Thursday, February 28, 2008

SS KILLING SQUADS : THE EINSATZGRUPPEN TO GASSING VANS Heroic Baby Killers???

" Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."
Thomas Paine

" I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."
Thomas Paine


... Thus any form of sympathy , any form of compassion; was a a demonstration of weakness . If an SS man felt these emotions come to him; it was a sign that the enemy had succeeded in deceiving him . " ( Auschwitz , Rees p. 8 )

" the SS members were conditioned to despise their own feelings of concern when , for example, they witnessed the beatings of an inmate. They were taught that any lingering of compassion was caused by the trickery of the victim. As " enemies of the state " these cunning creatures were said to use any method- not least an appeal to pity of those who held them captive -in an attempt to pursue their malicious goal. The memory of the " Stab in the Back " - the myth that Jews and communists had plotted behind the lines cause Germany to lose World War I- was never far away , and fitted perfectly into this vision of a dangerous but concealed enemy . "( Auschwitz, Rees , p. 8 )

From Shootings to Gassing Vans & Gas Chambers

Note for all those ignorant idiots & holocaust deniers NeoNazis Skinheads & other demented low-lifes who think the SS Einsatzgruppen were such a brave & romantic group.
What is so brave & honorable about killing children & old people and unarmed men & women.

Soviet movie "Come and See" (1985) about nazi atrocities.



Requiem pour un massacre/ with music & no sound
August 13, 2006- Montage from Russian movie " COME AND SEE " 1985
Montage du film d'Elem Klimov, musique d'Henryk Gorecki. Einsatzgruppen en BiƩlorussie, 1943.




Babi Yar Requiem
January 21, 2008
Monument for Babi Yar. Babi Yar was a ravine in Kiev where, in 1941, the Nazis' rounded up, stripped, shot, and pushed 100,000 Jews (and others) into the pit, then covered it up



The following is an odd bit from NBC news in 2007.
The massacres committed by the S.S. Einsatzgruppen/ Special Forces or Death Squads was well known by the time of the Nuremberg trials of the 1960s -Many people did not want to believe how utterly depraved and barbaric these so called members of the Master Race really were. People also don't like to face the fact that many of the local populations were quite willing to help murder their neighbors who were Jews or Gypsies or any whom the German Nazis considered worthy of death.

Anyway like most Americans the reporters at NBC only know what they learned about the Holocaust from hollywood movies such as Schindler's List or Sophie's Choice . What they want to believe is that only a few Germans took part in these killings and not that hundreds of thousands actively participated in the killings while millions who knew helped round up Jews and others to be deported or killed. It also took a fairly well informed bureaucracy to make sure that the trains ran on schedule and that everything ran like clock-work. For what does a bureaucrat care if they are helping to ship food to people or soldiers or Jews to Auschwitz. For them it is just more paper work to be completed.

Holocaust in the Ukraine ( Patrick Desbois ) from NBC NEWS



The horror of the Nazi slaughter of over twelve million people which included some six million Jews is beyond comprehension for most people. Those who were the targets of the Nazi Killing Machine were mostly civilians that is non-combatants . These were not soldiers killed on the battlefield . Those murdered by the Nazis included the elderly and children and pregnant women and women with small children.

Unfortunately even today there are those who defend the Nazis and the SS and characterize these brutal cowardly and insane demented killers as if they were brave heroes. What bravery is it that shoots or gases an infant or a two year old child or an eighty year old frail man or woman.Yet today once again in Russia and Croatia and Germany Poland these Neo-Nazi thugs are on the rise once again. They wrap themselves in their national flags and talk of their homeland and how they must deport or exterminate all so-called foreign elements (people) from their precious Homeland. And there are always those politicians or even religious leaders who will use such fanatics to further their own personal agenda ; the gaining of power, influence, some twisted version of respect or wealth etc.

Anyway not all the Jews or others targeted by the Nazis were killed at the various labor camps or death camps.Large numbers in fact were killed by shootings , by starvation, by disease by being worked to death. Many died in the transport trains or on forced marches or died in the over-crowded Ghettoes from hunger or disease. But make no mistake all of these deaths were as a direct result of the Nazis Policies. One of the reasons I mention this is that those who deny that the Holocaust never occurred or has been widely exaggerated often focus on what they see as contentious issues such as the Gas Chambers, Gassing Vans , the Crematoria and say six million Jews could not have all been killed in the Death Camps but their reasoning is based on a complete misrepresentation of the facts and outright fabrications and a denial of the validity any statements by the witnesses of these atrocities whether the witnesses are Jewish or Russian, or Polish Catholic or a former member of the Waffen SS.

SEE: EINSATZ GRUPPEN: THE KILLING SQUADS

Behind the advances of the German army during the war were four Einsatzgruppen – special German commando units. Each consisted of 500 to 1,000 men. Their job was to follow behind the German army, round up all the Jews in the newly conquered towns, and kill them.

The Jews would be herded to the outskirts of town, often to anti-tank trenches. Sometimes the Jews would be forced to dig their own graves.


The Nazis would line them up, and force the Jews to undress. Then they would shoot them over the trenches. In one incident lasting 3 days, over 52,000 men women and children were killed outside of Kiev, in the Babi Yar forest.


