Book Review: Anti-Nazi Lawyer Paid for Choices

By Linda Short
www.centredaily.com
May. 31, 2009

In the time after the failed Munich Beer Hall putsch, his short-lived imprisonment, and the writing and publication of Mein Kampf, but before his appointment as chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler was summoned as a prosecution witness by lawyer Hans Litten in the trial of four storm troopers.

The storm troopers were charged with attempted murder as members of a “roll commando” — essentially a paramilitary unit whose function was to seek out and attack or even kill political opponents.

“Crossing Hitler” offers an unfamiliar look at the life of — and consequences for — Litten, a 27-year-old Mischlinge (“crossbreed,” having Jewish ancestry) who intentionally chose cases that brought him into direct conflict with the rising Nazi party.

The failed putsch taught Hitler the need for acquiring power through legal means.

To that end, the succeeding years saw him trying to achieve a balance between proclaimed legality designed to reassure middle-class voters and cautious support of the violent proclivities of the SA, the storm troopers, in order to also keep their allegiance. That internal SA revolts against Hitler and the central Nazi party leadership erupted periodically indicates how delicate the balance was.

After a one-year ban following a deadly Berlin brawl, the Berlin SA began a new strategy for gaining political support: gradually moving in and taking over taverns in working- class districts where the political opponents of the Nazis predominated. Using the taverns as a base, SA members went out into neighborhoods fomenting violence.

The SA’s Storm 33 armed attack at the Eden Dance Palace gave rise to the trial in which attorney Litten called Hitler as a witness.

This trial was not the first time Litten had confronted members of Storm 33 in court. But in the Eden trial, Litten’s strategy was markedly different from that of the reluctant state prosecutor Stenig. Litten intended to use the trial to make a broad political point: “that the violence committed by Storm 33 was an essential element of the Nazi program” carried out on Hitler’s direct orders.

In this way, Litten hoped to expose the contradictions on which the Nazis’ appeal was based.

Only someone like Litten could dare to summon prominent leaders to give account in court. With his photographic memory and confidential information supplied by disgruntled SA members, Litten subjected Hitler to a “withering cross-examination” that left Hitler sputtering.

Litten’s choice of strategy ensured that he would be hated, remembered, and among the first arrested after Hitler was named chancellor.

The issue of choice is a real, significant and complex one. In all my classes I ask students to consider the choices they have made or might make in the face of antisemitic remarks, actions or stereotypes.

We consider Yehuda Bauer’s proposition, expressed in his “Rethinking the Holocaust,” that “any event is the result of the interaction of an infinite number of causal chains ... that ... interact and constantly change positions ... [based on] choices; and it is people who make the choices.”

Litten himself faced life-or-death choices, which he called the “double edge of the deed.” When confronted with the questions of how much to risk, he chose the dangerous answers over the safe ones, dying in a concentration camp despite international efforts to free him.

Litten’s story offers the reader an opportunity to ponder the choices he made, to consider the reasons why the German Association of Democratic Lawyers and the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights today give an annual prize for human rights advocacy in his name, and to challenge one’s personal choices when confronted with violations of justice and human rights, whether in the United States or abroad.

Linda Short, who has a law degree, is lecturer in Jewish Studies with an emphasis in the Holocaust at Penn State.

California Now Faces Budget Cuts “Beyond Draconian”

One of the first targets is 200 state parks, already causing a public outcry as summer approaches.

By Daniel B. Wood
features.csmonitor.com
May 30, 2009

LOS ANGELES - Before this state’s May 19 vote on five initiatives intended to solve the state’s chronic fiscal difficulties, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — in person on the stump and via TV ad blitzes up and down the state — told voters that if the measures did not pass, the resulting budget cuts would be “draconian.”

In the days after the measures went down in flames, the announcements have come rapid fire, and various constituencies are reeling — calling the cuts “beyond draconian.” Some 235,000 state workers will have to take a 5 percent pay cut. Of the state’s 279 state parks, 200 will be closed. Schwarzenegger’s plan to dismantle the Cal Grant program — considered one of the nation’s best programs to help poorer students cover full fees or tuition at public colleges — would make California the first US state to eliminate student financial aid while raising tuition.

The list goes on and on:

A massive plan to overhaul healthcare in state prisons will be scaled back. A Senate bill which would have created a state-run system to provide healthcare to every Californian has been scrapped. A CalWorks program providing medical, dental, and vision care to 90,000 children will be eliminated. Hundreds of new spending programs have been sidelined, and the local budgets of cities and counties have been raided to make ends meet.

“We recognize the fiscal situation in California, and as much as we would love to be doing new and different things in California, we simply don’t have the money,” says Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D) of Sacramento. After closing a $41.5 billion budget gap in February, the state has another $24.3 billion deficit in a $92 billion general fund budget.

Besides the pay cuts to state workers, one of the most highly-visible and painful cutbacks will be the closure of state parks, not just at the beginning of the summer season in which they are needed most, but in a recession year in which many vacationers are opting to say close to home to save money.

“This is going to be devastating,” says Jerry Emory, director of communications for the California State Parks Foundation, a nonprofit organization which raises money to support parks. State parks had a record 80 million visits last year, and every indication is this year would have exceeded that, with reservations for the year filling up just hours after opening in January.

Besides laying off staff, the effect to local economies will be even worse. Studies show that for every dollar spent at a state park, $2.35 is generated for the state’s general fund through the ripple effect at nearby stores, attractions such as ferries, restaurants, souvenir stores, and other amenities. Closing the parks also creates law enforcement challenges and the further deterioration of buildings, restrooms, trails, and roads.

“Closing parks costs a lot of money. We already have $1.2 billion in deferred maintenance,” says Mr. Emory, “and that figure will balloon way beyond that while this closure is in effect.”

Emory says his foundation website is creating easy links to legislators for citizens to vent their anger and hopefully change Schwarzenegger’s directive by next Tuesday, when a budget meeting is scheduled. The governor announced the closure of 48 state parks last year, but later changed his mind after a public outcry.

Parks that will remain open are state beaches and other parks used by off-road vehicles and boats whose funding comes from taxes and fees generated by such boats and vehicles. Some beaches attract enough visitors to operate from parking, admissions, and other concessions fees. Some critics have said that the amount of savings is so minuscule from parks — only $70 million — that the governor may be using the high-visibility parks issue to provoke public pressure on legislators to solve the budget problem.

But spokesman for the governor’s Department of Finance, H.D. Palmer, says the governor’s proposals are “not a test.”

“We have been forced to put forward proposals that would have been unthinkable even a few short months ago,” Palmer says.

Staff writer Gloria Goodale contributed to this report.

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/05/30/california-now-faces-budget-cuts-beyond-draconian/

West Plots to Supplant United Nations with Global NATO

by Rick Rozoff
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/62721
May 28, 2009

"A revived, robust, empowered and democratized UN must shift focus from a disproportionate emphasis on negotiating trade, treaty and other agreements in service to world commerce and in ceding vast tracts of the earth to interested parties under suspicious circumstances, as with the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon and 2.2 million square kilometers of the resource-rich Antarctic Ocean to Australia recently, to what needs to be its main objective: Exerting all efforts to eliminate forever the scourge of war."

Ten years ago it first became evident to the world that moves were afoot in major Western capitals to circumvent, subvert and ultimately supplant the United Nations, as the UN could not always be counted on to act in strict accordance with the dictates of the United States and its NATO allies. ...

"'[Madeleine] Albright ... and a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations, a secret plan we had called Operation Orient Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in doing in the UN head. In the end, the US had to do it alone (with its UN veto) and Sheehan and I had to prevent the President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending Boutros-Ghali's tenure, often by our racing to the Oval Office when we were alerted that a head of state was telephoning the President. In the end Clinton was impressed that we had managed not only to oust Boutros-Ghali but to have Kofi Annan selected to replace him.' ... "

STORY

Doctor Condemns Conditions in Sri Lankan Detention Camps

By our correspondent
www.wsws.orgorg
27 May 2009

The Sri Lankan government has herded about 300,000 Tamil civilians who fled the north-eastern war zone into camps around the northern city of Vavuniya. While the government has dubbed them “welfare centres,” in reality they are detention centres where people are forced to live in crowded conditions without adequate food and other basic necessities.

Detainees faced the brunt of intense shelling and bombing when the Sri Lankan army launched its final offensive to annihilate the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Amnesty International has reported: “The civilians who survived weeks under heavy combat reached the camps sometimes badly injured, malnourished, exhausted and traumatised. The displaced civilians are suffering from widespread and serious human rights violations at the hands of government security forces and allied paramilitary forces, including enforced disappearance; extra-judicial executions; torture and other ill-treatments, and forced recruitment to paramilitary groups.”

The government has severely curtailed access to the camps for the media, aid workers and anyone else who might report on the conditions in the centres. We publish below an account given by a doctor to the WSWS about the condition of people in one camp. He was among team of doctors who visited the camp to provide medical treatment. We have withheld his name for security reasons.
***
A group of us went to a “hospital” located in Chettikulam about 300 kilometres from Colombo, close to Vavuniya. It was, in fact, a school turned into a hospital. There was no residential doctor. Instead, doctors and other health workers from outside treated patients in a camp set up in the school grounds, making use of school furniture and folding beds. There were about 150 patients in the makeshift hospital.

The place was called a satellite camp of the main Manik Farm camp, where hundreds of thousands of people are interned, about three kilometres away.

When we were going to Chettikulam, we had to undergo a full security check at the army checkpoint near Manik Farm. We were not allowed cameras, camera phones or any recording items. Manik Farm is surrounded by three fences of barbed and razor wire. Through the fences we could see a sea of white tents. Thousands of people, including men, women and children, could be seen moving about under the hot sun. Trees had been uprooted in order to set up the camp. Hundreds of heavily-armed personnel were patrolling in and around the camp.

We heard several announcements over the public address system urging unidentified LTTE cadres to surrender. I have read about Nazi concentration camps. I thought these must be similar to them.

Conditions in the camp were appalling. Having enough water to wash one’s face and hands was a luxury. The water in this area is not good. People were given water brought from bowsers.

There were toilets covered with polythene and no doors at all. Due to the lack of water, people did not use the toilets and instead relieved their bowels outside. But there was no water to wash after relieving. Food and other supplies were very limited. These people were not treated as human beings and had to live like pigs.

When we went to the medical clinic, thousands of people gathered around and asked for food and water. This spoke a lot about their condition. Hundreds came to complain about their illnesses. We asked them to form a queue. Within a few minutes, the queue stretched for hundreds of metres. However, we were able to treat only about 500 patients.

There were soldiers guarding them. The army provided a translator because the refugees were only able speak in their mother-tongue, Tamil. It appeared that they were reluctant to speak, cautious of the guard and translator.

Almost every child was malnourished, and most had wounds around their mouths. There was no point even talking about the quality of their teeth—many were suffering from lung and throat infections. Others had chickenpox or diarrhoea. For malnourished children, these diseases can be critical. Many required hospitalisation, but we were able to hospitalise only a few as the “hospital” was overcrowded.

These people had been living in the Vanni. Most of the children had been unable to go to school for years due to the war, as well as the lack of school facilities after nearly three decades of war. Before the army captured the area, it had been under LTTE control. One mother told me that most of the time she had had to feed her children with only rice and salt water. As the war intensified, they had had to pay 1,000 rupees ($US8.70) for a one kilo of rice and 500 rupees for a kilo of dhal. Two tablets of Panadol had cost 100 rupees.

We could not see any facial expression from the majority of the detainees. They were traumatised. They could not give rational answers and they needed mental health treatment. Mothers had to feed infants with biscuits because they were not provided with milk powder. Ladies’ sanitary wear was not available at all. Almost all the people were dressed in old, dirty clothes.

It was shocking that there was not a single residential doctor for this camp which housed hundreds of refugees. Every doctor in our team thought the situation in the camp was pathetic. We don’t believe that the government will or can fulfil the sea of needs of these people. Even the most developed country could not do this alone.

People in the south of Sri Lanka don’t know the real situation in the camps since the government has restricted the news and aid access. The Sri Lankan media does not give a true picture. If people knew the reality, they would help the refugees. People did that after the tsunami [in December 2004]. I am sure of that. They might also condemn the situation in the camps and express anger.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/spcm-m27.shtml

Spanish Prosecutor Targets Alleged Nazi Guards in US

Pedro Martinez Torrijos calls for international arrest warrants for three alleged concentrations camp guards currently living in US, says Spain has jurisdiction under its principle of universal justice

Associated Press (Excerpt)
www.ynetnews.com
05.29.09

A Spanish prosecutor called Friday for international arrest warrants for three alleged former Nazi death camp guards living in the United States, saying evidence shows they acted as accessories to genocide. ...

The suspects are Anton Tittjung, of Kewaunee, Wis.; Josias Kumpf, who lives in Racine, Wis.; and Johann Leprich, who lives near Detroit. ...

Equipo Nizkor, the Brussels-based rights group that filed the original complaint in Spain, says thousands of Spaniards were among the millions killed in Nazi concentration camps. It says more than 7,000 Spaniards were held at Mauthausen, for instance, and at least 4,300 of them died.

The group says US authorities have tried for years to deport the four suspects, alleging they lied about their Nazi pasts on their immigration papers.

Most Spaniards in Nazi camps were leftist Republicans who fled to France during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 and were captured while fighting German troops. ...

Full story

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3723234,00.html

Drummond Accused of Paying Death Squad To Assassinate Union Leaders in Colombia

www.courthousenews.com
May 28, 2009

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (CN) - Drummond Co. paid a Colombian death squad millions of dollars to murder and terrorize union workers at its coal mine, hundreds of people claim in Federal Court. They claim the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia used a "scorched earth policy ... torturing and murdering" and displacing thousands of peasants from their homes along Drummond's railroad line in Cesar and Magdalena provinces.

"Almost every family in these provinces lost a family member, a neighbor or friend to war crimes committed by the AUC during its brutal civil war with the FARC," the complaint states.

The plaintiffs also sued Alfredo Araujo Castro, Drummond's "manager of community relations" in Colombia, and James Atkins, its director of security in Colombia.

They claim, among other things, that Araujo committed perjury when he testified in June 2005, in Romero v. Drummond Co., that he had never met with "his childhood friend, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias Jorge 40, the leader of the AUC's Northern Block ... or any other AUC members."

They claim that Atkins and Araujo were present at a meeting with death squad leaders in November 2000 "at the entrance to Drummond's mine in La Loma," and that "at this meeting, defendant Atkins, on behalf of Drummond, approved a payment to the AUC of the assassination of the top leaders of the Drummond union".

Plaintiffs' lead counsel is Garfield Ivey Jr. of Jasper, Ala.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/05/28/Drummond_Accused_of_Paying_Death_Squad_To_Assassinate_Union_Leaders_in_Colombia.htm

Mom in swastika case has online history of hate

Parent of girl in custody battle posts on pro-white forum, says her now-closed skinhead website ‘was a joke'

Patrick White
Winnipeg
Globe and Mail/www.theglobeandmail.com
May. 29, 2009

The couple who sent their seven-year-old daughter to school with white supremacist slogans drawn on her skin once set up a pro-skinhead website that was the subject of a criminal complaint.

Now deleted, the website aimed to attract skinheads interested in “looking out for each other and helping to cleanse the area we live in,” according to a statement on the homepage.

The girl's mother says the website “was a joke” and has repeatedly denied allegations that she preached hate to her daughter and two-year-old son. The province of Manitoba seized both children last year shortly after the daughter was sent to school with a swastika and white supremacist slogans on her ski and is seeking permanent custody in a Winnipeg court.

No one involved in the case can be identified under Manitoba law.

Social workers have testified that during interviews with the girl she spouted racial epithets and said “What people don't understand is that black people should die.”

The mother said she believes social workers coaxed her daughter into uttering the statements. “My daughter would never say anything like that,” she said in an interview.

The website, however, suggests the couple were fluent in such language.

Song lyrics on the site advocate hatred of Jews, blacks and gays.

The lyrics also glorify General Heinz Guderian, father of the German army's Second World War blitzkrieg tactics.

In the site's “Rants” section, diatribes target the mentally challenged and aboriginals.

Ottawa human-rights lawyer Richard Warman lodged a criminal complaint regarding the site in 2005. “I think it's regrettable that charges were never laid in 2005 which might have avoided this whole debacle now,” he said in an e-mail.

In an interview Wednesday, the mother – who is now living outside Manitoba and has not attended the custody hearing – admitted the couple created the site, but closed it shortly after police came knocking. “We were investigated for that one,” she said. “They took me in one room and [the father] in another.”

She is also an avid commenter on Web forums at Resistance.com, a “pro-white” site, where she has posted comments expressing hatred of Jews.

But the mother insists her indelible online fingerprint can be misunderstood without context.

“A skinhead is just a working-class white person,” she said, referring to the roots of skinhead culture in England during the 1950s. “Just because some skinheads want to go gay-bashing doesn't mean we all do it.”

She has been an self-professed skinhead from age 11 and said she remains one today despite her kids being taken away.

She said that throughout high school, she buried her nose in law and history books, studying the legal implications of her beliefs. She said she may have let racist remarks slip in front of her children from time to time, but said it was never with malicious intent.

“I might have come home and said something like ‘That stupid nigger at 7-Eleven asked me for ID again and now I've got to go back,'” she said. “Or it could be like, one of my best friends, I make fun of him for being a Pollack. He calls me a Scottish bitch, you know.”

While she moderates her own views, she said she can't speak on behalf of her husband. The couple separated soon after Child and Family Services took their children away.

“We've had several arguments on politics,” she said. “I have said to him ‘You're a bigot.'”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/mom-in-swastika-case-has-online-history-of-hate/article1156440/

Could a teenage girl topple Berlusconi?

