The Return of the Reeperbahn Donkey Show

As opposed to them wanting to see them published well in advance:

CIA Had Secret Plan to Kidnap German-Syrian Suspect in Hamburg

Behind the usual wooden SPONglish journalism, we discover that all they are doing it parroting a Vanity Fair article founded on merely thinking about it:

The CIA official said, “That would have been absolutely impossible in a country like Germany.”

But a CIA agent who was active in Germany at the time admitted to the magazine that the US secret services had considered kidnapping suspected al-Qaida activists in Germany and that this had been weighed up for Darkazanli.

Considered, you see, is more than enough for the bright lights of the press to tacitly root for an al Queda victory by rallying around a man wanted in Spain as well as the US, who took refuge in Germany. Unmentioned in the piece was that Darkazanli was linked to the Hamburg cell as a financier.

Shortly after the supposed assassination plot was made public, Christoph Ahlhaus, the interior minister of the city-state of Hamburg and a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called upon the German government to demand an explanation from Washington. As a result, parliament's domestic affairs committee and the parliamentary control committee, which is in charge of monitoring Germany's intelligence services, will look at the accusations, as will the public prosecutor's office in Hamburg.

While that’s a long way to go on a mere press report, this business of Germany protecting terrorists from reprisal for their actions has a familiar ring to it. The DDR trained and sheltered Abu Daoud, planner of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre who headed a group calling itself Black September. In reality they were Fatah men operating under the orders of Yassir Arafat.

The same goes for Abu Nidal, and the Libyan agents who carried out the Lockerbie - Pan Am 103 bombing and the La Belle Disco bombing and attempted to murder a US Diplomat posted to the DDR, even credentialling the terrorists as Diplomats.

Providing cover for the sake of a misplaced ideological grumbling is nothing new.