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MSNBC.com

Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?

Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups

By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit

Updated: 7:51 p.m. ET Dec. 13, 2005

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WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.

“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.

The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.

Four dozen anti-war meetings

The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One “incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents in the database were discounted because they had no connection to the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database.

The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982, that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain information on U.S. citizens.

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.

Make sure they are not just going crazy

“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.

The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens.

Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

Too much data?

Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.

One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide comprehensive information about people of interest.”

It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to “develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”

“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.

Lotz agrees.

“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD intelligence official says.

'Slippery slope'

Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.

Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.

“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth Project.

“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”

The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or so anti-war activists a “threat.”

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© 2005 MSNBC.com

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BREAKING: As Torture Amendment Nears Passage, Pentagon Rewrites Army Detainee Standards

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With Congress on the verge of passing the sweeping McCain amendment, the Bush administration has taken its drive to permit torture to new depths.

The basis of the McCain amendment is establishing the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation as the uniform standard for interrogation. That manual explicitly prohibits the use of so-called “coercive interrogation techniques.” As former Army interrogator Peter Bauer has written, “the standard interrogation techniques found in the US Army Field Manual 34-52 were far more effective than such abusive behavior as stress positions, sensory deprivation, and humiliation. We obtained more information – and more reliable information – with our basic skills than we did with even days of harsh treatment.”

Realizing this, the Pentagon has one-upped McCain, and simply rewritten the manual:

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The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods that may complicate negotiations over legislation proposed by Senator John McCain to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in American custody, military officials said Tuesday.

The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual that was forwarded this week to Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence policy, for final approval, they said.

The addendum provides dozens of examples and goes into exacting detail on what procedures may or may not be used, and in what circumstances. Army interrogators have never had a set of such specific guidelines that would help teach them how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogations.

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The political fall-out from this move is sure to be significant. The New York Times notes that McCain will likely be “furious” with the changes, and an unnamed Pentagon official is quoted, “This is a stick in McCain’s eye. It goes right up to the edge. He’s not going to be comfortable with this.”

The idea that we have a “Vice President for Torture” now appears quaint. What we really have is an entire administration, openly and unapologetically for torture.

Posted by Nico at 1:37 am

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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

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December 13, 2005 -- Cheney's January 2005 trip to Poland to mark the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp may have had a side trip.

Informed sources in Washington report that when Dick Cheney flew to Poland for the 60th anniversary ceremonies marking the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp last January, his three day visit also included a clandestine visit to a secret CIA camp in Poland where suspected "Al Qaeda" prisoners were being subjected to torture. Cheney was in Poland from January 26 to 28. The Auschwitz solemn ceremonies were on January 27. On January 26, Cheney held talks in Krakow with Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Ukraine's President Viktor Yuschenko and he visited the Galicia Jewish Museum.

Poland and Ukraine have been identified by U.S. intelligence sources as the location for secret CIA prisons and airfields. In the case of Ukraine, an intelligence source personally witnessed the defense and intelligence contractor Raytheon providing the logistics for Soviet-era airfields to handle the prisoner flights.

 

Cheney trip to Auschwitz allegedly took in a side trip to a secret CIA prison camp

The Cheney detour allegedly took place on  Friday, January 28, after he paid a quick visit to the Auschwitz camp and wrote in the guest book "may the evils committed here never again darken our world." Cheney's personal party included his wife Lynne Cheney; his daughter Elizabeth Cheney, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Two weeks after the Polish visit, Elizabeth Cheney, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 2002 to 2003, was named by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and Coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives.

There is particular interest being focused on Lynne Cheney's former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Radek Sikorski, Poland's new Defense Minister under its center-right government and a former Deputy Defense Minister who may have served as a liaison between Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon on the establishment of the secret prison network in Poland. It is interesting to note that former CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner referred to Dick Cheney as the "Vice President for torture." Cheney's and his family's active involvement in overseeing the establishment of secret prisons in Poland may have been what Turner, who obviously still talks to CIA insiders, was referring to.

Although Cheney's Air Force Two Boeing 757 left Krakow ahead of the plane carrying special guests, it arrived at Andrews Air Force Base after the guest plane arrived. It was claimed that Air Force Two had to stop for refueling -- a cover story to hide the fact that it had made another stop so Cheney could visit one of the secret CIA Polish prisons. Poland is now reported to have had the largest number of CIA prisons in eastern Europe. Cheney and Libby's detour may have been to Stare Liejkuty, a secretive and heavily guarded intelligence facility near Szczytno-Szymany in northeastern Poland. There is one recorded CIA flight to Szczynto-Szymany airport  -- a Boeing 737 operated by a CIA front company whose September 2003 route took it from Washington, DC to Prague Ruzyne Airport; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Kabul, Afghanistan; Szczytno-Szymany; Mihail Kogalniceanu, near Constanta, Romania; Sale, Morocco, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.