She calls him 'daddy'. He bought her a £6,000 necklace for her 18th. Silvio Berlusconi's relationship with Noemi Letizia has already seen his wife file for divorce. Now, could it cost him his grip on power? ...

Story: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/could-a-teenage-girl-topple-berlusconi-1691232.html

Controversial Bishop's Order Anti-Semitic, Too

Beyond the Bishop
By Heidi Beirich
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1061
Summer 2009

Dickinson, Texas — Twenty miles north of Galveston, at the busy intersection of two once-rural state highways that are now crowded with mini-malls and drugstores, stands the oldest church in the United States belonging to the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). A peaceful Catholic church with priests in residence, Queen of Angels shows no sign of the international controversy that erupted in January, when Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of four SSPX bishops.

Bishop Richard Williamson

Most of that controversy has centered on one of the reinstated bishops, Richard Williamson, who is infamous for his Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. In January, just a few days before the pontiff invited Williamson back into the church, he appeared on a Swedish TV program insisting the Nazis had no gas chambers. "I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler," Williamson said. "I believe there were no gas chambers."

The Vatican said the pope had been unaware of Williamson's views, which provoked a firestorm of criticism, some of it from ranking Catholic officials.

By the end of January, the pope had decided Williamson would not be allowed to perform priestly functions unless he recanted his views. In early February, Williamson was also suspended from his post as head of the SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina, and SSPX Superior General Bernard Fellay issued an order forbidding Williamson to make "any public statements on political or historical issues." Later in the month, Argentina expelled the bishop and he returned to his native England.

That wasn't all. Fellay also told the world that Williamson's beliefs "do not in any way reflect the position of our Society." But the facts do not support him. The truth is that Williamson's thinking reflects much of basic SSPX doctrine.

As the international furor over Williamson grew, SSPX officials rushed to scrub their websites of offending material. In February, for instance, a 1997 article by two SSPX priests that called for locking Jews into ghettos because "Jews are known to kill Christians" disappeared. But the makeover was far from complete.

Still on sspx.org at press time was a 1959 letter from a close friend of SSPX's founder. "Money, the media, and international politics are for a large part in the hands of Jews," Bishop Gerald Sigaud wrote. "Those who have revealed the atomic secrets of the USA were … all Jews. The founders of communism were Jews." And as of early February, the Canadian SSPX website still hosted an archive of Williamson's anti-Semitic letters, one of which complains that "Jews have come closer and closer to fulfilling their … drive toward world domination."

SSPX and Queen of Angels

SSPX, which has chapels and schools across the U.S. and worldwide, was founded in 1970 by the late French archbishop, Marcel-François Lefebvre, a hard rightist who supported the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Though he participated in the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that enacted several liberalizing reforms within the church, Lefebvre ultimately refused to sign certain of the council's final reports and in 1974 publicly denounced the effort as heretical. He was particularly upset by the adoption of the new Mass, celebrated in local languages instead of the traditional Latin. As a result, then-Pope Paul VI ordered the archbishop to shut down his Swiss seminary, but Lefebvre refused to comply, leading the Vatican to suspend his right to perform priestly functions (a step short of excommunication) in 1976. In 1988, Lefebvre took his most radical step yet, consecrating four bishops, including Williamson, in defiance of the Vatican. Pope John Paul II then excommunicated Lefebvre and his bishops, declaring SSPX in formal schism with the church.

Queen of Angels was the first SSPX church founded in the U.S. and served as the group's headquarters until 1978, when the leadership moved to St. Marys, Kan.

Dedicated by Lefebvre in 1977, the property features a pretty white church, set amid dormitories and a shrine to the Virgin Mary, that looks like it was built by Texas' original Spanish settlers. Attached to the front of the church is a big, bronze plaque announcing that it is part of SSPX and that traditional Latin masses are held twice daily. Inside the church itself are an impressive altar, stone sculptures and stained glass windows. Today, the only hint of the recent controversy is a notice on the inner doors of a letter from Superior General Fellay, expressing "our filial gratitude" for the lifting of the excommunications. No mention is made of the Pope's subsequent demand that Williamson recant his Holocaust denial—even though Williamson's views, and the Pope's rejection of them, have been broadcast around the world.

Perhaps there is a reason for why nothing is said of Williamson at Queen of Angels. As the place where the SSPX's Angelus Press first set up shop, the church itself has long been in the business of peddling anti-Semitism. Proudly on display in the small and musty one-room Queen of Angels bookstore, which is located behind the church, are all sorts of Catholic materials, from rosaries to advent calendars — plus hate literature, much of it either published or sold by Angelus Press. The history section prominently displays Hilaire Belloc's The Jews, which blames Jews for Bolshevism and corrupt financial practices. In a tall turnstile filled with pamphlets are several copies of Time Bombs of the Second Vatican Council, where SSPX's former superior general, Rev. Fr. Franz Schmidberger, pontificates on the Vatican Council's evils. Schmidberger denounces Third World immigration into Western countries as "destroying our national identity and, furthermore, the whole of Christianity," and goes on to accuse the Jews collectively of deicide.

Also on hand at Queen of Angels bookstore are dozens of current and back copies of The Angelus, a monthly magazine put out by the SSPX that has published several extremists. Found in the pages of The Angelus (and carried on the SSPX's website) are the writings of the late Father Denis Fahey, whose main topic was the inherent evil of the "Jewish Nation" and who is quoted on a white supremacist site devoted to "1,001 Quotes By and About Jews"; John Vennari, who publishes Catholic Family News and has written of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy to destroy the church; and Robert Sungenis, the leader of a particularly virulent group called Catholic Apologetics International who frequently reminds people that the 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia "predicts the anti-Christ will come from Jewry."

One item that was not on hand at Queen of Angels was the viciously anti-Semitic conspiracy tome, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which has been sold in the last few years by representatives of Angelus Press at far-right Catholic conferences and, in the past, from its headquarters in St. Marys, Kan. The Protocols probably won't surface again — SSPX officials have been cleaning their websites of controversial materials since the Williamson controversy erupted.

The 1997 article that was scrubbed, published by The Angelus and written by Michael Crowdy and Kenneth Novak, didn't stop at accusing Jews of murdering Christians. The article also blames Jews for the French Revolution, communism and capitalism; suggests a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy has destroyed the Catholic Church; and says Judaism is "inimical to all nations." The Williamson letters remaining on the Canadian SSPX website also were revealing. In "WTC—The Wage of Sin," Williamson blames the 9/11 terrorist attacks on "the would-be architects of the New World Order" who are clearly Jews, although he is not explicit. "In the Catholic Middle Ages the Jews were relatively impotent to harm Christendom, but as Catholics have grown over the centuries since then weaker and weaker in the faith, especially since Vatican II, so the Jews have come closer and closer to fulfilling their substitute-Messianic drive towards world dominion," he added.

Assessing SSPX

Williamson is only one of many SSPX leaders who have expressed anti-Semitic views. Also on the Canadian site at press time was a piece by SSPX Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Herkel called "Is the Anti-Christ Coming?" Herkel asserts that Jews are considering rebuilding "the ancient Temple of Jerusalem" which he argues "would fit in with the devil's desire to mock the holy places of God." "If the ancient Temple is rebuilt and is the place where the Antichrist will receive divine worship, it must follow that the Antichrist will be Jewish," Herkel writes. "The devil will not fail to make use of their blindness to foist the Antichrist upon them," he concludes.

Other SSPX officials sound similar. In 1997, French SSPX Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, one of the four bishops excommunicated by Pope John Paul II, wrote that "Jews are the most active partisans for the coming of the anti-Christ." After the Williamson controversy broke out, Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz, a pastor and spokesperson for the SSPX in Northern Italy, defended Williamson and said he, too, was unsure if gas chambers were used for anything but disinfection or whether 6 million Jews were really murdered. He called the Jews a "people of deicide."

Not all members of SSPX agree. Father Paul Morgan, the SSPX district superior for Great Britain, issued a statement in late January denouncing Williamson and declaring his division's opposition to "all forms of racism and anti-Semitism." Even so, the anti-Semitism that has been expressed by SSPX leaders, sold by Angelus Press and published on the group's websites makes a mockery of Superior General Fellay's statement that Williamson's beliefs "do not in any way reflect the position of our Society." Williamson is also making a mockery of Fellay's demand that he not "make any public statements on political or historical issues."

In a Feb. 9 interview with the leading German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Williamson, who is being investigated in Germany for having violated that country's criminal laws forbidding Holocaust denial, said he would reevaluate the facts of the Holocaust — including, presumably, his claim that fewer than 300,000 people died in Nazi death camps. But he added that the information available in the 1980s put the existence of the gas chambers and the entire Holocaust in question. Asked if he would visit any concentration camps, he declared, "I will not travel to Auschwitz."

How any of this squares with Pope Benedict XVI's statement on Feb. 12 that the Catholic Church "is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all anti-Semitism" is unclear. Meanwhile Rev. Arnaud Sélégny, the general secretary of the SSPX international headquarters in Menzingen, Switzerland, is on record saying that Williamson would certainly be included in any reconciliation between SSPX and the Vatican because "everybody is allowed to have his opinion in the Society."

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1061

Children, Unlamented Victims of Bush War Crimes

WRITTEN BY WWW.DAILY.PK
08 MAY 2009 00:00

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In 2008, the Bush administration reported to the UN-assisted Committee on the Rights of the Child that the United States from 2002 had detained 2,400 children in Iraq and 100 in Afghanistan, though another source claims that the figure for Afghanistan is at least 800 boys, aged 10 to 15, from whom as many as 64 were sent to Guantánamo, of which there were 21 as of May 2008. That month, the Committee upbraided the United States for charging minors with war crimes instead of treating underage persons as victims of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two children, aged 7 and 9, were separately detained to intimidate him to confess.

While detained, several children have been brutalized and tortured. At Abu Ghraib, American guards videotaped Iraqi male prisoners raping young boys but took no action to stop the offenses. Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down Abu Ghraib with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

While General Hamid Zabar was being questioned in Iraq, his interrogators decided to arrest his frail 16-year-old son in order to produce a confession. After soldiers found the boy, he was stripped, drenched with mud and water, and exposed to the cold January night while bound and driven about in the open back of a truck. When presented naked to his father, he was shivering due to hypothermia, clearly needing medical attention.

At least 25 war crimes refer specifically to child prisoners. Among the crimes are the arbitrary transfer out of their home countries, leaving their parents to wonder whether they were dead. When their locations were later revealed, parents were not allowed to contact them, even through the mail. And family members knew nothing of Hassin Bin Attash’s extraordinary rendition experience in Jordan or Ahmad Bashir’s disappearance for two years in a secret prison.

Children have been incarcerated in the same quarters as adults, contrary to the Geneva Convention. Subjected to solitary confinement, they are denied educational and recreational opportunities. Indeed, one attorney was not allowed to give his client (Omar Khadr) a copy of “Lord of the Rings” or play dominoes with him; another has been forbidden to supply his client (Mohammed Jawad) articles from the Internet. After Captain James Yee left Guantánamo on September 10, 2003, no Muslim chaplain has ever replaced him, so they have not been provided appropriate religious education.

Meanwhile, the authorities have refused to investigate or prosecute those who have abused children, and there have been no programs established to prevent prison mistreatment or to assist in their resulting post-traumatic stress. They have been denied legal counsel and a statement of reasons for their confinement upon arrival in prison, held far beyond the “speedy trial” requirement under the Geneva Conventions, coerced into confessions that may be false, and denied available exculpatory evidence, including witnesses.

In 2003, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao gave a speech on behalf of the need to rehabilitate child soldiers from Burundi, Colombia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. While she spoke, several children were being abused at Guantánamo. The most famous, Mohammed Jawad and Omar Khadr, are still being held for trial at Guantánamo.

Omar Khadr’s videotaped plea for his mommy and claims of torture has been seen on television worldwide. While still wounded from battle in Afghanistan, Omar was interrogated many times, sometimes while hooded with dogs barking near him, so he confessed to stop the pain from his wounds. During interrogation at Guantánamo, Omar was shackled to the floor in stress positions until he soiled himself. His bound body was twice used as a mop to wipe his own urine mixed with pine oil after which he was refused a shower and a change of clothing. He has also been administered a brutal beating while on a hunger strike, threatened with rape, and denied pain medication.

There is some puzzlement over the reason for imprisoning Mohammad Jawad. Is it because, while at an American-run prison in Afghanistan in 2002, he has claimed that he saw Americans murdering inmates? At Guantánamo, to deprive him of sleep in order to force some sort of confession, he was shifted from one cell to another more than 100 times during two weeks in May 2004, and he remains in solitary confinement today. When he showed up in court in 2008, he was the first to wear leg shackles. During his arraignment, the judge asked him whether he accepted the assigned military defense attorney as his lawyer. After replying in the negative, the judge asked whether he knew another lawyer. His reply to the Kafkaesque inquiry was “Since I don’t know any lawyer, how can I have them represent me? . . . I should be given freedom so that I can find a lawyer.” His request to hunt for a lawyer was then denied.

The mistreatment of children is something not so funny that has been neglected on the road to investigations of and calls for prosecution of those responsible for torture. George W. Bush has never been asked about the abuse of children in American-run prisons in the “war on terror.” It is high time for Bush and others to be held accountable for what is arguably the most egregious of all their war crimes—the abuse and death of children, who should never have been arrested in the first place.

http://www.daily.pk/world/asia/9967-children-unlamented-victims-of-bush-war-crimes-.html

A Holy Mission to Reveal the Truth about Nazi Death Squads

God's work: Father Patrick Desbois is in a race against time to gather testimony before all those who witnessed the slaughter die

Father Patrick Desbois has spent the past decade piecing together the horrific story of the Nazis' secret death squads. Jonathan Brown meets a man who's rewriting history

By Jonathan Brown
www.independent.co.uk
26 May 2009

Father Patrick Desbois is a man desperately racing with death. By his own calculations he has six, perhaps seven years at the outside in which to complete his work: a task, which until the reaper renders it impossible some time in the not-too-distant future, is at once unimaginably chilling in nature and nightmarishly ambitious in scale. For the 53-year-old French priest, with an easy laugh and shining eyes, has made it his holy mission to recall for the world the slaughter enacted by the Nazi mobile death squads, the feared Einsatzgruppen, which roamed and murdered Jews and Gypsies with impunity in the remote villages of the former Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944.

It was, until the intervention of Father Dubois, a largely overlooked episode in one of the grimmest chapters of the Second World War. But for the last 10 years the priest and his helpers have painstakingly gathered the testimony of the survivors of this period, travelling to some of Europe's most abject places where, without judging, they have listened as a procession of elderly men and women recalled – often for the first time – how, a lifetime ago, they became teenage helpmates to the Nazi killing machine.

Today these witnesses have grown old and infirm and many are already dead. Living in countries where the average life expectancy for a man is little more than 60 years, those who experienced first-hand the Nazi genocide in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Ossetia are steadily dying out. When they are gone, Father Desbois fears, so too will the memory of what they saw – and with it a truth which exists only in the conscience of Europe's poorest people.

During the course of the last decade, Father Desbois and his team from Yahad in Unum, a French organisation dedicated to Christian-Jewish understanding, have recorded conversations with more than 1,000 witnesses to the mass murders on Hitler's Eastern Front. So far they have discovered some 850 unmarked graves – the majority of them previously unknown – including a site at Bodgdanivka which contained the remains of some 42,000 Jews.

The oral histories they have gathered, along with detailed ballistic evidence, could soon change the face of the study of the Holocaust, pushing the final death toll upwards by as much as 500,000 victims. They are also, he hopes, providing irrefutable proof in the face of increasingly vocal Holocaust deniers, emboldened by the disappearance of the generation still able to recall the horrors of the Third Reich as they actually happened.

Father Dubois was invited to Britain by the University of Manchester's Centre for Jewish Studies where last week he addressed academics and spoke at the city's Anglican Cathedral. Though largely unknown outside Jewish circles in the UK, he is a hero in Israel and the United States. Last year, in his native France, he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and sports the discreet red streamer proudly in the buttonhole of his black priest's jacket. As he sits in the Victorian splendour of Manchester's Palace Hotel, describing the detail of his harrowing work, he displays a blistering sense of urgency at the looming loss of the folk memory of the Nazi atrocities in the former Soviet Union.

"I am running against time," he says. "We have a maximum of six or seven years if we take into account the age of the witnesses because they are so old. Sometimes you arrive in the village and are told 'I'm sorry, Father, but Madame Anna died just one month ago and she was the last witness. And now nobody knows any more.' So I see time is short and we need to achieve our goal as quickly as possible, which is why we must multiply our energy," he says.

The reason for taking up this work is simple: to restore the dignity of the uncounted and largely unmourned dead who were slaughtered and piled into pits like animals, and to allow the Kaddish – the Jewish prayer of mourning – to be recited over their final resting places. But there is another reason too; to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust.

"You cannot leave Europe with thousands of unknown unmarked graves, or we deny all our values," he says, his hands trembling slightly as he speaks. "And what do we say to Cambodia or to Darfur if we do not bury correctly the victims in our own continent? We are now 60 years after, and it is our last chance to do it."

It is estimated that a minimum of 1.5 million Jews and Gypsies were killed in Ukraine during the Second World War. The country was second only to Poland for the number of Nazi murders on its soil. A further 500,000 perished in Belarus, while the exact numbers that perished in the vast expanse of Russia, where the German army was encamped some 17 miles from the Kremlin in the Moscow suburbs, or even in occupied Ossetia, can still only be guessed at – until that is these territories, too, welcome in the priest and his helpers to unlock the memories of survivors there too.

