It became known that Yehia Yousif, the hate-preaching Egyptian imam in Ulm who converted Fritz to Islamism, had for many years been an informant for the state Office for Protection of the Constitution (LfV), a fact, the Stuttgarter Zeitung noted, the agency had gone out of its way to keep hush about. According to Johannes Schmalzl, head of the LfV in Stuttgart, Yousif, who has been in hiding since 2002, continues to pull strings from behind the scenes, allegedly from Saudi Arabia.
It wasn't just newspapers with minority readerships and a weakness for conspiracy theories that saw in the Fritz case something with "more to it than met the eye," as Junge Welt wrote. Mass-circulation Bild also noticed an increasing number of "strange and puzzling factors."
The circumstances surrounding the investigation of the Fritz case were irritating for observers on all sides. The operation bore the code name "Alberich," after the king in Germanic mythology who guarded the Nibelung treasure with the help of a magic hat that made him invisible, or, in Richard Wagner's "Ring", appears in the form of a tyrannical dwarf from the house of Schwarzalben. On Schäuble's orders the three suspects were kept under surveillance around the clock for 11 months, right up until their arrest, by a team of some 300 investigators. What amounted to the biggest police effort since the German Autumn of 1977 was triggered by suspicious e-mails that had been intercepted by the American National Security Agency. The operation was headed by a joint working group in Berlin involving representatives of the German intelligence agencies and the CIA, the first time this has ever been done.
One fact in the operation shows just how closely the surveillance teams were keeping tabs on things and how successful they were in wearing a magic hat that made them invisible. They succeeded in entering the storage facility they had staked out, removing the 35-percent hydrogen peroxide solution the men had purchased from a dealer in the town of Hodenhagen in the western German state of Lower Saxony, and replacing it with a three percent mixture, all without being noticed. A bomb made with this material would not have been able to explode any more than the incorrectly constructed Cologne suitcase bombs.
The odd thing is that the men knew they were being followed everywhere they went, that their telephones were tapped, their e-mails were being read and that their apartments and cars had been bugged. Nonetheless, they continued for months to travel around Germany, to case American bases at an irritatingly slow pace, to create disruptions in front of discos frequented by GIs, to buy chemicals and detonators as well as to rent houses and garages, all the while under constant surveillance.
It also seemed strange that the trio were not deterred from their activities when their apartments were searched and that they even made derisive comments about the officials involved. This kind of behavior, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, gave pause for thought and raised "serious concerns."
The same applied with regard to trips the converts had taken abroad, allegedly to training camps operated by the obscure IJU, according to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, and possibly infiltrated by the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, according to other sources. Solid information on their stays in training camps, in particular information that would stand up in court, was hard to come by.
Günther Beckstein, the Bavarian Interior Minister at the time (today he is the state governor), said it appeared doubtful that it was going to be possible to prove in court that the suspects had wanted to use car bombs against US military facilities in and around Frankfurt to send their message. His Hessian counterpart, Volker Bouffier, conceded that at the time of their arrest on Sept. 4 the suspects had not yet made a "final decision" on their targets for Sept. 11.
In wiretapped conversations the three men had talked about a wide range of targets, including "American whores" who frequent discos. Terrorism expert Annette Ramelsberger (author of "Der deutsche Dschihad" or "German Jihad") reported that they had cynically imagined the outcome of an attack on a disco: "Those bitches will be blown to bits, God willing."
With all of that in mind, it is understandable that the Federal Prosecutor's Office expressed its central accusation in a somewhat convolute manner, speaking of the "alleged consideration" given by the suspects to the possibility that US bases "might be chosen as targets of an attack."
The legal outcome of the case is difficult to predict. But the political consequences of "Operation Alberich" can be assessed very precisely. After the arrests US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff congratulated his counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble on this success and noted that Europe had become just as much a part of the battleground as the United States. Polls show that 76 percent of the people in Germany are afraid of Islamist attacks. After the arrests in the Sauerland a majority of the population, 58 percent, supported Schäuble's call for online searches of private computers.
Stasi 2.0 versus Jihad 2.0?
During his visits to Washington while still the federal interior minister, Otto Schily constantly heard from CIA Director George Tenet: "You've got to think like you would in a war."
As a Social Democrat, Schily had compunctions about letting Germany's rule-of-law system be transformed into a kind of rule-of-the-law-of-war system in response to the Islamist threat. American demands in this direction are more likely to be received with an open mind by his successor, Schäuble (CDU), who realizes that the fight against terrorism cannot be won "with traditional police methods."
With increasing frequency Schäuble has thought out loud about whether or not the government should treat apparent jihadists as "enemy combatants" and "detain" them, even when no concrete evidence can be found that they have committed punishable offenses. Schäuble has even put targeted killings of jihadists on the table as an option for consideration.
