Unable to Face Reality? Blame the CIA!

From The Sunday Times

September 28, 2008

CIA ‘backed’ Irish battle against Brussels treaty

Nicola Smith Brussels

FIRST it was the sheer ingratitude of the Irish, then it was the failure of the Dublin government to mount a successful yes campaign. Now Brussels has found a new explanation as to why Ireland voted down the European Union treaty in June - a CIA and Pentagon-backed plot, devised by American neoconservatives to weaken the EU. The European parliament wants an inquiry into whether Declan Ganley, the multi-millionaire chairman of the Libertas group that campaigned against the treaty, could be in the pockets of US defence and intelligence services.

The calls have been led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the firebrand 1968 student leader turned Green MEP, who pointed to Irish press reports that “revealed there possibly exists a link between the financiers of the no campaign in Ireland and the Pentagon as well as the CIA. “If proved true, this would clearly show there are forces in the US willing to pay people to destabilise a strong and autonomous Europe”, he said. Cohn-Bendit’s suspicions were backed by Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European parliament: “The facts must be put on the table. We cannot allow Europe to be harmed by people who demand transparency but do not provide it themselves.”

Last week the parliament’s most senior MEPs discussed the issue and urged the Irish Standards in Public Office Commission to investigate Ganley’s finances. “The suggestion is not only wrong but ludicrous,” said a CIA spokesman. Speculation by MEPs appears to rest on the fact that Ganley’s company Rivada Networks has telecoms contracts with the US military worth more than €200m (£159m). He disclosed last week that he loaned €200,000 of his own money to fund the Libertas campaign against the treaty. It is not clear on what terms the loan was given or if it breached rules on political donations. Ganley said he considered Pöttering’s remarks to be “absolutely outrageous” and insisted that neither he nor Libertas had done anything wrong.

Cohn-Bendit pointed to the right-wing Heritage Foundation in Washington as the intellectual source for the CIA’s plans to derail European unity. His claims were dismissed by Sally McNamara, a senior EU policy analyst at the foundation. “This administration is one of the most pro-European we have seen in a long time. There is no sinister anti EU conspiracy,” she said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4837672.ece

Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 1:27 am

Oh this is rich, can't wait to show my hubby this one. I am laughing so hard I almost wet myself. If the Irish were 1/2 as stupid as most of Europe portrays them as being, their IQ would not even reach double digits. I talk to Ireland on a weekly basis. I visit yearly, if not more. Not only do I go to see my in-laws, but I have made friends over there also. The Irish people voted NO on the treaty because there are still plenty of Irish living who lost fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, cousins etc to gain their independence. Most are not willing to sell this hard earned sovereignty for the promise of some shiny baubles. They saw how the "Celtic Tiger" died a quick death when they surrendered their punt for the Euro. They have watched the EU outlaw their sugar beat and mandate cane sugar. They read the small print where if they voted "YES" they would lose their constitutional right to vote on treaties in the future. The EU needs to face reality, the Irish said "NO" and the harder they push, the more you hear the people on the streets of Ireland talking about decreasing their involvement with the EU or pulling out all together. The Irish know what they want, it is what they have striven hundreds of years to obtain, their sovereignty.

Proud American and wife of a wonderful LEGAL immigrant from Ireland
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."-Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

If At First You Don't Succeed . . .

http://thepensivequill.am/

If At First You Don’t Succeed ...

In truth, the treaty is so gargantuan and garbled that no sane person would undertake to read it, never mind understand it. Its size and lack of plain English is a fundamental flaw that cannot be overcome unless it is changed – Matt Cooper

It hasn’t gone away, you know. The Lisbon Treaty, just like a bad smell, continues to linger in public discourse prompted by ministerial comment and government sponsored surveys. Earth shattering news it most definitely is not to learn from the media that the EU is expecting the Irish government to buckle and hold another referendum in 2009.

In Gramscian terms it looks like the Dublin political class is reconnoitring the commanding heights in a war of position before manoeuvring to shaft the electorate and give the middle finger to democratic sentiment. Matt Cooper in the latest issue of the Sunday Times alerts his readers to a government belief that in order to reverse the defeat it suffered in the referendum, it need only win over one quarter of those who voted ‘no’ on the basis that they did not understand the treaty last time around.

True the government is Tower of Babel-like in its reconstruction of a shattered European strategy, evidenced from the public variance between the positions of Taoiseach Cowen and Foreign Affairs Minister Martin. But there is a sneaking suspicion that the real intent is to be found in the position of European Affairs Minister Dick Roche when three weeks ago he informed the public of his private view that another referendum is the way to go in tackling the thorny issue of the rejected Lisbon Treaty.

Article continues, click here for full article...