What made the slaughter in Eastern Europe so unimaginable is that it was carried out not in the impersonal industrialised surrounding of the concentration camps but by mobile units of individuals armed with low-powered rifles. The policy laid down by Berlin was simple and based on an evil economy to appease the army's concerns over dwindling resources: "one bullet – one Jew; one Jew – one bullet".

The modus operandi of the Einsatzgruppen was as predictable as it was murderous, explains Father Desbois. The mobile units were the precursors of Heinrich Himmler's "Final Solution" policy. Composed primarily of German SS and military personnel, they could draw on members of the notorious German Gendarmerie, local police or even civilians – "anyone with a carbine" explains the priest. Using the Soviet system of requisition enacted on their behalf by compliant local mayors appointed by the Nazis, the death squads were often staffed by gunmen plucked from everyday war duties and left deeply traumatised by their actions. Their orders were to kill those they were told were enemies of the Reich. Among the Jews, Gypsies and communists were thousands of mentally and physically disabled people, women and children.

Their approach was always the same, explains Father Desbois. First a single uniformed officer, an expert in digging mass graves, would arrive in a village. His initial stop would be the home of the local mayor, where he would ask simply: "How many Jews?" Gauging who was and was not Jewish in the Soviet Union was easy. Jews were considered one of the USSR's national minorities and the information was recorded in official documents. Having arrived at a figure and estimated the volume of the pit required to hold the victims, the solider would order the mayor to round up local teenagers, many of whom are now among Father Desbois's witnesses. They would then be ordered to dig. Sometimes the pits were complex structures, excavated deep into the ground with stairs to allow the soon to be murdered to lie down "like sardines" before they were shot. Sometimes they were little more than shallow holes. When the work was complete, the call would go out to the regional headquarters seeking gunmen from the surrounding countryside.

The day of the murders would have a chilling routine to it, says Father Desbois. "They (the mobile units) would all gather together in the morning of the killing and surround the village and then announce that the Jews will be deported to Palestine. They are Soviets, so while an order like this is not nice, it is not surprising to be deported," he explains. The credulous victims would then begin to line up in the streets, assembling in lines of five, carrying whatever belongings they could. Those less credulous among them who refused to leave their homes were shot and their bodies stacked up on horse-drawn carts. The "deportees" were ordered to march to the waiting pit, strip and then, still five-a-breast, walk straight into the bullets of the waiting gunmen.

Those who were left behind remember all too vividly what they saw, says Father Desbois. "I met a witness who told me: I saw my neighbour. She was in the line to wait and I was crying. She told me: 'Don't cry, we are going to Palestine.' But I knew they were not going to Palestine because early in the morning I was out with my cow and I saw the mass grave – I saw it being dug by the children." As the victims were being mown down, the Germans and their forced helpers set about the task of looting the belongings of their victims. Clothes and jewellery were packed in boxes while gold was prised from the mouths of the dead. The furniture was taken from the now empty houses. The best was sent back to Germany while the rest was sold off for cash. Meanwhile, the grim task of burial was being completed by the same children who had dug the graves several days earlier. Because of the "one bullet" policy, many of those inside the pits were not dead. Children were dragged in by their falling parents or propelled by the force of the advancing victims behind them. Others were pushed in by gloved helpers. "In some cases there were Ukrainian girls," recalls Father Desbois. "I met one who was asked to walk on the corpses between the shootings to make them flat. She said: 'The soldiers asked me in the morning to come with my friends and between each of the shootings I had to go down and walk on the corpses with my bare feet.'" Among the victims were many friends and classmates, stripped naked and slaughtered before her eyes. "They shot them and I had to walk on them like the others," she recalled. Witnesses, little more than children, remembered how the victims writhed "like flies and worms" as they died.

Sometimes some of those who were not dead would escape. More often they would suffocate under the weight of the earth and bodies, but not before they had endured further days of suffering, during which villagers watched as the freshly dug earth heaved and fell under the agonized movements of the victims below. It was as if the whole pit was breathing, according to one onlooker.

"On the evening of the killing they would organise a party for the shooters," says Father Desbois. There would be drinking, dancing and prostitutes who travelled with the death squads as they moved from village to village. The party was designed to ease the psychological guilt of the killers, believes the priest, and bind the gunmen in the commonality of their mass murder.

But while official records were kept detailing how many had been shot, it is believed that up to 10 times that number were killed in Ukraine unofficially. After the shootings each village would be declared "Judenfrei" – free of Jews – putting them in good favour with the Nazi authorities. Any Jews that escaped and returned were often killed to prevent this status being lost. Many were forced into hiding in the forests until the end of the war, only to emerge into the further terror under Stalin. Others were not so lucky.

"In some villages they kept Jewish women to be sex slaves or forced workers for the Gestapo," explains Father Desbois. "At the end of the war, in many villages, they were pregnant, so they shot them just before leaving the village. It is very difficult to find the mass graves of these girls because no one wants to speak of that. All the village knew them because they worked for the Gestapo so they saw them every time they went to present their papers," he says.

Unlike the Holocaust in Central and Western Europe, where victims were rounded up and deported, the genocide in Ukraine and Eastern Europe came to the village squares, the gardens and farms of the survivors, and it was among them that the bodies remained. Again, unlike Germany and Poland, where the extermination camps stand testament to the atrocities that were perpetrated within their walls, no symbols or memorials exist to the dead Jews and Gypsies of the former USSR. Under Stalin, the victims, where they were remembered, were considered to be fallen fellow-Soviets. All that remains of this Holocaust by bullets are the cartridge cases discarded in the dirt, each bearing a distinctive date and brand and each having claimed the life of a human being.

It may seem strange that the task of remembering the millions of Jews and Gypsies who died in Eastern Europe should fall to a Roman Catholic priest. Father Desbois is neither a historian, nor an archaeologist. He is certainly not a politician. It was through his family's wartime experiences that he became involved in his present mission. The Desbois family resisted the German occupation, hiding partisans on their farm in eastern France. His grandfather (and other relatives) were imprisoned, eventually being sent to the Ukraine, witnessing the horrors at Rawa-Ruska where thousands of Jews died. He eventually told his grandson what he had seen, as a way of downplaying his own suffering. It was during a visit to the site of his grandfather's wartime incarceration that Father Desbois posed the local mayor a simple question: "Where are the bodies of the Jews?" The politician said he did not know – an answer the priest found impossible to believe. Returning the next year, there was a new mayor, who this time took the inquisitive Frenchmen out in to the forest where 100 villagers were waiting to tell him of the horrors they had seen played out there among the birch trees.

The symbol of his authority is, he says, his clerical collar. Arriving unannounced, he knocks on doors and listens – offering no comment or judgment on actions which may have haunted a life for 60 years. Often, at the end of a gruelling testimony he may pray with the witnesses, though he does not offer absolution through confession. It is simply an opportunity for someone to talk while another listens.

"These people, they may have seen on one day the killings of over 1,000 persons, and sometimes they say to me: "all my life I dreamt of finding someone to tell them.'"

He recalls a recent interview in Brest, Belarus, when an elderly man was describing how he would rest at night from packing away the belongings of the slaughtered Jews as the German soldiers raped the surviving women. "At the end of the interview I said: 'Of course you have spoken a lot of times about that before?' He said: "No, it is the first time that I have spoken. Who would be interested in all that?' These were poor people and no one has ever paid any attention to them," he says.

Even today, conditions in the villages of the former Soviet Union are harsh. There are often no roads; no running water and the weather is bitterly cold. It is also an occasionally violent part of the world and the priest, who has been shot at in the past, makes his five journeys a year to the former killing fields in the company of armed bodyguards. After enduring the horrors of the Nazis and Stalin during their lives, the villagers have never posed themselves the kind of questions of guilt and complicity that so often bedevil the conscience of the wealthier and more privileged, believes Father Desbois.

As a former mathematics teacher in West Africa who became a priest after working with Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta, he is not inured to suffering. But he dismisses inquiries about how he or others "feel" in relation to the atrocities as "typical Western questions". Under the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century people simply had no choice – they co-operated or they died. This leaves him free to concentrate on the task in hand – logging the dead.

"My questions are who killed the Jews? Where are the corpses and how do we establish evidence? I am completely concentrating on my goal and I try to avoid the other questions or I might miss my goal," he says."

With the backing of the French government and Pope Benedict, Father Desbois has become of the leading figures in the world of Jewish-Christian relations. But he sees his role simply. "I am a very practical person and I want to stay at this level. I am not an important person. I am only doing some duty that has to be done. To bury the people is not an important role – it is a simple role," he says. As for those who question the existence of the Holocaust, whether they are politicians or within his own church, he sees them as the direct inheritors of Himmler and Heydrich. They are, he says, the "deniers of the inferno".

And at the heart of the unimaginable continent-wide tragedy can be found individual human suffering and a timeless story and its still unanswered questions dating back to the murder of Abel.

He says: "I don't work for millions. I am the disciple of Mother Teresa. Everybody asked her: 'How can you stand in Calcutta with 13 million poor people?' And she answered: 'I never saw 13 million, I only saw one.' It is the same for me... it is people. I try to think really concretely of these people not as a millions or just mathematics – I am looking for the tombs of Isaac, Rebecca and Dora," he says. "We cannot build a safe Europe and a modern world and ask people to keep silent. Otherwise we justify the next genocide. It is the ultimate victory to Hitler if we don't bury the victims."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/a-holy-mission-to-reveal-the-truth-about-nazi-death-squads-1690595.html

Democrats: CIA is Out to Get Us

By MANU RAJU | 5/12/09
www.politico.com

Dems, including Sen. Carl Levin, charge that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on waterboarding in order to deflect blame away from itself.



Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

“I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others — that’s what I think,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was briefed on interrogation techniques five times between 2006 and 2007.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he finds it “interesting” that a document detailing congressional briefings was released just as “some of the groups that have been responsible for these interrogation techniques were taking the most criticism.”

Asked whether the CIA was seeking political cover by releasing the documents, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said: “Sure it is.”

The CIA has long been on the receiving end of harsh rebukes from Congress — on intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq, on secret prisons abroad and on the harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects. But with the release of records showing that it briefed members of Congress along the way, the CIA has effectively put lawmakers on the defensive.

Intelligence officials insist it wasn’t intentional and have not taken responsibility for publicly releasing the documents.

Asked for comment about the Democrats’ charges, CIA spokesman George Little said only that the CIA “understands the importance of a strong relationship with the Congress, which in our democracy, conducts oversight of secret intelligence activities.”

But another U.S. intelligence official went further, noting that the records of the congressional briefings were “prepared in response to a request from Congress.”

Intelligence Committee member Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) said it appears that “members of the committee or their staff were not in any way involved in [the release of the document]. It appears to come from the executive branch itself. ... I think it’s unbelievable.”

A top congressional official who has participated in the briefings added: “I think the agency wanted to get this out, quite frankly.” ...

"Democrats: CIA is out to get us - Manu Raju - POLITICO.com" - http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22439.html#ixzz0GYXi4VVn&A

FAREWELL, DR. KISSINGER

" ... Nancy Kissinger, who was sitting next to me, recommended the pigs in blankets. ... "

By Thessaly La Force
New Yorker/MAY 7, 2009

Last night, at The River Club, Henry Kissinger threw a book party for his protégé, Joshua Cooper Ramo. Handsome and fluent in Chinese, Ramo speaks with the rapidity and grace of those who appear regularly on television. He’s the youngest full partner of Kissinger Associates, a geostrategic advisory firm. Naturally, his book—which is already a best seller—is called “The Age of the Unthinkable.”

In a wallpapered room overlooking the East River, among waiters passing canapés of foie gras and lobster, I asked Ramo about the genesis of his book. “The summer before September 11th,” he said, “I had been doing volunteer work in an AIDS hospice in South Africa and I realized our foreign policy was failing in a huge and dramatic way. Basically, it was morally indecent. Then I came back and saw September 11th, and saw that it was intellectually incoherent as well. It was at that point where I really started saying to myself, ‘Okay, something is deeply flawed in our system.’” Ramo says he wrote from four to eight every morning.

Ramo concludes that the models we use to think about the world, and to solve our problems, are wrong. He thinks we should study terrorists, hedge-fund managers, (there’s a chapter called “The Management Secrets of Hizb’allah”), and other innovators who have learned to be resilient in a time of crisis.

But what about his boss? “Dr. Kissinger’s summary,” he said, “after reading my book, was, ‘My understanding from reading this book is that you have complete contempt for me.’ As an employee, it’s kind of a conversation-ender, but I’ve done my best to recover from that.”

Kissinger, who nonetheless was full of high praise for “young Joshua” admitted as much: “It has one basic theme that is a little difficult for me, which is that my generation is sort of a bunch of dodos, that we stagger through life with just one idea in our minds, which on top of it, is hugely wrong. We don’t have the perception to look at the multiplicity of events that the modern generation experiences.”

Nancy Kissinger, who was sitting next to me, recommended the pigs in blankets. I asked if she could explain geostrategic advising.

“I haven’t the vaguest idea!” she said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/05/last-night-at-the-river.html

9/11 Commission Official says Public Story “Almost Entirely Untrue”

By Hunter Gorinson
www.examiner.com
May 21, 2009

John Farmer

Since the turn of the millennium, John Farmer’s resumé has boasted many impressive accomplishments: New Jersey Attorney General, Acting Governor of that same state for 90 minutes on January 8, 2002 and, perhaps most importantly, Senior Counsel to the Bush-appointed - and dramatically underfunded - 9/11 Commission (also known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States).

Now, with a freshly inked contract from Houghton Mifflin Books in hand, Farmer is set [to] contradict the findings of the so-called “truth commission” that he once helped administrate with his new book, The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11. Though the 256-page hardcover won’t be released until January 2010, its description is enough to make even the most stoic of conspiracy theorists take to internet message boards faster than you can say Loose Change. Here’s the official solicitation, care of Houghton Mifflin:

... John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues’ work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write.

Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general’s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He reveals — terrifyingly and illuminatingly — the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, revealing them as they have never before been seen.

Ultimately Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures tells a very different story — a story that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied. ...

http://www.examiner.com/x-1551-Fringe-Culture-Examiner~y2009m5d21-911-Commission-official-says-public-story-almost-entirely-untrue

Ray L. Hunt: Catalyst for Cataclysm

"Ray L. Hunt is CEO of Hunt Consolidated, Inc., a member of the Halliburton Board of Directors, a Bush "Pioneer," a major Republican fund-raiser, a contributor of $35 million to Southern Methodist University (SMU) to support a George W. Bush Presidential Library and think tank (oxymoron alert), and, by the way, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). ... "

The Disappeared: Dozens of CIA ‘Ghost Prisoners Missing'

" ... The CIA spent weeks during the summer of 2006—shortly before Mr. Bush acknowledged the CIA prisons and suspended the program—transferring prisoners to Pakistani, Egyptian and Jordanian custody. ... 'If these men are now rotting in some Egyptian dungeon, the administration can't pretend that it's closed the door on the CIA program.' ... "

By William Fisher
www.finalcall.com
May 21, 2009

NEW YORK (IPS/GIN) - At least three dozen detainees who were held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas appear to be missing—and efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful.

The story of these "ghost prisoners" was comprehensively documented by Pro Publica, an online investigative journalism group.

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said, "fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA's facilities." One memo released recently confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and "employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these."

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA program in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had "little or no additional intelligence value," Mr. Bush said, "have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

But Mr. Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts—information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross to find them—or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers. ...

Pro Publica reported that former officials in the Bush administration said that the CIA spent weeks during the summer of 2006—shortly before Mr. Bush acknowledged the CIA prisons and suspended the program—transferring prisoners to Pakistani, Egyptian and Jordanian custody.

The organization said the population inside the program had been shrinking since the existence of the prisons was detailed in a Washington Post article in November 2005. Renewed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Libya in May 2006 made it possible for the CIA to turn over Libyan prisoners to Muammar Gadhafi's control.

Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program at Human Rights Watch, said, "If these men are now rotting in some Egyptian dungeon, the administration can't pretend that it's closed the door on the CIA program."

CONTINUED

http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_6023.shtml

Franco, Like Hitler, had One Testicle

BBC
18 May 2009

Spain's Franco 'had one testicle'

Gen Franco ruled Spain following the civil war until his death in 1975
A new book claims the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, may have had more in common with Adolf Hitler than previously known - having one testicle.

Much like the Nazi leader, Franco's loss stemmed from an injury he suffered in battle, his doctor's granddaughter told the historian Jose Maria Zavala.
Franco was wounded in the lower abdomen at El Biutz, near Ceuta, in June 1916.

Biographers have long speculated this affected the reproductive organs of the dictator, who ruled from 1939 to 1975.

However, he did have a daughter, Carmen Franco y Polo, in 1926.

Last year, documents came to light containing an account by a medic who treated Hitler during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Dr Johan Jambor told his priest that Hitler had been injured in the abdomen and had lost a testicle. He said the first question Hitler had asked him was: "Will I be able to have children?" ...

