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To: Yaacov who wrote (15461)	6/20/2002 11:39:29 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Yaacov, as you probably know, the head of Belgium's Gestapo was given the sack last week.... What are you waiting for? Apply! Brussels dispatch Brussels and the civil liberties balance Belgium's secret service chief has resigned following accusations that politicial correctness prevented her organisation from rooting out Islamist extremists, writes Ian Black Friday June 7, 2002 Godelieve Timmermans is not exactly a household name in her native land. But the Belgian lawyer achieved instant fame this week when she resigned suddenly as head of the country's secret service, pilloried for not having done enough to combat Islamic extremism in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the US. Ms Timmermans, a French-speaking liberal who had run the Surete de l'Etat for the last two years, told the justice minister she could no longer function effectively because of "a climate of mistrust" in her headquarters, an unprepossessing Brussels office block called Northgate. Backstabbing and tensions in Belgium's tiny secret world spilled out of the shadows when a report by a parliamentary oversight body - the "R" committee - was mysteriously leaked to the media. It blamed the Surete -the equivalent of Britain's MI5 or the FBI in the US- for failing to deal adequately with fundamentalist militants. Most damaging of all, said critics, was the charge that fear of breaching current standards of political correctness had prevented the security service from warning the government of the danger: many of the country's 300 mosques or community centres served as recruiting points for extremist Muslim groups, according to the report. Committee members said that young Arab immigrants who were not yet integrated into Belgian society were the main target of Islamist organisations numbering several hundred people. Sensitivities are understandable. Belgium, with a population of just 10 million, has 350,000 Muslims hailing from Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, and it would be wrong to target them as a group at a time when Islamophobia is on the rise. Officials, rightly worried about undermining integration, stress that the vast majority are law-abiding citizens who have nothing to do with extremism or terrorism. So there was real embarassment when it was revealed that members of North African fundamentalist groups had received military training and watched Osama bin Laden videos in the rolling countryside of the Belgian Ardennes, more famous for its beer and cheese than preparations for jihad. Insiders insist that Ms Timmermans was doing a reasonable job in difficult circumstances, largely resulting from the fact that the government did not take the Surete's work seriously enough. With other European security and intelligence services making hay while the post-September 11 sun shines, Belgium's is still badly under-resourced. Amazingly, the Surete is 80 posts short of its full complement of 480 employees. Its Islamic section, which had 18 officers in 1999, had only 10 left last year. It is also bent double under a civil liberties tradition that makes it almost impossible to even tap telephones, a basic tool for counter-terrorist surveillance. "Not being able to do that is like having one hand tied behind your back," said one expert. The Surete has never enjoyed a very impressive reputation. During the cold war, when Soviet espionage was the main worry, Belgium was shaken by scandals involving extremists of left and right, including Flemish separatists. A neo-fascist group turned out to have been manipulated by government agents. The Surete had no formal legal status until a decade ago. It started monitoring Muslim militants after the Iranian revolution in 1979 and rounded up a weapons-smuggling network serving the Algerian Armed Islamic Group in the mid-1990s. But the US has often criticised Belgium as a soft touch for terrorists and criminals because of its porous frontiers, liberal asylum laws and the failings of its security agencies. The FBI complained bitterly after September 11 that the Belgian judiciary was withholding key information needed to track down al-Qaida activists before intelligence leads turned cold. In one example of laxity, a staggering 19,000 Belgian passports have been stolen since 1990. Two found their way to the men who murdered the Afghan Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, last year. And one of them, a young Belgian-based Tunisian, had been spotted by the Surete as long ago as 1998, but they had no inkling of his intentions. Nezar Trabelsi, another Tunisian, has been questioned in connection with a plot to blow up the US embassy in Paris. Several other Belgian men of foreign descent were arrested as suspected al-Qaida members by US forces in Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban last November. Not everything is clear about Ms Timmermans' decision to quit, but - in a detail worthy of Maigret or John Le Carré - there are suspicions that the leak of the "R" committee report may have been designed to encourage her to go. Observers also suggest she fell foul of prejudice against women in a still largely male organisation. It is certainly bad news for attempts by one small European democracy to tackle sensitive issues of intelligence-gathering, civil liberties and security: no different, though on a vastly smaller scale, to the difficulties encountered by American law enforcement agencies after September 11. "Look at the problems they are discovering in the US," said Jean-Claude Delepiere, chairman of the "R" committee. "The same difficulties occur even with services that have enormous means compared to ours." The political implications are worrying too. Filip Deman, a leader of the anti-immigrant Vlaams Blok, warned that Belgium's elites had been brushing the Muslim "problem" under the carpet for years. "It was taboo to even talk about it under our code of political correctness," he warned. "But this report cannot be ignored." guardian.co.uk

