Joseph Cannon

Alex: I read Joseph Cannon's column on the SLA, and it repeats some of the work done by Mae Brussell years ago. What do you think of Cannon? - Gina

Not much. Less that that. The column you mention only confirms a few points raised by Mae, and he insults her memory in the process by assuming that he is capable of judging her, and he isn't.

Cannon's comments weren't peer review, because he is not her peer.

Anyone who claims that 9/11 forensic research detracts from understanding the CIA & drugs is out to lunch and will never return. Cannon, Hopsicker's tag team partner, is engaging in opinion formation and can't possibly believe his own argument. It's intended to manipulate, reinforce Hopsicker's spin, reinforce the emphasis on bin Laden.

What do drugs have to do with 9/11?

Didn't he write the column claiming that Barbara Bush is the illegitimate daughter of Aleister Crowley?

And he calls Mae Brussell "loopy." ...

And his absolute certainty that the World Trade Center was not taken down by controlled demolition is positively hopsickerian. Cannon presents himself as an informed columnist, fancies himself a gatekeeper, but what he doesn't know hurts him.

- AC

"Intelligent Design" (A. Constantine Studio Demo)

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Pacifica: Voice of the Controlled Left - Larry Bensky Denies Nazi Role in McCarthy's Anti-Communist Snipe Hunt

By Alex Constantine

On his November 9, 2003 broadcast of "Sunday Salon," Pacifica's Larry Bensky (a veteran of the CIA's Paris Review cultural/political propaganda front) heaped scorn on a caller who asked, innocently enough, if Paperclip Nazis had any influence on the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s. KPFA's Bensky ridiculed the caller, apparently unaware that McCarthy travelled with old guard Nazis and fascists in the intelligence community, and the hysteria was their group effort.

The caller really irked Bensky. He fell into a fit of rage - a "snit" - an invaluble, tried-and-true prop in the mass opinion formation business.

The caller attempted to explain himself, stammered, but Bensky hung up, insisting hotly, "nothing is really certain," after all - the mention of Nazis suddenly led him to question the sum of human knowledge - spitting condescensions at the poor caller’s suggestion that the German and East European imports, secretly sponsored by the CIA and the military’s Operations Paperclip, Sunrise, etc., might have influenced the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.

He went on to criticize nameless individuals who have discussed Nazis over Pacifica airwaves (Alex Constantine, for instance - I'm guilty), blamed these lunar mollusks for inventing capricious and arbitrary conspiracy theories that interfered with his own sober, responsible, balanced news reporting.

This insidious approach to censorship is inexcusable, for reasons that will be discussed at the end of this critique.

Bensky was unaware that Joseph McCarthy, the eye of the sturm und drang, was a hands-on Nazi collaborator, having freed Germans interred by the Allies at the end of the war. The late Mae Brussell: "Senator Joe McCarthy's two strongest supporters [in his Senate campaign] were Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter Harnisfeger. Both admired Adolf Hitler and made continuous trips to Germany…. Before he went after the Commies in the State Department, he had to release a few of Hitler's elite nazis lingering in the Dachau prison camp…. In 1949, during congressional hearings on the Malmedy Massacre … McCarthy invited himself to take over the entire testimony. He wasn't satisfied until the prison doors flew open. The most detestable and ugly battle of World War II, an assault upon Americans and civilians in Belgium, was ignored. Hitler's precious Generals Fritz Kraemer and Sepp Dietrick, along with Hermann Priess and many others, were free. With that business finished, McCarthy took on Robert Morris as chief counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Morris' earlier training in Navy Intelligence in charge of USSR counter-intelligence and psychological warfare could be utilized well by Senator Joe. Particularly the psychological warfare part. After McCarthy died, Morris moved to Dallas, Texas. He was a judge, and became president of Dallas University…."

One Nazi in particular, Nikolai Poppe, made a massive contribution to the right-wing furor over communism in the States. Poppe was a spy attached to Himmler's SS, assigned to the confiscation of Jewish property, director of the Wansee Institute (a think-tank that conducted studies on the USSR for the SS). In the postwar calm, Poppe went on to become a scholar at the University of Seattle, a well-known author on Tibetan Buddhism, a CIA expert on Mongolia.

Nazi Poppe participated in the most important case in McCarthy's alcohol-soaked career as an anti-communist. "No influence?" Bensky's scornful refutation is met directly by Christopher Simpson in Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988): "An incident during Poppe's career in the 1950s illustrates the DELICATE INFLUENCE that certain Nazi collaborators have had on domestic politics in the United States. Early in the McCarthy era, Professor Owen Lattimore, the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and a longtime advisor on Asian affairs to the State Department, was brought before a congressional investigation committee to face accusations of espionage and running a "communist cell" in the Institute for Pacific Relations. McCarthy, whose allegations were already drawing criticism from Democrats and even a few Republicans, had pledged that HIS ENTIRE ANTI-COMMUNIST CRUSADE WOULD "STAND OR FALL" on the supposed proof he had in the Lattimore case....

The supposed proofs against Lattimore, and ultimately the fate of McCarthy's blacklist, rested mainly on the word of Nikolai Poppe. Simpson found that Poppe's testimony "Proved to be an important element in the resurrection of McCarthy’s case against Lattimore, who he claims used his influence to block Poppe’s immigration to the United States prior to 1949." (pp. 118-122).

Lattimore was pursued by Joe McCarthy and his fellow far-right travellers for years, but eventually the evidence proved insufficient to convict and he moved to the UK in disgust to take a teaching job at the University of Leeds.

McCarthy’s covert relationship with Nazi imports continued into the Eisenhower decade thanks to a close partnership with CIA officer John Valentine Grombach, a domestic fascist who did more to fuel the Congressional anti-Communist "investigations" of the 1940s and ‘50s than anyone.

Grombach ran his own ultra-conservative, off-the-shelf, international spy network. One of his most vital assets was General Karl Wolff of the SS. Christopher Simpson writes in Blowback that Grombach, a fierce anti-communist, oversaw an imposing intelligence apparat, and it "effectively became the foreign espionage agency for the far-right." (p. 237) Including and especially Joe McCarthy’s stumble-bum anti-Communist crusade.

In addition, the Birch society - native fascists funded by the same American military-industrial syndicates that backed Hitler - supported McCarthy and drove the hysteria with far-right propaganda. To be sure, Nazis did influence the reactionary delusions of the Cold War era ... especially if we are willing to label all fascists, including American ones, as Nazis.

The rise of the Reich, after all, is not such a far remove from the Orwellian drift of the U.S. since WW II – brought closer by radio talk-show hosts who rush the anti-fascist left off their phone lines with terse denials and curses.

In the history of the left, the Lattimore case is well known. The background of McCarthy's anti-communist charade is not, after all, obscure knowledge - reporters and talk show hosts for Pacifica itself promoted Simpson' Blowback heavily, and offered it as a fund-raising gratuity more than once. Simpson was interviewed over Pacifica on multiple occasions. Late at night, "conspiracy theorists" spent hours reading excerpts of his book over the network's airwaves. Many of Bensky's own listeners had read the book and would have fielded the caller's question without having a stroke over it.

That is, the fascist connections are something any serious left-wing scholar should know, especially one who hails from The Paris Review, a controlled, cold war CIA propaganda outlet, Bensky's old haunt. And this goes for the fascist cold war machinations. Bensky's antipathy toward anyone who does research these significant connections is wrong and wrong-headed - as any responsible, sober, balanced anti-fascist researcher knows.

Note to Pacifica: Fascism is the traditional enemy of the left.

A left-wing talk show host's "ignorance" and refusal to discuss the subject publicly is a red warning sign that Mockingbird has landed.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum Whitewashing the Biography of the Holocaust-era Mufti of Jerusalem - a Notorious Nazi Collaborator

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
Jerusalem Post
Mar 17, 2009

A watchdog group says the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington "seeks to exonerate Hajj Husseini from actually murdering Jews." So says Holocaust Museum Watch, an American group that seeks to expose Arab anti-Semitism, and which has a years-old dispute with the Holocaust Museum in Washington on the matter.

At issue now is the biographical entry for the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, on the museum's Web site.

"The museum's biography undercuts documented facts about the mufti, and, in an effort to be politically correct, seeks to exonerate him from actually murdering Jews and falsifies the historic record," Carol Greenwald, chairwoman of Holocaust Museum Watch, said on Tuesday.

Husseini encouraged Arabs in Mandatory Palestine to riot and commit other violent acts against Jews. Yet the museum's on-line biography states that whether he "explicitly encouraged or incited the violence is not documented."

The site also says that the British "never unequivocally linked" Husseini to the 1930s Arab riots.

During World War II, Husseini allied himself with Nazi Germany and lent his support to the "Final Solution," the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Husseini contributed to the German war effort by setting up Bosnian Muslim battalions that were attached to the Waffen SS, whose soldiers fought partisans in Bosnia and massacred civilians there. The mufti also sought to convince Germany and its allies to bomb Tel Aviv and to expand the Final Solution to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine. When he was informed of various Nazi proposals to exchange Jewish lives for goods or money, he strenuously campaigned against them.

The museum's Web site says that impact of Husseini's attempt to prevent the emigration of Jewish children from Europe was "nil," and that the thousands of Balkan Muslims he recruited into the Waffen SS divisions were "generally ineffective."

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has previously changed an earlier bio of the mufti after public criticism by Holocaust Museum Watch, insisted this week that it was simply stating historical facts.

"The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's on-line resources make clear that the mufti of Jerusalem was a life-long ardent anti-Semite who was fundamentally opposed to the creation of the State of Israel, and later committed to its destruction.

He was a Nazi sympathizer and propagandist. During the Holocaust he actively supported the Nazis' efforts by inciting hatred of Jews, broadcasting pro-Axis propaganda from Germany, and recruiting thousands of Muslim auxiliaries for Hitler's SS," the museum said in a written response.

"Others may make various claims about the influence and impact of his actions during his lifetime and today. But as a historical museum we adhere to the highest standards of research and documentation. We do not base conclusions on secondary source material. Our historical research is based on primary source documentation which must be understood through the context of the events. We believe our conclusions are consistent with the available evidence. We will continue to review and evaluate our research as new documentation comes to light."

After the war, Husseini was arrested in France but escaped to Egypt, where he continued to be active in Arab affairs until his death in 1974.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1237114855652&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Nazi Expatriates on the Costa del Sol

BY ALFREDO BLOY
19 Mar 2009

IN February, news agencies around the world reported that the second most wanted Nazi war criminal the world, the man dubbed ‘Doctor Death’, Aribert Heim, had died in Cairo in 1992. At least this is what his children revealed during an interview with German television channel ZDF. Some Nazi hunters from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, however, still remained unconvinced.

