An Ambiguous War

Senior public prosecutor August Stern confirmed a report in the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung Thursday that Spanish authorities have handed over a list of 20 names, believed to be US agents, who may have been involved in the kidnapping of German citizen Khaled el Masri.

The agents allegedly kidnapped el Masri in early 2004, taking him from Macedonia to Afghanistan in what has become one of Europe's most controversial rendition cases. He claims he spent months behind bars, enduring torture and questioning before he was released.

But despite the latest media revelations, the prosecution said it would wait until any kidnappers were officially identified before incorporating new evidence into the case.

Inevitably, it all creates the impression that the German authorities are less eager to solve the case than they might be if el Masri were German rather than Lebanese-born.

They can certainly be efficient when they want to be -- they clearly weren't dragging their feet when they arrested the Lebanese-born men suspected of taking part in a plot to bomb German trains in late July.

The attempted "suitcase bombings" left German authorities hell-bent on protecting its citizens even at the cost of curtailed personal freedoms. No sooner had the suspects' grainy CCTV pictures appeared on televisions around the country than police were issuing arrest warrants and hailing the virtues of Big-Brother-style surveillance technology.

Media pressure

Khaled el Masri originally came from Lebanon, but gained German citizenship several years ago. He spent five months in detention, but in his case, the German authorities were not, apparently, in any hurry to organize his release.

A parliamentary inquiry set up to establish what exactly happened has largely failed to shed light on the affair, not least because the bulk of the files pertaining to the case are classified. And whenever the hearing finally appears to be getting exciting, any journalists present are requested to leave.

Even so, it's been up to the media to reveal many of the most important details in the el Masri case. The German public only read in the papers that public prosecutors in Munich already knew the names of the suspected kidnappers -- US pilots working for the CIA. But this information has yet to factor in the hearing. Who is pulling the strings here? One official with the Federal Criminal Office who gave evidence revealed he had felt instructed by a senior member of the foreign ministry to refrain from researching el Masri's case abroad.

Ambiguity of war on terror

Could it be that Berlin was more concerned about its relationship with the US and the CIA than about the physical and psychological well-being of a German citizen with the very un-German-sounding name of Khaled el Masri? Not only does it seem that German authorities were failing to do their job, it seems as though they were singularly unperturbed by the fate of a German with Arab roots.

His case illustrates just how ambiguous the international war on terror really is.

The state came down hard on the suspected suitcase bombers, wasting no time linking their activities to terrorist networks. In the wink of an eye, new legislation was drawn up to facilitate the fight. But the state's reaction in the case of el Masri could not have been more different. The full extent of the story is only now emerging under pressure from the media rather than from members of parliament determined to discover the truth -- and it shows Germany in a very bad light.

The CIA's abduction of a Lebanese-born German citizen and the rapid arrest of suspected terrorists are two sides of the same coin. One is the shiny side and one is the grimier side. One shows that Germany knows how to deal with terrorists; the other shows the more sinister consequences of curbing civil rights. And these simply cannot be tolerated by a democracy.

Marcel Fürstenau is a political correspondent for DW-RADIO in Berlin (jp).