“Imagine if [German Intelligence] were to carry out a hit job via a front company, say in New Orleans,” says a German lawmaker. “It would be a shocking occurrence”
By Jeremy Scahill
German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that a Blackwater-led CIA team conducted a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince.
The magazine reported that after 9/11, the CIA used one of Prince’s homes in Virginia as a covert training facility for hit teams that would hunt al Qaeda suspects globally. Their job was find, fix, and finish: “Find the designated target, fix the person’s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off.”
According to Vanity Fair, one of the team’s targets was Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized German citizen originally from Syria. Darkazanli has been accused by Spain of being an al Qaeda supporter with close ties to the alleged 9/11 plotters who lived in Hamburg. The Blackwater/C.I.A. team “supposedly went in ‘dark,’ meaning they did not notify their own station—much less the German government—of their presence,” according to Vanity Fair. “[T]hey then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down.” Authorities in Washington, however, “chose not to pull the trigger.”
Dieter Wiefelspütz, the domestic policy spokesperson for the parliamentary group of Germany’s center-left Social Democrats, told Der Spiegel it is irrelevant that Darkazanli’s targeted assassination was never carried out. “If it can be confirmed, then this was a murder plot,” he said. The conservative Christian Democratic Union joined the Social Democrats in calling for an official inquiry.
From Der Spiegel:
Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent German Green Party politician, however, said he was unconvinced. “The fact is that the CIA can, for the most part, do whatever it wants here in Germany,” the member of parliament said. “The secret prisoner transports after Sept. 11 showed that — and no one dared to do anything about it.” Try to imagine the opposite happening, he said. “Imagine if (Germany’s federal intelligence agency) the BND were to carry out a hit job via a front company, say in New Orleans. It would be a shocking occurrence,” he said.
[…]
Ströbele said he would call for the parliamentary control committee to discuss the allegations. He said one also had to ask “where the German intelligence services were.” After all, he said, “they are supposed to find out whether other services are romping about here.”
In an interview on German TV this week, Darkazanli said he was “speechless” at the story.
This brewing scandal in Germany is the latest allegation to surface in what is a clear pattern of the US conducting clandestine rendition and assassination operations within the borders of allied countries. In November, an Italian judge convicted 23 US intelligence operatives in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian imam from a Milan street as part of a CIA extraordinary rendition operation. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, aka Abu Omar, was taken to Egypt, where he said he was tortured.
