The rhetoric of leading state security officials reveals disturbing parallels in the state’s counterterrorism efforts
The open border between the knowledge and the not-knowing has always fascinated the poets and thinkers. Philosopher Plato saw himself climbing in a cave, poet Goethe discovered a pact with the devil, physicist Heisenberg struggled with the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Who would have thought that this interesting terrain would be occupied by modern administration?
Internal security officials are sometimes confronted with difficult intellectual challenges. Thereby they often have to deal with Faustian questions. In the following, three exemplary performances by so-called security officials are presented, which, when examined closely, reveal how fragile the situation is in this democracy. Every time it is about the problem of the right way of dealing with "Known knowledge", as one of the gentlemen briefly called it.
A classic of the art of formulation was delivered by the then State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Klaus-Dieter Fritsche (CSU), on 18.10.2012 before the Bundestag’s investigative committee on the NSU murders. The oft-quoted sentence reads: "No state secrets were allowed to become known that would undermine government action." Members of parliament understood that a civil servant was presuming to decide what the parliament was allowed to know and what not. They were emport.
Naturally, this reading was the focus for parliamentarians. Yet another view of this sentence is of much greater importance. The gleanings show that Fritsche did in fact confirm the existence of state conspiracy in the NSU complex.
He did not use the subjunctive. In reviewing the transcript, he liked to leave the sentence like this. Accordingly, he did not mean fictitious secrets that undermine a state action were. From this only the conclusion can be drawn: There were and are the secrets in question, otherwise the secretary of state had bibed their claim as a slander. This fact is not to become known and becomes nevertheless evident with Fritsche’s appearance, because he could not renounce in his vanity to stage himself as important Geheimnistrager.
Unfortunately, the deputies did not notice. The same witness, who was the least willing to provide information, described the so-called deep state most pragnantly. Fritsche retired contentedly in May 2018: "I am glad to have survived 21 years as a political official." Since March 2019, he has been working as an advisor to Austrian Interior Minister Kickl (FPo), who proudly announced a "Mastermind" to be able to bury them.
"Please do not pass"
The second medal-suspicious sample, again in the context of NSU, comes from a delicate conversation between two interceptors in Kassel. It is about the murder of Halit Yozgat on the 6th of June.4.2006 in his internet cafe. One, Andreas Temme, is in extreme need of explanation. He had witnessed the cold-blooded murder a few days earlier and is considered a suspect by the police. His employer has given him leave of absence and put him in the status of the three monkeys: nothing seen, nothing heard and certainly nothing said. The other, Hasso Hess, holds the position of a secret protection officer of the Hessian Verfangsschutz; he is supposed to ensure that the secrets of the secret service remain secret. In the telephone conversation, he wants to make sure that the officer on leave stays on track and to agree on the further wording. Both participants in the discussion feared that they would be taken away, which was indeed the case.
Hasso Hess opens with a sentence that he later claims to have understood as an ironic introduction to lighten the atmosphere: "I tell everyone: if he knows that something like this is happening somewhere, please don’t drive by." Of course nobody can laugh about. When the sentence is found nine years later by the Yozgat family’s lawyers while listening to police phone records, a bombshell bursts in the public eye.
Temme was therefore neither accidentally nor privately in the cafe at the time of the crime. He knew not only vaguely that something was going to happen, but he knew very concretely that it was going to happen "something like that" like a crime happen. The mooingly erected legend of an unfortunate chain of coincidences threatened to collapse. The well-being of the state of Hesse could only be preserved because its then Minister of the Interior Bouffier instructed all respondents to maintain strict silence. This thought can make you feel quite uncomfortable.
From a guiding cultural point of view, we can put Klaus-Dieter and Hasso in a row with Faust and Mephisto, ideally embodied by Gustaf Grundgens. You cannot know anything. That burns your heart. If it happens, stay away. Otherwise you’ll burn your fingers too. Please do not drive by, recommends the secret protection officer. Neither at this nor at any other point in the phone call does he say the self-evident: please understand Kassel police. Then Halit Yozgat could still be alive.
"If we had known at that time what we knew .."