According to Heim’s neighbours, his last few years were quiet and peaceful. He had converted to Islam and had enjoyed a quiet retirement in Cairo far away from war tribunals after his escape had taken him to the Balkans, South America and Spain.

This was thanks to the work of the ODDESSA organisation, which was composed of ex-SS officers whose objective was to help their colleagues escape capture via Spain and Argentina. Many of them managed to to live relatively normal lives under pseudonyms on the Spanish Costas or South America until their anonymous deaths without ever seeing the inside of a prison cell. Others simply managed to have a few years of freedom before being caught and sentenced.

Some of the most famous who managed to escape were Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann, Leon Degrelle, Erich Priebke, Aribert Heim, Klaus Barbie, Gerhard Bohne and, most infamously, Josef R. Mengele.

Costa del Sol

With the Costa del Sol being a haven for retirees, it is perhaps no major surprise that at least one senior Nazi SS officers moved here to enjoy his retirement. This man was Leon Degrelle, who lived in Torremolinos for 50 years until his death at the ripe age of 87.

Portrait of a Nazi: Leon Degrelle

Leon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle was born in Bouillon, Belgium on June 15, 1906. In his early adulthood he was a poet, politician and soldier. On March 29, 1932 Degrelle married Marie-Paule Lemay with whom he had four daughters and a son.

In the late 30s he was said to befriend the famous cartoonist George Remi, known as Herge, the creator of Tin Tin. Degrelle believed Tin Tin had been inspired by him, although Remi denied this. During this time Degrelle allied himself first with Mussolini, then with Hitler.

He fought for the Axis forces during World War II in a foreign wing of the Waffen SS called the Legion Wallonie, formed exclusively by Belgian volunteers.

In the dawn of World War II he was promoted to general by Himmler on May 2 1945. However this promotion cannot be considered official as Himmler had been stripped of all SS and Party posts by Fuhrer order on April 28, 1945.

Hitler reportedly once said that if he had had a son he would have liked him to be like Degrelle.

After Germany’s defeat, Degrelle fled to Denmark and eventually Norway, where he commandeered an aircraft, allegedly provided by Albert Speer.

He was severely wounded in a crash-landing on one of the beaches in San Sebastian in the North of Spain, when his planeran out of fuel.

Franco’s fascist regime rescued the seriously injured Degrelle and offered him refuge in Spain.

After the war he was condemned to death in absentia by a Belgian court, charged with treason, and much pressure was put upon Franco to hand him over. To avoid extradition Franco granted him Spanish citizenship under the pseudonym Jose Leon Ramirez Reina.

The Falange (Spanish fascist organisation) assigned him the leadership of a construction firm that benefited from contracts assigned by the state, and was, understandably, well off.

During his stay in Spain he wrote several fascist propaganda books in which he denied the holocaust. He was proud to be Nazi and is said to have attended many commemorative events to pay homage to Hitler and the Nazis.

He spent his final years in Torremolinos until he died of a heart attack in 1994, aged 87 at the Sanatorio Parque San Antonio in Malaga.

http://www.euroweeklynews.com/news/14291.html

Video: Historic Power Shift in El Salvador

Journalist leads former guerrilla army to left's first presidential victory in country's history

Just over 17 years since the 1992 Peace Accords brought an end to El Salvador's vicious civil war, the country has seen its first peaceful transfer of power. V for victory hand signs and red flags were paraded throughout the country's streets as the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, FMLN, won the presidency; thereby bringing to an end 20 straight years of rule by the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA. El Salvador will be governed from the left for the first time since gaining its independence from Spain in 1821. The face of the victory was that of former television journalist Mauricio Funes, a political newcomer and the first FMLN leader to not have fought in the country's horrific 12-year civil war.

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3425

John "Torture Memo" Yoo & the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution

The Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution is an annual event funded by the Annenberg Foundation. It's a propaganda farce, of course:


Faculty for 2009

Kenneth W. Starr, Dean, Pepperdine University School of Law

John Yoo, Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean, University of California at Irvine School of Law

Todd Brewster, Director of the Center for Oral History, United States Military Academy West Point

Akhil Amar, Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Susan Estrich, Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Southern California

David Westin, President, ABC News

Sherrilyn Ifill, Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law

http://constitutioncenter.org/jennings/
•••
Messing with Our Liberty isn't any President's Job
By D. PARVAZ
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/saturdayspin/402638_parvaz07.html

If you were wondering to what extent President George W. Bush was messing with our rights and liberties, look no further than the story that broke earlier this week.

On Monday morning, National Public Radio reported that President Barack Obama's administration had on that day revealed the Bush administration's "anti-terrorism memos that claimed exceptional search-and-seizure powers and divulging that the CIA had destroyed 92 videotapes of interrogations and other treatment of terrorism suspects."

While the Bushies ultimately concluded they couldn't get away with some of the things outlined in the memos, the story indicates that President Bush "had broad authority to set aside constitutional rights."

Given their druthers, we'd have no Fourth Amendment protections. Bring on the unwarranted searches and seizures.

And First Amendment rights? Meh, wrote Bush's Deputy Assistant Attorney General John "Torture Memo" Yoo. "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully...(and) may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."

The NPR story indicated that Yoo didn't return calls. How come? Well, he might've been busy playing catch-up on messages. After all, he was a faculty member at the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution in Philadelphia over the weekend. I was there as a fellow, and in deference to my generous hosts, held back on cornering Yoo, who was there as an esteemed guest of the program. Unfortunately, he didn't hold a panel (not even an off-the-record one) on what he was thinking when he wrote that anything short of pain equaling that of organ failure or death wasn't torture. No, he didn't seem remorseful, but one can hope. None of the other members of the Bush administration sitting on a fascinating behind-the-scenes panel (including White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith) seemed wracked with guilt. That party line? They're still clinging to it, so much so that one member of the audience snapped, calling them "a den of vipers." ...

Now, about those 92 tapes...

Until now, the CIA had copped to destroying three tapes documenting the interrogation -- and torture -- of terror suspects. We were told in late 2007 that that the tapes had been destroyed with the knowledge of several Bush administration attorneys in November 2005, five months after a U.S. District Court judge ordered the government to save "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at Guantanamo Bay."

According to the Los Angeles Times, all the tapes -- not just the three -- were destroyed after that order. This is why no administration -- that includes Obama's -- ought to have the kind of power and secrecy Bush's yielded.

As an aside, I'd hate to take off without saying: I'll miss you -- dear readers -- all of you. You've taught me much, and I won't let those lessons go to waste.

D. Parvaz is an editorial writer.

German Publisher Releases Study of Own Nazi Past

Deutshe Welle
17.03.2009

The DuMont Media Group in Cologne has become the first newspaper consortium to publish a historical account of its own activities in the Third Reich. The work is a portrait of a dark age for freedom of the press.

The study was written by historian Manfred Pohl and entitled M. DuMont Schauberg: A Newspaper Publisher's Fight for Independence Under the Nazi Dictatorship.

Commissioned by Dumont itself, the study was officially launched in Berlin on Monday, March 16.

The book focuses on the then head of the family-owned publishing company, Kurt Neven DuMont. The author Pohl concludes that DuMont, although a Nazi Party member as of 1937, did not actively support Hitler's regime and indeed tried to help employees threatened by Nazi oppression.

'From citizenry to obedience'

But Pohl also found that DuMont-run newspapers were gradually co-opted as the Third Reich established itself.

"The Koelner Zeitung [Cologne Newspaper] contributed, not insignificantly if also involuntarily, to the transition from a culture of active citizenry to one of obedience," Pohl wrote, adding that Neven Dumont himself "subordinated his own liberal spirit step by step to the system."

The publishing group said it welcomed the historian's findings.

Critical publications risked being taken over by organs loyal to Hitler's regime

"We thank Professor Pohl and his collaborators," Dumont said in an official statement. "This work provides a broad and comprehensive picture of the past -- without it much would have been either forgotten or become subject to speculation."

In 2006, the German news magazine Der Spiegel published a report saying that Neven Dumont had profited from the Nazi Aryanization of Jewish property. It was later forced to retract that report as inaccurate.

The Dumont group, whose holdings include a number of prominent papers in western Germany and stake in the Israeli daily Haaretz, was recently involved in a high-profile takeover of leading newspapers in Hamburg and Berlin.

Coercive measures

The history of the Dumont Group under Hitler was fairly typical for the Third Reich.

When they came to power in 1933, the Nazis did not nationalize all of Germany's newspapers. But they did put pressure on publishers critical of Hitler's aims, in some cases forcing them to sell their publications to buyers more amenable to the Nazi world-view.

Furthermore, the Editors Law of October 4, 1933 required newspaper to omit any material "calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home."

This intentionally vague directive essentially made publishers responsible for censoring their publications and ensuring they did not print information or opinions critical of the Nazi government.

In Dumont's case, historian Pohl wrote, the firm faced a concrete threat of being taken over by a pro-Nazi rival.

Nonetheless, Pohl concluded, Dumont did his best to maintain an "inner freedom" within the company, while ensuring an external appearance of conformity.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4105503,00.html

In Torture Cases, Obama Toes Bush Line

Legal Stance Appears to Contradict Earlier Statements From Obama and Holder
(EXCERPT)
By DAPHNE EVIATAR
Washington Independent
3/16/09

While Congress debates whether senior Bush administration officials should be called to account for the torture, humiliation and indefinite detention of prisoners taken during the “war on terror,” some of those prisoners aren’t waiting around for lawmakers to make up their minds. A growing number of private lawsuits brought by former detainees against former Bush officials are slowly making their way through the courts. And to the dismay of some of its strongest supporters, the Obama administration has, in every case so far, taken the side of the Bush administration, arguing that these cases should all be dismissed.

What’s more, Obama administration lawyers are not arguing for dismissal purely on procedural grounds. In most cases, they’re arguing that the courts should not second-guess the president’s authority in national security matters. They are also insisting that the right to not be tortured, to be treated humanely and to not be detained indefinitely without charge or trial were not clearly established back when government officials violated them. Therefore, under the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity,” those officials should not be held responsible now, the Justice Department claims.

hat stance outrages many of the lawyers handling these cases. “Torture has always been illegal,” said Eric Lewis, a partner in the law firm Baach Robinson & Lewis, which is representing four British former Guantanamo detainees against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Affirming qualified immunity for torture seems contrary to the traditions of the military which abjure torture and contrary to the doctrine of qualified immunity which says you are protected within a large discretionary area,” but not for acts that were clearly illegal. “It can’t be right that prior to Boumediene” — the landmark Supreme Court case affirming Guantanamo prisoners’ rights to challenge their detention in U.S. courts — “anyone could have thought that torture was legal,” said Lewis.

