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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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March 13th,
2008 - Minister Denies Germans Complicit in U.S. Rendition |
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Minister
Denies Germans Complicit in U.S. Rendition By Kerstin Gehmlich Reuters March 13, 2008 Berlin - Foreign Minister Frank-Walter
Steinmeier denied on Thursday Berlin had advance knowledge of a 2001 U.S.
operation to seize a German citizen in Morocco and transfer him to Syria
where he was allegedly tortured. Steinmeier was testifying
before a special parliamentary committee set up to investigate German
cooperation with the U.S. "war on terror", particularly its
knowledge of secret CIA transfers of terror suspects known as
"renditions". Thursday's hearing focused
on the case of Mohammad al-Zammar, a Syrian born man with German citizenship
who had links to the Hamburg al Qaeda cell that led the Sept 11, 2001,
attacks on the United States. German authorities
questioned Zammar after the attacks and released him. Shortly thereafter, he
traveled from Germany to Morocco, where he was arrested. A Council of Europe
report said he was then flown to Syria on a CIA-linked aircraft. Steinmeier, now the top
Social Democrat (SPD) in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government, was
chief of staff to then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and responsible for
coordinating intelligence matters at the time. Any sign that Steinmeier
knew more about CIA rendition flights than he has previously acknowledged
would do serious damage to him and the SPD, which is already reeling from a
public debate over whether to cooperate with a far-left party. Steinmeier described
allegations by the media and some parliamentarians that Germany passively
accepted CIA kidnappings of its own citizens as "pure nonsense". "In November 2001,
there was no Guantanamo and neither was there information about ...
kidnappings and so-called renditions by U.S. secret services,"
Steinmeier told the committee. "None of us could
therefore have imagined that ... the United States could take Mr. Zammar 'out
of traffic' in Morocco." Zammar was sentenced by a
Syrian court last year to 12 years in prison. His lawyer has said he is a
religious man who had the misfortune of frequenting the same mosques as the
planners of the September 11 attacks. Steinmeier defended sending German
officials to a Syrian prison to interrogate Zammar before his sentencing,
saying they had a duty to question him to seek information on possible
security threats to Germany. Human rights groups had said
he was being tortured in the prison, but the German interrogators reported no
evidence of that, Steinmeier said. Steinmeier appeared before
the committee last year about a German-born Turk, Murat Kurnaz, who was
arrested in Pakistan three weeks after the Sept 11 attacks and handed over to
U.S. authorities. At the time, Steinmeier
denied widespread media allegations that he had turned down a U.S. offer to
release Kurnaz from the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects in
October 2002. (Editing by Noah Barkin and
Mary Gabriel) © Reuters 2007. All rights
reserved. External link: http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1391056920080313?sp=true Ex-CIA agent: German
officials told of abductions in 2001 By Mathaba News Network March 13, 2008 The former chief of CIA's
European unit Taylor Drumheller contradicted claims by German officials who
have repeatedly stated that they were not informed of CIA kidnappings of
terror suspects until 2004, the weekly stern news magazine said in a report
to be published on Thursday. Drumheller said that talks
between top representatives of German security officials and CIA took place,
focusing on US plans to kidnap terror suspects as early as fall 2001. The German side voiced
concern that the US would engage unilaterally in such abductions on European
soil without its knowledge, said Drumheller, adding that the CIA had pledged
to include US allies in such operations. The former head of the
chancellery Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the ex-secret services coordinator
Ernst Uhrlau have alleged that they were not briefed on US kidnapping plans
until 2004. Drumheller also claimed that
he met personally with Uhrlau at the chancellery. Steinmeier and Uhrlau are to
attend a secret parliamentary hearing on their role in the CIA kidnappings of
Lebanese-born German citizen in December 2003. Khaled al-Masri as kidnapped
by CIA agents in the Macedonian capital Skopje on New Year's eve 2003 and
flown to a jail in Afghanistan where he was interrogated, beaten and brutally
tortured during a five-month ordeal. Al-Masri was freed in
Albania in May 2004 after the CIA found out that they had abducted the wrong
person. The Al-Masri case has been a
sore point in US-German ties and led to a special parliamentary probe on
allegations German intelligence agents were involved in the kidnapping
affair. German judicial authorities
have repeatedly criticized the refusal of the US government to cooperate in
the Al-Masri scandal. External link: http://mathaba.net/news/?x=585267 |