Nazi Fears Stopped Me Snorting Cocaine: Mirren

LONDON (AFP) — Oscar-winner Helen Mirren admitted she loved snorting cocaine and only stopped due to the capture of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, in an magazine interview out this month.

The respected British actress, 63, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in "The Queen", told the October issue of GQ men's monthly that she took the drug until her late thirties.

She only quit after the notorious Barbie was caught in Bolivia in 1983, and believed to have been making money from the Class A drug.

The star, knighted in 2003, also talked about meeting Queen Elizabeth, and spoke further about her date rape experiences.

Mirren said she used to take "a bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties.

"But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in the early eighties.

"He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron.

"And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this fucking horrible man in South America.

"And from that day I never touched cocaine again. Until that moment I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain." ...

Story continues
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i8DBotVvjP12IW6-HcUs_tpHrOUQ

Tunnels Show Hitler's Megalomaniac Vision

By Madeline Chambers
Aug 25, 2008

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three vast tunnels were opened under central Berlin this month, giving a glimpse of Adolf Hitler's megalomaniac vision of a new architectural centre for the capital of Nazi Germany.

The 16-metre (50-foot) deep tunnels were constructed in 1938 as part of an underground transport network beneath a series of bombastic buildings designed by Nazi architect Albert Speer, including the biggest domed hall the world had ever seen.

The overground plans, never completed because of World War Two, included boulevards, squares and huge buildings, such as an arch dwarfing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and the 290-metre high Great Hall, with room for 180,000 people.

Hitler called the concept, a symbol of the power of the Third Reich, "Berlin -- the capital of the world" but in recent times it has come to be known as "Germania."

The tunnels, between 90 and 220 meters long lying beneath the Tiergarten park, would have accommodated roads and a railway line.

"The tunnels -- which are in surprisingly good condition -- were part of Speer's grand plans, what we now call 'Germania'," historian Dietmar Arnold, head of the Berlin Underground Association and bunker tour guide, told Reuters.

Last week, Arnold -- who runs an exhibition of Hitler's plans -- took journalists on a rare visit into the dank tunnels.

They are closed to the public most of the time because of safety concerns, but visits can be arranged.

"The acoustics are incredible," said Arnold, who likes singing a note and hearing it reverberate around him.

After the war, British forces in divided Berlin closed the tunnels. They were rediscovered in 1969 but have remained shut. In 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they were handed to the city of Berlin.

The Berlin Underground Association, set up in 1997, has seen a surge in interest in tours of Berlin's remaining bunkers.

Although most were destroyed, some of the maze of 1,000 World War Two bunkers are intact and serve as a reminder of the city's violent history.

Propaganda posters and escape instructions on the walls convey a sense of the past. In one bunker, suitcases, helmets, and uniforms from various sites are on show.

"Interest is constantly growing -- we have about 150,000 visitors a year to the bunkers," said Arnold. "That is partly why we want the bunkers to be protected -- they are an important part of the history of Berlin."

By the end of the war, Germany's most heavily bombed city could protect up to 800,000 people in its bunkers.

http://in.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idINLM63579720080825

NPR Transcript: Breaking The Silence Of a Secret POW Camp (Parts One and Two)

by Pam Fessler

Streaming audio file of the NPR broadcast

NPR Morning Edition, August 18, 2008 · About two years ago, National Park Service employees stumbled upon a fascinating and largely untold piece of American history.

It involves a secret World War II interrogation camp at Fort Hunt, Va., not far from the Pentagon. During and right after the war, thousands of top German prisoners were questioned there about troop movements and scientific advances.

Soldiers at the site also prepared special "care packages" for American POWs that they sent overseas. They included maps, radios and other escape tools.

Many of the camp's records were destroyed right after the war, and those who worked there were sworn to secrecy. Many veterans never spoke about it, even to family and friends, although the operation has been gradually declassified over the past two decades.

The National Park Service, which now runs Fort Hunt Park, has been trying to piece together the story of the interrogation facility — code-named P.O. Box 1142 during the war.

Oral History Project

It all started when Brandon Bies, a park cultural resources specialist, was researching Fort Hunt for some historical signs for the park. He knew it had been the site of an intelligence operation during the war, but he'd been unable to learn much more.

A ranger giving a tour told a group of visitors that the Park Service's knowledge of the site's history was limited. Then one of the tourists raised her hand and said her next-door neighbor had been an interrogator at Fort Hunt.

That was the lead he needed. Bies learned the veteran's name, Fred Michel, and tracked him down at his home in Louisville, Ky.

"And the stories that Mr. Michel was sharing with us were unbelievable. Stories of secret submarines and nuclear devices and German rocket scientists that we absolutely had never heard of before," says Bies.

Michel also had documents, including some with the names of others who had worked at Fort Hunt, including his former colleague, George Mandel.

George Mandel

Bies did a quick Google search "and immediately found the Web page for Dr. H. George Mandel," Bies says. Mandel had become a pharmacology professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., right near Fort Hunt. The park service contacted him and then reunited him with Michel at the park in August 2006.

"They showed me around, and of course nothing was recognizable," recalls Mandel. "There's one house still available apparently from that time — and all the rest has been demolished."

Bies knew he was in a race against time if he wanted to preserve this history. Like Mandel and Michel, remaining veterans were likely to be in their 80s and 90s. So Bies and his colleagues began to interview and record as many Fort Hunt veterans as they could find.

They've contacted about 50 veterans who worked at P.O. Box 1142 and have interviewed more than 40 of them.

Underground At Fort Hunt?

On June 16, Bies interviewed Elvin Polesky in Frederick, Md., as part of the Fort Hunt oral history project.

Polesky is a tall, friendly 83-year-old. He wears a white T-shirt with the word "SECRET" written across it in bold black letters — a souvenir from the National Park Service. Bies hopes Polesky can fill an important gap in the story. The veteran was at Fort Hunt when the intelligence operation shut down in 1946.

Bies gently prods him for details as a videotape records the interview: "Do you remember about how many Americans were stationed at 1142 at that time?"

"Aw, gee, we didn't have all that many," says Polesky, as he tries to recall. It's a fine line for Bies, trying to jog a veteran's memory without influencing it.

Polesky then says something that grabs Bies' attention.

"We had 250 German war prisoners underneath. They were down underground at Fort Hunt," he says.

Most veterans remember the prisoners being kept above ground. Bies doesn't really know whether some might have been kept underground. There are so few records.

He unrolls a large military map in the hopes that it will help Polesky recall more details.

Polesky peers at the map and points.

"Up on this far end was the two taller buildings, one of them being the one we billeted in," he says, going on to describe in detail what the fort looked like when he was there.

But then Polesky pauses. "Where's the underground part?"

"Well, that's what we were hoping you would tell us," says Bies. It's a slow process, mining all these memories, but Bies say with each veteran, they learn a little more.

"We actually have from veterans a photograph of, on the day after the war ended, hundreds of documents being burned at 1142," he says. "And it illustrates how critical it is to speak to these gentlemen, because who knows what part of the story went up in smoke?"

He knows some of the history is gone forever. And the urgency only continues to grow. Four of the veterans he's interviewed so far have died.
•••••••
Fort Hunt, Va.

Former GIs Spill Secrets Of WWII POW Camp
by Pam Fessler

Correction: The story described a German scientist who was aboard a U-boat that surrendered to the U.S. in 1945, and said, "On that same U-boat was Germany's top rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun." Von Braun was in Bavaria when he surrendered to the U.S. Army.

This is part two in a three-part series

All Things Considered, August 18, 2008 · Amid the shade trees, swings and picnic grounds at Fort Hunt Park just outside Washington, D.C., there are few traces of the site's top-secret military past. But for the GIs who were stationed there during World War II, the park is alive with memories of what it had been: an interrogation camp for nearly 4,000 mostly German prisoners of war.

The park, then code-named P.O. Box 1142, was where the military elicited crucial information from top enemy officers and scientists. It also was where the United States had a clandestine program to help American POWs escape.

Until recently, much of what occurred at P.O. Box 1142 was unknown. Many who participated went to their graves without revealing — even to their families — what they'd done. The buildings were razed after the war. And many documents about the camp were destroyed in an effort to conceal its existence.

The National Park Service, which now runs Fort Hunt Park, is trying desperately to capture some of this history before it disappears. It has conducted more than 40 oral interviews with vets who had been stationed there.

A Nickel And A Phone Number

One GI who worked at P.O. Box 1142 was John Gunther Dean, a young American soldier singled out while in basic training because he seemed well-suited for the intelligence operation. Dean, now 82, recalls how he was summoned to the Pentagon, where an Army officer asked him if he knew how to speak German.

"And I said, 'Yeah, I speak German like a native,'" says Dean.

His family, which was Jewish, had fled Germany in the late 1930s. When everyone else at Fort Belvoir — a U.S. Army base in Virginia — was sent overseas, Dean was handed a nickel and a phone number and then mysteriously dropped off in the middle of Alexandria, Va.

"There was a drug store. I went in, called the number and they said, 'Dean, you stay outside and we'll pick you up in a staff car.' And they drove me up towards Mount Vernon and that's how I ended up at Fort Hunt. It must have been end of November, early December 1944," he says.

George Mandel, now an 84-year-old professor at George Washington University, also ended up at P.O. Box 1142 during the war. Mandel says when he was there, things looked quite different than they do today. There were prison barracks and buildings where American soldiers would interrogate Nazi and other enemy prisoners. About 4,000 high-ranking prisoners passed through the camp.

"My job was to interrogate scientifically trained and experienced Germans who had been sent to this country by the military," says Mandel. He German and had a chemistry degree. But he admits that at age 20, he was naïve in the face of some of the Third Reich's top scientists.

"One of them was a person who worked on enriching uranium, and I didn't know why anybody would want to enrich uranium. I mean, what does this have to do with anything?" he says. "And so my job was to find out what he was doing and how it was being carried out, and then I reported this to the Pentagon."

It was part of a U.S. effort to learn what the Germans were up to. The prisoners were asked about troop movements, scientific advances and anything else that could help the Allied cause.

Gluing A Broken Vase

For years, Mandel, Dean and others kept quiet about P.O. Box 1142 because they had been sworn to secrecy. The operation has since been declassified, but many records were lost, which is why the veterans' stories are so important to the park service.

For Chief Ranger Vincent Santucci, it's like trying to glue together a broken vase — with some important pieces missing.

"Many of the archives were destroyed directly after the war. And so if we didn't have the opportunity to speak with these men and capture their stories, much of it may have been lost forever," Santucci says.

Another soldier who passed through Fort Hunt was Cameron LaClair. He was a junior intelligence officer on his way to England to brief soldiers and airmen before the D-Day invasion on how to evade capture by the Germans. He later went to work for the CIA.

LaClair says interrogators at Fort Hunt were helped a great deal by information gleaned from bugs placed in the prisoners' rooms.

"There were a group of men sitting around a table in a room with great huge recorders, recording everything these people said to each other," LaClair recalls. "And so it sort of threw the prisoners off. 'How did you know this, how did you know that my daughter was 17 on March 28th?' So it really put them at a disadvantage."

Transcripts show that interrogations at Fort Hunt were usually straightforward, almost cordial affairs. Veterans say they often got their best information just by being friendly. Some prisoners were even wined and dined to soften them up.

Dean, who later became a top U.S. diplomat, says it was very effective.

"I was a pretty good athlete. … I would do sports with them in order to make them more cooperative. I would take some of the people out for dinner at a restaurant in town in civilian clothes," he recalls.

A Shopping Trip

One of those Dean befriended was German engineer Heinz Schlicke, who developed infrared fuses that could be used to trigger an atomic bomb. Schlicke was brought to P.O. Box 1142 after the U-boat on which he and other scientists were fleeing Germany for Japan was surrendered in 1945.

Schlicke's time at Fort Hunt was part of Operation Paperclip, a secret effort to bring hundreds of top German scientists — and their expertise — to the U.S. before the Russians got their hands on them. Dean says he and Schlicke played tennis and rode horses.

"It took quite some time before he was willing to cooperate. The war had ended in Europe and at that point, he said, he's willing to help us, but his wife was at that point in what was in the Russian zone," says Dean.

Dean was eventually sent to Europe to find Schlicke's wife and two small children and to reunite the family. Schlicke ended up working in the U.S. for the remainder of his life.

Germany's top rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, also wound up at Fort Hunt after surrendering to the U.S. Army. Von Braun had developed the deadly V-2 missile, which killed thousands in London and elsewhere before the end of the war.

"I was the morale officer of Wernher von Braun," says Arno Mayer, now an 83-year-old Princeton historian.

Mayer's orders at Fort Hunt were to keep the German scientists happy, so he supplied them with magazines and liquor. In one bizarre incident, he took von Braun and three other German POWs Christmas shopping at a Jewish-owned department store in Washington, D.C. Mayer says the men wanted to buy lingerie for their wives, who were still back in Germany.

"We told the sales person what size and so on. And the woman held up a pair of panties," he says. The Germans were appalled. They didn't want nylon underwear, Mayer says: They wanted woolen ones "that should be long, so as to cover their legs."

The special treatment must have worked. Von Braun went on to be a leading figure in the U.S. space program.

Fort Hunt Reunion

Last October, the National Park Service and the military honored some of the more than 50 veterans who've been tracked down so far. The men, all in their 80s and 90s — some spry, others with wheelchairs or walkers — were reunited for the first since P.O. Box 1142 shut down.

Symbolically, at 11:42 a.m., the flag was raised over Fort Hunt.

"For 63 years, nobody ever said thank you. And it was very nice to receive recognition that what we did was being recognized of being helpful to our country," says Dean.

It was a poignant affair for men who seldom got to share their stories. But it was also an opportunity for some veterans to note how much times had changed — and how their interrogations bore little resemblance to some harsher methods used today.

"And I think that point was made very emphatically," says Mandel. "Yes, we threatened them with being sent back to Russia, but there was no other personal harm of any kind. And people thought they could be most effective as interrogators by being nice to the people they interrogated."

But Mandel admits many of the German prisoners wanted to cooperate, especially at the end of the war.

For the most part, the veterans are happy that new details about P.O. Box 1142 have finally emerged. They say they'll leave it to others to decide what it means.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93635950

Revealed: Diplomat's Plan to give Europe to Nazis, World to Britain

afp.google.com

LONDON (AFP) — A British amateur diplomat tried to stop World War II by offering Nazi Germany rule over Europe if the British Empire could rule the rest of the world, according to secret files declassified Sunday.

James Lonsdale-Bryans, a well-educated fascist sympathiser, flew to Rome in the early days of the war to try to negotiate the deal with Ulrich von Hassell, the German ambassador to Italy.

The Security Service files reveal that the Foreign Office was aware of what Lonsdale-Bryans was up to and their unease about his actions.

"It would appear that Bryans may be taking part in unofficial discussions for the benefit of troops under the auspices of education officer," the file read.

"Bryans' idea is that the world ought to be divided into two parts.

"That Germany should be given a free hand in Europe and that the British Empire should run the rest of the world.

"I am not sure that this is a very desirable point of view to publish at the present time."

Lonsdale-Bryans contacted the then-foreign secretary Lord Edward Halifax with his plans, triggering panic among officials.

"Bryans is a talkative and indiscreet fellow who is in possession of a story which he delights in telling and which if told publicly would be likely to cause embarrassment to the Foreign Office," the files read.

To the further annoyance of officials, he also tried to discuss his plans with top US officials, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, who during the war was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.

That led Britain to reassure the Americans that Lonsdale-Bryans was "unreliable though not disloyal".

The level of backing given to Lonsdale-Bryans by Halifax and the Foreign Office is unclear, but one hand-written note from the Security Services explained: "He went to Italy with the knowledge of the F.O. in order to develop his contacts. He greatly exceeded his instructions."

It was feared that Lonsdale-Bryans would take his story to the press.

A Foreign Office letter explained: "Although there seems to be a good deal to be said for locking him up to prevent him airing his views to all and sundry, I understand that if this is done it will inevitably involve his bringing up the question of his contacts with the Foreign Office and the facilities afforded him to go to Italy."

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jBilUxUKlvEzkQJhqA9yuSYZwzcw

America Burning: Racists say Obama Must Die

In a television interview Grand Wizard Railton Loy predicted Barack Obama would not survive long as president

scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com

10 August 2008
By CLAIRE PRENTICE
IN THE UNITED STATES

AMERICAN law enforcement agencies fear Barack Obama will be the target of a violent attack by white supremacists at the Democratic convention in Denver this month.

Ever since the Senator for Illinois emerged as the likely Democratic presidential candidate, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups have been making racist threats.

In an interview on Fox News, Railton Loy, Grand Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan International, said of Obama's presidential campaign: "I'm not going to have to worry about him, because somebody else down south is going to take him out... If that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell. The hate would be so deep down south."

Meanwhile, websites and blogs have been buzzing with racist posts.

"Obama will die, KKK forever," says a post by "Rodney" on a blog run by a person identified only as Strider333. "The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a N***** President all you N*****'s (sic] will think you've won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you F*** THAT."

John W Hickenlooper, the Democrat Mayor of Denver, confirmed that he was aware of threats against Obama from white supremacists and other racist groups.

He added that the Denver Police Department was working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service. He said: "We are looking at every possibility and making sure that we have prepared for every conceivable contingency. If someone is threatening violence we will go to great lengths to deal with that."

The federal government is providing Denver – and St Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans are staging their convention at the start of next month – with $50m (£26m) each to cover the security costs of staging the conventions.

The Denver Police Department will nearly double in size, bringing in an additional 1,500 police officers from communities throughout Colorado and beyond. National Guard specialists trained to deal with biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons will also be available.

Keen to take advantage of an unprecedented level of media attention – 16,000 journalists are expected – protesters are preparing to flock to Denver in their tens of thousands.

They will include everyone from environmental to health groups and those championing the rights of unborn children to Hillary Clinton supporters, as well as more sinister groups.

Obama's decision to accept his party's nomination not at the convention's Pepsi Centre but at the 75,000-seat Invesco Field, home to the Denver Broncos, has created another headache for the Secret Service. They have had to work out plans to secure the open-air stadium, which is adjacent to a major highway. According to officials, it will almost certainly be closed during Obama's speech.

Mark Potok, an expert on the radical right at the Southern Poverty Law enter in Montgomery, Alabama, said: "People on these racist and white supremacist websites are being quite careful because they know that if they make a threat they will very likely get a visit from the Secret Service.

"The scary thing out there is the lone wolf phenomenon. There are enough crazy people in this movement that it is possible one of them will decide today is the day to kick off the Aryan revolution."

A survey by the centre, which tracks hate groups and handles legal cases against white supremacist organisations, found that the number of racist groups in America has soared in recent years, from 602 in 2000 to 844 in 2006.

It is not just the security forces who fear a racially motivated attack on the Democratic presidential candidate. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 59% of Americans (and 83% of African-Americans) are concerned "that someone might attempt to physically harm Barack Obama".

On Thursday, Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22, appeared in court in Miami after allegedly threatening to assassinate Obama. He was in a training class when he allegedly referred to Obama with a racial epithet before adding: "If (Obama] gets elected, I'll assassinate him myself."

According to court documents, Geisel said in an interview with a Secret Service agent, that "if he wanted to kill Senator Obama he simply would shoot him with a sniper rifle, but then he claimed that he was just joking".

A search of Geisel's car and hotel room in Miami uncovered a loaded 9mm handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition including armour-piercing types, body armour, military-style fatigues and a machete.

After the assassination of high-profile black leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, violent attack is of clear concern to black politicians. Colin Powell, former secretary of state, has said his decision not to stand for the presidency in 1996 was largely due to his wife's fear that he might be shot.

Obama was placed under Secret Service protection in May 2007, the earliest ever for a candidate for the presidency.

Obama's Secret Service detail has recently been increased to a level which rivals that of President George Bush, far exceeding the level of protection afforded to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Whenever the Illinois senator holds an event or makes an appearance, a dozen Secret Service agents lead bomb-sniffing dogs through event venues.

The Obama campaign declined to comment on specific threats to the candidate.
••••
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/world/America-burning-racists-say-Obama.4375120.jp

Judges Refuse to Rehear W. Pa. Ex-Nazi Guard Case/Profile of his U.S. Employer, Sharon Steel

By RAMESH SANTANAM

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A federal appeals court has refused to rehear the deportation case of a retired western Pennsylvania steelworker who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II. The only recourse now for Anton Geiser, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled in June that Geiser, 83, of Sharon, should have his citizenship revoked and be deported because his work as a guard meets the type of persecutory conduct banned under the Refugee Relief Act, which was in effect when he entered the U.S.
His attorneys had wanted the three-judge appellate panel or the entire 3rd Circuit to rehear the case. The appeals court refused last week. Geiser's attorney, Adrian Roe, declined to comment Thursday.

Geiser, an ethnic German born in what is now Croatia, was drafted into the German army at 17 and served as an armed SS Death Head guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin for much of 1943.

He later was transferred to an SS officer training camp at Arolsen, where he escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald camp, where tens of thousands of Jews and others were exterminated. He was at Arolsen until April 1945.

Geiser has denied harming any prisoners, though he said he had orders to shoot prisoners who tried to escape.

He was granted a United States visa in 1956 and became a citizen in 1962. He did not cite his Nazi ties on his U.S. visa application, but has said he was never asked about them. Geiser is not accused of lying about his Nazi ties. Files from the period have been lost and it is not clear what questions he was asked.

Roe argued to the 3rd Circuit this year that guards not deemed war criminals were sometimes allowed into the U.S. He said the Justice Department, in its efforts to expel former Nazis, was revisiting decisions made five decades ago.

Geiser told federal authorities he told his family of his wartime service only after the government filed its civil lawsuit in 2004. Geiser has lived in Sharon, about 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since June 1960. He and his wife have three sons. He retired from Sharon Steel in 1987.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jf7YKOKC0UicbmwnhzyxMYcpukBAD92RHN880
•••••••
Victor Posner & Sharon Steel, Geiser's employer

Wiki: Posner "is perhaps best known for his hostile takeover of Sharon Steel Corporation in 1969, one of the earliest such takeovers in the United States. ... His investment would be the forerunner of the leveraged buyout and junk bonds business of the 1980s. Meanwhile, the Fairmont coke plant [owned by Sharon Steel] was one of the worst polluters in the Monongahela Valley and Posner stopped investing in it. It closed in 1979.

Victor Posner (September 18, 1918 - February 11, 2002) was an American businessman, millionaire and philanthropist. He was known as one of the highest paid business executives of his generation. He was a pioneer of the leveraged buyout. ...

Said by Forbes magazine to "have the arrogance of a banana republic dictator" and by the New York Times to be the "dean of the corporate takeover", Posner was a maverick player in the world of corporate finance. Many of his dealings were alleged to be illegal and he was closely watched by the Securities and Exchange Commission from the mid-1980s on. ...

The late 1980s were the start of his downfall:

In 1987, Sharon Steel operated in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
DWG was the target of a takeover attempt by Granada Investments.
Evans Products, operated in Chapter 11 and did not emerge until vendors and lenders were assured that Posner would leave the company.

In 1988 he pleaded no contest to tax evasion and fraud for inflating the value of land he donated to Miami Christian College in 1975. He was ordered to pay more than $6 million in costs and fines and to devote 20 hours a week for five years to working with the homeless.

Also in 1988, the SEC sued Drexel Burnham Lambert and charged Victor Posner and Steven Posner with scheming to conceal the Posner's purchase of stock the electrical contractor, Fishbach Corporation.

Again, in 1988 a bankruptcy judge ordered him to return several original Norman Rockwell paintings to the Sharon Steel Corporation, which he had removed from the company's headquarters when he acquired the company.

In 1993 both he and Steven were barred from being an officer or director of a public company by the SEC.

In 1995, Steven sued his father over alleged mismanagement of his company, Security Management Corporation, claiming that the elder Posner was paying himself too much money and had wrongly removed Steven as a company director. They settled the suit by flipping a coin over the share of more than $200 million worth of property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Posner

Were Jewish Partisans Depicted in New Hollywood Movie Murderers or Heroes?

" ... Nechama Tec, who wrote the historical account of the Bielski partisans on which the film is based, [said] that allegations connecting the partisans to the massacre were 'total lies.' ... "

By Marissa Brostoff, The Forward
8/10/2008

A new movie about a band of Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis during the Holocaust has led some in Poland to suggest that the group may also have been murderers.

In anticipation of the December release of Defiance starring Daniel Craig, aka James Bond, a Polish newspaper ran an article headlined, "A Hollywood Movie About Heroes or Murderers?"

The article in Gazeta Wyborcza contrasts the film's portrayal of Tuvia Bielski as a Moses figure leading frightened women and children through the forest, with a recently released report from a Polish government investigative body. The government report suggests that Bielski and his followers may have participated in a massacre of civilians in the eastern Polish town of Naliboki.

The tarnishing of the Bielski partisans has infuriated a number of people close to the memory of the group. Some of those people have also been involved with the production of the movie, directed by Ed Zwick (Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai). Nechama Tec, who wrote the historical account of the Bielski partisans on which the film is based, told the Forward that allegations connecting the partisans to the massacre were "total lies."

Those allegations "underline the anti-Semitic tendencies of the writers and the distortion of history," Tec said.

The controversy comes on the heels of a Lithuanian government investigation into allegations that Jewish partisans committed war crimes during World War II. That investigation has been met with dismay on the part of Jewish communal leaders inside and outside Lithuania, who note that only three Lithuanians have ever been prosecuted for wartime crimes against Jews. ...

Story continues

Men's Threat to Kill Obama is Downplayed

Associated Press

Federal authorities say the pair's rants while on a methamphetamine binge do not meet the legal standard for filing charges, despite their possession of rifles and sniper scopes.

By Nicholas Riccardi
Los Angeles Times
August 27, 2008

DENVER -- Federal authorities Tuesday downplayed what they said were threats made by a pair of men arrested here over the weekend possessing rifles, sniper scopes and an alleged desire to kill Barack Obama.

Shawn Robert Adolf, 33, and Tharin Robert Gartrell, 28, face federal weapons charges, as does an associate, Nathan Johnson, 32.

Plot unfolds to assassinate Obama on national TV, a 4th arrest, more details
U.S. Atty. Troy Eid said that during a methamphetamine binge, Adolf and Gartrell had expressed strongly racist views and spoken about killing the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.

Eid said the talk did not meet the legal standard to file charges for threatening a presidential candidate.

"The law recognizes a difference between a true threat -- that's one that can be carried out -- and the reported racist rants of drug abusers," Eid said at a news conference. ...

Full story
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-plot27-2008aug27,0,4279510.story

Devil's Den: Inside the Aryan Nations (Book Review)

Intelligence Report
www.splcenter.org/intel
Fall 2008

Into the Devil's Den: How an FBI Informant Got Inside the Aryan Nations and a Special Agent Got Him Out Alive
By Dave Hall and Tym Burkey, with Katherine Ramsland
New York: Ballantine Books, 2008
$25.00 (hardback)

The most intriguing character among the rogue's gallery of racist skinheads, bikers, dope fiends, gunrunners, Klansmen, informants and feds who inhabit this oral history true-life thriller isn't co-author Dave Hall, who infiltrated the Aryan Nations at the behest of the FBI. It's the devil himself, in the human form of Harold "Ray" Redfeairn, aka Pastor Ray, the schizophrenic, murderous cokehead who ran the Ohio branch of the Aryan Nations in the mid-to-late 1990s, when the once-powerful neo-Nazi organization was at the height of its power.

Redfeairn in early 1997 was a regular at Ike's, a biker bar in Dayton, Ohio, controlled by the Outlaws, a notorious motorcycle gang. It was the kind of place where, as Hall puts it, "Almost every day, some biker broad was running around naked or someone else was getting the hell beat out of 'em."

Sporting his trademark priest's collar, Redfeairn, a self-styled pastor of Christian Identity (the radical theology that claims Jews are biologically descended from Satan and was practiced at the Aryan Nations), was in his element at Ike's, delivering cocaine-fueled, hate-filled tirades against Jews and "muds." Unfortunately for Pastor Ray, Hall was equally at home in this beer and blood-soaked milieu.

A 6-foot-4-inch, 350-pound, hard-drinking, heavily tattooed former biker who counted several members of the Outlaws as good friends, Hall had agreed to become an FBI informant and attempt to gain Redfeairn's confidence in order to avoid prison after pleading guilty to distributing marijuana.

Alternating chronologically between the first-person accounts of Hall and his FBI handler, Special Agent Tym Burkey, Into the Devil's Den provides a richly detailed, step-by-step account of Hall's rapid rise through the ranks of the Aryan Nations, from his first meeting with Redfeairn at Ike's to his attending the Aryan Nations World Congress in 1998 at the AN compound outside Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where he was assigned front-gate guard duty.

Along the way, Hall repeatedly attends Christian Identity church services led by Redfeairn. They're held in a dilapidated building near Dayton where an Israeli flag is used as a doormat and portraits of Adolf Hitler are hung in places of honor side-by-side with paintings of Jesus Christ.

Other stops on his journey include a neo-Nazi wedding officiated by Pastor Ray, at which the newlyweds embrace in front of a giant flaming swastika, and, most importantly, the rural Kentucky headquarters of the Imperial Klans of America (IKA), where Hall uncovers a plot to assassinate Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) co-founder Morris Dees. The plotters were enraged that Dees and SPLC had just filed a lawsuit against Aryan Nations and its leader. Ultimately, thanks to Hall's and Burkey's work, the would-be assassin was arrested as he prepared to head south to carry out his plans in April 1999.

In his account of that assassination plot, Hall writes that he suspected that the leader of IKA, Imperial Wizard Ron Edwards, was involved. Edwards was never charged in the case. (As it happens, the SPLC filed a suit in 2007 against the IKA and Edwards, on behalf of a teenage youth who was beaten by IKA members at a county fair. The trial is scheduled for November.)

An interesting aspect of the book is its account of Hall's struggles to maintain his own identity and his risking addiction to pills and booze in trying to chemically soothe his chronically jangled nerves. He suffers from nightmares and endures several harrowing moments during his two and a half years under cover.

While the story arc of Into the Devil's Den follows a well-worn path—the undercover operative finds a way in, loses a part of himself, then emerges damaged but victorious — its setting is not the mafia, a terrorist cell or a narcotics ring, but a strange and terrifying subculture in which hatred and paranoia are valued character traits and a maniac like Redfeairn is treated with reverence by mindless followers.

Hall's knack for recollecting the finer points of his many white-knuckled interactions with the late Pastor Ray, who died of a heart attack in 2003, bring a nasty piece of work back to life. It feels at times as if Redfeairn could almost leap off the page and stick a .45 in the reader's face.

The devil, in this book, truly is in the details.

—David Holthouse

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=938

Lessons Not Learned at the Bay of Pigs

" ... The Bay of Pigs debacle provided ample warning of the dangers inherent in any interventionist foreign policy. ... "

By Howard Jones
8-18-08

Mr. Jones is the author of the just-published book, The Bay of Pigs (Oxford University Press).

On April 17, 1961, a small band of 1500 Cuban exiles invaded their former homeland at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. Masterminded by the CIA, the operation hinged on covert action, a pre-emptive strike, and, its greatest novelty, an arrangement with the Mafia to assassinate Castro and set off a popular insurrection. The Kennedy administration had taken a new direction in foreign policy, one that rested on assassination and military force. Indeed, the assassination of Castro was just one part of an executive action program under development inside the CIA that aimed at regime change by simply eliminating troublesome state leaders.

The landing, as is well known, was a spectacular failure. Castro not only survived the invasion but outlasted ten presidents despite every effort to force him from office—including at least six attempts at assassination.

The question is, what lessons can be extracted from this fiasco of nearly half a century ago? The short answer is that “regime change” has remained a central part of American foreign policy, meaning that the White House failed to learn anything constructive at the Bay of Pigs.

We should start with the CIA. The agency had appeared invincible after its covert triumphs in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s—which was why the Eisenhower administration authorized it to plan a covert program in Cuba that unexpectedly escalated from guerrilla tactics into an amphibious military operation. At this point, such a highly complex enterprise should have come under the purview of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the CIA jealously guarded its mandate, telling the Joint Chiefs that this was “not a military operation” and “You will not become involved in this.”

The CIA did not use common sense in partnering with the underworld. Its operatives have often recruited help from unsavory characters—but in this case, they went beyond the pale. “Assassination was intended to reinforce the plan,” insisted Richard Bissell, chief architect of the operation. Castro’s death would make the invasion “either unnecessary or much easier.” Castro had stripped the Mafia of its casinos and other businesses, leaving a thirst for vengeance that provided the CIA with a cover story for plausible deniability—the notion, first stated publicly by agency director Allen Dulles, that one can escape culpability for an act by instituting a loose chain of command that leaves no trail of evidence.

Plausible deniability, however, was an illusion. The CIA assured the White House that it could deny complicity in one of the most open secrets in the annals of secret history. From the beginning came warning signs. The CIA established a training camp in Guatemala for Cuban dissidents run by U.S. Army Special Forces—all known by the Latin public, American newspapers, Castro’s spies, and the Soviet news agency Tass. The invasion would take place on April 17, reported the Soviet embassy in Mexico City to Moscow earlier that month.

Nevertheless, it was an illusion that Kennedy clung to, particularly because political considerations began to take priority over military strategy. Concern about public exposure led him to reject the original plan for a dawn landing at Trinidad, an anti-Castro town of 18,000 inhabitants that offered potential for a popular uprising, several landing docks, geographical isolation from the regime’s forces, and close proximity to the Escambray Mountains, home of a thousand anti-Castro guerrillas and a base for future operations. Kennedy, however, opposed a Normandy-like invasion that exposed U.S. involvement and called for an alternate site allowing a quiet, night-time landing dependent on surprise—which undermined the chances of a popular uprising.

Bissell all too quickly found another landing spot—Zapata, whose focal point for the invasion was much closer to Havana—the Bay of Pigs. But the Zapata peninsula, known as the “Great Swamp of the Caribbean,” was sparsely populated, which virtually eliminated an insurrection, and it had no landing docks and was rimmed by shark-infested waters too deep for anchoring in some areas and ribbed with razor-edged coral reefs capable of ripping the bottoms of boats as well as the legs of men. Its beaches wrapped around a million miles of hot tropical wilderness that was overrun with tangled mangrove trees and shrubs, nearly impenetrable thickets, alligators and crocodiles, ferocious pigs, poisonous snakes, voracious insects, and millions of sharp-shelled, toxic red land crabs that in the spring of every year (the time of the invasion) scurried out of the jungle, carpeting the passageways and the beaches in their haste to breed in the sea. Furthermore, the landing site lay eighty miles from the Escambrays, no longer affording a sanctuary because of distance and the deadly swamp lying between. If Bissell was aware of these problems, he did not alert the president to them.

The strategists underestimated the enemy. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs assumed that Castro’s forces were lukewarmly loyal and too poorly trained to run the tanks, fight effectively, and pilot his small air force of B-26s, Sea Furies, and T-33 jet trainers. To assure success, the CIA planned two days of pre-invasion strikes by its own B-26s—D-2 and D-1 bombing and strafing that would disable Castro’s air and ground forces—followed by D-Day air cover. But Kennedy cut the number of planes in the initial D-2 strikes from sixteen to eight, and then canceled the D-1 operations. Finally, he called off the air cover for D-Day—all to hide the American hand and maintain plausible deniability.

