Franz-Hermann Brüner has been reappointed to continue on his corrupt "leadership" of the EU Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF).

Germany’s Franz-Hermann Brüner was expected to be replaced when his six-year stint at the head of the anti-fraud office came to an end next month after widespread criticism of his time in charge.

OLAF was created in 1999 after the corruption scandal that ended Jacques Santer’s tenure as commission president, and has had some success, not least the discovery of widespread fraud at the EU’s statistical office, Eurostat, in 2003.

But the case of German journalist Hans-Martin Tillack, accused of bribing officials for access to information that was highly critical of the EU executive, brought accusations that Brüner was trying to gag the press following highly critical articles about him in Tillack’s magazine, Stern.

The EU ombudsman was highly critical of OLAF’s handling of the Tillack case, with Brüner personally taking much of the flak.

I did a quick search and couldn't find a single mention of the Hans-Martin Tillack scandal in all of TPM or TPM Cafe.  The point of this post is to just catch folks up on what exactly went down in this awful story back in 2004-2005 - and to see how much disdain corrupt governments have for their people.

Hans-Martin Tillack, a journalist, tried to prevent the Belgian Authorities, at the behest of the European Commission, from seizing his computers, address books, telephone records, and 1,000 pages of notes.  Below is an account I wrote last year about the whole episode. The general sources (which are not linked) are to WSJ Europe and varios English-language papers.

 ~~~

One Friday morning in March 2004, a ring of the doorbell woke Hans-Martin Tillack.   Drowsy and dressed only in a t-shirt and boxers, Mr. Tillack opened his door to find six Belgian police officers, who subsequently served him a warrant to search his home and office.   The basis for the search was an accusation that Mr. Tillack had bribed a European Union (“EU”) official to obtain a sensitive dossier pertaining to an internal EU anti-fraud investigation. 

  Pursuant to the warrant, the Belgian police seized over 1,000 pages of documents,  his personal computer, his address book, his bank statements, his 2002 scheduling diary, all of his mobile phones, and a copy of "Spaceship Brussels", one of his published books on the European government.   After the search, the Belgian police arrested Mr. Tillack and held him incommunicado for ten hours,  refusing him access to a lawyer or a phone call to his wife.   When Mr. Tillack objected to the search and arrest, one police officer commented that Tillack should consider himself “lucky” that he did not live in Burma, because “[t]here, journalists get treated much worse.”

At the time of the search, Mr. Tillack was an investigative reporter for the German magazine, Stern.   In early 2002, Mr. Tillack wrote two articles about the ongoing corruption in the European Commission despite the “zero tolerance” pledge of the new administration that had taken over from the previous scandal-plagued Commission.   One of the stories indicated that Eurostat, the EU’s powerful statistical agency, had improper financial dealings with private-sector firms  and had failed to account for millions of euros that disappeared into secret bank accounts.   The material for these articles came from a forty-six page confidential memo that leaked to Mr. Tillack from the European Anti-Fraud Office (“OLAF”).  After refusing to disclose the agency source who leaked the document, OLAF began investigating an allegation that Mr. Tillack had bribed an official for the document.   However, later in spring 2004, journalists discovered that the source of the bribery allegation was the press spokesman for the European budget commissioner who oversees OLAF.   As the chairman of OLAF’s supervisory committee admitted, the bribery case “was purely on the basis of hearsay evidence from an informant, one informant, who happened to be in one of the public relations offices of the commission . . . Any normal person would have to say that somewhere along the line OLAF is trying to get back at (Mr. Tillack).”

Despite the weak evidence against Mr. Tillack, OLAF reported these allegations to the governments of Belgium and Germany and encouraged them to quickly investigate.   While the German authorities found the evidence against Mr. Tillack too weak to investigate, the Belgian police promptly acted on the OLAF report.   Following the raid and Mr. Tillack’s detention, the Belgian police sealed the documents and refused Mr. Tillack access to them.

After the Belgian police seized his materials and released him from custody, Hans-Martin Tillack went to court in Belgium to challenge the search and seizure.  In addition, he filed two applications for interim measures with the European Court of First Instance requesting compensation for his injuries and to prevent OLAF from “obtaining, inspecting, examining or hearing the contents of any documents and information” that resulted from the Belgian search.  He lost (pay per view req'd) on all counts.

And today, Franz-Hermann Brüner was reappointed to another 6-year term. God Bless the Hegemon.

In today's Boston Globe, Richard Cravatts (identified as a "lecturer" at Boston University) took the Newton, Massachusetts head librarian to task for preventing a warrantless seizure of library records and property.

Cravatts seems outraged that anyone, nonethess a librarian or her American Library Association counterparts, should "stymie the investigative efforts of government officials."  He excoriates her for "protecting terrorists" and acting as a "human shield" by simply demanding that the police obtain a warrant before disappearing with library records.  And in a cheap potshot, he tells her to leave those poor officials alone and get back to "mastering the use of the Dewey Decimal System."

Aside from his contempt for those in the library sciences, Cravatts misses the entire point.  He baldly claims that the librarian and her supports have a profound "misunderstanding of both Section 215 of the Patriot Act as well as the protections provided in the Constitution's Fourth Amendment."  He cites to those ivory towers of conservative "thought" at the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation who claim that the founders didn't really know how bad terrorism could be and therefore couldn't have expected the need for executive searches of libraries. They're concern is misplaced.

The Heritage Foundation "scholar" claims that  ''Americans should keep in mind that the Constitution weighs heavily on both sides of the debate over national security and civil liberties."

He's not quite right.  The Bill of Rights was/is a protection for the people against the government.  Certainly, based on Supreme Court precedent, one would have a lower expectation of privacy when you make transactions in a public space (bank account transaction information, trap/trace devices monitoring the numbers [not content] of outgoing phone calls). 

But when an executive official, without even the minimal oversight of a magistrate judge, shows up at your door, or the door of your library, or the door of your school, or the door of your nonprofit group's meeting, or the door of your public company and demands to seize the computers, I hope - and I'm sure if it came to his doorstep, Cravatts would hope - that there was someone as brave as the head librarian to stand up for his rights. Because it isn't the terrorist's rights she was protecting, it was the rights of the good people of Newton that she was saving.

Josh et al.

 The new site looks terrific. Very user friendly, very pleasing on the eyes and very community-oriented. I look forward to posting here and leaving comments - even though I've been a quiet emailer before today.

 Keep up the good work!

- Gnopple