CIA-EU: The Embarrassment of Stitches

It will stitch. It will hurt. The revelations about what individual European Governments knew, saw, concealed and tolerated. (Their Secret Services, to be more to the point; but what are Secret Services, if they do not share their secrets with their paymasters?)

The USA have deliberately chosen to embarrass their European allies at this point. The confirmations from non-American sources of the CIA-EU cooperation, seem traceable to CIA-manipulations, like the ones revealed in yesterday's Sueddeutsche Zeitung and in the Los Angeles Times.

There might be a defensive and a revengeful side to that: After the Washington Post revelations of November, the European locations had to be abandoned and the prisoners transferred to Egypt. That made the existing arrangements with individual European secret services redundant. Along the defensive line, implying the Europeans in the waterboarding practices, makes sense as regards the world public opinion. If there is also an element of backlash in it, it must have been calculated so as not to stand in the way of what the USA may have as their objective in budgeoning their allies in this way.

So, what can their objective be?

I would opt for: Splitting.

Splitting and dividing the European governments amongst themselves. Caught in the act, every Government will have to justify itself before its public opinion. We can expect ministers whitewashing themselves, pointing at scapegoats in their secret services. We can expect fingerpointing by one country to another and vice-versa. And at the end of the day, a common EU security policy will be farther away than ever. This is an imperial interest: "divide et impera".

A more practical outcome that the USA may hope for, is a further estrangement of (East-) European countries, the ones who are already up to above their knees in this mud, from the other ones. That may go up to the point, where they will dissociate completely from existing common EU-security and human rights conventions and decide to cooperate as "willing" accomplices with the USA, defying "Old Europe". The new Polish government is a fair candidate for that role.

This is the worst scenario, I can imagine. It is also the most credible, I fear.

I can imagine a dream-scenario, in which Xavier Solana succeeds, on the wave of the coming embarrassments, in making the EU adopt a common charter, that is strong in combating the new kind of non-state enemies and that puts also the necessary tools at his disposal. It would set a new standard, in compliance with human rights and Geneva Conventions, for the treatment of prisoners.

But that's not for now, my friends.