Has President Obama broken yet another promise – this one to the German people not to use Germany as a launching pad for drone strikes? As if there wasn’t enough friction between Germany and the United States, this week, Tagesschau is reporting that two of Germany’s most respected journalistic organizations, German Public Television and Süddeutsche Zeitung, are publishing and broadcasting the fruit of a two-year joint investigation into U.S. military and intelligence activity in the country involving torture, kidnapping and drone strikes, that looks destined to cause another upwelling of distaste for the United States.
This Tagesschau introduction to what is to come starts off this way:
According to a joint TV NDR-Süddeutsche Zeitung investigation [The Secret War: Germany and the Role of America], the United States, in the fight against terrorism, organized kidnapping and torture in Germany. U.S. security forces, in the process, arrested suspects at German airports. According to the investigation, U.S. agents interrogated asylum-seekers and gathered information that may have played a role in determining drone targets. A secret torture prison was constructed at a CIA base in Frankfurt am Main.
After the two-year joint NDR-SZ investigation, the authors conclude that Germany has long been a part of the U.S. security architecture. A U.S. intelligence firm that has worked closely with the National Security Agency (NSA) and planned the kidnapping and air transportation of suspects for the CIA, to this day, receives millions of dollars in contracts from the German government.
Based on research conducted in Stuttgart and the U.S. base at Ramstein, drones were sent to kill suspected terrorists and civilians in Africa and the Middle East. “The decision about when, how and where such operations are arranged, is made in Stuttgart,” journalist John Goetz is convinced.
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