Story continues

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8055329.stm

Edwin Black's THE PLAN

http://www.planforoilcrisis.com/
Four Minute Trailer
•••••••
edwin black
The Plan in paperback from Dialog Press
http://www.planforoilcrisis.com

The Cutting Edge
http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com

also see
http://www.edwinblack.com
http://www.internalcombustionbook.com
http://www.bankingonbaghdad.com
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com
http://www.transferagreement.com
http://www.formatnovel.com
http://www.featuregroup.com
•••••••
The Plan excerpt
Chapter One

... During the preparation of this chapter, ominous predictions based on underreported, almost obscure, international developments suddenly became outstripped by tornadic daily events proving the point and accelerating the crisis. Over-the-horizon notions foreshadowed in 2007 became a scream from the rooftops and the stuff of nightly newscast headlines. By spring 2008, biofuels-blamed food staple riots requiring armed government suppression had already broken out in at least 15 nations including Russia, Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti, Egypt, Bangladesh, Thailand and several African states. Mass starvation due to fuel-stoked food prices suddenly loomed on a scale not previously seen in dozens of countries for an estimated 100 million people. Numerous nations began formulating countermeasures to fuel-based food riots, including governmental bodies in the Philippines, India and even such stable societies as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Indeed, during April 2008, the crisis hit home even in the wellfed USA. Leading “buy in bulk” retailers, such as Costco and Sam’s Club, suddenly announced rice rationing, in some stores voluntary and in some units enforced. Nonetheless, some stores actually reported food shortages. At the same time, food banks for the disadvantaged reported angry citizens waiting in line for depleted supplies.3 Publishers and distributors spoke of prominently placing this book not only in conventional bookstores but in thousands of grocery stores around the nation as the entire topic was now more than merely political or environmental fodder for the mind, but indeed a matter of food and household necessity.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called biofuel-related starvation a greater threat to world stability than the international credit crunch surging through the money-wracked world of 2008. “Tackling hunger,” Brown declared, “is a moral challenge to each of us and it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of nations.” World Food Program executive director Josette Sheeran agreed, terming the “food or fuel” crisis a “silent tsunami.” Jean Ziegler, the U.N.’s ranking food official made headlines worldwide by going so far as to declare to a German radio station that “Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity.” India’s finance minister used the same words in condemning the trend to corn ethanol.

Surely many will die if the oil stops or is radically reduced. Large numbers will simply slip quietly into death from weakness and malnutrition. But how many will also die fighting as the aggression between men heightens in the face of a shrinking food supply? If a man must choose to pump a gallon of gas to secure a gallon of milk for his babies, he will. As society spirals down into desperation, who will be blamed? What hoarders will be shot? How many will carjack a vehicle not for its stereo but for its gasoline? How many will jump a fence to drill a gas tank? Which gas stations will be overrun? How many will never get to the hospital in an emergency? How many buildings will burn because fire trucks cannot roll for lack of fuel?

The situation can get worse if an oil shortage becomes intractable. Rooftop ethanol stills producing stockaded “moonshine fuel” will become a fact of life complete with the armed motorcycle marauders who populate “future shock” movies. They will jump from the screen into our communities.

War for oil will result. The blood of young men mixing with the ooze of oil will once again drain the life out of industrialized nations as it has so many times during the turbulent 20th century and the first groans of the tower-tumbled 21st century. Those who crave the oil will fight to get it. Those who possess it will fight to withhold it.

All the nightmare scenarios have been written, published, broadcast, epistled, door hammered, lectured and Web-spread throughout the hemispheres and blogospheres and the tired ears of a helpless world. That world wonders if it should act up and demand, look up and beseech, or just give up and wait. We get the message: Oil is our necessity and our curse. All of us have heard some of it, all of it, too much of it. ...

Suspected War Criminal to Lead U.S. Forces in Afghanistan

By Nicolas J S Davies
Online Journal
onlinejournal.com
May 14, 2009

On July 22 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled “No blood, no foul” about American torture practices at three facilities in Iraq. One of them was Camp Nama, which was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), under the direction of then Major General Stanley McChrystal.

McChrystal was officially based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but he was a frequent visitor to Camp Nama and other Special Forces bases in Iraq and Afghanistan where forces under his command were based.

An interrogator at Camp Nama described locking prisoners in shipping containers for 24 hours at a time in extreme heat; exposing them to extreme cold with periodic soaking in cold water; bombardment with bright lights and loud music; sleep deprivation; and severe beatings. When he and other interrogators went to the colonel in charge and expressed concern that this kind of treatment was not legal, and that they might be investigated by the military’s Criminal Investigation Division or the International Committee of the Red Cross, the colonel told them he had “this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the international body charged under international law with monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions, and it, therefore, has the right to inspect all facilities where people are detained in a country that is at war or under military occupation. To hide prisoners or facilities from the ICRC or to deny access to them is a serious war crime. But many U.S. prisons in Iraq have held “ghost” prisoners whose imprisonment has not been reported to the ICRC, and these “ghosts” have usually been precisely the ones subjected to the worst torture. Camp Nama, run by McChrystal’s JSOC, was an entire “ghost” facility. ...

CONTINUED

Kansas City Writer's Book Covers Neo-Nazis, Other Ultra-Right Groups in US Politics

By Associated Press
May 18, 2009

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Kansas City researcher of fascist and neo-nationalist movements has published a book on radical, right-wing American politics.

Leonard Zeskind's book Blood and Politics is summed up in its subtitle: "The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream."

Zeskind attempts to trace the lineage of the ultra-right in the United States and interpret it as a historical movement rather than spikes of violent activity. He also works to show how some ideas, such as anti-immigration, have seeped into American political life.

Zeskind established the Kansas City-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights. The book is being published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

http://www.fox4kc.com/news/sns-ap-mo--kansascitywriter,0,332461.story

Attorney Forced Off Lawsuits Against Banks Over Pinochet Money

Alana Roberts
Daily Business Review
www.law.com
May 18, 2009

Squire Sanders & Dempsey partner Pedro Martinez-Fraga has been forced -- after at least four years of work -- to withdraw from cases filed by the Chilean government alleging four banks helped former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet hide $26 million in government money. Portugal's Espirito Santo Bank claims Martinez-Fraga has a conflict of interest in pursuing the complaints because a Squire Sanders attorney serves on Espirito Santo's board. Another defendant, Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group, also is a Squire Sanders client.

The Chilean government claims Espirito Santo, PNC, Spain's Banco Santander and the Bank of Chile violated the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act for negligence or active roles in helping Pinochet hide stolen government money. The suits were filed in Miami federal court March 11 by Martinez-Fraga and Squire Sanders associate Tania Cruz.

Pinochet, who seized power in a 1973 military coup that overthrew the Marxist-led government of President Salvador Allende, died at the age of 91 in late 2006. Although he led the country to an age of prosperity and a revival of a free market economy, his name became synonymous worldwide with human rights abuses, brutal political oppression and domestic corruption. He was barred from continuing as president in a 1988 plebiscite.

Two years before his death, Chilean investigators said they identified millions Pinochet had placed in secret bank accounts in various countries, and the Santiago government undertook legal action to retrieve the money.

"Tragically, had many of the financial institutions that opened accounts by or for Pinochet followed even the most basic regulations and guidelines concerning among other things the reporting of suspicious transactions and the determination of the source of a customer's funds, Pinochet's misdeeds would have been exposed long ago," the complaint against Espirito Santo says.

Martinez-Fraga asked to withdraw as counsel for the Chilean government in all four of the Miami cases after the conflict issue was raised by Berger Singerman attorneys Mitchell Berger of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and James Cunningham Jr. of Miami. They alleged in an April 27 response that the presence of another Squire Sanders attorney on Espirito Santo's board caused a conflict. Another conflict stems from PNC's status as a Squire Sanders client, attorneys familiar with the case say.

Espirito Santo noted Squire Sanders of counsel Eric Buermann is a senior director on Espirito Santo's board, and a bank court filing said the Squire Sanders team initially refused to withdraw from the case.

Berger and Cunningham also wrote that Squire Sanders attorneys told them Buermann said there was no reason to withdraw.

"Squire Sanders & Dempsey indicated to the bank's counsel that based on the facts known by Mr. Buermann, there was no reason for it to withdraw. The only way that the law firm could have reached this conclusion was by interviewing Mr. Buermann about his knowledge of the facts of the case. The bank pointed out that any such interview is a violation of ... rules of professional conduct," Espirito Santo said in a court filing.

The Squire Sanders team filed a motion to withdraw from the Espirito Santo Bank case last month and sought a 30-day extension to find replacement attorneys. Espirito Santo is challenging the 30-day request, and a hearing on that motion is set for today before U.S. District Judge Donald Graham.

William Hill and Melissa Alvarez, attorneys at Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod in Miami, agreed to step in to represent the Chilean government.

The Espirito Santo attorneys also allege the case is time-barred and say the RICO statute is often misused.

In a filing last week, Hill disputed that assertion and said Espirito Santo's effort to block the 30-day extension to find replacement plaintiff attorneys is now moot.

"On the issue of the conflict, we said very clearly in the papers we're not addressing it," Hill said. "It's not an issue. That issue I will say for PNC is moot because the Squire Sanders firm was given leave to withdraw."

Banco Santander filed a dismissal motion Monday, arguing the case is time-barred and asserts "unsupportable legal theories."

Martinez-Fraga didn't address in an e-mail why he withdrew from the cases.

Calls to Buermann, Berger and Cunningham were not returned by deadline.

Martinez-Fraga began working on the case while he was a Greenberg Traurig shareholder. He and other lawyers for the Chilean government petitioned U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard in June 2005 to force the banks to cooperate with its investigation.

The Chilean probe of Pinochet concluded banks helped the general hide stolen government funds.

"Over the course of 20 years, Pinochet and his chief henchman, Oscar Aitken Lavanchy, devised and implemented a scheme to siphon no less than $26 million in funds, secreted these funds and their investment proceeds in an astonishing number of bank accounts at financial institutions located worldwide, including in the United States," the Chilean government's complaint said.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202430750245&Attorney_Forced_Off_Lawsuits_Against_Banks_Over_Pinochet_Money

"Grim Photos - Pictures Should be Released" - Salt Lake Tribune Op-Ed

Salt Lake Tribune
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_12380519
05/15/2009

Much as he'd like to, President Barack Obama can't have it both ways. In releasing four memos that gave a patina of legal justification to the CIA to brutalize prisoners, he ignited a controversy.

Should the memo writers, and perhaps their Justice Department supervisors further up the ladder -- maybe all the way to the top -- be prosecuted for authorizing interrogation methods that treaties and U.S. laws forbade? And, if not prosecutions, should a special commission be empaneled to at least investigate and make public all the evidence?

At first, the president appeared to encourage the debate, although making it clear he opposes prosecutions. Now, in opposition to a court order, he is trying keep secret photos that show prisoners being abused by U.S. interrogators.

That turnaround seems both counterproductive and ill-advised, serving merely to strengthen compelling arguments for an exhaustive investigation and full disclosure. And in seeking to block the photos, he degrades the commitment to transparency that he said informed his decision to release the memos.

Obama has responded that the pictures would only "further inflame anti-American opinion" and put U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq in greater danger. He says they are not as graphic as the stark images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that shocked the world in 2004. It's true, given the deep-seated hatred for America in much of the Arab world, that more images of prisoner abuse would be inflammatory, even if, as Obama says, the photos are less explosive than those that already are public.

We understand that the president is working feverishly to get U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that part of that effort is to improve America's image in that part of the world. New photos of prisoner abuse won't help that cause.

But Obama set a correct course for the country when he issued an executive order on his second day in office prohibiting the harsh interrogation techniques that amount to torture. His release of the torture memos was a good beginning.

Obama has said he wants the country to look forward, not getting bogged down in investigating and prosecuting those involved in the policy of torture.

But a simple disavowal of torture is woefully inadequate. We as citizens must face squarely what has been done in our name and then decide what to do about it. Obama should release the photos and appoint a bipartisan commission to examine all the evidence of how this happened, who ordered it and who carried it out.

Dutch WWII Collaborator Dies in Germany

May 1, 2009

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, May 1 (UPI) -- Hans Bikker, a Dutch collaborator with the Nazis who lived in Germany for decades after escaping from prison, has died in the Netherlands, officials said.

Bikker was 93, Radio Netherlands reported. Police in Germany confirmed that he died in early November and was buried in Haspe in the Ruhr, where he had lived.

A member of the Waffen SS, Bikker served on the Eastern Front and in the Netherlands. He was nicknamed the Butcher of Ommen for his treatment of inmates at the Erika concentration camp.

After the war, Bikker was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Jan Houtman, a member of the Dutch Resistance, in 1944. The sentence was commuted to life in prison, and he escaped from a prison in Breda with six other Nazi collaborators in 1952 and fled to Germany.

In Germany, Bikker took advantage of a 1943 law granting citizenship to foreigners who served in the German military. He was able to stay under the radar until 1995.

He escaped a new trial for killing Houtman in 2004 when a judge ruled he was mentally incompetent.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/05/01/Dutch-WWII-collaborator-dies-in-Germany/UPI-59841241151195/

North Dakota Alum Really Looks Up To Hitler

Also see: "Ralph Engelstad - Nazi enthusiast, Las Vegas gambling tycoon, and sugar daddy to the University of North Dakota"

deadspin.com
April 21, 1988

Ralph Engelstad, owner of the Imperial Palace casino in Las Vegas, is in a bit of hot water because of a birthday party he threw yesterday evening in a private suite of his hotel. Probably because it was a birthday party for Adolph Hitler.

Englestad is originally from Minnesota, but is a graduate of—and prominent donor to—the University of North Dakota. He moved to Vegas in the 1950s and got in on the (sort of) ground floor of the growing gambling trade and has since become one of the most successful independent hotel owners in the city. Oh, and he also loves him some Nazis. Casino employees say Englestad's primary joy in life is his "War Room, a 3,000-square-foot private suite filled with Nazi memorabilia-heroic murals of Adolph Hitler and staff, swastikas and Nazi daggers, and military cars used by Mussolini and by Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen Himmler and Göring."

Here's the real shocker—he's also a bit of bastard! Employees were afraid to question or blow the whistle on him out of fear of retribution, which may or not have include being shipped out of state in box cars. Lawsuits that have just now become public accuse Englestad of religious discrimination, sexual harassment, wrongful termination and, of course, anti-Semitism. This is actually the second Hitler birthday bash that Englestad has thrown in the hotel. But hey, at least there was cake!

Another guest says that during this year's party Engelstad "forced some Jewish employees to come against their wishes. He wanted one Jew to cut the cake, but the person ducked out. Ralph ran around trying to find him."

This guy isn't a Holocaust denier ... he's a Holocaust enjoyer!

http://deadspin.com/5256436/deadspin-classic-north-dakotas-nazi+loving-alumni-donor

Gallup poll: Most Americans describe themselves as 'pro-life'

By Jonathan D. Salant
Bloomberg News
May 15, 2009

Most Americans for the first time say they consider themselves "pro-life" on abortion rather than "pro-choice," though most believe abortion should be legal in some cases, a new Gallup poll finds.

The poll, conducted May 7-10, showed 51 percent of Americans said they are pro-life, a position often associated with opposing abortion in all circumstances. That is the first time a majority responded that way, Gallup said, since the polling organization first asked the question in 1995. ...

Continued

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705304463/Poll-Most-Americans-pro-life.html

A Nazi Pope Popery

WWII row dogs Pope in Jerusalem
Katya Adler, BBC News, Jerusalem

Pope Benedict XVI held Mass in Israel's Josaphat Valley, beneath the Mount of Olives

A row has flared over Pope Benedict XVI's membership as a teenager of the Hitler Youth, as he paid an historic visit to Jerusalem's holy sites. A Vatican spokesman said the pontiff had "never, never, never" belonged - contradicting the Pope's own admission.

The comments came as he visited the Dome of the Rock - the first pontiff to do so - and then the Western Wall, one of Judaism's holiest places. ...

Vatican spokesman Rev Federico Lombardi said: "The Pope was never in the Hitler Youth, never, never, never." ...

But his remark appeared to contradict the Pope's own words in his 1997 memoirs, Salt of the Earth.

"As a seminarian, I was registered in the HY [Hitler Youth]," he said then. "As soon as I was out of the seminary, I never went back."

The Rev Lombardi sought to make a distinction between the anti-aircraft auxiliary corps the Pope was enrolled in towards the end of the war and the Hitler Youth, which he described as a "corps of volunteers, fanatically, ideologically for the Nazis".

For a controversy which had been puttering to an end, the Vatican appears to have fanned it energetically back into life, says the BBC's Tim Franks in Jerusalem.

There has already been criticism from Israeli politicians and commentators, who said that in his speech on Monday the Pope failed to express enough remorse for the Holocaust. ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8046746.stm
•••••••
Nazi row puts spotlight on Pope's PR
By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem

"The Pope spent the start of the day stepping gingerly through some of the most sensitive real estate in the world. ... "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8046483.stm
•••••••
'Pope was reluctant Hitler Youth'
By MATTHEW WAGNER AND SAM SER

"Pope Benedict XVI was forced to join the Hitler Youth as a teenage seminary student, but was ideologically opposed to the movement, Rev. Federico Lombardi, spokesman for the Holy See, said Tuesday."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242029511615&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
••••••••
Vatican 'surprised' by criticism of pope
By MATTHEW WAGNER

"The Vatican was 'surprised' at negative reaction in Israel to words spoken by Pope Benedict XVI at Yad Vashem on Monday, Holy See spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said Tuesday."

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242029512782&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
•••••••••
BENEDICT XVI WALKS A RELIGIOUS TIGHTROPE

Trying to Stay on Message Despite Criticism
By Father Thomas D. Williams, LC

"JERUSALEM, MAY 12, 2009 (Zenit.org).- We woke up this morning in Jerusalem to newspaper headlines decrying the supposed inadequacy of Pope Benedict's remorse in his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial Monday and in his meeting there with six Holocaust survivors. ... "

http://www.zenit.org/article-25876?l=english
•••••••
MIDEAST: Pope Failing the 'Test of Pain'
Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

"JERUSALEM, May 12 (IPS) - Before stepping into Jerusalem's interfaith and inter-political Middle East minefields, Pope Benedict XVI had posited himself as a "pilgrim of peace". But, only hours into his spiritual mission, the Pope found himself crashing up against the walls erected by pain - Jewish pain and Muslim pain, the memory of the Holocaust, and Palestinian pain of the continued Israeli occupation. ... "

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46807

Calling Cheney On His Lies

13 May 2009 12:27 pm

FBI agent Ali Soufan is testifying today. Greg Sargent points out significant parts of his written testimony:

Soufan will directly contradict key claims by torture apologists that the techniques elicited high-value information. He will say flat out that the claim that Abu Zubaydah didn’t start giving up info until August 2002, when he was waterboarded, is false. “The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him,” Soufan will say.

