The editors of the Atlantic Review link to this declassified report (pdf) released last Thursday which seemed to exonerate direct official involvement of the German government and the intelligence agency BND in providing substantive assistance to the US military in the 2003 Iraq invasion. Blogger erphschwester smelled a rat, and it turns out her instincts were correct, for today the New York Times has a front-page article that details the highly useful intelligence passed by the BND to the US invasion-planners:
Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein's plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed on to American commanders a month before the invasion, according to a classified study by the United States military.
In providing the Iraqi document, German intelligence officials offered more significant assistance to the United States than their government has publicly acknowledged. The plan gave the American military an extraordinary window into Iraq's top-level deliberations, including where and how Mr. Hussein planned to deploy his most loyal troops.
(...)The prelude to the Iraq war was a period of intense strain in German-American relations. In his 2002 political campaign, Gerhard Schröder, then the German chancellor, warned against an invasion and vowed that Germany would not participate. President Bush declined to make the customary congratulatory phone call to Mr. Schröder when he won re-election that September. Annoyed by the antiwar stances of Germany and France, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offended the two nations by labeling them "old Europe" shortly before the war in March 2003.
Longstanding relations between American and German intelligence agencies, however, persisted. As the American military prepared to invade Iraq, the German intelligence agents operated in Baghdad.
Among their tasks, they sought to obtain Mr. Hussein's plan to defend Baghdad, the United States study asserts
The report is a blow to the credibility of German foreign minister Steinmeier, who had responsibility for the intelligence arm under the former Red-Green Government in Berlin, and has consistently denied that the BND played any substantive role in the invasion. Even before the NYTimes article, the opposition parties, led by the Left Party and the Greens, had been calling for an independent investigation into the BND activities in Iraq. Today, according to Spiegel-Online, they are demanding an emergency meeting of the Intelligence Committee to deal with the affair:
Der grüne Politiker Hans-Christian Ströbele schloss sich der Forderung nach einer schnellen Sondersitzung des PKG an. "Wir brauchen nun umgehend umfassende Aufklärung von der Bundesregierung", sagte Ströbele SPIEGEL ONLINE am Montagmorgen. Für ihn belegt der neue Bericht einmal mehr, dass die Affäre um den BND nur mit den Mitteln eines parlamentarischen Untersuchungsausschuss geklärt werden könne. "Die Bundesregierung hat uns eine Menge Details genannt, doch von diesem Vorgang haben wir bisher nichts erfahren", monierte er.
Is it possible that the Greens, as former coalition partner, had been left completely in the dark? Was the BND acting as a rogue unit within the government? This has now become a full-blown crisis for the new Black-Red government in Berlin, which was just celebrating its first "successful" (in their eyes) hundred days in power.
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