The third linguistic blunder of a criminalist is again the result of a need for explanation, which has arisen once again after a terrorist event. Anis Amri, who was hit by a tractor-trailer on 19. The man who raced into Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz Christmas market in December 2016 was quickly deemed by authorities to be a lone perpetrator, a madman, and a so-called lone wolf. Such unpredictable people, who radicalized within a very short time, contact with the "Islamic State" (IS) and suddenly acted as assassins could simply not be located, identified and arrested in time, according to appointed terror experts, who put it as a spin-off interpretation in all the media. Two years later, the picture is completely different.
Amri was not just a written record, but an old acquaintance at state criminal investigation offices, foreign authorities, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the Joint Terrorism Defense Center of the Federation and the Lander (GTAZ). No other threat was on their agenda more often than the later assassin with his 14 fake identities, which were discovered early on. His document and social fraud, his trafficking in drugs, his involvement in beatings or burglary plots have been recorded, as well as his accommodations, visits to mosques, his contacts with IS circles as far as Libya, his research into the manufacture of explosives and his manifestations of a "Project". Amri was, according to an investigator’s assessment "basically in a wonderfully supervised structure". But counterterrorism failed, even when Moroccan intelligence transmitted two urgent and very specific warnings about Amri to its German counterparts in the weeks before the attack.
There was no lack of reasons to arrest, prosecute or deport Amri. But those who present themselves as hardliners of internal security and call at every opportunity for the tightening of asylum law, an increase in police and services, and the mass deportation of fugitives, refuted themselves and for some inexplicable reason remained inactive. He was finally arrested in Friedrichshafen in July 2016; he probably wanted to go to Switzerland.
Now it’s all over, thought the terrorist suspect. But after two days he was free again; only he was forbidden to leave the country. Amri himself was surprised by the fact that he amed that it was a miracle of God. His religious feelings intensified, as he told friends, and his prayers became more fervent. If he was right with this intuition, then Allah would have appeared on earth in the form of a German official of the higher service to help a holy warrior out of trouble.
Now an investigative committee of the Bundestag is again trying to unravel and clarify the alleged confusion. The self-respecting media have made it a topic of discussion and published extensive dossiers about it. Why they were so naive two years ago to spread the thesis of a lone wolf, they do not explain. On the contrary, nowadays an Australian Nazi as the alleged murderer of Christchurch is again a confused individual, a terror troll, "The police ame that the crime was committed by a lone wolf".
But back to Anis Amri. Now the security authorities are alarmed, as they should have been three years ago. Explanations are urgently needed, excuses are found. But there are also thoughtful officials in the authorities who are agonizing over how this could have happened.
A senior investigator did not take it easy with an answer. Then he found this: "If we had known at that time what we knew, many things might have turned out differently." It is an acrobatic sentence. Despite its adventurous structure and content, it made it through all the approvals, editors and proofreaders to the columns of a prestigious magazine. Its wording is thus intended and not otherwise.
If we had known then what we know now… – so it would be easy to understand. But the official didn’t want to print it, he wanted something else. Dealing with his thesis is a demanding task. According to her, the knowledge we knew is apparently subject to a fuzzy relation, the invention of which is known to be one of the masterpieces of the German mind. The closer you get to it, the less precise it becomes. The more knowledge one accumulates, the more quickly it flees into the thickets of bureaucracy, from where it diffuses into the archives to be magically attracted by the shredder.
In any case, the logic in the quotation can be maintained only if one ames different types of knowledge. This of course opens a wide field. Science knows basic and applied knowledge, companies know management and accounting knowledge, politics has leased the ruling knowledge, bureaucracy distinguishes the available from the available knowledge and philosophy, whose special field it is, distinguishes conscious from unconscious knowledge. But it is necessary to go so far? In the cases discussed, a usually powerful co-knowledge is revealed. He is confronted with a powerless conscience. In this respect, the pact with the devil somehow plays a role.
P.S. Why no source reference to the last quote? Find it yourself! Enter the string – If we had known what we knew at the time – into a search engine. uberraschung! All other hits refer to the Holocaust.