The German connection

While conventional wisdom says Germany is apparently filled with a beer-loving liberal citizenry who oppose war on all counts, including the politicians, part of that might not exactly be true. The politician part, that is.

The latest story causing a furor is this one,

Media reports on Thursday said two agents of Germany's BND foreign intelligence service in Baghdad had helped the United States identify bombing targets at the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003, which the Berlin government strongly opposed.

Aside from the fact we have yet another clueless journalist trying to endanger field operatives to help political parties, the main question here is whether the anti-Bush rhetoric we heard from Shroeder was just for show.

Let's take stock of some facts. Germany has been a stopover for many terrorists these past 25 years, including an event in Munich Speilberg just put in the local Bijou. Most notorious was the Atta/Binalshibh Hamburg cell.

Ironically, they were likely being watched (or aided) by a contingent of Iraqi spies, the latter story almost completely unreported in America. Atta left Germany on his way to Prague once and maybe thrice. And if Iraqi diplomat/Mukhabarat spy al-Ani didn't meet with Atta in 2001, he met with a German Iraqi car dealer. Did anyone check him out?

More recently Germany just let Mohammed Hamadi loose after serving less than 20 years for murdering a US Navy sailor and hijacking an airplane. It was rumored he was a trade for Susanne Osthoff, a German 'archeologist' working in Iraq and herself rumored to be a spy. Weird, wild stuff. These guys were in the middle of everything.

Perhaps this 'keeping up appearances' policy was all Schroeder could do. The European populace at large has apparently sunk so far into leftism as to not recognize a threat when it pokes them in the eye. The same policy might have also included the French. Now, what was John Kerry saying about that global test thing?