Sending Gitmo Grads To Europe: A Suicidal Proposition

There has been much talk recently of sending Guantánamo detainees to Europe. The measure is supposed to apply to detainees who have been cleared for release, but who cannot be returned to their home countries on account of human rights concerns. It has been pushed, notably, by the Austrian professor and UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, as a way of “helping” to shut down Guantánamo. (On Nowak’s role, see my article here.) In an open letter to Barack Obama published before the inauguration on the website of the German magazine Spiegel, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier appeared to endorse the idea and he has since expressly stated that Germany should be prepared to host some of the detainees. The “international community” will not “abandon” the new administration in the task of dealing with released detainees, Steinmeier promised.

That the idea could even be seriously considered in America – much less greeted as a helpful or friendly gesture – provides a measure of how woefully misinformed or under-informed the American public has been about the nature and methods of international Jihadist activism. A first point that needs to be stressed is that a detainee’s being “cleared for release” by the Pentagon in no way implies that he was not in fact engaged in Jihad when he was captured. This is made clear by the example of Murat Kurnaz: perhaps the most celebrated of the ostensibly “innocent men” released from Guantánamo up to now. The Bremen-born Kurnaz was returned to Germany in 2006. But evidence presented before the intelligence oversight committee of the German Bundestag leaves scarce room for doubt that when he was picked up in the vicinity of Peshawar in November 2001, he was there to fight, exactly as US authorities maintained. (On Kurnaz, see my article here; and for a translated summary of the contents of his German police file, see here.)

About the remaining detainees, Manfred Nowak has glibly asserted that “very, very many” of them ended up in Guantánamo simply by virtue of having been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the erstwhile Qaeda operations planner and current Guantánamo resident, presumably knows better and he disagrees. In a March 10, 2007 Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing, Mohammed likewise pleaded for the release of many of his fellow detainees. But he by no means denied that they had been combatants. “When America invaded Afghanistan, they just arrive in Afghanistan cause the[y] hear there enemy,” he said,

They don’t know what it means al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden or Taliban. They don’t care about these things. They heard they were enemy in Afghanistan. They just arrived. As they heard first time Russian invade Afghanistan. … [T]hey don’t know what is going on. They just hear they are fighting and they help Muslim in Afghanistan.

The very fact, incidentally, that human rights concerns have been invoked as grounds for not returning detainees to their home countries amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that the latter – as in the famous case of the Chinese Uighurs – do in fact regard the detainees in question as terrorists.

Secondly, and more to the immediate point, an enormous body of evidence makes patently obvious not merely the importance, but indeed the centrality of Europe, as a base of operations for al-Qaeda and kindred Jihadist organizations. This evidence derives from such sources as the Zacarias Moussaoui trial (including the testimony both of Moussaoui himself and of FBI counterterrorism agents), the nearly 700-page 2003 Spanish indictment against members of the al-Qaeda network, bits and pieces of German police surveillance records that have become public, the admissions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the Italian police surveillance tapes of Osama Mostafa Hassan Nasr, better known as “Abu Omar.”

That Europe is a central field of action in the global Jihadist network should, of course, come as no great revelation. The 9/11 attacks were, after all, conceived and planned in Hamburg. But the strange disinterest of the major media for the subject has permitted the impression to take hold that the residence of Mohammed Atta and the other members of the Hamburg cell in Germany was somehow merely incidental and that this was, in any case, a one-off affair.

In fact, Atta and fellow suicide pilots Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah would continue to receive crucial logistical support from Germany even after they departed for the United States. Zacarias Moussaoui also received logistical support from Germany: presumably from Ramzi Binalshibh, a fourth member of the Hamburg cell who was denied entry to the US and who served as the principal facilitator of the attacks from abroad. Indeed, the traces of Moussaoui’s contacts with Binalshibh represent the key evidence connecting him to the 9/11 plot. These traces include wire transfers from Germany, the presence of Binalshibh’s Hamburg phone number in Moussaoui’s notebook, and pages from a German aviation magazine listing American flight schools that were found among Moussaoui’s possessions. Oddly enough, despite its obvious importance to the case against Moussaoui, the major news media covering the Moussaoui trial did not find the evidence of this German connection to be newsworthy.

