EU Threatens Members States That Help U.S.

The European Union is upset over recent allegations that some of its nations are hosting secret cia prisons for the United States.

Europeans—sensitive to reports of prisoner abuse by U.S. officials at Guantanamo Bay and ever mindful of the Abu Ghraib scandal—are on edge, thinking that some Eastern European nations have hosted other clandestine American operations. Poland and Romania are believed to be sites for the covert jails—a claim that both nations have denied.

What’s more, cia planes allegedly crossed over or stopped in other nations, such as Germany, while transferring terrorist suspects to the prisons.

So now, the EU’s justice commissioner, Franco Frattini, has threatened to “suspend” member states who cooperate with the U.S. in such operations. Frattini’s idea, raised at a press conference in Berlin November 28, would include the suspension of a nation’s voting rights in the EU Council—the member states’ decision-making body (see EUobserver, November 28).

This is just another slam at member states’ sovereignty. The EU must dictate a common foreign policy for the entire superstate: That’s what any pro-Union federalist would argue, if the Continent is to be truly united.

It’s interesting that such common policy is going in the direction of obstructing U.S. policy—and any nation so bold as to think for itself would lose its say within the Union.

British political analyst Rodney Atkinson says Frattini’s remarks take “the EU’s presumed political imperialism to new heights. … This is just one of many points of friction—on Iraq, international trade, interference in South America, the Middle East, the Galileo satellite system, Germany’s nuclear ambitions, Spain’s support for the anti-American Marxist leader of Venezuela to name but a few—which characterize the growing anti-Americanism of the new Eurostate” (www.freenations.freeuk.com,November 29)

For more on where trans-Atlantic tensions are leading, see our February 2000 article “Atlantic Rift.”