German president quits over Afghan remarks

Political parties really should install mute buttons on some of their politicians. Some politicians just have to speak out no matter how stupid and unfortunate for the party what they say. This is from the BBC. The Afghan mission is very unpopular in Germany and the government is already down in the polls.

German President Koehler quits amid row over military

German President Horst Koehler says he is resigning immediately, following criticism of remarks he made about German military deployments abroad.

Mr Koehler, whose job is largely ceremonial, had linked missions such as the Afghanistan deployment with the defence of economic interests.

His remarks drew criticism from a number of German politicians.

Mr Koehler, 67, was re-elected last year to serve a second five-year term as president.

He made the controversial remarks in a radio interview after a brief visit to Afghanistan earlier this month.

He said that for an export-orientated country like Germany, it was sometimes necessary to deploy troops "to protect our interests... for example free trade routes".

Announcing his resignation on Monday, he said "it was an honour for me to serve Germany as president".

Unpopular deployment
With his wife standing next to him, he said he regretted that his comments could lead to a misunderstanding about a difficult question for the nation.

Jens Boehrnsen, speaker of the parliament's upper house (Bundesrat), will be interim president. He is in the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The BBC's Oana Lungescu in Berlin says Mr Koehler's remarks about military missions led to accusations of gunboat diplomacy and embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel's government. It has come under strong popular pressure to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

Mr Koehler's shock decision could hardly have come at a worst time, our correspondent says. Polls show that the government's approval rating has plummeted to a four-year low, mainly due to its management of the eurozone crisis.

Germany co-operates with US in rendition case

When there seems to be genuine evidence that someone might be a terrorist the public and press seems to lose interest in their being rendered or tortured. The same is true of the young Khadr youth a Canadian citizen imprisoned in Guantanamo.


In Another CIA Abduction, Germany Has an Uneasy Role

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 5, 2007; Page A11

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.

Karlheinz Schreiber, Brian Mulroney, Airbus Affair

This is taken from the entry on Brian Mulroney, former Canadian Prime minister in Wikipedia. Recent Canadian news reports on the failure of Schreiber's appeal against being extradited to Germany seem somehow to have forgotten his relationship to Brian Mulroney. Maybe reporters fear that Mulroney will file a lawsuit and collect another mint.


Airbus affair
In 1997, Mulroney accepted a $2 million settlement to a lawsuit he had brought against the Government of Canada. At issue were allegations that Mulroney had accepted bribes in the so-called "Airbus affair" concerning government contracts. The government said the charges could not be substantiated. The principal RCMP investigator on the case resigned a year later. The government later dropped the investigation entirely.

But Mulroney's actions continue to be the source of controversy. After stepping down as Prime Minister, Mulroney accepted $300,000 in cash from Karlheinz Schreiber, a German-Canadian businessman. The cash changed hands in three meetings in hotels over an 18 month period, beginning in 1993. Schreiber had at his disposal $20 million from Airbus for the payment of secret commissions. CBC television reported on February 8, 2006[18] that the money Schreiber paid to Mulroney originated in a Swiss bank account code-named "Frankfurt" which Schreiber also used to pay the secret Airbus commissions. $500,000 was transferred from "Frankfurt" to an account in Zürich code-named "BRITAN" on July 26, 1993, from which withdrawals totalling $300,000 were made in 1993-4. But there is no evidence that Mulroney was aware of the source of the funds. Nor is there any evidence that Mulroney accepted bribes in the Airbus affair.

Through a spokesman, Mulroney said Schreiber paid him the money for consulting services to promote Schreiber's pasta business. In the February 2006 interview with CBC television, Schreiber scoffed at the claim, saying the only (pasta-related) service Mulroney ever performed was sending him a brochure. "What had he done for the money? Well, I learned to my great surprise that he worked with me on spaghetti." Schreiber said the money was a gift made to assist Mulroney in the transition to private life.

For many years, Mulroney did not acknowledge receiving money from Schreiber. The payments were not disclosed in Mulroney's lawsuit and Mulroney testified under oath that he "never had any dealings" with Schreiber and knew him only "peripherally". According to the February 2006 CBC article, "In 1999, a spokesman for Mulroney denied any money was exchanged. But in 2003, Mulroney indirectly acknowledged he did receive money from Schreiber but as payment for his help in promoting Schreiber's pasta business." In his 2004 book "A Secret Trial," former law professor William Kaplan describes Mulroney's testimony as evasive, incomplete and misleading -- but concludes that it did not rise to the level of perjury.

Schreiber is fighting extradition to Germany, where he is at the centre of a bribery scandal that helped bring down the government. Mulroney supporters question Schreiber's credibility. Mulroney said he was "as clean as a whistle" in accepting the payment because he declared the money and paid tax on it.