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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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February 5th,
2007 - In Another CIA Abduction, Germany Has an Uneasy Role |
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In Another CIA Abduction,
Germany Has an Uneasy Role By Craig Whitlock Washington Post February 5, 2007 Hamburg - The decision by
Munich prosecutors to press charges against CIA counterterrorism operatives
for kidnapping a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, won widespread applause
last week from German politicians and the public. "The great ally is not
allowed to simply send its thugs out into Europe's streets," lectured
the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. But there has been an
awkward silence and no prosecutions in the parallel case of another German
citizen, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who was also covertly abducted in a
CIA-sponsored mission after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The difference:
German agents were directly involved in the Zammar case, providing crucial
information to the CIA about his travels and making a secret trip to Syria to
interrogate him after he landed in prison there. Zammar vanished from public
view five years ago but resurfaced last fall in a Syrian courtroom, where he
stands accused of training in al-Qaeda camps and faces the death penalty.
After insisting for years that they couldn't confirm his whereabouts, German
diplomats in Damascus have scrambled to provide him with a defense attorney
and consular assistance. Unlike Masri, a car salesman
from Bavaria who was grabbed in an apparent case of mistaken identity, Zammar
had previously drawn scrutiny from German and U.S. investigators for his role
in the Hamburg cell that planned the Sept. 11 hijackings. German authorities
have never assembled enough evidence to charge him with a crime. But given
his association with the Hamburg group, few people in Germany have been
willing to take up his cause or question the legality of how he was abducted. "He's seen as being in
a different category because there's the impression that he's a bad guy, and
he's not around to defend himself," said Cem Ozdemir, a German
legislator in the European Parliament and member of a committee that has
investigated CIA activities in Europe. "Even if he is a bad guy, he
doesn't deserve to be tortured." Details of the German role
in Zammar's disappearance have emerged gradually in recent months as
legislative panels in Berlin and Brussels have conducted investigations into
CIA counterterrorism operations in Europe. German officials have said
that they were not directly involved in Zammar's seizure and did not know
where he had been taken until June 2002, when The Washington Post first
reported that he had been arrested in Morocco and secretly transferred to
Syria at the behest of the CIA. But the legislative probes have revealed that
German federal police made the abduction possible by forwarding details of
Zammar's travel plans to U.S. agents. In addition, German
officials have admitted that several German intelligence operatives and
investigators went on a secret mission to Damascus in November 2002 to
interrogate Zammar. According to lawmakers in Berlin who are reviewing the
case, the Germans gained access to Zammar only after cutting a deal with the
Syrian government to drop a criminal investigation into a suspected Syrian
espionage ring based in southern Germany. German Interior Minister
Wolfgang Schaeuble defended the interrogation of Zammar as proper and
legitimate. But he drew heavy criticism from other lawmakers when he
suggested that German intelligence agents might use information shared by
other countries, such as Syria, even if it was obtained as a result of
torture. Guel Pinar, a Hamburg lawyer
who has represented Zammar and his family, said it was apparent German
officials knew in advance that the CIA had targeted him for
"extraordinary rendition," an extralegal tactic under which Islamic
radicals have been abducted and interrogated at secret sites overseas. "Clearly, the Germans
at the very least were guilty of being an accessory in terms of his rendition
to Syria," Pinar said in an interview. "They knew what they were
doing when they gave his travel dates to the Americans. Why else would they
do that?" German prosecutors have not
announced any criminal inquiries into Zammar's disappearance, even though his
family reported him missing five years ago. Pinar said she has drafted a
civil lawsuit on his behalf against the German government. But she said his
wife, Rabab Banhaoui, has decided against filing it, for fear it would worsen
his situation in Syria. German authorities have made
few statements about the case. The German Foreign Ministry did not respond to
several requests for an interview. The German Embassy in Damascus, which has
been monitoring Zammar's closed-door trial, declined to comment. Zammar reemerged last
October, when a European Union official monitoring trials in Damascus saw him
in a state security court and notified the German Embassy. If not for the
chance encounter, Zammar might have remained out of sight forever, Pinar said.
"No one in the world would have known," she said. A spokeswoman for the
European Commission delegation in Syria declined to comment, calling the case
a "highly sensitive subject." Zammar, 45, was born in
Syria but emigrated to Germany in 1972 and obtained citizenship there. Syrian
authorities have charged him with membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, a
fundamentalist group that is banned in the country, and with visiting
al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. It is unclear whether he is charged with
committing any crimes in Syria. A parliamentary committee is
expected to review the German government's handling of Zammar's case later
this month. One question is whether information obtained by German
interrogators is being used against him in court by Syrian prosecutors, a
particularly sensitive issue since he faces the death penalty, which is
banned in Germany. "It is a big problem, I
believe, for Germany and the federal government," said Hans-Christian
Stroebele, a member of the committee from the Greens party. "It's the
duty of a state to help its citizens. But clearly in Zammar's case, the state
did not do this." Former inmates in Syria,
including Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was similarly targeted for
rendition by the CIA but later released, have said that Zammar was kept in a
tiny cell in a special prison wing. They said prisoners were regularly
tortured, and that Zammar - who tipped the scales at 300 pounds when he lived
in Hamburg - had lost about a third of his weight. Special correspondent
Shannon Smiley contributed to this report. External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020401112.html |