very telling. The insiders are now speaking out. Not much time remains before the collapse now. Take heed. The video interview with World Bank insider Karin Hudes is down below for you to hear yourselves to verify this information. She verifies not only a ‘bought off’ media but a ‘finance group’ which systematically engages in disinformation which “undermines the core of democracy.”
“Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with one of the most courageous and astute women in the western world: By Karin Hudes, Ex Senior Advisor at the World Bank – which now appears as a whistleblower. It was a very important debate, because Karin Hudes worked 20 years at the World Bank as an economist and lawyer before she reported on the internal fraud and corruption in World Bank and was “Gone”.
World Bank Whistleblower Karin said: “I am now struggling for years to make the Americans realize what is happening. I’m not penetrated, because this finance group has bought the press and systematically engaged in disinformation. This undermines the core of democracy. How citizens can vote without informed opinion without the information to which they are entitled? And so this stranglehold to offer the information is ending very soon.”
We had our discussion with the shocking centralized power
structures started they witness was at the World Bank and Karin had declared that “a study of three Swiss system analysts using mathematical models have shown how the 43,000 transantionalen Konzeren the world intertwined on the Group’s business guides are. There is a group of 147 companies, most of them from the financial sector who control 40% of the net assets of 43,000 companies through these links and also 60% of the revenue …… so this group chaired by the World Bank as a kind of puppet post for the domination of the world took advantage … which is [now] to end. ”
Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/world-bank-insider-western-power-structures-collapse/#pstrGhyMwcLiXEjo.99
The usual suspects are here
And one is a demon to fear
Is it the nerd?
Or the Keynesian turd?
Or the fellow that Niall says is queer?
And one is a demon to fear
Is it the nerd?
Or the Keynesian turd?
Or the fellow that Niall says is queer?
The Limerick King
h/t Omid Malekan for inspiration
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