Corridors of Power: The lady was a spy

This whole ordeal had a foul odor from the start!

It's worse than a foul odor! I just read a letter from the American Navy diver's family to President Bush, which details some of what Hamadi put the diver through before killing him.

It wasn't a 'simple murder,' it was prolonged torture. Hamadi was trying to force the sailor to scream, to use those screams to get fuel delivered to the plane (I think it was on American Thinker or a link from there, but I'll have to check).

But Merkel? She attempted to contradict Condi Rice during the Secretary's meeting. Nice lady, that Merkel.

President Bush should be too busy to see her when she arrives in DC. Perhaps he could appoint someone to greet her -- someone of the stature that "hardline" joke deserves; someone like, oh, how about Hinckley, while he's on a week-end pass from the asylum?

i think ostoff and the BND (perhaps non-sanctioned units withn the BND) were actually ASSISTING zarqawi.

this whole thing was a cover to get them more money.

All of these "European hostages" appear to be nothing more than disguised conduits for milking euro cash ransoms.

Let them remain hostages for good, and perhaps forced re-reading of the Koran and the rancid falafels will get to them, finally.

Either way, they're no longer working as a Fifth Column against the West.

As the late Johnny Carson said:

"May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their nether regions!"

So this only tells me that the German Government set this up as a ruse to legitimize the release of a murderous terrorist, Islamofeces. They knew exactly what they were doing!!! They can protest us putting down a convicted murder, Stanley "Tookie, tookie" Williams. But they release one to wreck more havok on the world? May be we should arrest her, Ms Merkel, and put her on trial in Hamadi's stead. But then, he'd still be free in some Islamofeces country. Chancellor Merkel and the German government must think that we're stupid. Mohammad Ali Hamadi tortured and murdered this sailor for nothing more than being an American serviceman. He was unarmed!!! Posed no treat to him and his fellow Islamofeces. Now that I think about it, Mohammad and Tookie,tookie do have this one thing in common, they love murdering inocent, unarmed, defenseless people.Our President will be the gracous host, of course. And will treat Chancellor Merkel as the head of state that she is. But after that, when her face is stuffed with snitzel, snozzel and Heiniken beer, show her the pictures of the American sailor before Mohammad and after Mohammad. Show her the pictures of him as he was after they tortured and murdered him. And then politely escort her to the next plane back to Germany, with a note to the anti American German parliment telling them to kiss our American halfmoons. And another note to the Islamofeces country that he's gone back to. Letting them know, They're next.

So this only tells me that the German Government set this up as a ruse to legitimize the release of a murderous terrorist, Islamofeces. They knew exactly what they were doing!!! They can protest us putting down a convicted murder, Stanley "Tookie, tookie" Williams. But they release one to wreck more havok on the world? May be we should arrest her, Ms Merkel, and put her on trial in Hamadi's stead. But then, he'd still be free in some Islamofeces country. Chancellor Merkel and the German government must think that we're stupid. Mohammad Ali Hamadi tortured and murdered this sailor for nothing more than being an American serviceman. He was unarmed!!! Posed no treat to him and his fellow Islamofeces. Now that I think about it, Mohammad and Tookie,tookie do have this one thing in common, they love murdering inocent, unarmed, defenseless people.Our President will be the gracous host, of course. And will treat Chancellor Merkel as the head of state that she is. But after that, when her face is stuffed with snitzel, snozzel and Heiniken beer, show her the pictures of the American sailor before Mohammad and after Mohammad. Show her the pictures of him as he was after they tortured and murdered him. And then politely escort her to the next plane back to Germany, with a note to the anti American German parliment telling them to kiss our American halfmoons. And another note to the Islamofeces country that he's, Hamadi, has gone back to. Letting them know, They're next.

