Here is an English language report from Deutsche Welle on what is known so far about the forthcoming stern article:

During a visit to the US military base in Tuzla, in northeastern Bosnia, two officers from Germany's federal police (BKA) and a translator for the German foreign intelligence service (BND) discovered that suspects held there were beaten savagely, the magazine said in an early extract from its edition that is set to come out on Thursday....German investigators recorded what they saw in an intelligence document, which the magazine used as the basis for its report.

It said a 70-year-old terror suspect needed 20 stitches to his scalp after he was repeatedly hit over the head with a rifle butt while being held at "Eagle Base," as the US camp is called.

The soldier who had beaten him was "visibly proud" of his conduct, the magazine quoted the report as saying.

The Independent adds this information:

The two German agents and their translator had been asked to appear at the base to help the Americans interrogate suspects and help evaluate confiscated material. But according to the leaked report, they immediately informed Germany's federal prosecutor of what they had witnessed and left the base shortly afterwards.  The magazine's report appeared to directly contradict the German government's claims that it had only been made aware of the possible existence of secret CIA interrogation centres in Europe through media reports. Stern said that German intelligence, the country's Federal Criminal Bureau and German military intelligence had all been informed about the agents' visit to "Eagle Base". All three agencies refused to comment on the Stern report yesterday [Tuesday].

The German Parliament is already considering whether to open an investigation into allegations by a German citizen, Khalid al-Masri, that he was interrogated and tortured at an American camp in Afghanistan with the collusion of German agents. I suspect that the new report by stern will add some urgency to a case that might help to expose the Bush/Cheney web of torture camps worldwide.

We know relatively little about the history of German involvement in the CIA's torture of detainees in the four corners of the globe, except that it is extensive and very different from the official story. Take a look at this recent article from Time, for example, which recounts the seizure and torture of Mohammad Haydr Zammar, an alleged al Qaeda operative resident in Germany.

In December of 2001, U.S. agents arranged to have a German citizen flown to a Syrian jail called the Palestine Branch, renowned for its use of torture, and later offered to pass written questions to Syrian interrogators to pose to the prisoner, according to a secret German intelligence report shown to TIME on Wednesday. The report is described in the new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by British investigative journalist Stephen Grey. The complex arrangement was part of the CIA's sprawling practice of extraordinary renditions, the secret transfer of terror suspects to hidden prisons across the world -- which has involved the aid of numerous foreign governments and the knowledge of key Western European allies, according to the book, which was shown to TIME by the author....

The intelligence report gives a rare glimpse into the favors exchanged between governments during the CIA renditions. One day after Germany learned that the Syrians were holding Zammar, the CIA offered the German foreign-intelligence agency BND the chance to put written questions to their prisoner. The intelligence report doesn't make clear whether CIA interrogators had direct physical access to Zammar. In June 2002, Syrian officials offered German interrogators access to Zammar in prison, according to the 263-page report by the BND, marked "Geheim" (Secret). That same day, the BND chief asked Germany's federal prosecutors to drop their charges against Syrian intelligence agents who had been arrested in Germany for allegedly collecting information on Syrian dissidents.

The German intelligence report cites another deal, an "urgent request [by the United States] to avert pressure from the EU side [on Morocco] because of human-rights abuses in connection with [Zammar's]arrest, because Morocco was a valuable partner in the fight against terrorism." Grey, who had the report translated, says he obtained the classified report from a German investigator, who remains anonymous. The German government has acknowledged that they dropped the charges against the Syrian intelligence officers because of their cooperation in anti-terrorism, but they deny that the decision was specifically linked to the Zammar case.

In short, Germany was working closely with the CIA in facilitating the torture network.

As for "Eagle Base" in Tuzla, it has already been implicated as a torture center. For example, there is this report to the European Parliament by Dick Marty (PDF). It describes the treatment of six Bosnians of Algerian descent, who were detained but never tried in Bosnia. Eventually they were handed over 'extra-legally' to US forces after the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released from Bosnian custody.

The Bosnian authorities shackled the men, placed hoods over their faces, and transported them by police vehicles to the Americans. By order of the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. forces in Europe, our clients were detained at "Eagle Base," the U.S. military base at Tuzla.

While still on Bosnian soil, the six men were kept shackled in painful positions. They were forced to wear goggles to prevent them from seeing, headphone-like covers over their ears to make it impossible for them to hear, and face masks making it impossible to be understood and very difficult to breathe. They were subsequently transported to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.

And incidentally, we also know that torture is just one of the forms of abuse that have been ongoing at the Tuzla base. Here is congressional testimony from 2004 about human-trafficking (in women and girls) by contractors stationed at Tuzla (PDF). Note that the testimony indicates that none of the DoD contractors who trafficked in humans at Tuzla were prosecuted by the Defense Department. In fact, the speaker (Martina Vandenberg) complains that Rumsfeld has dragged his feet in implementing regulations for prosecuting DoD contractors.

The scandal, in the US as in Germany, is not simply torture and abuse (though that by itself is horrific). The deeper scandal is the culture that permits, excuses, and covers up torture and abuse.

From Unbossed