Soufan will also contradict claims that waterboarding got Abu Zubaydah to cough up info leading to the capture of so-called “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. He will point out that waterboarding wasn’t approved until August of 2002, while Padilla was captured in May of 2002.

And Soufan will deny yet another key claim of torture apologists: That torture revealed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s involvement in 9/11. “That was discovered in April 2002, while waterboarding was not introduced until almost three months later.” Soufan will say.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/05/fisking-cheney.html

FBI Terrorist Watchlist Riddled With Errors

www.courthousenews.com
May 07, 2009

WASHINGTON (CN) - The FBI failed to remove thousands of people from its "Terrorist Watchlist," sometimes years after determining that they were not actually terrorists; failed to put on the list people who are tied to terrorism, allowing them to enter and move about the country; and its controls over "nomination" of people for the list without an FBI investigation were "weak or nonexistent," the Justice Department concluded in a report released Wednesday.

Of 68,669 suspected terrorists on the list in February 2008, 35% were based on outdated information; the FBI failed to perform a "watchlist modification" 67% of the time when a modification was necessary; failed to remove from the list people who should have been removed from it 8% of the time; and in one case kept a person on the list for 5 years after he or she should have been removed from it, the DOJ concluded.

The 121-page report from the Department of Justice's Inspector General, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices," Audit Report 09-25, May 2009, was released Wednesday.

Among the conclusions in its Executive Summary:

"As of December 31, 2008, the consolidated terrorist watchlist contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities ..."

"Our audit found that initial watchlist nominations created by FBI field offices often contained inaccuracies or were incomplete, leading to delays in the inclusion of known or suspected terrorists on the watchlist. In addition, the audit determined that the FBI did not consistently update or remove watchlist records when appropriate. Finally, the audit determined that FBI field offices had, at times, bypassed some of the FBI's quality control mechanisms by excluding FBI headquarters and submitting watchlist nominations directly to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) ...

"We found that the FBI failed to nominate many subjects in the terrorism investigations that we sampled, did not nominate many others in a timely fashion, and did not update or remove watchlist records as required. Specifically, in 32 of the 216 (15 percent) terrorism investigations we reviewed, 35 subjects of these investigations were not nominated to the consolidated terrorist watchlist, contrary to FBI policy.8We also found that 78 percent of the initial watchlist nominations we reviewed were not processed in established FBI timeframes.

"Additionally, in 67 percent of the cases that we reviewed in which a watchlist record modification was necessary, we determined that the FBI case agent primarily assigned to the case failed to modify the watchlist record when new identifying information was obtained during the course of the investigation, as required by FBI policy. Further, in 8 percent of the closed cases we reviewed, we found that the FBI failed to remove subjects from the watchlist as required by FBI policy. 9 Finally, in 72 percent of the closed cases reviewed, the FBI failed to remove the subject in a timely manner;

"Because the consolidated terrorist watchlist is used by government frontline screening personnel to determine how to respond when a known or suspected terrorist requests entry into the United States, the failure to place appropriate individuals on the watchlist, or the failure to place them on the watchlist in a timely manner, increases the risk that these individuals are able to enter and move freely about the country. In fact, we found that several persons with names matching the subjects who were not watchlisted or who were untimely watchlisted attempted to cross U.S. borders during the period the names were not watchlisted by the FBI.

"FBI policy allows for the nomination of known or suspected international terrorists for whom the FBI does not have a terrorism investigation. All such nominations must be submitted through the Counterterrorism Division's (CTD) International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS). ITOS is then responsible for forwarding the nomination to NCTC. However, we found the controls over these types of nominations to be weak or nonexistent. ...

"Finally, in February 2008, in response to our data request, we were provided a list of all terrorist identities sourced to the FBI in the consolidated terrorist watchlist. This list contained a total of 68,669 known or suspected terrorist identities. In analyzing this list, we found that 35 percent of these identities were associated with FBI cases that did not contain current international terrorism or domestic terrorism designations. Rather, many of these watchlisted records were associated with outdated terrorism case classifications or case classifications unrelated to terrorism and had been nominated by various FBI field offices and headquarters units.

Our review of a sample of these nominations revealed that many of the records were for individuals who had originally been appropriately watchlisted but should have been removed from the watchlist after the case had been closed. In one instance, we identified a former subject who remained watchlisted for nearly 5 years after the case had been closed."

http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/05/07/FBI_Terrorist_Watchlist_Riddled_With_Errors.htm

The Channel Islands Under Nazi Rule

" ... The Channel Islands' war history was one of almost total collaboration with the Nazis. ... How was Victor Carey treated after his wartime record of referring to the Allies as 'the enemy?' After the war, he was knighted by King George VI. ... "

(Excerpt, story originally published at rudistettner.com)

Our predominant image of Britain in World War Two was of the bombing of London. Winston Churchill and Princess Elizabeth personified the grim determination of the people of the United Kingdom to defeat the Nazi menace at whatever cost might be necessary. The sacrifices of soldiers lend eternal resonance to this bloody chapter in British history.

There is another side to the history of British territory in the Second World War. It is that of the Channel Islands. Although they are only thirty miles from France, the hearts of the Channel Islanders are with Great Britain, which is twice as distant. French is widely spoken in the Channel Islands, where Elizabeth II reigns not as Queen but as Duke of Normandy. ...

The Channel Islands History took a sharp turn from the British mainland on June 30, 1940. ... There was a window of opportunity in which those who wished to could evacuate to the British mainland. About a third of the islanders did so. On Alderney, almost everyone left. On Jersey, relatively few did so.

The Germans were not harsh with most of the Channel Islanders. there were restrictions on listening to the BBC. There were deportations to labour camps on the European mainland of non natives. among these non natives were 17 Jews, some of whom were murdered in concentration camps.

There was some resistance to the German occupation. Almost all of it was symbolic, such as defacing street signs. Occasionally, escaped slave labourers were given refuge. In General, the civil service shifted allegiance to their new German masters, implementing the new order.

The occupation was mild for natives to the Channel Islands. It was welcome news to many a German soldier that he would be stationed in the Channel Islands. It was a rest stop among a cordial populace that included some who welcomed them wholeheartedly.

For Spanish Civil War prisoners and Russian Prisoners of War, the Channel Islands were far more grim. there was a forced labour camp that was built in Alderney, upon the ruins left by retreating residents who wanted to leave nothing of use to the Germans. After their hurried departure, the entire island was turned into a forced labour camp. ...

Julia Pascal writes as follows on Buzzle.com

"The Channel Islands' war history was one of almost total collaboration with the Nazis. It has taken decades for the islands to admit their role in the Jewish deportations, which took place when Guernsey and Jersey absorbed Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic laws into their own legal system. Today there is still shame about the issue, and the islands' governments are uneasy about revealing what happened during the second wave of deportations." ...

The British deportees included pregnant women and babies. It was a harsh deportation in which some died Julia Pascal, in the London Independent paints a damning picture of the useful and wholehearted collaboration of channel Islanders. She compares the Bailiff of Guernsey, Victor G. Carey to Marshal Petain in France, who traded his medals for valour for the role of Nazi collaborator. How bad was Carey? At one point he offered a 25 Pound reward for anyone who provided information useful in the apprehension of those who defaced German signs with anti Nazi graffiti.

How was Victor Carey treated after his wartime record of referring to the Allies as "the enemy"?

After the war, he was knighted by King George VI. To this day, critical records on the island remain classified. The checkered history of the Channel Islands is kept under wraps. ...

http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/The-Channel-Islands-Under-Nazi-Rule.aspx

Elisabeth Waldheim's Papal Award

VIENNA, Austria (AP) August 22, 1994 -- Another papal honor has been accorded the Waldheims, despite criticism over the papal knighthood granted to the former Austrian president and World War II German officer.

Papal Nuncio Archbishop Donato Squicciarini awarded Kurt Waldheim's wife, Elisabeth, the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Cross for her services to the Roman Catholic Church, the Neue Kronen Zeitung newspaper said Sunday.

On July 6, Waldheim was awarded the distinguished award of knighthood in the 147-year-old Order of Pius IX.

Waldheim's honor raised no waves in predominantly Roman Catholic Austria. But it angered Jews in Israel and elsewhere. Waldheim has been accused of complicity in war crimes because of his service with a German army unit in the Balkans blamed for atrocities. He has denied any involvement.

Israel has asked for Vatican clarification of the award.

Friday's award to Mrs. Waldheim was part of 50th wedding anniversary celebrations for the couple in Nussdorf, a village near Salzburg.

NBC Forms Relationship with Unethical Jeweler

The crown "jewels"

c5company.wordpress.com
20 April 2009

As part of NBCs “Green is Universal” campaign the crown placed on the winner of the Miss USA pageant, which aired on NBC earlier this week, was made by Diamond Nexus Labs.

NBC seems to be very proud of its new relationship with a jewelry company they can claim is “eco-friendly,” but it appears that NBC did nothing to determine if that is actually true. Is NBC color blind?

The thing we don’t understand is how the crown can be considered “green.” Our research uncovered nothing about the metals used, the environmental practices of Diamond Nexus Labs or about the diamonds themselves. In fact, the information on the DNL website about their diamonds makes it clear that they are just simulants…not lab-grown diamonds.

As we have stated in previous posts, lab-grown diamonds are indeed genuine diamonds that have been created in a lab, rather than in nature. Simulants are plain fake.

Diamond Nexus labs employs grossly unethical marketing practices. They lead people into believing that they are purchasing real, lab-grown diamonds. They do produce genuine, lab-grown rubies, emeralds and sapphires, but according to their website, Diamond Nexus Labs does not produce lab-grown diamonds.

Read about lab-grown diamonds here.

http://c5company.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/nbc-forms-relationship-with-unethical-jeweler/

BBC Photos of the Civilian Murders in Afghanistan

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8036327.stm

French brothels 'flourished during the Nazi occupation'

www.telegraph.co.uk

French brothels flourished under Nazi occupation, according to a new book highlighting the role of "horizontal collaborators" during the Second World War.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/5256504/French-brothels-flourished-during-the-Nazi-occupation.html

How war on the Kurds put guns in the wrong hands

Background: "Family feud that turned wedding into bloodbath" - Turkish leaders condemn 'tradition' that led to the village massacre of 44 people who had gathered to celebrate marriage
•••
Commentary by Nicholas Birch
May 2009

For Mazhar Bagli, a sociologist who specialises in Kurdish tribes, the wedding-day massacre in Bilge is a sign of how traditional structures have been dangerously unbalanced by a separatist war. Look closely at the details of the 1990s feud that pitted the two branches of the Celebi family against each other, and you begin to understand what he means.

Family tensions began at the height of the war, which erupted in 1984 when the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) took up arms against the state, with the aim of obtaining their own homeland. Ankara began drafting thousands of local Kurds into militias, known as the Village Guards, in the hope that they would help state security forces fight the rebels. Villagers didn't often have much of a choice: either you join up, or you leave your homes, the state told them.

One branch of the Celebi family joined up eagerly, not so much out of a sense of patriotism, rather in the knowledge that the guns and ammunition on offer from the state would give it the upper hand over its rivals. Members of the other branch were reportedly more unwilling to register for duty, but they followed suit shortly afterwards, so as not to be left behind. For a decade or more, the two families, armed to the teeth, put on a show of unity, going out together on operations against the PKK. But when unhappiness about Cemil Celebi's choice of a groom for his daughter relit old enmities, they were more than ready to act.

There are tens of thousands of state-sponsored village guards throughout Turkey's south-east. Human rights groups have long criticised the premise of creating peace and order by pumping weapons into the region.

Mr Bagli said Turkey's government must respond to Monday's bloodbath by opening an investigation into a system that permits men armed with nothing more than a primary school certificate and an oath of loyalty to tout Kalashnikovs at will. Rustem Erkan, another sociologist, said the Bilge massacre had left the whole country with blood on its hands. "I didn't think this could possibly happen in Turkey. It is as though Turkey has become Iraq."

Disbanding the militias will not that easy, especially with local economies falling on hard times. Five years ago, there were 70,000 village militiamen; since then, up to 27,000 newcomers have joined the ranks. "There are entire villages in the south-east where being a village guard is the only way of subsistence," Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based analyst, told Reuters. And the system has naturally attracted those with less than perfect motives. A 1995 Turkish parliamentary report described it as an "investment in social discord", and confirmed militia involvement in extortion, property theft and evictions. There may, however, be some hope of change. In March, prosecutors arrested a militia chief believed to have avenged the murder of his brother and father by ordering a killing spree in the town of Cizre – a sign, at least, of a some willingness to bring some of the worst criminals to justice.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nicholas-birch-how-war-on-the-kurds-put-guns-in-the-wrong-hands-1679726.html

The Orff Question

By Scott Foglesong
www.examiner.com
April 17, 2009

Any discussion of Carmina Burana heads inexorably towards the question of Carl Orff’s ties to the Third Reich. With that question comes the impression that the gigantic cantata has on its listeners: is it a hedonistic outpouring, or a manifestation of fascism?

The images brought up by a piece of music typically resist any attempt at logical resolution. We see what we see, hear what we hear, or feel what we feel. I typically react to Carmina Burana with discomfort; the jackboots stomp just a bit too closely. Others hear nothing of the sort in the music, and may well deride my visions of swastikas and goose-stepping automatons as a cinematic layering induced by unjustified association or an overactive imagination.

Carl Orff turned himself inside out after 1945 to disassociate himself from the Third Reich, going to far as to lie outright about his supposed involvement with the “White Rose” resistance group led by Kurt Huber. He knew Huber, true, but had nothing to do with the White Rose. His desperation to brand himself as an anti-Nazi was born out of fear of Allied justice, and not any yearning for truth. Orff was no heroic resistance fighter. He made every attempt to paper over the clear and evident marks of his compliance with Nazi officials and the many perks he enjoyed as a favored composer of the Reich.

Whether or not his intentions were explicitly fascist (probably not), Orff emerged from the defeat of the Third Reich as one seriously compromised fellow. His original classification by the occupying authority placed him well within the category of suspicious characters, and only a certain amount of maneuvering and manipulation of a sympathetic American officer (Newell Jenkens) cleared him sufficiently for his career to resume.

No evidence survives that establishes any hint of Orff being a member of the Nazi party, but his compliance with the Nazis is all but irrefutable.

Undoubtedly Orff’s acceptance of a 1938 commission to compose music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream -- replacing Mendelssohn’s banned score -- forever, and rightly, stains his posthumous reputation. The critic Alex Ross typically supports 20th century composers, but he gave no quarter in his 1995 article for the New York Times, condemning Orff’s decision to write replacement-Mendelssohn as “one of the shabbiest acts in musical history.” Orff’s thinking might have been aesthetic rather than political, but even the most unobservant and apolitical of musicians should have recognized the heinousness of the anti-Semitism rife in the situation.

Nor can we consider Carmina Burana free from the taint of Nazism; whatever its author’s original intentions (difficult to determine after his post-war obfuscations), no amount of whitewashing will cover the cantata’s having become a cultural display piece for the Third Reich. Orff had little or nothing to do with the work’s Nazi-fication, but the cultural ministry did not bestow its blessings on works by composers considered even remotely unsympathetic to the aims of the Reich.

The Carl Orff who emerges from Michael H. Kater’s Composers of the Nazi Era impresses me as an operator, a manipulator, a slick charmer with little regard for any considerations other than his own selfish interests. Facile excuses to the effect that “most composers are like that” fail to move me in regards to Orff’s near-monstrous vanity. The man comes across as someone who would have played along with anything, provided he could have benefitted personally from the experience.

For that reason I incline towards viewing Carl Orff as a composer of deeply flawed character and of equally dubious moral standing, not quite at the depth of a Richard Wagner but far, far below the sunshine level of relatively ethical creators such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, or Haydn -- allowing each his own personal, human flaws, naturally. I expect no saints amongst artists, but downright immoral bastards are another matter altogether.

When all is said and done, Orff lives on via two venues: the music education system he pioneered and which continues to chug along throughout the world, and his blockbuster 1937 hit Carmina Burana. The rest of his output has shown little traction in the concert or opera world, even Catulli Carmina, which at least partakes of the same Cinerama-spectacle world of its famous predecessor.

And Orff’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains consigned to oblivion, let us hope forever.
-----
Members of the San Francisco Symphony, together with A Cast of Thousands, perform Carmina Burana in an arrangement for two pianos and percussion (with chorus and soloists) this Sunday, April 19, at 7:00 PM in Davies Symphony Hall.

Soap Opera Actor Eric Braedon's Father was a Nazi

Edited by Alex Constantine

The Wikipedia version: "Eric Braeden (born Hans Jörg Gudegast on April 3, 1941) is an Emmy Award-winning German film and television actor, best known for his role as Victor Newman on the soap opera The Young and the Restless.

Eric Braeden was born in Bredenbek, Germany (near Kiel), where his father was once mayor, and emigrated to the USA in 1959. In the United States, Braeden attended The University of Montana in Missoula. While an American citizen, he also considers himself a loyal citizen of Germany, and holds dual citizenship. He has been awarded many German civic awards. ...