To: Yaacov who wrote (15461)	6/20/2002 12:08:25 PM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 23908

Footnote to my previous post.... Excerpt from the Guardian report: The Surete has never enjoyed a very impressive reputation. During the cold war, when Soviet espionage was the main worry, Belgium was shaken by scandals involving extremists of left and right, including Flemish separatists. A neo-fascist group turned out to have been manipulated by government agents. The Surete had no formal legal status until a decade ago. ____________________ And now, the updated, post-911 version: The Surete has never enjoyed a very impressive reputation. During the war against terrorism, when the rise of Islam was the main worry, Belgium was shaken by scandals involving extremists of left and right, including Flemish separatists. An Islamic group turned out to have been manipulated by government agents.

To: Yaacov who wrote (15461)	6/24/2002 4:05:39 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 23908

In case the Belgian intelligence turns you down, just send your resume to the French.... 911's latest casualties: the heads of DGSE (France's CIA) and DST (France's FBI). LE MONDE \| 22.06.02 \| 14h24 L'Elysée accuse les services secrets d'avoir enquêté sur M. Chirac sous le gouvernement de M. Jospin Convaincu que la DGSE et la DST ont recherché, au Liban et au Japon, des éléments destinés à le compromettre, le président de la République souhaite en remplacer rapidement les directeurs. L'annonce n'est pas encore officielle mais la décision est acquise. Les chefs des services d'espionnage et de contre-espionnage français, dont la nomination incombe au président de la République, doivent être remplacés au cours des semaines à venir. La cause de ces changements n'apparaît pourtant pas ressortir à la seule tradition d'une majorité succédant à une autre. Le directeur général de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), Jean-Claude Cousseran, et son homologue de la Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST), Jean-Jacques Pascal, sont accusés par l'Elysée d'avoir commandité - ou au moins toléré - des investigations visant la personne de Jacques Chirac et d'éventuelles "relations financières" du chef de l'Etat dans deux pays étrangers : le Liban et le Japon. Le soupçon est déjà ancien, mais il est, jusqu'à présent, resté confidentiel. Il a toutefois été clairement formulé à deux reprises par M. Chirac face à M. Jospin, à l'automne 1991, au cours des tête-à-tête hebdomadaires du président et du premier ministre, sans que la cohabitation n'en soit publiquement bouleversée. "C'est scandaleux : vous utilisez les services de l'Etat pour monter des dossiers contre moi", avait accusé M. Chirac, rapportent - en termes concordants - deux sources respectivement proches du chef de l'Etat et de son ancien premier ministre. M. Jospin avait cependant contesté toute manoeuvre relative aux "affaires". [...] lemonde.fr Chirac 'to sack intelligence chiefs for spying on him' By John Lichfield in Paris 24 June 2002 President Jacques Chirac is preparing to settle a personal score with the two main French intelligence services by sacking their top officials. The newly re-elected President, who holds all the levers of power for the first time in five years, suspects the French equivalents of MI5 and MI6 of conspiring with the previous Socialist-led government to investigate his private life and financial dealings. According to the newspaper Le Monde, Mr Chirac will take his revenge in the next few weeks by firing the head of the main French espionage agency, the Direction Générale de La Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) and the principal counter-espionage agency, La Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST). Although it is common for the heads of leading national agencies to be changed by a new government, sources in the Elysée Palace say that Mr Chirac has personal reasons to want to get rid of Jean-Claude Cousseran, the head of the DGSE, and Jean-Jacques Pascal, the head of the DST. [...] news.independent.co.uk