Moreover, al-Qaeda’s use of Germany as base in the 9/11 plot was not a one-off affair. Exactly seven months after the 9/11 attacks, on April 11, 2002, a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with explosives into the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killing 21 persons. Shortly before proceeding with the attack, the bomber placed a phone call to one Christian Ganczarski in North Rhine-Westphalia. Ganczarski is a German convert to Islam – and a confidante of Osama bin Laden. “Do you need anything?” Ganczarski asked the bomber. “All I need is your blessing,” he replied. The German police know the details of the conversation – because they had Ganczarski’s telephone bugged.

Another six months later, on October 12, 2002, a suicide bomber and a follow-on blast killed some 202 persons at the Indonesian resort of Bali in what remains, even after Mumbai, the deadliest Qaeda-linked attack since 9/11. Yet again, there was a major German connection. The reputed financier of the attack was one Reda Seyam: an Egyptian-born German citizen and veteran of Jihad who had recently arrived in Jakarta. According to German press reports, two arrested members of the Indonesian Qaeda subsidiary, Jemaah Islamiah, independently identified Seyam as their “boss.” As so happens, Seyam is a good friend of another allegedly “innocent man” who is supposed to have been victimized by America’s “war on terror”: namely, Khaled Al-Masri (aka. Khaled “El-Masri”), who claims that he was rendered by the CIA to Afghanistan in early 2004. (On Seyam and his ties to Masri, see my 2006 article “The CIA Rendition Controversy: Is Khaled Al-Masri Lying?”.)

In addition to serving as a base for plotting and facilitating terror attacks, Europe has also served as fertile grounds for recruiting fighters to active fronts in the global Jihad like Iraq and Afghanistan. Recruitment rings are known to have operated in numerous European countries, including Germany, France, Belgium and Italy.

The Egyptian cleric Osama Mostafa Hassan Nasr, or “Abu Omar,” is best known in the United States as yet another supposed “innocent victim” of American counterterrorism operations. In February 2003, Omar is supposed to have been “rendered” from Milan, where he was the Imam of a local mosque. In fact, Italian police surveillance tapes show that Abu Omar formed part of a Europe-wide network of Jihadist recruitment rings. (See my “Who is Abu Omar? Extracts from the Italian Police Surveillance Tapes”.)

In April 2007, a German-born Turk by the name of Cüneyt Ciftci followed much the same path from Germany to the tribal areas of Pakistan as Murat Kurnaz had six years earlier. Unlike Kurnaz, Ciftci did not end up being taken prisoner by the US army and sent to Guantánamo. Instead, he ended up blowing himself up in a suicide attack against an American guard post in Afghanistan’s Khost province. According to US Army and Afghan sources, two American soldiers and two Afghans were killed in the attack and another seven persons were wounded. (See my report “Germany's Taliban Trail: From Murat Kurnaz to Cüneyt Ciftci”.) Ciftci came from Ansbach in Bavaria, not far from the twin cities of Ulm and Neu-Ulm, which have evolved into a notorious hub of Jihadist activism and proselytism. (See here for some details.)

That Germany in particular would remain a major center of Jihadist activism within Europe is hardly surprising. Whereas France, for example, takes extraordinarily harsh and pre-emptive measures against suspected Jihadist militants, German authorities have shown incredible leniency toward persons who are widely believed to be major al-Qaeda operatives.

Despite the German police surveillance of Christian Ganczarski, for instance, no charges were brought against Ganczarski in Germany and he was permitted to leave the country. He was arrested in 2003 at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport. He is presently on trial in France for complicity in the Djerba synagogue bombing. Despite the evidence connecting Reda Seyam to the Bali bombings, as well as both material evidence and testimony connecting him to gruesome war crimes in Bosnia, no charges have ever been brought against Seyam in Germany. He presently lives on welfare benefits in the comfortable Charlottenburg neighborhood of Berlin. The 2003 Spanish al-Qaeda indictment identifies the Hamburg-based Mamoun Darkazanli as “the permanent interlocutor and assistant of Osama bin Laden in Germany.” Darkazanli’s name appears on both the US and UN lists of designated terrorist persons or entities. No charges have been brought against Darkazanli in Germany and Germany refuses to extradite him.

It should be recalled in this connection that any detainee released to any EU member state other than the UK, Romania and Bulgaria will benefit from uncontrolled freedom of movement within the entire “Schengen space” (which now also includes Switzerland).

To put it simply, for the US to release Guantánamo detainees to European countries is asking for trouble. If the current administration cares anything about US national security interests, it must not do it.

(Update: Christian Ganczarski was found guilty today, February 5, of complicity in the Djerba synagogue bombing. He was also found guilty on a second charge of being a member of a terrorist organization. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.)