No Respect for 'NO' Vote

www.free-europe.org

A plan to circumvent the Irish "no" vote begins to emerge
The main pro-Lisbon opposition parties in Ireland have also reacted angrily to suggestions of a second referendum. A spokeswoman for Fine Gael said that talk of a second referendum only served to highlight the "arrogance and lack of respect" the government has for voters. A spokesman for the Labour Party said comments about a second referendum were "not helpful" and that there can be no question of simply putting the same proposition to the people again. Continue

http://www.free-europe.org/blog/index.php

Oh, La, La! Sarkozy In Ireland

www.irishexaminerusa.com

He Came, He Saw, He Stared Into Our Eyes

By Charley Brady
It's one of those times that I really didn't want to be right, but you don't always get what you want. Especially if the country you live in insists on electing time after time a group of gutless windbags whom you would not wish to have in your corner under any circumstances, let alone when being visited by Emperor Bonaparte Sarkozy. Several columns back I said that if the Majestic One visited us there would probably be some serious sucking up from our corner. Yes, you guessed it. It did so come to pass.

Continue reading, click

http://www.irishexaminerusa.com/mt/2008/07/30/he_came_he_saw_he_stared_into.html

Vote Early, Vote Often

www.economist.com

Ireland and the Lisbon Treaty
Vote Early, Vote Often
Jul 24th 2008 DUBLIN

From The Economist print edition

The French President Mollifies his Tone Towards Ireland

DAYS before his visit to Dublin on July 21st, Nicolas Sarkozy had alienated those he hoped to conciliate in his efforts to salvage the European Union’s Lisbon treaty. The Irish government was dismayed when the French president privately told party members, only four weeks after Ireland’s voters had decisively rejected Lisbon, that they would have to vote again. His leaked comments suggested that he would press his hosts into taking an early decision to hold a second referendum. It was the latest in a series of gaffes that have strained relations between the two governments, starting when the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, warned the Irish that they would be the first victims if they said no to Lisbon.

Continue reading, click:

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11792298

Irish Say No To 2nd Lisbon Referendum

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/mick_fealty/blog/2008/07/28/71_per_cent_of_irish_people_do_not_want_a_lisbon_ii




71 per cent of Irish people do not want a Lisbon II

Mick Fealty

Monday, July 28, 2008, 05:37 PM GMT [

General]

The Irish Foreign Minister, Micheál Martin, is not happy. A survey carried out by leading Irish pollster Red C Research has discovered that a massive 71 per cent of those polled do not want to vote in a second referendum. The sample was of just over 1000 respondents (Mori considers 1,000 sufficient to replicate the results from higher samples).

The EurActive site

extrapolates the figures for the poll into a future referendum and concludes that: The new figures would mean that, compared to the first run on 12 June, where 53.4 per cent of the Irish rejected the text the no camp could further increase its lead by 6 percentage points to a commanding 24-point lead in a rerun.

But the reason the Minister gives for being so unhappy is that it was commissioned by the London based Eurosceptic think tank,

Open Europe. He considers it a meddling exercise in Irish internal affairs: "I would like to know what prompted a British organisation with a strong ideological bias to commission a poll into Irish attitudes to Europe at this time. Ireland's future in Europe is a matter for decision by Irish people."

A fair enough point so far as it goes, especially given the troubled history between the two countries. Except, as Lorraine Mullally of Open Europe tells Brassneck: "How is it interfering to ask people how they might vote in a future re-run referendum? It's not as though it hasn't happened before, look at Nice? It's clear that people don't want a referendum. The truth is the government is panicking, since it's strategy of taking the country back to the polls is in trouble".

There have been accusations from

Dick Roche, the Minister of State for European Affairs, that the questions were 'extraordinarily skewed' on Newstalk yesterday morning. That is, perhaps, a line the Minister would be well advised not to pursue too rigourously.

In the immediate wake of the referendum, my Brassneck colleague Richard asked

why had there been no official exit poll from the national broadcaster RTE? He also picked up on a mystery at the time: ie, the selective leaking of the results of a EuroBarometer poll to certain papers days before the actual results were released: But much, much worse is this selective leaking of information from an unpublished poll, supposedly a flash Eurobarometer survey. That selective leaking is driving debate, and is going to further increase distrust in politicians - in Dublin and Brussels - based on confusion.

The poll should have been published properly, on the EU website, so that it could have been interrogated properly by lots of different people. What was the methodology? What research company was used? Where were they based? What were the questions? What are the demographic cross-tabs? Who actually commissioned it? Were there unprompted response questions? Did interviewers probe further on responses like "I didn't understand the treaty"?

In the end, there was, as

Open Europe reports on it its own blog, some serious discrepancies in detail between these briefings and the actual results when they were finally came out:
The Times story on 18 June ran with the headline "Irish voters failed to understand the Lisbon Treaty", citing a figure from the EU Commission stating that, amongst No voters, "40 per cent blamed the fact that they did not understand the treaty."

By then of course, the selective briefing had already driven and given shape to the national debate. It looks like a serious attempt, by the European Commission/Irish government to skew the terms on which that debate took place. This latest poll seems purer than the driven snow by comparison. And

it is already beginning to make itself felt on the super coalition of government and opposition.

This is likely to continue to be a multilateral battle of wills, with British Eurosceptics, French centralists, and an Irish government unused to being 'called' on it own strategic mores battling for significant mind share of the Irish people.

- Mick Fealty