How is it the German courts can release a 9-11 terrorist simply because the US refuses to divulge all its intelligence capability. While the available evidence is overwhelming, the fact that we do not tip our hands on all of what we know is used by some fantasizing judge to create unsubstantiated claims that would be thrown out in any other case.

The first person to be convicted over the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, Moroccan national Mounir El Motassadeq, was released from a German prison pending a ruling on an appeal, authorities said.

The justice department in the northern city of Hamburg said that the decision to release Motassadeq had been made on the basis of a federal court ruling upholding a complaint by the 31-year-old Moroccan.

Motassadeq left the prison in the company of his lawyer on Tuesday evening, according to journalists at the scene.

He had been found guilty in August in a retrial of belonging to a terrorist organization for plotting holy war with fellow Muslim extremists, including three of the September 11 suicide hijackers in New York and Washington.

He was jailed for seven years but both the prosecution and the defense have appealed the sentence.

His lawyer Gerhard Strate told AFP he filed the suit demanding Motassadeq’s release with the federal constitutional court in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe on the grounds that he had been held in custody during the year-long retrial.
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But a retrial was ordered when a federal court in 2004 quashed the verdict on the grounds that US authorities had refused to allow the court to question top suspects from Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network in American custody.

Next time we should just take the guy and drop him in GITMO.