Der Spiegel reported Saturday that "intense discussion" is underway in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office about whether to request the arrest and extradition of ten Americans suspected of belonging to a CIA rendition team, DPA said.[1]  --  Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries would like to send the request to Washington to complete a formal inquiry, but Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says this would "ruin German-U.S. intelligence cooperation."  --  Senior ministers debated the issue in Merkel's office on Wednesday, and the debate continues inside the government.  --  You'd hardly know it from U.S. mainstream media, where the phrase "war on terror" is dinned into American ears on a daily basis, but most of Europe (like UFPPC) does not accept the notion of a "war on terror."  --  In the words of Christian Tomuschat, an international law professor and advisor to the German government, "The notion of 'enemy combatants' is rubbish.  It doesn't exist in international law."  --  Germans are particularly incensed over the Khaled el-Masri case.  --  Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German, was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he was beaten and drugged.  He was released five months later without being charged with a crime, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has admitted it was all a mistake.  --  The Bush administration's "rendition" policy is really a kidnap-and-torture program.  --  Historian Chalmers Johnson said earlier this year:  "I believe that rendition, torture, and the denial of a suspect’s legal protections are part of the neocon program to proclaim the United States a new Rome, an irresistible superpower, essentially beyond good and evil.  Among the few bits of good political news in recent years is that the U.S. overreached itself and a backlash against its hubris is underway."  ...