Kick Belgium out of NATO; move NATO offices outside of Belgium.
Save for the decent Flemish there, Belgium is nothing but a national bureaucracy, anyway.
Posted on 06/27/2006 11:31:03 PM PDT by HAL9000
Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt has ordered a probe into whether a Brussels-based banking consortium broke the law when it provided US anti-terror authorities with confidential information about international money transfers.The consortium known as SWIFT – society for worldwide inter-bank financial telecommunications – was brought into the limelight when the New York Times last week reported that officials from the CIA, the FBI and other US agencies had since 2001 been allowed to inspect the transfers.
Prime minister Guy Verhofstadt asked the Belgian justice ministry on Monday (26 June) to investigate whether SWIFT acted illegally in allowing US authorities to inspect the transfers without the support of a Belgian judge.
"We need to ask what are the legal frontiers in this case and whether it is right that a US civil servant could look at private transactions without the approval of a Belgian judge," said government spokesman Didier Seus, according to the International Herald Tribune.
Also on Monday, US president George W. Bush called the media coverage of the SWIFT case "disgraceful" while the European Commission said it had no authority to investigate it.
"The disclosure of this program is disgraceful," Mr Bush said at a Washington news conference according to press reports.
"We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America. And for people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America," he said.
"At first sight, it would appear that there is no European legislation covering this type of transfer," commission spokesman Friso Abbing Roscam said. "Therefore it is a matter for national law."
"Everyone agrees that in the fight against terrorism we do need to have measures against the funding of terrorism," he added. "But the emphasis is that this must be done with full respect in the respect of data privacy."
Although SWIFT is based in Belgium – a European Union member – it is also subject to US laws as it has offices there. The US tapping into confidential bank transfers could therefore be legal as long as it is outside of Belgium where court-approved warrants are required.
The case comes at a time when the EU and the US have been criticised for the extent to which civil liberties can be sacrificed in the war on terrorism.
In May, Europe's highest court of justice overturned an EU-US deal which provides Washington with personal data on airline passengers flying from Europe to the US.
Nearly 8,000 financial institutions in 205 countries use SWIFT, which works as a central global centre operating a secure electronic messaging service.
The networks transmit nearly €4.8 trillion daily between banks, stock exchanges and other institutions.
Looks like all the big players want judges to run wars, countries, companies, etc. Same type of shilling coming out of our domestic traitors, God luv 'em.
L
Kick Belgium out of NATO; move NATO offices outside of Belgium.
Save for the decent Flemish there, Belgium is nothing but a national bureaucracy, anyway.
Time to move the HQ of SWIFT to a non hostile Country and free the Belgians to concentrate their efforts of raping Africa of their natural wealth such as diamonds.
yitbos
There's 2 impure motives at play here, I'd say:
Hatred and envy of the US.
Fear of Muslim terror.
One also has to wonder if the PM is not doing a CYA dance for the crowd. The incessant references to judges just bugs the living $hit out of me though. Is this the standard fall back position for those that just want to throw a little dust in the air???
Any semi-smart terrorist would be using Internet phones or text messages buried in photographs which have less of a chance of being tracked and would move their money as commercial deals on sea containers full of junk.
Actually, that sounds exactly like what the Belgian regulators should be doing.
I would like to think that if we found the French, the Chinese, or the government of Botswana had ordered similar access to U.S.-based financial activities that our regulators would at least check that such access complied with U.S. law.
I thought the NYT said that their public leaking of the secret program wouldn't cause the Europeans to shut down the surveillance.
Didn't the NYT assure us that this wouldn't happen?
They need to be charged with crimes. They have endangered our country (again).
For what it's worth, it was 1996 when I first heard that SWIFT was bugged. But the average terrorist probably hadn't heard about that.
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