SPINWATCH EXCLUSIVE 

Europe’s leaders are sleepwalking into the issue of MEP’s links with commercial interests, warns a new report launched today by SpinWatch.

The report, Too Close for Comfort? investigates potential conflicts of interest of some MEPs, including: 

* MEPs who accept paid work and hospitality from businesses with a vested interest in their legislative work

* MEPs with a financial interest in industries they promote

* MEPs who are in key legislative positions – for example, chairing parliamentary committees – while at the same time being involved with powerful business lobby groups.

The report argues that these potential conflicts of interest demand the attention of Europe’s leaders, more so than the recent scandals involving MEP’s expenses.

Too Close for Comfort? profiles 12 MEPs from the UK, Germany, France, Finland and Romania. Their activities are seen as illustrative of these potential conflicts of interest but are not deemed extraordinary.

David Morrison, 8 July 2008

On 11 June 2008, 6 people, who had occupied the offices of Raytheon in Derry and destroyed computers, were acquitted of criminal damage by a Belfast jury.  Raytheon is a huge US arms manufacturer, with sales of $20 billion in 2006 and over 70,000 employees worldwide.  It makes Patriot, Tomahawk, Cruise and Sidewinder missiles, and much more besides. 

The action which gave rise to the criminal charges took place on 9 August 2006 during Israel’s war on Lebanon, in which well over 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli bombing and shelling.  On 30 July 2006, an Israeli aircraft targeted a residential building in Qana in southern Lebanon with a Raytheon-supplied “bunker buster” bomb.  As a result, 28 civilians, from two extended families, the Hashems and the Shaloubs, were killed.  The dead included 14 children.

This event led to 9 members of the Derry Anti War Coalition occupying Raytheon’s offices in Derry ten days later.  They remained there until forcibly removed by police in riot gear about 8 hours later.

Nigel Green, 7 July 2008

NORTHUMBRIA Police is one of Britain’s biggest and busiest forces. It employs more than 4,000 officers and has a budget of around £320 million a year. Of that, more than £1 million is spent on its PR department. However, as a freelance journalist based in Northumberland, I am frequently amazed at how peaceful the area is – or at least if you believe the force’s press office. Despite the force now paying to staff its press office on Saturdays and Sundays, there are whole weekends when not one crime is released to the media.
 

Nicholas Jones,  1 July 2008 

Hand to hand combat between the government and political correspondents would continue if the Conservatives were elected because an administration led by David Cameron would be just as determined to try to control the news agenda.

This was the conclusion of journalists and press officers at a seminar held by the Westminster Media Forum (1.7.2008). The two sides felt that the politicisation of civil service information officers, and the likelihood that any future government would find itself on the defensive, meant that further trench warfare was inevitable.

Sam Gardiner, 1 July, 2008

Generate a casus belli.  Fabricate a situation that causes war.  Make it look as if it were the Iranians.  It’s the ultimate spin. 

In an article released on Sunday by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker Magazine, we learned the White House has met, considered and is probably working to fabricate a situation that could be used by the United States as a pretext for attacking Iran.  

Hersh tells us of a brainstorming session in the Vice President’s office.  The topic of the session was casus belli.  How can we get the Iranians to do something that will make it appear as if they started it, as if they were the bad guys?  

Based upon the article and what we have seen from other sources, it seems to me it’s possible to unravel the strategy probably discussed at that meeting.  What’s the US do?  How could a war with Iran be fabricated?

On the surface, the expanded US covert operations against Iran seem like pin pricks.  The US is training and supporting at least four Iranian minority groups to conduct attacks against targets inside Iran.  Soldiers of the Revolutionary Guard have been killed.  Soldiers and police have been kidnapped.  A cultural center was bombed.  An air base in Tehran was struck.  All are relatively minor incidents.  

I see a pattern, however, that goes back over 20 years.  It’s a pattern the United States seems to favor for starting wars.

Andy Rowell and Michael Gillard, 1 July 2008

A spin doctor behind David Davis and his much-vaunted "freedom" campaign against creeping state surveillance is an influential figure in the worldwide promotion of identity cards.

Kevin Bell is vice-president of Fleishman-Hillard, a global public relations firm representing security companies that have introduced ID cards in the United States and Spain. Opposition to the Government's move to introduce a British ID card is a major plank of the David Davis for Freedom campaign website, which Fleishman-Hillard also set up.

Mr Bell has been close friends with Mr Davis for more than 20 years. But they appear to be on opposite sides of the national debate that the politician is hoping to spark about Britain's surveillance society.

Andy Rowell, 1st July 2008

It is listed in one of the world’s top ten most notorious jails. Just the name Black Beach sends shivers down the spine of any convicted felon. The jail in Malabo, in Equatorial Guinea in central Africa has a gruesome reputation. Torture and starvation of inmates is said to be routine.

The human rights organization Amnesty International describes incarceration in the prison as “a slow, lingering death sentence”. One political campaigner from the country, released in 2006 said bluntly. “Prisoners are tortured and just disappear and die. They weight their bodies with rocks and throw them in the sea. Their families never know what happened to them.”

Equatorial Guinea is run by the iron-fist of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who seized power in a coup in 1979. Human rights groups say Mr Obiang’s corrupt regime is one of the worst abusers of rights in Africa. His reputation is fierce and he is said to enjoy eating the brains and testicles of his political opponents.

This gruesome fate is unlikely to meet Black Beach’s most famous current inmate, the British mercenary Simon Mann, who had admitted to being central to an international plot in 2004 to overthrow the government of this oil-rich state. In his show trial this week, Mann pleaded guilty to being a member of a coup attempt to replace Mr Obiang with Severo Moto, an exiled opposition leader living in Spain.

Sam Gardiner, 24 June 2008

The past few days have been overwhelming.  I had a notion that during the marketing of the US strike on Iran I would write something when I came across the kinds of exaggerations and creations that were used to prepare us for the invasion of Iraq.  I have gotten way behind. 

• The Israeli Exercise.  We got a big one on Friday.  The New York Times’ Michael Gordon gave us another one of his special stories.  This time it was a leak from unspecified sources, “several American officials.”   He described an Israeli air force exercise that had been conducted in early June, according to him, to show Iran that Israel has the capability to attack without the United States.  The description of Israeli capabilities was an exaggeration, and the story was probably a coordinated release between the US and Israeli governments.  I did have a chance to write about this one: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/is-israel-really-preparin_b_108314.htm
  

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, 23 June 2008

“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.¹ Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, writes Naomi Klein, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’.”² Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear will suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.

Eveline Lubbers, 20 June 2008

Last week, 12 June 2008, the Swiss investigative reporters program Temps Present revealed that Nestle had infiltrated Attac Switzerland, for more than a year. The food multinational paid Securitas, one of Switzerland's largest security firms, to plant a woman in the protest group from the summer of 2003 until 2004.

Using a false name the infiltrator participated in meetings and preparation sessions around the time of the July 2003 G8 summit in Evian. After the summer members of the group started editing a book about the “Nestlé Empire.” As a co-author she had complete access to the group's documentation and to all Attac’s email contacts around the world, including information on union members in Colombia fighting for workers-rights in Nestle plants. Such information is potentially dangerous in the wrong hands; in the past people have been killed just for being active organizers.

The Securitas agent never gave an address or phone number and refused to appear in any Attac photos, but the group considered this her personal right. After the work on the Nestle book had finished, she disappeared and could not be reached. However, through an anonymous call to the Suisse anti-corruption hot line of Transparency International, her story reached the desks of the television reporters of Temps Present.