Lewis is among a group of formidable opponents the administration faces in these cases, including some of the nation’s top lawyers and law schools making powerful legal arguments that former government officials are legally responsible for the torture, abuse and wrongful imprisonment that their policies directed.

In a federal court in San Francisco this month, for example, lawyers from Yale Law School’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic argued that John Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration and author of several memos that effectively gave legal cover for U.S. authorities to torture prisoners, is now liable for the consequences of his legal advice.

The lawyers represent Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen who was declared an enemy combatant and held for three years without charge or trial at a Navy brig in South Carolina. Padilla’s lawyers claim he was subjected to “vicious interrogations, chilling sensory deprivation and total isolation.” And they claim that John Yoo is responsible because he not only provided the legal justification for that treatment but, as a member of the Bush “War Council,” helped develop the administration’s interrogation policy.

“Yoo knew exactly what the natural consequences of his actions would be – because he intended them, because they were obvious, and because he was warned by others,” the lawyers write in their brief opposing the government’s motion to dismiss the case.

The Obama administration, stepping into the shoes of its predecessors, has now assumed the awkward position of arguing that the case against Yoo — whose opinions Obama administration officials have harshly criticized — should be dismissed. The Obama Justice Department is arguing that Yoo, as a government lawyer, was not directly responsible for decisions regarding Padilla’s treatment; that allowing such legal claims against a government official would “constitute an unprecedented intrusion into the President’s authority in the areas of war-making, national security and foreign policy”; and that Yoo did not violate “any clearly established constitutional rights.”

The Obama administration is making a very similar argument in another case, Rasul v. Rumsfeld, now pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In that case, four British citizens who were abducted in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay claim they were imprisoned in cages, brutally beaten, shackled in painful stress positions, forced to shave their beards and watch their Korans desecrated. They were finally released in 2004 without charge. They have sued former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials for their treatment.

The case was dismissed at the urging of the Bush administration, but appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In December, the court sent it back to the court of appeals in Washington for reconsideration in light of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last summer in Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detentions.

Rumsfeld, former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other former senior Bush officials also face a similar case brought by the Yale law clinic in South Carolina, where Padilla was being held. Because Yoo lives in California, he was sued separately in his home state to avoid potential jurisdictional problems.

Meanwhile, another torture damages case, Arar v. Ashcroft, involving a Canadian citizen abducted in New York and sent abroad to be tortured, is pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Still other lawsuits, such as one filed by Khaled al-Masri, a former detainee allegedly held and tortured by the CIA for five months in Afghanistan, has been dismissed based on government arguments that all information about the case and the CIA program al-Masri was subjected to is a “state secret” that the government may not be forced to disclose. (Other victims of so-called “extraordinary rendition” — or transfer to torture — are now suing the private flight data company that assisted the CIA in the hopes of getting around that problem, though as TWI has written, the Obama administration is maintaining — as the Bush administration did before it — that the “state secrets doctrine” should ban those suits as well.)

Many more such cases could still be filed: the Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project has documented more than 330 cases in which U.S. military and civilian personnel are credibly alleged to have abused or killed detainees. Other detainees released from Guantanamo have told reporters that they are considering bringing lawsuits. ...

STORY CONTINUES

Op-Ed: American Corporate Complicity Created Undeniable Nazi Nexus

By Edwin Black ·
March 12, 2009

NEW YORK (JTA) -- Adolf Hitler was completely responsible for the Holocaust. But Hitler had help.

When zealous Nazis waged war against an imaginary generation-to-generation Jewish conspiracy; when Nazis created ghastly extermination plans to help ensure their master race would rule the world; when the German military smashed across Europe with lightning speed in heavy Blitz trucks; when Mengele undertook heinous medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz; and when the Reich identified the Jews everywhere in Europe and then systematically pauperized and destroyed them -- when all these terrible things were done, the shape and scope of the horror was pivotally determined by major American industrial giants.

Now the dots can be connected. They create an undeniably Nazi nexus between iconic American corporations and the greatest crime of the 20th century: the Holocaust.

Henry Ford, acting directly through the Ford Motor Company, virtually invented political anti-Semitism when he published worldwide the fake "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Ford’s book quickly became the bible of German anti-Semites and early incarnations of the Nazi party. Nazis shipped the work throughout the country “by the carload.”

Among the many Germans massively influenced by the book was Adolf Hitler. Der Fuehrer read the work at least two years before "Mein Kampf" was written. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler wrote, “The whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie [as] shown incomparably by the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.' ”

The Carnegie Institution, the philanthropic incarnation of America’s greatest steel fortune, propagated the deadly American race science of eugenics that idealized a blond, blue-eyed superior race. In pursuit of that dream, Carnegie scientists believed some 90 percent of humanity was to be eliminated using various methods. These methods included organized identification, seizure of assets, marriage prohibition or nullification, forced surgical sterilization, segregation into camps and publicly operated gas chambers. Carnegie spent millions to propagate American eugenic theories in post-World War I Germany, financing race science programs in universities and official institutions.

While in prison, Hitler closely studied American eugenics. He proudly told his comrades, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”

Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, called his writing “my bible.” Der Fuehrer merely exchanged the American term “Nordic” for the Nazi term “Aryan" and then medicalized his pre-existing virulent anti-Semitism and fascist nationalism to formulate the concept of the blond, blue-eyed Master Race he deified in "Mein Kampf." As Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess insisted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

The Rockefeller Foundation, the philanthropic incarnation of Standard Oil, acted as a full partner with Carnegie in establishing eugenics in Germany. In the quest to perfect the master race, millions of Depression-era dollars were transmitted by Rockefeller to Hitler’s most anti-Jewish doctors.

In this quest, one specimen was desired above all: twins. Rockefeller funded Hitler’s chief raceologist, Otmar Verschuer, and his insatiable twin experimentation programs. Twins, it was thought, held the secret to industrially multiplying the Aryan racial type and quickly subtracting biological undesirables.

Verschuer had an assistant, Josef Mengele. Rockefeller funding stopped during World War II, but by that time Mengele had transferred into Auschwitz to continue twin research in a monstrous fashion. Ever the eugenicist, he sent precise clinical reports weekly to Verschuer.

From the first weeks of the Third Reich, General Motors president Alfred Sloan committed the company and its German division Opel to motorizing a substantially horse-drawn Germany, preparing it for war. Prior to this, Germany had been a nation devoted to legendary automotive engineering but only one vehicle at a time, built by craftsman. GM brought mass production to the Reich, converting it from a horse-drawn threat to a motorized powerhouse.

Sloan and GM knowingly prepared the Wehrmacht to wage war in Europe. GM built the Blitz truck for the Blitzkrieg. Detroit even secretly moved massive stores of spare Blitz parts to the Polish border in the days just before the Sept. 1, 1939 invasion to facilitate the Blitzkrieg. Using a charade of interlocking boards and executive committees, Sloan kept GM’s role secret as long as possible.

Internal Business Machines, inventor of the Hollerith punch card, precursor to the modern computer, custom-designed and co-planned the Nazi solutions to Jewish existence. IBM enjoyed a monopoly on information technology. Under the micromanagement of its president, Thomas Watson, while advertising itself as “a solutions company,” IBM in 1933 reached out to the new Hitler regime. It offered to organize and systemize any solution the Reich desired, including solutions to the Jewish problem.

With IBM as a partner, the Hitler regime was able to substantially automate and accelerate all six phases of the 12-year Holocaust: identification, exclusion, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation and even extermination. As it did with any other customer, IBM simply asked the Hitler regime what result was desired. Then company engineers devised custom-tailored punch card systems to deliver those results. There was an IBM customer site in every concentration camp. Machines were serviced monthly, sometimes weekly, by IBM on site -- whether that site was Auschwitz or downtown Berlin.

Had it not been for the continued conscious involvement of iconic American corporations in Hitler’s war against the Jews, the speed, shape and statistics of the Holocaust as we know it would have been dramatically different. No one knows how different, but the astronomical dimensions could have never been achieved.

For their part, American corporate collaborators have long tried to obscure or hide the details of their collusion using the well-known tools of corporate misinformation, financial contributions, and bought and paid for historian reviews. But in an era when people no longer believe big corporations, the dots can be fully connected to unveil the outlines of an indispensible Nazi nexus. The words “never again” must resound not just among the victims, but within board rooms of corporate perpetrators.

Edwin Black is the award-winning, New York Times and international investigative author of 65 bestselling editions in 14 languages in 61 countries, as well as scores of newspaper and magazine articles in the leading publications of the United States, Europe and Israel. With a million books in print, his work focuses on genocide and hate, corporate criminality and corruption, governmental misconduct, academic fraud, philanthropy abuse, oil addiction, alternative energy and historical investigation. Editors have submitted Black's work ten times for Pulitzer Prize nomination, and in recent years he has been the recipient of a series of top editorial awards. He has also contributed to a number of anthologies worldwide. For his work, Black has been interviewed on hundreds of network broadcasts from Oprah, the Today Show, CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports and NBC Dateline in the US to the leading networks of Europe and Latin American. His works have been the subject of numerous documentaries, here and abroad. All of his books have been optioned by Hollywood for film, with three in active production. Black's speaking tours include hundreds of events in dozens of cities each year, appearing at prestigious venues from the Library of Congress in Washington to the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Los Angeles in America, and in Europe from London's British War Museum and Amsterdam's Institute for War Documentation to Munich's Carl Orff Hall. He is the editor of The Cutting Edge News, which receives more than 1.5 million visits monthly. He is best known for the award-winning international bestseller, "IBM and the Holocaust." His just released book, "Nazi Nexus: America's Corporate Connections to Hitler's Holocaust," from Dialog Press. He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com.

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/03/12/1003678/op-ed-american-corporate-complicity-created-undeniable-nazi-nexus

Deep Roots of Nazi Science Revealed

BY ALISON ABBOTT AND QUIRIN SCHIERMEIER
Nature 407, 823 - 824 (2000)
© Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
19 October 2000

[MUNICH] A Berlin-based group of science historians has found that the ties between the top German scientists whose research was used to justify Nazi policies and the regime itself were much closer than was once thought.

In 1939, for example, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, praised two leading researchers at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology in Berlin for their work "that has contributed significantly to the scientific recognition of the racial parts of the national socialist view of the world".

The historians' report was published last week. Their research on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS) from 1933 to 1945 is being funded by the Max Planck Society (MPS), its postwar successor.

