THE EUROPEAN UNION — CESSPIT OF CORRUPTION, OR DEN OF THIEVES? First there’s this:

Jules Muis, the outspoken European Commission chief auditor, has delivered a scathing critique of the willingness of the organisation to embrace reform and to tackle fraud.

Explaining his decision to resign next April, earlier than expected, Mr Muis spoke of his struggles to get the Commission to move “from the 19th century into the 21st century”.

Romano Prodi, European Commission president, came to office in 1999 promising to create a world-class administration and to crack down on fraud. But Mr Muis, giving evidence to members of the European parliament (MEPs), gave a picture of an organisation which sometimes failed to face its problems, and which frustrated his attempts to root out wrongdoing.

The former World Bank official said he wanted to conduct a thorough inquiry into allegations of serious fraud at Eurostat, the Commission’s statistics arm, but was ordered to restrict the scope of his investigation. . . .

He said the Commission tied his hands so tightly on the Eurostat investigation that his final work would not constitute an audit. “You have a degree of very limited assurance at the end of the trip,” he told the parliament’s budgetary control committee. The Commission argues Mr Muis’s proposed work would have taken too long and would not have met the demands from MEPs for a speedy report.

Then there’s this:

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The European Commission has come clean and admitted the huge extent of fraud in its statistical office, Eurostat.

At a hastily arranged meeting on Wednesday (9 July), administrative reform Commissioner Neil Kinnock and his monetary affairs colleague Pedro Solbes told the European Parliament that Eurostat offices had been raided the night before and all its files secured.

The Commission acted after receiving two reports on Monday providing evidence that “serious wrong-doing on a much more widespread scale than previously thought may have taken place”.

The Commission has decided to open proceedings against three Commission officials and, as a precautionary measure, a number of Eurostat managers will be moved to advisory functions.

And there’s more.

Then there’s this report:

PARIS, July 7 (AFP) – One of France’s biggest ever corruption trials ended late Monday after four months of hearings, with top executives of the formerly state-owned oil company Elf Aquitaine facing prison terms of up to eight years.

Former chief executive Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 59, his deputy Alfred Sirven, 76, and Elf’s so-called Mr Africa Andre Tarallo, 76, are alleged to have made themselves personal fortunes worth hundreds of millions of euros from illicit slush funds run by the company in the early 1990s. . . .

In the concluding stages lawyers for Le Floch-Prigent and Sirven – both of whom are already serving jail terms on related offences – admitted their guilt, but argued that it was Elf’s long-established culture of graft and easy money that led them astray.

“Elf (was a company in which) secrecy was made into a system, where corruption was no longer an offense and where the smallest unit was 10 million francs. Some resisted but many others came crashing down,” said Sirven’s attorney Pierre Haik.

“It is an enormous company that erodes your sense of reality. Everything at Elf was taken to excess,” Le Floch-Prigent told the court earlier.

Indeed. Remember all that talk about the superiority of “European-style capitalism” during the Enron scandals?

NANOTECHNOLOGY MAY CREATE NEW ORGANS, according to this article in The New Scientist. Interesting research, anyway.

NOAH SHACHTMAN WRITES on the Pentagon’s new information-gathering program.

AUSTIN BAY ON LIBERIA:

The instant upside to intervention is saving thousands of innocent lives. That’s another reason to intervene.

Liberia, however, is a “fake state” in utter disorder. Fixing it requires sustained presence. There’s the crux of the “exit” issue — who stays to build?

ECOWAS is 16 poor African nations — aid recipients, not donors. The best non-governmental relief and development organizations are already overtaxed.

The African, European and American consensus seems to be to use American forces to stop Liberia’s killers. The Bush administration needs to use this crisis as an opportunity to pursue a grander political consensus: America will stop the killers, but other nations must supply the builders.

France crabs about American “hyperpower,” though hyperpower puts Marines in Monrovia. What Liberia needs is “hammer power” — long-term developmental support. That’s difficult, and it’s expensive. Still, it’s the only way to make any entrance worth the effort.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

UPDATE: Vik Rubenfeld, meanwhile, thinks the Liberia issue is rebounding on Bush’s critics. Weirdly, James Ridgeway, writing in The Village Voice, sort of agrees:

Bush’s foray into Africa carries meaning for his re-election campaign. The religious right is taking credit for getting the president into Africa. Moreover, for 20 years the GOP right wing has drooled over the idea of breaking the Democratic Party’s grip on the black vote. Despite all his talk, Clinton did little for Africa, and indeed had to apologize for not acting in the Rwanda disaster. Should Bush actually get seriously involved in combating AIDS and poverty, and if he succeeds in stabilizing West Africa, he may at long last begin the process of pulling black votes from the Democrats.

Just how smart is Karl Rove, anyway?

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. forces have arrested the Iraqi diplomat alleged by some Czech officials to have met with the lead Sept. 11 hijacker five months before the attacks.

U.S. government officials said Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was arrested on July 2. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said al-Ani had been interrogated but had provided little information.

The arrest was first reported Thursday by CBS News. U.S. investigators have dismissed Czech accounts of an April 2001 meeting in Prague between suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta and al-Ani, who is widely believed to be an intelligence agent.

Some Czech officials stand by their claims, the only known link between Saddam Hussein’s government and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“Atta and al-Ani met,” Czech U.N. Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek said a year ago in an interview with The Associated Press.

Two points: (1) We keep rolling these guys up, one by one; and (2) If the Bush Administration had been deliberately hyping intelligence on Iraq, why did it go out of its way to step on the reports of the Atta meeting, which seem reasonably credible to me? I’m not convinced yet that they aren’t true — and certainly there was plenty of evidence to go with had the Bush Administration been engaged in the campaign of deception that its critics keep charging it with.

