Coming to Their Senses, Germans Drop CIA "Kidnap" Case

No doubt the left will have a cow over this story once they're finished celebrating Little Mahmoud's sticking it to the man at the UN.

Germany Drops Pursuit of CIA Kidnappers

The German government has said it will not pursue extradition requests for 13 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a German citizen and taking him to Afghanistan for interrogation and abuse. Relations with the US government, Berlin says, are more important.

That, and not exactly having a credible witness.

For a moment earlier this year, it seemed as though Germany might turn international relations on their head. A Munich court in January issued arrest warrants (more...) for 13 CIA agents allegedly responsible for kidnapping a German citizen. The agents are accused of flying him to Afghanistan for interrogation before dumping him on the side of an Albanian road in May 2004 after they realized they had abducted the wrong man.

Now, though, in the face of US intransigence, Germany has backed down. SPIEGEL has discovered that, in order to avoid a conflict with Washington, Berlin has decided to forgo forwarding a formal request that the agents be arrested. Germany's Justice Ministry sent out a feeler in late August to determine how Washington might react to such a request. The answer was clear: Washington is fundamentally unprepared (more...) to move against the agents.

Shocking, isn't it, the U.S. would be hesitant to act against their own interest just to placate far-left activists?

Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was abducted in December 2003 in Macedonia and taken to a prison in Kabul where he was abused. El-Masri has said he was beaten and sodomized by his captors. He was released five months later and claims his captors admitted it was a case of mistaken identity. The US has never owned up to the error, but Merkel has said that US officials acknowledged to her that they had taken el-Masri by mistake.

What a fine, upstanding citizen this fellow is.

The 43-year-old el-Masri has suffered from psychological instability since his return to Germany in 2004; his lawyer Manfred Gnjidic described him as a "psychological wreck" earlier this year. In May, el-Masri was arrested (more...) for attempting to set a supermarket on fire following an argument over a defective MP3 player el-Masri had purchased at the store.