In Europe, pushback against US 'war on terror'

The "secret, routine, and massive access" by US agencies to banking SWIFT codes – needed to transfer in and out of European financial institutions – is "unacceptable," stated Peter Hustinx, the Brussels official responsible for EU data oversight.

Boosting this sentiment is Europeans' recognition that the US is also in flux with an election season starting up, and that President Bush's term appears to be winding down with the United States in a vulnerable position overseas.

The US legal basis for conducting interrogation centers at Guantánamo Bay, for example, has long rankled in Europe.

"Most of the French opinion, many of the German people, a large share of the Labor constituency in the UK, the Spanish, and now Italy, don't just oppose the policy, but the basis of US policy," says Georges Le Guelte, of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. "You can't have renditions and Guantánamo and talk human rights at the same time. That is more clear to many of us."

In Italy, prosecutors put out warrants several months ago for 25 members of a CIA team that abducted a Muslim cleric in Milan.

Nor is Europe alone in its willingness to speak more pointedly to the White House about its foreign affairs. On page 1 of last Thursday's People's Daily, a newspaper of record in China, a Chinese official criticized Mr. Bush for inflammatory rhetoric that turned the war in Iraq into a "religious war."

The comment was unprecedented in a state where official decorum is rigidly maintained. (For nearly a decade, China has conducted a brutal campaign of summary executions of Muslims in its far-west Xinjiang region, as documented in human rights reports.)

In the case of the Munich renditions, announced Jan. 31, 13 American CIA operatives allegedly apprehended German citizen Khaled el-Masri in Macedonia in 2004 and whisked him to an Afghan prison called "the Salt Pit." Realizing he was the wrong man, they left him on a hillside in Albania five months later, warning him never to talk of his experience. Mr. el-Masri instead filed suit in a Virginia court. Masri's case was dropped in Virginia after arguments that a trial would jeopardize US security operations.

But with help from Spanish police, the Munich prosecutors discovered the identity of the operatives through flight and hotel records in Palma de Mallorca, where they stopped to relax.

On Friday, in Washington, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Munich warrants were only valid in Germany at present, but that Berlin felt the local court might issue an international warrant, according to German papers.

Ms. Rice said the warrants would not harm US-German relations. Justice Department officials have not responded to approaches by the German prosecutors.

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