Germany's new anti-American propaganda hero.

Murat Kurnaz is the new darling of the German mainstream media, because he is able to generate as much anti-American sentiments as needed to keep the mainstream media happy.

It is possible that Kurnaz is indeed, as Cmdr. Gordon suggests, playing by the al-Qaida playbook. But it is equally possible that he is playing rather to the German gallery: saying what his German handlers and interviewers -- and apparently some significant part of the German public -- want to hear. How else is one to explain the following bizarre nugget from the ZDF report as narrated by Felicitas von Twickel?: "Perfidious American soldiers [in Guantanamo] threaten to do to the Bremen-born Turk what the Nazis did to the Jews." Is it really plausible that it would occur to an American soldier to say such a thing? Or is this rather deliberately concocted balm for the German soul: encouraging the German public to draw forced analogies between wildly disparate historical events and thereby to diminish the enormity of the crimes for which Germany itself owes its sad renown?

Read John Rosenthal's fascinating account of this former Guantanamo (Gitmo) resident.