Responding to the report, Hubert Markl, president of the MPS said: "There is no way of denying that directors, scientists and research assistants in many biomedical Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes put themselves in the service of a criminal regime. They actively supported measures conflicting with human rights and exploited the opportunities to use science conducted beyond all morally acceptable limits for the benefit of their own research."

Markl said he felt "deep disgust for the way that unscrupulous research was carried out" and appealed to German biomedical researchers to "confront and discuss their past".

The group has found that Ernst Rüdin, director of the KWI for Psychiatry in Munich, and Ernst Fischer and Otmar von Verschuer, both of whom headed the KWI for Anthropology in Berlin during the Third Reich, advised the Nazis at the highest levels.

All three had direct contact with the Nazi leadership and served on important government advisory panels. Rüdin, along with his co-worker Fritz Lenz, sat on an expert committee to the ministry of the interior on population and race policies.

Research into the links between KWS scientists and the Nazi regime dates back to the early 1980s. But the Berlin group is the first to investigate the direct influence of contemporary anthropological and biomedical research on the Nazi's racial and medical legislation.

Historians knew that Rüdin, whose work to give race laws a scientific basis was funded directly from Hitler's office, had chaired the committee's working group on 'racial hygiene and racial policies'. This panel set the criteria for the castration of criminals and the forceable sterilization of so-called inferior women, particularly those with 'psychological' problems.

The report says that Rüdin lobbied successfully for ever broader criteria. On his initiative, the sterilizations came to include the 'morally ill' — Nazi-speak for the mentally handicapped. This category covered 95% of the 400,000 sterilizations carried out between 1933 and 1945.

At Rüdin's suggestion, the sterilized included 600 children of black French soldiers and German women in the state of Rhineland, which the French occupied after the First World War.

In 1937, von Verschuer was made an expert to the Research Department on Jewish Questions of the governmental Reich's Institute for the History of the New Germany, whose main role was to research 'world Jewry'.

In this capacity, he wrote to Fischer that it was "important that our race policies, including the Jewish question, develop an objective scientific background that is broadly accepted".

The historians have not yet been able to show whether Nobel laureate Adolf Butenandt, director of the KWI for Biochemistry in Berlin and a postwar president of the MPS, allowed blood samples from Auschwitz to be analysed at his institute (see Nature 403, 474– 475; 2000). But they argue that it is unlikely that he did not know about the work being done under his directorship.

The historians have so far focused on four institutes. Three of these were considered biological; the fourth was the KWI for Metal Research in Stuttgart.

It is not known whether Nazi sympathies were the exception or the rule among scientists, says Carola Sachse, the research group's head.

http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Assign/topics/nazi-sci-roots.html

YouTube Video: Iraq war veterans accuse US military of coverups

"As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, hundreds of US veterans of the war say the American military has been covering up widespread civilian killings in that country."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoJHTuP7Lh0&NR=1

The far right is on the march again: the rise of fascism in Austria

www.dailymail.co.uk: "In Austria's recent general election, nearly 30 per cent of voters backed extremist right-wing parties. Live visits the birthplace of Hitler to investigate how Fascism is once again threatening to erupt across Europe."

Leaving No Doubt Where the U.S. Stands on Torture

Also see: "Congress, Obama Obstruct Justice for Torture Victims," AC's Blaclist, March 5, 2009.

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/letter159.html

To the (swans.com) Editor:

On February 9th, in response to a question in the course of the first presidential press conference since his inauguration, President Barack Obama stated that...

What I have said is that my administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, and that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process.

Just hours prior to this sanctimonious pronouncement, the Obama administration announced that the current Department of Justice would be continuing the Bush administration's arrogant stonewalling of the attempt by the proponents of human rights to expose the routine CIA practice of extraordinary rendition, the outsourcing of American torture practices, as manifested in the ACLU sponsored Mohamed et al v Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. lawsuit.

Chillingly, a representative of the Obama Department of Justice supported the administration's position by invoking the same state secrets for the preservation of "national security interests" argument that has been trotted out to shroud the brutal criminal acts of every abusive administration since the Nixon presidency. ... Given our corrupted electoral process, in which a candidate's viability is determined by his or her ability to procure the financial support of powerful corporate interests, we could not rationally expect this or any other administration to correct, or even honestly address, the economic injustices that have come to define the realities of the American caste system. But was it really too much to hope for that this new American president might possess the simple, human decency to put an end to the national shame of state torture? Apparently, it was.

Michael DeLang
Rockford, Illinois, USA - February 12, 2009

Seymour Hersh: "Executive Assassination Ring" Answered to Cheney, had No Congressional Oversight

Tricky Dick hates our freedoms. Who knew? The fascist, "secretly" CIA-sponsored Weekly Standard "spin": "More Conspiracy Theories from Seymour Hersh"

By Eric Black, MinnPost.com
Mirrored at www.alternet.org
March 12, 2009.

Investigative journalist Sy Hersh dropped a bombshell revelation on Monday about international killings ordered under Bush.

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota [Monday] legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective ... that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:

“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”

(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.)

Here is a tape of the full Mondale-Hersh-Jacobs colloquy, a little over an hour, without the audience Q and A. If you want to look for the Hersh statement quoted above, it’s about at the 7:30 mark.

The rest of the evening was, as expected, full of worry and wisdom and quite a bit of Bush-bashing.

Jacobs walked the two elder statesmen through their experiences of:

The My Lai massacre, which Hersh first revealed publicly and which he last night called “the end of innocence about us and war.”

The Pentagon Papers case, which Mondale called the best example of the “government’s potential for vast public deception.”

Henry Kissinger’s secret dealings, mostly relating to the Vietnam War. (Hersh, who has written volumes about Kissinger, said that he will always believe that whereas ordinary people count sheep to fall asleep, Kissinger “has to count burned and maimed Cambodian babies.”)

The Church Committee investigation of CIA and FBI abuses, in which Mondale played a major role. (He talked about the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, not only spied on Martin Luther King but literally tried to drive him to suicide.)

The Iran Contra scandal. (Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress wouldn't know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to keep the aid flowing. Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra, Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about it.)

And the Bush-Cheney years. (Said Hersh: “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extaordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.”

Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")

Jacobs pressed both men on the question of whether the frequent abuses of power show that the Constitution fails, because these things keep happening, or whether it works, because these things keep coming to light.

Mondale stuck with the happy answer. “The system has come through again and again,” he said. Presidents always think they will get away with it, but eventually reporters like Hersh bring things to light, the public “starts smelling this stuff,” the courts and the Congress get involved. Presidents “always, in the long run, find out that the system is stronger than they are.”

Hersh seemed more troubled by the repetitions of the pattern. The “beautiful thing about our system” is that eventually we get new leaders, he said. “The evil twosome, Cheney and Bush, left,” Hersh said. But he also said “it’s really amazing to me that we manage to get such bad leadership, so consistently.”

And he added that both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11.

“The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team,” Hersh said. Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to “pick holes” in what Bush was doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the plain sight of the public. It it was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-elected.

And even Mondale admitted that one of his greatest successes, laws reforming the FBI and CIA in the aftermath of the Church Committee, were supposed to fix the problem so that “we would never have these problems again in the lifetime of anyone alive at the time, but of course we did.”

http://www.alternet.org/rights/131153/seymour_hersh:_%22executive_assassination_ring%22_answered_to_cheney,_had_no_congressional_oversight/?page=entire

Provocateur Ward Churchill is Suing Colo. U

Edited by Alex Constantine

Who will tell Amy Goodman? ...

" ... AIM's Grand Governing Council has been dealing with Churchill's hateful attitude and rip-off of Indian people for years. ... "
http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html

Section A: The Provocateur
Section B: Trial Coverage

A) The Provocateur

" ... Churchill's 1978 resume stated he had a tribal heritage of 'Creek/Cherokee.' Hill said he knew Churchill's Indian ancestry was 'marginal,' but he brought him on anyway.... "


Former boss questions actions
Elizabeth Mattern Clark/February 17, 2005

The man who first hired Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado in 1978 said Thursday he thinks the controversial professor "needs to politely get off the backs of Indians."

"I think he overstates his Indianness, which I don't think is there," Norbert Hill said from Albuquerque, where he now heads an organization providing scholarships to Native American students. He said Churchill should "stand on his own" rather than claiming to represent American Indians.

Hill, a member of the Oneida Nation who served as director of the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program at CU, hired Churchill as an associate director.

Churchill's 1978 resume stated he had a tribal heritage of "Creek/Cherokee." Hill said he knew Churchill's Indian ancestry was "marginal," but he brought him on anyway.

"I needed some staff help, and I don't care what color thehelp comes in as long as the help cares," he said. "They didn't require anyone being Indian; I had an Irish secretary. I remember Ward did a good job for me."

Over the years, though, Churchill began to overstate his ancestry, Hill said.

Churchill, an activist and full professor, is backed by noted American Indian leader Russell Means. Others, though, have for years challenged Churchill's claims to one-sixteenth Cherokee ancestry. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees denies his affiliation.

The scrutiny has intensified since two scholars accused Churchill of inventing pieces of Indian history in essays and books.

CU officials are examining Churchill's work to determine whether he should be fired after his published comments comparing 2001 World Trade Center victims to a Nazi technocrat ignited a public firestorm last month.

CU's regents also are expected to examine the tenure process after learning that Churchill gained tenure in 1991 without the six-year tenure-track period that typically precedes the coveted job status.

Churchill's 2004 curriculum vita said he "directed" the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program from 1980 to 1983. He was an associate director and acting director during that time.

He also lectured as a non-tenure-track faculty member and began writing about American Indian issues, quickly becoming known as an expert in the field.

Hill said he was "surprised" that Churchill was given a tenured position without a Ph.D. CU documents show that Churchill was recommended for a one-year associate professorship in 1991 and instead landed a tenured — virtually permanent — job.

The fast track to tenure was based on his lengthy publication record, an internal review by a committee of top-notch faculty members, letters of reference from experts in the field, and the fact that he was being wooed by at least one other university, said Susan Kent, associate vice chancellor for faculty affairs.

"It was not a mistake," Kent said. "We have processes in place that are intricate."

Contact Camera Staff Writer Elizabeth Mattern Clark at (303) 473-1351 or clarke@dailycamera.com.

http://www.dailycamera.com/bdc/buffzone_news/article/0,1713,BDC_2448_3557836,00.html

Alliance with Agent Provocateur Bill Ayers

Ward Churchill and Bill Ayers Speak at Univ. of Colorado
By Jeralyn, Section Media
Mar 06, 2009

Former C.U. Professor Ward Churchill and current University of Illinois (Chicago) Professor William Ayers teamed up Thursday night in Boulder to speak to students at the University of Colorado. ...

