Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-05-Speech-3-195"
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"en.20060705.17.3-195"2
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"Mr President, that this is an emotional debate, and is also being conducted in an emotional way, is something I can understand, but I have to say, in all honesty, that I am horrified by the lack of rationality in it. Accusing all these Members of being motivated by pure anti-Americanism, accusing others of having an ideological barrier in their heads, is to act like children in a sandpit squabbling over their buckets and spades. We need to get beyond that stage if we want to be able to produce a balanced and rational report.
I can understand why some, for political reasons, might not share the view put across by the committee, and I can also understand why others might find the failure to share that view something worthy of scorn. On this occasion, of course, we have done no more than assemble circumstantial evidence rather than watertight proof, quite simply because no head of a secret service is going to come out and say, ‘Yes, of course, that’s how we did it. We abducted people illegally.’ There are people in this House who would probably not notice that they had been illegally abducted if they had been confined to an aircraft, been blindfolded and taken away, but that is irrelevant.
There are many legal systems in which circumstantial evidence can be used as the basis of a trial, and there is circumstantial evidence that is so weighty that it virtually constitutes proof. This is a situation we have found ourselves in in a number of cases. Not everything will turn out to be the way some people, with their conspiracy theories, imagine it to be, but nor is the world as pink and pretty as those imagine who maintain that these things never happened at all, and so this committee has done valuable work in bringing to light at least the tip of an iceberg, for if we want to win the war on terrorism, we can do so only if we are credible, and we can be credible only if we keep to the rules that we lay down to others.
What I would like to see, then, is for this committee to carry on doing what it is doing and come to an objective conclusion. I would, by the way, like to say something to the members of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats: your counterparts in the Council of Europe voted to endorse Mr Marty's report, which, as we have just heard, goes even further than the report before this House, and so I find myself wondering how you will be able to justify it if you decide not to vote in favour of this one."@en1
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