In this issue:

Schroeder To Attend Commemoration of 1944 Polish Uprising

Buttiglione: 'Franco-German Axis' in Italy's Interest

House of Commons Issues Report on Iraq Security Failure

British Court Inquiry into Iraq Prison Abuse

Regional Christian Democrats Embrace Maglev

CDU Neo-Cons Target Labor Force

Cossiga Praises British Intelligence, Slams Chirac

Missile Defense Sites in Eastern Europe?

From Volume 3, Issue Number 31 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Aug. 3, 2004

Western European News Digest

Schroeder To Attend Commemoration of 1944 Polish Uprising

In an important gesture toward conciliation between Germany and Poland, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder travelled to Warsaw on Aug. 1, to attend numerous official events in commemoration of the Polish uprising 60 years ago, which was crushed after two months by the German forces.

Schroeder was to meet with Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka and State President Alexander Kwasniewski, and lay wreaths at three different monuments: 1) for the participants and victims of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising; 2) at for the juvenile Poles that died in the Polish struggle for liberation; 3) for the participants and victims of the all-Warsaw uprising of 1944. At the conclusion of the events, Schroeder will give a speech, and there will be a concert in commemoration of the events of 60 years ago.

Schroeder, who was in Warsaw July 30 for talks with former Prime Minister Leszek Miller, said that he gladly accepts the invitation, which he considers a "great honor," and he will also attend a special ceremony during which a statue symbolizing the 180,000 Polish victims of the Nazi military crack-down against the uprising, which also destroyed most of Warsaw, will be unveiled.

Buttiglione: 'Franco-German Axis' in Italy's Interest

"The Franco-German Axis is in the interest of Italy," declared Rocco Buttiglione, the new Italian EU Commission nominee, Il Sole 24 Ore reported July 31. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in order to appease his government ally UDC party, and avoid a government crisis, has appointed Buttiglione, a UDC member and current Minister Without Portfolio, to replace outgoing EU competition commissioner Mario Monti. In his first interview after the appointment, Buttiglione announced a break both from Monti's previous budget formalism, as well as from Monti's hostility toward the Franco-German axis. Buttiglione's words would not have been well received by Berlusconi and his Anglo-Italian entente cordiale.

"The Italian interest in an entente with France and Germany is greater than with any other countries," Buttiglione said. "Italy must work to relaunch the French-German axis, which must play the pivot" in EU politics. Buttiglione noted that France and Germany, together, account for 50% of EU GDP; he defends the decision not to proceed with sanctions against Paris and Berlin for violation of the Maastricht Stability Pact, saying that, "had we punished France and Germany with sanctions up to 0.5% of GNP," and "thrown them into a recession, we Italians would have suffered first."

However, Buttiglione warns France and Germany that they should not play a "directorate," but rather play the "pivot," which means "organize consensus with everybody, Commission included."

Buttiglione then called for reforming the Stability Pact, introducing the "golden rule" that investment expenses do not count as deficit. If the Stability Pact is an obstacle to achieve "the target of 3% in research and innovation, established in Lisbon," then, the pact is wrong. "Instead of forcing cuts to current expenses, the Pact has so far produced cuts in investments."

House of Commons Issues Report on Iraq Security Failure

A report, released July 29 by the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, blames an "insufficient number of troops" for the breakdown in security in Iraq. The document says: "We conclude that the violence in Iraq stems from a number of sources, including members of the former regime, local Islamists, criminal gangs and Al Qaeda.... Iraq has become a 'battleground' for Al Qaeda, with appalling consequences for Iraqi people... However, we also conclude that the coalition's failure to bring law and order to parts of Iraq created a vacuum into which criminal elements and militias have stepped in...."

The report found it "disappointing" that some countries—without naming them— had not committed forces in Iraq.

The 181-page report was published by the 13-member cross-party committee a month and a day after the June 28 handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi administration in Baghdad.

