A story about the young man from Germany who was tortured by his American jailers before he was found to be innocent and was released after more than four years in Guantanamo surfaced in today’s issue of The Washington Post. The reason for the article about the case, which is not new, is a Supreme Court hearing today about whether the military tribunals in Guantanamo are legitimate.

Twenty-five-year-old Murat Kurnaz has related in numerous public appearances and in a book exactly what American torturers did to him after he was captured in Pakistan in 2001 and then taken first to a jail in Afghanistan and later to Guantanamo. He was set free and returned to Germany in 2006. The torture details are worth remembering and will be repeated here.

Murat Kurnaz was born in Germany, but he is not a German citizen. According to German law, any child born in Germany acquires the citizenship of either its father or mother, as the parents wish. Kurnaz’s parents are Turkish citizens; therefore, he is a Turkish citizen from birth with an unlimited residency permit for Germany. Read on to see after the fold why this played a role in his case.

If you don’t want to screw up the coming beautiful Christmas holidays for a lot of American civilian employees of the Department of Defense and their families by taking away these people’s income, then you had better support US military aggression by backing the emergency supplemental funding bill. The Pentagon is beating the drums again for what the department has the gall to call "the global war on terror." The tom-tom beat, however, gets weaker and weaker with dwindling numbers of Americans back on the Old Sod ready to put on the war paint and gather round the campfire to do a battle dance in preparation for acts of aggression that have already cost too Americans and too many foreign innocents their lives or their health.

The idea of waging ideological warfare against Muslims to get the good ones to quash the influence of the bad ones has flickered again in US media after the resignation of Karen P. Hughes as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Her resignation flushed out the head of a Near East think tank in Washington to explain how he believes what he calls the war of ideas can be won.

His recipe tells more than anything else about the predicament various American governments, essentially the present one, have maneuvered the United States into. His grand plan for the battle of ideas advocates the same old scheme for Americans to pull the strings behind the scenes, interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

Missing from the picture is the catastrophic background for any American eggheads to win the hearts and minds of men after American brawn has left us with pictures that will forever torment not only the victims and their families but will haunt every American who has a conscience.  Some of those pictures are worth recalling against the backdrop of the call for ideological warfare.

The actor and director Robert Redford makes some fascinating comments on the miserable state of US politics in today’s issue of one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a centrist publication. The occasion for the interview with him is his new movie Lions for Lambs, which opens this week throughout Germany, where there is great interest in US politics and foreign affairs.

The prestigious newspaper signals the importance it attaches to the interview by highlighting it in a big green banner on the front page referring readers to the features section. The headline quotes Redford asking, “How could America sink so low?” The interview in the print edition of the newspaper is entitled “The Politicians Today Are an Insult to Our Intelligence.” The editor of the paper’s website preferred a different heading from the same interview, “The Government Manipulates Us with Fear.”

Serious media in Germany have been trying to paint a diversified picture of the United States, Americans and their politics amid concern that people are going to wake up some morning and find that President Bush has unleashed the Third World War. The US has many friends in Germany from Cold War days, but the fears there are real.

A look at foreign media on the recent Russian-EU summit makes one wonder again just how skewed the reporting in mainstream media is, not only in the United States but in Europe as well, and how to figure out where the truth lies. Here are a few examples, and my thoughts.

Much attention has been paid in Western Europe to the conjuring up of the Cuban missile crisis by Russian President Vladimir Putin when he answered a reporter’s question about the US installing new military facilities in the Czech Republic and Poland. The media attention is understandable in the light of the fact that two of the biggest wars were fought in Europe in the past century, and fear of them lingers.

Media comments in Western Europe on Putin’s remarks seem to agree he was playing the strongman with his rhetoric, both for his own people and for a world audience. The media often turn to American sources for their assessment.