28 March 2012
Support our work: become a Friend of Statewatch from as little as £1/€1 per month.
Germany
Government complicit in Iraq war
- Secret
service BND remained in Baghdad and supported US military in
"identification of targets", Panorama reveals
Over the last few months, suspicions
of Germany's knowledge of the much debated CIA flights transporting
European and non-US citizens through European airports to extra-judicial
territories to be interrogated and tortured, have been confirmed.
There is also increasing evidence that Germany's Federal Crime
Police Authority (Bundeskriminalamt - BKA) interrogated German
citizens imprisoned and tortured by local secret services in
Beirut (Lebanon), Damascus (Syria) and Guantanamo (Cuba).
However, the most recent BND scandal has enraged parliamentarians
who have until now been led to believe by the German government
that it followed an anti-war stance, until the television programme
Panorama and the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung
revealed on 12 January this year that the foreign secret service
(Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND), on order of the chancellor's
office, remained in Baghdad during the war and worked closely
together with the US military secret service Defence Military
Agency (DIA). Although the long-standing but ineffective parliamentary
control commission (Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium - PKG)
on the secret services already heard witnesses to investigate
the allegations, parliament has now voted in favour of a special
Parliamentary Investigations Committee (Untersuchungsausschuss)
being set up. An investigation into the BND's activities in Baghdad,
according to Green party whip Renate Künast, would no longer
yield results through conventional parliamentary means.
When confronted with the question of what the BND was doing in
Iraq during the war, the government has given various and sometimes
contradictory answers. They range from: protecting the German
embassy, protecting German soldiers stationed in Kuwait, providing
the German government with intelligence as well as passing on
intelligence to foreign colleagues. The critical question is
if the BND collaborated in war actions, and according to a former
Pentagon officer as well as a BND employee working on the operations
in Iraq, it did. Both claim in the TV programme Panorama
that the German foreign intelligence helped identifying targets
"that were later bombed", as well as conducting intensive
searches for the whereabouts of the former Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein. These claims are refuted by BND president and former
BND coordinator in the chancellor's office, Ernst Uhrlau, who
said that "we were not involved in the hunt for Saddam Hussein".
More concretely, the former Pentagon official claims in the Panorama
programme, that a tip from the German BND about the possible
presence of Saddam Hussein in a restaurant in the district of
Mansur led the Americans to bomb the area, destroying four buildings
and killing 12 civilians.
All these concrete allegations, although not the presence of
the BND officers in Iraq at the time, are denied by the former
government and BND chiefs. Political commentators, however, say
that it is impossible to imagine that then chancellor Gerhard
Schröder, foreign minister Joschka Fischer, chief of chancellor's
office (and present foreign minister) Frank-Walter Steinmeier
and BND heads August Hanning and Ernst Uhrlau did not know of
the US collaboration. One unnamed MP commented that the government
seems to have pursued a shadow policy in 2003, on the one hand
the official and populist stance against the war, as it was promoted
by Schröder, and on the other the real operational collaboration
in the war in Iraq: "If one looks at this operation in Iraq,
it appears parts of the red-green government coalition foreign
policy will have to be rewritten", he commented.
Sources
1. Süddeutsche Zeitung 12-15.1.2006
2. Panorama programme: http://www.ndrtv.de/panorama/archiv/2006/0112/bnd.html
Filed 16 January 2006
Spotted an error? If you've spotted a problem with this page, just click once to let us know.