British Court Inquiry into Iraq Prison Abuse

A high court hearing in London July 28 on abuses by British troops in Iraq, heard testimony from a lawyer representing the families of Iraqi civilians, who were allegedly killed by British forces. A hotel worker, who had been imprisoned near Basra, in British-occupied southern Iraq, said that he and others were hooded, beaten on the neck, chest, and genital areas, kick-boxed against a wall, and ordered to "dance like Michael Jackson." He said his fellow detainee, Baha Mousa, who died in custody, "appeared to have much worse ill-treatment than the others."

The High Court will decide whether to conduct a full inquiry into the Iraqi civilian deaths, which could open the way to criminal prosecutions of British troops involved. The Blair government has refused to hold such inquiries.

Regional Christian Democrats Embrace Maglev

The Upper Lausitz regional CDU section has embraced maglev development as a prominent item in its Saxony campaign platform, but the Saxon state governor clings to conventional railway grids for Saxony.

The Upper Lausitz regional CDU in August 2002 passed a resolution with the following points: the party and its members in the national parliament shall launch an initiative for a maglev track from Munich to Wroclaw, Poland, via Nuremberg, and the three Saxon cities Chemnitz, Dresden, Goerlitz.

Apart from pointing to the immediate benefits for maglev development in Germany as a whole, and in the eastern states of Germany in particular, the resolution stated that such a German-Polish maglev project would also "represent a signal toward EU expansion to the east."

CDU Neo-Cons Target Labor Force

Friedrich Merz, deputy chairman of the CDU parliamentary group, called on July 26 for the elimination of workers' protection from layoffs to be eliminated, on the bizarre grounds that if workers cannot be fired, no new jobs can be created.

Christian Wulff, Governor of Lower Saxony, initially called for a general return to the 40-hour work-week, but then retracted it.

Edmund Stoiber, Governor of Bavaria (and chairman of the CDU's sister party, the CSU), wants to cut the state budget by 500 million euros per fiscal year, with the aim of having a fully "balanced budget" by no later than 2007. This translates into average cuts of 15% of every single state budget.

Cossiga Praises British Intelligence, Slams Chirac

In a July 24 interview in Italy's Corriere della Sera on issues involving maneuvers inside the Italian intelligence services, former State President Francesco Cossiga zeroed in on "Gaullist Chirac," a reference to French President Jacques Chirac, whom he called "anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, who follows the path of Vichy's fascist France."

Cossiga recommends that Italy reform its intelligence structure on the model of Britain. Recalling that when he reformed Italian intelligence in 1978 (shortly before Aldo Moro was kidnapped), he appointed members of the super-secret freemasonic P2 lodge to the top of Italian intelligence. Cossiga exclaimed: "That ridiculous story about the P2! Serious people never took it into consideration." Cossiga seems particularly worried that Carabinieri General Vittorio Savino, the candidate to replace current SISDE (Italian Intelligence) head Mario Mori, because of "high-level political protection" which evidently Cossiga's synarchist masters do not like.

Missile Defense Sites in Eastern Europe?

Several media, including the London Guardian, Jane's Defense Weekly, and the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborscza, have recently reported that the Bush Administration is planning to build ballistic missile defense (BMD) bases in eastern or southeastern Europe. For about eight months, negotiations have been taking place between U.S. government officials, from the Pentagon and the State Department, and the governments of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.

One BMD interceptor rocket site in Alaska is operational, a second one in California will soon be operational. The U.S. government has reached agreements with the British and Danish governments on upgrading BMD radar stations in Greenland and northern England. Now, a new BMD radar station and a third BMD interceptor rocket base are to be built in Europe.

According to the Guardian, the BMD negotiations are being led by Undersecretary of State John Bolton on the U.S. side. The paper also refers to a statement made by Lt.-Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, who told Congress earlier this year of plans to build a third BMD base in Europe.

Poland seems to be the most likely country for the planned BMD sites. Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Boguslaw Majewski was quoted by several press, saying: "We are very interested in becoming a concrete part of the [BMD] arrangement. We have been discussing this with the Americans since the end of last year."

A senior Polish source told EIW that "nothing so far is fixed" on the BMD issue, even though the US government "is working hard on it."

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