Europe

So Americans wonder why the US’ NATO partners won’t step up in Afghanistan? Well, here’s a clue.

Thanks to Avedon for pointing out this excellent post at NewsHog about the insulting and arrogant threats made by US ambassador John Bellinger to the European Parliament:

US To EU – Shut Up, Or Else
If you haven’t yet seen what John Bellinger, legal adviser to Condi Rice, is telling European nations about their probe into illegal rendition flights, read it and weep for the demise of American diplomacy and the simultaneous demise of any threadbare pretense that the Bush administration give a fig for anything or anyone but itself.

The European Parliament accused Britain, Poland, Italy and other nations in mid-February of colluding with the CIA to transport terror suspects to clandestine prisons in third countries.

In a report that concluded a yearlong investigation, the parliament identified 1,254 secret CIA flights that entered the European airspace since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

It said that these flights were against international air traffic rules and suggested some of them may have carried terror suspects on board in violation of human rights principles.

John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the European Parliament report “unbalanced, inaccurate and unfair” and called on the EU governments to challenge the suggestion that Europeans need to be concerned about secret CIA flights.

“I can understand concerns about specific incidents but we should not somehow suggest that all intelligence activity is something illegal or suspicious,” he said.

Germany, Italy and several other EU countries have been carrying out their own inquiries into secret CIA activities in Europe, probes Bellinger said “have not been helpful with respect to necessary cooperation between the United States and Europe.”

“I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation, that’s simply a fact of life,” Bellinger told reporters after meeting legal advisers to EU governments in Brussels.

EU parliamentarians have rejected Bellinger’s criticism and called on the United States to address concerns that some flights have carried kidnapped terror suspects.

“People are imprisoned without being tried first. That is unacceptable. (The U.S.) should open up to us and tell us where they’re flying and who they’re carrying,” said Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch member of the European Parliament.

[…]Bellinger also said the United States would refuse any Italian extradition request for CIA agents indicted in the alleged abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, one of the cases the European Parliament focused on in its inquiry.

“We’ve not got an extradition request from Italy. If we got an extradition request from Italy, we would not extradite U.S. officials to Italy,” he said.

If you read that as a blatant threat – stop these probes into our illegal actions or we will halt all our sharing of intelligence on international terrorism – then I think you’d be right there with how EU national governments will read it. If you read it as an assertion of the Bush administration’s right, by virtue of sheer might, to break international law and the laws of other nations then you’d agree with how Europeans will read it. If you read it as a blatant, American-exceptionalist, denial of international human rights and the right of other nations to apply their laws to American government personnel living and working in those very countries, with or without diplomatic immunity, then you’d be correct on that too.

Then, Bellinger utters a blatant lie:…
Read whole post

I’d read about it earlier in the week but didn’t post, (and now Cernig has done a way better job of it than I would have anyway) as I was much too angry at the shameless and malevolent disdain for even the minimum international standards of behaviour that Bellinger displayed to put my anger into any coherent form. I just had to let it go.

But of course you can’t let these things go: all these small angers, postponed, eventually coalesce into one big ugly anger. The US can’t keep showing such naked contempt like this for it’s supposed allies for very much longer – and it’s hardly the first time – and if USanians think Europeans are America-haters now, just keep on with this kind of thug diplomacy and see what happens. Soon the US won’t have a friend left in the bloody world.

Image from Bartcop.