Germans do not understand how the educated world, the world of those with memories, regards them still, and will for a very long time to come. They may have misinterpreted the indulgence of the American government, needing or thinking it needed to put all sorts of things behind it because no sooner was World War II over than the Cold War loomed, with what many intelligent people, many of them born after the war, in America, in France, in Italy, in Russia, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Denmark, in Norway, in England, naturally think of when they hear the word "Germany." The Germans may think that by now they are home free, and they appear all too ready to regard themselves and expect others to regard their country, their history, their manner of dealing with that history, as "normal." Many of them are "tired," as the writer Martin Walzer wrote -- not in these precise words -- of "being beaten over the head about the Holocaust" Too bad. There is no sell-by date on learning, in great detail, about that atrocity, and realizing there is no transcendiing of it, no "getting beyond or over it." It is there, in the air, permanently.

Young backpack-and-water-bottled Germans travel complacently about the world, completely oblivious to what comes to mihnd to those who either lived through the war, or who have learned about it in detail, when they hear the word "German" or see those faces that cannot but remind one of Hitlerjugend sun-worshippers tramping the heather in groups. And one repeatedly hears about the behavior of German high-school students, as they make their dutiful tours, as high school students, to Auschwitz -- chewing gum, cracking jokes, laughing their heads off, having a great time.

The Germans were always enthusiasts for the Project of Europe, a ghasly business which started small, as merely the European Coal and Steel Community, and has grown, and grown, and metastasized so that now, with corrupt and unrepresentative officials in Brussels, and regulations that efface more and more what makes Italy Italy, or France France, continue to build up the idea of homo economicus as the basis for the ideal, and that European Ideal is nothing more than the Expanded Big Market, where "Europeans" can compete using economies of scale, and economic gigantism also involves effacing, little by little, the local products (so that Italian chocolate, Italian parmigiano, or those who make caerphilly or bleu de Bresse, will have to conform to all-Europe standards), and eventually, the sense of the nation-state will dissolve, and with it national languages and national literatures, and national self-consciousnesses, all sacrificed for the Big Market. The monstrous E.U. bureaucracy with its regulations, owes its development in part, as one British observer noted in "Encounter" long ago, to the psychological need of Germans in the 1960s to identify themselves not as "Germans" but as "Europeans"" "Yes, ve are all Europeans now, aren't ve? The old days do not matter. Ve haf put the past behind us. It is the only vay ve Europeans can stand up to the American hegemony, jah?"

For those whose memories are long (and memories should for certain matters go on forever) Germans are permanently on probation. And Germany owes the United States everything -- for the absurdly generous treatment it received (compare what the Soviet Union did in the part of Germany it took over) after the war, for the Marshall Plan's tens of billions lavished upon that country, for the Berlin Air Lift, for the decades of protection offered by NATO, which is to say by the United States -- for the United States was the organizer, and paid most of NATO's bills, and certainly the Germans, the chief beneficiaries of NATO's preventing a Red Army advance further into Europe, has never paid anything like what its economic condition -- ordinary Germans live far better than do Americans -- should have required of it.

For Cold War purposes much was overlooked. The Cold War is over, and a lot that was overlooked need not be. The unseemly rapidity with which a nation that had engaged in mass-murder all of a sudden passed, as virtually its first act, a law banning capital punishment, so as to spare the lives of Nazi war criminals, the continued presence of Nazis in the German judiciary, in the Deutsche Bank, in politics (see T. H. Tetens, "The New Germany and the Old Nazis," that came out in the early 1960s), the handful of war criminals -- out of hundreds of thousands directly involved in the mass murders of Jews, gypsies, and others -- punished with ridiculously short jail terms.

It is intolerable that the German government believed it had the right to free a murderer of an American serviceman in order to get back a German convert to Islam, who had lived in Iraq for years, married (and divorced) an Iraqi, and apparently had gone as islamically native as one possibly could. Just because she had been involved -- so the German story goes -- in arranging or attempting to arrange a meeting with Zarqawi or his group, hardly makes her more than a one-time ad-hoc informant.

