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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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January 12th,
2010 - CIA Had Secret Plan to Kidnap German-Syrian Suspect in Hamburg |
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CIA Had Secret Plan to
Kidnap German-Syrian Suspect in Hamburg By John Goetz and Holger Stark Der Spiegel January 12, 2010 The CIA wanted to kidnap and
interrogate German-Syrian businessman Mamoun Darkazanli under its so-called
'extraordinary rendition' program in a move that would have provoked a
diplomatic crisis, SPIEGEL has learned. The plan was abandoned after an
internal dispute. The CIA wanted to kidnap
Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized Syrian-born German citizen, from Hamburg,
but it triggered a diplomatic crisis instead. Internal disputes put an end to
the operation. Mamoun Darkazanli is a
well-traveled businessman. He has arranged the sale of printer ink to Syria,
lamps to Jordan and cars to Albania. He once had plans to open a
bed-and-breakfast in Spain and to invest in an embroidery business in New Jersey.
He liked to travel - until Sept. 11, 2001 changed the world. Since then
Darkazanli, 51, has not left Germany. He spends much of his time in his
apartment in the middle-class Hamburg neighborhood of Uhlenhorst. Darkazanli's caution
probably saved his life. If he had left Germany after the attacks on New
York's Twin Towers, he would have been guaranteed a cell in Guantanamo.
Darkazanli, a native Syrian who has also been a German citizen since 1990,
has been on the CIA's most-wanted list for years. The agency, based in
Langley outside Washington, DC, believes Darkazanli is part of the first
generation of al-Qaida terrorists. It would like to arrest him - and perhaps
even go a little further. The American magazine Vanity
Fair claims that the CIA even sent a "hit team" of agents to
Hamburg after Sept. 11 to kill Darkazanli. According to the magazine, the men
observed the Syrian-born German there for several weeks and devised a plan to
assassinate him. "Find, fix and finish" was allegedly the motto of
the clandestine team created during the era of then US President George W.
Bush and his CIA director George Tenet. In the end, the plan was abandoned on
the orders of the US government. Shortly after the supposed
assassination plot was made public, Christoph Ahlhaus, the interior minister
of the city-state of Hamburg and a member of the conservative Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), called upon the German government to demand an
explanation from Washington. As a result, parliament's domestic affairs
committee and the parliamentary control committee, which is in charge of
monitoring Germany's intelligence services, will look at the accusations, as
will the public prosecutor's office in Hamburg. The case revisits a past in
which almost everything seemed possible, even government-ordered murder. The parliamentarians and
investigators will have to make do with a denial that US diplomats conveyed
to German security officials at a December meeting in the US Embassy in
Berlin. In a statement, the officials insist that the accusations are false,
and that no CIA hit team was dispatched to kill Darkazanli. A CIA official
who was involved in the case at the time and knows it well told SPIEGEL:
"That would have been completely impossible in a country like Germany." Kidnap Plot But the US government is
saying nothing about a very different approach to Darkazanli that was
discussed at the CIA, and it has good reason to remain silent, because
implementing such a plan would have sparked a diplomatic furor. "There was the idea to
conduct unilateral actions in Germany," says a CIA official involved in
the case at the time. "It had to do with operations that would take
place without German knowledge, and Darkazanli was one of the people on that
list." The bearded German of Syrian descent was to be included in the
so-called "extraordinary rendition" program under which Islamists
around the world were kidnapped and taken to secret prisons. Khaled el-Masri,
a German citizen from Neu-Ulm in southern Germany, became a victim of this
strategy, as did Hamburg resident Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a friend of
Darkazanli's. For both German and American
investigators, businessman Darkazanli was already seen as the incarnation of
evil when few people had even heard of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. His
name figured in the investigation of a case in which a ship intended for
al-Qaida was procured, and he had access to an account whose owner was
believed by investigators to have links with al-Qaida. To this day, the
German-Syrian says that he "had no contact with al-Qaida at any
time." Although he was involved in the purchase of the ship in question,
"I was not aware that the buyer was supposedly the head of
al-Qaida." He offers a similar argument to dispel the bank account
charges: "I am unaware, to this day, that the owner of the account was
al-Qaida's head of financial operations." The CIA, on the other hand,
believed that Darkazanli was an important figure in the Islamists' network,
and its agents went on the offensive in the fall of 1999. Rumors were
circulating about a planned "millennium attack," and the resident
CIA representative at the US Consulate in Hamburg urged his counterparts at
the Hamburg office of the German domestic intelligence agency to recruit
Darkazanli as a source. This led to a meeting between the German intelligence
officials and the presumed terrorist in late 1999. But the meeting was
unproductive, say the officials, and it did not lead to cooperation. Investigations Fail to Yield Evidence The German Federal Prosecutor's
Office in Karlsruhe began investigating Darkazanli in 2001. But its charges
did not stick, and in 2006 the Federal Prosecutor's Office shut down its
investigations due to a lack of evidence. An arrest warrant that Spanish
courts had issued in the fall of 2003, which cited Darkazanli's supposed
connections to al-Qaida, could not be executed. It appeared that it was
simply impossible to take Darkazanli into custody. Back in Langley, the
resentment that had been growing since Sept. 11 only confirmed the view
generally held by the US agents: That although the German government was
cooperating, the Germans were in fact a spineless lot who hid behind the laws
of the constitutional state whenever important questions were asked. When a
high-ranking delegation from the US Congress, led by Democratic Senator Nancy
Pelosi, visited the US Embassy in Berlin, German-American cooperation in
fighting terrorism was discussed. "Even the Syrians" were
"more cooperative than the Germans," one of the CIA agents present at
the meeting said sarcastically. This prompted agents in the
European division in Langley to propose a radical step: Darkazanli and other
Islamists were to be abducted and interrogated, without attorneys, without
charges and without a chance. "We had operations planned that would have
been completely illegal," says a CIA employee. After Sept. 11, 25 agents
were apparently working undercover in Germany, where they were scrutinizing
the Islamist scene in Hamburg and elsewhere. Kidnap Operation Abandoned The plan was pursued to a
point at which other departments were brought into the loop. But the agents
stationed in Germany were skeptical, arguing that the methods the agency
envisioned would be more suitable in a place like South America. In the end,
the operation was abandoned partly because of the objections from the CIA
group in Germany. "We said no at the time because we believed that we
couldn't do this sort of thing in an allied country where many American
soldiers are stationed." Darkazanli, for his part,
was smart enough not to travel abroad. He had heard about what had happened
to his friend Zammar, who had flown to Morocco for a divorce six weeks after
the attacks in the United States. The Moroccan intelligence service had
arrested the Islamist at the CIA's request and flown him to Syria, where he
was tortured and interrogated in a basement. He is still behind bars in
Damascus. To this day, the police
continue to classify Darkazanli as a "threat." According to one
investigator, he is "much sought-after and shrouded in mystery."
And what German authorities are observing today must seem like déjà-vu to
them. Once again, Darkazanli is attending the mosque on Hamburg's Steindamm
Street, where he occasionally served as an imam last year - the same mosque
where the Sept. 11 hijackers met before they departed for the United States. Translated from the German
by Christopher Sultan. External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,671198,00.html |