German journalists, parliamentarians under investigation for leaking classified documents

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

-- 



(My comment:  We are getting ever more close to just who, exactly, 
was masterminding political kidnapping of Ernst Zundel!  Anybody's 
guess?)

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German journalists, parliamentarians under investigation for leaking 
classified documents


The Associated Press: August 3, 2007



BERLIN: Seventeen German journalists and several members of 
parliament are under investigation in the alleged leak of classified 
documents given to a parliamentary committee, the federal 
prosecutor's office said Friday.

The documents related to a parliamentary inquiry into possible German 
government complicity in CIA prisoner flights and the detention of 
two men.

The president of the German parliament, Norbert Lammert, had sought 
charges against the journalists in June, senior prosecutor Simone 
Herbeth said, adding that an unidentified number of members were also 
under investigation.

"There is also an investigation in the direction of those entrusted 
with official secrets," Herberth said. "MPs are also being looked at."

The president of the Federal Association of German Newspaper 
Publishers criticized the investigations."It is not acceptable that 
journalists who are reporting about possible misdoing or errors have 
to fear persecution for giving away official secrets," Helmut Heinen 
said.


The journalists, among them reporters for national publications 
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel, Die Zeit and Die Welt, are under 
investigation on suspicion of having published classified material 
that is subject of a parliamentary committee.

The editor-in-chief of weekly Spiegel, who is under investigation 
together with four of the news magazine's reporters, called the 
inquiry an attack on press freedom.

"This seems to be an indiscriminate attack on press freedom," Stefan 
Aust was quoted as saying in the magazine's online edition.

The parliamentary committee is investigating the German government's 
possible complicity in the cases of CIA rendition flights that had 
layovers in Germany as well as the German secret service's activities 
in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion in 2003

The committee is also looking into the disputed kidnapping of Khalid 
el-Masri and the years-long detention of Murat Kurnaz.

El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says that he was 
seized in Macedonia on Dec. 31, 2003, and taken by CIA agents to 
Afghanistan, where he was allegedly abused before being released in 
Albania in May 2004.

Kurnaz, who was born in Bremen, Germany, but has Turkish citizenship, 
was detained in Pakistan in 2001, turned over to U.S. authorities and 
held at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay as a terror suspect 
until his release in 2006.

Opposition politicians had asked for the parliamentary committee to 
probe whether the German government looked the other way over 
practices such as the reported abduction. Some have accused German 
officials of delaying Kurnaz' release from Guantanamo.

In February, Germany's highest court ruled that authorities had 
violated press freedom in ordering a raid on the offices of a 
magazine that cited classified information in an article about the 
late leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The offices of the monthly Cicero were searched on Sept. 12, 2005 as 
investigators attempted to pinpoint the source of a leak of 
confidential papers from Germany's Federal Crime Office on the 
financing of Islamic extremists.