New EU anti-terrorist body will be 'like KGB'
Irish Sun (ANI) Saturday 2nd April, 2011
Senior European administrative officials are planning to set up a new European Union counter-terrorism agency, which critics warn, could turn into a Europe-wide secret police force that would be "like the KGB".
UK Independence Party MP Godfrey Bloom said: "My worry is that it would be less like America's CIA and more like Russia's KGB."
The move is likely to infuriate Britain's security and intelligence service MI5 and MI6 chiefs as British spies could be forced to share information with European agents.
EU counter-terrorism director Olivier Luyckx envisions the new organisation working alongside the EU's new diplomatic corps, headed by Foreign Affairs High Commissioner Baroness Cathy Ashton.
Luyckx had called for a series of existing EU security agencies including Europol, Eurojust, Cosi, Frontex and Cepol to be pulled together in one body with sweeping powers in the European Parliament in Brussels earlier this week.
"There is new room for action at EU level. This is how I see the change: To set up a system that would mirror the one that is being set up for monitoring external crises, a one-stop shop for information-sharing," the Daily Express quoted him, as saying.
Austria and Belgium had first proposed a European intelligence service after the Madrid train bombing in 2004, but the move was rejected by Britain and some other EU member nations as yet another unnecessary extension of the Brussels bureaucracy.
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