The Bush administration has been pleased to see that the German government is on the same wave length with regard to Islamism. During the joint Operation Alberich action, Schäuble spoke a number of times with Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff about Fritz and his friends. Surveillance of the Ulm trio was even a topic of conversation between Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Bush at the G-8 summit. Bush had even familiarized himself with the names of the suspects.
The kinds of coups that are possible in cooperation with the US intelligence agencies was shown in Canada more than a year before the Oberschledorn arrests. After months of around-the-clock surveillance by some 400 police officers and secret service agents a group of suspected homegrown terrorists, including some of Arab descent, were arrested just as they were taking delivery of three tons of a substance they assumed to be ammonium nitrate, a chemical fertilizer that can also be used to make bombs.
While the White House expressed its satisfaction at this instance of "successful cooperation" with Canadian law enforcement, the Toronto Star reported some revealing details. It alleged that undercover agents had been involved in handling the order, filling the fertilizer sacks with a non-explosive white powder and delivering them to the would-be terrorists.
The American administration regularly uses spectacular arrests of this kind as proof of the need to introduce new surveillance techniques everywhere in the West. It has already been able to gain acceptance for many of its demands. An agreement drafted by Schäuble and Chertoff on exchanging airline passenger information between the United States and the European Union is already in effect. Despite Germany's installation of a new anti-terrorism database the information-gathering needs of the security agencies are far from satisfied. Road toll data, scent samples of protesters, license plate video scans, passport photo database access, face recognition cameras, electronic eavesdropping on religious and legal counselors, six-month storage of all telephone and e-mail connections as well as the locations of mobile phone users at any given time -- all of this and more was or still is on the agenda in Berlin.
For some time now BKA President Ziercke has been trying to figure out how to sneak trojans onto private computers for purposes of covert surveillance. In a lecture given in Osnabrück, Ziercke theorized that spyware might be installed unnoticed by sending an e-mail with a link to a fictitious report that family members have been "injured in an accident." In this way recipients could be motivated to click on the link, installing the government surveillance trojan and making it possible to monitor everything on the hard disk.
Despite spooky prospects of this kind, criticism of the war conservative Christian Democrats are waging against a newly constituted "Jihad 2.0" continues to be muted. Critics have printed up T-shirts with a blacked-out mug shot of Schäuble and under it the lettering "Stasi 2.0" in protest of the incursions on privacy, a reference to the East German secret police. And members of Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag, from the Left Party and Klaus Uwe Benneter of the Social Democrats have declared the Interior Minister to be "out of his mind."
But there is also criticism from political experts with experience in this area and from prominent legal scholars which Schäuble should be taking more seriously. One of his predecessors in office, Gerhart Rudolf Baum of the market liberal Free Democratic Party, accuses the CDU minister of being "disproportionate" in his response. Baum, who helped to lodge a constitutional complaint against the storage of connection data, warns that the fight against terror is being portrayed increasingly as "war in a state of crisis" so that Germany will take the "American route."
So what makes Schäuble tick? Göttingen sociology professor Wolfgang Sofsky, author of "Das Prinzip Sicherheit" ("The Security Principle"), thinks Schäuble sees himself as having a spearhead function: "He's testing the water, trying to find out how far he can go at the moment." In Sofsky's view Schäuble is hoping that his policy of top-down familiarization will gradually get the German public used to what are currently still sensitive issues.
Schäuble's critics are pinning their hopes on the country's highest court overturning the curbs on privacy and civil liberties as unconstitutional. They argue that current legislation gives the government effective weapons in the fight against terrorism. "We don't need to change any laws," says security expert Sofsky, who supports the undercover operations already being implemented, apparently on a large scale, by Western intelligence agencies. "Infiltration of the terrorist milieu by intelligence agencies is certainly the most effective form of prevention that is fully compatible with democratic rights and freedoms." Fixating on a tiny minority within the Muslim population, however, could have dangerous and unwanted side effects when it comes to the acceptance of minorities in Germany.
The controversy that has gone on thus far has led media commentators to sow discord and mistrust against immigrants in general. "In the future we're going to have to get used to the idea that we can't trust anybody," the mass circulation tabloid Bild wrote in the wake of the Cologne bombers case. "Neither the well-behaved student who has been granted asylum here, nor the döner kebab cook nor the waiter with his Arabian eyes."
Making blanket judgements like this about immigrants being potential enemies within aggravates a problem that ought to be just as much a cause for concern as the jihadists -- the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of young people into their parallel societies. According to a study carried out by Joachim Müller, a researcher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at Germany's Bielefeld University, the more time Turkish or other young people spend enclosed in their own ethnic groups, the greater the likelihood is that they will approve of Islamic fundamentalist thinking and succumb to ideologies that preach violence. A lack of integration in German society can be just as explosive as canisters and suitcases that have been turned into bombs. While everyone talks about the risks posed by jihadism, Müller notes, the explosive potential of a failed integration policy in Germany has not yet been adequately assessed.
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