The new German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, stood up in parliament on Wednesday to defend himself and almost everyone in (or recently out of) the German government against charges of wrongdoing in the scandal over Khaled al-Masri. Steinmeier had been chief of staff to former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was in power when al-Masri -- a German citizen -- was nabbed in Macedonia and flown to a jail in Afghanistan. Al-Masri claims he was tortured for months by agents of the CIA before someone realized they had made a mistake, and set him free.

As the scandal developed last week, attention focused on Steinmeier as the man in the current government who could answer for Schröder and his ministers. He said the previous government heard from the CIA about the abduction only after al-Masri had been set free in late spring of 2004. The main German players, he said -- including Steinmeier himself -- had done their jobs, and allegations that they had failed to help el-Masri were unfounded. Allegations that Germany had aided the abduction (or any others) by passing intelligence on to the CIA were "disgraceful" and "irresponsible."

One piece of news that came up during the parliamentary session is that German intelligence officers may have set foot in Cuba to question a German citizen at Guantanamo Bay. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble mentioned allegations (in a closed-door meeting) that a Turkish man from Bremen, Murat Kurnaz -- otherwise known as the "Bremen Taliban" -- had been interrogated by German officials. Schäuble also suggested that the CIA had apologized and even paid al-Masri for his silence, something both American officians and al-Masri's lawyer have denied.

The newspapers see the parliamentary debate as a lot of hot air. The left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung hardly expected a mea culpa from Steinmeier, but the will of the back-bench opposition parties to pursue him looks feeble, write the editors. "Low expectations aren't easy to disappoint," but the opposition should press the government on thorny questions "about cooperation between various intelligence agencies and possible future cases of abduction and torture … The newest information from Wolfgang Schäuble suggests that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine agrees. Following a longish introduction, in which the paper describes, for those who might have missed it until now, the new type of warfare in which secret services are on the front rather than armies, the paper moved on to Wednesday's parliamentary meeting. "Schäuble’s comments have already undermined" Steinmeier's claim that German intelligence had nothing to do with cases of abuse and abduction. "Even the first attempts at clarifying these episodes of a dirty war have made the façade of German rule of law look threadbare."

"It was supposed to be a day of clarification," writes the right-leaning daily Die Welt. "Instead we have more questions surrounding al-Masri's abduction. Did the Americans really give former Interior Minister (Otto) Schily false and piecemeal information? Did the CIA really try to purchase al-Masri's silence?" The paper finds even more reason to wonder if Schröder's government was as innocent -- and opposed to America's war -- as it pretended to be. "Central questions still have to be answered in public: Are there more al-Masris? What will the government do for the "Bremen Taliban," Murat Kurnaz, who's been imprisoned in Guantanamo since 2002 without charges or legal status? In this matter the leadership still isn't out of the woods."