Parliament established a committee Friday to investigate contentious claims
that German intelligence agents helped in the war in Iraq by passing secret
information to the U.S. military ahead of the 2003 invasion.
The committee convened Friday afternoon, shortly after lawmakers voted in a
broad majority for it to be set up.
"All of us here have a long and difficult task to perform," committee
chairman Siegfried Kauder, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian
Democrats, told the other 10 members of the panel at their first meeting.
The three main opposition parties — the Free Democrats, the Greens and the
Left Party — had called for the investigation after a series of reports claimed
that Germany's Federal Intelligence Service passed along critical information
about Saddam Hussein's plans to defend Baghdad against American forces before
the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
Together, the three parties have 166 seats in the 614-seat Bundestag lower
house; 154 votes were needed to convene an investigatory commission.
The committee, which was to meet later Friday, will consist of 11 members and
be led by Gerda Hasselfeldt, a member of the conservative Bavaria-only Christian
Social Union.
Besides investigating the foreign service's role in prewar Baghdad, the
committee will seek to clarify whether the government had information regarding
possible CIA rendition flights over Germany, including stopovers at the U.S. Air
Force's Ramstein Air Base in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
The committee also will investigate what the government knew about the arrest
of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin who claims he was
wrongfully detained by Macedonian authorities while on a trip to Skopje and
taken to a U.S.-run detention center in Afghanistan.
The government previously has acknowledged that German intelligence agents
gave limited information on Iraqi forces to U.S. authorities before or during
the invasion, despite vigorous opposition against the war by former Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder.
However, it denied that the intelligence service ever had a copy of the
alleged Baghdad defense plan and said that U.S. authorities have stonewalled a
request for information about al-Masri.
The government has said it has a list of more than 400 overflights and
landings by planes suspected of being used by the CIA, but indicated it doesn't
know who was on board.
Germany sided with France and Russia to oppose the war in Iraq, and Schroeder
insisted his country would provide no active support for the U.S.-led operation.
That stance helped him win a narrow re-election victory in 2002 but damaged
relations with Washington that are still being repaired.