Moreover, the Kennedy administration did not seriously consider the opposition’s arguments that even success, which was unlikely, would damage America’s international stature. The president dismissed the warnings of Ambassador to India and close confidant John Kenneth Galbraith, Senators J. William Fulbright and George Smathers, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles, and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. White House adviser and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote extensive memos forecasting a public relations catastrophe that would undermine the good will and credibility amassed by the young president in his first months in office. Regardless of the outcome at the Bay of Pigs, the United States would stand as the imperial colossus from the north.

Instead, the White House relied on luck and ingenuity to smooth over the cracks in the plan. Kennedy ignored his own instincts in succumbing to his unusual attraction to guerrilla warfare and the James Bond mystique. Still clinging to the fig leaf of plausible deniability and trusting in the CIA and Pentagon experts as well as in his Midas touch, the president approved the plan. So confident were the planners in a last-minute resort to direct U.S. military action if necessary that they drew up no exit strategy in the event of failure.

In a three-day battle, everything that could go wrong for the Cuban brigade did.

Kennedy’s decision to change the landing site from Trinidad to Zapata, and to call off the D-1 and D-Day air strikes doomed the operation from the start. The first move eliminated any chance of a popular uprising; the second left the invasion force with no air cover. Not only did the sharply curtailed D-2 strikes warn Castro of an invasion, but the D-1 and D-day cancellations surrendered the skies to his planes and permitted the more expeditious arrival at the battle scene of his Russian tanks and thousands of militia.

Crucial to the outcome was the absence of a mass uprising. The CIA had not established a network of connections with the local populace; Castro had broken the back of any potential insurrection by clapping thousands of suspects into prison; the invasion had occurred in a place remote and isolated from populated areas; the guerrillas in the mountains were poorly armed and prepared; and the poison plot had failed when the potential assassin feared discovery and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy in Havana.

The most incisive appraisal of the invasion came from Castro, who attributed the brigade’s failure to lack of air cover. The rebel planes dropped their airborne battalions too close to the beaches, allowing his tanks and artillery to enter the three causeways leading to the battle sites. The landing spot was superb in military terms, but only if the invaders had closed the causeways and with air protection held the beachhead long enough to build a military and naval base, announce a provisional government, and seek recognition and outside aid. They had a “good plan, poorly executed.”

Kennedy’s nightmarish experience at the Bay of Pigs certainly helped him stand up to the Soviets in the ensuing Cuban missile crisis; yet one doubts that such a crisis would have occurred without the Bay of Pigs. It is questionable whether Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would have challenged him at Vienna to pull out of Berlin, but it is inconceivable that he would have risked placing missiles in Cuba had the young president thrown out an invasion plan pockmarked with flaws and aimed at a country posing no threat to U.S. security. Indeed, the Kennedys became so obsessed with Castro that during the missile crisis they spent valuable time planning his elimination out of vengeance for his welcoming the missiles.

But—and here is the critical point—both the president and his brother ignored the lessons left by the Bay of Pigs. Less than two weeks after the invasion and months before the missile crisis, the president gave contingent approval to an air- and marine-force assault on the Havana area followed by the landing of 60,000 American troops. While the Joint Chiefs worked out a detailed plan in the fall of 1961, Kennedy appointed CIA legend Edward Lansdale to head a top-secret program code-named Operation Mongoose which, with Robert Kennedy as its real leader, sought to eliminate Castro by any means necessary—including assassination. When Mongoose failed and White House attention turned to other trouble spots, the CIA tied the executive action plan to a revived collaboration with the Mafia. In the meantime, both before and after the missile crisis, the agency conspired with a potential assassin to eliminate Castro—Army Major Rolando Cubela, an associate of Castro who had become disenchanted with the political direction of the revolution. On the very day president Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Cubela (code-named Amlash) was meeting in Paris with a CIA operative, making plans for killing Castro either by sniper fire or in the course of a military coup.

President Kennedy soon afterward removed Bissell from his CIA post but praised his “enduring legacy.” Bissell had left a lasting mark on foreign policy—but not the type the president had in mind. In a statement that revealed an unintended double meaning if not a healthy dose of naiveté, Kennedy administration insider Richard Goodwin later noted that “Latin America was considered a kind of training ground for Southeast Asia.” Indeed, covert tactics aimed at regime change became the norm in Africa and the Middle East as well as in Latin America and Southeast Asia as Washington became enamored of what it could accomplish by clandestine and deniable means.

The Bay of Pigs debacle provided ample warning of the dangers inherent in any interventionist foreign policy. Yet the warning remains unheeded—as shown in Vietnam and Iraq.

http://hnn.us/articles/52561.html

Nazi Link in Plot to Assassinate Obama

" ... US authorities are playing down the ability of the arrested men to carry out an assassination. ... The evidence suggests a well-planned assassination attempt, with weapons assembled, a truck rented and hotel rooms booked in a town where most accommodation was full months before the convention. ... "

Tharin Gartrell was arrested Sunday in Aurora, Colo., on drug and weapons charges.

27 August 2008
By CHRIS STEPHEN
IN DENVER
news.scotsman.com

THE three men arrested over a reported plot to kill the US Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, have ties to the white supremacist group Aryan Nations, police said last night.

Shawn Robert Adolf, 33, Nathan Johnson and Tharin Gartrell are all said to have links to the group.

Adolf – his real name according to police – and the others were arrested on weapons charges after an apparent move to assassinate Mr Obama during his party's convention in Denver this week.

All three belong to Aryan Nations, according to Victor Ross, the police chief in Glendale, a suburb of Denver where one of the suspects was arrested. The other two were held in Aurora, another suburb.

"We don't usually have that number of Aryan Nations people here,'' Mr Ross said. "It was suspicious to us. We turned everything over to the federal authorities."

It is said the group planned to shoot Mr Obama during his convention acceptance speech, to be delivered outdoors at a football stadium tomorrow night – the anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" address. While federal agents are downplaying the plot as being of "no credible threat" to Mr Obama, the discovery of such a plan – and the way it was discovered – are certain to raise security concerns over the man who could be the next president of the United States.

Events started to move in the early hours of Sunday, the day before the Democratic National Convention was due to open, when a police patrol car stopped a pick-up truck driving erratically in Aurora.

In the back of the vehicle, officers found two high-powered rifles, one with telescopic sights, a spotting scope, a flak jacket, camouflage clothing, a bulletproof vest, boxes of ammunition, three fake identity cards, two wigs, two walkie-talkies and a quantity of the drug methamphetamine, a form of speed known as crystal meth.

The driver, Gartrell, 28, unemployed, was arrested.

Four hours later, police raided a nearby hotel where alleged accomplice Adolf, a wanted fugitive, was staying. He tried to escape by jumping from a sixth-floor window, breaking his ankle in the attempt.

He has a long history of convictions for drugs and violence, and when arrested, police found he had the key to handcuffs in one hand and a ring with a swastika emblem in the other.

Nathan Johnson

Shortly afterwards, police made two more arrests, of Johnson, 32, and his girlfriend, Natasha Gromek, both on drugs charges, at another hotel. In an extraordinary interview from his jail cell, Johnson told a reporter from CBS television that Adolf had planned to kill Mr Obama during his nomination acceptance address to 75,000 supporters at Denver's Invesco Field at Mile High football stadium tomorrow night.

"He (Adolf] said at one point, yes, it would be on probably the day of his acceptance speech," Johnson said. He had told FBI investigators "it would be from a high vantage point with the named rifle". But Johnson insisted he himself had no part in the plot.

He said Adolf had said of Mr Obama: "He don't belong in political office; blacks don't belong in political office. He should be shot." When asked if he felt there was a plot to kill Mr Obama, Johnson said: "Looking back at it, I don't want to say yes, but I don't want to say no."

Aryan Nations is the most influential of dozens of neo-Nazi groups spread across the US. Last year, one of its members, Jason Hamilton, went on a shooting spree that left three people and himself dead in Idaho, home to one of the group's three branches. Hamilton was a member of The Order, a self-styled commando group within Aryan Nations.

The group's website is blunt about its role in creating a whites-only state in North America. "We realise that it takes a cold-blooded, pragmatic and realist viewpoint to enact the changes which will be necessary to achieve our goals," it says.

But the US authorities are playing down the ability of the arrested men to carry out an assassination amid tight security. "We're absolutely confident there is no credible threat to the candidate, the Democratic National Convention or the people of Colorado," Troy Eid, the state attorney, said.

Opinion is divided about whether groups such as Aryan Nations represent a genuine threat or can be dismissed as cranks, but the US has a long and unhappy history of cranks with guns. The 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy was the work of a disgruntled loner, Lee Harvey Oswald, and in 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a former soldier, aided by two accomplices, built a bomb and detonated it outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168.

Prosecutors yesterday said they had evidence to charge the three men only with drugs and firearms offences.

Security fears have been heightened by Mr Obama's decision to hold his acceptance speech not in the convention centre in Denver, but in the open-roofed football stadium, a much harder venue to police.

The evidence suggests a well-planned assassination attempt, with weapons assembled, a truck rented and hotel rooms booked in a town where most accommodation was full months before the convention.

But police sources doubt such an attempt could have been carried out. Metal detectors will search all those entering the stadium; the nearest rooftops are 750 yards from the ground and will be monitored by police snipers; helicopters will guard a no-fly zone over the stadium, and even a McVeigh-style truck bomb would be kept away by a large cordon around the area.

Nevertheless, the arrests have touched a raw nerve .

Thursday's nomination acceptance takes place on the anniversary of the "I have a dream" speech by Martin Luther King, and King's campaign for racial equality saw him assassinated 40 years ago.

And while Democrats of all races are euphoric about the Obama campaign, that is countered by some resentment.

As a result, security is tight, verging on paranoid, across the city. On Sunday, a full security alert was triggered and a hotel evacuated – those that had to leave included House speaker Nancy Pelosi – after a man checked-in with two hunting rifles he had brought to Denver for repair.

On the main highway leading to the airport, police patrols have begun stopping vans and minibuses, apparently after fears about home-made bombs.

Meanwhile, a large part of downtown Denver has been closed off, with high metal gates and concrete barriers to thwart bombing attempts. Inside this zone, police vehicles cruise the streets with armed officers in black jumpsuits clinging to the sides.

Since Sunday, Denver police have been hunting through derelict and public buildings for weapons, flags and petrol bombs that they fear rioters may have stockpiled, intending to use during demonstrations planned for later this week.

The media are also under pressure from the Democratic establishment, which wants reporting to concentrate on their scripted conference and not be diverted into covering an alleged assassination conspiracy.

A target of hatred from the outset

THE men and women of the Secret Service, dressed in dark suits, wearing sunglasses and carrying SIG Sauer P229 automatic handguns, arrived at Senator Barack Obama's side at exactly 1pm on 3 May, 2007. And they don't look likely to leave anytime soon.

Mr Obama was given official protection under Public Law 90-331, introduced after the assassination of Robert F Kennedy, which authorises the protection of major presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Usually the armed protection begins 120 days prior to the election, however, Mr Obama was given early and elevated security because, as Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator, explained: "Mr Obama's African-American heritage is a cause for very violent and hated reactions among some people."

While Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee-in-waiting, is understood to have just eight full-time Secret Service agents in his detail, Mr Obama is thought to have dozens more. All are trained in the use of a variety of close-combat weapons, such as the Remington Model 870 shotgun, the IMI Uzi and the HK MP5 (including the MP5KA4) submachine-guns among others. Each is issued with a radio to maintain communication with a central command post and other personnel. Basic strategies include: shield the protectee from any threat; evacuate the protectee to a safe location; conduct extensive research in order to plan for all contingencies.

Protection goes beyond surrounding the candidate with well-armed agents. The Secret Service website states that the agency does extensive advance work and threat assessments.

It has been reported that the Secret Service's codename for Mr Obama is "Renegade". The Senator has a relaxed, good-natured relationship with the men charged with taking a bullet for him.

While Mr Obama's team insist the candidate has "the best protection in the world", there have been allegations that the vast numbers flocking to hear the senator speak are forcing the Secret Service to cut corners. It was reported that, at a rally in Dallas, agents ordered local police to stop searching each supporter before entering the arena.

http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Nazi-link-in-39plot-to.4428733.jp

CIA Implicated in Hariri Assassination, German Investigative Journalist Jailed to Silence Him

Note: I reported on Jürgen Cain Külbel and his investigation of CIA involvement in the Hariri murder in November, 2006. See: "Lexington Comair Crash, Part 22 Supplemental – CIA Arms Smuggling, THE MURDER OF RAFIK HARIRI & the LaBelle Disco Bombing Connection"

The Voltaire Network International is "a network of non-aligned press groups, founded in 2005 by Thierry Meyssan. It syndicates articles, edits the multilingual website Voltairenet.org, and information databases 911investigations.net and Gulf investigations.net." - www.voltairenet.org

- AC
(Reposted)
•••••••
Repression against the Voltaire Network keeps on. Jürgen Cain Külbel has been jailed in Berlin. The weak legal pretexts used to condemn him cannot hide the political motive behind this decision: our collaborator had shown that the Commissioner of the UN International Independent Investigation Commission into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri had financial binds with the perpetrators, and that his main aide is a CIA agent involved in the ongoing wave of kidnappings in Europe.

Political crackdown - A Voltaire Network collaborator jailed in Berlin
http://www.voltairenet.org/article157407.html

Voltaire Network collaborator Jürgen Cain Külbel has been jailed in Berlin. He is charged for having breached an emergency proceedings court order when leaving an active link on his website, pointing to a voltairenet.org article [1]

This peculiar intrigue is yet another CIA plot aimed at intimidating Jürgen Cain Külbel and the Voltaire Network collaborators. The mechanisms of this operation are as follows:

A former Eastern Germany police investigator, Jürgen Cain Külbel has led, as a journalist, an independent inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He put out his conclusions in a book that was published in German and Arabic: The Hariri File [2]. There he tackles and elaborates elements already presented by the Voltaire Network [3]. Thierry Meyssan had shown that an association of exiled Lebanese members of the opposition, the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL), had foreknowledge of the crime and had immediately launched a communication campaign aimed at directing suspicions towards Syria. [4]. The USCFL, asked by the CIA to set up a puppet regime for Lebanon in the event of a U.S. military intervention in that country, is therefore an accomplice – at least passively – in the crime. Talaat Ramih had shown that former German Public Prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, once appointed as U.N. Commissioner of the investigation, had been employed by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) [5].

By noting that the USCFL is a WINEP offspring, Jürgen Cain Külbel has shown that the UN commissioner was a former employee of people involved in the very murder he was asked to investigate. Following his lead, he shed the light on the role of Detlev Mehlis’ main aide, police chief Gerhard Lehmann, in the wave of CIA kidnappings in Europe that have taken place since 2001. Mr. Lehmann was indeed formally identified by one of his victims, Khaled al-Masri [6]. Several elements indicate that Mr. Lehmann may also be involved in the “disappearing” in Paris of the Hariri investigation’s key witness, Zuhair As-Siddik, on March 13, 2008 [7].

As soon as his book was published in German language, Jürgen Cain Külbel was approached by a Germany-based Palestinian militant, Said Dudin, who suggested he could undertake the publication in Arabic and promote it. However, when Mr. Külbel came to Damas to speak in a conference at the Syrian National Library, invited by Syria Alghad (Political research institute, member of the Voltaire Network), Mr. Dudin did his best to discredit the author. The publisher called for the audience to attack Western embassies and issued multiple incendiary statements to distract media attention.


Jürgen Cain Külbel’s conference, on May 8, 2006, at the Syrian National Library (Damas).
Back in Germany, Jürgen Cain Külbel tried to know more about this botcher. He then found out that this so-called Palestinian cause advocator was the son of Mustafa Dudin, an Israeli secret agent receiving orders directly from general Ariel Sharon. Thus uncovered, Mustafa Dudin was then executed by the Resistance. Resuming his research, Jürgen Cain Külbel then unearthed, from the Stasi (Former East German political police) archives, documents certifying that Said Dudin himself was himself a long-time CIA agent infiltrated within the German radical left-wing movement. These documents were published on Voltairenet.org [8].

Filing an emergency court proceeding, Said Dudin obtained from the Berlin Court an order issued to Mr. Külbel that he would no longer mention, in any way whatsoever, the Damas incident, his father’s role within the Israeli services and his own within the CIA. Obeying the Raison d’Etat, the Court only retained testimony provided by Mr. Dudin and brushed aside that provided by Mr. Külbel, including that of prince Issa al-Ayubi, vice-president of the Voltaire Network and grand-nephew of the Arab Syrian Republic’s founder, who witnessed the Damas incident where he opposed Mr. Dudin. Besides, the Court neglected the Stasi documents according to a German amnesty law prohibiting any mention to them.

However, since Jürgen Cain Külbel had subsequently left on his personal website an active link to the Voltaire Network’s article containing the Stasi documents that were illegally made public, the Court sentenced him to 10 days imprisonment for the breaching of its order.



[1] The article referred to is “Investigativer Journalismus und die Bombenleger von Beirut”, an interview of Jürgen Cain Külbel with Silvia Cattori, Voltaire Network, July 30, 2007. No English translation available.

[2] Mordakte Hariri, Unterdrückte Spuren im Libanon by Jügen Cain Külbel, Zeitgeschichte Band 34 Publishings, 2006 (ISBN 3-89706-860-5).

[3] “The Assassination of Rafik Hariri: A Biased Investigation”, by Silvia Cattori, Voltaire Network, September 15, 2006.

[4] “The plans of the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon », by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, March 8, 2005.

[5] “The disgrace of the Mehlis Commission”, by Talaat Ramih, Voltaire Network, December 9, 2005.

[6] Allegations of secret detention and illegal prisoner renditions in Council of Europe member states, a report by Dick Marty to the European Council, June 12, 2006.

[7] “Kouchner has “lost” the key witness in Hariri investigation”, by Jürgen Cain Külbel, Voltaire Network, April 21, 2008. No English translation available.

[8] Ibid.

"The Father of Hate Radio": Charles Edward Coughlin (1891-1971) - Facing the Corporate Roots of Fascism

By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!

Father Coughlin, “the Father of Hate Radio,” was born in Hamilton, Ontario. This rabidly right-wing, Catholic priest started with a weekly broadcast on WJR, Detroit’s “Good Will” station. CBS broadcast it nationwide in 1930 and 1931. He started his own radio network that grew to 30 stations. John Spivak, estimated that Coughlin’s broadcasts reached 40 million, said: “Only the President…had a bigger audience… The President spoke only on special occasions, the priest every Sunday…. To me, he was the most dangerous divisive influence in the country” (A Man in His Time, 1967).

Coughlin originally supported FDR, but turned against him in 1934 and created a political party, the National Union of Social Justice. Former Louisiana Governor, Huey Long was supposed to be their candidate, but he was assassinated in 1935. Journalist George Seldes said Long was America’s “first notable Fascist leader,...a very smart demagogue, [who] once said, ‘Sure we’ll have Fascism here, but it will come as an anti-Fascism movement.’” In the late 1930s, Coughlin called for FDR’s impeachment because he was “leaning toward international socialism or sovietism.”

Coughlin’s radio sermons praised Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The Nazi press praised Coughlin as “America’s most powerful radio commentator.” He ranted against Jews, the “Christ-killers and Christ-rejecters.” When a Boston Globe reporter asked him for proof that communists were influencing FDR, Father Coughlin belted the journalist in the face.

Coughlin's weekly paper, Social Justice, reached one million. It was sold in 2,000 churches. In 1938, it reprinted the anti-Semitic forgery “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

In his book Maverick Marine, 1987, Hans Schmidt notes that General Smedley Butler accused Coughlin of plotting to invade Mexico! Schmidt writes:

While visiting the [FBI] in 1936, Butler told Hoover about a plot by Father Charles Coughlin to invade Mexico to protect the Catholic Church from harassment. Smedley said that Coughlin, the famous "radio priest" whose voice he recognized, had approached him by telephone and that the call was traced back to Coughlin afterward. It seems that Butler was being hoaxed. In any case, he was clearly wary of becoming involved in another publicized plot exposé. Butler mentioned the Coughlin plot again to an FBI agent in 1940 in connection with what he termed dozens of "screwball" organizations that had invited him to appear as a speaker.

Whether it really was Coughlin who phoned Butler about this bizarre plot to invade Mexico is unknown. However, we do know that Coughlin really was allied with the openly-Nazi German-American Bund. By 1939, Coughlin had inspired and was directing a nation-wide, fascist network, the Christian Front, which John Spivak described as “street-fighting toughs.” Roy Carlson, who infiltrated and exposed U.S. fascist groups said:

"Like Hitler’s Brownshirts, the Christian Front was ostensibly organized to combat the ‘rising tide of Communism.’ All Jews,... liberals, New Dealers and labor organizations were called Communist; and since the Communist Revolution in America was scheduled to take place ‘any day now,’ the Christian Front–always under Coughlin’s inspiration and guidance—shouted that a private army was the only means to ‘save America.’ Coughlin filled the pages of Social Justice with Hitler’s sewer-spawned lies. He made direct use of Goebbels’ speeches, quoting the Nazi almost word-for-word.... He denounced the ‘poppycock of Democracy’ and branded Democracy as a version of Communism” (Under Cover, 1943).

In Shrine of the Silver Dollar (1940), Spivak said Coughlin “cynically used the prestige of a priest and the heart-tug of Christian charity as a cloak for a fast deal.” Spivak showed that Coughlin was playing the stock market while denouncing this on air as “shooting craps with other people’s money.” Coughlin, secretly one of the America’s largest silver owners, urged his followers to lobby for silver as the money standard. Coughlin’s “monetary forms…are of great help to the Rockefeller interests, [Henry] Ford and [William Randolph] Hearst” (Spivak, New Masses, Feb.5, 1935).

Not long after Spivak’s exposé in 1940, Coughlin went off the air and his paper was denied use of the mails. That year, when an FBI raid found weapons in a Christian Front office, J. Edgar Hoover said the Front was planning to murder Jews, communists and “a dozen Congressmen.”

Although Coughlin was criticised by some high-ranking Catholics, he was never defrocked for hate-mongering, political campaigning or deceptive fundraising. Neither was he prosecuted. He continued to churn out virulent anti-communist pamphlets until his death in 1979.

References:

John Carlson, Under Cover, 1943

John Spivak, A Man in His Time, 1967

New Religious Movements
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu

Schoolnet
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk

Mickey Z., "The A Word"
http://www.pressaction.com

Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

Order a Copy: Order a hard copy of this 54-page issue of Press for Conversion! on the fascist plot to overthrow President F.D.Roosevelt and the corporate leaders who planned and financed this failed coup.

http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/coughlin.html

Georgia Committed Genocide, Russians Say

Sydney Morning Herald
news.smh.com.au
August 26, 2008

Russian investigators have proof that Georgian forces committed genocide in their attack on the rebel region of South Ossetia, a top Russian official says.

"It has been fully established that between August 7 and 12, Georgia's armed forces invaded the territory of the unrecognised republic with the aim of fully annihilating the Ossetian ethnic group living in South Ossetia," Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin told state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.

"They spared no one. We found a woman who had been killed with a shot to the head. She was eight months' pregnant. Her unborn child died too," he added. Bastrykin was summarising the results of an ongoing investigation into the Georgian attack on the Moscow-backed rebel enclave, which prompted Russia to pour troops and armour into its southern neighbour.

Bastrykin did not say how many South Ossetian civilians were killed but a senior local prosecutor last week said 133 civilian deaths had been confirmed in South Ossetia and that toll was likely to grow.

Russian officials earlier backed up the genocide accusations by saying up to 2,000 of South Ossetia's population of 70,000 had been killed. Both Russia and Georgia have accused each other of ethnic cleansing and war crimes in the conflict, in which Russian forces routed Georgia's small US-trained army and dug in deep inside the Caucasus country.

A team of 211 investigators has compiled more than 100 volumes of evidence of Georgian atrocities and questioned 3,915 people, Bastrykin said, adding that "all their testimony confirms the fact of genocide".

Meanwhile, a vote by Russia's parliament to recognise two breakaway Georgian regions as independent nations has triggered an outbreak of diplomatic roulette with Washington to review its "entire relationship" with Moscow.

The White House warned Moscow it cannot unilaterally decide the fate of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow was ready to break with NATO. Tensions were underscored by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's announcement that Russia would withdraw from some WTO trade accords, as the US said Vice-President Dick Cheney would visit Georgia.

There was a flurry of other activity, as the European Union prepared for a special summit set for next Monday. France expressed concern at reports of looting and intimidation in South Ossetia, while a Russian warship left Sevastopol on Monday. With Russian troops still deep in Georgia, both houses of the Russian parliament passed motions urging Medvedev to recognise the independence of South Ossetia - where the conflict began this month - and Abkhazia. The pair are internationally recognised as part of Georgia, where Russian troops rolled in on August 8 to fight off a Georgian offensive to retake South Ossetia.

Addressing the Federation Council upper house, South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity said Russia had saved his region from "genocide". He asserted there was more political and legal legitimacy to recognising South Ossetia's independence than there had been for Kosovo, the Serbian province which broke free with EU and US backing earlier this year.

Abkhaz leader, Sergei Bagapsh, said: "Neither Abkhazia nor South Ossetia will ever again live in one state with Georgia." The final decision rests with Medvedev but he has already signalled his support and he mentioned the South Ossetia case when he said a dispute with Moldova over the Transdniestr region could be settled.

Medvedev told Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin that the dispute over Transdniestr, which lies on Moldova's eastern edge and where there are Russian troops, should be viewed in the context of the Georgia conflict.

Events in South Ossetia showed "how dangerous such so-called frozen conflicts can be, given that the Georgian leadership, as they say, went crazy," Medvedev said, according to Interfax news agency. Transdniestr fought a brief independence war after the Soviet Union's collapse but is not internationally recognised.

"We're reviewing our entire relationship with Russia, both for the medium term and the long term," said spokesman Tony Fratto.

He said was "no question that Russia has not lived up to the ceasefire agreement".

"The status of those two regions in Georgia are not a matter for any one country to decide. They're a matter for the international community, through the mechanisms at the United Nations," he added. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russia was making "an attempt to change Europe's borders by force," in an interview with the French newspaper Liberation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the vote was "worrying" and Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini called on him to be "particularly prudent" in his decision.

Poland meanwhile hopes to convince the European Union to take a hard line on Russia at a special summit on September 1, its prime minister said.

Security troops in Georgia's separatist republic of South Ossetia detained a group of Georgian policemen, the separatist interior minister Mikhail Mindzayev told Interfax news agency.

Russia withdrew tanks, artillery and hundreds of troops from their most advanced positions in Georgia on Friday. But Russian troops still control access to the port city of Poti, south of Abkhazia, and have established other checkpoints around South Ossetia.

Russia says a six point peace plan brokered by France's President Nicolas Sarkozy gives it the right to leave "peacekeepers" in a buffer zone deep inside Georgia.

http://news.smh.com.au/world/georgia-committed-genocide-russians-say-20080826-42hg.html

YouTube Removes Clip Showing Neo-Nazi Youth Urinating on Holocaust Memorial

By Haaretz Service
www.haaretz.com

YouTube on Tuesday removed video clip posted by a group of Rhodes high school students showing a teenager urinating on a memorial to Holocaust victims on the Greek island.

The clip showed the memorial, a black pillar which commemorates the murders of 1,604 Jews killed by the Nazis in Rhodes during World War II. The video then showed a youth - his face obscured by an Israeli flag covered by the international "no" symbol of a red circle with a slash through it - urinating on the pillar.

"We are a secret group of students of the 'Venetoklio' High School of Rhodes, that does not digg [sic] at all the Jews who wish to turn the island [of Rhodes] into a second 'Land of Canaan.'" says an accompanying "manifesto."

"After all the propaganda fed even in Religion school books, over the 'chosen people' and other bullshit, we have decided to take the situation into our own hands and show to everyone with deeds of how much do we really agree with this view."

The clip also included rock music with lyrics threatening Rhodes Jews, praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Auschwitz death camp, and a refrain using the German term "Juden raus!" [Jews, get out!]

According to the Israeli nrg news Website, the memorial was built in 2002 near a synagogue in a section of Rhodes once known as "Little Jerusalem."

Although the Rhodes Jewish community once numbered some 6,000 people before the war, the Holocaust and ensuing emigration left only a tiny Jewish population, estimated to be as small as 40 resident Jews at present.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1015403.html

Ottawa Exhibition - Deadly Medicine: Creating The Master Race

http://www.huliq.com/65633/deadly-medicine-creating-master-race

The Canadian War Museum announced the opening of the special exhibition, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The exhibition, organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, examines how eugenics — the belief that humanity can be improved by encouraging some people to have children, while preventing others from doing so — was seized upon by the Nazis to further their vision of creating a master race.

“This exhibition provides visitors with an opportunity to explore the origins and rationale for Nazi Germany’s racial policies and to understand how such policies contributed to the Holocaust,” stated Mark O’Neill, the War Museum’s Director General.

The study of eugenics was embraced in Germany by a Nazi dictatorship determined to build a master race and to rid German society of people it deemed inferior or perceived as threats to the German nation. Nazis considered Jews the prime threat to “Aryan racial purity”. Through a powerful collection of artifacts, powerful images and moving personal testimonies, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race explores every aspect in the development of Nazi eugenics: the use of callipers and eye-colour charts to measure “human value”; the forced sterilization of the mentally ill and the disabled; the killings of infants, children, and adults under the guise of euthanasia or mercy killing; and medical experimentation on those deemed inferior.

The exhibition culminates with the targeting and murder of approximately six million Jews in the Holocaust. Many others also became victims of persecution and murder during the Nazis’ campaign to “cleanse” German society of individuals they viewed as threats to the nation’s “health”. Throughout, the exhibition highlights the central role played by public health workers, doctors, research scientists and other professionals in the implementation of Nazi eugenic policies.

Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, is a special exhibition organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is sponsored in part by The Samberg Family Foundation, the Dorot Foundation, the Viterbi Family Foundation of the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, and the Rosenbluth Family — Al, Sylvia, Bill and Jerry. Additional support was provided by the Takiff Family Foundation and the David Berg Foundation.

Deadly Medicine, a special exhibition created by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., allows visitors to explore in greater detail the nature of the Nazi regime and provides wider context for the Canadian experience of the Second World War.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics promised a better society, with supporters claiming it would reduce the incidence of physical and mental infirmity and help eliminate poverty and crime. Drawing on wide public support, some parts of the United States, two Canadian provinces, and a number of European countries introduced laws authorizing the forced sterilization of many thousands of people considered physically and mentally unfit.

The exhibition explores Nazism’s roots in biology and genetics, and examines the role played by German physicians, scientists, public health officials, academic experts, and others in the Nazi racial eugenics program that culminated in the Holocaust. Deadly Medicine chronicles how, during the Second World War, the Nazi leadership — in its zeal to find biological solutions for social problems — worked with individuals in professions traditionally charged with healing and the public good to legitimize persecution, murder and, ultimately, genocide.

Deadly Medicine begins with an examination of the promotion and implementation of the ideas of eugenics, also known as “racial hygiene”, in Germany during the period of social, economic and political crisis following the First World War. The exhibition shows that these ideas, part of an international phenomenon, helped inform public health policies in many countries, including the United States and Canada. From 1933 to 1945, Germany’s Nazi party, with the support of much of the German scientific and medical community, absorbed eugenic ideas into its ideology based on a nationalism that combined territorial expansion with claims of biological superiority— an “Aryan master race”.

An increasingly radicalized Nazi racial hygiene program shifted from simply controlling reproduction and marriage to justifying and perpetrating the murder of those regarded as biological threats to the nation’s well-being. Driven by virulent anti-Semitism, the Nazi regime expanded this programme of mass killing from those deemed biologically unfit to those deemed “racially” unfit. As the Second World War raged, this culminated in an attempt to eliminate all of Europe’s Jews, six million of whom ultimately perished in the Holocaust. Many others also became victims of persecution and murder in the Nazis’ campaign to ”cleanse” German society of individuals viewed as threats to the “health” of the nation.

The exhibition was first shown at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from April 2004 to May 2006, and has been exhibited at the following museums: the Science Museum of Minnesota, with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota (St. Paul, MN); The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage (Beachwood, OH); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Global Health Odyssey in the Tom Harkin Global Communications Center, with The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum (Atlanta, GA); The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA); and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Dresden, Germany).

Deadly Medicine can be seen until November 11, 2008 at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. -- www.civilization.ca

Eugenics: Study Finds Vast Majority (84%) of Down Syndrome Babies Aborted in Norway

Study also says "prenatal detection rate was poor," that is, screening many have led to abortion based in inaccurate data

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski
www.lifesitenews.com
August 13, 2008

TRONDHEIM, Norway, August 13, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A recently published Norwegian study of prenatal detection of trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome) reveals that 84% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the country are aborted. The study also concludes with the observation that "based solely on maternal age and second-trimester ultrasound imaging, the prenatal detection rate of trisomy 21 cases was poor and remained unchanged throughout the 18-year study period."

The study was conducted by the Norwegian National Center for Fetal Medicine and published in the August 2008 issue of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology.

The research was based on data obtained from 1987 to 2004, where all cases of Down syndrome were registered, detected either by genetic testing following amniocentesis, or postnatally after delivery.

The study's finding that the prenatal detection results were not accurate ("the prenatal detection rate was only 43%") means that, in practice, the possibility of false positive results could lead to the abortion of healthy children.

The Norwegian study confirms other research which has also found that prenatal screening is not as accurate as previously thought.

One report, published in the journal Nature in 2006, found that genetic continuance from parents to child is more complex than earlier research had indicated and suggests that prenatal screening may have incorrectly diagnosed genetic variations as defects, which may have led to selective abortion based on an inaccurate conclusion of genetic abnormality.

Another study, authored by Brian Skotko of the National Down's Syndrome Congress and published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2005, showed a predisposition to abortion among medical professionals after amniocentesis indicated a possibility of Down's Syndrome.

"It has become routine to offer pregnant women, especially those over 35 prenatal screening for Down's Syndrome. Such testing, however, does not give a certain diagnosis of Down's Syndrome, but only a percentage possibility. Nevertheless, the abortion rate with even an uncertain pre-natal Down's Syndrome diagnosis is extremely high, with some studies showing as many as 90% of children aborted." Mr. Skotko wrote.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com articles:

Prenatal Screening not so Accurate as Once Thought - "Normal" Children Killed as "Defective"?
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/nov/06112403.html

Earlier Screening for Down's Syndrome May Fuel Eugenic Program Against Disabled
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/nov/05111002.html

95% of Spanish Down's Syndrome Children Aborted After Prenatal Testing
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jul/08073111.html

Abortion is Primary Direction for Obstetricians After Down's Diagnosis Study Finds
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/apr/05040502.html

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/aug/08081304.html

Re Project Anthrax & the Cover-Up - Stephen Hatfill, the Selous Scouts & the Previous Anthrax Mailings in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe

This letter from "A Rhodesian" is angry - but that's fine, because it's over an issue that I was aware of and have been meaning to explain. Actually, I understand the writer's rage and would feel the same way in his place - that is, if I also adopted a position of knee-jerk denial concerning Stephen Hatfill's checkered residence in Rhodesia:

"Steven Hatfill was never in the Rhodesian SAS you can go to their website and you will see his name in the roll of dishonour. ... Get your facts right before bursting into print with absolute nonsense." - A Rhodesian

As explained in "Project Anthrax & the Cover-Up," Hatfill WAS in Rhodesia and worked in academia - these details in his resumé were not fabricated and they have been confirmed by the NY Times - sent there on the recommendation of a neo-Nazi. Hatfill boasted that he ran with the Selous Scouts, who were, according to all evidence, responsible for maiing anthrax spores to black areas in Zimbabwe, leading to an outbreak that was devastating to BLACKS exclusively. The SS denies any connection to Hatfill - but they also deny participation in the anthrax outbreak and many other atrocities.