Braeden has a wife, Dale Gudegast, and is regarded as a very good tennis player. Braeden and Dale were witnesses at the wedding for Bob Crane and Sigrid Valdis while on the set of Hogan's Heroes. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Braeden
•••
Nazis, Prison and Cadavers

"After World War II, his father, who had been a Nazi party member, was imprisoned by the British for a year (although there is no evidence he participated in any atrocities). When his father died in 1953, his mother turned to factory worker to support her four sons. At age 19, Braeden, then known by his birth name of Hans Gudegast, moved to the USA and resided with a cousin in Houston, where he found work dissecting cadavers for medical research. ... "

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/participant.jsp?spid=20974&apid=65452
•••
The Censored & Sanitized TV Guide Version - Nazis Written Out of the Story, Eric Loves and Praises his Father, Childhood Abandonment, the Orphanage ...
tvguide.sympatico.msn.ca

... Born Hans Jorg Gudegast in Bredenbek, Germany, where his father was once mayor (the star emigrated to the U.S. in 1959), Braeden lost his father at the young age of 12. As Y&R fans know, Victor was raised in an orphanage after being abandoned by his parents, who he later met in Genoa City. Both men changed their real names as well (Victor Newman was derived from three words: Victory, and New Man — remember when soaps used to name characters with some meaning?).

“My father was not in the [Second World War], but many people we knew were killed. That affected him greatly. When I was 12, he died suddenly of a heart attack. His sudden death destroyed my world. Not only were we plunged into poverty, but my sense of justice and injustice, fairness and unfairness — ideals that my father had instilled in me — were also destroyed. I was a very angry kid; I got into fights with other kids, threw tomatoes at the Allied tanks as they rolled into town, and I never understood why my father had left us. From that time on, I was on my own.”

http://tvguide.sympatico.msn.ca/Dirty+Sexy+Money/Soaps/Features/Articles/081029_eric_braeden_NB.htm?isfa=1
•••
TV’S BLACK KNIGHT

" ... Like most people, I did discover Eric Braeden on daytime TV playing multi-millionaire industrialist Victor Newman on the long running CBS soap opera Young and the Restless. ... Eric Braden’s career is so dipped in pop culture history that he is a television icon all his own. His list of screen credits on the imdb is one of the most impressive I've ever seen, and the people he has worked with is incredible. Quite frankly, Eric Braeden is a man with stories to tell. You see, long before he even stepped on a soap opera sound stage, Eric Braeden appeared on over 80 television and film productions playing the villain of the week. With his dark hair, intense stare, and cold and authoritive German accent, Eric Braeden menaced some of pop cultures biggest and most beloved icons of the 1960s and 1970s He was half ladies man, half demon and a whole lotta evil. Every generation needs it’s Edward G. Robinsons, Christopher Lees and Gary Oldmans and in the decade where adventure shows were king, Eric Braeden made an entire career out of playing spies, Nazis, crooks and villains. ... "

http://www.popcultureaddict.com/television/ericbraeden.htm
•••
Braeden Notes Parallels Between Nazi German and the US

" ... He noted that one of Hitler’s deadliest weapons was his use of Article 48 of the German constitution to shut down newspaper editors who opposed his views so that he could blanket Germany in Nazi propaganda. 'Never allow any network to spout simplistic solutions to complex problems,' he said. 'That is the essence of fascism and it allows people to not think. I think it rings a certain bell with what’s happening here [in the United States] today. Beware of people who talk too much about patriotism and offer simple solutions.' ... "

http://www.vcreporter.com/cms/story/detail/?id=3290&IssueNum=68
•••
Nazi Germany, Braeden on the Holocaust

... Although no fan of soap operas, I immediately recognized Eric Braeden, the tall, dapper, mustachioed star of the Young and the Restless when I spotted him two weeks ago at a dinner gathering of American-Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.

Braeden was familiar to me not from his daytime TV serial, but from news coverage of his Ministry of Tourism-sponsored visit to Israel.

A day earlier, this newspaper had quoted him saying: "In such difficult times, it is important that people demonstrate solidarity, and that is the reason I am here: To tell you that our hearts are with you, and to tell people throughout the world not to fear visiting Israel. Everyone in the world must know that there are warm and welcoming people here, and that Israel is a most beautiful country. I feel safe here, and I hope the fact I am here will motivate others to visit."

Three days later a suicide bomber blew up the No. 14 bus, killing eight people, just around the corner from his hotel. Braeden was unfazed, though, continuing his visit and adding onto his itinerary a stop at a local hospital to offer condolences to those wounded in the blast.

That fact alone makes Braeden an exception at a time when most celebrities - including many American-Jewish show business figures who have been outspoken about Israel in the past - are too fearful or concerned over political ramifications to pay a similar visit here.

But only after personally encountering the thoughtful, erudite actor at this dinner did I realize what a truly exceptional figure he cuts. Braeden was born in northern Germany in 1941, where his father was a Nazi party member and mayor of the town Bredenbek. Two decades later he moved to California and began to pursue a career as an actor.

"I was born Hans Juerg Gudegast, " Braeden told me, "but Lew Wasserman, who headed Universal Studios, told me such a German name wouldn't do in American movies. Eric was a name of other family members, and Braeden I took from Bredenbek."

In addition to his acting career Braeden has dedicated himself to encouraging dialogue between Germans and Jews, both as a founder of the German-American Cultural Society and through such gestures as playing on the Los Angeles Maccabees squad that won the 1972 US soccer championship.

"Without down playing the terrible things that happened during the Nazi period," Braeden told me, "we have to work harder to bring attention to the positive aspects of German-Jewish relations Ð the position in German society Jews enjoyed before the 1930s, and the past half-century during which Germany has been a thriving democracy." ...

it's worth quoting a 1994 interview Braeden gave to a German magazine, during which he rails in general against the collective guilt for the Holocaust he feels has been unfairly placed on the German people as a whole, and expresses his personal frustration as a Hollywood actor who has had to battle against being stereotypically cast as an evil Nazi officer.

"But I want to be very specific about this, "Braeden adds. "My anger does not reach the point where I become revisionist, where I deny what happened. There are some here who do, to my dismay. By denying those things you only make it worse."

http://www.ericbraeden.com/jerusalem_post.txt

Free Speech and the Far Right

Austrian law prohibits public denial, belittlement, approval or justification of Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast, or in other media. The law prohibits public incitement to hostile acts against a church, religious society, or group because of its race, nationality, or ethnicity, if that incitement poses a danger to public order. It also prohibits incitement, insult, or contempt against these groups if it violates human dignity…



by Karl Pfeifer
Z Word Blog
30/04/09

A Viennese jury this week convicted Gerd Honsik, 67, to five years in prison for violating the Nazi Prohibition Act which forbids the denial of National Socialist crimes.

The trial started on April 20 and lasted for three days. Honsik was earlier found guilty of similar charges, but fled in 1992 abroad during his appeal. He spent 15 years in Spain where he continued his pro-Nazi publicity work via the Internet and by publishing books, which prompted further charges. Austria demanded his extradition several times. Finally, in 2007, Spain deported him.

Honsik pretended in court to be a “social democrat” and said he had only “rejected the textbook wisdom that demonizes National Socialism”. He argued that he never outright denied the existence of gas chambers where six million Jews were killed; rather he had only ruled them out “wherever I had not verified the (facts) myself”.

In April, around the anniversary of Hitler’s birth, Honsik’s friends intensified their efforts to show solidarity with Honsik - the “Historian”, “Poet”, “Dissident” and “Philanthropist” - through willful damage to property in eastern Austria against his alleged political persecution. Honsik’s lawyer, Herbert Schaller, tried his level best to damage the interests of his client, by denying on the first day of the trial the existing of gas chambers. This is “not fact” but mere “prevailing opinion,” he said. Because of that, the prosecution against him was launched.

Honsik denied the charges and said he would appeal against the verdict.

Prosecutor Stefan Apostol is seeking a longer jail term for Honsik, who potentially faces up to 20 years prison on the charges of “re-engagement” in public promotion of Nazi ideology in his magazine “Halt” and several books.

Apostol called Honsik “one of the ideological leaders” of Europe’s neo-Nazi scene and said he had distributed his “hate magazine” at schools. The Vienna court ordered offending editions of the magazine withdrawn from circulation.

Judge Andreas Boehm cited Honsik’s previous conviction, his “repeated shows of contempt” for the law, his escape to Spain and continued propaganda activity there as key factors in the verdict and prison term. The Austrian news agency APA reported that after Boehm repeatedly rejected Honsik’s confused motions to admit evidence as irrelevant on Monday, the defendant began screaming and beating his fists on his table in the dock.

Honsik argued in court that the Waffen SS was not criminal. His evidence: a picture of some Waffen SS leaders shaking hand with Polish resistance fighters. Judge Boehm remarked, “but after that, they were shot.”

Apostol described Honsik as a historical revisionist, someone who misrepresents what he really is. Especially now when a deep crisis is underway, the extreme right becomes in Europe a danger to democracy.

Over half the states of Europe now criminalize Holocaust denial. They accept the premise that deniers are extremists who use denial, among other means, to rehabilitate Nazism. Their legal rationale in doing so is usually that denial negates the historical facts established at Nuremburg in 1945, rather than that it constitutes offensive or threatening speech.

International agreements take the same line and this was reinforced and given a legal basis in April 2007 by the EU Common Framework Decision, which requires European states to criminalize denial. Legislation, however, has not stopped extremists from continuing to promote Holocaust denial and they are now joined and invigorated by Iran, which promotes it as state policy. Nevertheless, states now accept that Holocaust education is vital and several intergovernmental initiatives offer hope for the future.

Two far-right, anti-foreigner parties combined for almost a third of votes in Austria’s 2008 national election and Austria is a country accused by Amnesty International of “institutional racism.”

At the same time, Austria has a severe legislation against the denial of Nazi crimes has curbed the activities of Neo-Nazi. On February 20, 2006, a Vienna jury sentenced the “historian” David Irving to three years’ imprisonment for denying Nazi crimes. The court’s decision prompted much negative commentary both within Austria and internationally. I have argued the case for the Austrian law forbidding Nazi activities and against those who take an absolutist approach to the right to freedom of expression.

The case of Hungary, where there is tolerance of hate speech as well as demonstrations by neo-fascist groups in the image of the Arrow Cross, and where several gypsies have been murdered since 2008, shows also that the Austrian laws are necessary in Europe, especially in countries where Jews and others were persecuted and murdered during the Second World War.

That Holocaust denial cannot be tolerated has been recognized by President Obama recently.”To this day, there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened, who perpetrate every form of intolerance,” he said, “We have an opportunity as well as an obligation to confront these scourges… That is my commitment as president.” He added, “How do we ensure that ‘never again’ isn’t an empty slogan or merely an aspiration, but also a call to action? I believe we start by doing what we are doing today - by bearing witness, by fighting the silence that is evil’s greatest co-conspirator.”

This brings me to YouTube, which broadcasts Holocaust denial and other Nazi incitement by Austrian neo-Nazis. YouTube should be confronted with this declaration of the president of the United States of America and be asked not to continue to enable those who violate the Austrian laws.

It is to be hoped that the American public in the USA understands that the First Amendment cannot, for historical reasons, be applied in Europe. European neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers should not be allowed to abuse the American Constitution.

http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2009/04/30/free-speech/

The Hitler Legacy

AUSTRIA: On the 120th anniversary of the Nazi leader’s birth, far right parties are again being resurrected - From Billy Briggs in Vienna

IN A courtyard at the University of Vienna there was laughter as graduates posed for photographs, but as noon approached, an uneasy calm descended and guests left en masse. Improbably, one of Europe's most revered seats of learning has become a place of violence.

The controversy surrounds a statue called Siegfried's Kopf. Portraying a warrior from German mythology, the monument is a symbolic figure for Austria's far right, so each week fiercely nationalist students, called Burschenshaften, gather to pay homage.

But for months now there has been fighting on campus as other students protest at what they view as an unacceptable show of support for a despised Nazi past. In order to prevent violence, the university tried to remove the statue but were unable to because it is protected by the state. As a compromise, the piece was relocated from the main entrance to the courtyard where it now sits in a glass case engraved with the stories of Jews persecuted by Nazis during the 1930s; in the eyes of the far right an act of desecration.

On our recent visit, the Burschenschaften had been banned from visiting the statue and at the main entrance to the university armed police stood guard as they handed out leaflets to protest. Dressed in their uniforms, the Burschenschaften resembled colourful bandsmen of an age gone-by and are a far cry from the shaven-headed thugs normally associated with neo-Nazism.

As the protest continued other students gathered and there was clearly tension in the air. One girl claimed the Burschenschaften were part of a group of men who attacked a student march against fascism outside the Austrian Parliament the week before. Whispering, she added: "The Nazis are back in Austria." ...

Drumming up hatred of foreigners and campaigning against the "Islamisation" of Austria, the Freedom Party (FPO) and Alliance for the Future (BZO) jointly secured massive public support - 29% per cent - in a result viewed as a horrifying development by many people across Europe.

Both parties ran xenophobic campaigns, particularly the FPO who pledged to set up a ministry to deport foreigners and whose leader, Heinz Christian Strache, described women in Islamic dress as "female ninjas".

More sinisterly, the FPO wants to revoke the Verbotsgesetz, an Austrian law enacted in 1947 that bans the promotion of neo-Nazi ideology. ...

STORY CONTINUES

http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.2502909.0.0.php

Jewish Mass Grave to be Excavated in Germany

By Sachin Seth
blastmagazine.com
April 25, 2009

On February 2 1945, just seven months before the end of World War II, more than 753 sick Jewish men and women are thought to have been killed by the Waffen SS at the Nazi camp of Lieberose in Brandenburg state. Efforts to excavate the site, which is one of the last undiscovered mass graves of Jews killed by Nazis, began on Wednesday after a long court battle over land rights.

The excavation, interestingly enough, is taking place in the garden of a two-story home just 75 miles south-east of Berlin, according to the BBC. Guenter Morsch, director of the Brandenburg memorial foundation, claims evidence strongly suggests that the garden is the site of the ill-named “recuperation barracks” used to house sick Jews at the Lieberose concentration camp. The grave would have to be very close.

Morsch says the Waffen SS killed all 1,342 prisoners at the camp after they were declared unfit to evacuate as the Soviet Red Army advanced on their location in early 1945. The remains of 589 victims, who were shot and killed the next day, were uncovered nearby in 1971 but the other 753 victims are yet to be discovered. It is thought they lie beneath the garden site.

Until last year, the owner of the land had forbidden any investigation on his property. It wasn’t until this year’s lengthy court battle that local authorities reached a deal with the owner to purchase the property. Joerg Schoenbohm, Brandenburg’s interior minister, says the excavation is expected to take 21 days. If bodies are discovered a memorial will most likely be erected in the victims’ honor.

“We need to end the uncertainty surrounding the crime so that we will have time for mourning and remembering,” he said.

Sachin Seth is the Blast Magazine world news reporter. He writes the Terra blog.

http://blastmagazine.com/the-blogs/terra/2009/04/jewish-mass-grave-to-be-excavated-in-germany/

Two Flight 3407 Attorneys Die in Plane Crash

Fatal plane crash provokes concern of Cuyahoga County Airport neighbors
County airport's neighbors worry about expansion, resulting traffic
Amanda Garrett
Thursday, April 30, 2009

Some people who live near the Cuyahoga County Airport knew what happened as soon as the ground shook.

A plane had crashed.

Their first thought: I hope it didn't hit somebody's house. ...

Just after takeoff, their Cirrus SR22 went down and exploded in woods just east of SOM Center Road in Mayfield about 4:15 p.m.

Some neighbors called the pilot a hero, believing he must have steered the plane away from a subdivision and to the edge of Cleveland Metroparks' North Chagrin Reservation. ...

CONTINUED

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1241080211285280.xml&coll=2
•••••••
Searching for Cause of Ohio Crash
Two Buffalo attorneys died in planecrash
Michele McClintick
www.wivb.com

30 Apr 2009

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - Two Buffalo attorneys who were fighting for justice for one of the Flight 3407 families, lost their own lives in a plane crash near Cleveland.

Michael Doran and Matthew Schnirel died when their Buffalo-bound plane went down Tuesday.

Could fatalities have been avoided?

That's what the National Transportation Safety Board is trying to figure out as it continues to search for the cause of the plane crash in Ohio that killed Buffalo attorneys Michael Doran and Matthew Schnirel.

Michael Doran was piloting the aircraft when the plane went down.

There are reports that the Cirrus SR-22 has a built in parachute. The pilot reaches overhead in the cockpit and pulls a red handle. That deploys a fuel rocket that pulls the parachute from the back of the plane.

The NTSB will look into whether that was tried or even possible in the crash.

Daniel Rose said, "It certainly leads me to believe that something went wrong with the aircraft that needs to be considered."

Daniel Rose from Kreindler and Kreindler law firm worked with Michael Doran and Matthew Schnirel. Together they represent the family of one of the victims from Flight 3407.

The small law firm of Doran and Murphy is taking the news very hard. Chris Murphy says Mike was not only his partner, but a close friend for over 15 years.

Murphy said, "Flying, practicing law, boating and skiing; and he was very committed to doing all those things."

26-year-old Matthew Schnirel started there as a law clerk three years ago and was building a great reputation.

Murphy said, "He recently passed the bar and just purchased a home. But right from the get go I just knew he was a special person."

Emergency crews in the Cleveland suburbs where the crash took place say that the pilot may have deliberately avoided casulties on the ground, landing between homes in a heavily wooded area.

http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/searching_for_cause_of_ohio_crash_090429

U.S. has a 45-year history of torture

The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and 'enhanced interrogation' now is that some modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.

By A.J. Langguth
LAT/May 3, 2009

A.J. Langguth is the author of "Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America."

As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.

I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.

