German GWOT Misfire

The signs from Europe on the antiterrorism front look increasingly ominous, less because of any discernible upswing in terrorist activity than because of European governments' attempts to criminalize opposition. First came word that the German government was investigating seventeen top journalists who had published articles about a parliamentary investigation of German involvement in CIA rendition flights to Europe. The same week saw an even more chilling development: Several urban social scientists in Berlin were secretly investigated and charged--one was imprisoned--on suspicion of terrorism. The grounds cited include the research they have done and people they may have talked to in the process.

Dr. Andrej Holm, a 36-year-old urban sociologist at Berlin's Humboldt University, was arrested July 31. A researcher on the gentrification of Berlin, he wrote the academic volume Die Restrukturierung des Raumes (The Restructuring of Space). He was rendered by helicopter to the federal court in Karlsruhe and ordered detained under antiterrorist law on suspicion of "terrorist association." He was held in solitary confinement in Berlin's Moabit Prison, in his cell twenty-three hours a day, with almost no access to lawyers and little contact with family, including his three children.

The homes and workplaces of three other academics were also raided, their computers, phone books and other research materials searched and confiscated. All four have been under surveillance since September 2006, suspected of association with a "terrorist organization" referred to as a "militant group." The raids and the detention of Holm were apparently triggered by the earlier arrests of three people alleged to have set several army trucks on fire in Brandenburg. Rather than charge these avowedly antimilitarist activists with vandalism, the German government has reached back to Section 129a of the German Penal Code to throw the antiterrorist book at them. Section 129a was established in 1976 during the state's pursuit of the militant Baader-Meinhof Gang but lately has been dusted off for the purpose of fighting the "global war on terror" (GWOT).

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070924/smith

This article from The Nation is a chilling illustration of where we are likely headed.

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