There are three possible versions of the Osthoff story.. One is that she was not involved in any intelligence work, and that the German government, stung by American criticism, is now pretending that she was some kind of intelligence agent to justify their pusillanimity. The second is that she had gone native, married a Muslim, became a Muslim, and identified with Islam, but was willing to arrange a meeting, in order to help the Sunni Muslims obtain a hearing for their supposed demands from others who were working for German in tellignece. But it is only the third version of the tale – and that is one that the Germans have not yet given, perhaps because it is false, or perhaps because it is true (and one hopes, for their sake, and to justify their action, that it is true) that Osthoff was not simply being asked to arrange this meeting given her obvious sympathies and identification with the locals, but rather was, and had always been, an intelligence agent for the Germans in Iraq.

Were that to have been the case, then obtaining her release by freeing Hamadi, the torturer abnd killer of Robert Stethem, might have been explicable and, for some, perhaps even justifiable. But only in that case.

Germans do not understand how the educated world, the world of those with memories, regards them still, and will for a very long time to come.

Very true. We had a German exchange student at my high school who had never heard of the Holocaust or so many other atrocities until she studied in America. I think she first heard about it from the art teacher. Rude awakening.

So that means there's at least two generations of blissfully ignorant "young backpack-and-water-bottled Germans" in the same boat.

Make Europe responsible for its own defense again, and they might grow some backbones in record time.

I'm also quite disappointed at Merkel so far. I thought she was going to kick some arsch and take names.

Another example of what happens when Moslems are put in positions of trust in infidel governments, militaries included.

DISLOYAL TREASONOUS SEDITIOUS TURNCOAT SUBVERSIVE TRAITOROUS MOSLEM

I'd like to huff and puff about how enraged we'll all be when such a treason occurs, but it did occur in the al-Arian investigation and 0.00001% of the American public was informed of the traitor Gamal FBI Agent Abdel-Hafiz, born in Egypt and a devout Moslem.

And the egregious case of Sgt. Hasan was handled very quietly, too.

Germans are currently our enemies. I wouldn't buy
anything from Germany, even that Heckler & Koch
.45 ACP that I'd like.

"not even that Heckler..."
- from a posting above

You're right. Buy American. And if you have a fondness for that particular kind of insurance policy (for all I know, it may give pause to some) then "insure your car with Smith & Wesson."

The Italian female hostage that was released after a ransome was paid -- Italian Communist party member -- that was fairly obviously a money laundrying operation for the Iraqi Communist Party. I seriously doubt the Islamo-crazys had her...I think commies welcomed her to Bagdad.

Merkel is from the former East Germany. The DDR had extensive contacts with and provided support for various Islamic terror groups in the world during the '70's and '80's. I wonder what her background is...maybe we should be looking her name up in the Rosewood Files.

http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/2006/01/catch-and-release.html

http://www.geocities.com/americanmilitarycasualties/stethem.html

"When the plane was at the Beirut airport in Lebanon, Petty Officer Stethem was singled out because he was in the US military. After many hours of being cruelly beaten, tortured, and finally killed by the terrorists, they threw his body from the plane in a final disgraceful, cowardly act. The wounds were so terrible that his body had to be identified by its fingerprints.

Throughout the ordeal, Robert Stethem did not yield, and instead encouraged his fellow passengers to endure by his example. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star for heroism and bravery. He is buried at Arlington Cemetery."
--Mark Crawford, Bryantown from "Who Was Robert Stethem"

This is an affront to all Americans. Merkel's White House invitation needs to be revoked, at the very least. Just send her on to speak at the UN, with all the rest of her ilk.

"I wouldn't buy anything from Germany..."
-- from a posting above

Aside from the pistol, the main thing German you should not buy, new or used, is a German car. Make them suffer. And if you are in the economic class that can afford the BMW or Mercedes or Porsche, take special pleasure in denying them all that money for a very big ticket item.

Too bad the Australians don't make cars. Well, nobody's perfect.

Joe Scarborough did an interview with the brother of Robert Stetham last night on his show. The brother indicated that the state department has not even made a formal request from the Lebanese government to return Hamadi. This is truly outrageous. What are they doing?

It will be interesting to see how Bush sucks up to Merkel on her upcoming visit.