At the time, I was researching a book on the United States' role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator's files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent's Southern Cone.

Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.

Our interference, which went on for decades, was not limited to one political party. The meddling in Brazil began in earnest during the early 1960s under a Democratic administration. At that time, Washington's alarm over Cuba was much like the more recent panic after 9/11. The Kennedy White House was determined to prevent another communist regime in the hemisphere, and Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was taking a strong interest in several anti-communist approaches, including the Office of Public Safety.

When OPS was launched under President Eisenhower, its mission sounded benign enough -- to increase the professionalism of the police of Asia, Africa and, particularly, Latin America. But its genial director, Byron Engle, was a CIA agent, and his program was part of a wider effort to identify receptive recruits among local populations.

Although Engle wanted to avoid having his unit exposed as a CIA front, in the public mind the separation was quickly blurred. Dan Mitrione, for example, a police advisor murdered by Uruguay's left-wing Tupamaros for his role in torture in that country, was widely assumed to be a CIA agent.

When Brazil seemed to tilt leftward after President Joao Goulart assumed power in 1961, the Kennedy administration grew increasingly troubled. Robert Kennedy traveled to Brazil to tell Goulart he should dismiss two of his Cabinet members, and the office of Lincoln Gordon, John Kennedy's ambassador to Brazil, became the hub for CIA efforts to destabilize Goulart's government.

On March 31, 1964, encouraged by U.S. military attache Vernon Walters, Brazilian Gen. Humberto Castelo Branco rose up against Goulart. Rather than set off a civil war, Goulart chose exile in Montevideo.

Ambassador Gordon returned to a jubilant Washington, where he ran into Robert Kennedy, who was still grieving for his brother, assassinated the previous November. "Well, he got what was coming to him," Kennedy said of Goulart. "Too bad he didn't follow the advice we gave him when we were down there."

The Brazilian people did not deserve what they got. The military cracked down harshly on labor unions, newspapers and student associations. The newly efficient police, drawing on training provided by the U.S., began routinely torturing political prisoners and even opened a torture school on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro to teach police sergeants how to inflict the maximum pain without killing their victims.

One torture victim was Fernando Gabeira, a young reporter for Jornal do Brasil who was recruited by a resistance movement and later arrested for his role in the 1969 kidnapping of Charles Burke Elbrick, the U.S. ambassador. (Elbrick was released after four days.) In custody, Gabeira later told me, he was tortured with electric shocks to his testicles; a fellow prisoner had his testicles nailed to a table. Still others were beaten bloody or waterboarded. When Gabeira's captors said anything at all, they sometimes boasted about having been trained in the United States.

During the first seven years after Castelo Branco's coup, the OPS trained 100,000 Brazilian police, including 600 who were brought to the United States. Their instruction varied. Some OPS lecturers denounced torture as inhumane and ineffectual. Others conveyed a different message. Le Van An, a student from the South Vietnamese police, later described what his instructors told him: "Despite the fact that brutal interrogation is strongly criticized by moralists," they said, "its importance must not be denied if we want to have order and security in daily life."

Brazil's political prisoners never doubted that Americans were involved in the torture that proliferated in their country. On their release, they reported that they frequently had heard English-speaking men around them, foreigners who left the room while the actual torture took place. As the years passed, those torture victims say, the men with American accents became less careful and sometimes stayed on during interrogations.

One student dissident, Angela Camargo Seixas, described to me how she was beaten and had electric wires inserted into her vagina after her arrest. During her interrogations, she found that her hatred was directed less toward her countrymen than toward the North Americans. She vowed never to forgive the United States for training and equipping the Brazilian police.

Flavio Tavares Freitas, a journalist and Christian nationalist, shared that sense of outrage. When he had wires jammed in his ears, between his teeth and into his anus, he saw that the small gray generator producing the shocks had on its side the red, white and blue shield of the USAID.

Still another student leader, Jean Marc Von der Weid, told of having his penis wrapped in wires and connected to a battery-operated field telephone. Von der Weid, who had been in Brazil's marine reserve, said he recognized the telephone as one supplied by the United States through its military assistance program.

Victims often said that their one moment of hope came when a medical doctor appeared in their cell. Now surely the torment would end. Then they found that he was only there to guarantee that they could survive another round of shocks.

CIA Director Richard Helms once tried to rebut accusations against his agency by asserting that the nation must take it on faith that the CIA was made up of "honorable men." That was before Sen. Frank Church's 1975 Senate hearings brought to light CIA behavior that was deeply dishonorable.

Before Brazil restored civilian government in 1985, Abourezk had managed to shut down a Texas training base notorious for teaching subversive techniques, including the making of bombs. When OPS came under attack during another flurry of bad publicity, the CIA did not fight to save it, and its funding was cut off.

Looking back, what has changed since 1975? A Brazilian truth and reconciliation commission was convened, and it documented 339 cases of government-sanctioned political assassinations. In 2002, a former labor leader and political prisoner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was elected president of Brazil. He's serving his second term.

Fernando Gabeira went home to publish a book about kidnapping the American ambassador and his ordeal in prison. The book became a bestseller throughout Brazil, and Gabeira was elected to the national legislature. In an election last October, he came within 1.4 percentage points of becoming the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.

But in our country, there's been a disheartening development: In 1975, U.S. officials still felt they had to deny condoning torture. Now many of them seem to be defending torture, even boasting about it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-langguth3-2009may03,0,6987276.story

Video: Ralph Nader on Ron Paul, George Bush, and Barack Obama

Nader himself - see here.

Flight 3407 Crash: Alison Des Forges Reconsidered

The CIA-DoD War on Democracy grinds on, unhindered by public awareness of covert, bloody acts of aggression. Was Ms. Des Forges an actual rights activist (the "enemy") or a willing intelligence/propaganda "asset" someone wanted out of the way?

Edited by Alex Constantine

" ... On 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called 'mysterious plane crash' where Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330 U.S. marines landed at Bujumbura's airport in Burundi, ostensibly to 'rescue Americans' in Rwanda. More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S. trained forces and U.S. supplied weaponry—launched its war against Rwanda as a proxy force for the United States of America on October 1, 1990." ... Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the U.S. government at the time of the 1994 crises. ... In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of 'genocide in Rwanda,' and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda 'genocide,' and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes. ... Key to the operation were "former" Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving the Pentagon interest. ...

False Narrative: Whitewashing Rwanda Genocide
By Keith Harmon Snow

On 12 February 2009, Alison Des Forges, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for more than 20 years, was killed when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed on route to Buffalo, New York. Des Forges was widely cited as a staunch critic of the Rwandan military government controlled by Paul Kagame and the victors of the war in Rwanda, 1990-1994.

In the ongoing life-and-death struggle to reveal the truth about war crimes and genocide in Central Africa, competing factions on all sides have posthumously embraced Alison Des Forges as an activist challenging power and a purveyor of truth and justice against all odds. Meanwhile, in March, 2009, based on false accusations of genocide issued by the Kagame regime—and given the close relations between Rwanda and the Barack Obama Administration’s former Clintonite officials—the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began the process of revisiting all immigration cases of Rwandan asylum seekers and criminalizing innocent refugees.

"In May of 1994, a few weeks into the killings of Tutsis in Rwanda," reported Amy Goodman, posthumously, on Democracy Now, Alison Des Forges "was among the first voices calling for the killings to be declared a genocide." Added Goodman: "She later became very critical of the Tutsi-led Rwandan government headed by Paul Kagame and its role in the mass killings in both Rwanda and neighboring Congo after 1994. Last year, she was barred from entering Rwanda."

To say that Des Forges was "amongst the first voices calling for the killings to be declared genocide" in 1994 is an Orwellian ruse. The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government; much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

The Clinton Administration refused to apply the genocide label: to do so might have compromised an ongoing U.S.-backed covert operation: the invasion of Rwanda by the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A).

According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the U.S.-brokered pact between Rwanda's President Paul Kagame and the Democratic Republic of Congo's President Joseph Kabila in December 2008 "earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources."

"With U.S. military forces of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now backing a joint Ugandan-DRC offensive in the northeastern DRC to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army," wrote Madsen on 16 February 2009, "with hundreds of civilian casualties in the DRC and Uganda, and a secret pact worked out between Kabila and Kagame to permit Rwandan troops to occupy the eastern DRC, the target of both operations is securing the vast territory that is rich in commodities that the United States, Britain and Israel—all allies of Uganda and Rwanda—want badly.

Those commodities are gold, diamonds, columbium-tantalite (coltan), platinum and natural gas." Massive oil reserves are also at stake, with major concessions bifurcated by the international border. Ongoing petroleum sector investment (exploration and exploitation) in the region involves numerous western extraction companies—many being so-called petroleum "minors" likely fronting for larger corporations—including Hardman Resources, Heritage Oil and Gas, H Oil & Minerals, PetroSA, Tullow Oil, Vangold Resources, ContourGlobal Group, Tower Resources, Reservoir Capital Group, and Nexant (a Bechtel Corporation subsidiary).

Billed as a "tireless champion" and "leading light in African human rights," there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed: Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch (HRW) provided intelligence to the U.S. government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime.

Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity. Indeed, this was my impression upon meeting her as well. She is said to have helped people who were being persecuted—no matter that they were Hutus or Tutsis—by the Rwandan regime that has for more than 19 years operated with impunity behind the misplaced and misappropriated moral currency of victimhood. In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime.

In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of "genocide in Rwanda", and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda "genocide", and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the U.S. government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region.

"Alison des Forges is a liar," Cameroonian journalist Charles Onana told me, in Paris, France, several years ago. Onana is the author of numerous exposés on war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in Central Africa, and he is the author of the book "The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, Investigations on the Mysteries of a President," published in French in 2001.

Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president "elected" through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal. Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their U.S., U.K., Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia.

In his book, Onana accused Kagame of being the principle instigator of the missile attack of April 6, 1994 that brought down the plane carrying Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira. Unlike the U.N.'s ongoing high-profile investigation of the murder of Lebanon's former prime minister Rafik Hariri, no major power has pushed for a similar probe into the murder of the two African presidents.

Des Forges own death in a plane crash garnered major coverage.

"Leading light in African Human Rights killed in Buffalo Crash," reported the Pentagon’s mouthpiece, CNN. "Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said she was ‘best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story.’ She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist—principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people."

Alison Des Forges first worked as a HRW agent in Rwanda in 1992; in 1993 she helped produce a major international document highly biased against the Rwandan Government and protective of the RPF/A invaders: "Report of the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990."

In late 1992, the International Federation of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-African Union for Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples, and the International Center for the Rights of the Individual and the Development of Democracy created the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990. With 10 members from eight countries, the commission reported its findings in March 1993: Des Forges was co chairperson, one of the three principal writers, and translator of the French to English version.

The report noted that "hundreds of thousands" of Rwandans were made homeless and forced to flee, prior to January 1993, but these casualties of the RPF/A invasion were not attributed to international crimes of peace against a sovereign government committed by an invading army—the RPF/A guerrillas covertly backed by the U.S., Britain, Belgium and Israel—but instead merely to "war".

In other words, the initial act of aggression, the RPA/F invasion, was institutionally protected and the war crimes that set the stage for the conflagrations in Rwanda and Congo went unpunished.

Later in 1993, Rwandans Ferdinan d Nanimana and Joseph Mushyandi, representing four Rwandan organizations under the Rwanda Associations for the Defense of Human Rights, challenged the DesForges commission in their 26-page document, "A Commentary on the Report of the International Commission's Inquiry on the Violation of Human Rights in Rwanda since October 1990."

"How can an international commission be taken seriously when its members spent only two weeks extracting verbal and written evidence on human rights violations for a period of two years?" the authors wrote. They also pointed out that the commission spent less than two hours in areas controlled by the RPF/A rebels and that they could not visit all the 11 prefectures in the country because of demonstrations that blocked the roads. "Can there be any objective and credible conclusions in their report?"

Ferdinand Nanimana was later sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide. Many members of the Rwandan human rights organizations he worked with prior to April 1994 were subsequently killed. The rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe, Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in prison on July 4, 2007.

Like other researchers who have endlessly perpetuated the disinformation, Des Forges made no attempts to correct the record. In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, another pivotal "human rights" report that manufactured the "genocide" fabrications, set the stage for victor’s justice at the ICTR, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists. In 1995, Omaar and de Waal recycled the disinformation in the left-leaning Covert Action Quarterly under the title "U.S. Complicity by Silence: Genocide in Rwanda."

Since 2003, Alex de Waal has been one of the primary disinformation conduits on Darfur, Sudan. "An intensive back and forth activity between this so-called British human rights organization, African Rights, and the intelligence services of the [Kagame] President’s office and the Rwandan military, has been observed," wrote Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroics was immortalized in the film Hotel Rwanda. "Her investigators are very close to the [RPF/A] military intelligence apparatus, and the modus operandi of both appears to be similar."

Alison Des Forges years-long "investigations" into the bloodshed of 1994 resulted in the fat treatise on genocide in Rwanda, "Leave None to Tell the Story," a book co-researched and co-written by Timothy Longman, now Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents—based on field investigations in Congo (then Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008—touted as independent and unbiased human rights documents, all skewed by hidden interests.

According to a recent PBS Frontline eulogy, less than two weeks into the killing in April 1994 Des Forges met with officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC) and lobbied for their help. "We were not asking for U.S. troops," Frontline quotes her saying, "it was clear to us that there was no way that the U.S. was going to commit troops to Rwanda."

But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF/A tactically and strategically already. Key to the operation were "former" Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon's logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving the Pentagon interest.

Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide; meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer. Newsweek, June 20, 1994.

ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black reports that reliable sources confirm that US Special forces were with the RPF all the way through the war. "My client testified in June that U.S. Hercules [C-130 military aircraft] were seen dropping troops in support of the RPF…"

Further, on 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called "mysterious plane crash" where Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330 U.S. marines landed at Bujumbura's airport in Burundi, ostensibly to "rescue Americans" in Rwanda.

More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S. trained forces and U.S. supplied weaponry—launched its war against Rwanda as a proxy force for the United States of America on October 1, 1990.

The result was a coup d’état: we won. The 2003 Frontline interview with Alison Des Forges exemplifies her continuing role in whitewashing U.S. involvement in war crimes and genocide in Central Africa. "Kagame received his military education under the Pentagon's Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) at the Command and General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, beginning in 1990," wrote John E. Peck of the Association of African Scholars (2002). "His sidekick, Lt. Col. Frank Rusagara, got his JCET schooling at the U.S. Naval Academy in Monterey, California. Both were dispatched to Rwanda in time to oversee the RPF's takeover in 1994. Far from being an innocent bystander, the Washington Post revealed on July 12, 1998 that the United States not only gave Kagame $75 million in military assistance, but also sent Green Berets to train Kagame's forces (as well as their Ugandan rebel allies) in low intensity conflict (LIC) tactics. Pentagon subcontractor Ronco, masquerading as a de-mining company, also smuggled more weapons to RPF fighters in flagrant violation of UN sanctions. All of this U.S. largesse was put to lethal effect in the ethnic bloodbath that is still going on."

"This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power," Des Forges wrote, blaming "Hutu Power". However, her assertions about a "planned" Hutu genocide—"They seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter"—collapse under scrutiny.

From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal Habyarimana—of genocide.

"Kagame assigned some people to work with Alison Des Forges," says Ugandan Human Rights activist Remigius Kintu, "and also to assist her in fabricating and distorting stories to suit Tutsi propaganda plans."

According to the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, whose discoveries resulted in the high courts of Spain issuing international indictments against 40 top RPF/A officials: "Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en masse.

From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in Rwanda and Congo."

Before former President Habyarimana’s assassination on 6 April 1994, Des Forges, and the organizations she worked with, blamed the whole war crimes show on President Habyarimana and his government, they dismissed the illegal invasion and atrocities of the RPF/A, and they began calling it genocide against the Tutsis as early as 1992.

"In the Military II case Alison Des Forges admitted that she was funded by USAID when she was part of that so-called International Commission condemning the Rwandan Government [under Habyarimana] for human rights violations," reports Canadian Chris Black, a defense attorney at the ICTR, "and she admitted that she just took the word of the RPF and pro-RPF groups and that she did not deal with RPF atrocities, as she did not have the time."

Chris Black notes that Des Forges presented reports to the ICTR in certain legal cases that were decidedly doctored from the original reports presented in previous cases against other accused Hutu genocidaires, and that it was necessary to cross-examine Des Forges "very forcefully" to get her to agree that changes had been made to the reports presented as evidence in the case being tried.

"In her expert report in the 2006 Military II trial against General Ndindiliyimana," Chris Black adds, "she removed all the positive things she had said about him in her book and in her previous expert report in the [Colonel Théoneste] Bagasora case. When asked by me why she deleted the positive view of him at his own trial, and why she tried to hide the fact that he saved a lot of Tutsis, among other things, she had no explanation. It was a cheap, low thing to do and I can tell you even the judges here at the ICTR were not too happy about it."

On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the former Habyarimana government. It was war, and the actions—far from a calculated genocide—were found by ICTR judges to be "war-time conditions".

"The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide," wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. "But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy."

Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of protecting the Kagame regime and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the former top military leaders of the Habyarimana government—Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze—were sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

"The real news was that all of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide," writes Erlinder. "And General Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff, was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians."

Now, after more than 15 years of massive western propaganda proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.

In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the "Hutu leadership" of an "organized" and "planned" genocide were the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous uprising of the Hutu masses—people who had been brutalized, disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were themselves the victims of brutal atrocities.

These were more than a million internally displaced Rwandan Hutus, people who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way into Rwanda; and possibly a million Burundian refugees, Hutus who suffered massive reprisals in Burundi after the first civilian President, Melchior Ndadaye, a democratically elected Hutu, was assassinated by the Tutsi military in October 1993.