Szczynto-Szymany airport: capable of handling
large planes like Cheney's Boeing 757.

Oddly, Cheney's motorcade in Poland, all flown from the United States, had a special decontamination vehicle accompanying it to the location of the camp that once masked gas chambers as decontamination units for incoming prisoners.



Cheney's note in Auschwitz memorial book: "On this anniversary of liberation, we look back with reverence and resolve: May God bless the survivors and the souls of the lost, and may the evils committed here never again darken our world."

 

Heinrich Himmler on his Polish camp tour, Cheney on his.

http://lnk.nu/prisonplanet.com/70r.htm

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Blackwill's Black Heart: Conman Pulls Sales Tricks to Market Torture

When Saddam, Kim and Mugabe do it it's bad, when we do it it's to protect the American people

Paul Joseph Watson | December 14 2005

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Former White House advisor Robert Blackwill's comments that torture is sometimes necessary underscore a dominant philosophy of absolute despotism that pervades elitist circles who like to think of themselves as part of this wicked New World Order hierarchy.

The fact that it is nearly 2006 and we are still having to even debate people who insist that the barbaric practice of torture is acceptable in a supposedly cultured and intellectually advanced world is proof that evil in its purest form still exists and holds the reigns of power on planet earth.

The abhorrent scum that promote torture belong to a philosophical school that wouldn't have been one iota out of place over one thousand years ago in the dark ages. These people deserve to be thrown on the slagheap of history, forever castigated and referenced as the worst example of how any human being can ever behave while the rest of us advance with the innate human spirit of dignity and freedom.

To pick apart Blackwill's argument is in one sense a step too far because it means we have to engage these parasites on the level of their own foul delusion.

Blackwill argues that a terrorist who is part of a plan to nuke a city should be tortured in order to discover where the bomb is. No doubt the CFR boys almost drowned in their own putrid drool when they heard that one.

WARNING: GRAPHIC!
http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d111/nmeofthestate/141205dead.jpg
Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi tortured to death at Abu Ghraib. Do you feel safer America?

Blackwill's malevolence is only paralleled by his unbridled stupidity.

Do you really entertain the notion that a psychopathic terrorist with the audacity to nuke a major city and slaughter untold millions is going squeal at the first sign of a cattle prod?

No, he's going to give false information and cause false leads to be followed, ensuring the attack has a greater chance of occurring.

I make myself shudder by entertaining what Blackwill's response would be.

'Well in that case maybe we should up the ante and torture this guy's children! No I know let's torture his newborn baby, that should get the job done!'

My stomach turns at the prospect of these cretins rubbing their hands together and starting to discuss applying bunsen burners to infants in order to 'protect the American people'.

This is a revolting prospect but it was already the storyline on the popular drama '24' - which tells us that they're already planting the seeds of this in the public consciousness.



Blackwill sells torture like a con man sells a beaten up old Mustang. He wraps a giant stinking turd in a veneer of twisted mental gymnastics and reasoning.

He takes an extreme example which has never even happened throughout the course of recent history and uses it as a justification for a sweeping policy directive whose victims are overwhelmingly bewildered Afghan goat herders or Iraqis who didn't show their papers at a checkpoint.

As former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Dr. Paul Craig Roberts points out, the torture program was not set up to gain any kind of real information from accused detainees because torture is renowned for extracting useless and false information. The real reason for the torture is to make the terrorists implicate themselves and thus create the perception of a real terrorist threat.

This is exactly the process in Uzbekistan, where the government was caught torturing innocent people into confession and then using the confessions as evidence that the government needed to crack down on terror.

People who refuse to torture and blow the whistle on it, like General Janis Karpinsky and Rick Baccus are ejected and replaced with cadres of torture teams willing to do the dirty work. Roberts said that these torture teams would be turned loose on US citizens before long.

Because torture is the new American virtue.

And the polls suggest that more than half of Americans buy the scam. That's because it is marketed to them just the same as every other brazen policy of brutality the Bush administration has embraced - carefully served up with a buffet of lies.

Of course when Saddam Hussein chops people's fingers off for stealing and puts people's heads through meat grinders that's evil.

WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC!
http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d111/nmeofthestate/141205victim.jpg
Victim of Saddam Hussein's torture. But if an American had done this on orders of the US government it would have been OK?

When Kim Jong-il orders political dissidents to be force fed chemical weapons and concentration camp guards stamp on newborn babies' necks that's horrible.

When Robert Mugabe orders his henchmen to threaten white farmers with death if they don't rape their own children, that's evil.

