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What was the president thinking when he asked the Germans to take prisoners from Guantanamo?

Mohammed Haydar Zammar

Suspected of having recruited the members of the Hamburg cell for al-Qaeda and of having run a “travel agency” that organized the trips of al-Qaeda recruits from Germany to Afghanistan.

According to German press reports, the Syrian-born German citizen was under surveillance by German domestic intelligence starting in 1997. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (September 12, 2002 and January 12, 2003), German police questioned Zammar following the 9/11 attacks, but did not arrest him. On October 25, 2001, he was issued a passport by German authorities and two days later he left the country for Morocco. He is currently in prison in his native Syria. (For more on Zammar from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, see the English translation here.)

Mamoun Darkazanli

On both the U.S. and UN lists of terrorist persons or entities. Darkazanli is a known acquaintance of Hamburg cell members who was suspected of being involved in terrorist financing already before the 9/11 attacks. The 2003 Spanish al-Qaeda indictment identifies him as “the permanent interlocutor and assistant of Osama bin Laden in Germany.” Germany has refused to extradite him and no charges have been brought against him by German prosecutors. He lives in Hamburg.

Reda Seyam

An open proponent of jihad who is suspected by American and Indonesian intelligence of being the al-Qaeda financier of the 2002 Bali bombings. The bombings killed 202 people. In his 2008 memoir Die Abrechnung ["Settling Accounts"], Michael von Wedel, a former agent of Germany’s Federal Office of Criminal Investigations (BKA), writes that his own investigations confirmed these suspicions. Nonetheless, von Wedel was required by his BKA superiors to arrange for the safe passage of Seyam from Jakarta to Frankfurt in 2003. In Germany, Seyam was released. No charges have been brought against him by German prosecutors. He presently lives with his family in Berlin and receives a reported €2300 per month in social benefits. (For more on Seyam, see my forthcoming review of Michael von Wedel’s Die Abrechnung in Policy Review magazine.)

Christian Ganczarski

A known confidante of Osama bin Laden who was convicted by a French court in February of complicity in the April 2002 Djerba synagogue bombing. Some 21 people were killed in the suicide attack. The German convert to Islam was under surveillance by German authorities at the time of bombing. Shortly before the attack, Ganczarski received a telephone call from the bomber asking for his “blessing.” Despite the police surveillance, German authorities brought no charges against Ganczarski and he was allowed to leave the country. He was arrested in 2003 at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.

Cuneyt Ciftci

Suicide bomber who drove a pick-up truck packed with explosives into an American guard post in Khost province in southeastern Afghanistan in March 2008. Two American soldiers and two Afghans were reported killed in the attack. Ciftci left his native Bavaria for the tribal regions of Pakistan in April 2007. He was recruited by the Taliban-affiliated Islamic Jihad Union (IJU). The IJU is known to have sent numerous other recruits from Germany to Afghanistan. (For more, see my “Germany’s Taliban Trail: From Murat Kurnaz to Cüneyt Ciftci.”)

The above list is only a partial one. Numerous other names could be added to it — names like Said Bahaji, Yehia Yousif, Thomas Fischer, and Selcuk Bilgin. Two other better known names could also be added to it: Murat Kurnaz and Khaled Al-Masri (aka Khaled El-Masri). The two German residents have served as “poster children” for the campaign against America’s erstwhile war on Islamic terror. In fact, however, both men have numerous links to Germany’s Islamic extremist scene, and both have in the past been identified as security risks by German authorities themselves. (On Kurnaz, see here and here; and on Masri, see here.)

What the list shows is that Germany’s role as base for the 9/11 co-conspirators was no accident. Germany has been and indeed remains a thriving center of jihadist activism and recruitment. What the list also shows is that German authorities have displayed remarkable indulgence toward the jihadists in their midst — at least as long as these jihadists were planning or implicated in attacks “merely” on foreign soil and not in Germany itself.

For the Obama administration to be asking Germany of all places to take Guantánamo detainees reveals either disdain for American security interests or a strange obliviousness to the threat that German jihadist networks have abundantly demonstrated that they represent.

It is truly as if 9/11 never occurred.

John Rosenthal’s writings on European politics and transatlantic relations have appeared in English, French, and German in such leading publications as Policy Review, Les Temps Modernes, and Merkur. He holds a PhD in philosophy and he taught political philosophy and classical German philosophy before turning to journalism. More of his work can be found at Transatlantic Intelligencer.

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