There is evidence that the RPA/F pursued "pseudo-operations"—death squads committing atrocities disguised as government soldiers—and evidence that at least some of the infamous Interahamwe militias pursued their campaigns of terror in the pay of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army.

"She concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!" wrote Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who had called for Des Forges’ resignation from HRW.

"And these people knew that Tutsi rebels caused their misery. They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6 assassination and resumption of hostilities by the RPF."

"Alison Des Forges is no longer," writes Charles Onana. "Peace be with her soul! She nonetheless leaves behind her many victims of injustice, who she painstakingly accused, using false testimony, before the International Criminal Tribunal Court for Rwanda (ICTR)." Alison Des Forges provided expert testimony in 11 genocide trials before the ICTR, including the ‘Military I’ trials that condemned Col. Theoneste Bagosora and two others on December 18. Des Forges also testified in genocide trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.

Charles Onana continues: "Among her victims there is Jean-Paul Akayesu, the first to be condemned to life imprisonment for genocide. This man, who Alison Des Forges had accused without any proof against him, was even defended by a Tutsi from the Patriotic Rwandan Army [RPA] who had been party to the fabrication of the ‘incriminating’ evidence against him in Rwanda. The Tribunal never listened to this witness, but they did listen to Alison Des Forges."

"I have also discovered during the course of my investigations into the ICTR that, at the start of the trial in 1997, she introduced a forged fax that was purported to be written by General Dallaire in 1994. This fax, maintained Des Forges, concerned the 'planning of genocide’."

New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch spread the mythology of "The Genocide Fax" far and wide. Gourevitch’s first pro-RPF/A disinformation piece appeared in the New Yorker in December 1995; in May 1998 the New Yorker published Gourevitch’s "The Genocide Fax," a charade fed to him by Madeleine Albright’s undersecretary of state James Rubin.

Gourevitch’s fictional book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" was funded by the euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace and written in league with the Kagame regime.

It is certainly possible that Alison Des Forges was unaware of the original fabrication, but she and Human Rights Watch never changed their tune, and they never denounced the fabrication.

Charles Onana continues: "It was on the basis of this false document that she called for the condemnation of Jean-Paul Akaseyu. To lend credibility to this first trial process, the ICTR, with astonishing lightness and irresponsibility, condemned this man to life. The Tribunal had no proof. The judicial dossier is slapdash and skimpy, but that has no importance. This was Alison Des Forges first great victory."

"She then decided to pursue a Rwandan refugee living in Canada: an ideal target," Onana adds, referring to Leon Mugesera. "He had the misfortune to be Hutu. For her, this man was a ‘planner of genocide’. But where is the proof? Alison Des Forges has none, but she wants to see this man in prison. Having deciphered or seen through Alison Des Forge’s arguments, the Judge of the Canadian Federal Tribunal concluded witheringly and without pity: ‘I note above all the relentlessness with which Mme Des Forges launched her diatribe against M. [Leon]Mugesera, and am astonished by the lack of care she has demonstrated in drawing up the report for the International Commission of Enquiry and in her Expert Assessment.’"

"The Canadian judge did not hesitate to qualify Mme. Des Forges as partisan, demonstrating ‘a prejudice or preconceived position against Léon Mugesera’. He concluded that she could not be considered an objective witness, adding that no correctly informed tribunal could take her allegations seriously. Nevertheless it was on the basis of the same arguments, and of the same fantasy report published in 1999, that she accused numerous Rwandans, all Hutu."

"CONTINENTAL SHIFT," one of Philip Gourevitch’s pivotal disinformation essays that appeared in the New Yorker, outlined the "new brand of African leader" exemplified by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame: it is a whitewash of U.S.-backed terrorism. "It was thus that she devoted the penultimate day of her examination, during the process against the military, to presenting Colonel Bagosora, Hutu, as the king pin in the genocide.

The Tribunal in the long-running ‘Military I’ trial did not accept the ‘planning of genocide’ that Alison Des Forges never ceased to hammer on about by means of her pseudo-fax of 11 January 1994. She lied, lied and lied again. She tried a come-back or to recover her credibility by criticizing her ‘hero’ Paul Kagame, the organizer of the 6 April 1994 assassination of two presidents."

"Alison Des Forges finally dared to speak of the crimes committed by the Tutsi rebels of the RPF/A: the great taboo. It was a bit late but it assuaged her conscience. For those who were condemned by the ICTR, deliberately and unjustly recorded by her, there will be no justice for them. Can Alison Des Forges still hear their suffering and their pain? She who has done them so much harm—along with their families? She who claimed to defend the Rights of Man has without doubt violated the rights of many Rwandans, who will undoubtedly never forget her. Their homage to Mme. Des Forges would have been different, very different, to what her many friends in the media have to say."

Timothy Longman and Des Forges, the co-authors of the HRW treatise, "Leave None To Tell The Story," both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Des Forges was a member of the HRW board from 1988 and was "principal researcher" on Rwanda and Burundi, 1991-1994.

In this period Des Forges also consulted for USAID, and collaborated with the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council. Simultaneously, Des Forges worked with, informed and influenced U.S. Congress-people, Permanent Representatives at the United Nations, the U.N. Under-Secretary General, and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Rwanda and Special Rapporteur for Summary and Arbitrary Executions. Des Forges also pumped the disinformation into the academic world through her high-level ties to human rights committees, African and Africana Studies departments and the elite African Studies Association.

In the same period, Des Forges constantly influenced the U.S. media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an "expert" on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF/A- Ugandan guerrilla insurgency. The blanket media coverage falsely situated the "Rwanda genocide" as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the "highly disciplined" RPF/A stopping the genocide.

Such is the disinformation that indoctrinated the English-speaking media consumers and created a mass psychological hysteria about Rwanda that persists to this day. Timothy Longman worked with Des Forges in Rwanda in 1994 and has worked regularly with both USAID and HRW on contracts in Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, throughout the late 1990’s and into the present; Longman worked in Rwanda on one USAID contract for Management Systems Incorporated, a firm whose clients include the Pentagon. Longman also worked as a consultant for HRW in the spring of 2000 conducting field research in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and producing "a detailed report on human rights conditions in rebel-controlled areas."

The Des Forges and Longman position vis-à-vis their whitewashing of the Tutsi-led RPF/A organized genocide in Rwanda certainly explains the sanitation of HRW reports, and it raises questions, for example, about how Human Rights Watch "researchers" navigate their "work" in rebel (read: Rwandan and Ugandan) controlled areas in DRC.

It also raises questions about how, why and when HRW does or doesn’t expose the western operatives, non-government organizations and multinational corporations: a singular example is the Human Rights Watch report that mildly exposes the criminal operations of Anglo-Gold Ashanti—a company partnered with the George H.W. Bush connected Barrick Gold Corporation—in eastern DRC.

HRW says nothing about Moto Gold, Mwana Africa, Banro Resources, Hardmann Oil, Tullow Oil, De Beers, H Oil & Minerals, OM Group, Metalurg, Kotecha, International Rescue Committee—and the many proxy armies, militias, gun-runners and other organized white collar war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Congo.

The role of HRW as an intelligence conduit to the U.S. Government is incidentally confirmed by Samantha Power in her book "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide"—a whitewash of U.S. and allied war crimes for which she was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.

While Power’s "bystanders to genocide" thesis about Rwanda is a total inversion of the facts, she notes in passing that "Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence to the U.S. Government and lobbied in one-on-one meetings" in April and May 1994, and that Alison Des Forges and other HRW staff visited the White House on April 21, 1994. Samantha Power is currently a member of the National Security Council in the Obama Administration.

The mass media was flooded with "Rwanda genocide" disinformation between April and July of 1994, and advertising that served up subliminal seduction and white supremacy often surrounded these "news" clips.

Alison Des Forges continued to remain silent about Western corporate and military interests in the Great Lakes region to her death. A perfect example of this silence is the very unrevealing March 2008 interview by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum titled "Alison Des Forges: The Impact of Rwandan Genocide in Congo."

Timothy Longman also produces significant pro-US propaganda about Sudan. Thus it is important to note that amongst the key USAID conduits for disinformation and covert operations in Sudan today is Roger Winter, one of the primary architects of the RPF/A guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that led to the loss of millions of lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since October 1990.

Alison Des Forges, of course, never mentioned Roger Winter or his colleague in covert operations, Susan Rice, the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the U.N. Of Roger Winter, Remigius Kintu, the Ugandan Human Rights activist says "he was the chief logistics boss for the RPF until their victory in 1994…."

"Roger Winter was with the RPA on the front lines in Rwanda and he regularly briefed the Clinton Administration of the RPA’s military achievements," says Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, former Rwandan official. "Alison Des Forges contributed to the RPF/A takeover of Rwanda. I have no doubt about that… I met her three times, first in 1995, and in 2004 she encouraged me to testify at the ICTR. I said 'no way: I will only testify if RPF officials are arrested.' She insisted I should testify, she was confident that the RPF were going to be arrested. I think she did not realize that the U.S. government would never accept that. She was something of an opportunist."

The zeal displayed by Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch in the pursuit of justice and human rights appears in sharp contradistinction to their absence of zeal in pursuing the architects of the criminal invasion of Rwanda on October 1, 1990, by Uganda, the double presidential assassinations of April 6, 1994, and all kinds of other murderous corporate conspiracies in Central Africa where foreign-financed wars are used as cover for illegal extraction of resources, particularly in the Congo.

Ironically, as the world this week commemorated the 15th Anniversary of the terrible mass murders that followed the assassination of the presidents, Rwandan asylum seekers that are critics of the Kagame regime live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by an illegitimate dictatorship. Forty of the regime's military officials have been indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by two international courts.

Kagame’s ruthless Directorate of Military Intelligence has dispatched agents to Europe to eliminate RPF opponents; some of these agents are operating under cover as bogus asylum-seekers in Europe and North America.

As of January 20, 2009 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began reopening all cases of Rwandan asylum seekers, and is criminalizing and threatening to deport legitimate refugees to Rwanda, actions that violate the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

(Keith Harmon Snow is the 2009 Regent's Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work, outside of academia, contesting official narratives on war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide while also working as a genocide investigator for the United Nations and other bodies.)

http://www.ethiopianreview.com/content/2009/04/genocide-and-new-speak/

Remembering Serbia’s Nazi Past and Mass Murders of Jews

www.miamiherald.com/
April 28, 2009

Avraham Yehoshua, JERUSALEM - In just a few days of February 1943, the Serbian Chetniks under the leadership of Draza Mihailovich committed genocide of close to 20,000 Bosniak Muslims in the Podrinje area (around Srebrenica region) - mostly women, children and elderly. Serbian Chetniks themselves admitted killing over 9,000 people in this genocidal campaign alone.

Serbs portray themselves as the major Balkan victims of the Second World War, but conceal the Chetnik collaboration with Nazi fascists, including systematic genocide that they had committed against several peoples, including the Bosniaks and Jews.

Although Serbian historians contend that the persecution of the Jews of Serbia was entirely the responsibility of Germans and began only with the German occupation, this is self- serving fiction.

Fully six months before the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia had issued legislation restricting Jewish participation in the economy and university enrolment. 94 percent of Serbia’s 16,000 Jews were exterminated, with the considerable cooperation of the Serbian government, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Serbian State Guard, the Serbian police and the Serbian public.

The largest proportion of anti-fascist Bosnian partisans were Bosniaks Muslims, who were being slaughtered by all sides (Ustashas, Chetniks and Nazis). Attempts to form a pro-Axis Bosniak division failed when the Bosniak Muslim conscripts revolted against the Germans at a training base south of Le Puy, France in September 1943.

While it is true that during the War, both the Partisans and pro-German Serbian-Nazi Chetniks aided Allied pilots in escaping, they did so because they were paid in gold for each one. However, only NAZI collaborator and fascist Draza Mihailovic received Medal, due to intensive Serbian lobbying and propaganda in the U.S.

The first experiments in mass executions of camp inmates by poison gas were carried out in Serbia. Serbia was the first country to proudly declare itself “Judenfrei” (”cleansed” of Jews) The long concealed Historical Archives in Belgrade reveal that Banjica, a concentration camp located in Belgrade, was primarily staffed by Serbs.

http://www.palluxo.com/2009/04/28/remembering-serbias-nazi-past-and-mass-murders-of-jews/

Part One - The Early History of the John Birch Society: Templars of the Corporate-Warfare State

Bircher Nazis here.

Blackwater out of Iraq? No, not yet

By MATTHEW LEE and MIKE BAKER
Apr 20, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — Armed guards from the security firm once known as Blackwater Worldwide are still protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, even though the company has no license to operate there and has been told by the State Department its contracts will not be renewed two years after a lethal firefight that stirred outrage in Baghdad.

Private security guards employed by the company, now known as Xe, are slated to continue ground operations in parts of Iraq long into the summer, far longer than had previously been acknowledged, government officials told The Associated Press.

In addition, helicopters working for Xe's aviation wing, Presidential Airways, will provide air security for U.S. diplomatic convoys into September, almost two years after the Iraqi government first said it wanted the firm out.

The Washington Times first reported that Blackwater, or Xe, signed a $22.2 million deal in February with the State Department to keep the company working there through most of the summer.

The company's continued presence raises fresh questions about the strength of Iraq's sovereignty even as the Obama administration urges the budding government to take more responsibility for the nation's future.

Iraqis had long complained about incidents caused by Blackwater's operations. Then a shooting by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007 left 17 civilians dead, further strained relations between Baghdad and Washington and led U.S. prosecutors to bring charges against the Blackwater contractors involved.

That deadly incident was the end, Iraqi leaders said. Blackwater had to get out.

But State Department officials acknowledge the company is still there.
The company declined to comment about a timetable for leaving. "We follow the direction of our U.S. government client," Xe spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said. Last February, Blackwater changed its name to Xe — pronounced ZEE — in a bid to leave its controversial reputation behind.

Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said Iraq's ability to enforce bans on companies like Blackwater may provide an early measurement of the strength of its internal sovereignty. As the Iraqi leaders gain more control, he said, the final exit for Blackwater will be inevitable.

"But let's face it, they're not entirely their own masters yet," he said.
In Baghdad, an Iraqi security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said that while Xe will not be allowed to work in Iraq, the company needs "some time" to fully shut down its operations there. The official did not give further details on the timetable.

The State Department's continued reliance on Blackwater also underscores the difficulties facing the U.S. government in finding other options to protect its diplomats in dangerous areas.

Department officials said this month that Blackwater guards would stop protecting U.S. diplomats on the ground in Baghdad on May 7, when the company's contract for that specific job expires and a new security provider, Triple Canopy, takes over.

But in its statement following the Iraqi government's decision to prohibit Blackwater from operating there, State did not reveal that the firm has two other contracts — known as "task orders" — that do not expire until August and September respectively.

Blackwater guards will remain on the ground protecting American diplomats in al Hillah, Najaf and Karbala, all south of Baghdad, until Aug. 4, according to the department.

And Presidential Airways — which operates some two dozen helicopters — will continue to fly until Sept. 3, it said.

After the Nisoor Square deaths, Iraqi officials ruled that North Carolina-based Blackwater would be barred from operating in the country. Despite the ban, the State Department renewed Blackwater's contract seven months later, in April, 2008.

It wasn't until January of this year, when Iraqi authorities denied the company an operating license, that the Obama administration said it would not renew the company's existing task orders.

On Jan. 30, the department said it had informed Blackwater in writing that it "did not plan to renew the company's existing task orders for protective security detail in Iraq."

On Feb. 2, though, the department signed a revised task order for Presidential Airways that allowed the Blackwater-owned airline to operate through Sept. 3, according to a federal public procurement database.

Department officials deny any impropriety in the move because the change in the task order was a revision of an old contract. Karl Duckworth, a State spokesman, said the Iraqi government did not tell U.S. officials until March 19 that it would bar Presidential Airways' flights.

"Based on the government of Iraq's decision, the department notified Xe in writing that it did not plan to renew the company's task order for aviation services in Iraq," Duckworth said.

Duckworth said that State would "re-compete the aviation task order," allowing Xe and Virginia-based DynCorp and Triple Canopy to bid for the air security contract.

Xe is technically allowed to rebid under federal law because it holds the existing task order. But State would not grant the company a contract because it lacks an operating license in Iraq, officials said.

The State Department has not yet selected a successor to Blackwater for ground protection in al Hillah. But both Triple Canopy and DynCorp have the capability to do the job.

Some of the same security personnel who worked for Blackwater might simply transfer to the new companies operating there, industry experts say.
"As Triple Canopy's work expands, the logical place to start looking and interviewing and evaluating employees will be those who are already there, those who have some skills and are already employed by Blackwater," said Alan Chvotkin, a senior vice president and counsel for the trade group Professional Services Council.

Xe, DynCorp and Triple Canopy are all members of the council.

Chvotkin added that in view of the controversies over Blackwater's role, "Triple Canopy and other security companies are making an independent assessment of any individual before deciding whether to hire them."
The Iraqi official also said that some former Blackwater officials could remain in Iraq, depending on their experience.

The transition from Blackwater to a new air security firm may be even more complicated. Chvotkin said it will not be easy to find a firm with Blackwater's air resources. Blackwater should not be ruled out as an option, he said.
"Since the nature of the work is so very different, there may actually be authority for them to operate the air services contract even though they don't have a license for private security," Chvotkin said.

Blackwater has been shifting its focus to other lines of business, including international training and air support in places like Afghanistan and Africa.
Mike Baker reported from Raleigh, N.C. Associated Press Writer Brian Murphy contributed to this report from Baghdad.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g4OiK8Bkks3epqQ-eXeiSGX6cu7gD97MJNH80