This is not the reason why I'm certain that Hatfill was telling the partial truth, however - one of whom wrote to inform me directly that he doesn't remember a Stephen Hatfill.

I don't doubt it. Hatfill worked in labs on bio-chemical and medical projects, as he did later at Ft. Detrick, and there was no reason for him to have any contact whatsoever with foot soldiers. The SS vets who disavow knowing Hatfill are telling the truth.

Example: Why should James Bond necessarily have personal knowledge of the lab technicians who concocted his sleeping-gas cologne?

The sensitivity of his work ensured that he kept it under wraps and spun cover stories, told half-truths.

Please consider, as I did in writing the story: It is far too "coincidental" that Hatfill, who WAS in the area where the first round of anthrax mailing occurred in Africa, should move on to an identical mass murder scenario in the US. ... and have no role in either.

Hatfill was telling the partial truth about his "work" in Rhodesia. But he couldn't very well talk about his participation in prior anthrax mailings, could he? So he slanted a few facts, and this strikes me as far more plausible than the insistence of Rhodesian operatives that he wasn't one of them. Hatfill was a lab tech, so they had no reason to deal with him directly.

- AC

Obama Assassination Plot

" ... Sources say he was wearing a ring with a swastika, and is thought to have ties to white supremacist organizations. ... "

Aug 25th 2008
by TMZ Staff

A Denver TV station is reporting authorities may have foiled an assassination plot against Barack Obama, and there's talk the suspects may be members of a white supremacy group.

KUSA-TV claims three men are in custody after a routine traffic stop in Aurora (near Denver) turned up two rifles, high-powered scopes, ammo and meth. The man in the car led authorities to a hotel where another suspect jumped out of a fourth floor window in an attempt to escape. ...

Story developing..

http://www.tmz.com/2008/08/25/obama-under-fire/
•••••••
Plot to Kill Obama: Shoot From High Vantage Point

Written By Brian Maass
Aug 25, 2008

E-mail DENVER (CBS4) ― CBS4 has now learned at least four people are under arrest in connection with a possible plot to kill Barack Obama at his Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver. All are being held on either drug or weapons charges.

CBS4 Investigator Brian Maass reported one of the suspects told authorities they were "going to shoot Obama from a high vantage point using a ... rifle … sighted at 750 yards."

Law enforcement sources tell Maass that one of the suspects "was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative."

The story began emerging Sunday morning when Aurora police arrested 28-year-old Tharin Gartrell. He was driving a rented pickup truck in an erratic manner according to sources.

Sources told CBS4 police found two high-powered, scoped rifles in the car along with camouflage clothing, walkie-talkies, a bulletproof vest, a spotting scope, licenses in the names of other people and methamphetamine. One of the rifles is listed as stolen from Kansas.

Subsequently authorities went to the Cherry Creek Hotel to contact an associate of Gartrell's. But that man, who was wanted on numerous warrants, jumped out of a sixth floor hotel window. Law enforcement sources say the man broke an ankle in the fall and was captured moments later. Sources say he was wearing a ring with a swastika, and is thought to have ties to white supremacist organizations.

A third man -- an associate of Gartrell and the hotel jumper was also arrested. He told authorities that the two men "planned to kill Barack Obama at his acceptance speech."

That man, along with a woman, are also under arrest.

The Secret Service, FBI, ATF and the joint terrorism task force are all investigating the alleged plot.

The U.S. Attorney in Denver has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon.

CBS4 will have new details on this developing story at 10pm.

http://cbs4denver.com/investigates/assisination.plot.obama.2.802827.html

Condi Rice's Favorite Leftist: Soros Agent Mark Malloch Brown, Multinationalist Cabinet Secretary in the UK

In which the false Sorosian dialectic behind a recent key political appointment in merry old England is dissected ...

Also see "Labor Leader Gordon Brown's Guru is Mrs. Irving Kristol"

By Alex Constantine

Malloch Brown's CV boasts tenure at the World Bank, among other interesting places. The Bank's 1999 press release on Malloch's departure depicts a leftist and a humanitarian, like his boss Soros ... whose closest associates happen to constitute the upper tiers of the multinational power elite:

"Prior to joining the World Bank, Mr. Malloch Brown was the lead international partner from 1986-1994 in a strategic communications management firm, where he worked with corporations, governments, and political candidates. He also provided strategic advice to governments on managing change and on public policy issues including privatization, environment, human rights, and other matters. Mr. Malloch Brown also advised CEOs on corporate marketing and change management issues. ... Mr. Malloch Brown is a board member of the Open Society Institute, George Soros' foundation network."
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTPROGRAMS/EXTTRADERESEARCH/0,,contentMDK:20016316~menuPK:162686~pagePK:210083~piPK:152538~theSitePK:544849,00.html

The foreign policy bona fidés that led to Malloch's appointment in Gordon Brown's cabinet belie his left-wing, "anti-American" image. From the maskofanarchy site, August 27, 2007, "Mark Malloch Brown - The Colombian Connection":

" ... Melanie Phillips, the representative of the far-right, has been quick to present the appointment of Mark Malloch Brown as causing 'dismay in Washington DC'. She also claims that he played a vital role in the oil-for-food scandal, the removal of Wolfowitz and portrays him as an opponent of the Iraq war. The combination of these factors allow Phillips to portray Malloch Brown as anti-American, corrupt and disreputable. This, of course, would lead to some on the right to suspect that Malloch Brown is therefore closely associated with the left. However, there is more to Malloch Brown than Phillips would have you believe, and it certainly seems unlikely that the US is really concerned about his appointment.

"During the late 1980s, Malloch Brown was on the payroll of Washington's Sawyer Miller political consultancy group. The Sawyer Miller group were actively involved in the political situation in Colombia during the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s. Their role? They were instructed to present the Colombian government in a positive light. Central to this was addressing the concerns that the government was linked to paramilitaries. The director of Sawyer Miller declared that:

"'the main mission is to educate the American media about Colombia, get good coverage, and nurture contacts with journalists, columnists, and think tanks. The message is that there are ‘bad’ and ‘good’ people in Colombia and that the government is the good guy.'

"Their appointment was made when the Colombian government was at its lowest standing with the American people. Opinion polls at the end of the 1980s found that 76% of all Americans thought Colombia was corrupt and further 80% wanted sanctions imposed. Sawyer Miller (and Malloch Brown) were given the task of presenting the Colombian government in a more positive light. They certainly seemed to profit from their task. The group earned nearly a million dollars in fees and expenses in the first half of 1991 alone.

"The main role of the group, who had signed up former Reagan administration Ed Rollins and PR star John Scanlon on as partners, was to pressure journalists into spinning for the government. They distributed pamphlets, sent letters to editors signed by government officials and placed full-page advertisements in The New York Times and The Washington Post. All American journalists were required to go through Sawyer Miller before they could interview government officials. According to one reporter, Sawyer Miller declined a request for an interview with President Gaviria because the network also wanted to interview former U.S. drug czar Bob Martinez, who had criticized the Colombian government. The reporter claimed:

"'Sawyer/Miller did not want to give the perception that the Colombian government and the U.S. had differences.'

"Producers even claimed that Sawyer Miller tried to change the content of the programme.

"Sawyer Miller also attempted to pressurise editors who were unsympathetic to Colombia's ties with drug barons. Sawyer Miller reuqested a meeting with the editor of the Miami Herald when it described the Colombian government as a 'weakling'. According to the editor:

"They were sharp and even followed up the meeting with a couple of phone calls. Yes, we did tone down our criticisms, but it was mainly because the president explained that he was following public opinion in Colombia."

"Sawyer Miller has also played a key role in skewing the 'war on terror' in Colombia. As a result of PR activities conducted by the group, FARC is considered the 'most dangerous international terrorist group based in the Western Hemisphere'. However, this is mainly due to the work of Sawyer Miller and the Colombian military who, according to the US ambassador to Colombia in 1996, 'considered it a way to obtain U.S. assistance in the counterinsurgency'. And this assistance has continued to this very day. Colombia continues to be on of the largest recipients of American military aid in the world.

"Colombia's links to narcotics and right-wing paramilitaries are well documented (click on the Colombia label below), Sawyer Miller's role was to cover this up and present Colombia as a country free from corruption. Sawyer Miller helped to convince the American public that Colombia wasn't the corrupt country that they had been led to believe, and that there were no such links to narcotics. The recent revelations over Uribe's administration have given lie to that and yet, such was the effectiveness of this PR campaign, Uribe maintains a level of popularity far in excess of most corrupt administrations. The fact that Malloch Brown played such a key role in producing propaganda for the Colombian government, much to the delight of Washington, truly gives lie to the claim that Gordon Brown has shifted the government to a more humane position in global politics. There are still those at the heart of government that are eager to do the bidding of the United States around the world. Melanie Phillips can sleep easy."
Posted by korova at 12:59
http://maskofanarchy.blogspot.com/2007/08/mark-malloch-brown-colombian-connection.html

Caveat: Right-wing slant to this Spectator story. Author Claudia Rosett hails from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and she nurtures the false dialectic in the controversial Malloch appointment by clucking her tongue over his "leftist" agenda. I've redacted the story to reduce it to pertinent information.

Mark Malloch Brown, Former UN deputy secretary-general's taxpayer funded accommodation

The taxpayer is being stung so this Lord can live in Admiralty House
By Claudia Rosett
November 8, 2007

Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, was the most prestigious recruit to Gordon Brown’s ministry of all the talents. But this appointment might be about to come back and embarrass the Prime Minister with controversy brewing over the former UN deputy secretary-general’s taxpayer funded accommodation.

In February 2006 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UN Secretary General’s chief of staff, was interviewed by Claudia Rosett at the UN, and found himself increasingly furious at the line of questioning about his housing arrangements in New York. Malloch Brown had caused controversy with his decision to live on the smart country estate of George Soros....

Scroll forward to the summer of 2007 and the same man found divine providence intervening on his behalf. Gordon Brown, shortly to become Prime Minister, was desperate to bring Malloch Brown on board. One friend who was advising him while Brown and Malloch Brown were negotiating over the telephone remembers egging him on: ‘It was great fun! You know, strike a hard bargain.’

It ended up with Malloch Brown nailing down a quite remarkable deal from the supplicant Prime Minister-in-waiting. This newcomer to British government picked up an extensive portfolio incorporating Africa--one of Brown’s foreign policy priorities--Asia and the United Nations, a peerage and the right to attend Cabinet. The message was clear: Malloch Brown was not to be some token peer picking up the crumbs under the Foreign Secretary’s table but a man with a seat at the top table.

Why was Gordon so keen to bring him in? In the months leading up to the takeover on 27 June, senior Brownites expressed concern at their boss’s comparative inexperience in foreign policy. Despite a decade at the centre of power, Brown’s experience on the global stage was limited to his work with the International Monetary Fund, the development agenda and his famously grumpy appearances at meetings of EU finance ministers. Brown’s emphasis on the economic aspects of international security and peace-making in the Middle East served only to highlight the narrowness of his focus. Blairites sneered that ‘Gordon doesn’t do abroad’.

There were obvious attractions, therefore, in hiring a foreign policy heavyweight to act as his guide and guru.... The answer Brown’s team came up with--with help from some unofficial headhunters--was Malloch Brown; a Brit in his early fifties who was married with four children and had been educated at Marlborough, Cambridge and Michigan, been a journalist on the Economist and a political consultant before entering the world of international bureaucracy, rising to become Kofi Annan’s deputy secretary general at the United Nations in April 2006. There could only be a dozen or so people in the world who were as thoroughly well-versed in the global agenda as Malloch Brown..... Malloch Brown, the theory ran, would add instant heft to Brown’s reform agenda for international institutions and signal that foreign policy would be very different under Brown. Shriti Vadera, now parliamentary under-secretary of state at DFID and one of Brown’s closest aides, was apparently particularly keen on the appointment. His multilateral UN credentials also meant that the Labour party was likely to tolerate his political promiscuity--Malloch Brown had flirted with the SDP in the 1980s and done a turn at David Cameron’s first Tory conference ....

The CV of Brown’s most senior outside appointment reads like that of a hair-shirted technocrat: a vice-president of World Bank, head of UNDP, chief of staff and then deputy secretary-general of the United Nations and now Minister for Africa, Asia and the UN.

But Malloch Brown’s living arrangements in this country are exceedingly grand, and provided by the taxpayer. Only three members of the government have grace-and-favour residences in London. Malloch Brown is one of them, the other two are the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. David Miliband and his growing family have yet to use 1 Carlton Gardens, the Foreign Secretary’s London residence. Yet Malloch Brown, astonishingly, has secured one of the three government flats in Admiralty House, where John Prescott used to live. In so doing, this newcomer has leapfrogged 20 full members of the Cabinet who notionally enjoy seniority over him. ...

The Treasury’s National Assets Register values the Admiralty House accommodation at £7.76 million and as worth more than the flats above No. 10 and 11 Downing Street. It is, indeed, fit for a Lord, and one with tastes which are the opposite of frugal. A parliamentary answer earlier this autumn revealed that ‘the floor area of the ministerial residences in Admiralty House is 859 square metres.’ In 2006–07 the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office paid the Cabinet Office no less than £173,000 for John Prescott’s living in one of the flats there.

One of the Brown government’s key selling points--part of its ‘change’ message--was that, in contrast to the Blair era, there would be no more high life, no more ministerial noses in the trough. Malloch Brown’s housing arrangements threaten to sully that message. One Cabinet minister fretted: ‘Housing is always so sensitive. Every voter can relate to it because everyone has a home or, increasingly, is struggling to afford one. ... Malloch Brown’s determination to keep the flat may not be in the best interests of the government’s image, but it conforms to a pattern of behaviour. The minister is simply keeping himself in the style to which he has become accustomed.

Before moving to London, Malloch Brown had been living as a tenant on George Soros’s estate in Katonah, New York. Katonah is in Westchester Country, home to the Clintons, and about an hour from New York City itself.

Soros’s estate is so large that only a curving tree-lined drive can be seen through the eagle-topped red-brick front gates. Malloch Brown was paying a UN-subsidised rent of around $10,000 a month for his accommodation. He could well afford this as by the end of his time at the United Nations his total, take-home compensation package amounted to $287,087 p.a. Malloch Brown might be doing ‘God’s work’, but he was receiving his rewards on earth, too. He was paid more as number two at the UN than Dick Cheney was as Vice President.

Despite being asked by the press on a number of occasions about the details of his housing arrangements in Katonah, Malloch Brown has provided neither details nor documentation. At a UN press briefing in New York on 20 June 2005, about six months after he had become Annan’s chief of staff, Malloch Brown was asked by a reporter to explain the full extent of his financial relationship with George Soros.

He heatedly denied any financial relationship, praised Soros for his work around the world and tore a strip off the questioner. He went on to say, ‘In UNDP we collaborate extensively. For that reason, it was absolutely critical when we set our hearts on a house on his property that if we were going to rent it, we’d pay the full commercial rent, and we have done so.’

But neither proof nor any further details were forthcoming. Indeed, Malloch Brown has refused even to say when he began his tenancy.

The relationship between the UNDP and Soros remains obscure. The UN last year was unable or unwilling to supply a complete list of details accounting for this relationship; neither did Soros’s Open Society Institute open up about it. But Malloch Brown and Soros were sufficiently close professionally to give a joint press conference on 19 March 2002 at a global aid gathering in Monterrey, Mexico.

Nor did Malloch Brown ever disclose his finances to the public--despite presiding over reforms that he assured the world would mean more transparency. In 2005, Malloch Brown told the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that ‘transparency and accountability are the watchwords for the United Nations in the new century’ and described ‘more rigorous financial disclosures by senior officials’ as an immediate management reform that the UN was already undertaking. In 2006, the UN Secretariat launched a reform requiring senior UN administrative officials to fill out financial disclosure forms and file them with the UN’s new Ethics Office. But this ‘financial disclosure’ policy came with an extraordinary loophole of which Kafka would have been proud: the forms did not actually need to be disclosed to the public. This year, Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan’s successor, and his deputy both voluntarily released their financial forms to the public. But despite much talk about transparency, neither Annan nor Malloch Brown chose to release theirs.

The connection with Soros became ever closer once Malloch Brown left the UN. Malloch Brown was appointed to senior positions at both Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute, which promotes democracy and the rule of law and which Soros founded and of which he remains the chairman. The Wall Street Journal cheekily dubbed Malloch Brown part of an ‘axis of Soros’.

Another episode at the UN that calls Malloch Brown’s judgment into question concerns a glowing book on the UNDP published in late 2006 by Cambridge University Press. It turns out the book had been commissioned by Malloch Brown shortly before he left the agency. More than half a million dollars had been spent to hire a historian, give him a travel budget and then buy copies of the book from CUP. To no one’s great surprise, the book is very positive about Malloch Brown’s tenure.

Back in Westminster, Malloch Brown’s appointment in June was widely and correctly seen as a message that things were going to change on foreign policy. He was, after all, known to oppose the Iraq war, and had slapped Bush and Blair down over the war in Lebanon. Malloch Brown’s appalling relations with the Bush administration-- the President personally pleaded with the incoming UN Secretary-General to get rid of him--were music to the ears of those who were desperate for reassurance that Brown was not going to pursue the same strategy as Blair on the global stage.

In Washington, however, Malloch Brown’s appointment caused considerable consternation and continues to cast doubt on Brown’s judgment. Confidants of the Prime Minister now report that Brown claims that if he ‘had known it would cause such a fuss, I wouldn’t have appointed him’. Nile Gardiner, a Republican foreign-policy thinker and expert on US-UK relations who is close to the White House, says that Malloch Brown is viewed in Washington as ‘viscerally anti-American’.

In his first (and so far only) big interview in the job, Malloch Brown set out to dismiss the idea that his appointment might cause problems with anyone but a few neocon crazies. He told the Daily Telegraph: ‘What I really hate is the effort to paint me as anti-American, but I am happy to be described as anti-neocon. If they see me as a villain, I will wear that as a badge of honour.’ He went on to boast that: ‘From Colin Powell to Condi Rice all the way through to Richard Holbrooke or Madeleine Albright, across that massive swath of American foreign policy, I would bet you a drink that you would find that I am their favourite multinationalist Brit.’ This, though, is not an opinion shared in Washington. An adviser to a 2008 presidential candidate warns that ‘the extremely negative reaction that he causes will last long after President Bush’s departure from office’. ,...

Since this disastrous start, little has been heard from Lord Malloch-Brown. His blaming of the neocons for all criticism of him is also wearing thin. As one minister says, ‘He explains away all criticism as evidence of neocon briefing. It is a completely bloody circular argument.’

Is this just a fable of folly and grandeur? No. There are substantive policy issues where Malloch Brown could well end up causing Brown problems. The government has already been embarrassed by the revelation that when at the UN, Malloch Brown was enthusiastic about the concept of a European Union seat on the Security Council....

Brown defends Malloch Brown’s appointment to those committed to the special relationship by saying that all he really wanted was his expertise on Darfur. But this answer doesn’t stack up. Since taking on the job, Malloch Brown’s diplomacy in the region has been unexceptional.

Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the US-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and James Forsyth is online editor of The Spectator.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/562

Iran and America, Friends or Foes?

" ... do both nations use each other in order to salvage domestic support at home? ... "

By Lee Jay Walker
Tokyo Correspondent
http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=7088
August 25, 2008

America and Iran are meant to be natural enemies, however, their relationship is very complex and sometimes both nations share a common vision in the realm of geopolitics. Yet to the outside world both nations do not trust each other and this is based on so-called tension and mutual loathing. However, do both nations really hate each other or are quotes taken out of context or do they have cultural meanings? Or do both nations use each other in order to salvage domestic support at home? So what is the real relationship?

If we focus on economics and the nuclear issue, then it is abundantly clear that America does enforce a strict economic blockade on Iran. At the same time the nuclear issue could be the one area which causes a possible limited conflict or where America gives Israel the green light. So it is clear that you do have major tensions within the relationship and maybe it is Iran which is forcing this breakdown? After all, if it wasn`t for the nuclear issue then tensions or conflicts could be contained, just like in the past. Given this, Iran should remember that America once had dealings with Saddam Hussein but he also over-stepped the mark.

Yet when we concentrate on the field of foreign affairs and geopolitics then we see a very different relationship because in recent times both nations have worked together. Sometimes this may have applied to mere tacit support and not directly working together, yet this tacit support did sometimes involve a shared common ground. Therefore, it is important to focus on this unspoken side in order to highlight the complex nature of their recent relationship.

If we turn the clock back to Bosnia and Kosovo respectively, then America and Iran had a shared interest in supporting the Muslims of the Balkans. During the Bosnian conflict the United Nations enforced a military embargo on all sides. However, America clearly gave Iran the green light to send military arms to the Bosnian Muslims and this is how the Bosnian Muslims, and Croatians, could turn the table against Serbia within both Bosnia and Croatia. Because the military arms embargo was clearly broken and Iran often sent in military arms in order to prop-up the Bosnian armed forces. Also, this American-Iranian policy in the Balkans shatters the myth that America is anti-Islamic. After all, during Bosnia, Kosovo, and Cyprus respectively, the armed forces of America and senior politicians sided with Islam every time.

If we even dig further and turn the clock back even more, then we even see covert dealings under the late Ayatollah Khomeini. This applies to the murky Oliver North scandal with regards to the Iran-Contra affair, whereby Iran was involved in supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, via American economic support. Therefore, elements within the American administration were adopting a different policy and sometimes elements within different departments were ignoring senior political leaders.

Now if we forward the clock to more recent times then the same situation happens again. For example, when America attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan they allied themselves with the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance in turn was supported by both the Russian Federation and Iran. More astonishing was the fact that Iran gave America secret information about the Taliban, after all, the Taliban hated Shia Muslims. So both nations, just like the Balkans, had a shared and vested interest.

If we also focus on Iraq then a similar linkage emerges once more. Because Iran also gave covert support to America via knowledge they had obtained during the Iran-Iraq war. Also, Iran did little to prevent this conflict because they hated Saddam Hussein and his secular regime. Therefore, was the trade off an Islamic state? Because once the secular government had been defeated, then America installed Sharia Islamic Law which in turn persecuted the Christian community.

Given all this, then what is the truth behind the "veil?" Do both nations share similar aims and objectives within a limited geopolitical space? If they don`t, then how do you account for past dealings between both nations? This issue needs to be debated openly because nothing appears to make sense when it comes to the relationship between America and Iran.

Lee Jay Walker Dip BA MA
http://journals.aol.com/leejaywalker/uk/
Lee Jay Walker
TOKYO
JAPAN

Robert Fulford on The Hitler Salute: The meaning of a gesture

Robert Fulford
network.nationalpost.com
August 23, 2008

In the days of Adolf Hitler’s triumphs some of his followers showed their enthusiasm by turning a routine “Heil Hitler!” greeting into an excuse for a kind of performance piece. One man who became notorious for making a fuss of this ritual was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister who was tried at Nurnberg and hanged in 1946. A one-time wine importer in Ottawa, he was regarded as a fool by hard-core Nazis and was so clumsy in conversation that when he served as Hitler’s ambassador to London in the 1930s he acquired the nickname Von Brickendrop.

But when it came to saying “Heil Hitler” he was a champion. It was a spectacle no one wanted to miss. Martha Dodd, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, wrote in her memoir, Through Embassy Eyes, that when introduced to someone at a diplomatic reception, Von Ribbentrop would hold out his hand, then retreat, holding his new acquaintance at arm’s length. He would then lower his arm stiffly to his side and suddenly, almost violently raise it in a Hitler Salute, barely missing the nose of the person he had just met. “The pompousness, the maddening leisureliness, the affectation,” Dodd recalled, were calculated to make everyone know that Von Ribbentrop was present. His strategy always worked. Somehow, by Dodd’s account, she managed to avoid laughing.

Tilman Allert, a University of Frankfurt sociologist, has written a short and intensely interesting book, The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture (Metropolitan Books), which leaves a reader freshly impressed by the peculiar forms of evil the Nazis invented.

Studying the Hitler Salute gives a deeper meaning to the word “totalitarian.” A true totalitarian, as Hitler was, somehow arranges to dictate precisely the words that people call out when they meet for coffee. You can’t get closer to “total” than that. And only an amateur totalitarian would be satisfied with anything less than changing the content in children’s books. One of Allert’s illustrations shows a fairy-tale painting on a school wall in which the Prince awakens Sleeping Beauty with a Hitler Salute rather than a kiss. A 1936 book for teachers explained why: “No fairy tale cries out more for ethnic interpretation.” Children were to understand that Hitler rescued Germany from a death-like sleep caused by foreign races.

Beginning in the summer of 1933, only a few months after Hitler assumed power, “the German greeting” was made compulsory. Civil servants used it when meeting one another and at the end of their letters. Postmen, delivering their mail, sang out “Heil Hitler!” Schoolchildren faced their teachers with it every morning. (Tiny Hitler dolls with movable right arms demonstrated the technique.) Department store clerks said, “Heil Hitler, how may I help you?” Even washroom attendants used it.

Wherever two Germans met, Hitler was present as a silent third party. He acquired, rhetorically, something of the magic of a god — particularly when the Hitler Salute replaced “Grüss Gott” (“God’s greeting”), a traditional salutation among Roman Catholics in southern Germany. Travelling in Bavaria, Samuel Beckett noticed that on the front of a Dominican church “Grüss Gott” had been crossed out, replaced by “Heil Hitler.”

In 1934, the Hessian State Government sent a memo to local police stations mandating capital punishment for subversive monkeys. It had come to the attention of the state that vaudeville performers were training monkeys to give the Hitler Salute at the end of their performances. This was a mockery of the German spirit and liable to provoke public disorder. Therefore, “In case of violations, see to it that said animals are destroyed.”

In private, people who trusted each other might use the Hitler Salute with a sneer, making it clear (as Allert puts it) that in public they “saluted opportunistically.” But there was always a risk. The National Socialist German Students’ League advised everyone to discard all other greetings, including Auf Wiedersehen: “All who wish to avoid the suspicion of consciously obstructionist behaviour will use the Hitler Salute.” Allert argues that it “invested every human encounter with magical fascination and helped to silence a nation’s moral scruples.” It “politicized all communications within German society.”

There was always a ridiculous side to the Nazis. It was as if the Marx Brothers had turned vicious and been given a country to control. Getting everyone in a modern state to run around shouting “Heil Hitler!” at each other was obviously absurdist humour. But, like all the craziness of the Nazis, it was horribly true, a madman’s dream that couldn’t happen, but did.

National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/08/23/robert-fulford-on-the-hitler-salute-the-meaning-of-a-gesture.aspx

Son of McCain Narrowly Skirts a Banking Scandal

Excerpt from "No-taxes pledge helps conservative activist oust three Republicans"
BY JOHN L. SMITH
Las Vegas Review-Journal
www.lvrj.com
Aug. 15, 2008

... BANK NOTE: When banking community veterans scoffed last month about the sudden departure of McCain's son from the board of Silver State Bancorp of Henderson, they laughed that "personal reasons" was a pretty vague excuse for the rapid separation.

Now comes word that Silver State's holding company is reporting a $73.2 million loss in the second quarter. Sounds as if Andrew McCain's departure came just in time to avoid being part of a story that might have generated big headlines nationally. ...

http://www.lvrj.com/news/27011089.html
•••••••
Silver State Bank: What’s Deposited in Vegas Doesn’t Stay in Vegas
www.faulkingtruth.com
By Mark Faulk

"When the casinos treat you poorly, let Silver State treat you like a valued customer." ~ Silver State Bank Motto

In yet another bizarre development in the saga of CMKM Diamonds, better known as CMKX, one of the largest financial frauds in history, Andrew McCain, the son of presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain, resigned from the Board of Directors of Henderson, Nevada based Silver State Bank, the bank where hundreds of millions of dollars was deposited as it was stolen from CMKX shareholders.

Almost immediately, the internet began buzzing with rumors and stories, mostly either questioning Silver State’s financial condition or drawing the inevitable comparison to his father’s involvement twenty years ago in the infamous “Keating 5” savings and loan scandal, where federal regulators seized Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California. The senior McCain was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Commission, who concluded that he had and four other senators had tried to hold off a government investigation into the savings and loan’s risky real estate deals. Lincoln’s chairman at the time was Charles Keating, who was not only one of McCain’s top donors, but was a business partner with Cindy McCain.

But the younger McCain, who had only been with Silver State Bank for a little over four months after Choice Bank, where McCain was director, was taken over by Silver State, might have to answer questions of his own. Silver State Bank has its own history of problems, and it appears that Andrew McCain either ignored the bank’s past woes, or didn’t properly research the company before joining the Board of Directors.

Just two months ago, one of the bank’s executive vice-presidents resigned after the company reported a massive loss for the first quarter of 2008, which the company blamed largely on the deteriorating real estate market. The bank recently announced plans to raise an additional $40 million in capital, which could be a problem, since their share price has dropped over 95% in the past year, from a high of $19.48 to July 29th’s closing price of $1.18. Their market cap has fallen from $275 million to less than $17 million. At today’s closing price, that $40 million in additional capital will more than triple the company’s current number of outstanding shares.

There’s more…a lot more. Andrew McCain served on the bank’s Audit Committee, which means his responsibilities included, according to the company’s bylaws, an understanding of finance and accounting:

“All of the members of the Audit Committee must have a basic understanding of finance and accounting and be able to read and understand fundamental financial statements. At least one member of the Audit Committee must be an audit committee financial expert, as determined by the Board, consistent with the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the applicable rules and regulations of the stock exchange on which the Corporation’s shares are listed.”

But a little diamond mining company from Canada that turned out to be the biggest penny stock fraud in history might become a major problem for McCain’s campaign as well. Insiders with CMKX defrauded over 50,000 shareholders of in excess of $250 million. A large portion of that money was run through a single Silver State Bank branch in Las Vegas. In all, former CMKX CEO Urban Casavant and reputed mastermind John Edwards (no, not that John Edwards) opened over 100 bank accounts at Silver State, and ran tens of millions of dollars through the bank.

In one multi-million dollar gamble taken by Silver State Bank, they accepted not just one but four checks for $2.5 million dollars each from a fraudulent company account at Wells Fargo Bank in Las Vegas in one week…written on temporary checks. John Edwards opened an account for a company called Saint George Metals on the same day that CMKM Diamonds announced a “business partnership” with the company, which in reality was just a bank account whose only signor was John Edwards. Edwards would write a $2.5 million check to CMKM Diamonds on a temporary check from Wells Fargo, and Urban Casavant would deposit it the “official” company account at Silver State Bank and write a press release announcing the investment. In turn, money was filtered back to Edwards either in illegally issued company stock or cash, essentially making the exchange a wash. To Silver State Bank’s credit, they at least wrote “HOLD” across one of the deposits, apparently waiting for the $2.5 million temporary check to clear before crediting the CMKM Diamonds’ account.

This was not an isolated case, but was instead the normal way of doing business with Casavant, Edwards, and their cohorts. It was an incredible whirlwind of activity for Silver State Bank and other Las Vegas banks, including Wells Fargo, Nevada State, and Sun West Bank. Hundreds of checks, wire transfers, and deposits totaling tens of millions and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars flowed like champagne in the Vegas casinos.

Among the transactions executed by Silver State Bank:

• Wire transfers totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars were executed with only the notation “transferring to Personal Acct. per cust. transfer via phone”.

• Checks from the CMKXtreme and other accounts controlled by Casavant and Edwaerds written out only to “CASH”…including one for $350,000.

• Multi-million dollar wire transfers between Edwards and Urban, run through one of the almost 100 accounts they controlled there.

• Millions of dollars written out of company accounts to Urban, his wife Carolyn, and several family members, often on temporary checks.

The scam finally came crashing down in late 2005 when the SEC finally delisted CMKX, and a shareholder named Kevin West was appointed by Urban to take over while Casavant fled to Canada. West inherited a company with no tangible assets, no real business…and $558 in the bank. Edwards, Casavant, and their cohorts had stolen the rest. West brought in Bill Frizzell, an attorney from Tyler, Texas, who had been conducting a multi-year investigation into CMKX for a shareholders’ group.

They have since filed numerous lawsuits against Edwards, Casavant, and others, and have subpoenaed records from Silver State Bank and other banks associated with the scam in an ongoing effort to recover assets for the defrauded shareholders. The SEC recently filed charges against eleven individuals and three companies in the CMKX case, but a multi-year investigation by a task force comprised of the DOJ, FBI, and IRS has yet to produce any arrests or charges.

Silver State Bank has not been charged in the CMKM Diamonds case, although they did fire an employee named Patricia DeCosta, who approved most of the transactions. DeCosta in turn filed a lawsuit in early 2006 against her former employer, detailing her side of the story:

“Throughout plaintiff’s employment she was encouraged to open new accounts and each ‘performance appraisal’ done with regard to her employment speaks glowingly of the number of new accounts her branch opened.

That on or about the 5th day of September 2004 the bank was served with a subpoena with regard to accounts maintained at the branch plaintiff supervised. Certain executives of defendants (Silver State Bancorp, Silver State Bank) owned stock in companies controlled by the subject of the subpoena and became disconcerted when the bank was served with the aforementioned subpoena.

Seeking a scapegoat the bank terminated plaintiff claiming she had not processed a suspicious activity report in a timely manner. Plaintiff was unable to timely process the SAR due to the fact that she was undergoing a ‘serious health condition’, which required her to take leave from her employment.”

The fact remains that Silver State Bank never filed a single Suspicious Activities Report (SARS) while 50,000 CMKX shareholders lost their entire investments. Did Andrew McCain look into the bank’s shady past, and if so, is he now just quietly trying to slip out the side door before the building comes tumbling down?

How this new twist plays out remains to be seen, but the saga of CMKX, as detailed in “The Naked Truth: The Stock Play of a Lifetime” seems to be a story that won’t go away. After years of being ignored by public officials at all levels, maybe it will take a presidential campaign to expose the seedy underbelly of corruption in our financial markets.

And that….as always…is the Faulking Truth.

UPDATE ON THE SILVER STATE BANK STORY:
Silver State Bank: Like Rats From a Sinking Ship

(Mark Faulk’s first book, entitled The Naked Truth: Investing in the Stock Play of a Lifetime, is now available at www.thenakedtruthbook.com. Buy it now while you still have a few dollars in the bank. Tune in with Mark Faulk and DeWayne Reeves every Friday from 9-10 AM CST on The Faulking Truth Show, and join Mark and Paul Faulk every Saturday from 1-2 PM CST on The Faulking Truth X2 Show at www.toginet.com)

http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/BlogFest/1097.html

Operation Underworld

Culture: Operation Underworld
21 January 2008
by Garrett Johnson

On the night of July 9, 1943, the first of 160,000 allied troops began landing on the southwest beaches of Sicily.

After nearly a full week of fighting that yielded the city of Syracuse and not much more, General George S. Patton was given the task of advancing towards the city of Palermo.

60,000 Italian troops and almost 100 miles of thin, heavily-mined highway stood in the way. Yet Patton's army crossed the distance in just 4 days, taking minimal casualties and splitting the Axis army in two. This lightening strike established General Patton as America's greatest general of WWII.

