Inside the USA

La France, un allié clé dans la guerre contre la terreur.

Enfin.
Enfin, la presse américaine se fait l’écho de l’étroite et efficace collaboration entre les Etats-Unis et la France dans la lutte contre le terrorisme. Il était grand temps de dépasser la mésentente sur l’Irak et de dire au public américain, la vérité sur la réelle volonté française, celle du terrain.

Nightly News, émission d’info de NBC, a fait un sujet de 2mn50 tiré de l’article de Dana Priest, qui parait dans le Washington Post de dimanche :
Help From France Key In Covert Operations.

Extraits probants de l’article (désolé, pas le temps de traduire… week-end en cours…) :

Ganczarski is among the most important European al Qaeda figures alive, according to U.S. and French law enforcement and intelligence officials. The operation that ensnared him was put together at a top secret center in Paris, code-named Alliance Base, that was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.

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John E. McLaughlin, the former acting CIA director who retired recently after a 32-year career, described the relationship between the CIA and its French counterparts as “one of the best in the world. What they are willing to contribute is extraordinarily valuable.”

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But even as Rumsfeld was criticizing France in early 2003 for not doing its share in fighting terrorism, his U.S. Special Operations Command was finalizing a secret arrangement to put 200 French special forces under U.S. command in Afghanistan. Beginning in July 2003, its commanders have worked side by side there with U.S. commanders and CIA and National Security Agency representatives.

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Alliance Base, headed by a French general assigned to France’s equivalent of the CIA — the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) — was described by six U.S. and foreign intelligence specialists with involvement in its activities. The base is unique in the world because it is multinational and actually plans operations instead of sharing information among countries, they said. It has case officers from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States.

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French law, by contrast, encourages intelligence sharing among its police and security services. In fact, since the Napoleonic Code was adopted in 1804, French magistrates have had broad powers over civil society. Today, magistrates in the French Justice Department’s anti-terrorism unit have authority to detain people suspected of “conspiracy in relation to terrorism” while evidence is gathered against them.

The top anti-terrorism magistrate, Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, has said that in the past decade, he has ordered the arrests of more than 500 suspects, some with the help of U.S. authorities. “I have good connections with the CIA and FBI,” Bruguiere said in a recent interview.

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France sent its interrogators to Guantanamo Bay to gather evidence that could be used in French court against the French detainees the United States was holding there. France is the only one of six European nations that continues to imprison detainees returned to it from the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

So it did not surprise many intelligence officers when, in the days after the attacks (du 11 septembre 2001 – ndlr), President Jacques Chirac issued an edict to French intelligence services to share information about terrorism with the U.S. intelligence agencies “as if they were your own service,” according to two officials who read it.

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France was also an early and willing collaborator in other parts of the world, allowing the CIA to fly its top-secret, armed Predator drone, still controversial inside the Pentagon, from France’s air base in the former French colony of Djibouti. Its mission was to kill al Qaeda figures on a classified CIA list of “high-value targets.” On Nov. 3, 2002, CIA officers operating remote controls from the air base took their first shot, killing Abu Ali al-Harithi, the mastermind of the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole, and six others, including Ahmed Hijazi, a naturalized U.S. citizen, in a Yemeni desert.

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France’s willingness to share its dossiers on terrorists has helped the United States make some of its most significant convictions, including those of Ahmed Ressam, who was stopped at the Canadian border on his way to attempt to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, and Zacarias Moussaoui, a Moroccan who once lived in France and is the only person in the United States to have pleaded guilty in the Sept. 11 hijacking plot.

Après la tension sur le conflit irakien :

French fries became “freedom fries” on Air Force One and in congressional cafeterias. Rumsfeld prohibited general officers from telephoning their French counterparts, grounded U.S. planes at the Paris Air Show and disinvited the French from Red Flag, a major U.S. military exercise in which they had participated for decades.

Three months into the dispute, the State Department and the CIA made a case for France, citing its intelligence cooperation. Bush eventually told Rumsfeld to desist, according to two former State Department officials. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell wrote a memo saying that punishing the French was not U.S. policy. A. Elizabeth Jones, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, kept it on top of her desk. “I frequently needed to be able to pull it out and quote it to my Pentagon colleagues,” Jones said.

But Rumsfeld persisted a year later, excluding the French Air Force from the Red Flag exercise in 2004.

Rumsfeld’s symbolic jabs baffled some officials inside the Bush administration. “Most things the secretary of defense did I could understand, even if I disagreed with him,” said Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Powell. “On this one, it was totally irrational, even dumb.”

Pour visionner le sujet vidéo de Nightly News, vous devez utiliser Internet Explorer 6 et cliquer sur le titre : French a key ally in war on terror.

Pas forcément du neuf pour qui suit cette actualité, surtout côté français, mais ça fait certainement du bien de le rappeler (ou de l’apprendre…) côté américain.