But when the guards at Abu Ghraib rape Iraqi children (as is described in the official Tuguba military report) then it's different! Those guards had to rape the kids to protect the American people from terrorists!


TEAM TORTURE: If it's good enough for these nice fellows
it's good enough for Blackwill.

And who are the terrorists? Who are the ones that are having their genitals scorched and their anuses raped with chemical glowsticks?

The LA Times reported that no leaders of Al-Qaeda were found at Guantanamo Bay. Most of them were shoemakers, farmers who had never even heard of America and people who were given guns by the Taliban and shoved onto the front lines.

The official army report on Abu Ghraib said that between seventy five and ninety percent of prisoners were totally innocent and just hadn't had their papers in order. The former General there, Janis Karpinski, confirmed this in a recent interview on the Alex Jones show:

"That's correct and I believe that it remains so today because they are still doing these raids, these round ups where they will go out and target an individual, and whoever happens to be around that individual, they bring them all in. And then there is no avenue to release them, once they are tagged as security detainees, they fall into this relatively new and unsupervised category."

The CIA are aware that the vast majority of detainees are not terrorists, proven by the fact that Pakistani gangsters admitted to rounding up innocent people in street sweeps and selling them to the US government as terrorists for anything up to $25,000. These people are now at Guantanamo Bay.

Only nine so-called terrorists have been brought to trial and none have been convicted. Why do individuals have to be held for four years without trial if there is proof that they can be convicted with? Army interrogators have gone public with their frustrations that these people are obviously not terrorists but they are still ordered to keep them. Images of mass ranks of terrorists are pure lies on the part of the insane Neo-Cons in order to keep the American people in fear.

Blackwill was one of the architects of Iraq reconstruction policy, or the 'bomb it to shit and hand out no bid contracts to Cheney's buddies and Halliburtion to rebuild it' role as it's better known. No wonder then that Blackwill diverts attention away from the total and complete catastrophe that is Iraq, a situation that lead the majority of Iraqis to yearn for the good old boy corruption days of Saddam Hussein.



No, Blackwill insists, the absence of an exit strategy and any stabilization plan whatsoever, leading to the insurgency isn't the problem! The problem is Iran! Iran is the biggest threat to Iraq so now we have to give them a taste of the same 'shock and awe' medicine.

Bring 'em on!

Blackwill and his ilk are helping make America the most hated country on earth and it is by design. The more terrorists they can recruit will lead far more of the public to support the vacuous amoral abyss of torture.

We need to collectively stand up as human beings and vociferously cast out these devils by relentlessly countering their rancid torture-promoting tirades and showing them up for who they really are, a bunch of sadomasochistic power obsessed perverts who deserve to rot in hell with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and the rest of history's torture loving madmen.



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Related: The Post 9/11 Saturation Of Our Culture In Torture

On The Defensive...

http://lnk.nu/nytimes.com/70h.html

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December 13, 2005

Probe Supports Allegations of C.I.A. Prisons in Europe

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

International Herald Tribune

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PARIS, Dec. 13 - Europe's chief investigator looking into allegations about the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons said today that preliminary evidence suggested that American agents had kidnapped people and illegally transferred them between countries.

Dick Marty, who leads an investigation for the 46-country Council of Europe, sharply criticized the United States as failing to come clean on the allegations, notably during a five-day visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Europe last week. But he also said he believed that there was some degree of collaboration from European officials.

In his first written interim report on the issue, Mr. Marty said that his investigation so far had "reinforced the credibility of the allegations concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any judicial involvement, in European countries."

His report, which was presented to the Council's Legal Affairs and Human Rights committee in Paris, also said: "Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards."

Mr. Marty's investigation is still in the earliest stages. According to the statement released today, the preliminary report is based primarily on published information, ongoing legal proceedings, talks with some of the non-governmental organizations and individuals involved - including Ms. Rice - and discussions with journalists.

Mr. Marty, a Swiss senator, was appointed by Europe's human rights watchdog to investigate whether the United States had breached the Continent's human rights rules - and whether European governments had turned a blind eye or even allowed such breaches.

The allegations have been circulating since Nov. 2, when The Washington Post said it had evidence of C.I.A. prisons in at least eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe. Human Rights Watch has identified Poland as the C.I.A.'s main base for holding and interrogating terrorist suspects and said Romania was a key transit point for moving detainees. Both countries have denied the charges.

Mr. Marty said he believed that the United States was no longer holding detainees in Europe. He said he believed that prisoners were moved to North Africa after the claims were first published in early November.

Washington and a number of European capitals have also come under pressure to account for dozens of C.I.A. flights on the Continent, some of which are thought to have transported suspects to countries with a track record of torture and cruel treatment.

