Kidnapping Muslims

Khaled el-Masri just wanted to go on a short holiday to Skopje, he says. He needed some time alone -- away from the clamor of his four young sons. A couple of days. But it turned out to be a longer trip than he had planned. And he didn't end up seeing much of the Macedonian capital, either. Rather, he spent months locked up in a dirty prison cell in Afghanistan.

El-Masri, a 41-year-old German citizen who lives in the western German city of Ulm, was kidnapped on the Macedonian border by secret service personnel -- he doesn't know what country they were from -- on Dec. 31, 2003. From there, he was brought to a hotel in Skopje where he was not allowed to leave his room for three weeks. His captors began interrogating him there: "They offered me a deal," he told the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "I should sign a confession that I was a member of al-Qaida and then they would let me go."

He refused. A short time later, a hood was placed over his head, he was brought to an airfield and his clothes were cut off of him with scissors. Then he was photographed naked, given a jump suit to wear and flown to Kabul. Interrogations -- three months of questioning from agents he claims were American -- followed. They wanted to know about the mosque where he worshipped in Ulm. They asked about fellow worshippers and about suspected extremists.

Apart from the bent of the questions, el-Masri had no indication, for the first three weeks in Afghanistan, why he was being held. And he was desperate to get out. He began a hunger strike and held out for 34 days before giving it up. In the meantime, he was told that he would be let free. The prison warden told him, says el-Masri, "From the very beginning I had the impression that you don't belong here." But the release took a long time.

While he was away, his wife and children didn't hear a word from him. He was not allowed to write, call or communicate with the outside world in any way. In desperation, she gave up and moved the family back to her home in Jordan. He was released in the early summer of 2004 and now he and his family are back in Germany. His captors -- which he continues to insist were American -- obviously realized they had the wrong man.(2:45 p.m. CET)

Send Le Pen to the Pen

French right-wing extremist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen needs to go. Really. We are tired of his knee-jerk, moronic comments; of his cuddling up to the Nazis like they were fuzzy teddy bears with guns; of his hate. When will right-wingers like Le Pen pick up a history book instead of picking up a microphone? When will the French stop voting for him?

What's he done now? In an interview with the right-wing French magazine Rivarol, Le Pen, the 76-year old leader of the National Front party, said that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane," and that the massacres of the French population that occurred under the Nazis amounted to a few "blunders." He also said, in his senile wisdom, that the Gestapo worked primarily to protect the French population.

On Thursday, he proved unwilling to follow the standard political script, which calls for an immediate retraction of such radical statements, and he repeated his oh-so-well-thought-out opinions. Not that one would expect humility from him. His political career, after all, is based on such tripe. In the 1980s, he disgusted the world by referring to the Nazi slaughter of the Jews "a detail of history."

It is no longer so easy to get away with such comments in today's France, however. The French government said on Thursday it was considering prosecuting Le Pen for breaking a law which bans the denial of Nazi crimes against humanity. He likely won't get convicted. He was, after all, "only" guilty of relativizing history. Still, it's time to lock him up. (1:55 p.m. CET)

Can't Wait for Act III

It's like a well-scripted play. Act I: the Indonesian military says that all foreign aid workers active in the tsunami-devastated region of Aceh on the island of Sumatra -- a region in which a low-level civil war has been simmering for years -- have to register their travel plans with the government or risk deportation. Act II: A newspaper, citing police reports, says on Friday that shots were fired near aid workers in the region and the Aceh rebels were the ones pulling the triggers.

Maybe the shots were fired. And maybe the rebels are to blame. But, in the words of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in reaction to US attempts to prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the war there: "Pardon me, but I am not convinced." (12:35 p.m. CET)

Saddam Conference in Berlin

Berlin weekends have a lot on offer. Concerts, theater, movies, parties. Everything a night owl could wish for. But Saturday, March 12 is going to be an especially difficult day to decide what to do. "Let's see. Do I have a quick cat nap to get ready for a full night of clubbing? Or do I go to the Iraq conference?"

That's right. The Iraq conference. Turns out, the German Solidarity Committee for a Free Iraq is going to hold an international meeting to talk about Iraq resistance. Here are some of the topics on the menu:

* The US Occupation and its Social, Economic and Political Implications
* The Legitimacy of the Resistance
* The Interests of Imperial Powers