But how did he do it?

The answer involved a small, American army plane flying low over the tiny town of Villalba on July 14. The plane trailed a yellow banner with a large, black "L". At a certain spot it dropped a nylon bag containing only a gold foulard handkerchief, also sporting the letter "L".

That place was the estate of Don Calogero Vizzini, the most powerful Mafia boss of Sicily.

Two days later, three American tanks rolled into Villalba after driving thirty miles through enemy territory. Don Calogero climbed aboard and spent the next six days traveling through western Sicily organizing support for the advancing American troops. As General Patton's Third Division moved onward into Don Calogero's mountain domain, the signs of its dependence on Mafia support were obvious to the local population. The Mafia protected the roads from snipers, arranged enthusiastic welcomes for the advancing troops, and provided guides through the confusing mountain terrain.

The "L" on the handkerchief stood for Salvatore Lucania, also known as Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

Salvatore Lucania had been born only 15 miles from Don Calogero's estate on November 24, 1897. At the age of 10 his family emigrated to America, arriving in New York.

Within a year Lucky was shaking down Jewish kids on their way to school and serving time in Brooklyn correctional facility for truancy. During this time he befriended Bugsy Siegal.

At the age of 18 Lucky was doing time for selling heroin and morphine. After getting out of jail he joined the violent Five Points Gang. He managed to dodge the WWI draft by intentionally catching chlamydia.

Lucky's First Break

In 1918 Lucky was busying himself with the humdrum job of beating a prostitute senseless. A 14-year old Bugsy Siegel looked on, knife in hand. Suddenly the door flung open and a young man leaped into the room. He hit Lucky on the back of the head and knocked Bugsy aside. As he pulled the prostitute up, the New York City police rushed into the room and promptly arrested everyone.

The man who heard the prostitute's scream and came to her rescue was Meyer Lansky. Locked in the same cell Lucky and Meyer began talking and realized that they had a lot in common. Meyer worked for the Lepke and Gurrah gang, which controlled much of the heroin trade of New York City. It didn't take long before Meyer convinced Lucky to get into the heroin business. This friendship they developed would last half a century.

But there was a problem with Lucky's new business - the old Sicilian mafia dons disapproved of drug trafficking. It wasn't a matter of moral qualms, they just didn't want to antagonize the police.

On October 16, 1929, the old dons kidnapped Lucky and took him to a New Jersey warehouse. There they hung him by the wrists from a hook, beat him with a baseball bat, stabbed him with an ice pick, and slit his throat. It should have been the end of Lucky, but while he was left for dead he didn't die. Lucky somehow managed to get out of his chains and make it to safety, hence his nickname "Lucky" Luciano. He then exacted a bloody revenge on the dons.

Over the next four years Lucky, Meyer, Bugsy, and their associates at Murder, Inc. eliminated all of their primary competition and built a small empire that Lansky claimed was modeled after Standard Oil Trust. Luciano, Meyer, and Siegel implemented a total reorganization of how the mafia did business, including an organized system of bribes to various politicians.

Thomas Dewey

The Luciano empire involved the traditional gambling, bookmaking, loan-sharking, and extortion. It also extended to near complete control of the Manhatten waterfront, from corrupt labor unions to garbage hauling, construction, garment center businesses, and trucking. Lansky traveled to Cuba and set up a working relationship with the dictator Batista for the building of casinos and smuggling of heroin from Sicily.

Lucky's used his new heroin empire to enhance his old prostitution business by keeping his prostitutes addicted to heroin. This was Lucky's downfall.

In 1936 Thomas Dewey was merely an up-and-coming New York City prosecutor. It would take another 6 years before he became governor of New York, and another 6 years before he came within a whisker of the presidency.

Dewey quickly discovered that Luciano's prostitutes were more than willing to talk to the police about their exploitation. It is a popular belief that the charges against Lucky were trumped up. Nevertheless, Dewey was able to get the jury to convict Luciano of 62 counts of racketeering. Lucky drew a sentence of 30 to 50 years in New York's more brutal penitentiary, Dannemora.

It should have been the end of Luciano's career. But then something happened that no one suspected - WWII.

Operation Underworld

On April 11, 1942, Meyer Lansky had breakfast at a restaurant on West 58th Street with Luciano's lawyer, Moses Polakoff, District Attorney Gurfein, and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) Commander Charles Haffenden.

The topic of the conversation was German U-Boats. Between December 7, 1941, and February 28, 1942, the Germans had sunk 71 merchant ships off the east coast. American military intelligence was convinced that German spies were operating in America's harbors and everyone was fully aware of who ran the waterfront.

This meeting wasn't an accident - Luciano had set it up. Albert's idea was to give the Navy a big chunk of sabotage, something so big that it would scare the Navy to death.

The sabotage that Albert and his brother were talking about was the sinking of a ship in the West Side Manhattan port- the French luxury liner, the SS Normandie- a ship that was being slated to be turned into a troopship for the Allies. Luciano thought it was a great plan. It would get the attention of the Navy and wouldn't truly affect the war effort since the ship was nowhere ready for war. The plan was set in motion. Withing twenty-four hours the SS Normandie was gutted and wrecked. Naval Intelligence was charged preventing anything like this to happen again, since it was obvious that German spies had done this. That is when the U.S. Government turned to organized crime for help and began the idea of "Operation Underworld."

Lansky suggested that Luciano might be more willing to cooperate if he was transferred to a "better facility". The ONI leaned on the prison authority and shortly afterwards Luciano was transferred to the new Great Meadows prison outside of Albany.

Over the next several weeks there was a constant shuffle of mafia captains through the Great Meadows facility receiving personal instructions. Lucky was also meeting with the ONI in order for military agents to infiltrate the mob-controlled International Longshoremen's Association (ILA).

During that time labor leader Harry Bridges was trying to get workers to abandon the corrupt ILA and join the independent International Longshoremen and Warehouseman's Union. Bridges was beaten up in 1942 while trying to organize the New York docks. From 1942 to 1946 there were twenty-six unsolved murders of labor leaders and dockworkers.

Back in Sicily

So why did Don Calogero cooperate with the American military via Lucky's intervention? For two reasons:

1) Mussolini started a war against the mafia in 1924. Hundreds of mafia leaders had been rounded up, tortured, and then shot in the public square of Palermo. The tactics were similar to what was used during a Holy Inquisition. By 1943 most of the Sicilian mafia had either been killed, imprisoned, or forced into exile.

"The mafia is dead, a new Sicily is born." - NY Times headline, 1939

2) As the American army marches across Sicily, they discovered that the main opposition to the fascist government was communists. Wanting to free up troops from garrison duty for the front lines, their choice was to either turn to the communists, or the mafia.

They chose the mafia.

the Fascist army had long since deserted, and Don Calogero's Mafia seemed far more reliable at guaranteeing public order than Mussolini's powerless carabinieri. So, in July the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. army appointed Don Calogero mayor of Villalba. In addition, ANIGOT appointed loyal mafiosi as mayors in many of the towns and villages in western Sicily...

To combat expected Communist gains, occupation authorities used Mafia officials in the AMGOT administration. Since any changes in the island's feudal social structure would cost the Mafia money and power, the "honored society" was a natural anti-Communist ally. So confident was Don Calogero of his importance to AMGOT that he killed Villalba's overly inquisitive police chief to free himself of all restraints.

[...]

Don Calogero rendered other services to the anti-Communist effort by breaking up leftist political rallies. On September 16, 1944, for example, the Communist leader Girolama Li Causi held a rally in Villalba that ended abruptly in a hail of gunfire as Don Calogero's men fired into the crowd and wounded nineteen spectators. Michele Pantaleone, who observed the Mafia's revival in his native village of Villalba, described the consequences of AMGOT's occupation policies:

By the beginning of the Second World War, the Mafia was restricted to a few isolated and scattered groups and could have been completely wiped out if the social problems of the island had been dealt with . . . the Allied occupation and the subsequent slow restoration of democracy reinstated the Mafia with its full powers, put it once more on the way to becoming a political force, and returned to the Onorata Societa the weapons which Fascism had snatched from it.

In other words, the rise of the Sicilian mafia during and after WWII was because of a decision by the American military. The responsibility for decades of violence and the hundreds of innocent deaths in Italy's battle against the mafia since 1943 can be at least partly attributed to America.

Lucky's Reward

On VE Day, Moses Polakoff filed a petition seeking clemency for Luciano based on his "important aid to the military authorities." On December 3, 1945, the New York State Parole Board vote to grant clemency to Luciano on the condition that he be deported to Italy.

On February 9, 1946, a large group of mobsters gathered at the docks to see off Luciano. Lansky was nice enough to hand him a suitcase containing $1 Million. Over the next five years over 500 other mobsters were deported to Italy, becoming Lucky's new army in Italy.

Lucky's primary business was still heroin. It was shipped from Italy to Cuba, where it was adulterated and then smuggled into Miami and New York. Gradually Lucky's heroin empire grew until it had surpassed its 1936 levels. In other words, the heroin plague of the 1950's and 1960's can be traced back to the American intelligence service and their poor choice of allies.

When the ONI realized how embarrassing their role in getting Luciano released might look given his huge heroin enterprise, they ordered that all relevant documents be destroyed. Nevertheless, the information leaked out a few decades later.

Lucky Luciano died of a heart attack in Naples, Italy, on January 26, 1962.

Time Magazine nominated Luciano as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century.

http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/6796/

Hitler's Chemists Chased Auschwitz Profits, Financed Mengele

Review by James Pressley

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- A sweet stench filled the site in occupied Poland where chemical maker I.G. Farbenindustrie AG was building a factory to feed Adolf Hitler's tanks and bombers with synthetic rubber and fuel.

Amid the hammering, barking dogs and screaming kapos, emaciated men unloaded cement bags at a trot, bent under iron girders, and died like animals. All around milled I.G. Farben men -- ``quiet men in impeccable civilian clothes,'' as one survivor recalled, ``picking their way through corpses they did not want to see, measuring timbers with bright yellow folding rules.''

This was Buna-Werke, a.k.a. I.G. Auschwitz, and the cloying smell came from the crematoriums at Birkenau.

Buna-Werke was I.G. Farben's single biggest investment ever, the site where eight years of Nazi collaboration culminated in ``a carefully planned process of extermination through labor,'' as Diarmuid Jeffreys writes in his damning new history, ``Hell's Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine.''

Jeffreys is a British journalist and television producer whose previous book, ``Aspirin,'' recounted how German chemical makers pioneered that painkiller. In ``Hell's Cartel,'' he draws on Nuremberg tribunal documents, corporate and state archives, memoirs and his own interviews with survivors to explore the dark side of I.G. Farben, which was once the world's fourth-largest industrial concern.

The leading lights of the German chemical makers that merged into I.G. Farben in 1925 had invented breakthrough drugs, succeeded in mass-producing fertilizer and won Nobel Prizes.

Chemical Weapons

They also had shown a disturbing willingness to put German nationalism -- and profits -- ahead of humanity: Fritz Haber, the scientist renowned for ``fixing'' nitrate, also engineered the first poison-gas attack in World War I.
Jeffreys brings a rare combination of forensic acumen and narrative flair to bear on the material. Tracing the story back to the 19th century, he exposes the historical logic, financial pressures and moral failings that would place sophisticated executives and scientists at the heart of Hitler's strategy of autarky and conquest.

The real madness began in the 1920s, when I.G. Farben gambled its future on breakthrough technology: synthetic gasoline made from coal. The bet was predicated on research that concluded the world was running out of oil.
The first Leuna gasoline went on sale in 1927. Barely three years later, massive oil reserves were discovered in Texas, then more in the Mideast. As the Great Depression drove down demand, Leuna's prospects looked grim.

Secret Luftwaffe

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, a new market emerged: Hermann Goering was building his illegal military air force, and the secret Luftwaffe needed stealth supplies of aviation fuel.

By the end of 1933, the Reich agreed to buy all of the Leuna factory's output that couldn't be sold on the market, Jeffreys says. That same year, I.G. Farben donated more than 4.5 million Reich marks to Nazi Party funds, he says.

The cooperation deepened as I.G. Farben bosses joined the Nazi Party, worked on government commissions, dismissed Jewish workers and executives. How central was the company to Hitler's war? Here's how Jeffreys describes the Luftwaffe's dependence on I.G. Farben products as Germany prepared to invade Poland:

"The Heinkel and Junkers Stuka bombers that would launch attacks on Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz and Lublin were largely made from the I.G.'s light metals. Around 75 percent of their engines were produced from high-grade I.G. nickel, their fuselages from I.G. aluminum, their wings from I.G. magnesium.'

'
The company supplied the fuel and oils. More than 90 percent of the phosphorous incendiaries they carried were made from I.G. Farben materials.

Financing Mengele

Later, at Auschwitz, the company financed the diabolical experiments of Josef Mengele and supplied the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers.

After the war, I.G. Farben was broken up and 23 of its executives were tried in Nuremberg. Most resorted to blanket denials of wrongdoing: They acted under orders, didn't dare oppose Hitler, and had no idea prisoners were being murdered.

Though 13 were found guilty of crimes including plunder, slavery and mass murder, the stiffest sentence was eight years in prison. By early 1951, all had been released on good behavior. They returned to boardrooms at German companies including I.G. Farben successors BASF AG, Bayer AG and Hoechst AG.

Some evil in Nazi Germany was born of cowardice, and some sprang from greed and ambition. Jeffreys leaves no doubt about which variety of malevolence motivated I.G. Farben.

"Hell's Cartel'' is from Bloomsbury in the U.K. and from Metropolitan in the U.S. (406 pages, 20 pounds, $32).

(James Pressley writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=a931TWBEmRns&refer=muse

Ray Robison: The Hearst Press' Dizziest Military-Industrial Propagandist

By Alex Constantine

Ray Robison is passed off as a "National Security" analyst by the San Francisco Examiner. His "informed analyses" of intelligence and military issues has led him to write psyop howlers steeped in self-serving "conservative" fantasy, to wit: "The Afghanistan success story," "Al Qaeda's Man in Saddam's Iraq," "More Evidence of Saddam-al Qaeda Ties" and "Documents Support Saddam-Taliban Connection."

One of Robison's funniest pieces, posted at his blog in 2006, employs "logic" and "common sense" to arrive at an original "deduction": Bin Laden AND his henchman Saddam Hussein were behind the anthrax mailings:

"So, that anthrax probably didn't come from top US labs after all?"

Even the FBI, stumbling through an awkward cover up of the military operation, hasn't had the nerve to claim that Al Qaeda, in league with some "rogue nation," probably Iraq, perpetrated the lethal mailings:

"My reasons to disbelieve the US scientist theory are not based on discovered documents or interviews, but rather reason and probability. ... There are two prevailing theories. One theory is that a US scientist did it. The other is that the Saddam regime of Iraq or another rogue government with anthrax capability gave anthrax to al-Qaeda. Other theories abound but I will limit the argument to the two theories that fit the facts best.

"Those who follow the news about the anthrax attack know that for years the FBI has been investigating American defense scientists. Let me be more specific. The FBI has been pursuing U.S. citizens with high level clearances, years of professional experience and demonstrated loyalty to this country. The FBI has found nothing. As anyone working at a government facility knows, the morning of the 9/11 attack, physical security went on high alert. Military bases closed gates, people and vehicles were searched. It is not impossible that someone at a bio-weapons research facility could have smuggled out the anthrax that morning or shortly after in response to the attacks. It is highly unlikely though.

"That day and for at least the week after would have been the worst time to smuggle anything out of a high security area. ...

"Weaponized anthrax is in very short supply in the U.S. inventory. The supply we do have is most likely kept in conditions that enable inventory down to the microgram. It is surely weighed and measured anytime it is utilized for research. ...

"Motivation is the key problem in my view. Defense scientists at this level have Top Secret clearances, usually for compartmentalized information. It takes an extreme level of vetting to be granted this clearance. The scientist would surely be a Ph.D. That’s a lot of years of demonstrated hard work to throw it all away for a bioweapons attack without a solid motivation. The real people involved with this type of research are smart, dedicated, successful and patriotic, not like a character in a bad movie who is motivated to hurt the United States because they were overlooked for a promotion or saw some sort of poetic justice at using US anthrax on the United States. ...

"So what makes more sense? A nation and a terrorist organization that had the expertise, the opportunity, the motivation, and in the case of al Qaeda, in fact carried out a monstrous attack at nearly the same time did it? Or that an American scientist with the highest clearances, demonstrated patriotism by working in a very dangerous field to defend this nation, who would have lost years of hard work, with no seeming motivation, with a very small pool of suspects, and apparently small concern at being caught, smuggled the anthrax out of a high security facility to attack Americans?

"What does your common sense tell you? Most of my friends (usually military) at the time of the attacks believed the anthrax was a continuing, near simultaneous attack with the plane hijackings of 9/11."
Source: http://rayrobison.typepad.com/ray_robison/2006/09/so_that_anthrax.html

Despite the psyop fantasies churned out by Robison, and the fact that he is consistently wrong by about a mile, the CIA's Mockingbird Press continue to publish this DoD/CIA shill's ludicrous cant.

"Ray Robison," the Examiner informs us, "is a former army officer who now works as a military analyst and freelance investigative journalist." At his blog, Robison notes, "I am a military analyst living in Huntsville, Alabama. Before that I was an army officer and also a member of the Iraq Survey Group. ... My work has been on Fox News, American Thinker, Rush Limbaugh, Slate (Hitchens) and 411mania." (Source: http://rayrobison.typepad.com/about.html)

Amazon notes that his "work" has been cited by "the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Investor's Business Daily, US News and World Report, Slate Magazine, Jerusalem Post, National Review, and many national radio programs. Although he specializes in Iraqi document exploitation, he also writes about general military matters and exposes media abuses against the military and military members." (Source: http://www.amazon.com/Both-One-Trench-Saddams-Documents/dp/1419678663)

The Guardian tells us that Robison "has a greater claim to authority than most." That is, most third graders.

Robison's latest celebration of "reason" and "common sense" - in defense of the CIA and its machinations to draw the country into the illicit and genocidal Iraq war - is about as brilliant as his "deduction" that Bin Laden was behind the anthrax mailings. The latest "reasoned" argument, boiled down, is based on a PHANTOM DOCUMENT that a reporter for the Telegraph LOST ("Coughlin didn't know where it had gotten to after he saw it ... ") but TOLD him about:

New Ron Suskind Claim Strains Credibility
National Defense Examiner
Examiner
August 20, 2008

By Ray Robison

"Author Ron Suskind claims in his new book The Way of the World that a letter reported to connect the Saddam regime to al Qaeda is a fake and was crafted by the CIA according to two former CIA officers. ...

"[S]hortly after the invasion of Iraq journalist Con Coughlin writing for The Telegraph revealed that he had been provided with a document from what he called a reliable, Iraqi source which expressly showed Mohammad Atta, the 9/11 attack ringleader, training for the mission in Iraq with Saddam's knowledge. Coughlin claimed that the letter formed the first “proof” that Saddam was involved with 9/11.

"I contacted Coughlin while researching the book and he stood by his report as of mid-2007. It is doubtful that many other people have seen the original of this document (including myself) since even Coughlin didn't know where it had gotten to after he saw it when I talked to him. ...

"While my coauthors and I have not seen it, we find the contents of the document (as described by Coughlin) to be within the bounds of reason. ..."

As we've seen, Robison's analytic prowess is not all it's cracked up to be, and leads him to draw ludicrous conclusions that happen to buttress the Murdochian "conservative" perspective on the world, ie. fascism. At least, his facile "reasoning" WOULD be amusing if it wasn't an obvious psyop tool intended to lead the naive down the primrose path of blind patriotic (jingoistic) ignorance and insanity - ideal conditions for the flourishing of Mussolini's corporate dreams.

PERU: US Govt. Document Links President García to 1980s Death Squads

" ... The Reagan government at the highest level therefore knew about the killings, but kept silent. ... "

Inter Press Service News Agency
January 15, 2008

US Gov't Document Links García to 1980s Death Squads
Lucy Komisar*

NEW YORK, Dec 5 (IPS) - There is irony in the recent announcement by Peru's President Alan García that he would publish the names of 1,800 "freed terrorists", so that people might recognise and report them if they were participating in anti-state conspiracies. His list includes people imprisoned on false charges or never convicted or sentenced.

One name that is not on the list is that of Alan García. However, according to a declassified U.S. government document, García, during his first administration from 1985-1990, gave instructions to terror squads organised by his political party to assassinate suspected leftists. Victims included trade unionists and other civil society leaders.

The one-page document, written in late 1987, said that the party, APRA, and top government officials were running a secret paramilitary organisation. It said they were responsible for the attempted bombing of the El Diario newspaper, linked to the violent Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso, sent people to train in North Korea and may have been involved in executions. It made it clear that it believed that García was giving the orders.

For example, the report said, "Acting on García's instructions to retaliate for the October 2 assassination of an APRA leader, COSEPAP [a secret APRA branch] recently botched an attempted bombing of a pro-SL [Sendero Luminoso] newspaper." The attempted bombing happened on Oct. 2, 1987; though the report is undated, the reference to the bombing suggests it was written in October or November 1987.

The U.S. government document was written as a factual account, not as speculation. It appears in the files of the National Security Council (NSC), which advises the U.S. president on foreign policy. A reference to the paper was discovered in the presidential library of Ronald Reagan, U.S. president from 1981-88, and it was obtained after a request for declassification by this reporter.

It has been known for years that the APRA paramilitary Rodrigo Franco Command operated during García's first administration and that it engaged in assassinations of oppositionists. It was determined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, after the fall of repressive President Alberto Fujimori, that the Command was under the direction of García's interior minister, Agustín Mantilla. However, there was no assertion of direct links to García.

García in 2003 termed the existence of the Command "a fantasy". This reporter sent him the U.S. document and asked for a response, but he declined to comment.

Among the report's assertions:

"Peru's ruling APRA party is sponsoring secret paramilitary groups."

"The García administration operates a secret paramilitary organisation, perhaps several." APRA had a branch "codenamed COSEPAP (security and intelligence command)" that was "so compartmentalised that many APRA officials are unaware of its existence."

COSEPAP "reportedly has agreed to send 1,000 of its members to North Korea for training by 1989; about 300 have been there already."

"Close associates of President García -- APRA Senator Armando Villanueva and Alberto Kitasono, APRA organisational secretary -- apparently direct COSEPAP."

"García's vice interior minister, Agustín Mantilla, supervises a secret police force that is armed with interior ministry weapons." That has been widely known, and was reported by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated violations of human rights that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s and filed its final report in August 2003.

Under a paragraph labeled "reports of executions", the report says, "Mantilla reportedly believes that APRA needs the capability to eliminate terrorists because of the judicial system's tendency to release them and police reluctance to kill captured SL militants." The last four lines of the paragraph are still classified and are blacked out.

The document said, "Although the paramilitary units appear now to act only against terrorists, the specter of APRA violence is unnerving García's political rivals. Opposition congressmen tried to censure the interior minister for his suspected role in the attempted kidnapping of a leftist congressman with alleged SL ties."

It indicated that APRA members of parliament were given some information about the paramilitary operations. It noted, "After García ordered that APRA congressmen be briefed about their party's 'self-defence' units, they used APRA's legislative majority to support the minister." And, with not a little irony, it added, "But García's reputation as a human rights crusader was tarnished."

"Exactly who in the armed forces knows what about the paramilitary squads is unclear," says the U.S. document. It explained, "The vice interior minister claims that army intelligence assisted his anti-terrorist squad even as the navy was investigating it."

The U.S. report's final assessment was that García's "vigilantism will further weaken his standing with the military and political opposition." The report added, referring to criticism by human rights groups, that "Military leaders probably are delighted by García's loss of the moral high ground, which lessens pressure on them to be concerned about human rights abuses. But those perpetual coup plotters in the military who are aware of APRA's sponsorship of paramilitary groups must also be aware these could be used to raise the costs of any attempted move against the regime."

At the time, in the late 1980s, the Coordinadora nacional de derechos humanos -- the human rights groups -- were documenting the frequent disappearances and extrajudicial executions of oppositionists. They criticised García for not exercising control over the military, which they accused of rights violations in the fight against Sendero. However, they did not accuse García of collaboration in the killings.

The document was not among the U.S. government papers provided by the George W. Bush administration to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The document did not indicate the author or how the information was obtained. But four officials who had high positions at the time in the Latin America section of the White House's National Security Council or the U.S. embassy in Lima told IPS that the form and style of the document suggested that it was prepared either by the Central Intelligence Agency or by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. All asked for anonymity.

One said, "Obviously they had some high-ranking inside source providing them this information." The NSC routinely received copies of such documents, which is why it appeared in NSC files. The Reagan government at the highest level therefore knew about the killings, but kept silent.

None of the people mentioned in the document has been charged or tried for their crimes. Several former leaders and members of the Rodrigo Franco Command have high-level jobs in the García administration.

*Lucy Komisar visited Peru during the first administration of Alan García and wrote about the human rights situation there. Her articles appear on http://thekomisarscoop.com.

http://ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=40354

Michigan: Birch Society Spin-Off Group's Past Raises some Questions

Livingston Daily (Mich.)
www.livingstondaily.com
AUGUST 3, 2008

In the recent newspaper stories about the Brighton Township supervisor candidates, I noticed that Tom Murphy was a co-founder of Livingston County's local Americans for Prosperity. Never having heard of this group, I did a little searching around on the Internet, and what I found should concern everyone.

Americans for Prosperity was founded by David Koch, the owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held company in the United States. Koch Industries includes oil and gas production, chemicals, pipelines, asphalt, commodities trading, lumber and paper. Koch Industries has been one of the largest polluters in the country.

During the 1990s, Koch Industries was responsible for more than 300 oil spills, leading to a landmark penalty from the Environmental Protection Agency of $35 million, and in 2000 was charged with illegally releasing 91 metric tons of benzene from its refinery in Texas. In the latter case, had Koch Industries been convicted, it would have faced fines of up to $352 million but got away with a slap on the wrist from the Bush administration, and you and I got stuck with the bill to clean up the company's mess. Not very patriotic of it.

Americans for Prosperity is largely funded by the Koch brothers. Americans for Prosperity's top items are convincing people that climate change is a hoax and deregulating government. Coincidence?

That is all bad enough, but here is one more shocker. Fred Koch, father of David and Charles, was a co-founder of the John Birch Society.

If Mr. Murphy is elected to lead our township, will these extremist views be on his agenda?

Sue Kelly

Brighton Township

http://www.livingstondaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080803/OPINION03/808030346/1014/OPINION

Our Military has no Higher Duty than to End Fascism

By Timothy V. Gatto
www.countercurrents.org
19 August, 2008

As with any civilization, there comes a time where that civilization must choose between right and wrong, commonsense and nonsense, and civility over barbarism. The period immediately after World War II saw the world community questioning the German people on their complicity with the fascist regime that had wrecked havoc and desolation upon the world and was guilty of mass exterminations of millions of human beings. The answer that was often time given was that the average German didn’t see it coming, and that if they knew what the future would bring, they would have never participated in Hitler’s mad schemes. The world never quite forgot the German people’s complicity in the last World War, and they will not forgive the American people for displaying their lack of concern over what our government does in the name of the “American People”.

In order to create “A more perfect union” we devised one of the greatest documents in history, the American Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights. These documents have served us well for the last several centuries, but of late it has become the shell of what they once were. They are no longer documents that guarantees the people’s rights, but of the government’s utter control over its own people. We have basically lost the 1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In this nation we are expected to elect our President not only for his statesmanship, but also for his religious stance. We are given “Free Speech Zones” away from the focal point of a demonstration in order that our voices will not be heard. We are not allowed to peaceably assemble without permits and permission, and as far as the redress of grievances, all one has to do is look at the new bankruptcy laws and the Patriot Act. Congress is deaf and dumb to the articles of impeachment brought against this President for illegally wiretapping American citizens and starting an invasion against a sovereign nation of false pretenses killing over 1.2 million people and thousands of American soldiers, just two of the 36 articles of impeachment.

The political corporate duopoly has stonewalled the inherent contempt citations that should have come out of Congress that should be leveled at the Executive Department employees that refuse to answer Congressional subpoenas’ to testify in front of Congress about what they knew about the lies leading up to the Iraq War, the firing of US Attorneys for political reasons and the exposing of a covert CIA Agent by the Executive Branch. This was the reason Nixon resigned!

The 4th Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This Amendment was scrapped in it’s entirety by the Patriot Acts that require no warrant in the event you are suspected of being a “terrorist” or a “terrorist sympathizer”. What is the definition of a “terrorist”, or is this just a catch-all phrase for the government to violate the fourth amendment? The people in PETA have been designated as belonging to a terrorist organization! What is the government’s next step in this march towards fascism? Where is wiretapping phone conversations of American citizens and prying into their e-mails and computers in the scheme of things? Does this not also violate the 4th Amendment?

The 5th Amendment: No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

This was also written before The Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Grand Juries are not required for suspected “terrorists” and property is regularly confiscated and used for public use by drug enforcement agencies on our other never-ending war “The War on Drugs”. Double jeopardy seems to be the only part of this amendment not written out, and there are ways the government has to get around that also.

The 6th Amendment: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

That is unless you are charged with being a “terrorist” and you fall under the Patriot Act and the MCA2006. This is another amendment stripped out of the Bill of Rights.

The 8th Amendment: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Torture for detainees, even American citizens suspected of being “terrorists” or “terrorist sympathizers’ is routine in this once proud republic. It’s public record for anyone to see. Extrodinary Rendition and placement in Guantanamo can result in a number of nefartious types of U.S. torture procedures such as water-boarding and being assaulted “up to and not exceeding organ failure.” This is just one more insult to the rule of law in our once proud nation.

The truth is that we have become a nation bent on military conquest and seizure of other nation’s resources by military force. We have invaded the Middle-East for resources, not to bring these people “democracy”. We are in the process of surrounding the nation of the Russian Federation to insure global hegemony. We are in the process of installing nuclear missiles in the former Warsaw Pact nation of Poland in defiance of the wishes of the Russian State. This is akin to the USSR installing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1963. This almost caused a thermo-nuclear war, but the USSR backed off if we took our missiles from Turkey. Now this insane administration wants to bring us back to the prospect of “nuclear brinkmanship” and put the entire world in harm’s way in order to satisfy our leader’s hubris.

The corporate political parties are putting up men that have as their global advisors, neo-cons of the worst caliber. The ordinary citizen in this republic no longer has any power when faced with the will of the corporations that control and finance our political leaders. Our vote counts for nothing as we are presented with corporate controlled candidates that have sold their souls to the corporate leaders and the military industrial complex. Our media has distorted news at all levels, systematically feeding our citizens government propaganda and censoring those that are determined to speak out. Third parties have had experienced intimidating rules and procedures in order that they do not gain ballot access; this is a direct result of the Democratic and Republican parties intimidations.

The truth is that our republic is virtually bankrupt with a national debt of over 9.5 trillion dollars. We have outsourced our industries for corporate profit, regardless of the cost to the American taxpayer. We are privatizing our infrastructure and holding a “fire sale” to pay for our military expenditures. We are not the richest nation on the planet. We are the nation that has more debt than any other. This does not bode well for the future of our children and our nation.

I believe that the problems facing the United States are insurmountable. The people have no real power by using the ballot box or by using the media to bring attention to these very serious problems. Massive demonstrations are not feasible simply because the people are much too involved trying to scratch out a living in this new corporate society where they are victims of rouge capitalists, from the banks to the retailers. There are many Americans that don’t understand the severity of the situation our republic finds itself in because they have not been told the honest truth, and are just too loyal to doubt their government’s words. This harkens back to the days when Germany was controlled by the National Socialists and their corporate community of military equipment and munitions makers.

We are facing thermo-nuclear war by the policies of both political parties. We are facing depression and the loss of Constitutional rights. The people are not in control of their government, nor their access to information. We are a nation of chattel and the prospects are looking very dim indeed. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen, it is unavoidable. Something has to happen to restore our freedom and our civil rights as a people. We separated from Great Briton in order to coin our own money and not be beholden to banks in Europe for credit. We find ourselves now in that very same situation with the Federal Reserve, a PRIVATE banking company made up of global bankers that charge us interest on our OWN money! This is unacceptable. This regulates us to a nation devoid of actual sovereignty.

The only way out of this predicament is to replace our corporate controlled government. Thomas Jefferson once said;

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

That time is now. The only way to restore the republic is to eliminate this government and this political system. There will be no peace, only death and poverty along with enslavement if we do not. There is, in my mind, only one solution. The American military knows just how far this government has strayed. They are the ones that the greatest burdens are borne by. Our General grade and Flag grade officers understand the impossibility of what our civilian leaders ask of them. They too suffer the economic crises that have led us to the brink of financial ruin.

I served in the military for almost 21 years. The Uniform Code of Military Justice is now a more just system than our civilian constitutional system of laws. The largest organization that has taken an oath to protect and defend the United States from all enemies, foreign or domestic, and to protect and preserve the constitution of the United States is our Armed Forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are required to preserve and protect the republic. Their obligation is clear. The sociopaths that are in control of this nation must be thrown out of office along with their corporate masters. During the time that the military assumes power, a new constitutional convention formed by elected delegates from every State must write a new Constitution that has in it a clear and concise plan for the dignity and rule of out government “by the people and for the people”. An American military government is preferable to the policies of today. Elections can be held after the signing of a new constitution and a civilian government can reassume it’s duties as trusted stewards of our republic.

This may sound like a radical plan and may frighten most Americans. We have no other choice. 10% of the population holds 71% of its wealth. The average American is not a voice in the government of today. World War III is about to begin. We are almost out of time, and I mean that in every sense of the word. I may be imprisoned for writing this, but I cannot in good conscience watch my nation rain depleted uranium, white phosphorus, napalm and other forms of death on foreign nations, killing millions. War is no longer an option unless we are attacked directly. It is not a form of diplomacy to be used in the 21st Century. It is ironic that the only people that can change our future are the very same people that do these criminals bidding. Who better to defend the republic than the military that is charged to do so? It is their solemn duty, and there can be no higher calling.

timgatto@hotmail.com
http://Liberalpro.blogspot.com

http://www.countercurrents.org/gatto190808.htm

Book Review: Eugenics in Oklahoma

‘Reckless Hands' looks at state's history with eugenics
By Stephen E. Reel
http://newsok.com/article/3277401
August 3, 2008

Oklahomans may be surprised to learn the state shares a dark past with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Eugenics, the wonder science of the early 1900s, hailed by academics worldwide as a means to improve a race by sterilizing those who possessed serious heredity defects, was also embraced by Gov. Alfalfa Bill Murray. This book, In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics (W.W. Norton, $24.95) by Victoria F. Nourse, examines how a scientific theory about nature was transformed into the basis of social policy ordained by the power of the state of Oklahoma.

The case's backdrop began in 1927 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a forced sterilization of a feebleminded girl in the case of Buck v. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.” The law deferred to the state of Virginia's right to regulate health and safety.

Jack Skinner, 24, held in the McAlester prison for stealing 23 chickens and armed robbery, challenged the 1935 Oklahoma law that mandated sterilization for undesirable persons in prisons or state asylums. Subject to the law were three-time repeat criminals or the feebleminded. The law mandated his sterilization before he could return to society after his sentence was satisfied.