During last week's visit, Ms. Rice acknowledged that the United States had used "renditions" to move terrorist suspects to third countries to be "questioned, held or brought to justice," but, she insisted, only with the permission of the governments of the countries where the suspects were captured. She also said that all American personnel - including the C.I.A. - were subject to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

But she did not confirm or deny the reports on the secret detention centers, a point Mr. Marty criticized in a statement today.

The investigator said he "deplores the fact that no information or explanation had been provided on this point by Ms. Rice during her visit to Europe."

The State Department declined to comment on Mr. Marty's report. A spokesman, Justin Higgins, said Ms. Rice had "said all she plans to say on this matter for right now."

Mr. Marty also said he suspected that European secret services knew about the alleged C.I.A. transfers.

"I think it would have been difficult for these actions to have taken place without a degree of collaboration," he said, although he added, "It is possible that secret services did not inform their governments."

At least eight European Union member states, many of which launched their own investigations, demanded a clarification from the United States last month. Many decided to accept Ms. Rice's response for now. But until Mr. Marty publishes his final conclusions, officials say, the issue will not go away.

"We were given assurances by the Americans, and we don't have the intention to demand more," said a French diplomat, who in accordance with French practice spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we'll see what the Council of Europe investigation finds out."

Mr. Marty announced today that the Council of Europe's Legal and Human Rights Committee would next debate the issue at the end of January.

Brian Knowlton of The International Herald Tribune contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

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Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

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When Allies Become Accomplices to Terror

By Christian Bommarius, Senior Editor

Translated By Carl Bergquist

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12/07/05 "Berliner Zeitun" -- Bush and Company: Shooting Western World in the Foot?The terrorism against Western societies cannot result in victory for the perpetrators, but the so-called war on terror can be lost offhandedly by the West itself. To no small degree, this prospect has been helped by U.S. President George W. Bush's decision to declare war on Islamist terror on the one hand and the decision to makes the laws of war inapplicable to terrorists on the other.

Never before has an American administration cut such a swathe in the field of international law – an unlawful war of aggression was legitimized and confessions extracted through torture were deemed admissible in courts of law. And never before has an American administration fought a no-holds-barred battle, one without any rules - for democracy - that has turned so many democracies into accomplices.

But instead of openly declaring their complicity, European governments have silently aided and abetted. This does not refer to tolerating secret CIA-agent flights in European airspace - though it is good to know that CIA agents are still unbridled in their movements. Rather, the complicity began with the knowledge that these agents were accompanying suspected terrorists on their way to European and non-European torture chambers. The justifiable suspicion exists that European governments not only knew of the torture, but that they also benefited from the coerced testimony so gathered.

From this point of view, and in the realm of complicity, the activities of the recently dethroned [Schroeder] Government in the Khaled el-Masri case merit scrutiny. If it is true that el-Masri, a German national of Lebanese origins, was kidnapped by CIA agents in late 2003, who then brought him to Afghanistan and kept there until the end of May 2004; if it is true that the then U.S. Ambassador to Germany [Daniel Coats] asked the then German Federal Interior Minister Otto Schily to keep quiet about the matter; and if it is true that this silence was acquiesced to, then the secret practice of torture was not only tolerated but also supported by the German government. This would, alas, not only be a scandal, representing a catastrophic negation of the Red-Green (Social Democrat, Green Party) human rights policy, but it would be a successful attempt by American foreign policy to make complicity synonymous with democracy.

Does a State become a rogue State because it uses roguish methods? Or does it use roguish methods because it is a rogue state? An old French proverb assists in finding the solution: "Whether a drunkard is sick because he drinks or drinks because he is sick is of no consequence to his children." It makes no difference if a State tortures (or outsources torture) in the name of human rights, in the name of a religion or in the name of a dictator. For it then tortures not as a society based on the rule of law but as its antithesis.

It makes no difference whether terrorists employ terror tactics or whether the U.S. military does so in the war on terror. What then unites them is this usage of terror, and the only thing that separates them is the American administration's claim that super-positive international law permits the demolition of positive international law. In comparison, the terrorists' pretense to banish Western culture to hell in the name of Allah seems almost modest. Above all, however, it is relatively close to becoming a reality.

For in pursuing its so-called War on Terror, the U.S. administration is not merely turning European democracies into its accomplices, the administration itself has long since – naturally unsuspectingly, but naiveté in this case not a convincing justification - become the most important accomplice to the Islamist terrorists. An ever so fanatical terrorist could never have undermined American civil liberties as effectively as the administration under George W. Bush. And the termination of the much-vaunted community of Western values, as it is now represented by the U.S. administration's desire, approval or toleration of torture, was likely a fantasy never entertained by the top terrorists themselves.

The War on Terror cannot be waged with terrorism. Not until European governments have grasped this, not until the next President of the United States of America also understands this, can accomplices once more become allies.