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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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September 24th,
2007 - No Justice for El-Masri |
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Germany Drops Pursuit of CIA Kidnappers By Spiegel magazine September 24, 2007 The German government has
said it will not pursue extradition requests for 13 CIA agents charged with
kidnapping a German citizen and taking him to Afghanistan for interrogation
and abuse. Relations with the US government, Berlin says, are more important. For a moment earlier this
year, it seemed as though Germany might turn international relations on their
head. A Munich court in January issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents
allegedly responsible for kidnapping a German citizen. The agents are accused
of flying him to Afghanistan for interrogation before dumping him on the side
of an Albanian road in May 2004 after they realized they had abducted the
wrong man. Now, though, in the face of
US intransigence, Germany has backed down. SPIEGEL has discovered that, in
order to avoid a conflict with Washington, Berlin has decided to forgo
forwarding a formal request that the agents be arrested. Germany's Justice
Ministry sent out a feeler in late August to determine how Washington might
react to such a request. The answer was clear: Washington is fundamentally
unprepared to move against the agents. Justice Minister Brigitte
Zypries' decision to jettison the case doesn't just sidestep a potential
trans-Atlantic spat, it also avoids a further deepening of existing tensions
within Germany's governing coalition. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a
member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, had promised to
veto an official request if Zypries, a member of the Social Democrats,
elected to pursue the case. Khaled el-Masri, a German
citizen of Lebanese descent, was abducted in December 2003 in Macedonia and
taken to a prison in Kabul where he was abused. El-Masri has said he was
beaten and sodomized by his captors. He was released five months later and
claims his captors admitted it was a case of mistaken identity. The US has
never owned up to the error, but Merkel has said that US officials
acknowledged to her that they had taken el-Masri by mistake. Human rights groups have
focused on the el-Masri case in pointing out the fundamental injustices
inherent in the US "extraordinary renditions" program, which sees
terror suspects arrested by US agents and flown to third countries for
interrogation and, it has been alleged, torture. El-Masri, though, may have
nowhere left to turn in search of justice in his case. He is pursuing civil
damages in US courts, but the government in Washington is claiming state
secrecy concerns and has refused to cooperate - leaving the courts with no
choice but to bar the case. The 43-year-old el-Masri has
suffered from psychological instability since his return to Germany in 2004;
his lawyer Manfred Gnjidic described him as a "psychological wreck"
earlier this year. In May, el- Masri was arrested for attempting to set a
supermarket on fire following an argument over a defective MP3 player
el-Masri had purchased at the store. External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,507455,00.html |