Quote Originally Posted by Tacitus View Post
Left out of this summary is anything about Mohamed Atta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Atta#Germany
He apparently felt comfortable enough operating in Hamburg to create the Hamburg Cell, which was central to carrying out the 9/11 assault.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_Cell

I've been to several places in Germany, but never Hamburg. Is Hamburg especially hospitable for radical Islamists, for some reason?

I'm not a big fan at all of this democracy project of ours in Mesopotamia. But if the USA was discovered to be used as a base of planning operations for an Al Qaeda attack on another place (say Germany), I would regard this as a pretty serious development. If they feel comfortable planning something like that from here, then we've got a problem.
Tacitus,
I believe the Hamburg Cell’s radicalization process was the “bunch of guys” dynamic. The key was their recruitment, what happened once they decided they wanted to join an armed Jihadi front. Their original aim was to fight in Chechnya, but they were selected for a bigger mission while they were in the AQ training process. Two individuals also located in Hamburg are involved in linking them into this process, Mohammed Haydar Zammar and Mamoun Darkazanli.

Zammar and Darkazanli were both born in Allepo, Syria, both are German citizens, and both are members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Zammar was active in the 1990’s in supplying foreign fighters and arms to Bosnian Muslims. It is known that Germany covertly aided Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims, as did we-overtly once the arms embargo was dropped. Islamic NGO’s based in German (and in the U.S.) also provided humanitarian and military aide to the Bosnian Muslims with little interference by both governments.