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2009/3/6/12338/45607

Left Denial on 9/11 Turns Irrational
by Jack Straw

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/05/1736367.php 6 May 2005
www.globalresearch.ca 8 May 2005
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/STR505A.html

People like Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill are turning toward the irrational as they continue to deny increasing signs that 9/11 was an inside job. ...

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/04/chomsky-manufactures-consent-on.html

AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT GRAND GOVERNING COUNCIL
MINISTRY FOR INFORMATION
P.O. Box 13521
Minneapolis MN 55414
612/ 721-3914 . fax 612/ 721-7826

" ... The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

"Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe. He has deceitfully and treacherously fooled innocent and naïve Indian community members in Denver, Colorado, as well as many other people worldwide. Churchill does not represent, nor does he speak on behalf of the American Indian Movement. ... "

http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html

Cherokee Wannabe: ".... clues about not only what, but who Ward Churchill Is"

Found on the AIM Council on Security and Intelligence web page is this 1994 letter from Susan Shawn Harjo of the Morning Star Institute regarding the ethnic identity of Ward Churchill, once a member of one tribe or another, and now fairly exposed as a fake, a phony and a fraud. (This of course will result in his speaking fees increasing faster than his bookings at colleges around the country and in France.)

Still, it is interesting to see that Churchill's poseur status has been known for well over a decade. By everyone, it would seem, other than his employers and publishers.

What follows is a transcription of part of the text of the letter discussing a call Harjo received from one Regina Brave. Ms Brave asserted:

"...that she knew WC [Ward Churchill] when he surfaced in Boulder as an Indian of several other tribes before he settled on Cherokee/Creek/Metis, and that she never bought into his assertion that he was an Indian of any kind; 2) that another of the 'judges in Bellngham, Washington shared her concerns, and another, a woman from Canada, was on a scholarship at the University of Colorado and living with WC and his wife; 3) that she has heard WC claim that he provided firearms going into Wounded Knee in 1973; and 4) that she overheard WC tell another white man ... that he was an expert witness in the Bernard Escamillo trial in Council Bluffs, and that she called one of the men associated with the trial that said WC was not a defense witness, but that he recognized WC's name as a prosecution witness... From the way she relates a story, it could go either way...but it is a lead to follow tht might have documentable clues about not only what but who WC is.
Hope you have enough fax paper for all this."

Other documents of interest reproduced on this site include:

Ward Churchill's 1980 Resume in which he asserts he is "Creek/Cherokee (unenrolled)."

We also learn he claims to hold a 'Master of Arts degree in Cross-Cultural Communication from Sagamon State.

He notes he is married to "Dora-Lee Larson, 30 year old Santee"

The resume states Chruchill served in Vietnam in 1968 as a "Public Information Specialist" writing battalion reports and press releases among other things.

But an interesting passage in this ICC document cites a 1991 resume in which Churchill "indicates he is Airborne/Recondo trained with multiple decorations" during the same tour of duty.

Other interesting reading includes:

1) Press Release on Churchill's brief times as an "associate Keetowah"; and
2) A page from the letter expelling Ward Churchill from AIM in 1993.

"A major agenda item was the need to deal with the wrath of 'wannabees', instant shake and bake shamans, phony medicine men and women, artists, writers, and self-proclaimed 'AIM leaders' who are really non-Indians masquerading as Indian people. These people for various reasons, whether it be romanticism, self grandeur, exploitation, greed, or possibly agents of Operation Cointelpro of the FBI and/or Operation Chaos of the CIA ... infiltrate the American Indian Movement and other organizations for the purpose of misdirecting, disrupting, and sowing division in order to discredit and neutralize the leadership of the American Indian Movement.

Two persons whose method of opertations (MO) fall clearly within this description is, of course, yøurself Mr. Churchill along with Mr Morris..."

There's more, much more, and it is fascinating, if not pretty, reading.
I suppose that during Mr. Churchill's climb to tenure there must have been some vetting of his past, his claims, and his resume. But if that's the case, which set of pasts, claims, and resumes were consulted?

http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/005070.php

ETC. ...
•••
Also see: "Provocateur Ward Churchill Fired for Plagiarism & Other Academic Ethical Lapses"

B) Trial Coverage

Camera reporter John Aguilar is covering Ward Churchill's wrongful termination trial and will be filing live updates throughout the day from the courtroom in Denver District Court.

CHURCHILL TRIAL BLOG: Brown Calls Claim of Grand Scheme to Ax Prof "Absurd"
By John Aguilar
www.coloradodaily.com
March 12, 2009

Ward Churchill enters the courtroom before the continuation of his civil suit against the University of Colorado at the City and County Building in Denver, Colorado March 21, 2009. Churchill is suing the University of Colorado for wrongful termination. CAMERA/Mark Leffingwell

Churchill, 61, sued the University of Colorado after it fired him in July 2007 for allegedly plagiarizing, falsifying and fabricating portions of his academic work. The former ethnic studies professor claims in his suit that CU trumped up charges of academic misconduct in retaliation for controversial comments he made about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He is suing to get his job back. CU, which has already ruled that Churchill's 9/11 comments were protected speech, claims Churchill is using a First Amendment argument as a smokescreen for shoddy scholarship.

The case has generated headlines across the country and spurred fiery debates about academic freedom versus academic integrity.

UPDATE: 12:18 p.m.

Former CU President Hank Brown testified that once it was determined by several university faculty panels that Ward Churchill had committed academic fraud, he had a moral obligation to recommend that the professor not be kept on staff.

"It was clearly intentional, it wasn't an accident, and he never acknowledged his mistakes," Brown said. "He had never taken the steps to say that was wrong, he never corrected the record. There was never a sentence, or statement, that he wouldn't continuing doing it in the future."

He said the school couldn't continue to employ a professor who had committed such transgressions and expect students to take the issue of academic fraud seriously.

Brown, a former U.S. Senator from Colorado, took the stand mid-morning Thursday on the fourth day of Churchill's civil trial against CU.

Churchill attorney, David Lane, started the questioning of Brown by asking him about his role as president of the private foundation Daniels Fund.

He asked Brown if he participated in a decision by the foundation to withhold giving grant funds to CU while it investigated the controversy surrounding Ward Churchill's 9/11 essay.

Lane asked Brown what the fund was investigating regarding the professor.

Brown said he did not know.

Lane pointed out that the foundation grant money was finally released to the college shortly after Brown took over as CU president in mid-2005. Brown agreed.

Lane showed the jury a letter the university sent to donors and alumni the day Churchill was fired on July 24, 2007, in which the school reported that the professor had been let go for research misconduct. The letter also talked about the school's various financial needs.

Lane asked if the letter wasn't using the news of Churchill's firing to "drum up business" for the university, especially since it was headed with the words "Dear University of Colorado donor."

Brown said Lane was mischaracterizing the letter and that it was informational only. He said it wasn't accompanied by the return envelope typical of donation solicitation mailings.

"The purpose of the letter was to keep the university constituents advised of the progress of the university," Brown said.

Lane then told the jury that Brown had reinstated two academic fraud charges against Churchill in his termination recommendation to the regents that the Privilege & Tenure Committee had removed because it determined they had not fallen below the standards of professional integrity.

Brown said he simply disagreed with the committee's finding that Churchill had committed academic fraud in those two areas but that the fraud didn't fall below the standard of integrity.

CU attorney, Patrick O'Rourke, began his cross-examination of Brown by asking him if it was plausible that the university had concocted a grand, highly complex plan to have Churchill fired, and managed to keep dozens of faculty -- some of whom had signed petitions defending his First Amendment Rights -- on board for two years in an effort to dump the professor.

"All of that is absurd," Brown said of O'Rourke's hypothetical scenario.

"Would you participate in a scheme to railroad a professor out of the university on false pretenses?" O'Rourke asked.

"Absolutely not," Brown replied.

The court is in recess for lunch. Brown will finish his testimony this afternoon.

UPDATE: 10:41 a.m.

Hank Brown in the witness box

Hank Brown, former president of CU, has just taken the stand.

He recommended to the regents in 2007 that Ward Churchill be fired.

UPDATE: 10:21 a.m.

Former student describes "healthy discomfort" in Churchill's class

Hillary Old, a former student of Churchill's, is now testifying.

She described Churchill's teaching style -- with tough questions and unorthodox views -- as one that provided a "healthy discomfort" to his students.

Before Old took the stand, Deward Walker, professor of anthropology and ethnic studies at CU, took questions from an attorney for CU, Kari Hershey, during cross-examination.

She put a passage written by Churchill up on the screen that discussed the U.S. Army moving blankets from a smallpox infirmary in St. Louis. Churchill has claimed that the U.S. Army deliberately infected the Mandan Indians by distributing to them blankets contaminated with smallpox.

Hershey asked Walker from his reading of the passage whether he would expect that a smallpox infirmary existed in St. Louis at the time.

"Yes, I would," he said.

Churchill attorney, David Lane, countered that if Churchill had a "good-faith belief" that the information was correct, wouldn't that be legitimate.

"If he has some reason for believing there was an infirmary in St. Louis, that wouldn't be fraud," Lane asked.

Walker agreed.

Lane said it would be part of conventional academic debate for another scholar to challenge Churchill on that fact.

UPDATE: 9:30 a.m.

Former Churchill colleague on stand

Former University of Colorado president, Hank Brown, is seated on a bench in the hallway of the Denver City & County Building, waiting for Ward Churchill to call him to the stand.

The trial began its fourth day Thursday morning with Deward Walker, professor of anthropology and ethnic studies at CU, taking the stand.

Walker, who worked with Churchill at CU before Churchill was fired in 2007, is talking about his role on a committee that gave a full professorship to Churchill.

David Lane, Churchill's attorney, is asking Walker about Churchill's writings and academic work.

"Ward asks the most uncomfortable questions," Walker said.

He said Churchill isn't afraid to talk about the "dramatic truths" of federal government policy toward Native Americans and other minorities.

http://www.coloradodaily.com/news/2009/mar/12/churchill-trial-blog-hank-brown-waiting-testify/

Nazi Origins of Adidas and Puma Tennis Shoes

Sneakers, Nazis, and a Family Feud
Two German brothers—and their communities—battled each other to build the Puma and Adidas empires

Review of Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud that Forever Changed the Business of Sport

By Barbara Smit
Business Week (Repost)
Ecco; 384pp; $26.95

The term "sibling rivalry" doesn't quite do justice to the relationship between German shoemaking brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, proprietors of the German athletic-shoe enterprise known as Dassler Brothers. During World War II, Rudolf was convinced that Adolf, better known as "Adi," contrived to have him sent to serve with German forces in Poland. After the German surrender, Rudolf retaliated by denouncing Adi to the Allies for allegedly assisting the Nazi war effort.

