‘An engineer is on trial in Germany for allegedly attempting to help Libya develop a nuclear bomb. But the network the man was allegedly part of was under surveillance by intelligency agencies, with the CIA getting involved early on. The Swiss government has even gone so far as to eliminate evidence by secretly shredding thousands of documents’, the German newspaper the SPIEGEL reports.

It is because of this lack of evidence that the truth will likely elude the participants in the Lerch case in the coming weeks, while Lerch himself will probably walk away a free man. The real story begins in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe, on a cold winter day in late December 2004.

The smuggling ring had been cracked more than a year earlier, and a witness was being heard by the investigating judge on Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The witness, who had come all the way from Malaysia, was a foreman in a factory that had supplied parts for a plant in which Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi had planned to enrich uranium. The proceedings began with the clerk of the court recording the personal details of the participants, but then Lerch’s defense attorney, Gottfried Reims, pointed out that there was one man in the room who wasn’t on the list.

According to a source familiar with the case, Reims wanted to know the identity of the Malaysian man standing next to the foreman. The witness’s Malaysian attorney, he was told. Oh, but that’s unacceptable, Lerch’s attorney insisted, because a witness’s attorney must be licensed to practice law in a German court. Besides, he added, who is to say that the man isn’t a Malaysian intelligence agent? As if someone would actually admit to being an agent, even if it were true, the judge snapped. But Reims, undeterred, asked the man point-blank: “Are you with the intelligence agency?” The mysterious Malaysian answered, proudly: “Yes.”

A foreign intelligence agent appearing incognito at a witness hearing in one of Germany’s highest courts — now that says more about the cause than the case being made in Stuttgart. Something that would be unthinkable in any other trial is par for the course here: The intelligence agencies seem to have their fingers in every pie, raising the same dilemma that forced a court in the southwestern German city of Mannheim to throw out the first case against Lerch in 2006. In those proceedings, the investigators repeatedly withheld documents, claiming reasons of national security, while in fact the real reason had more to do with the paranoia of intelligence agencies.

The current case, in Stuttgart, is also groaning under a discrepancy that couldn’t be greater. On the one hand, you have the constitutional state with its criminal code, and the other you have the American and British intelligence agencies, which have only one objective in a matter like this: a success.

In short, one gets the impression that, in the war on terrorism, some are overdoing it a bit, which results in bad cases.

No?