The book's title comes from a line in the 1942 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Skinner v. Oklahoma striking down this Oklahoma law, warning that "in reckless hands” an entire "race or types” might "wither and disappear.” Not coincidentally, this was the year Nazis were trying to eradicate the Jewish race on the theory of natural inferiority. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas can produce horrible consequences. Yet, as late as the 1960s, more than 100,000 people had been sterilized under U.S. federal health and welfare programs, the author writes.

Nourse, a law college professor at Emory University, provides a fascinating story of gritty and determined Oklahoma lawyers who took Skinner's case to the nation's highest court. This book should appeal to general readers of Oklahoma history and those interested in the modern science of genetics, which likewise promises a better future through the selection of desirable genetic traits. Will the history of human engineering repeat itself?

GRASSLEY SEEKS ANSWERS TO FBI’S AMERITHRAX INVESTIGATION

For Immediate Release
August 7th, 2008

WASHINGTON – Senator Chuck Grassley today began asking tough questions of the Department of Justice and the FBI following the release of documents implicating Dr. Bruce Ivins as the only suspect in the Amerithrax investigation.

“This has been a long investigation full of missteps and mistakes. There’s been too much secrecy up to this point and it deserves a full and thorough vetting,” Grassley said. “There are clearly a lot of unanswered questions and it’s time to start a dialogue so we can get answers.”

Here is a copy of the text of Grassley’s letter.

The Honorable Michael B. Mukasey
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.,
Washington, DC 20530

The Honorable Robert S. Mueller, Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20535

Dear Attorney General Mukasey and Director Mueller:

Thank you for ensuring that Congressional staff received an advanced briefing yesterday of the information released to the public in the Amerithrax investigation. The three affidavits provided represent an important, but small first step toward providing Congress and the public a full accounting of the evidence gathered by the FBI.

At yesterday's briefing, Justice Department and FBI officials invited follow-up questions after there had been time to read the affidavits. Indeed, there are many important questions to be answered about the FBI's seven-year investigation, the basis for its conclusion that Dr. Bruce Ivins conducted the attacks alone, and the events leading to his suicide. To begin this inquiry, please provide complete and detailed answers to the following questions:

What is the date (month and year) that the FBI determined that the anthrax came from a specified flask in Ivins’s lab ("RMR-1029")?

When (month and year) did the FBI determine that Dr. Hatfill never had access to the anthrax used in the killings?

How did the FBI determine that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the anthrax used in the killings? Was that because the FBI determined that Dr. Hatfill no longer worked at USAMRIID when the powder was made?

Was Dr. Hatfill or his counsel informed that Dr. Hatfill had been cleared of any involvement in the anthrax killings before the Department of Justice offered a settlement to him? Was he informed before signing the settlement agreement with him? If not, please explain why not.

Was Judge Walton (the judge overseeing the Privacy Act litigation) ever informed that Dr. Hatfill had been eliminated as a suspect in the anthrax killings? If so, when. If not, please explain why not.

Was Dr. Ivins ever polygraphed in the course of the investigation? If so, please provide the dates and results of the exam(s). If not, please explain why not.

Of the more than 100 people who had access to RMR 1029, how many were provided custody of samples sent outside Ft. Detrick? Of those, how many samples were provided to foreign laboratories?

If those with access to samples of RMR 1029 in places other than Ft. Detrick had used the sample to produce additional quantities of anthrax, would that anthrax appear distinguishable from RMR 1029?

How can the FBI be sure that none of the samples sent to other labs were used to create additional quantities of anthrax that would appear distinguishable from RMR 1029?

Please describe the methodology and results of any oxygen isotope measurements taken to determine the source of water used to grow the spores used in the anthrax attacks.

Was there video equipment which would record the activities of Dr. Ivins at Ft. Detrick on the late nights he was there on the dates surrounding the mailings? If so, please describe what examination of the video revealed.

When did the FBI first learn of Dr. Ivins’ late-night activity in the lab around the time of the attacks? If this is powerful circumstantial evidence of his guilt, then why did this information not lead the FBI to focus attention on him, rather than Dr. Hatfill, much sooner in the investigation?

When did the FBI first learn that Dr. Ivins was prescribed medications for various symptoms of mental illness? If this is circumstantial evidence of his guilt, then why did this information not lead the FBI to focus attention on him, rather than Dr. Hatfill, much sooner in the investigation? Of the 100 individuals who had access to RMR 1029, were any others found to suffer from mental illness, be under the care of a mental health professional, or prescribed anti-depressant/anti-psychotic medications? If so, how many?

What role did the FBI play in conducting and updating the background examination of Dr. Ivins in order for him to have clearance and work with deadly pathogens at Ft. Detrick?

After the FBI identified Dr. Ivins as the sole suspect, why was he not detained? Did the U.S. Attorney’s Office object to seeking an arrest or material witness warrant? If not, did anyone at FBI order a slower approach to arresting Ivins?

Had an indictment of Dr. Ivins been drafted before his death? If so, what additional information did it contain beyond the affidavits already released to the public? If not, then when, if ever, had a decision been made to seek an indictment from the grand jury?

According to family members, FBI agents publicly confronted and accused Dr. Ivins of the attacks, showed pictures of the victims to his daughter, and offered the $2.5 million reward to his son in the months leading up to his suicide. These aggressive, overt surveillance techniques appear similar to those used on Dr. Hatfill with the apparent purpose of intimidation rather than legitimate investigation. Please describe whether and to what degree there is any truth to these claims.

What additional documents will be released, if any, and when will they be released?

http://grassley.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=9f42563c-f11d-e765-d965-e937adfa47dc&Month=8&Year=2008

UK: Government to Invest in 'Spying' Database

Every UK call, internet search and email will go into big data vat
The government is looking to invest in spying database

By Marc Chacksfield
www.techradar.com/news

It's what science fiction movies are made of, but the government has plans to create a massive database to house all the UK's communications via email, phone, or internet, for at least two years.

The new scheme was uncovered by the Register and points to plans that the government is to invest millions in what is being dubbed as a 'snooping silo'.

The likes of MI6 and the GCHQ – Government Communication Head Quarters – are trying hard to get this database up and running, but the sheer scale of it is likely to cause headaches for communication providers and outrage among the general public.

Communications database

The database will take time to create, however, with trials set to take place that will see one mobile, one internet and one landline operator monitored.

It is unclear, as of yet, who exactly will be the operators to take part in the trial.

The idea of the database has been mooted for some time, according to The Register, with Home Office minister Lord West speaking about it in his 8 July parliamentary answer.

In his speech he said: "The objective of the interception modernisation programme is to maintain the UK's lawful intercept and communications data capabilities in the changing communications environment.

"It is a cross-government program, led by the Home Office, to ensure that our capability to lawfully intercept and exploit data when fighting crime and terrorism is not lost."

http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/government-to-invest-in-spying-database-454301

Appeals Court Declines to Decide Spying Case

The Associated Press
08/21/2008

SAN FRANCISCO—A federal appeals court has declined to decide whether telecommunications companies can be sued for helping government terrorism investigators eavesdrop on their customers without a warrant.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent a lawsuit against AT&T back to a trial judge to consider in light of a new law that shields telecommunications companies from such legal attacks.

Some 45 other lawsuits against other companies were awaiting the outcome of the AT&T case. Those legal challenges essentially ended in July when Congress overhauled bitterly disputed rules on secret government eavesdropping.

LA Theater: The Accomplices

The Accomplices

When: August 21: 8 p.m.
Price: $18-$30, $15 previews
Event Phone Number: 323-663-1525
http://www.FountainTheatre.com

Fountain Theatre
Neighborhood: East Hollywood
5060 Fountain Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90029
323-663-1525

New York Times reporter Bernard Weinrub's award-winning play delves into a blistering account of what the U.S. government did - and didn't - do to help the Jews flee the Nazis.

The production centers on the life of firebrand activist Hillel Kook a.k.a Peter Bergson who shattered the wall of silence surrounding the news about Hitler's annihilation of the Jews.

July 3- August 24

Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat 8 p.m.
Sun, 2 p.m.

Previews July 3-11

Arizona: Three Congressmen call for J.T. Ready's ouster, the Nationalist Coalition's PHX "family night," and Oi Fest! in Tonopah

" ... Arizonans in general are far too forgiving of neo-Nazis and white supremacy, and this apathy needs to end. This state is a hotbed of racist activism. ... Arizona needs to wake up. These people are not fucking around, and they are in our backyard. ... "

A flier for Tonopah's upcoming Oi Fest!, one of many neo-Nazi/white power events scheduled for Arizona.

By Stephen Lemons
blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com
Aug 20, 2008

As you might have read in the far right Sonoran Alliance blog this morning, three GOP Congressmen from Arizona -- Jeff Flake, John Shadegg and Trent Franks have called on Tom Husband, Chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party to boot J.T. Ready from his post as a Republican precinct committeeman. Precinct committeemen are at the lowest rung of the party structure, and Ready, a Mesa neo-Nazi, has been a committeeman for several years now, but the letter from the three U.S. Representatives to Husband brooks no compromise.

"We are not familiar with the process by which elected Precinct Committeemen are removed from office," the missive states. "We’re not even sure our bylaws contemplate such a situation. If such a remedy is available, it should be immediately pursued. If it does not, we should, at a minimum, adopt a resolution asking for Mr. Ready’s immediate resignation.

"We simply cannot allow Mr. Ready to serve out his term, even if that term were to expire next week. We need to take action now and send a message that such behavior has no place in the Republican Party."

The Letter's text.

Ready himself was not impressed when I spoke with him this afternoon.

"Here's three Congressmen stumbling over their shoestrings," Ready said via phone, "who can get this letter together and do this thing to a precinct committeeman that lives in the Third World here, that's not even going to be in office in three weeks if he's moving? What is the point, you know what I mean? If I'm going to be the proverbial whipping boy, there must be a reason."

(Ready explained that because he'll be moving soon, he did not put his name in to run for pc again. Stay tuned for more of my interview with J.T., which I will post shortly.)

Maricopa County Elections Department confirmed that Ready is not a candidate for reelection to the post. Back in a 2007 Bird column, I first revealed that J.T. Ready had slipped in under the wire in the 2006 GOP primary to take the open, unpaid position. (Ready has since advised me that he's been a pc since 2002, which I've yet to verify.) GOP executive director Sean McCaffrey was unaware of Ready's position in his party when I informed him in 2007. Check this excerpt from what I wrote back then:

"A call to campaign finance director Kristi Passarelli at Maricopa County Elections confirmed Ready was telling the truth about his PC-ship. Passarelli informed this pelican that Ready was elected in 2006 from precinct 529, also known as Mesa 67. There were two slots open for Republicans, but Ready was the only one on the ballot in that primary. He received 36 votes.

"...Sean McCaffrey, executive director of the state GOP told the Taloned One the party was unaware of Ready's Republican position. He vowed Ready will be asked to step down. If Ready refuses, the party will field candidates for his PC-ship in '08, when Ready's term's up, to make sure Ready's not re-elected."

Needless to say, Ready did not step down. And there was no great hue and cry from the AZ GOP or the Maricopa County GOP demanding that some action be taken. In January of 2008, the Mesa white pride advocate once again bit Republicans in the ass, handing out anti-Semitic, racist literature at a County GOP function, as I revealed in a February blog post:

"Take the events of January 19 in Tempe," I wrote at the time, "where the Maricopa County Republican Party hosted its `mandatory meeting' and elected a new chairman, Tom Husband, who replaced outgoing county chairman Lyle Tuttle. At this MCRP assembly, Mesa neo-Nazi J.T. Ready distributed several racist and Holocaust-denying tracts, leaving copies on the seats of attendees for them to pick up."

The letter from the three Congressmen notes this incident as well. I'm not unaware of the politics behind this letter, as Jeff Flake is the brother-in-law of Kevin Gibbons, the Republican going head to head with erstwhile Ready-pal Russell Pearce in LD18. But so what? It's long since past time for the local Republican Party to take a stand, and if it takes a hard-fought Republican primary to do it, so be it.

Arizonans in general are far too forgiving of neo-Nazis and white supremacy, and this apathy needs to end. This state is a hotbed of racist activism, with almost an event a month geared toward neo-Nazi skinheads, white separatists and others. Recently, the local Nationalist Coalition, a descendant of William Pierce's neo-Nazi National Alliance, was instrumental in publicizing the June appearance of infamous Holocaust-denier David Irving at a Phoenix restaurant. Some 40 neo-Nazis paid $20 a head to hear Irving speak as part of his American book tour, though some later were pissed (if you read their accounts on the neo-Nazi site Stormfront.org) at having to cough up the green to hear Irving bloviate.

Also, Jesse Curnow, the Nationalist Coalition's Arizona coordinator, recently announced that the neo-Nazi org would be hosting "Stormfront Family Nights," with the first one to take place this Saturday, August 23rd.

"It is hoped that this event will provide White Nationalist parents with an opportunity to meet and network with one another," writes Curnow on the NC's Web site, "and will provide the children of those parents with an opportunity to make some new friends within their own community, having a blast in the process!"

Think they'll be making S'mores as they hang a black man in effigy? If so, my guess is that they lose the Hershey bars. The graham crackers, as well. Too, um, brown. Actually, might as well scrap the whole thing and just eat the marshmallows.

But white power family night ain't just for married folk. Singles can also go looking to hook up with an Aryan mate.

"White Nationalists who are not parents are also encouraged to attend," Curnow states. "And, as soon as possible, to meet a member of the opposite sex, and have at least 4 or 5 children."

Better hurry. According to the U.S. Census, whites will be a minority by 2042. Y'all ofays got a lot of catchin' up to do. But if you miss family night, the Nationalist Coalition regularly holds BBQs, and every year, they have a pagan, Xmas-type event called Winterfest.

If the Nationalist Coalition seems a little effete, keep in mind that the NC's father figure, the late William Pierce, was the author of The Turner Diaries , a racist dystopian novel that J.T. Ready once listed as one of his favorite reads. The novel also inspired The Order, the neo-Nazi group that killed Denver talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984. And most famously, it inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to commit the most heinous act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

There's rougher trade than the Nationalist Coalition to be found in the Valley skinhead scene. This September 20, The White Knights of America, the Deaths Head Hooligans, Thor Ink, and the Sons of Aesir Motorcycle Club will be putting on Oi Fest!, a white power music festival to be held in Tonopah. According to the flier, the event will feature bands such as White Wash, Stormtroop 16, White Knuckle Driver, Romantic Violence, and the Totenkopf Saints, whom you can watch a clip of at the 2005 NordicFest, here. Their lyrics read like the soundtrack for an all-American genocide:

"What about the Jews? No mercy.
What about the SPICS? No mercy.
What about the niggers? No mercy.
What about the faggots? No mercy.
What about the traitors? No mercy."

Arizona needs to wake up. These people are not fucking around, and they are in our backyard. If it takes the Ready-Pearce controversy to make people pay attention to hate in our midst, so be it. We should be vigilant and mindful of what these groups and events represent, and do everything we can to oppose their creep into the mainstream here in Arizona. Moreover, the local Republican Party has a right and a duty to protect its legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater.

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2008/08/az_congressman_call_for_jt_rea.php

A New Age of Torture

By DEEPAK TRIPATHI
www.counterpunch.org
August 19, 2008

" ... It turned out that the CIA first abducted people, including children as young as seven, across the world. The agency was then able to fly captives, under an agreement by all NATO members, including Britain, which granted blanket over-flight clearances to American and allied forces involved in the 'fight against terrorism.' ... ”

The recent appearance of Dr Aafia Siddiqi in a New York court (August 5, 2008) has brought another disturbing episode in the 'war on terror' of President George W. Bush to light. According to a lawyer acting for Dr Siddiqui, an American-educated scientist of Pakistani origin, her client was brought to New York after spending several years in US custody at an unknown place, thought to be the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. While in detention, she suffered 'horrendous physical and psychological torture'. The American authorities claimed that they captured Dr Siddiqui only in July 2008, accusing her of attacking US military officers and being an Al-Qaeda operative. These charges have been dismissed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

The case has drawn international attention and comes at a time when the Bush administration, in its last few months, appears determined to put as many detainees captured during its 'war on terror' as possible on trial. According to Dr Siddiqi's lawyer, New York has been chosen as the venue for her trial because it is the city of Twin Towers, where the sentiment is likely to be most prejudicial and the November elections are close. Just before Dr Siddiqui was produced in court in New York, a US military commission in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp convicted and sentenced Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, to five-and-a-half years in prison. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both criticized the Guantanamo trial as falling below anya acceptable standards of justice.

The crisis for human rights has grown to unprecedented proportions since 9/11. On the day Amnesty International published its 2007 human rights assessment worldwide, its message reflected something that had become increasingly obvious. The 'war on terror' had left a long trail of human rights abuses and created deep divisions that cast a shadow on international relations, making the world more dangerous. In one of the strongest repudiations of the policies of Western governments, the Secretary-General of Amnesty, Irene Khan, said: "The politics of fear are fuelling a downward spiral of human rights abuses in which no right is sacrosanct and no person safe." She accused these governments of adopting policies which undermine the rule of law, feed racism and xenophobia, divide communities, intensify inequalities and sow the seeds for more violence and conflict. Amnesty said that old-fashioned repression had gained a new lease of life under the guise of fighting terrorism in some countries, while in others, including the United Kingdom, loosely defined counter-terrorism laws posed a threat to free speech.

Among leaders who were named for playing on fear among their supporters to help them push their own political agendas and strengthen their political power were President George W Bush, John Howard, then prime minister of Australia, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

The 2008 report of Human Rights Watch mourned the state of democracy with these words: "Rarely has democracy been so acclaimed, yet so breached, so promoted yet so disrespected, so important yet so disappointing." Human Rights Watch accuses the Bush administration of embracing this route instead of defending human rights, because talk of human rights leads to Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons abroad, simulated drowning and other forms of 'rendition', military commissions and the suspension of habeas corpus. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are two of the world's leading organizations in the field of human rights. How did they reach conclusions so bleak?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes in the opening chapter named 'Arrest' in The Gulag Archipelago how it feels when someone is seized by shadowy individuals, about whom the victim knows nothing and has no clue as to what lies ahead:

"Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life. A bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you."

On September 6, 2006, President George W. Bush admitted the existence of a secret CIA program to abduct, detain and interrogate people outside America as part of his 'war on terror'. In a statement intended to portray himself as a strong leader, Bush referred to the CIA interrogation techniques as tough, lawful and necessary. His message, which gave few insights, was that "we are getting vital information necessary to do our jobs and that is to protect the American people and our allies." The President said he could not describe the methods used. He wanted everyone to understand why. The admission followed months of media reports in America and Europe and protests by non-governmental organizations that had made the administration's continued silence untenable.

Why did the US administration choose to operate secret prisons abroad? Where were they located and what kind of interrogation techniques were in use there to get what Bush described glibly as vital information? Glossy assertions, in the guise of confidentiality, became the hallmark of the Bush administration as the 'war on terror' progressed. The official justification became that 'we in the civilized world face an unparalleled and escalating terrorist threat and extraordinary measures are required' to deal with it. The administration knows it all. The people should simply believe what they are told, although the lesson of history is that laws are invariably broken when there is unwarranted secrecy and appropriate constitutional supervision is absent. Where the Bush administration led, other governments followed. From Britain, Italy and Australia to Russia, China and elsewhere, talk of the terrorist threat became engrained in government polemics. Among the most disturbing aspects was the Chinese leadership's description of protests by Buddhist monks in Tibet as terrorist activity.

Reports, which first surfaced in 2005, of secret CIA prisons in European and other locations were confirmed in an investigation by the Council of Europe in June 2007. The investigation, conducted by the Swiss Senator, Dick Marty, concluded that 'large numbers of people had been abducted across the world' and transferred to countries where 'torture is common practice'. Others were kept in 'arbitrary detention without any precise charge' and without any judicial oversight. Still others had 'disappeared for indefinite periods, held in secret prisons, including in member-states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operation of which had been concealed'.

Dick Marty said in his report that these people were subjected to degrading treatment and torture to extract information, however unsound, which America claimed 'had protected our common security'. Prisoners were interrogated ceaselessly and physically and psychologically abused before being released because they were 'plainly not the people being sought'. The report said that these were the terrible consequences of what in some quarters is called the 'war on terror'. The report specifically named Romania and Poland, where the CIA ran secret prisons and torture centres.

How were prisoners taken to such camps and what was done to them? It turned out that the CIA first abducted people, including children as young as seven, across the world. The agency was then able to fly captives, under an agreement by all NATO members, including Britain, which granted blanket over-flight clearances to American and allied forces involved in the “fight against terrorism.” Apart from Poland and Romania, former Soviet bloc countries where successors of the Communist intelligence services operated, Chechnya, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Syria were among other destinations named, as well as Italy, where abductions by the CIA took place. The report said that the systematic exporting of torture outside the United States and the reservation of such methods exclusively for non-Americans amounted to an 'apartheid' mentality, which fuels anti-Americanism and creates sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism.

What went on inside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is truly horrific, with up to 50000 men, women and children kept there at a time. Pouring acid on captives, forcing them to remove their clothing, keeping them naked for days in low temperatures and pouring cold water on them, a military policeman having sex with a female detainee, arranging naked male prisoners in a pile and jumping on them, forcing them to wear women's underwear, taking photographs of dead prisoners and threatening captives with rape – such 'blatant, sadistic and wanton' abuses of Iraqis were carried out by American soldiers in the prison. All this and more was done to them when, in many cases, their jailers did not even know their identities or the reasons for their detention.

Other examples of the culture of torture are recorded in numerous pictures of Abu Ghraib abuses now in the public domain. A young American soldier, Sabrina Harman, took many of these pictures during her tour of duty inside the prison. Like so many other young American soldiers, she joined the military to help pay for her college education. In March 2008, The New Yorker published her story with photos she took of abuses committed on prisoners. The pictures provided a graphic illustration of the abuses which America itself admitted in the official Taguba report. The inquiry resulted in a number of largely low-ranking reservists who either took the pictures, or were seen in them, portrayed as 'rogues who acted out of depravity'. Documents obtained by the Washington Post and the American Civil Liberties Union showed that the senior military officer in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, had actually authorized the use of military dogs, extreme temperatures, reverse sleep patterns and sensory deprivation as interrogation techniques in Abu Ghraib.

As The New Yorker said, Abu Ghraib 'was de facto United States policy'. And 'the authorization and decriminalization of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies' of the Bush administration. The techniques of interrogation were a direct result of the administration's hostility to international law – the doctrine of extracting confessions by torture flowing from the White House, the Vice President's office and a small number of senior Pentagon and Justice Department officials who had turned themselves into an oligarchy.

A new dawn comes with new hopes. But the dawn of the twenty-first century will forever be known for vengeance and brutal conflict for domination of energy resources in the Middle East. The attacks on 9/11 were a wake-up call about the existing and future dangers. But they were also a reminder of mistakes of the past. These mistakes were made in the final decade of the Cold War, the 1980s, when America's decision to favor extremist, against moderate, Islam in the region fanned the fires of hatred; and in the decade after the Cold War, the 1990s, when the battleground in Afghanistan was abandoned with the fires still burning.

Such mistakes created a sanctuary for the Taleban and Al-Qaeda. Far from learning the obvious lesson, the neo-conservatives had a new agenda for the coming century, well before the events of 9/11. Globalization had gone too far. Economic and political power had rapidly begun to shift to Asia. The scope and intensity of the American counter-attack under the presidency of George W. Bush was an expression of the determination to draw back the centre of gravity towards the West, with little realization that such course of action involved great risks.

Deepak Tripathi was a BBC journalist for nearly 25 years He is currently working on a book on the Bush presidency. He can be reached at deepak.tripathi@btopenworld.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/tripathi08192008.html

John McCain, The Most Dangerous Man in America

by Werther
August 20, 2008
www.antiwar.com

The first crisis over North Korea's nuclear program arose in late 1994. It was obvious there was not much the United States could do to step in unilaterally and disarm the North Korean regime. Sanctions, the normally inevitable option short of war, had no meaning – the United States had no trade with the North in the first place and the regime followed a policy of economic autarky (Juche) in any case. There was really only one feasible course of action: gather as many regional allies as possible, agree to a process of inducing North Korea to freeze its nuclear program, and tender an offer to the North Koreans on the basis of a quid pro quo.

When the Clinton administration outlined its proposed course of action to Congress there was some grumbling. Arm-waving professional patriots of the American political class do not like seeing the slightest diminution of their country's God-given prerogative to impose its will abroad when and as it likes. But there was no rational alternative, and apart from a few obscure, back-bench House Republican members a general consensus emerged that the administration's Agreed Framework was the best of a bad series of options.

Only one politician of any political standing dissented. His name was John Sidney McCain III. His modest proposal was that the United States should be prepared to bomb the North Korean reactor sites. Never mind that he could be condemning several thousand U.S. troops (and tens of thousands of South Korean civilians) in the vicinity of the Demilitarized Zone to a virtual death sentence. It had never occurred to this self-proclaimed military expert that the North Korean regime had amassed thousands of long-range artillery pieces and rocket launchers and concealed them in tunnels north of the DMZ. From these positions the North Korean military could unleash an avalanche of fire south of the border. The result would probably have been a repeat of the Korean war of 1950-53 but with even more murderously lethal weapons.

Fast forward to 1999 and the Clinton administration's great crusade in the Balkans (carefully calculated to target a weak and isolated country – Clinton was no fool). Humanitarian intervention was all the rage but it had to be designed to minimize the exposure of U.S. troops; after all, with no conceivable vital U.S. interest at stake, the public would not contemplate the spilling of American blood without an attendant drop in Clinton's all-important poll numbers.

Some politicians were actually able to set aside their reflexive jingoism and smell the scent of wag-the-dog in the sanctimonious statements of Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, and Richard Holbrooke. The vote on an authorization of the use of force against Serbia failed in the House on a tie vote of 215-215 — the only time the equivalent of a war declaration failed in either house in U.S. history.

In the other chamber John McCain was also critical of the administration's Balkan policy. Only for him, it wasn't bellicose enough. Rather than limiting it to a bombing campaign he introduced a joint resolution to authorize the introduction of ground troops into a full-scale war with Serbia, something the Clinton administration did not even ask for. Fortunately, in a rare show of good sense, the Senate tabled the McCain resolution by a vote of 78-22.

McCain's unbridled, almost manic, bellicosity with respect to the quagmire in Iraq is too well known to require elaboration. But the sophistication of his military strategy with respect to that country can be inferred from his remarks to a group of bikers in Sturgis, S.D.: "We'll win it the right way, and that's by winning it!"

Apparently, though, McCain's neoconservative handlers have already grown tired of the generational struggle against "Islamofascism" (not to mention their long-planned intention to bomb Iran), for they are already pivoting McCain into a stance of maximal belligerence against Russia.

Much has been made about McCain's relationship with his principal foreign policy handler, Randy Scheunemann, heretofore a paid lobbyist of the Republic of Georgia, and who still benefits financially from part ownership of the lobbying firm that continues to service the Georgia account. This is clearly a conflict of interest and indicates the corruption that is endemic to political campaigns of both parties. But to try to explain McCain's actions in this way is to misunderstand the man.

Scheunemann is merely a toad overstuffed by one too many lunches at the Capitol Grill, in sum, a typical Washington success story. But McCain is sui generis. If Scheunemann had never existed someone else would be writing precisely the same talking points for the presumptive Republican candidate. McCain's love of war and diplomatic brinkmanship is nothing if not sincere. Perhaps it is the only sincere thing about the man.

Democrats are finally stumbling onto the fact, although the press has yet to discover it, that McCain is a serial flip-flopper and prevaricator. Across virtually the entire spectrum of domestic policy McCain has held one position and then jumped to the polar opposite, apparently without noticing the inconsistency (and his pals on the press bus are too polite to bring it up):

A recipient of cash and favors from savings and loan fraudster Charles Keating, McCain reminted himself as the Conscience of the Senate, to the hosannas of an adoring and amnesiac press.

McCain could not in good conscience support tax cuts that disproportionately favored the rich – until he began to sniff the incense of a Republican presidential coronation ceremony.

He was against offshore oil drilling before he was for it.
Wearing the garb of the Serious Centrist (a mythical species that David Broder venerates), McCain railed against "agents of intolerance" like Jerry Falwell, but crawled to Canossa when Republican base-pandering mandated that he must give a cringing speech at Falwell's Liberty University.
Even on his signature issue of torture McCain postured as an implacable foe of the Bush policy right up until the primary season commenced. Since then he has voted "no" on measures that would ban torture or confine CIA interrogation techniques to those permitted by the U.S. Army Field Manual.
And so on. McCain's hypocrisy is perhaps somewhat more egregious than the practices of the average politician, but not markedly so. After all, politicians do not have principles, they have positions. No doubt the Democrats will make heavy weather of these flip-flops, as they are clearly entitled to. But in so doing they miss the central point about John McCain.

All these flip-flops illustrate McCain's near-total lack of sincerity: he doesn't really care about the issues at all. In practice he changes positions so easily because the positions themselves are throwaways. He is required to have them for political purposes, but they mostly bore and annoy him.

There is only one thing he cares about, and that is building an altar to Mars. War is the one fixed star in the McCain universe. You will find no flip-flopping or prevaricating there.

While McCain admits he doesn't understand the economy (and then denies that he doesn't), he claims unlimited expertise in national security matters. His belligerent megalomania with respect to the Georgian crisis has now, finally, even earned him a mild reproof from the neocon-friendly Washington Post: "Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president."

In a development little reported in the U.S., Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "claimed that Georgia's ports and airports would be placed under U.S. military protection, a suggestion quickly denied by the Pentagon." Assuming that the Department of Defense is telling the truth (and granted that it is difficult to determine whether the Pentagon or Saakashvili is more prone to fabrication), then where did the Georgian president get his information that the United States would be militarily intervening? Given that McCain claims to talk to Saakashvili every day, and given a string of grandiose pronouncements by McCain and his handlers regarding Georgia, is it possible that he misled Saakashvili, either deliberately or by implication, to believe that U.S. military intervention would be forthcoming?

It is still unclear whether McCain promised Saakashvili anything, or whether it was simply the Georgian president's own delusion that he was the apple of Washington's eye, but McCain's buttinski tactics would already have been a major scandal if any other American politician who was not the sitting president had made such inflammatory pronouncements on foreign policy. As it is, McCain is already, in his campaign ukases, dramatically downgrading relations with Russia in a manner that suggests he thinks he is president.

The public is inclined to believe the worst of a politician when he is insincere, inconsistent, or dishonest; indeed, such personality traits are virtually what makes the typical politician as we know him today. But such creatures are merely nuisances, like mosquitoes. The really dangerous politician is one with an idée fixe, and when that obsession centers on the desirability of perpetual war, the possibility of catastrophe is all too real.

Given who he is, what makes him tick, and the potential that he might actually realize his ambitions on the world stage, John McCain is the most dangerous man in America.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/werther.php?articleid=13325

Book Review: Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City

New Book Takes Different Look at Horrors of Holocaust
www2.iwu.edu
August 19, 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— Historians have explored the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II for decades, whether through the eyes of the Nazi officials, or through the memoirs of victims. Few, however, have looked at the dynamic interaction between the camps or ghettos created by the Germans, and the cities that surrounded them.

Gordon Horwitz, associate professor of history at Illinois Wesleyan University, examines the chilling evolution of the Holocaust as it came to Lodz, Poland, in his new book, Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City (Harvard University Press, 2008). “What interested me most was to explore the relationship between the ghetto and the city,” said Horwitz, who has been researching the book for more than a decade.

One of the first occupied cities to be annexed to the Third Reich, Lodz possessed the second-largest Jewish population in Poland with more than 200,000 Jews, constituting a third of the city’s residents. Horwitz said the Nazis set about remaking the city into a pristine and modern example of German ingenuity, and devoid of Jews.

“Today we would call the process ‘ethnic cleansing,’” said Horwitz of the Nazi goal to populate many cities in Eastern Europe with “pure” ethnic Germans. “This was a city that was undergoing radical demographic shift under the Nazis, who were colonizing Poland, and Lodz was to be a showcase of this colonization effort,” Horwitz said. “This is a rather large microcosm of what the Germans were doing in Eastern Europe during the occupation.”

In May of 1940, the Nazis established the Lodz ghetto, and herded more than 160,000 Jews into the overcrowded slum. Horwitz said it was only intended as a temporary solution to the “Jewish problem.” “The Nazis were not sure what they were going to do with the Jewish population, but the first step was seizing their assets and enclosing them in a guarded situation,” he said, noting the Nazis would not begin to carry out the so-called “final solution” of attempting to wipe out the entire Jewish population for years. “It was always in the air, but the Nazi had to go through a period of consideration of what was possible. They had to figure out themselves what they were going to do.” In the end, only a few thousand Jews survived the Nazi occupation of the city.

In the book, Horwitz maneuvers back and forth between what was happening in the desperate circumstances of the ghetto and the elaborate refurbishing projects the Nazis were conducting in the city. “What this book does is link those two worlds,” said Horwitz, who delved into newly available resources, released only after Poland became independent in the 1990s. “New documentation, new visual evidence from that time period opened up possibilities,” he said.

Horwitz traveled to Poland and Germany, pulling from such resources as official Nazi reports, diaries of ghetto residents and Lodz newspapers. “I looked beyond the war news on page one and into the local sections, which dealt with events and the remodeling efforts to make the city a gleaming cultural jewel,” he said. While reading stories, from interviews with premiere architects to reviews of plays being performed in the local theatres, Horwitz discovered the ghetto was not easily ignored. “My hunch was right. Their prospective vision, all be it filtered through the Nazi lens, reveals a great deal about the mentality of the new city fathers and the Nazi design,” said Horwitz. “You find – not unexpectedly – that they cannot help but make reference to the ghetto, to all that the Jews had supposedly done to harm the city.”

Ghettostadt is Horwitz’s second book on the Holocaust. His first, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen, was published in 1990 (The Free Press) and focused on the relationship between the Austrian town and the death camp. Horwitz said he is drawn by the striking dichotomy of the isolation and desolation of the camps and ghettos, and the thriving life outside them. “We must examine a civilizational problem that arises when looking at the Nazis,” said Horwitz. “In some ways, I think we are still puzzling over the problematic relationship between the idea that ‘life goes on,’ while simultaneously life is in danger, or more than in danger, being destroyed.”

In Lodz, that dichotomy is reflected in the building of a Nazi city, while destroying hundreds of thousands of lives. “They were able to continue with their work – which was of course the work of annihilation – while at the same time enjoying the fruits of culture and civilization. I’m curious about this,” said Horwitz. At the same time, he analyzes the inner workings of the ghetto, and how Jewish leaders dealt with the Nazis, especially the controversial Chaim Rumkowski. “Did he do what he thought was best to keep Jews in the Lodz ghetto alive?” Yes he did. Was he a hero? No, he was not,” said Horwitz, recalling the infamous speech where Rumkowski pleaded with parents to turn their children over to the Nazis or face them wiping out of the entire ghetto.

Horwitz admits researching the horrors of the Holocaust can take a toll. “It can be draining at times, but I think it’s important work to do. Perhaps you can call it a calling, or a mission, and that sustains me. I believe in what all historians do. In part, we are mediating the memory of another generation.”