Bizarrely, the bickering brothers continued to share a villa, with their wives and children, in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach until 1948, when Rudolf and employees loyal to him formed a rival shoe company called Puma. Adi renamed his outfit Adidas (ADDYY). So great was the animosity between the brothers that the whole town became embroiled. Residents declared their loyalty to either Adidas or Puma according to the shoes they wore and sometimes refused to speak to members of the other side.

The epic feud shaped not only the shoe industry but also the relationship between sports and business. Both brothers and, later, their sons, realized that getting star athletes to wear their shoes was crucial to sales. Flouting Olympic rules, they showered potential medalists with cash and swag. The Dasslers can take much of the credit, or blame, for turning the Olympics into the marketing circus it is today.

It's a great story, unevenly told in Sneaker Wars: The Enemy Brothers Who Founded Adidas and Puma and the Family Feud that Forever Changed the Business of Sport by Dutch journalist Barbara Smit. The book eventually finds its footing, but the early chapters are poorly paced and full of loose ends. Recounting Rudolf's war years, for example, Smit first seems to accept his postwar assertion that he was arrested by the Gestapo for suspected desertion in the final weeks of the war. Then later she raises the possibility that he was in fact working for the Gestapo. A better writer would have handled the contradictory evidence more gracefully.

Certainly, neither brother was a saint. Both joined the Nazi Party soon after Hitler took power, although their first allegiance seems to have been to the shoe business. (Adi worked hard to get star athlete Jesse Owens to wear his spikes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, even though the Nazis reviled the black American.) After Adi and Rudolf split, they and their successors stopped at nothing to undermine each other. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Adidas managers contrived to get Puma shoes impounded by Mexican customs and may even have arranged for a Puma rep to be arrested and jailed.

As if the Puma-Adidas rivalry weren't enough, Rudolf and Adi couldn't even get along with their own offspring. Adi's estranged son, Horst, established a parallel company in France, using the Adidas name but offering a separate product line, competing for orders, and even spying on the Herzogenaurach faction.

Despite all the internal conflicts, Adidas and Puma rode the postwar sports boom to riches. They saw the potential of the U.S. market and signed athletes such as Joe Namath, the quarterback for the New York Jets who wore dazzling white Puma boots on the field.

The Adidas-Puma rivalry may even have fired the brothers' competitive spirit and contributed to their success. But their preoccupation with each other also seems to have left them exposed to newcomer Nike (NKE) in the 1970s. Nike's rise drove Adidas from a 60% market share in the U.S. to only 2.5% at the beginning of the '90s. The heirs of Adi and Rudolf eventually lost control of both Adidas and Puma.

Luckily for Smit, the owners and managers who followed were no less colorful. Smit's narrative improves considerably as the book proceeds, possibly because there are more living witnesses to provide the lively detail lacking in early chapters.

Smit is not one to draw business-case lessons from her tale. But a reader may come away with a new appreciation for the MBA-style professionalism at the top of Adidas and Puma today. Current Adidas CEO Herbert Hainer and Puma CEO Jochen Zeitz are both marketing professionals who have delivered stability and growth—even if they don't make such juicy copy as their companies' founders.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_14/b4078120287801.htm

Original Nazi Death Star

http://www.combobulate.com/node/52
10/07/2008

Long before Star Wars at the end of WWII it was discovered that Nazi scientists at a research center in Hillersleben were laying plans for a space station 5,100 miles up, from which a "sun gun" much like the death star could focus the sun's energy on the enemies of Nazi Germany. A high ranking United States Army Ordnance officer declared that after an exhaustive interrogation of the scientists was revealed that plans had already been drawn up and determined that a dish just three kilometers square would have the power to destroy nations or boil ocean water.

Click to enlarge

The Journey of Dr Death

The world's most wanted Nazi war criminal hid in Egypt, converted to Islam and was buried here, Sophi Ibrahim reports

weekly.ahram.org.eg (Cairo)
12 - 18 February 2009

Passport photo of Aribert Heim (Tarek Hussein Farid); his son Ruediger

In Cairo's most populous district, a tall athletic man who speaks Arabic with an accent moved from one place to another. For 30 years, neighbours and their children would call him the "German man" or "Uncle Tarek" who played table tennis and carried a camera all the time but never allowed himself to be photographed.

No one seemed to know his real identity -- a Nazi war criminal, concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim. During the 1930s, Heim earned the nickname Dr Death. The most wanted Nazi war criminal was still believed by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish human rights organisation aimed at hunting down Nazis and bringing them to justice, to be at large.

Even after his death in 1992 and his burial in the Poor's Cemetery, Heim remained -- to his neighbours at least -- a German who converted to Islam, and who lived a simple life. He had few friends, he said few words and would walk long miles from Ataba and Ramses where he used to live, to Groppi Café for coffee and Al-Azhar Mosque, Islam's most renowned institution, for prayers.

Only when Heim's son Ruediger spoke up did the long and mysterious life of Uncle Tarek start to be unravelled.

Heim, a member of Hitler's elite Waffen-SS and a medical doctor at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, left a son who constantly denied knowledge of his father's whereabouts. Only last week, Ruediger, the son, told the press that his father had died in Egypt in 1992. He had tried to close his father's file, claim inheritance and stop anti-Nazi police from searching for Heim all over the world, especially Latin America where he was thought to have taken shelter.

Ruediger gave the press tips on how to trace his father's journey in Egypt. Most importantly was Heim's suitcase that carried documents, research papers, medical reports, letters and newspaper clippings. The suitcase had been kept for 17 years, since the death of Heim, with the family of Mahmoud Doma, the owner of Qasr Al-Madina Hotel in Port Said Street where Heim lived and died.

Heim is accused of committing atrocities against Jewish prisoners in Mauthausen, in his native Austria. He allegedly performed operations on prisoners without anaesthesia; removing organs from inmates, then leaving them to die on the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the skull of at least one victim as a souvenir.

After living off the radar of Nazi hunters for more than a decade after World War II -- much of it in the German spa town of Baden-Baden where he had a wife, two sons and a medical practice as a gynaecologist -- he escaped capture just as investigators closed in on him in 1962. Investigators suspected that he took shelter in Latin America where his illegitimate daughter lives in Chile. They also received tips that he might be in Saudi Arabia, Argentina or Vietnam.

A travel document found inside his briefcase showed that he entered Egypt in 1963 after driving through France, Spain and Morocco, under his real second name. In the space marked "profession", he was described as a "doctor/ economist" but then crossed it out. Other applications for extension of residency showed that he lived in Egypt under his real name until the late 1970s when bank receipts showed the transfer of money to a Tarek Hussein Farid.

In the dusty briefcase, there were also research papers he wrote in English that show his attempt to prove that Jews are not Semitic. He planned to send the documents to several figures including former United Nations secretary-general Kurt Waldheim, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and ex-Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito.

There was also a letter dated 1980 which described all allegations about torturing Jews in the concentration camp as "new" and "lies".

Medical reports issued by several Egyptian officials showed that he suffered from cancer, which his son said, led to his death.

A death certificate, however, described Tarek Hussein Farid as being Egyptian who died at age 81. None of the papers in his briefcase showed that he carried Egyptian citizenship. He was also reportedly born in 1941, meaning that he died at 68.

His friends in Egypt, including a family member of his dentist, were shocked to learn that Uncle Tarek or The German was in fact a Nazi war criminal.

"The only thing we knew about him was that he fled from the Jews and he was in conflict with the Jews," Tarek Abdel-Moneim El-Rifaai, son of Heim's dentist, Abdel-Moneim El-Rifaai, said. "He was well built, he was very kind -- he brought us cakes and chocolates -- but I never knew he was a Nazi or that he was a doctor."

"Dr Heim lived with his real identity when he was granted some sort of political cover in the 1960s and early 1970s," Emad Gad, an expert in Israeli affairs in the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, believes. "But when this political cover was lifted, he converted to Islam and dissolved into Egyptian society."

Heim's political cover, Gad added, was blown after Egypt signed its 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

Efraim Zuroff, the Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who had been searching for Heim and who travelled to Chile last July to raise awareness about the case, expressed surprise when informed by The New York Times of Heim's apparent fate, saying the centre had been about to raise the reward leading to information or his arrest to $1.3 million from $400,000.

Heim's last wish was to donate his body organs for scientific experiments. However, in Egypt, this was not possible.

Doma's family wanted to bury the body in the family cemetery. Doma tried to bribe health employees, however, police found out and buried the body instead in the Poor's Cemetery where it is impossible to keep track of the deceased.

German authorities said earlier in the week they were waiting for Egypt's permission to go to Egypt and search for the body remains. Until now, Egypt has not made any official comment, but in all cases, finding the body will be an almost impossible task.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/934/eg10.htm

BurrowGate

Key Bush Gitmo advisers burrowing in at the Pentagon
thinkprogress.org
By Ali Frick
Feb 6th, 2009

The AP reports that three senior officials “tapped by the Bush administration to oversee detainee policy at Guantanamo Bay” remain in their jobs, weeks after Bush left office and despite President Obama’s efforts to dramatically change the U.S.’s detention policies. Two of them “have been shunted into civil service jobs,” meaning Obama can’t simply fire them. On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing concern about former Bush appointees that “have been improperly converted to career positions within the Department of Defense” and asked Gates to investigate:

I ask that you immediately review the circumstances behind the conversion of these positions and the hiring of any former Bush administration appointees as career or temporary officials within the Office of Detainee Affairs. … This is especially disconcerting within the Office of Detainee Affairs due to the nature of the policy recommendations that office provides regarding Guantanamo.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/06/bushies-burrowing-detainee-office/
•••
Back up a couple of months:

Burrowing watch: Bush appointed 18 administation officials last Tuesday alone.
By Ali Frick
Dec 7th, 2008

With only 44 days left in office, President Bush continues to “burrow” people into government positions that will continue long after President-elect Obama is sworn in. “All told, Mr. Bush has made roughly 30 personnel moves since the November election, some in nominations that will require Senate approval, and others in direct appointments that will last well into President-elect Barack Obama’s term and beyond.” The New York Times reports that on Tuesday of last week alone, Bush hired 18 people for administration jobs.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/07/bush-burrowing/
•••
Top scientist says Bush’s ‘burrowing’ of political appointees will ‘leave wreckage behind.’
By Matt Corley
Nov 22nd, 2008

Yesterday, the president of the nation’s largest general science organization railed against efforts by the Bush administration to give political appointees “permanent federal jobs with responsibility for making or administering scientific policies, saying the result would be ‘to leave wreckage behind.’” James McCarthy, who heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called the “burrowing” of people without scientific backgrounds into science-related jobs “ludicrous“:

“It’s ludicrous to have people who do not have a scientific background, who are not trained and skilled in the ways of science, make decisions that involve resources, that involve facilities in the scientific infrastructure,” said James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “You’d just like to think people have more respect for the institution of government than to leave wreckage behind with these appointments.”