WHAT ROBERT BORK DOESN’T KNOW: It’s something rather important.

You can read a much more extended treatment of the subject here. And, in a sort-of-related item, you may want to read this post by Larry Solum on “legitimate state interests.” I mentioned it over at GlennReynolds.com, but neglected to do so here.

PORPHYROGENITUS HAS BEEN LISTENING TO THE BBC’S COVERAGE OF IRAN:

From the BBC report, one would have absolutely no understanding of the reasons behind the protests, except that they’re ungrateful that progress isn’t going faster than it is (but how things have improved! – great emphasis was placed on a split between the young people who just don’t get it and the older people who were around in the early days of the revolution and understand just how good things are in Iran now).

Completely unmentioned were the Mullahs (or Ayatollahs); on the BBC website’s Middle East page the only stories on Iran are ones pertaining to the “positive” talks between the IAEA and Iran on its nuclear program, mourning the death of the twins, and one on a movement leader who’s been released.

Absolutely nothing mentioning threatened massacre by the government that shut down protests planned for today.

And one wonders why Europeans might have a different viewpoint on the Middle East than we do. Well, opinions are shaped by the information one has – or doesn’t have.

I guess state broadcasting services would tend to have a natural affinity for tyranny, wouldn’t they?

EVAN COYNE MALONEY WRITES on The Great Media Meltdown.

Day by Day belongs in your daily newspaper. Write ’em and tell ’em so.

A LUNAR KLONDIKE? BRING IT ON! My TechCentralStation column is up.

AFGHANS SAY that things are getting better in Afghanistan. Good. Funny we’re not reading more stories like this one.

IRANIAN STUDENTS HAVE CANCELLED PLANS for a massive protest today after being promised a Tiananmen-like massacre. I don’t know what to say about that — on the one hand, you don’t overthrow a government by backing down in the face of such threats, on the other hand, Tiananmen didn’t lead to more democracy, did it? Patience may be more important than drama, sometimes.

Anyway, the mullahs’ writ doesn’t run far from Tehran, and OxBlog has a lot more on pro-Iranian freedom protests around the world. And Andrew Sullivan has information on protests scheduled for today in New York and DC.

UPDATE: Go here, too, and just keep scrolling. And Jeff Jarvis has a roundup of blog coverage.

Why is this stuff getting so little big-media attention? Is it the Eason Jordan effect?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, and go read Lileks too. Like I have to tell you.

GETCHER KEN LAYNE CDS NOW! Cheap!

I’M JUST A SOUL WHOSE INTENTIONS ARE GOOD — but, Lord, sometimes I still get misunderstood.

But not by Matt Welch, who has it exactly right.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up over at Winds of Change.

Winds of Change will also sponsor a special July 9 Carnival featuring posts about liberty in Iran. Follow the link for instructions on how to participate.

IRANIAN CURRENCY FEATURING GEORGE W. BUSH: Heh. I hope the mullahs see this . . .

WAS MICHAEL SAVAGE AN AGENT PROVOCATEUR? I lack the requisite cynicism to believe this, though he certainly played the part.

THIS USA TODAY STORY ON BLOGS by Janet Kornblum gets extra points because it mentions various kinds of blogs that are generally ignored in such stories, like personal diaries and photo blogs.

WHY IS IT OKAY FOR THE U.S. TO GET INVOLVED IN LIBERIA? Kate has the answer. But of course!

JEFF JARVIS has much more on tomorrow’s scheduled protests in Iran. Just keep scrolling.

JUSTENE ADAMEC, who predicted the Gray Davis recall in February, now has some further predictions on the subject.

IRAQ, IRAN, HONG KONG, and the need for patience. Plus more sodomy! All over at GlennReynolds.com.

CAN A DISSERTATION BE A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY? Bill Hobbs looks at an interesting story.

BIG-GOVERNMENT REPUBLICANS: Cato is on the case:

WASHINGTON — In President Bush’s second year in office, the Federal Register, a chronicle of all regulations proposed and enacted by federal agencies, held an extraordinary 75,606 pages of new rules. That’s about 300 pages issued each business day during 2002. Not only is that a new record for the Bush administration, but it’s an all-time record for any presidential administration, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. of the Cato Institute.

Every year for the past seven years Crews has analyzed countless pages of federal regulation data and documented it in Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State. He examines the process behind creating these rules, why it’s nearly impossible for the government to accurately assess what they cost, and he provides a way by which Congress can rein in the agencies behind the nonstop rule making.

In 2001, President Bush’s first year in office, the Federal Register contained 69,591 pages, 7 percent less than President Clinton’s record-setting 2000 edition, which contained 74,528 pages. However, in its second year in Washington, the Bush administration topped Clinton’s record by over 1,000 pages.

I suppose it’s possible that homeland security and anti-terror measures account for the change, but I rather doubt it.

UPDATE: A reader makes a point that I should have made myself (but then, that’s why I have readers!):

The Federal Register for 2002 may have 75,606 pages, but it is not “75,606 pages of new rules.” The Federal Register includes notices of administrative investigations, notices of administrative decisions, requests for public comment. An agency that wants to reduce regulation and be upheld on appeal has to provide a notice of proposed rulemaking (with commentary), and then when it actually strikes the rule, it has to provide several pages of justifications for the change in the rule and demonstrate that it considered the public comments supporting the status quo. All of this takes up numerous pages in the Federal Register without telling one anything about whether the scope of federal bureaucracy has expanded or shrunk.

True. The effort to abolish the Tea Board took up many pages.

Heh. I suspect a lot of people feel this way.