The new book, Ghettostadt: Lodz and the Making of a Nazi City, was published in June to critical acclaim, and is available now.

http://www2.iwu.edu/CurrentNews/newsreleases08/fac_HorwitzBook_808.shtml

'Anthrax Killer' Remains a Mystery

The FBI's accusations against dead scientist Bruce Ivins are full of holes. The case may be closed but it isn't solved

Brad Friedman
www.guardian.co.uk
August 11 2008

Case closed. The FBI has found the "Anthrax Killer" – and he acted alone. And now that he's committed suicide, just at the moment the Feds were about to finally snare the diabolical menace who arguably brought utter chaos in days following the September 11 attacks when he'd sent deadly letters to Democratic officials and members of the media, his guilt couldn't be clearer.

Then again, you may have also believed that whole "Mission Accomplished" thing.

The case against Dr Bruce Ivins – the widely-respected bio-terror researcher at the US army's medical research institute of infectious disease in Fort Detrick, Maryland – was revealed by the FBI in a press conference, following his reported suicide the previous week, several ensuing days of bad reporting, laughable evidence-free leaks from anonymous government officials to media outlets happy to repeat them, growing scepticism from experts in the field of bio-terror research, colleagues of Ivins' and anybody who bothered to pay close attention beyond the misleading headlines. ...

STORY CONTINUES

"Freedom Cages" Coming to Denver/Secret Service, CIA, Military Plans to Suppress Protest at DNC

DENVER Protest News:

A U.S. District Court judge ruled last week in Denver that, even though protesters' free speech rights will be damaged, "national security" justifies the government's plan to restrict parade permits to end 3 hours before the Democratic Party convention begins. Thousands of police and 400 national guard will be on duty, in a city where, four years ago, activists exposed and fought a widespread, illegal, program of local police surveillance on political activists.

Further, protesters will be kept away from the convention center, allowed only into chain link fenced cages 700 feet from the center's door.

Reportedly, the cages won't be wrapped over the top with barbed wire, as they were at the last DNC in Boston. The "freedom cages" will be ringed by police and concrete barriers, and, as of today, huge media tents are being erected between the cages and the convention. Some comments on recent blog posts about the suppression of protest:

"Watch them almost break all of the rules, and get down and dirty! Order now and get your free AT&T/telecom immunity tote bag!"

"'Protest Zones?' I'm an unabashed Obama supporter, but as much as I like him, I like the rights to free speech and free association even more. The Dems should've rejected the idea of free speech zones outright, as a symbol of the Constitution-hating Bush."

"What about the 'security concerns' of the protesters? They want to secure the bill of rights, they want to secure peace and an end to foreign occupations, they want to secure themselves from arrest for bullsh*t crimes...I guess these are the rare cases where the freedom to tyranize trumps 'security'."

We have all watched George Bush express indignance about the suppression of protest in China, while justifying increasing repression in the "land of the free". Now we have the Democrats attempting to hold a political convention with dissenting opinions blocked by barricades.

World Can't Wait will be joining thousands of people in the Denver protests who want to send a different message to the world. Bring the whole Bush program of lying to start illegitimate wars, and threatening other countries, spying on citizens, justifying torture -- to a HALT!

http://us.f800.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?MsgId=9118_25789566_1527228_2424_5890_0_13651_21995_1663855241&Idx=3&YY=69928&y5beta=yes&y5beta=yes&inc=25&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&view=&head=&box=Inbox
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Gitmo on the Platte: Secret Service, CIA, Military Plans to Suppress Protest at DNC in Denver

by Debra Sweet (Posted by Elaine Brower)
August 14, 2008
www.opednews.com

With the Olympics has come plenty of criticism of China from the "west" over the Chinese government's crackdown on protest. Parks far from the Olympics are designated for protest, which are rare, and protesters have been dragged off towers while displaying protest banners, and swiftly deported.

Time magazine reported that "George W. Bush, on his way to watch the Games as a self-professed sports fan, got into the act by expressing 'deep concern' about China's human-rights record. 'America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents and human-rights advocates and religious activists,' Bush said in a speech in Bangkok a day before leaving for China. 'We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential.'" But anyone who studies American history knows that freedom of assembly is always conditional on who is assembling, and why. Forty years ago, when students and youth poured into Chicago aiming to stop Democratic Party support for the Vietnam war , as the Mayor of Chicago sent the police into the streets to gas and beat the protesters bloody.

Bedlam broke out inside the convention over the war in southeast Asia, and the war outside on the streets, as the youth chanted "The whole world is watching!" Denver, CO (USA): Since early 2007, even before the city was announced as the location for the 2008 Democratic National Convention, activists have been planning to hold what Mark Cohen, of the Denver coalition Recreate68 calls the "biggest anti-war demonstration in Denver since Vietnam" in response to the convention. This plan has taken on even more urgency and righteousness as the Democratic Party now owns this war, having voted funds for it six times since taking over Congress in 2006.For more than a year, the city of Denver stalled and blocked the granting of permits for marches, citing "national security" as the reason they couldn't disclose "confidential" information on permits, which they wouldn't accept applications for. The Secret Service designated both the DNC (August 25-28), and the Republican National Convention (Sept 1-4 in St. Paul MN) as National Special Security Events. $50 million in federal funds for "security" went to each city.The New York Times reports that "Federal and local authorities are girding for huge protests, mammoth traffic tie-ups and civil disturbances." In an intensifying atmosphere less than two weeks before the convention, a "designated protest zone" is being built in the parking lot at the Pepsi Center, where the convention will be held. The 47,000 square foot pen of cha in link fence will be double-fenced, with 8' between fences to prevent "escape." The closest edge of the zone is more than 700 feet from the convention center doors, almost completely blocked by huge media tents, and barely visible from the convention center. Reportedly, the cages will be ringed by concrete barriers and rows of police, with concrete barriers inside so that the crowd can't surge together. See photos here

Recreate68 and a dozen other groups filed a lawsuit this spring to force the city to grant protest permits. The ACLU brought the suit against the city of Denver and the Secret Service. Cohen says, "The city said they couldn't disclose information because the Secret Service wouldn't tell the city their plans. But once we filed suit, suddenly the started releasing information. Then the second phase of the suit was to challenge the constitutionality of the security arrangements, which the judge of course upheld."March permits were granted in June for each day of the convention, but only during the hours of 11am to 3pm, so that permits expire before the convention starts each day. Permit routes end more than a third of a mile from the convention center, and from the Invesco Mile High Stadium, where Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech on Thursday, August 28. Another "freedom cage" will be erected there. Rally permits were granted for Civic Center Park, about a mile from the convention, but ultimately denied for City Park, and larger venue further away.During the trial on the lawsuit July 29, The Denver Post reported, "Mark Cohen testified that the security conditions around the DNC will make demonstrators look like animals in a cage and that the delegates won't hear them. He also said that the public demonstration zone is blocked by a media tent and other structures that limit 'sight and sound' access to the delegates. 'It is not the image of fellow citizens but rather prisoners in a cage with no clear connection to the purpose of their being there,' Cohen said.""Before the trial started, members of Recreate 68 staged a quiet protest outside the U.S. District Courthouse against the Secret Service and the city while wearing orange jail jumpsuits with the words 'Dissent is not a crime yet.' They also placed silver duct tape over their mouths." Under the rubric of the "war on terror," the government argued that there should be no restrictions on their determination of what constitutes "national security" risks, nor on their ability to restrict the movement of people, or the methods or timing of protest.

The federal district court judge sided with the government, ruling that the restrictions on protest are justified by "national security" concerns. "We are going to file our appeal in the street," Glen Spagnuolo of Recreate68 said after federal Judge Marcia Krieger announced her decision.The ACLU also brought suit against the government to determine what types of security equipment have been purchased. ACLU of Colorado Legal Director Mark Silverstein told The Denver Post the ACLU had "learned that a manufacturer of pepper-ball guns had earned a contract with the city because the information was posted on the manufacturer's website, but the city has refused to say whether the purchase was made."

Ultimately the ACLU postponed the lawsuit, in exchange for an agreement that the city would disclose purchases. But all the ACLU received was a non-specific list, including more than $500,000 in equipment for the purpose of mass arrests.Preparations for mass detentions, and crowd-control weapons, including use of portable plastic fences used in NYC in 2004 at the Republican National Convention, and "exercises" of BlackHawk helicopters flying over the city in June give an indication of just how much the local and federal authorities are concerned that mass protest may break out in Denver.

On August 13, CBS4 News broadcast footage of a previously undisclosed detention facility the city is preparing in a warehouse in northeast Denver. They report, "Inside are dozens are metal cages. They are made out of chain link fence material and topped by rolls of barbed wire...Each of the fenced areas is about 5 yards by 5 yards and there is a lock on the door. A sign on the wall reads 'Warning! Electric stun devices used in this facility.'"

CBS4 news also reported that activists immediately called the facility "Gitmo on the Platte" referring to the local Platte River. The facility is "reminiscent of a political prisoner camp or a concentration camp," said Zoe Williams of Code Pink, who was shown the footage. And the blogs filled up. "'They hate our freedoms.' Gee, George W. was right after all! Whoops, wrong country." "If an organization were to plan to hold hundreds of dogs in those cages, the Humane Society would have to get involved." The Denver Post reports August 14 that the city is saying "the center will have air conditioning, water, restrooms and medical staff, as well as telephones for detainees to reach family and attorneys." But Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado said, "Colorado law requires that confidential attorney visits be accommodated at the temporary detention facility as well." According to the New York Times, "The Secret Service, the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and scores of police departments are moving thousands of agents, analysts, officers and employees to Denver for the Aug. 25-28 convention. They will operate through a complex hierarchy of command centers, steering committees and protocols to respond to disruptions...The Denver Police Department will nearly double in size, according to federal officials involved in the planning. The city is bringing in nearly 1,500 police officers from communities throughout Colorado and beyond, even inviting an eight-person mounted unit from Cheyenne, WY."

In 2002, the ACLU sued the city when it was revealed that the Denver Police Department had been keeping what came to be called "spy files," criminal intelligence files that labeled as "criminal extremists" people and organizations who had committed no crime, but only engaged in First Amendment-protected free speech activities. In These Times reported in 2003, "Ignoring a city prohibition against the collection of First Amendment-related intelligence, the Denver Police developed files on 208 organizations and 3,200 individuals. The department appears to have continued its surveillance until the fall of 2002, despite the ACLU lawsuit. Monitored groups included the American Friends Service Committee (a pacifist Quaker group), Amnesty International and many others with no history of criminal activity. Documents obtained by the ACLU describe how police intercepted e-mails, recorded the license plate numbers of vehicles at demonstrations, and infiltrated advocacy group meetings." That suit resulted in a new policy for the city's intelligence bureau establishing that files could be kept only when there was probably cause to believe criminal activity was taking place, but it did not affect federal agencies.

Democracy Now reported August 1 that intelligence is being gathered by a new "fusion center," one of 40 in the U.S. "Federal and state law enforcement officials in Colorado plan to increase intelligence operations during the Democratic National Convention in Denver and run a fusion center, where intelligence analysts will collect and analyze reports of suspicious activity. Civil rights advocates fear the fusion center could enable unwarranted spying on protesters exercising their First Amendment rights at the convention." Mike German, a counter-terrorist operations specialist and former FBI agent who is now national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative office in Washington., D.C told Democracy Now, "These centers have very robust police powers and domestic intelligence-collecting powers, and what we've seen in the past is that when police agencies are given secret powers to spy, they abuse those powers. And where there is very unclear line of accountability, the chances of something bad happening under that system were very high." German said he was very concerned that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency are integrated into the collection of intelligence on civilians. There are specific orders for the fusion centers on what intelligence can be gathered and kept, including on normal activities that are not considered crimes. Erin Rosa, of the Colorado Independent said that fusion centers are "meant to facilitate communications between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to share information about, quote-unquote, 'suspicious activities,' which can include taking pictures or taking notes. The definition is very broad when it's defined by them."

German told Democracy Now, "One of the precursor behaviors to terrorism that's identified in the order is taking video. And we put in our report a couple of instances where people taking video were stopped by police officers simply for taking pictures or video. And in some cases, particularly where they're taking photographs or video of police, it actually resulted in arrests."

Anticipation is growing as thousands – the government predicts tens of thousands – are planning to be on the streets of Denver, protesting the Iraq war, a US war on Iran, government spying on the people, and the expected wave of repression. Many will be there with the hope that the Democrats and Obama will meet their demand for change. Many others will be acting on the understanding that no matter who the president is, only you, not your government can bring this to a halt. Is there another way than accepting the change you're allowed to believe in, and fitting your protest into a cage? Just read the blogs in response to the "freedom cages." "This isn't Tiananmen Square, it's a political convention."

"The Dems are becoming what they loathed. Free speech suppressing hacks. I wonder if one is going to have to sign a "loyalty oath" at Invesco the day of the event?" "Watch them almost break all of the rules, and get down and dirty! Order now and get your free AT&T/telecom immunity tote bag!" People in Denver are opening up their homes to protesters, making their restaurants and stores and churches available for gatherings, and many are not liking the police-state atmosphere. The political battle in Denver is going to be two-sided. Last month the Mayor's State of the City speech got completely upstaged when Rene Marie, a jazz singer scheduled to sing the national anthem switched up, and instead, substituted "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," the Black National Anthem.

Debra Sweet is the Director of The World Can't Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Gitmo-on-the-Platte--Secr-by-Debra-Sweet-080814-662.html

Carlyle Group's Robert E. Grady Joins Symbio's Board of Directors

Carlyle Group Profile

Robert E. Grady Joins Symbio's Board of Directors
Aug. 19, 2008

ROCKVILLE, MD, Aug 19, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- The Symbio Group ("Symbio"), a leading provider of software development, testing, and globalization outsourcing services, announced today that Robert E. Grady, a Partner and Managing Director at The Carlyle Group, one of the world's leading private equity firms, has joined the Company's Board of Directors. In addition to his extensive experience as a venture capitalist, investment banker, and public official, Mr. Grady brings wealth of contacts and relationships in the technology and investment communities globally.

At Carlyle, Mr. Grady is the Chairman of Carlyle Venture Partners ("CVP"), which invests in high growth technology, medical device and business services companies. He has served as global coordinator of and helped to build Carlyle's global venture capital and growth investing operations, which today are comprised of over $4.2 billion in assets under management in 9 funds. Mr. Grady is a member of the Investment Committees of CVP, Carlyle Asia Growth Partners and Carlyle Europe Technology Partners. Carlyle has been an active venture and growth capital investor for over a decade, and has made over 80 venture and growth capital investments in the U.S. and over two dozen in China.

Mr. Grady is a director of Maxim Integrated Circuits (PINKSHEETS: MXIM) and AuthenTec, Inc., and a former director of Blackboard (traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol "BBBB") and Ingenio (sold to AT&T, traded on the NYSE under the symbol "T"). He also serves on the boards of directors of several privately held Carlyle portfolio companies, including eScreen, Panasas, Verari Systems, Secure Elements, Wall Street Institute, Viator, and The Health Central Network. ...

Prior to joining Carlyle, Mr. Grady was a Managing Director and Member of the Management Committee at Robertson Stephens & Company, a leading technology investment bank, at which he served as the lead investment banker on over 150 public market financing and M&A transactions. He served in the White House as Deputy Assistant to former President George H.W. Bush and as Executive Associate Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget ("OMB"). He also served as the Chief Speechwriter and policy advisor on the successful 1988 Bush presidential campaign, and as a chief aide to a Governor (Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey) and a U.S. Congresswoman (Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey). From 1994-2004, he served on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching courses on environmental policy, regulation, and "Investing in Highly Regulated Industries." ...

In addition to his many corporate leadership roles, Mr. Grady has contributed in a broad range of public service activities. He is a member of the National Commission on Energy Policy, an Advisory Trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was appointed by President Bush to the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiation ("ACTPN"), by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California Commission on Military Base Restructuring and Realignment, by the Administrator of NASA to the Blue Ribbon Commission on the Management of the International Space Station ("ISS"), and by the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution to the Commission on the Future of the Smithsonian. ...

About Symbio

Symbio leverages China outsourcing teams to help companies become global leaders. It helps organizations accelerate their software development and testing cycles by optimal application of its global resources and delivery models. Symbio also localizes and supports technology products for any language or locale. Founded in 1994 by a group of engineers from IBM's international research and development labs in Asia, Symbio now functions as a cost-effective and highly efficient extension of an organization's development, testing and globalization teams. Symbio's clients include IBM, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Citigroup, AOL, BMC, Computer Associates, and many more. For further information on Symbio, visit www.symbio-group.com.

PROJECT ANTHRAX & THE COVER-UP (PART SIX): VAXGEN'S DONALD FRANCIS & AIDS; THE THAI EXPERIMENTS; THE MAILINGS AS FASCIST "CLINICAL TRIALS"

By Alex Constantine
(Updated)

The anthrax mailings and the development of vaccines were inseparable projects - these involved animal and human experimentation. On August 3, 2008, USA Today explained the work that Dr. Ivins did at Ft. Detrick, specificially - terminal animal experiments:

"Ivins performed research that required exposing research animals to airborne anthrax, according to a 1998 report in the journal Vaccine. The goal was to test whether a new vaccine could guard against anthrax inhaled in a bioterrorist attack."

The strain of anthrax employed "in Ivins' vaccine experiments was a wet form sprayed into the faces of macaque monkeys through a mask."

In the cover story, crazed, conveniently suicidal Dr. Ivins was the "lone assassin." Clouds of confusion gather around the sacrificial goat and entire covert op (the famed "hall of mirrors" effect) when everyone involved points the finger elsewhere. Dr. Franz steered attention away from the lab:

"Q: Did Ivins and other researchers for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., work with dried anthrax spores?

"A: No, says Col. David Franz, the institute's commander until 1998 and now with the Midwest Research Institute.

"Q: Would Ivins have had the opportunity to make dried anthrax?

"A: Not in the lab, Franz says.

"Q: Did the lab have equipment to produce dried anthrax?

"A: No, Franz says, adding that it would be difficult for Ivins or others to carry out the work without detection."

Dr. David Franz

Colonel David Franz, Ivins' colleague - another Special Forces vet - was a frightfully cheerful "counter-terrorist." (Franz served in the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command for 23 of 27 years on active duty. He served as commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and as deputy commander of the Medical Research and Materiel Command. Prior to joining the Command, he served as group veterinarian for the 10th Special Forces Group, Airborne. Franz was the chief inspector on three United Nations Special Commission biological warfare inspection missions to Iraq and served as technical advisor on long-term monitoring.)
Source: http://www.k-state.edu/media/mediaguide/bios/franzbio.html

He told ABC News on April 4, 2002 that a "lot of good" had come of the anthrax attacks. Sad Sacks and Dreary Donnas may tremble because "five people have died, but we've put about $6 billion in our budget."

Thumbs up.

Dr. Charles E. McQueary, per his DoD bio, "former President of General Dynamics Advanced Technology Systems in Greensboro, N.C. He has also been President and Vice President of business units for AT&T, Lucent Technologies, and a Director for AT&T Bell Laboratories. Early in his career at Bell Laboratories, Dr. McQueary served as head of the Missile Operations Department for the SAFEGUARD Antiballistic Missile Test Program. ... Dr. McQueary is a former executive board member of the National Security Industrial Association and the American Defense Preparedness Association (ADPA) (combined to form the National Defense Industrial Association.")
Source: http://www.defenselink.mil/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=119"

A sunny disposition can carry one far in the military hierarchy. Dr. Franz was appointed to the Homeland Security Science and Technology Committee in February 2004 by Dr. Charles E. McQueary - a former president of General Dynamics, undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security.

Biological threats loomed on the horizon, the Pentagon's viral visionaries assured with psychic certainty. Peculiar, though ... read the small print on the packaging and it's clear that the newly emerging diseases and the vaccines created to repel them hung in ... CLUSTERS. Ingri Cassel comments, "Cipro and smallpox vaccine have much in common besides capturing America's urgent attention." Alas, the corporate parents of the companies that produce "these favored elixirs for anthrax and smallpox bioterrorism are linked, strangely enough, to an infamous history involving contaminated blood, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and even the Nazi [ties] that the FBI doesn't seem anxious to explore."

Cipro is manufactured by Germany's Bayer AG, and the smallpox vaccine's newly-incorporated producer is Acambis – formerly OraVax, the West Nile people. "All have jaded histories. The `Big Three' - Bayer, Baxter, and Rhone-Poulenc - are [infamous] for having infected more than 7,000 American hemophiliacs with the AIDS virus during the early 1980s. They admitted foreknowledge in selling HIV-tainted blood clotting products and settled the class action case for $100,000 per claimant."1

Two shrouded power bases of the Third Reich, Bayer and Hoechst, were spun from IG Farben following World War Two. Hermann Schmitz, president of Farben during the war (with its partial control of the Deutsche Bank) "held as much stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey as did the Rockefellers," according to author Paul Manning. He wrote that on August 10, 1944, the Rockefeller-Farben group filtered flight capital through "affiliated German/French, American, British and Swiss banks `for the new Germany.'" These reserves secured "the sophisticated distribution of national and corporate assets to safe havens" across the globe, ensuring the continuation of the "Neuordnung (New Order)" for the petrochemical, drug and banking cartels.2

An upcoming distiller of the said "elixirs," joining BioPort and Bayer, is VaxGen (owned by Genentech ((55.6%-owned by Hoffmann-La Roche (((owned by Roche AG of Switzerland, also an ally of IG Farben and the Reich))).

In November 2004 the company publicized a contract under the auspices of Project BioShield worth $877 million over five years, with the government paying VaxGen to produce 75 million doses of anthrax vaccine. In addition, the company was to receive $123 million in further payments from the government in late 2007.3

And it was just one more hyped boondoggle, if the history of AidsVax, the company's HIV drug failure, is any indication.

On October 3, 1999, the Times of London reported that before VaxGen went public, "the most important government cheerleader for AidsVax" - Dr. William Heyward, head of HIV vaccine research at the CDC - "had a secret deal to join the company." From the CDC, Dr. Heyward "lobbied policymakers and approved $8 million in grants for VaxGen. But the company had already drawn this chart on his future duties, and in January 2000, he joined ex-CDC staffer Dr. Donald Francis, VaxGen president, who also hired former CDC deputy director Dr Walter Dowdle to head its influential data monitoring board."

In US v William L. Heyward, prosecutors charged him with violation of anti-graft laws. Dr. Heyward skipped up the corporate ladder to a VP's desk at VaxGen, but eventually confessed to the flagrant conflict of interest, paid a $32,500 fine, "and escaped a high-profile criminal trial that might have proved devastating to the AidsVax project," the Times reported.

Next thing you knew, on March 17 2003, a class action suit was filed against VaxGen. The lawsuit claimed securities fraud after Dr. Heyward wrote a series of glowing reports on the potential of AidsVax that inflated the stock price but proved baseless when the drug failed in clinical trials.

A word about those "trials": As we shall see, there was little that was "clinical" about them. Testing of the vaccine was sponsored by the NIH, FDA, World Bank, UN agencies and the International Aids Vaccine Initiative.4

The tests were overseen by Dr. Donald Pinkston Francis, president of VaxGen, who, along with molecular biologist Dr. Philip Berman, founded the company in 1995. Dr. Francis, 62, was bestowed with an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Harvard in 1979. Since 1978, he has been chief of the epidemiology division at the Hepatitis Labs Division of the CDC. Under the auspices of the Agency for International Development (AID), he served as an epidemiologist in Rivers State, Nigeria (1971). He was American "epidemiological intelligence service officer" at the CDC (1971-73). In And The Band Played On, Randy Shilts's 1987 Aids book, Dr. Francis is found on no less than 76 pages, a driven, scolding, at times hysterical presence. In the movie, he's played by Full Metal Jacket's Matthew Modine."5

Dr. Leonard Horowitz, an independent authority on public health education and the origins of AIDS, writes that Dr. Francis had "intimate connections to the U.S. Government agencies, programs and people (including Max Essex and Robert Gallo) that CREATED numerous AIDS-like and Ebola-like viruses during the `Special Virus Cancer Program' of the late 1960s and early 1970s..."6

Dr. Francis is one of the instigators of Aids, as Horowitz deconstructs the history of the disease.7

The London Times detailed the "clinical trials" conducted by Dr. Francis's team in Thailand. As Dr. Heyward sees it, "only through such trials will further knowledge be gained". Thumbs up…

The "trials" followed the Farben model:

AIDSVAX: THE VAXGEN EXPERIMENT
Sunday Times Magazine (UK)
October 3, 1999
By Brian Deer

... At first glance, Thailand is a strange location to carry out medical trials.... Corruption is de rigeueur, while police are accused by Amnesty International of "extra-judicial killings". Much of its profile relies on sex: first with young women and later with children.

Since the coup, however, quick cheap, experiments on the Thai population have been added to the country's attractions. Dozens of projects are currently in progress, run by foreign pharmaceutical companies and sponsored by the CDC and WHO. With an estimated 800,000 Thais infected with HIV, Aids is the big one, with tests of drugs, immune-system stimulants, and top of the list Francis's AidsVax trial.

It makes sense to test products where the risk of Aids is greatest, but my attention was drawn to potential problems during a conference in a Bangkok hotel. The topic was Aids vaccines. Francis spoke. And a doctor pointed out that some volunteers in an AZT trial were mothers from remote hill tribes. "They come across the border from Burma." he said.

"They don't speak Thai, so there is the question of whether they can understand enough to give informed consent."

The question was brushed aside ("They keep coming back.") and might not have meant much if I hadn't also met an activist from the northern town of Chiang Mai. Despite grilling 11 people who swallowed tablets daily, he complained that he couldn't discover even the name of the product or the pharmaceutical company involved. This man was a former heroin user, so I asked him where VaxGen was recruiting. "Go to Khlong Toei," he said. "By Port Authority Building. That's where they'll get people for the trial."

Khlong Toei is a slum; a sewage-stinking wasteland; a cauldron of disease and drug use. The better-off live in concrete hutches, with wire-fenced windows and balconies. Next down in the social scale are wooden-shack coops on plots of flood-prone ground. Then there are kennels: festering shantytown alleys of plank, sheet-iron and debris sheds. The "streets" are dim corridors, with boardwalk floors, cluttered with children and dogs. At night frail figures shuffle around, suffering from Aids, tuberculosis or both.

Thailand was once praised for anti-HIV efforts in disease hot zones such as this. But evidence suggests that since the 1992 coup priorities have changed. In 1992, a health minister complained that talk about the virus had "seriously affected tourism." And now, official figures show that Aids prevention has been slashed by one third against comparable public health programmes.

The biggest cuts have been in initiatives aimed specifically at drug misusers. "There used to be a project for clean needles in the early 90s, but now it's gone," a spokeswoman for a Khlong Toei charity, the Duang Prateep Foundation, told me....

Nobody could explain the thinking, but the effect on the junkies can be measured. Blood tests reveal that HIV prevalence peaked among female prostitutes in 1993 - when 30% were positive - and has since fallen back to 21%. Among rent boys, prevalence peaked in the following year at 18%, and is now half that figure. But prevalence among heroin-injectors has leapt from 31% in 1994 to a staggering 47% now.

Were these changes evidence that the government were allowing the junkies to be put at greater risk to make them useful for experiments? (Health department officials told me that if AidsVax is marketed, they expect a billion-dollar manufacturing plant.) I couldn't find out. People wouldn't talk when I raised such contentious concerns. Even Bangkok's Medicines Sans Frontieres staff went silent when asked about the trial.

Francis is convinced that nothing is amiss, and his collaborators voice no worries. "All have assured me that this has been done ethically," he told me, when eventually we met. "We are going out of our way not to increase the vulnerability of an already vulnerable population." The trial was conducted in Thailand, he said, for scientific reasons. Different parts of the world are linked with different HIV subtypes, with their myriad subsidiary strains. B subtype strains, for instance, are most common in North America, Europe and Australasia; A, C and D in Africa. In Thailand, there's a mix of B and E strains and, for technical reasons to do with E strains, the company argues that success is more likely there "than anywhere else in the world."

But there are aspects of the project which suggest that the junkies may be involved in an unusual way. A parallel trial among gay men at American clinics is having problems finding and keeping volunteers, due to scepticism towards the venture. But at Kachit's clinics the programme has features which may help to avoid these snags. The junkies get methadone, an oral heroin substitute, plus $10 expenses for each of up to 17 visits. The risk is the appearance of offering drugs and money as inducements to this desperate group.

There's also a feature of the experiment's design that seems self-contradictory. If the methadone liquid got people off injecting heroin, the volunteers' risk of infection would slump and they would be of little use to the vaccine trial. In fact, documents drawn up with the CDC and WHO show that that 7% of clinic users are expected to become HIV-infected each year. So, despite the oral methadone, they keep injecting heroin. They may even buy it with VaxGen's money and have an increased risk of getting Aids.

The logic of the trial creates a dilemma for Francis. The moral uncertainties about using junkies as GUINEA PIGS might be offset by humanity's greater needs. But there would need to be plausible scientific grounds to think that AidsVax might work. And on that the VaxGen experiment is open to even greater doubts. ...

AidsVax cannot give volunteers Aids, but there may be something even more terrifying than the anxiety that it might accelerate their disease if they are later infected with HIV. Some scientists think that, if it works at all, the product may have a dangerous effect on the evolution of HIV. Five years ago, Los Alamos scientists declared that there was "no simple answer" as to whether Aids could become contagious through coughs and sneezes - and other researchers argue that, in much the same way as a partial course of antibiotics can promote resistant bacteria, so a poorly-effective vaccine may promote more deadly and infectious strains.

This may sound like journalistic scare, but HIV's best-understood RNA cousin is influenza virus, which produces devastating mutations every 20 or 30 years. Hepatitis B virus, meanwhile, has already produced mutant strains accepted as being vaccine-induced. "When you use a vaccine, you are introducing another selective pressure," Dr Paul Ewald, professor of biology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, explained. "It could make the problem more damaging, or less damaging, depending on the antigen you use."

Researchers told me that, compared with the potential risks to volunteers, this doomsday scenario was "unlikely". But with agencies standing by to jab hundreds of millions of people, some wondered if, for our species' safety, "unlikely" was reassuring enough. "My personal view," Dr Art Ammann, president of the San Francisco-based Global Strategy for HIV Prevention, and a former AidsVax researcher, said, "is that we could face a global nightmare." ...

NOTES

1) Ingri Cassel, "Public Health Expert Says Solving The Anthrax Mailing Mystery May Be Easy: FBI Doesn't Seem Interested," news release, Tetrahedron, LLC, Nov. 12, 2001.

2) Paul Manning, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, Secaucus: Lyle Stuart, 1981.

3) Adam Feuerstein, "VaxGen Hits Anthrax Jackpot," TheStreet.com, November 5, 2004.
http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/comment/adamfeuerstein/10193015.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

4) Brian Deer, "AidsVax: The VaxGen Experiment," Sunday Times Magazine (UK), October 3 1999.

5) Ibid.

6) Dr. Leonard Horowitz, "New Genocidal AIDS Vaccine Experiments: Don Francis, Genentech, Hoffman-La-Roche, and The Rise of the Fourth Reich," updated 11/07/02. http://www.originofaids.com/articles/experiments.htm

7) Ibid. Also see, A. Cantwell, AIDS and the Doctors of Death. 1988 (pp. 50-2, 78, 178), A. Cantwell, Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, 1993 (pp. 42, 109, 123).

Murderous Dallas Oil Tycoons on Vacation: The Murchisons of Vail, CO and La Jolla, CA

Excerpt: "Where Dallas' elite go to cool their heels in the heat of summer," By ALAN PEPPARD, Dallas Morning News, August 4, 2008

... To be caught in one's own hometown between the Fourth of July and Labor Day is prima facie evidence that, in financial terms at least, you are mortal. Even a leased Maserati and a leased Rolex can't erase the shame of not having a summer home in the Hamptons.

For affluent Dallasites, Colorado has always been the default destination for summer hedonism. The late Dallas tycoon John Murchison was one of the founders of Vail and it still has its adherents. ...

Texans take La Jolla

The annual migration of Dallasites to La Jolla, Calif., began in 1951 when Clint Murchison Sr., father of Vail's John Murchison, built the Hotel Del Charro in the seaside town. Three years later, he and his best friend, Fort Worth oilman Sid Richardson (great-uncle of the billionaire Bass brothers), bought control of the nearby Del Mar Race Track.

Their guests not only included the Dallas aristocracy, but also summer regular J. Edgar Hoover and movie stars such as Jimmy Durante, William Powell, Betty Grable and Joan Crawford. (Ms. Crawford once spent an unfruitful evening pursuing the never-married Mr. Richardson, who had been the subject of a Look magazine article titled "The Case of the Billionaire Bachelor.") ...

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/summervacation_0804gl.2f0bba2.html

Ralph Reed's Link to McCain Brews Storm of Criticism

Former Christian Coalition leader tied to scandal sent e-mail for Atlanta fund-raiser

By AARON GOULD SHEININ
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 08/14/08

Ralph Reed's involvement in an upcoming Atlanta fund-raiser for John McCain has the presidential candidate fending off an onslaught of criticism from Democrats.

Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, was tied to the corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff, the highly paid Washington lobbyist now serving a six-year prison term. Much of the Abramoff scandal was exposed by an investigation led by McCain when he chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

McCain's campaign said Tuesday that Reed has no official role in the presidential campaign. But that didn't stop Democrats from castigating Reed's participation in Monday's fund-raiser at the Marriott Marquis.

"John McCain's decision to cozy up to one of the central figures in the Republican culture of corruption shows how far he is willing to go to win," said Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. "Despite all of his rhetoric about reform, McCain's willingness to accept money raised by tainted Abramoff cronies like Ralph Reed shows that McCain simply cannot be trusted to bring change to Washington politics."

The Georgia Democratic Party was even more blunt. "John McCain says he takes the high road, and then he comes to Atlanta and chows down on shrimp cocktail with an unindicted co-conspirator," party spokesman Martin Matheny said.

The Republican National Committee struck back. Katie Wright, a spokeswoman, called the attacks "baffling" considering McCain led efforts to uncover Abramoff's corruption. McCain, she said, "has a solid record of integrity."

Democrats have Abramoff's dirt on their shoes as well, she said, noting that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) accepted nearly $70,000 in contributions from Abramoff and his associates.

Link began in 2000

All this, apparently, from one e-mail. On Aug. 7, Reed wrote friends and supporters asking them to give to Monday's fund-raiser. He praised McCain and said he had joined the "McCain Victory 2008" team in a message that was billed as a "special invitation from Ralph Reed."

McCain Victory 2008 is a joint fund-raising venture of the McCain campaign, the RNC and various state Republican parties.

The first hint of controversy came Monday when Campaign Money Watch, a Washington group that monitors campaign finance, called on McCain to cancel the event.

"Senator McCain knows exactly how Ralph Reed helped Jack Abramoff defraud Indian tribes out of tens of millions of dollars," Campaign Money Watch director David Donnelly said. "Senator McCain should spare himself any further embarrassment by canceling this event immediately."

Reed's firm received more than $4 million to rally Christian voters against a casino that competed with Abramoff's Indian clients.

Although McCain's committee uncovered much of Abramoff's shenanigans, McCain never called Reed to testify. Reed was not charged in the subsequent Justice Department investigation, although the scandal helped sink his 2006 bid for the Georgia GOP's nomination as lieutenant governor.

McCain and Reed's history goes back to 2000, the first time McCain ran for president. His bid was derailed in the South Carolina primary by a whispering campaign of false charges. Reed oversaw direct mail for George W. Bush's campaign in the state.

McCain has tried to heal wounds from 2000. They include a rift with some evangelicals, whom McCain criticized after the devastating loss. For some, such as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, that reconciliation was successful. For others, it was not.