McCarthy particularly questioned the qualifications of Todd Harding and Jeffrey T. Salmon, who received civil service positions at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Energy Department’s Office of Science, respectively.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/22/scientist-burrowing/

Perino: Obama ‘Should Want’ Bush’s Political Appointees In His Administration
By Satyam Khanna
Nov 18th, 2008

The Washington Post reported this morning that between March and November, the Bush administration has “burrowed” at least 20 political appointees into career civil service posts, initially depriving President-elect Obama of the chance to install his own appointees in key jobs.

In today’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino defended the “burrowing,” saying that Obama’s administration should want experienced Bush political appointees in his administration:

PERINO: But there are people in the federal government who — and you should want people who have worked in the administration who think that they might want to make their careers in government. We have a lot of smart people all across the government with a lot of expertise — in the financial sector, in the energy sector, in the environmental sector, the Labor Department, etc.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/18/white-house-burrowing/

Bolivia Expels U.S. Diplomat for "Conspiring"

Reuters
Mar 9, 2009

LA PAZ (Reuters) - Two weeks after he accused the CIA of conspiring against his energy policies, leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled a U.S. Embassy official on Tuesday.

"Today, I've decided to declare Francisco Martinez ... who works for the United States embassy, persona non-grata," Morales, a fierce critic of the United States, said at a press conference in La Paz.

The president said he needed to expel Martinez "to put an end to a foreign conspiracy."

Morales, who often calls the United States "the empire," previously ejected the U.S. ambassador and U.S. anti-narcotics officials from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

A spokesman at the embassy said Martinez was a mid-level official at the diplomatic mission, and that his title was second secretary. The embassy made no other comment.

Last month, Morales accused Washington of plotting against the state-run energy company, YPFB, a claim the U.S. government dismissed.

Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador from Bolivia last year, charging he was conspiring, accusations that the United States called "false" and "absurd."

Earlier this year, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa expelled a U.S. Embassy official that he said was the director of the CIA in Ecuador.

Correa is a close ally of Morales, as is Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who expelled the U.S. ambassador to his country last year.

All three of the leftist leaders have said the U.S. meddles in their domestic politics.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE52867J20090309

The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be Terminated

" [The CIA] represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently. ... If you think this is a “radical” idea, think again. What is “radical” is to empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has hinted, is chilling. ... "

By Sherwood Ross
www.scoop.co.nz/24 February 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its creator President Harry Truman that it might degenerate into “an American Gestapo.” It has been just that for so long it is beyond redemption. It represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently.

Over the years, [the CIA] has given U.S. presidents so much wrong information on so many critical issues, broken so many laws, subverted so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many dictators, and killed and tortured so many innocent human beings that the pages of its official history could be written in blood, not ink. People the world over regard it as infamous, and that evaluation, sadly for the reputation of America, is largely accurate. Besides, since President Obama has half a dozen other major intelligence agencies to rely on for guidance, why does he need the CIA? In one swoop he could lop an estimated 27,000 employees off the Federal payroll, save taxpayers umpteen billions, and wipe the CIA stain from the American flag.

If you think this is a “radical” idea, think again. What is “radical” is to empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has hinted, is chilling. These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur again.

“The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before---beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama,” writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book “Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA”(Random House). Weiner has won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the intelligence community. “It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before---beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before…”

In Iran in 1953, for example, a CIA-directed coup restored the Shah (king) to absolute power, initiating what journalist William Blum in “Rogue State” (Common Courage Press) called “a period of 25 years of repression and torture; while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the US and Britain each getting 40 percent.” About the same time in Guatemala, Blum adds, a CIA-organized coup “overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims---indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century.” The massive slaughter compares, at least in terms of sheer numbers, with Hitler’s massacre of Romanian and Ukranian Jews during the holocaust. Yet few Americans know of it.

Blum provides yet other examples of CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow neutralist president Sukarno. It plotted Sukarno’s assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government, including bombing runs by American pilots, Blum reported This particular attempt, like one in Costa Rica about the same time, failed. So did the CIA attempt in Iraq in 1960 to assassinate President Abdul Kassem. Other ventures proved more “successful”.

In Laos, the CIA was involved in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960, creating a clandestine army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In Ecuador, the CIA ousted President Jose Velasco for recognizing the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro The CIA also arranged the murder of elected Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and installation of Mobutu Seko who ruled “with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers,” Blum recalls.

In Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a military coup against leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of elected President Salvador Allende in 1973 and brought to power the murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet who executed 3,000 political opponents and tortured thousands more. In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped subvert the elections and backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month of operation. “Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine,” Blum writes.

In South Africa, the CIA gave the apartheid government information that led to the arrest of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who subsequently spent years in prison. In Bolivia, in 1964, the CIA overthrew President Victor Paz; in Australia from 1972-75, the CIA slipped millions of dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party; ditto, Brazil in 1962; in Laos in 1960, the CIA stuffed ballot boxes to help a strongman into power; in Portugal in the Seventies the candidates it financed triumphed over a pro-labor government; in the Philippines, the CIA backed governments in the 1970-90 period that employed torture and summary execution against its own people; in El Salvador, the CIA in the Nineties backed the wealthy in a civil war in which 75,000 civilians were killed; and the list goes on and on.

Of course, the hatred that the CIA engenders for the American people and American business interests is enormous. Because the Agency operates largely in secret, most Americans are unaware of the crimes it perpetrates in their names. As Chalmers Johnson writes in “Blowback”(Henry Holt), former long-time CIA director Robert Gates, now Obama’s defense secretary, admitted U.S. intelligence services began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet invasion in December, 1979.

As has often been the case, the CIA responded to a criminal order from one of the succession of imperial presidents that have occupied the White House, in this instance one dated July 3, 1979, from President Jimmy Carter. The Agency was ordered to aid the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul---aid that might sucker the Kremlin into invading. “The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on,” Johnson writes, helping bin Laden train many of the 35,000 Arab Afghans.

Thus Carter, like his successors in the George H.W. Bush government --- Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell, “all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the ‘collateral damage’ that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance,” Johnson added. Worse, the Bush-Cheney regime after 9/11 “set no limits on what the agency could do. It was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officer and contractors used techniques that included torture,” Weiner has written. By some estimates, the CIA in 2006 held 14,000 souls in 11 secret prisons, a vast crime against humanity.

That the CIA has zero interest in justice and engages in gratuitous cruelty may be seen from the indiscriminate dragnet arrests it has perpetrated: “CIA officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand people in more than one hundred countries in the year after 9/11,” Weiner writes, adding that only 14 men of all those seized “were high-ranking authority figures within al Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency jailed hundreds of nobodies…(who) became ghost prisoners in the war on terror.”

As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence, the record of the CIA has been a fiasco. The Agency was telling President Carter the Shah of Iran was beloved by his people and was firmly entrenched in power in 1979 when any reader of Harper’s magazine, available on newsstands for a buck, could read that his overthrow was imminent---and it was. Over the years, the Agency has been wrong far more often than it has been right.

According to an Associated Press report, when confirmed by the Senate as the new CIA director, Leon Panetta said the Obama administration would not prosecute CIA officers that “participated in harsh interrogations even if they constituted torture as long as they did not go beyond their instructions.” This will allow interrogators to evade prosecution for following the clearly criminal orders they would have been justified to disobey.

“Panetta also said that the Obama administration would continue to transfer foreign detainees to other countries for questioning but only if U.S. officials are confident that the prisoners will not be tortured,” the AP story continued. If past is prologue, how confident can Panetta be the CIA’s fellow goons in Egypt and Morocco will stop torturing prisoners? Why did the CIA kidnap men off the streets of Milan and New York and fly them to those countries in the first place if not for torture? They certainly weren’t treating them to a Mediterranean vacation. By its long and nearly perfect record of reckless disregard for international law, the CIA has deprived itself of the right to exist.

It will be worse than unfortunate if President Obama continues the inhumane (and illegal) CIA renditions that President Bill Clinton began and President Bush vastly expanded. If the White House thinks its operatives can roam the world and arrest and torture any person it chooses without a court order, without due process, and without answering for their crimes, this signifies Americans believe themselves to be a Master Race better than others and above international law. That’s not much different from the philosophy that motivated Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. It would be the supreme irony if the American electorate that repudiated racism last November has voted into its highest office a constitutional lawyer who reaffirms his predecessor’s illegal views on this activity. Renditions must be stopped. The CIA must be abolished.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0902/S00406.htm

Online Documentary: The Lost Von Braun

Note from Aron Ranen, Director

I have just posted my entire Von Braun Documentary The Lost Von Braun, which features 3 former Nazi rocket scientists, all of whom are retired NASA employees. It also includes an interview with a former slave from the V-2 Rocket factory, as well as Eli Rosenbaum from the Department of Justice, and Mike Nuefeld of the Smithsonian. The film examines the crimes of Von Braun during World War Two, and how he escaped punishment.

Here are links to all four parts, free at YouTube:

Part One The Lost Von Braun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxiJJS5W65A&feature=channel_page

Part Two

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kxUe64-w_M&NR=1

Part Three

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTlgU7eKS54&feature=related

Part Four

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcyeHvnlkX4&feature=related

Thanks,
Aron Ranen

Hughley: GOP Convention "Looked like Nazi Germany"

Caveat: This is National Review Online's slant on Hughley's comments - NRO is a CIA/fascist front, and the view that his comments were "slanderous" is obviously not my own. The GOP convention is an enclave of American Nazis, no stretch of objective fact - the US has systematically murdered more racial "subhumans" than the Nazis ever did. (In a single war, "we," without provocation, killed many more Vietnamese than the Nazis did Jews, and down to the very last drop of Napalm no one could explain what "we" were doing in Vietnam.) So the comparison isn't necessary. "American Nazis" would have sufficed because there is nothing lower than a doctrinaire Republican, and I see no reason to insult the German people with hyperbolic insults. - AC

That Steele Interview on CNN Is Really Bad
[Andy McCarthy]
National Review

Rich referred to this earlier. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but the video is much worse than described by Newsbusters' Michael Balan. He quotes a lot of what was said by the host, D.L. Hughley, about Republicans being like Nazis, but Balan goes on to report, incorrectly, that "[Michael] Steele did not verbally react to Hughley’s Nazi characterization." Steele not only did react but did so in a way that accepted Hughley's slanderous claim — Steele's infuriating come-back was to suggest that this description of Republicans as racists was valid, but now he, Michael Steele, was here to set things right.

