Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-02-14-Speech-3-018"
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"en.20070214.2.3-018"2
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"Mr President, this CIA Committee has been a ‘me too’ exercise from the start. The Council of Europe, under Swiss Senator Dick Marty, produced a report on extraordinary rendition, so the European Parliament had to do one as well.
This report will do little to promote human rights. What it will do is to give comfort and encouragement to the very terrorists who intend to destroy our way of life. If we approve this report, they will know that we are more concerned about the comfort of terrorist suspects than about the safety of the people we represent.
A British Government minister said that the Marty report was ‘as full of holes as a Swiss cheese’, and the Fava report is not much better. As Senator Marty has said, we, with enormously greater resources, have produced little solid material in addition to his own report. We have assembled a great number of press cuttings. We have collected flight information obsessively, with enormous lists of aircraft movements, and we are told that these aircraft
have been owned by companies that
have some connection with the CIA. However, we have no idea who or what was on these flights.
All the way through our work we have sought to conflate flights with renditions. We have simply assumed that CIA flights equate with extrajudicial rendition of suspects. However, the CIA may have all sorts of legitimate reasons to move people and materiel around the world.
We went to Washington determined that senior US politicians should be made to confess their guilt, but we were met by a robust response. The US Administration admits that a few renditions took place in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but far fewer than we wanted to see.
We heard allegations from a number of people who claimed to have been subject to rendition, but with little supporting evidence. We went, at great expense, to Macedonia, but all we learned was that Macedonian hotels and border posts keep rather poor records.
The fact is that our whole exercise was designed to provide a platform for anti-American propaganda. We should all be ashamed of the deep undercurrent of anti-Americanism in this House. The Fava report is its latest manifestation.
However, it was not enough to attack the US: we attacked Member State governments as well, accusing them of collusion with American security services. For my part, I should be concerned if European governments did
cooperate with the US in the war on terror.
In particular, the virulent attack on my constituent, the British minister Geoff Hoon, by our committee Vice-Chairwoman Baroness Ludford, breached the norms of courteous political discourse and stands as a reproach to our House.
We are right to insist on human rights and humane treatment for terrorist suspects, but we cannot expect either European or American security services to operate under constant scrutiny amounting to harassment from MEPs."@en1
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