Evangelical votes needed

All this creates an electoral minefield for McCain. Having Reed's support could bolster his campaign with still-skeptical evangelicals. Should McCain criticize Reed's actions on his behalf, he risks angering the evangelical voters he needs as part of the traditional Republican base. Reed's presence also leaves McCain open to criticism, since he uses his work against Abramoff to boost his reputation as a reformer.

Damien LaVera, a DNC spokesman, struck that chord Wednesday.

Reed's involvement in the Atlanta event, LaVera said, "raises serious questions about why he [McCain] didn't bring Ralph Reed before his committee. Was he concerned it would undercut his presidential campaign? Now you see Ralph Reed raising money for his campaign."

The McCain campaign has said little about the fund-raiser or the Reed controversy. McCain spokesman Jeff Sadosky said that "Ralph Reed is not part of our fund-raising organization in the state of Georgia, nor is he part of this event."

Reed initially told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday that he sent last week's e-mail as a private citizen, and that he has no role in the campaign. But he reportedly told The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, that he was asked to do so by Jamie Reynolds III, McCain's Georgia finance committee chairman.

Reynolds was not in his office Wednesday and did not return a telephone message. When contacted for clarification on why he sent the e-mail last week, Reed's office issued a statement.

"I take the long view of politics, which is that yesterday's opponent can be tomorrow's friend or ally," the e-mailed statement said. "I have found this to be the case with Senator McCain. I am supporting him because he is running on principled conservative positions on taxes, judges, terrorism, energy, values and the family. I hold no position, title or official role in the McCain campaign and am not seeking one."

Political charge

The issue has some here scratching their heads.

"I was very intrigued when I heard reports that Ralph Reed was actively fund-raising for McCain," said Jim Beck, executive director of the Georgia Christian Coalition. "I was curious as to whether or not Senator McCain knew that Ralph Reed was actively fund-raising for him."

Mark DeMoss, a GOP political strategist from Gwinnett County who specializes in evangelical voters, sees a problem for the larger political system.

"The whole process on both sides of the aisle is getting so politically charged," said DeMoss, who said he received both Reed's e-mail and an official invitation to Monday's event. "Someone can certainly take issue with Ralph Reed's politics or his conservative views," DeMoss said, "but I would hate to think Senator McCain would decline Ralph's effort to recruit some people to attend a fund-raiser in Atlanta. Ralph has friends and he has enemies. Anyone who's been in politics for long, the same could be said."

http://www.ajc.com/test/content/news/stories/2008/08/14/ralph_reed_mccain.html

Hells Angels: Officials Mum about Fire at ATF Agent's Home/Seattle Officer Involved in Biker Shooting was Disciplined Before

by Dennis Wagner
Arizona Republic
Aug. 17, 2008

Criminal investigators in Tucson put up a wall of secrecy last week after a fire that police believe was intentionally set damaged the home of a federal investigator who has faced death threats since he infiltrated the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Dawn Hanke, a Pima County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman, confirmed that deputies are investigating a blaze at the residence of Jay Dobyns, who is among the most celebrated agents in the history of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Hanke said detectives have not established whether the blaze was set by an arsonist. She declined to provide additional information.

The blaze started about 3 a.m. last Sunday in the back-porch area at a house on a mini ranch in northwest Tucson, according to Willie Treatch, a fire marshal with Rural/Metro. Dobyns was not home at the time, but his wife and two children had to run outside in their nightclothes. Treatch said there were no injuries, but flames consumed the rear of the house, causing about $30,000 in damage. He would not discuss the investigation.

Dobyns, an agent for two decades, declined comment for this story.

The former all-conference receiver on the University of Arizona football team joined the ATF in 1987 and spent much of his career working dangerous undercover cases. He was wounded twice in the line of duty and received some of law enforcement's highest awards.

Several years ago, Dobyns penetrated Hells Angels clubs in Arizona by posing as a criminal affiliated with another biker gang. The case, known as Operation Black Biscuit, resulted in numerous indictments but mostly fell apart in court amid defense allegations of wrongdoing by snitches, investigators and prosecutors.

According to federal records, Hells Angels and other criminals have made threatening comments about Dobyns and his family and once sought to enlist prison-gang members to carry out a hit.

As the operation ended, an outlaw biker in Tucson supposedly warned Dobyns he would always be a target, looking over his shoulder. Dobyns subsequently complained that the ATF failed to protect him and his family despite 20 years of service. He criticized bureau administrators and filed a federal claim for damages.

Special Agent Tom Mangan of the ATF declined comment on the fire and would not say whether the bureau is assisting Dobyns with security.

Dobyns' exploits are described in several books, and he has co-authored a new one, set for release in February.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2008/08/17/20080817dobyns0817.html
•••••••
" ... Of the other four officers at the scene, one has been identified as a sergeant who at one time ran the security detail for former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice. ... "

Seattle officer involved in biker shooting was disciplined before
August 11, 2008

Detective taunted football fans, reportedly made threat

By HECTOR CASTRO AND BRAD WONG
P-I REPORTERS

The Seattle police officer who reportedly shot a known member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang at a weeklong rally in South Dakota was previously disciplined, once for taunting fans at a football game and another time for allegedly threatening to shoot a restaurant manager who had asked him to leave.

Police officials have not released the name of the officer involved in the shooting, or four other officers with him at the time, but sources have confirmed he is a 43-year-old detective who works for the Seattle police Pawn Shop Squad and is a police guild board member. The officer also is known throughout the department as an avid motorcycle rider.

South Dakota investigators have obtained videotape of the shooting that Seattle union leaders believe will exonerate the officer of any wrongdoing in the altercation that left a Hells Angels member wounded.

"I think it's going to be pretty evident that the officer was fearful of his safety and life and that's why he had to fire," said Sgt. Rich O'Neill, president of the Seattle Police Officers' Guild.

O'Neill said Seattle officers are now concerned for all of their safety because of the Hells Angels' reputation of violent retaliation if one of their members is attacked. "There is a real threat," he said.

Authorities have said the officer and four others at the scene all identified themselves as members of the Iron Pigs, a motorcycle club made up mostly of police officers and firefighters.

Police Officers Jon Pike, left, and Mike DeBruin, who were hired for the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., monitor Sturgis' Main Street in front of the Loud American Roadhouse on Saturday. A vacationing Seattle police officer was involved in a shooting that occurred at the bar on Saturday about 1 a.m. Of the other four officers at the scene, one has been identified as a sergeant who at one time ran the security detail for former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice. Ryan Soderlin/Rapid City Journal

The two men were with a group of officers who had traveled to Sturgis, S.D., to join the annual motorcycle rally there.

The shooting happened around 1 a.m. Saturday at the Loud American Roadhouse, a popular bar that held as many as 500 patrons at the time. Sturgis police reported that there was an altercation between some Hells Angels gang members in the bar and members of the Iron Pigs, all of them Seattle police officers on vacation.

Authorities have not said what led to the confrontation, though sources said it might have been sparked because the officers were displaying colors or other identifying markings associated with their club. At some point, the confrontation became physical, and one of the officers allegedly fired two shots, striking and wounding one of the Hells Angels.

O'Neill said he spoke with some of the officers who attended the Sturgis motorcycle rally and that based on early indications, he believes the officer was defending himself from a "completely unprovoked" attack that might have involved choking.

"It's unfortunate that it had to end like this," O'Neill said. "All the same, the indications are that somebody was totally jumped and beaten. If that's what the investigation says, they have a right to defend themselves."

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske has relieved all five officers of duty, pending the outcome of the investigation by South Dakota authorities, according to a statement released on Saturday.

The chief also sent a team of detectives to Sturgis to learn more about the incident, including homicide Lt. Jim Dermody, homicide detectives and a sergeant with the Office of Professional Accountability. The team arrived Saturday, but there was no information available on Sunday as to what they might have learned.

"Our job isn't to interfere with the investigation, but to gather information for our internal purposes," said Seattle police spokesman Sean Whitcomb.

The group of Seattle officers has attended past Sturgis motorcycle gatherings without problems, O'Neill said.

Federal law allows off-duty officers to carry their guns, and the Seattle Police Department's manual gives each officer the option to carry one while off duty.

"One of the reasons for that federal law is that police officers, unlike anyone else, are almost on duty all the time," he said. "You never know when you might run into someone who you arrested." All are looking forward to "getting back to this side of the mountains," he said.

The officer implicated in the shooting has not been arrested or charged with any crime, but has been disciplined in the past. The detective was suspended for two days for conduct unbecoming an officer during a Seahawks football game on Jan. 8, 2005. He arrested a fan he said had assaulted him, but other witnesses said the officer's comments at the conclusion of a game the Seahawks lost to the Rams had provoked the crowd. He allegedly taunted the Seahawks fans by pretending to cry like a baby and yelling out, "Go Rams."

The man he arrested had objected, yelled at him and, during a melee, the detective was struck with a megaphone the man was holding. The officer contended the man had assaulted him and so arrested him, but other witnesses said the blow was accidental.

According to the city's investigation documents on the matter, a witness told investigators, " 'Had the officer not said a word, it would never have happened." She adds police "are supposed to keep the peace, not rile up the crowd.' "

The department disciplined the detective but continued to permit him to work off-duty security at the football stadium if he worked in a different part of the field.

On Aug. 12, 2005, he was again accused of getting into an altercation, that time at a Tacoma restaurant while off duty.

He at one point allegedly threatened to shoot the restaurant manager, who had asked him to leave.

According to internal documents, Tacoma city authorities declined to prosecute the officer, finding there was no evidence that he intended to carry out his threat, but he received a written reprimand for the incident.

But at least one witness said most regular patrons of the restaurant knew he was a cop, and that he was known to always carry a gun.

The police guild is offering moral support to the officer and his family, O'Neill said, and the union's attorney is aware of the shooting.

"The decision to fire is up to each individual officer. Only you know when you feel the time is right and your life is in danger," he said, adding, "It's a traumatic incident any time someone has to fire a handgun."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/374413_sturgis11.html

Incompetent or Cursed: Minot Air Force Base in the News Again!

ohmygov.com
AUGUST 17, 2008

After this most recent incident of a overturned truck carrying an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) booster, one thing is certain: North Dakota’s Minot Air Force Base is in the news again.

Since June, the Peace Garden State, with some of the United States' largest nuclear weapons arsenals, has provided headlines that have put North Dakota in the limelight unfortunately by an Air Force fraught with systemic problems including the removal of their current leadership, aircraft mishaps, fraudulent multi-billion dollar contracts, and the continued mismanagement of their nuclear devices.

To add to the long list of Air Force calamities, this Thursday a truck carrying the booster for a Minuteman III missile overturned a few miles east of Parshall in northwest North Dakota. The Air Force said there was no danger to the public, since it was an unarmed booster rocket for an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The truck and booster rocket, which is 66 feet long and weighs 75,000 pounds, were still sitting along the road Saturday under armed guard.
"The scene is still in the assessment phase," said Maj. Laurie A. Arellano, an Air Force spokeswoman. "It's still on its side in the ditch."

According to the Associated Press, “the truck was traveling from Minot Air Force Base to a launch facility in northwestern North Dakota when it crashed on the gravel road Thursday morning between Parshall and Makoti, about 70 miles from the air base. Two airmen in the vehicle were not seriously injured.”

Folks in this area are used to missiles being transported, and they trust the Air Force. Residents of the small towns seem unfazed by an ICBM rocket booster lying in their ditch.

Darwin Quandt, a resident of Makoti said he wasn't worried. "As long as it ain't going off, we're OK," he said. "And if it did, it wouldn't matter anyway."

http://ohmygov.com/blogs/general_news/archive/2008/08/02/incompetent-or-cursed-minot-air-force-base-in-the-news-again.aspx

Psychologists Vote on Referendum against Aiding in Bush Detention Center

by Stephen Soldz
17 August 2008
www.atlanticfreepress.com

The American Psychological Association has been racked with controversy over the role of psychologists in Bush regime detainee interrogations. Unlike other health professions, which have determined that participation in the interrogations is unethical, the APA leadership has defended psychologists’ involvement in interrogations at Guantanamo and the CIA "black sites." Psychologist opponents of the APA position have, for the first time in APA history, organized a referendum to change APA policy. They ask the APA membership to reject psychologists’ participation when such sites are in violation of international law or the Constitution. The ballots are currently arriving in members mailboxes.

After reviewing the disturbing background of psychologists crucial role in U.S. torture and detainee abuse, the referendum's crucial clause states:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in isolation of, either International law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

Jean Maria Arrigo, the psychologist who served on the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force in 2005 and exposed the PENS report as a rubber stamp for an already determined government policy, has succinctly explained the importance of a “Yes” vote on the referendum:

The ballot arrived today from APA, and I just voted Yes on the Referendum. To my mind, the timeliness of the Referendum as social action supersedes the problem of misinterpretation of the text.

My thinking on this matter has been most strongly influenced by military and intelligence personnel I know, including senior interrogators.

At an emotional level, I was much affected by audience responses to my February presentations to anti-torture symposia at two universities in Sao Paulo and the regional psychological association. Audiences were outraged by the APA endorsement of psychologists at military interrogation centers (people standing up and shouting) and truly horrified that I had agreed to the PENS report. (In Brazil, the word “interrogation” is virtually synonymous with “torture.”) If the APA leadership accommodates current government policy on interrogations, well, Brazilian psychologists can understand…, but if the APA membership defeats the Referendum, at this point in our history, that sends a bad message I cannot explain away. They are worried about the passivity of the APA legitimizing torture by our government, which legitimizes torture by their government and delegitimizes their own protests as psychologists.

Respectfully,

Jean Maria Arrigo

In response to the referendum, the APA has launched a strong effort to convince members that they should not support this "well-intended" referendum because it would restrict the ability of psychologists to work in domestic prisons and mental hospitals. Although legally informed psychologists have opined that any such risk is extremely far fetched, the referendum authors have issued a clarifying statement that would put these concerns to rest for those sincerely concerned about the domestic application of the referendum:

This referendum is focused on settings such as Guantánamo Bay and the CIA ‘black sites’ set up by the U.S. as part of its ‘global war on terror’; settings where the persons being detained are denied the protections of either constitutional or international law, settings which have been denounced by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.

The campaign of confusion has, however, only intensified since this clarification was issued.

Psychologist and attorney Bryant Welch, who founded the organization's Practice Directorate and then served as its Executive Director for eight years, has himself penned a piece explaining what is at stake in this referendum [included here with permission]:

Vote to End the Shame APA has Inflicted on all Psychologists
By Bryant L. Welch, J.D., Ph.D.

In the eyes of the world psychologists are being seen as aiders and abettors of torture. The damage to the profession grows day by day, and the shamefulness of it reflects on all of us, whether we like it or not.

This is the third consecutive annual convention in which APA has presented new reasons for refusing to explicitly state that psychologists are not to participate in detention centers where torture is being used. In 2006 we were told, among many things, that torture was not occurring, and that it was sufficient for APA to reiterate its 1986 resolution “opposing torture.” Last year we were told that psychologists’ presence at the detention centers was actually necessary to prevent the torture whose very existence these same APA officials denied the previous year. Bizarrely, APA outlawed nineteen specific forms of torture, as if in some way the large number of proscribed techniques would cripple torture efforts.

As a result, for the first time in APA history, APA rank and file members have secured the necessary signatures to petition the APA and force APA to submit the torture issue to a referendum by the membership.

Persisting in its support for psychologists’ participation in Bush detention centers and appearing insensitive to the moral concerns of its members, APA leaders are now advising APA members to oppose the referendum because the language of the referendum might be interpreted to preclude psychologists working in certain institutional settings. This argument is based on scenarios that are extremely far fetched and could readily be addressed even were they to occur. To the public, of course, the message would be that psychologists are not willing to stop torture now if there is even a remote risk of losing jobs in the future.

Since the Bush Administration will be out of office by the next time APA meets, this will be the last opportunity psychologists will have to remove this terrible stain from our reputation and our history

Torture is not a nuanced issue.

Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum.

For more information see Torture, Political Manipulation and the American Psychological Association.

Bryant Welch, J.D., Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and licensed attorney. In 1985 he proposed and developed the APA Practice Directorate which he ran from 1985-93. He is the author of State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind. He can be reached directly at welchfirm@aol.com. ...

STORY CONTINUES

YAF: Far-right ‘hate group’ members sought, won election in Michigan races

By TODD A. HEYWOOD
8/12/08
www.michiganmessenger.com

YAF members present themselves to voters as run-of-the-mill Republicans

Members of the Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) have gotten a ton of publicity over the last two years for racist and homophobic antics on campus, earning the YAF a listing as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and as an “extremist group” by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

But now a slightly more scary trend is appearing — they’re running for elected office.

Kyle Bristow

Kyle Bristow, the former chair of MSU-YAF, ran for and achieved the post of precinct delegate of the 29th district in southeast Michigan’s Clinton Township.

This is not Bristow’s first time in an elective position. He served a short term as representative to Associated Students of Michigan State University (ASMSU), the student governing body of MSU. He was recalled from that post, representing the James Madison College after students learned of his plans to eliminate all minority groups, create a white council and “hunt down illegal immigrants in the Lansing area.” In April, Bristow was involved in bringing Canadian Nazi Paul Fromm to Lansing.

Tyler Whitney

Tyler Whitney, a 20-year-old MSU student with links to the 2007-2008 presidential campaign of anti-immigration and anti-gay Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, as well as to the YAF MSU chapter, made a quiet, unnoticed bid for a slot as a Republican trustee for Bath Township in Clinton county north of Lansing.

He came in fourth in Tuesday’s primary in a five-way race, but what’s more interesting is how he presented himself to voters. That is, his time as the webmaster for Tom Tancredo for President as well as his participating in an anti-gay protest in Lansing with MSU YAF did not make it into either his campaign literature or any media coverage of the would-be trustee.

Nor did his time working with the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance to recall Republican State Rep. Richard Ball. The 2008 effort sponsored by the Howie Rich and Grover Norquist-funded Americans for Tax Reform was labeled a blackmail effort by the far right-wing, free-market extremists attempting to punish moderate Republicans who voted for tax increases.

Instead, Whitney, who trained at the Leadership Institute in Virginia — which trains conservative youth activists from across the country — ran a campaign with platforms that included encouraging new businesses and saving green space. No mention of his attendance at Nick Griffin’s speech about the British National Party at MSU. Griffin and his party are openly racist, running a platform to prevent all non-whites from immigrating to England. During the appearance at MSU, Griffin made claims that parts of the Holocaust were fabricated by the Allied powers. He claimed the chimneys at Auschwitz were added by the Allied troops who liberated the infamous death camp.

If Whitney were elected a trustee, he would be in charge of such decisions as zoning changes, ordinances and other related local government issues for the small township.

Dennis Lennox III

Whitney’s attempt at running for office follows that of Dennis Lennox III. Lennox was the chair of YAF’s chapter at Central Michigan University (CMU) back in April of 2007 when CMU’s student government considered ousting the group by labeling them as a hate group. The student government-led move was in response to an anti-gay graffiti incident on campus, combined with the close ties the CMU YAF chapter had with MSU’s more infamous YAF chapter. Lennox threw his hat in the ring to run as a Republican for the state House, but quickly backed out when the incumbent of the 105th, Kevin Elsenheimer, announced he planned to seek re-election.

Lennox is known nationally as the controversial student who followed Gary Peters, who is running for the 9th Congressional District as a Democrat, around CMU with a video camera. Lennox was on Peters for taking a position at the university and running for office. Lennox was recently punished by the school for passing out literature against Gary Peters in violation of university rules.

Lennox has since started a new group at CMU called The Conservatives that is funded in part by the aforementioned Leadership Institute.

(Cross-posted at YAFWatch.)

http://www.michiganmessenger.com/2084/yaf-members-take-a-crack-at-local-elections

When The World Said 'No' To The Jews

By Dr. Ervin Birnbaum
www.jewishpress.com
August 13, 2008

In its confrontation with the West, Iran is using the Nazi playbook circa 1938. The Iranians have been boycotting, stalling, and sidestepping every attempt to halt their nuclear program.

So far the UN has failed to come up with a satisfactory answer to the threat, and the Six-Nation Meeting in Geneva last month, which for the first time included a high-level U.S. official, Undersecretary of State William Burns, failed to persuade the Islamic Republic to halt its uranium enrichment program.

As if the five European powers and the U.S. were the ones not fulfilling their obligations, the chief Iranian negotiator, Saeed Jalili, declared at the meeting: "Iran is calling on the Western powers to resume the dialogue."

In other words, the good guy, Iran, is calling on the bad guys, led by European Union envoy Javier Solana, to give up their recalcitrant ways, pleading with them to "resume the dialogue."

Hitler reborn. The bad guy turning to the good guy with an earnest appeal to finally consider becoming good - just as the Anschluss (German annexation) of Austria in March 1938 was, as the Germans had it, not the invasion of a sovereign state in the heart of Europe but the rectification of the "evil" of Versailles.

The year 1938 was both eventful and chilling, witness to not just the Anschluss but also to the Munich Agreement, Kristallnacht - and a conference held from July 6-15 at Evian, France, one of the most significant meetings of all time concerning the Jewish people.

The world has been doing its best to forget the Evian Conference of 1938. Thus the great Grand Larousse Encyclopedique of France speaks about the beauty of the place (as do other encyclopedias) but only mentions a conference held in March 1962 to mark the signing of a French-Algerian accord.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (1982 edition) also makes mention of the latter event - "In 1962 a ceasefire agreement between the French government and the provisional government of Algeria was concluded in Evian" - but ignores the 1938 conference that in effect decided the fate of the Jews.

The Schweitzer Lexicon does touch on the Evian Conference of 1938, "called at [President] Roosevelt's initiative after Hitler's march into Austria, to find a suitable solution to the German and Austrian refugee problem." Note, however, that the Jews are not mentioned at all.

In March 1938 Hitler staged his sensational march on Austria, with all the clatter and terror, pomp and circumstance, of which the Nazis were consummate masters.

I was a child growing up in nearby Czechoslovakia, but I remember vividly that watershed event in our lives. It was a Friday afternoon. The radio in our home was tuned to Vienna. The news was unambiguous. German troops were marching into Austria. As the troops advanced on Vienna, Hitler made his birthplace, Braunau, the first stop and touchingly placed flowers on his mother's grave.

By late afternoon, Hitler was on his way to the Austrian capital. My father broke away from the radio and ordered us to the synagogue. For the first time in my recollection he left the radio on for Shabbat. After we returned from services and made a hasty Kiddush on the wine and blessing over challah, all attention was again focused on the reports emanating from our radio.

At about eight p.m. the chancellor of Austria gave his final radio address: "Because we did not wish to spill German blood, we have ordered the Austrian army to offer no resistance. I take leave of the Austrian people with a German farewell and the greeting: God protect Austria."

It was around midnight that Hitler's motorcade entered Vienna. The bells of the city's revered St. Stephens' Church pealed hymns of warm welcome. Delirious crowds cheered, shouted, and cried in rapture.

The German-speaking Austrians, humiliated by the breakup of their extensive empire at the end of World War I, released pent-up frustration in a rapturous welcome of the Fuhrer who dared to abrogate the Versailles Treaty.

The Anschluss added to Hitler's Reich more than 200,000 Jews, to whom all Nazi anti-Jewish legislation was promptly applied, and at an accelerated pace. The complete ruin of Jewish life in Austria came a month later when all Jewish holdings and individual wealth above $2,000 were confiscated by the Nazis.

The world watched the goings-on and barely uttered a sound. There were some formal protests and a bit of tongue-clicking on the part of leading statesmen and diplomats at the League of Nations, but nothing more.

On March 16, The New York Times noted: "This afternoon the Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt was invaded by triumphant crowds that called families from their houses and forced them to kneel and scrub the pavements shouting 'Perish Jewry,' 'Out with the Jews!' "

Two days later the Times described storm troopers "entering Jewish-owned shops and carrying off whatever goods they fancied as well as money, and going into private homes and demanding large sums of moneypersonal jewelry and other valuables."

The number of suicides among Viennese Jewry rose to some 200 a day. The Jews found the ground opening up under their feet with no hope of escape as Italy, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia simultaneously closed their borders to Jewish refugees. All this was reported in the world press.

In the wake of the reports about the humiliation and suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, President Franklin Roosevelt called for an international conference to address the matter. Plans for the meeting were announced on March 22, ten days after the Anschluss.

Hitler's response was immediate and full of scorn. Addressing himself to the "other world" - the non-Nazi, civilized world - he said: "I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals, will at last be generous enough to convert that sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries - for all I care, even on luxury ships."

It took a full three and a half months to organize the conference at Evian, a luxury resort on Lake Geneva, though all the while the newspapers were reporting shocking episodes of Jewish humiliation on virtually a daily basis.

No one caught more clearly the impact of the moment than Anne O'Hare McCormick, who wrote in The New York Times on July 4, the eve of the Evian Conference: "It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings around our consulates in Vienna and other cities waiting in suspense for what happens at Evian. It is not a question of how many unemployed this country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of civilization. Can America live with itself if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination?"

We ought to emphasize here that this was not 1944, or 1942, or even 1940. It was 1938, and an article in The New York Times spoke of the policy of extermination being formulated by the Germans against the Jewish people. The tip of the iceberg had begun to emerge above the waves; those who were ready to face facts with a grain of realism could tell. The indicators were unmistakable.

The conference at Evian opened on July 6 with the declared purpose of seeking a solution to the problem of the refugees who wished to leave Germany. Thirty-two nations participated. There was much flamboyant rhetoric. Locations such as Kenya, British Guiana and Madagascar, whose places on the map most of the participating delegates would have had difficulty pinpointing, were generously proposed for refugee settlement - always territories belonging to another party.

Australia, with vast, unpopulated areas, announced: "As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one."

France stressed that it had reached a saturation point and could not bring in refugees.

The Peruvian delegate pointedly remarked that the United States had given his country an example of "caution and wisdom" by its own immigration restrictions.

Central American states issued a joint statement saying they could accept no "traders and intellectuals."

Brazil actually declared that every visa application would have to be accompanied by a certificate of Christian baptism.

Canada was prepared to accept only experienced agricultural workers ( a designation that conveniently exempted all but a handful of Europe's Jews).

Britain, while prepared to accept Jewish children (some 9,000 eventually arrived there) was not willing to accept their parents because "a sudden rush of Jewish refugees might arouse anti-Semitic feelings."

The United States would not go beyond its usual annual German immigration quota of 25,957 - although it had allowed only a total of 27,000 German Jews to enter in the six years between Hitler's rise to power and the Evian Conference.

Inexplicably, the U.S. government demanded of the Jews desiring to migrate to the United States certificates of good conduct from the German police, a cruel and inhuman demand, made with the full knowledge that the Germans at the time viewed the Jews as worse than vermin.

The Swiss representative, Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, spoke about the threatening refugee inundation of Switzerland. Three or four thousand Jewish refugees had already crossed the frontiers, Rothmund reported.

"Switzerland, which has as little use for these Jews as Germany has, will herself take measures to protect [herself] from being swamped by the Jews," he declared.

The consequences of the Evian Conference, the avowed purpose of which was to help Jewish refugees, were disastrous. Among other developments, all German passports of Jews were henceforth stamped with a large red "J," further curtailing the already limited freedom of Jews to move about.

When Nazi observers at the Conference returned to Berlin they told Hitler, "You can do what you like with the Jews, nobody is interested in them."

Hitler was triumphant. Had he not challenged the democratic world, when the Conference was first proposed, that it be generous enough to convert its claims of sympathy for the Jews into practical aid? Had he not declared, as noted above, that "we on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries - for all I care, even on luxury ships"?

The German Danziger Vorposten wrote, "We see that one likes to pity the Jews as long as one can use this pity for a wicked agitation against Germany, but that no state is prepared to [admit] a few thousand Jews. Thus the Conference serves to justify Germany's policy against Jewry."

Another newspaper, the Nationalsozialistische Parteikorrespondenz,stated that Evian had confirmed "the danger that world Jewry constitutes."

But it was not government policy alone that led to the rejection of the Jews at Evian. Popular opinion - particularly the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of the masses - influenced and even drove the actions of the decision-makers.

In England, to cite just one country, the British Medical Association declared that "no member of the medical profession wishes to see the country inundated by émigrés," while the Evening Standard editorialized, "It is felt by many people that we hear too much about the trouble of the Jews. They shout too loudly. They make too insistent a demand upon the compassion of the world. Compassion they get - and deserve - but annoyance is apt to accompany it."

Evian was a definite turning point in modern Jewish history. By the time the Conference took place, the Nazis had persecuted the Jews for six years. There were economic boycotts. There were book-burnings. Jews were deprived of their wealth and financial security. They were fired from their jobs. They were declared second-class citizens with dubious protection by law. They were forbidden to sit, shop, and visit in certain places, to employ Christians and associate with them. There was physical harassment as well as occasional attacks.

But there were no mass deportations and large-scale brutal assaults on a countrywide basis against Jewish residents. These began after Evian.

Evian clearly signaled the world's indifference to the fate of the Jews. No nation was ready to extend a helping hand to the drowning Jew when it actually would have been a rather easy thing to do. The reasons offered were in some cases no less despicable than the refusal itself - We don't want a racial problem; We don't need those traders and intellectuals (in other words, those parasites); We have as little use for them as has Germany.

The signal to the Germans was unmistakably clear: The international community may on occasion issue a formal protest and pay lip service to Christian charity, but underneath the mask of humanitarianism and compassion, the Western world does not want to be troubled by Jewish concerns. Mankind has no interest in the fate of the Jews.

After Evian, the Nazis understood their hands need not be tied by fear of reaction from the civilized world. They caught the consenting nod of the U.S., of England, of France, of Switzerland - of the 32 countries that had met ostensibly to extract the Jews from the jaws of the German beast but instead ensured their consumption.

The Germans began their relocations and deportations of Jews not long after Evian, and Kristallnacht, the Nazis' first concerted large-scale anti-Jewish atrocity, occurred within a few months of the Conference. The Jews undoubtedly would have been better off without Evian. Without the nations of the world stating so forthrightly that they were essentially uninterested in saving Jews, the Germans would not have known just how empty and shallow were the international declarations of support and sympathy for their Jewish victims.

With Evian, all confusion and uncertainty evaporated. Nazi Germany was given the green light. This was the true meaning of Evian. What counts is not what the planners of the Conference said they wanted to achieve, but rather what the Conference actually did achieve: It utterly betrayed the Jews who had placed their trust in civilized humanity.
•••
Dr. Ervin Birnbaum, a leader on the Exodus 1947, is founder and director of Shearim Netanya, the first outreach program to Russian immigrants in Israel. He has taught at City University of New York, Haifa University and the University of Moscow; served as national superintendent of education of Youth Aliyah and as the first national superintendent of education for the Institute of Jewish Studies; and, at the request of David Ben-Gurion, founded and directed the English Language College Preparatory School at Midreshet Sde Boker.

http://www.jewishpress.com/displayContent_new.cfm?mode=a§ionid=61&contentid=35084&contentName=When%20The%20World%20Said%20'No'%20To%20The%20Jews

Ex-CIA-Backed Haitian Death Squad Leader Convicted of Mortgage Fraud

www.democracynow.org
July 28, 2008

Here in New York, a former CIA-backed Haitian death squad leader has been found guilty on all counts in a mortgage fraud case. Emmanuel “Toto” Constant was found to have orchestrated a scheme to flip properties at inflated prices by selling them to so-called straw buyers. Human rights groups say Constant ordered killings and torture in the Caribbean nation in the 1990s, before fleeing to the United States. He has evaded deportation after threatening to go public with the extent of his ties to the CIA. In a statement, Jennie Green of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, “The conviction gives…his victims hope that he will soon be brought to justice for his crimes in Haiti that included the murder and rape and other torture of thousands more.” Constant will be sentenced in September.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/28/headlines

Posada: A terror suspect abroad honored in Miami

Los Angeles Times Archive
May 07, 2008 in print edition A-13

A dinner with 500 fellow Cuban exiles honors the militant and former CIA operative, now 80 and still wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges. The dapper octogenarian in a crisp blue suit, his face smoothed by plastic surgery, swanned from table to table in the candlelit banquet hall, bestowing kisses and collecting accolades.

An aging movie star being feted by fans? A veteran politico taking his bows?

No, the man being honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a sold-out gala was Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges and under a deportation order for illegally entering the United States three years ago.

Posada, 80, has mostly kept a low profile since his release from a Texas prison a year ago and a federal judge’s dismissal of the only U.S. charges against him – making false statements to immigration officials. But recent events like the Friday dinner and an exhibit and sale of his paintings last fall show that the man who spent his life trying to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro has returned to the social forefront of this city’s exile community.

“We are coming to the end of a terrible stage. The end of our struggle is near,” Posada told the crowd of supporters in evening dress, referring to Castro’s failing health.

Venezuela’s ambassador in Washington, Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, condemned the celebration of Posada as a mockery of justice and evidence of a Bush administration double standard in fighting terrorism.

“This is outrageous, particularly because he kept talking about violence,” Alvarez said of Posada. “He said that the whole thing now is ‘to sharpen our machetes’ ” for a confrontation with leftist regimes in Latin America. ...

Story continues
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/07/nation/na-posada7

True Lies and Foreign Wars

" ... Georgia's leader, says Reagan-era official Paul Craig Roberts, is a "U.S. puppet." He studied in the U.S. on State Department fellowships, worked at a New York law firm, his government's election was subsidized by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros's Open Society Institute. He put a George W. Bush Boulevard in his capital. ... "

RICK SALUTIN
Globe & Mail
August 15, 2008

Since the Second World War, the "good war," people seem to demand unambiguously just wars. So each new conflict provokes attempts to find parallels to Hitler and the Nazis. In the Persian Gulf war, Bush the elder called Saddam Hussein worse than Hitler. The Bosnian war had camps, emaciated prisoners and alleged genocide. Now, in Georgia, President Mikhail Saakashvili says Russian troops are "pushing people into concentration camps" with "World War II-type and Baltic-type ethnic cleansing." He told Katie Couric the Russians are "an insult to humanity." In other words, inhuman monsters like guess who. Russia replies that Georgia attacked first with a "blitzkrieg."

It doesn't really work since the Nazis were pretty much sui generis in their technologized savagery and racist justification. Ethnic cleansing, for instance, used to be called population transfer and was common. It is cruel and despicable, but it's not Auschwitz. Such acts are frequent in foreign policy, routinely cloaked by attempts to claim moral status that are obviously hypocritical. Take the Georgia conflict. Russia supports autonomy in the ethnic regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but denies it for Chechnya. The U.S. backs separation for Kosovo, but rejects it in the Georgia cases. It praises democracy in Georgia, but in Iraq ignores a democratically elected government's call for it to leave. And Georgia's President is a democrat who suppresses protest in his streets. The claims about fighting the good fight are fig leaves, even Hitler mouthed them. South Ossetia's beleaguered 70,000 people? Barely table stakes for some real politics. What are the true stakes?