Watch the video (linked in Balan's report) and judge for yourself. I did and made my own transcript, which follows:

Hughley: I’m tellin’ you, if it were the sign alone — In other words, the tenets of the Republican Party are amazing, and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied — like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention.

Steele: Agreed.

Hughley: It literally looked like Nazi Germany. It really did.

Steele: [ACM: I think he appears to be nodding his head slightly. Could mean he agrees — judging from the entire context, that’s certainly a fair interpretation — or it could mean he was simply following what Hughley was saying but not necessarily agreeing. Again, judge for yourself, but Steele is very clearly NOT objecting.]

Hughley: And I make — say that point, it just does not seem, like not only are we …

Steele: Well —

Hughley: not welcome, not only we’re not welcome, um, they don’t even care what we think.

Steele: Well, I’m here, I’m here now —

Hughley: And that — I mean that, that, that, seems to be the way I —

Steele: You — you’re right

Chuck D: I covered the — I covered the Republican Convention in 1996 … [statement continues]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmJlOWY0NmFkZWRiMmU2OGFjNDFmNjdlYTE0OGY3Mjk=

Schaeffler Auto Parts Founder Had Nazi Ties, Cicero Reports

Also see: "German car company 'used hair from Jews murdered at Auschwitz'"

By Chris Reiter

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Wilhelm Schaeffler, one of the founders of Schaeffler Group, was a member of the Nazi party and employed forced labor to produce weapons for the German military during World War II, Cicero magazine reported.

Schaeffler’s company, called Davistan AG at the time, was purchased in 1940 from creditors after being abandoned by its Jewish owner in 1933, according to Gregor Schoellgen, a historian commissioned by the Schaeffler family to research their past, the magazine said in its March issue. Wilhelm Schaeffler joined the Nazis in 1941 yet didn’t play an active role in the party, the report said.

Schaeffler, who died in 1981, was the brother-in-law of Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, who now owns Schaeffler Group with her son Georg. The manufacturer, strained by 11 billion euros ($14 billion) of debt from the purchase of Continental AG, makes transmission parts and ball bearings for cars, planes and fishing reels.

In 1942, Wilhelm Schaeffler converted some of the company’s textile production to the manufacture of bombs, armored vehicles and canons. He “acted as did most German industrialists of this time,” Schoellgen, a professor at the University of Erlangen, said in the report.

“Those who wanted to keep their companies above water entered the defense business and contributed to the German war and annihilation machine, whether they wanted to or not,” said Schoellgen.

Imprisoned Until 1951

Slave labor was used by the company from 1943 as military call-ups led to labor shortages, the magazine reported. Wilhelm Schaeffler was arrested in 1946 and imprisoned until 1951 for misappropriating Polish property.
The report rejects claims that the company used human hair from the Auschwitz concentration camp to produce textiles.

“All evidence today contradicts these suspicions,” said the report, adding: “None of the systematic searches of German archives in connection with Schaeffler found even a hint of links to Auschwitz, let alone the delivery of hair,” said the report.

Detlef Sieverdingbeck, spokesman for Herzogenaurach, Germany-based Schaeffler, said in an e-mail yesterday that Schoellgen was engaged several years ago to investigate business activities prior to Schaeffler Group’s founding in 1946 on the family’s own initiative.

“Because of false reports and allegations that have surfaced recently on the Internet, Professor Schoellgen published, for clarification, the most essential results of his research in Cicero,” he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=aujTqxF0LQzs&refer=germany#
•••
" ... Schaeffler's Internet site sets the start of its history in 1946 ... "

Auto parts family Schaeffler worked with Nazis
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090226-17665.html

The German industrialist family Schaeffler, creator of the eponymous auto parts group, collaborated with the World War II Nazi regime in Poland, according to a report in Cicero magazine.

The company initially specialised in textiles but converted to work in the arms industry and employed forced workers which included French, Poles, and Russians, historian Gregor Schöllgen wrote in the magazine's latest edition published on Thursday.

Schoellgen, who is based at the university in Erlangen, southern Germany, was mandated by heirs to the group's founders, including the current boss Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, to explore the family's archives, a company spokesman told AFP.

The research was completed two years ago but has not been published before.

It was released this week owing to "false allegations on the Internet" that the historian sought to clarify, the spokesman said.

According to the report, Schaeffler grew out of Davistan AG, a company owned by a Jewish family that fled Germany following calls for a boycott of Jewish firms by the Nazis, Schoellgen explained. The company was taken over by a consortium of banks that sold it in 1940 to Wilhelm Schaeffler, the researcher said.

Schaeffler began to produce military equipment and became a member of the Nazi Party, while his brother Georg also invested in the new company. In 1946, Wilhelm Schaeffler was arrested by US forces and turned over to Polish authorities.

He was convicted of "liquidating" assets that belonged to the Polish state and citizens, and Jews, "on behalf of the Third Reich," in 1949 and imprisoned in Poland until 1951, Schoellgen said.

Schaeffler's Internet site sets the start of its history in 1946, with the launch of a group to produce industrial parts such as needle rollers, a kind of specialised ball bearing, by Georg and Wilhelm Schaeffler.

Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler is Georg's widow.

The report in Cicero appeared after Schaeffler asked for public aid to avoid bankruptcy while expanding rapidly in recent years.

The company has been hit by the global slowdown in auto markets, and by the purchase last year of its much bigger German rival Continental, which has turned into a heavy weight on Schaeffler's finances.

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20090226-17665.html

Exhibition Exposes Sex Slavery at Nazi Camps

timesofindia.indiatimes.com
2 Mar 2009

FUERSTENBERG, Germany: "They told us we were in the camp brothel, that we were the lucky ones. We would eat well and have enough to drink. If we behaved and fulfilled our duties nothing would happen to us."

So begins the wrenching account of Frau W., a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrueck north of Berlin who between mid-1943 and December 1944 was forced to work as a sex slave for her fellow detainees.

Her story forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition at Ravensbrueck about the fate of women pressed into prostitution between 1942 and 1945, like Asia's "comfort women" during World War II. But rather than servicing soldiers, the camp prostitutes were the brainchild of SS chief Heinrich Himmler to increase productivity among forced labourers and try to keep homosexuality from "breaking out" among their ranks.

Their numbers were far smaller than the tens of thousands of "comfort women" kidnapped across Asia to serve Japanese troops. But Ravensbrueck centre director Insa Eschebach said the at least 200, predominantly German women who were enslaved also endured paralysing trauma, shame and scorn in an until now largely "taboo" chapter of European history.

Most of the sex workers were taken from the women's camps at Ravensbrueck and Auschwitz to brothels at 10 camps in Germany and the Nazi-occupied eastern territories. The vast majority were imprisoned for "anti-social" behaviour -- a crime arbitrarily defined under Hitler to include prostitutes but also women with suspect political ties or relationships with Jews. Prisoners given a privileged place in the camp hierarchy -- exhibition curator Michael Sommer estimates about one percent of the forced labourers -- could "buy" up to a quarter of an hour with a prostitute for two Reichsmarks from the pittance they earned in the Nazi-run factories.

A fraction of that amount was credited to women's camp accounts which they could use for food when it was available.

"The sex work was organized very bureaucratically," said Sommer, showing prisoner files with the code 998 signifying a prostitute and vouchers used by men allowed to visit the camp brothel. No Jews worked at the brothels or were allowed to patronize them, and separate facilities were created for camp guards.

Prostitutes were regularly tested for sexually transmitted diseases to avoid outbreaks at the camps. Pregnancies ended in forced abortions.

"The irony was that while the Nazis tried to regulate prostitution in German cities, they institutionalized it at the camps," Sommer said. Some women "volunteered" for service in the brothels, which were heated and had slightly better hygienic conditions, after being promised early release from the degrading and life-threatening conditions of the camps.

Others only learned of their fate when the first patrons were ushered in.

Another woman whose testimony is featured in the exhibition, identified only as Frau B., said each woman worked in a small room where she received up to 10 men in two hours.

"There was a spy hole and sometimes the guards would peek in and sneer," she said. "But you know, we were so numb that we just thought, 'Get stuffed, you bastards.'" Although the months in the brothel left her permanently scarred, Frau B. said the men who visited her were "decent" by and large.

"They had also been locked up for years and were happy to have human contact," she said. Sometimes, the men just wanted to talk.

Many political prisoners boycotted the brothels. Communists at Buchenwald were convinced the bordellos would be used by the SS to spy on prisoners. Although nearly all the sex workers survived until the camps' liberation, there is scant evidence any were released for service rendered.

After the war, most of the German sex workers kept their trauma silent out of shame, while foreign victims feared being seen as "collaborators".

None received recognition from the German state as victims of sex slavery or compensation for their ordeal. Few, if any, are still alive today.

Eschebach noted that sex slavery has only been recognized as a war crime under international law since 2002 and said the more recent occurrences of mass rape in Bosnia and Rwanda, as well as the demands of "comfort women" for justice, had prompted more research in Germany.

The exhibition can be seen at Ravensbrueck until March 8, and will make three more stops in Germany before opening in Rome in 2010.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Exhibition-exposes-sex-slavery-at-Nazi-camps/articleshow/4210607.cms

Blackwater Changes its Name to Xe

Xe (pronounced /ˈzi/, formerly Blackwater Worldwide & Blackwater USA), is a private military company founded in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al Clark. In October 2007, Blackwater USA renamed itself Blackwater Worldwide, and was colloquially referred to simply as "Blackwater".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xe_(company)

Robert Farley, a conservative opinion-shaper at American Prospect, laments: "I WANTED BLACKWATER, BUT ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY XE." (I know, I know: conservative "humor" is strained and cliché-ridden.) Blackwater, the propaganda sheet notes, changed its name to "Xe" in "an apparent effort to escape the bad publicity associated with the Blackwater brand."
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2009&base_name=i_wanted_blackwater_but_all_i

Brand of what?? Contractual murder? ...

In retrospect, opines this Prospect wit, "Xe may have erred by developing too public a profile." You don't want everyone knowing how you murdered innocent pedestrians in cold blood - bad for the corporate image. "One component of success," that is, getting away with mass murder, "I'm guessing, is the ability to fly just below the radar, such that the relevant customers know of your existence but the media and public really don't." Sage advice from a publication much respected by American conservatives who dwell in a world of lucrative delusions and thus are capable of any and all atrocities.

- AC