These tend to appear lower down in the stories and press releases. Georgia's leader, says Reagan-era official Paul Craig Roberts, is a "U.S. puppet." He studied in the U.S. on State Department fellowships, worked at a New York law firm, his government's election was subsidized by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros's Open Society Institute. He put a George W. Bush Boulevard in his capital. He admits this "is not about Georgia ... It is about America, its values." The U.S.? It wants to ring Russia militarily and move Caspian oil through Georgia so as to bypass Iran and Russia. Russia wants to assert itself in the 'hood, like any great power. It uses autonomy movements in Georgia as "daggers" to threaten the U.S. oil strategy, says energy expert Michael Klare. It differs from the U.S. mainly in that the U.S. considers the Caucasus, the Mideast and the rest of the world all as its "sphere" of "national interest." None of this involves confronting a new Hitler, it might as well be the Boer War or the Indian mutiny. Welcome to the 19th century. ...

Story continues

'Embarrassing' Lack of Response to Nazis in NZ

" ... There was absolutely no political will to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1940s and early 1950s, posing as refugees fleeing communism. ... "

By Hamish Aug 2008
www.odt.co.nz

It is believed up to 40 wanted war criminals escaped to New Zealand following World War 2 and the Government's lack of action was an "embarrassment", says a leading Nazi hunter.

"New Zealand's response on this issue should be a source of embarrassment," Simon Wiesenthal Centre director Dr Efraim Zuroff, of Israel, said yesterday.

A Holocaust historian, Dr Zuroff founded the centre in 1986 which has tracked and identified more than 2800 suspected Nazi war criminals. Many of those war criminals were discovered to have fled to Western democracies, and the centre has worked with countries to bring suspects to trial.

In 1987, Canada passed legislation to enable prosecution of suspected Nazi war criminals and was followed by Australia in 1989, and Great Britain in 1991. New Zealand set up a two-person unit in 1991 to investigate allegations that perpetrators of war crimes settled in this country.

The unit spent $190,000 investigating the claims in New Zealand and overseas, narrowing the suspected list from 46 to 17 known to be alive and living in the country.

The Wiesenthal centre had supplied 42 of the 46 names. Fifteen were cleared and two were further investigated, with the unit finding it was "possible" one of the suspects was involved in war crimes.

The finding of the unit was presented by the then attorney-general, Mr Paul East.

"We feel we've discharged our obligations to the international community in the steps we've taken and that we will now only respond if we are given something far more substantial than individual names," Mr East said in 1992.

Dr Zuroff said the centre tried to convince successive New Zealand governments to take legal action against suspected Nazis, but to no avail.

"New Zealand was the only Anglo-Saxon democracy which faced this problem and chose to ignore it," he said. "There was absolutely no political will to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals who emigrated to New Zealand in the late 1940s and early 1950s, posing as refugees fleeing communism."

During the 1980s and 1990s, Dr Zuroff researched the whereabouts of 40 suspected war criminals who are believed to have emigrated to New Zealand after World War 2.

Dr Zuroff visited New Zealand in February 2006 to promote Operation Last Chance, which was a last attempt to find surviving Nazi war criminals.

"By the time that I found these people, many were no longer alive.

"But one who was alive and living in Auckland was Jonas Pukas, a Lithuanian who served in the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion, which murdered tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and Belarus," Dr Zuroff said. ...

The Killer Countess: Baron Heinrich Thyssen's Daughter

Baron Hans Heinrich "Heini" Thyssen-Bornemisza with his fifth and final wife, Carmen, the former Miss Spain

" ... in the last days of the Second World War, Margit hosted a party for SS officers, Gestapo leaders and local collaborators during which 200 Jews were slaughtered, as entertainment. ... "
••••••••••••••
The killer countess: The dark past of Baron Heinrich Thyssen's daughter

She was born into one of Europe's most powerful dynasties. And involved in a wartime atrocity so shocking that it remains shrouded in secrecy to this day. David Litchfield investigates the dark past of Baron Heinrich Thyssen's daughter Margit

Independent
07 October 2007

When I was researching my book about his family, Baron "Heini" Thyssen-Bornemisza, self-styled "Swiss" industrialist and legendary art collector, always insisted that Margit, his vivacious older sister, was in fact shy and retiring, while his family's castle at Rechnitz had been entirely destroyed by the Russians during the war.

I first suspected he may have been lying when Josi Groh, his Hungarian lawyer, told me that far from being shy and retiring Margit had a "voracious sexual appetite" and that she had remained in residence at the Thyssens' castle throughout the war, enjoying the attention of the SS officers sent there for rest and recreation. But it was his insistence that the castle, or what remained of it, hid a terrible secret that encouraged me to visit Rechnitz.

In this quiet castle town in the foothills of the Alps, I learnt that in the last days of the Second World War, Margit hosted a party for SS officers, Gestapo leaders and local collaborators during which 200 Jews were slaughtered, as entertainment. Ever since, the Thyssens have not accepted involvement and have played down their Nazi past. '

The story begins with Heini's German father, Heinrich, heir to one of the world's largest industrial fortunes. Having profited from the First World War, but lacking an "appropriate" social position, he acquired Hungarian nationality and the dubious title of baron. To complete his reinvention as a Hungarian aristocrat, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon bought himself a castle at Rechnitz, 150km south of Vienna, on the Austro-Hungarian border. But in 1938, when it became obvious that another war was looming, the "Baron" transferred ownership of the castle to his daughter and slipped across the border to the safety of Switzerland.

From Villa Favorita on the shores of Lake Lugano, Heinrich controlled his German mines and factories throughout the war; supplying the Third Reich with coal, steel and U-boats. He also provided his close friend Hermann Goering and the Nazi secret service with international banking facilities, while in 1941 his August Thyssen Bank in Berlin contributed 400,000 Reichmarks towards the upkeep of the castle, which had by then been requisitioned by the SS.

Meanwhile Margit remained at the castle, where she was provided with a generous allowance from Thyssengas, one of her father's German companies. A Thyssengas employee and Nazi Party member, Joachim Oldenburg, was seconded to assist in managing the estate. Locals employed at Rechnitz report that the "young, dashing and virile" Oldenburg quickly accepted responsibility for accompanying Margit on hunting trips – and was soon sharing her bed.

This despite the fact that, in 1933, Margit had enhanced her social position by marrying the impoverished Count Ivan Batthyany, whose family had originally owned the town of Rechnitz and a large slice of Hungary. In a bizarre arrangement, while "the countess" shared the castle with her SS guests and her bed with Joachim Oldenburg, her estranged husband continued to enjoy his wife's money and breed horses on one of the Batthyanys' adjoining Hungarian estates.

Further complicating her domestic arrangements, Margit was also enjoying a dalliance with the sexually ambitious Franz Podezin, a Gestapo administrator and leader of the Rechnitz Nazi Party.

But SS officers were not Margit's only guests at Rechnitz. At the end of 1944, 10,000 Hungarian Jews and gypsies had joined the 100,000 forced labourers building fortifications along the Austro-Hungarian border, which were designed to stop the advancing Red Army. During the 200km westward march from Budapest they were subjected to atrocities at the hands of their guards while local inhabitants felt free to shoot at them as they passed by – thousands died.

Six hundred Jews, assigned to strengthen the Rechnitz defences, were housed in the cellars of the castle, living in appalling conditions. Many were arbitrarily beaten and shot, particularly by Podezin, while local people reported the countess derived obvious sadistic pleasure from observing these barbaric acts: "She always stood right at the front when anything like that was going on," said one witness.

By the spring of 1945, it had become obvious that it was only a matter of time before the advancing Russians would overrun the area but Margit appeared determined to remain at the castle until the last possible minute.

Finally, with the Red Army only 15km away, the countess hosted a party at the castle on the 24 March, the eve of Palm Sunday, inviting up to 40 people including leading Nazi Party, SS, Gestapo and Hitler Youth members. The party started at 9pm and lasted until dawn, with a great deal of drinking and dancing. But traditional party entertainment was not enough, and at around midnight some 200 half-starved Jews, pronounced unfit for further work, were delivered by lorry to "Kreuzstadel", a barn within walking distance of the castle. Podezin then ushered Margit and 15 of the more senior guests to a store room, gave them weapons and ammunition and invited them to "kill some Jews".

The prisoners were then forced to strip naked before being shot by drunken guests, who returned to the castle to continue to drink and dance until dawn. The following morning, they were heard bragging about the previous night's atrocity: one Stefan Beiglboeck even claiming that he had "slain" six or seven Jews with his own hands.

The bodies of the victims were buried by 15 of the prisoners saved for the purpose. The burial party were kept in the local abattoir before being shot the following evening by Oldenburg and Podezin.

Many years later, Heini admitted his family's industrial and financial support of Hitler and the Third Reich, but he avoided providing any details concerning the Rechnitz massacre.

But within hours of arriving at Rechnitz, my research partner Caroline Schmitz and I had been quizzed by the local innkeeper as to why we were there. He introduced us to sons of the castle's wartime staff and to a retired teacher and the town's official historian, Doctor Josef Hotwagner – a charming man whose ill health does nothing to diminish his wit or his academic skills. Known locally as "the Professor", he is regarded with affection in the town, despite the occasional accusation of being a trouble maker. But Hotwagner has a better reason than most for remaining determined that the Rechnitz massacre should never be forgotten.

The people who committed the barbaric execution were the same people who, in 1941, effectively killed his father by charging him with high treason and sentencing him to 10 years' hard labour at Dachau. Hotwagner senior had been among a small group of townspeople discovered to be supporting the starving women and children left behind when their persecuted men-folk had been shot or forced into slave labour. Dachau was liberated by the Americans in 1945, but Hotwagner's father died in hospital before he was able to return to his family. Josef still displays obvious emotion when recalling the terrible story of both his father and his town.

He remembers the terrible dilemma at eight years of age of he and his mother being forced to leave his grandparents as the battle front drew closer, fleeing into the countryside to take shelter in a wine cellar.

But when the Russian attack finally took place during the night of 29 March 1945, the Red Army, facing very little opposition, soon overran the town and the surrounding vineyards. After being shot at by a drunken Russian soldier, Josef and his mother decided to return to the town, where more sober soldiers shook their hands in greeting. But the castle was already alight, and he remembered "the sky was blood red from the flames for three whole days". Although the Russians were blamed for setting it alight, Hotwagner and many of the townspeople believe it was the German forces who torched it, in compliance with Hitler's "Nero Command", or scorched earth policy.

After a brief counterattack by the SS and the loss of more than 1,000 lives, the Germans eventually admitted defeat, leaving the Russians to occupy Rechnitz and Eastern Austria for the next 10 years.

According to Hotwagner, the victorious Russians soon discovered that, 12 days earlier, a large number of Jews had been murdered, and following further investigation issued a protocol which read: "We, the undersigned have written down the following in order to bear witness of the Fascists' bestiality. On 5th April, a number of graves were excavated, where Jews were buried who had been killed in a bestial manner. In all, 21 graves were found, each one being 4m to 5m long and 1m wide. Each grave contains 10 to 12 people, victims of shots in the neck using firearms or machine ' pistols. The murdered people were very emaciated. An examination of their bodies revealed many bloodshot and blue areas on their skins. Apparently, they had been hit with sticks and rubber clubs prior to being shot. The inhabitants say that on 24 March these people had to dig their own graves and were shot immediately afterwards."

This protocol was published on 12 April 1945 in the Soviet national newspaper, The Red Star, but was subsequently dismissed as propaganda by many Austrians. During the resulting legal proceedings which took place in 1946 before the "people's court", the graves were again opened and an exact location plan was compiled and placed with the Austrian District Court in Oberwart. However, shortly afterwards this plan disappeared. It was only the first of a number of such conspiratorial occurrences.

In the years 1946 to 48, several further legal proceedings took place. But in 1946 the two main witnesses were murdered and one also had his house burnt down to destroy any incriminating evidence. Fear spread, and as a result, most of the witnesses revoked their testimonials during the main proceedings, or toned them down, or failed to appear at court. The few sentences that were awarded to those who hadn't already fled were very lenient and after a few years they were freed on appeal.

The court also uncovered evidence that suggested further murderous acts had been committed in Rechnitz. This was supported by one Paul Szomogyi, who said in his witness statement that on 26 March 1945, 400 Jews from his group of forced labourers had also been killed in a similar fashion. But due to intimidation, he failed to appear in front of the court, which claimed his testimonial could not be investigated any further.

Margit, along with Podezin and Oldenburg, also avoided prosecution, having fled Rechnitz ahead of the advancing Russians and escaped to Switzerland where, having facilitated the latter's return to Germany, Margit housed Podezin in a small apartment above a bar in Lugano, from where he continued to fulfil his role as her lover. But eventually, Podezin's presence became embarrassing and he was forced to leave. Under threat from the criminal proceedings, he demanded financial assistance from Oldenburg and Margit to enable him to escape to South Africa, threatening to "drag Oldenburg and the countess through the mud" if ignored. Funds were forthcoming and Podezin was last seen in Pretoria, while Oldenburg fled to Argentina.

It was not until 1987 that the Refugius (Rechnitz Refugee and Commemorative Initiative and Foundation) was founded and began to organise the erection of a monument to commemorate the massacre. The association also bought the land on which the Kreuzstadel stood, presenting it to the Vienna-based Israelitische Kultusgemeinde organisation. Every year a small commemorative service takes place at the site, although only one of the victims, Laszlo Blum, has ever been identified.

In the local park, a memorial to four murdered resistance fighters, including Dr Josef Hotwagner senior and the "200 Jewish forced labourers from Hungary, who were murdered on 24 March 1945", was finally unveiled – on the opposite side of the park to the monument honouring the names, and photographs, of the 177 local soldiers who lost their lives in the war, fighting for the Reich.

The atmosphere during the unveiling of the memorial to the Jews and members of the resistance was overshadowed by the knowledge that a meeting of the Rechnitz Comrade Club, whose leader was Tobias Portschy, ex-SS, Wehrmacht member and Nazi Gauleiter, was to take place on the local Geschriebenstein mountain the following day. This was not to commemorate the liberation of Austria from the Nazis, but the noble defence of the homeland by the Wehrmacht.

Tobias Portschy died of natural causes in 1996 but a disturbing number of local people still share his beliefs. As recently as 1985 the journalist who wrote a series of articles in the Austrian newspaper Oberwarter Zeitung on the murders under the headlines, "The Rechnitz Murder", "Orgy Ball" and "Dance Macabre" decided to curtail the series after his life was threatened. Meanwhile, a recording of an old woman's eye-witness report, sent to the Austrian television channel ORF by Josef Hotwagner, was permanently "mislaid".

According to local legend, the landlady of the local Gasthaus Rose and widow of Tobias Portschy believed that trying to locate the exact burial site, so that the remains of the victims could be reburied in a Jewish cemetery, was completely unnecessary. She is quoted as saying: "Don't look for the Jews' bones. Look for the gold that they buried."

She and her husband also openly expressed their hatred of gypsies, and a number of the townspeople appreciated the irony when, many years later, they accepted money for housing refugee gypsies in their hotel.

While reactions to the memory of the terrible atrocity remain mixed, there are few members of the community who forgive the Thyssens for failing to repair the castle which had, since the 13th century, been both their town's soul and the reason for its existence. Instead, the remaining building suffered the ignominy of being converted into apartments and the Thyssens' private chapel into a bar.

When the Russian occupation ended, Margit arrogantly returned to Rechnitz as a guest at the Batthyanys' newly built hunting lodge, shooting deer and wild boar in the surrounding forests. Otherwise, she occupied herself by breeding horses at the Thyssens' Erlenhof stud farm, near Bad Homburg in Germany. The original owner of Erlenhof, the Jewish paper manufacturer Moritz James Oppenheimer, was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and forced to sign a declaration of bankruptcy prior to his death, which the authorities claimed to have been the result of his suicide. Heinrich then bought the stud from the liquidators for a fraction of its true value before leaving it to Heini. He then leased it to his sister who successfully rejected all post-war claims for restitution.

Without ever being implicated in the atrocity, Ivan and Margit died of old age in 1985 and 1989 respectively. But the Count Batthyany of Güssing, near Rechnitz, appeared to be unwilling to permit their burial in the family crypt at their Franciscan chapel, despite or because of the fact that Count Ivan's father, Count Ladislaus Batthyany, eye surgeon and benefactor, was in the process of being beatified; the third stage of the sainthood process that had started in 1944 and was finally carried out by Pope John Paul II in 2003.

What is remarkable about Margit's complicity in the Rechnitz massacre, is the fact that Germany, despite claims to the contrary, still suffers from a selective memory: only publishing carefully edited versions of the history of the Thyssens, which avoid reference to the family's anti-Semitism.

In 2003, an authorised history of the Thyssens, Fritz Thyssen – Hitler's Benefactor and Hostage was published in Germany, which quoted from a letter illustrating Fritz Thyssen's (Heinrich's brother) refusal to do business with Jewish industrialists, because of their criminal record rather than his anti-Semitic views, which are contained in the same letter. None of the previously published histories of the Thyssens, either social or industrial, in books or periodicals, have mentioned the Rechnitz story or the full extent of the family's involvement with the Third Reich.

The fact that ThyssenKrupp AG refused to grant me access to its archives during my research, and 23 prominent German publishers rejected The Thyssen Art Macabre prior to its UK publication, may not immediately signify a cover-up, but when, at the last minute the Bertelsmann-owned Spanish publisher demanded that I remove all references to the Nazis before they would publish, it was difficult not to suspect a degree of conspiracy. Having been published in the UK by Quartet, The Thyssen Art Macabre will now be published in Spain, home of the Thyssen-Bornemisza art collection, by Temas de Hoy, a Spanish-owned publisher who made no such demands. Meanwhile, German publishers still appear to ignore the book. *

'The Thyssen Art Macabre' is published by Quartet Books

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article3028644.ece
•••••••••••
Re: Georg Heinrich Thyssen, Son of Heinrich

The Son of a Baron's Windfall

Today's IPO by the technical publishing group IHS brought to light the fact that the company is controlled by Georg Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the eldest son of Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, a Swiss citizen with a Hungarian title and resident of Spain who was the heir to the Thyssen Steel and armaments fortune. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because of the world-famous Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

In February 2002, Georg and his father settled out of court after a year long legal battle over the $2.7B Thyssen industrial empire. The feud, played out in a court in Bermuda, cost an estimated $100M in legal fees.

With IHS, Thyssen-Bornemisza owns 62% of the company that is now worth well over $1B and he was able to cash out several hundred milliion dollars. The IPO was his opportunity to gain liquidity and perhaps live the life of opulent splendor that his family is accustomed to.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/thyssenportrait1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2005/11/the_barons_wind.html&h=327&w=250&sz=20&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=4d17vMPEFqpMDM:&tbnh=118&tbnw=90&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dheinrich%2Bthyssen%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

Nagging Questions in Anthrax Case

Time Magazine
Aug. 13, 2008
By LAURA FITZPATRICK

A decontamination crew dressed in hazmat suits stands together as an investigator takes photographs outside Ottilie Lundgren's home in Oxford, Conn., who died of inhalation anthrax on Nov. 21, 2001.

As probable bioterrorists go, Bruce Ivins was a near perfect suspect. Among the hundreds of pages of evidence that the FBI had mounted against him (which were released last week), there were electronic records documenting Ivins' late-night sojourns in the lab, e-mails revealing a mind wracked by paranoia and an inventory of a November 2007 FBI search of his home, which turned up a paperback copy of Albert Camus's novel The Plague.

The Anthrax Files

The FBI says the government biodefense researcher acted alone in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17. But as anthrax experts begin seeking hard data behind the eerie and suggestive details of the case, they are left with nothing but questions. For one thing, the FBI says its anthrax evidence is based on "new and sophisticated scientific tools" — i.e., new DNA technology that the agency says is more accurate than older methods — which investigators have used to trace the anthrax from the deadly mailings back to Ivins. The FBI began with 1,000 distinct samples of the Ames strain of anthrax, the type used in the attacks, from 16 laboratories that handled the bacterium. From there, investigators whittled their way down to a match: a single spore batch taken from a beaker in Ivins' laboratory. No scientist has ever been able to accomplish a feat of such precision before, not even those familiar with the subtle variations of the anthrax genome — but the FBI won't reveal its methods.

Now, scientists and some members of Congress are calling for the FBI to release details about the new DNA technology, so that its validity can be confirmed. "It's a general rule," says Donald Henderson of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, who heads the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness. "When you develop a new test for something, it usually has to go through a fairly rigorous examination: Does it really do what it claims to do?"

Anthrax experts interviewed by TIME point to the peculiarities of anthrax research that underscore why it is critical that the FBI's methodology be evaluated. Most important is that anthrax has historically been shuttled freely around the world — a fact that the FBI has not explicitly accounted for. Until the security crackdown that followed the 2001 attacks, most labs readily sold anthrax strains — including the type linked to Ivins — to scientists doing research in other parts of the world. "Bruce, like most people in the lab, derived most of his strains from outside sources," says Jeffrey Adamovicz, a former bacteriology chief who worked with Ivins at Fort Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for 12 years. If the FBI has not investigated every one of those possible sources, in other words, it can't be certain that the path to Ivins is solid. No one but the FBI knows for sure.

Equally troubling, scientists say, is the complete lack of forensic evidence in the FBI dossier. Documents reveal, for instance, that investigators swabbed Ivins' home and cars for anthrax DNA and spores, but they don't say whether the subsequent lab tests linked those samples to the 2001 envelopes. "Until we see the details, who knows?" says Richard Spertzel, a bioweapons expert who worked at USAMRIID with Ivins. "There are too many loose ends."

Scientists also say that the FBI's recent bungling of certain high-profile investigations throws doubt on federal investigators' ability to understand scientific evidence. The most obvious and recent example is the agency's unwarranted fingering of Steven Hatfill in 2001 as a "person of interest" in the same attacks for which Ivins is now believed responsible. Hatfill's reputation was irreparably damaged by the accusation, which was never supported by concrete evidence. The government officially absolved Hatfill this month and awarded him $5.8 million in damages. "You have less confidence in how much [the FBI is] really sharing and how accurate this might be," says Henderson, who would like to see the FBI release its data to a neutral body, such as the National Academy of Sciences or the National Institute of Medicine, for review.

While even the staunchest critics of the FBI acknowledge that publicizing details about new technology may pose a national security risk, others insist that doing so and hastening a firm conclusion to the "Amerithrax" case would only make the country safer. "To know what challenge you're defending against is terribly important," says Henderson. Further, the FBI's technology may prove useful for other "benign reasons," such as in vaccine research or legal investigations involving poisoning, says Adamovicz.

Scientists' best hope to budge the FBI may be through Congress. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt — whose district is home to the Princeton, N.J., mailbox from which the FBI says Ivins mailed the anthrax letters — are pushing for a government inquiry into the FBI investigation. In an early indication of what Grassley may seek to accomplish, the Senator has composed 18 questions for the FBI and the Justice Department. Chief among them is a request for clarification of the timing of the FBI's scientific discoveries. In tandem with other facts of the case, Grassley says, that timeline could help determine how definitive the FBI's data is. "If top FBI officials knew in 2005 that the anthrax used in the attacks came from Dr. Ivins' lab, then why didn't they clear Dr. Hatfill until [Aug. 8]? Either they were unsure of the scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins, or they knew long ago that Dr. Hatfill was not the killer," Senator Grassley said in a statement to TIME. "Both possibilities are disturbing."

Representative Holt says his goal is to uncover enough physical evidence to satisfy those who doubt the FBI's conclusions about Ivins. "I don't want it to reside in the court of public opinion. Then we'll end up with something like the Lee Harvey Oswald case," says Holt in reference to the conspiracy theories that still dog the John F. Kennedy assassination. "There [will be] too many people in whose minds the case is never closed."

Congress is unlikely to begin hearings until it reconvenes in September. Holt, a former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the only scientist to sit on the House Intelligence Committee, expects the hearings to spark broader debate about the way the government handles certain scientific issues, including policy questions — such as how to ensure lab security — and a general attitude regarding the scientific method. "[The FBI] try to confirm their hunches, whereas a scientist tries to refute his or her own conclusions," says Holt. "The whole point of science is to publish it so that other people can tear it apart."

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1832646,00.html

German Industrialist Family Breaks Silence Over Nazi Ties

Also see: "BMW's Quandt Family Faces Its Nazi Past"

Note: Axel Springer, the German publishing giant - mentioned in the text for supporting the Quandt family's denials of collaboartion with the Nazis - has a reputation for far-right reporting bias. The company was started up with funds from the CIA:
"German media tycoon Axel Springer had received the then-substantial sum of more than $7 million from the Agency to build his press empire. ... "
(Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3700.htm)

Stefan Quandt

www.dw-world.de
01.08.2008

Nazi prisoners were forced to work for the Quandt family during WWII

Almost nine months after a German television documentary highlighted the exploitation of Nazi prisoners that helped the Quandt family make its fortune, a family member spoke up about the issue.

The Quandt family, which owns close to 47 percent of the shares in German car maker BMW, had been maintaining a wall of silence following the broadcast of a film that put the spotlight on the stories of former Nazi prisoners who were forced to work in a battery factory owned by magnate Guenther Quandt (1881-1954).

The workers recounted beatings, mistreatment and even deaths at the factory in the film which premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival last year.

Hoping to repair the family's damaged reputation, Stefan Quandt used the recent award ceremony for the "Herbert Quandt Media Prize" to undercut the documentary's integrity, German daily FAZ reported on Thursday, July 31.

"The allegation that the family's assets can be traced back to the time of the Third Reich defrauds fifty years of entrepreneurial success on the part of my great grandfather Emil and my grandfather Guenther Quandt before the year 1933," he was quoted as saying.

Integrity of media prize questioned

The documentary's broadcast has tarnished the Quandt moniker to such an extent that three prominent members of the board of trustees responsible for awarding the prize resigned their posts.

Mathias Müller, Editor in Chief of Der Spiegel, Gabriele Fischer, Editor in Chief of Brand Eins and Christoph Keese, former Editor in Chief of Welt am Sonntag and current CEO of Public Affairs for the publishing giant Axel Springer have called for the cancellation of the prize until the family's role during the time of the Nazis was clarified.

But the Quandt family is determined to see the media prize live on. After the documentary was aired, the family hired historian Joachim Scholtyseck to spend three years exploring the family history. Scholtyseck's findings may lead the Quandts -- one of Germany's last corporate dynasties that has not dealt with its past -- to finally face the skeletons in the family closet.

Nazi ties misjudged

Through her re-marriage to Joseph Goebbels, Magda Quandt directly linked the family to the Nazi regime

In addition to being one of the most important German arms producers during World War II, the Quandt family also had a private connection to the Nazis. Guenther Quandt's first wife Magda Ritschel married Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's future propaganda minister, two years after divorcing Guenther. Their first son Harald then lived with her and Goebbels.

Stefan Quandt, however, found fault with the documentary for leaving out a very important aspect of the Quandt-Goebbels connection: the fact that Guenther Quandt took legal action against Goebbels in 1934 in order to gain custody over Harald.

"The court did not accept the claim against the influential Minister Goebbels and the lawyer representing my grandfather was removed from his leading position in the lawyers' association," he said. He also said that his family members were only human and that the circumstances of their time were largely beyond their control.

"Some people followed national socialism from conviction," he said. "Some agreed to small or large compromises. Others were forced. In a world of fear and instability, it wasn't any different for Guenther and Herbert Quandt as entrepreneurs."

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3530701,00.html

Re-Chilling the Cold War: Putin and Pro-Georgian Propaganda

pacificfreepress.com
14 August 2008

Putin Walks into a Trap (Excerpt)
by Mike Whitney

The American-armed and trained Georgian army swarmed into South Ossetia last Thursday, killing an estimated 2,000 civilians, sending 40,000 South Ossetians fleeing over the Russian border, and destroying much of the capital, Tskhinvali.

The attack was unprovoked and took place a full 24 hours before even ONE Russian soldier set foot in South Ossetia. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Americans still believe that the Russian army invaded Georgian territory first.

The BBC, AP, NPR, the New York Times and the rest of the establishment media has consistently and deliberately misled its readers into believing that the violence in South Ossetia was initiated by the Kremlin. Let's be clear, it wasn't.

In truth, there is NO dispute about the facts except among the people who rely the western press for their information. Despite its steady loss of credibility, the corporate media continues to operate as the propaganda-arm of the Pentagon.

Former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev gave a good summary of events in an op-ed in Monday's Washington Post:

"For some time, relative calm was maintained in South Ossetia. The peacekeeping force composed of Russians, Georgians and Ossetians fulfilled its mission, and ordinary Ossetians and Georgians, who live close to each other, found at least some common ground....What happened on the night of Aug. 7 is beyond comprehension. The Georgian military attacked the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali with multiple rocket launchers designed to devastate large areas....Mounting a military assault against innocents was a reckless decision whose tragic consequences, for thousands of people of different nationalities, are now clear. The Georgian leadership could do this only with the perceived support and encouragement of a much more powerful force. Georgian armed forces were trained by hundreds of U.S. instructors, and its sophisticated military equipment was bought in a number of countries. This, coupled with the promise of NATO membership, emboldened Georgian leaders into thinking that they could get away with a "blitzkrieg" in South Ossetia...Russia had to respond. To accuse it of aggression against "small, defenseless Georgia" is not just hypocritical but shows a lack of humanity." ("A Path to Peace in the Caucasus", Mikhail Gorbachev, Washington Post)

The question for Americans is whether they trust Mikhail Gorbachev more than the corporate media?

Russia deployed its tanks and troops to South Ossetia to save the lives of civilians and to reestablish the peace. Period. It has no interest in annexing the former-Soviet country or in expanding its present borders. Now that the Georgian army has been routed, Russian president Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin have expressed a willingness to settle the dispute through normal diplomatic channels at the United Nations. Neither leader is under any illusions about Washington's involvement in the hostilities. They know that Georgian President Mikail Saakashvili is an American stooge who came to power in a CIA-backed coup, the so-called "Rose Revolution", and would never order a major military operation without explicit instructions from his White House puppetmasters. Most likely, the orders to invade came directly from the office of the Vice President, Dick Cheney.

The Georgian army had no chance of winning a war with Russia or any intention of occupying the territory they captured. The real aim was to lure the Russian army into a trap. US planners hope to do what they did so skillfully in Afghanistan; lure their Russian prey into a long and bloody Chechnya-type fiasco that will pit their Russia troops against guerrilla forces armed and trained by US military and intelligence agencies.

The war will be waged in the name of liberating Georgia from Russian imperialism and stopping Putin from achieving his alleged ambition to control critical western-owned pipelines around the Caspian Basin. Much of this "think tank" generated narrative has already appeared in the mainstream media or been articulated by American political elites. Meanwhile, the fighting in the Caucasus has diverted attention from the massive US naval armada that is presently sailing towards the Persian Gulf for the long-anticipated confrontation with Iran.

Operation Brimstone, the joint US, UK and French naval war games in the Atlantic Ocean preparing for a naval blockade of Iran, ended just last week. The war games were designed to simulate a naval blockade of Iran and the probable Iranian response.

According to Earl of Stirling on the Global Research web site:

"The war games included a US Navy supercarrier battle group, an US Navy expeditionary carrier battle group, a Royal Navy carrier battle group, a French nuclear hunter-killer submarine plus a large number of US Navy cruisers, destroyers and frigates playing the "enemy force. The lead American ship in these war games, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN71) and its Carrier Strike Group Two (CCSG-2) are now headed towards Iran along with the USS Ronald Reagen (CVN76) and its Carrier Strike Group Seven (CCSG-7) coming from Japan."

Stirling adds:

"A strategic diversion has been created for Russia. The South Ossetia capital has been shelled and a large Georgian tank force has been heading towards the border....American Marines, a thousand of them, have recently been in Georgia training the Georgian military forces... Russia has stated that it will not sit by and allow the Georgians to attack South Ossetia...This could get bad, and remember it is just a strategic diversion....but one that could have horrific effects." ("Massive US Naval Armada Heads for Iran," Earl of Stirling, Global Research) ...

Story continues
http://pacificfreepress.com/content/view/2935/81/

Editorial: European Resurgence of Xenophobia

14 August 2008

IT was advertised as a “Youth Adventure Camp” but when German police Sunday raided the site near Rostock where 40 children were camping, they discovered racist films and literature, the sort of indoctrination material that was served up in Hitler Youth Camps in Nazi Germany. This is the latest evidence of resurgent neo-Nazi activity throughout Europe, which now focuses its vitriol not simply on Jews and gypsies but on Muslims, black Africans and now Asians, especially the Chinese.

Mainstream politicians seek to dismiss the neo-Nazis as unimportant fringe groups and lunatics. Indeed the fact that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France is so hard up, it is having to sell its headquarters might seem to indicate that Europe’s ultra-right is in trouble. But it is not as simple as this. Germany’s Nazi revival may still be limited but it is sinister and, some argue, has far deeper roots than predecessor movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Adolf von Thadden’s NDP. Much of the new support comes from eastern Germany. During Communist rule, there was little attempt to force East Germans to face up to their Nazi past. Indeed, given that Communist rule was in many respects little different, there was little or no reason to cause East German citizens to confront Nazi wickedness. This was in marked contrast to West German citizens, who learned the explicit details of the horrors that were perpetrated in their name by the Third Reich. Since reunification, eastern Germans, many disappointed by the failed appearance of the anticipated economic boom, have gravitated toward extremist parties, especially the neo-Nazis who blame their misfortunes on immigrant workers as well as the old standard-international Jewry.

Unfortunately this trend in the east has met a current of impatience among western Germans with the blanket condemnation of all things Nazi. Young people talk of searching for a “balanced” view of the Hitler years. The reality is that it is not possible to have a balanced view of the savagery of the Nazis any more than such an assessment could be made of the even bloodier and equally brutal rule of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Yet just as handfuls of German school kids are being pedaled pernicious propaganda promoting Nazi bigotry, so in modern Russia there is a sizable minority that looks back with a sense of loss to Stalin’s rule.

While it is often argued that too much public focus on these supporters of ruthless totalitarianism broadens their appeal to the unthinking and the racist, the authorities must nevertheless act decisively to combat the dissemination of the poison of neo-Nazi claptrap. Violent racist attacks on foreigners, particularly Turks living in Germany, are slowly but steadily increasing. As Germany and indeed the rest of Europe has to cope with the challenges of recession, the siren song that evil foreigners are taking jobs and housing and even wives, will become louder and perhaps more enticing. It must be combated vigorously, wherever it is heard.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=112810&d=14&m=8&y=2008

PROJECT ANTHRAX & THE COVER-UP (PART FIVE): OPERATION JEFFERSON, ROOTS OF THE PLOT, JERRY HAUER, PATRICK, HATFILL, IVINS & HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

"You simply don't develop a new hyper-weaponized strain of anthrax powder for military defense, and then commission the top U.S. anthrax expert to report on this new weapon's capability and lethality from mailed delivery, unless that's how you foresee it being used." - Ingri Cassel, director, National Vaccination Liberation Association

By Alex Constantine

The corporatists in the post-911 war profiteering loop derive a childlike thrill from their weaponized anthrax stockpiles.

A "new and highly lethal strain" was produced in advance of 911, a nameless Pentagon general told the New York Times in September 2001.

He mentioned something called Operation Jefferson.1

Battelle Memorial Institute

What was "Operation Jefferson?" Before the anthrax mailings, William Patrick III went to work at the Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI). Patrick holds five classified patents in the manufacture of weapons-grade anthrax.

BMI – a contractual partner of BioPort – hired him to conduct a risk-assessment study involving the dissemination of anthrax powder through the mail system.2 BMI is located in West Jefferson, Ohio. The work was done at the BL-3 Anthrax Lab.3

Battelle had exclusive control of the Ames strain, a fact the press has not made clear. It's true that Dugway Proving