We have testimonies of people who were shot and fell into the trenches, but were not killed. They waited until night, when the Germans were gone.

Then they clawed their way out of the pile of bodies. Those who were lucky – who were not killed by the locals – lived to tell their story.

Over 1,500,000 people were killed in this way.


-----
and from The Jewish Virtual Library.org
The Mobile Killing Squads


After the German army invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, a new stage in the Holocaust began. Under cover of war and confident of victory, the Germans turned from the forced emigration and imprisonment of Jews to mass murder. Special action squads, or Einsatzgruppen, made up of Nazi (SS) units and police, moved with speed on the heels of the advancing German army. Their job was to kill any Jews they could find in the occupied Soviet territory. Some residents of the occupied regions, mostly Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, aided these German mobile killing squads by serving as auxiliary police.

The mobile killing units acted swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise. The killers entered a town or city and rounded up all Jewish men, women, and children. They also took away many Communist party leaders and Roma (Gypsies). Victims were forced to surrender any valuables and remove their clothing, which was later sent for use in Germany or distributed to local collaborators. Then the killing squad members marched their victims to open fields, forests, and ravines on the outskirts of conquered towns and cities. There they shot them or gased them in gas vans and dumped the bodies into mass graves.

On September 21, 1941, the eve of the Jewish New Year, a mobile killing squad entered Ejszyszki, a small town in what is now Lithuania. The killing squad members herded 4,000 Jews from the town and the surrounding region into three synagogues, where they were held for two days without food or water. Then, in two days of killing, Jewish men, women, and children were taken to cemeteries, lined up in front of open pits, and shot to death. Today there are no Jews in Ejszyszki. It was one of hundreds of cities, towns, and shtetls whose Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The rich culture of most of these Jewish communities was lost forever.

The killing squads murdered more than a million Jews and hundreds of thousands of other innocent people. At Babi Yar, near Kiev, about 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting. Only a few people in the general population helped their Jewish neighbors escape. Most people were afraid that they too might be killed.

The massacres of innocent men, women, and children in Babi Yar and other towns were not the crimes of hoodlums or crazy men. The executioners were "ordinary" men who followed the orders of their commanding officers. Many of the killers had wives and children back in Germany. Propaganda and training had taught many members of the mobile killing squads to view their victims as enemies of Germany. Some killers drank heavily to dull their thoughts and feelings. In addition, when they described their actions they used code words like "special treatment" and "special action" instead of "killing" or "murder" to distance themselves from their terrible crimes.



---
WANNSEE CONFERENCE: THE FINAL SOLUTION

January 20, 1942: The Wannsee Conference set a new course for how the Nazis would deal with the Jews. Wannsee is a suburb outside Berlin. It is where the "Final Solution" was decided, the Nazi plan for the complete elimination of the Jewish People.
"Shopping" List

The drafted document contained sixteen signatures from all the upper ministries of the German establishment. Of these sixteen signators, eight had PhD’s. By the way, Poland was divided up into six governments; all six of the German / Polish governors had PhD’s. Of the concentration camp officers, 43% of them had either MD’s or PhD’s. One of the Einsatz Gruppen commanders, Ohlendorf had a degree in law by age 21. He was a genius. Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had 3 PhD’s. He was a brilliant intellectual.

Ask the question: Does "education" equal "morality"? The answer should be obvious.

The plan drawn up at Wannsee was for the murder of eleven million Jews. One of the last things Hitler did, just before committing suicide, was to apologize to the German people for not finishing the job.



Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State clip 1 of 5
The rest of the clips are at AUSCHWITZ: THE FINAL SOLUTION BBC clip 1/5 gothgod at youtube




So I was wondering who built the vans? Did some corporation make a buck selling mobile killing machines ? What shame that a private corporation should make profits off of the deaths of others-is it any different than those who produce Napalm or cluster bombs or nuclear bombs all meant to kill civilians as well as combatants -

At almost every stage of the Nazi killing machine from the forced labor camps to the rounding up of the Jewish population and other Nazi targeted groups to the mass shootings to the deportations to the Gas Chambers there were those who made a profit or benefited in some economic manner. This included the citizens who were moved into the newly vacated homes or took over the businesses of those who had been transported or killed to the corporations and industrialists who were able to tap into the cheap labor of those imprisoned by the Nazis to those industrialists who supplied whatever the Nazis needed from munitions to Gas Chambers and the ovens for the crematoria to the plundering of the personal valuables of those interned or killed. Even many members of the SS themselves profited though according to their own code of conduct they were not supposed to profit financially. Doing their duty for the Fueher was supposed to be its own reward. So they too were no better than any other corrupt officials within the Nazi party itself.

"The gas vans were supplied to the Einsatzgruppen and to the Chelmno death camps in November-December 1941. The killing in Chelmno began on December 8, 1941. By the middle of 1942, about thirty gas vans had been produced by a private car manufacturer, the Gabschat Farengewerke GMBH, Will=Walter Strasse 32-38, Berlin. "

and : The gas-van is a special product of the Third Reich, it is a van with a gas-tight cabin/container-box/superstructure mounted on its chassis/understructure used to kill people by the motor-exhausts led into that cabin. The designation was coined only later: "Gaswagen [Gas-van] - that was the common word only afterwards/later".

In the contemporaneous documents the designation doesn't arise. There the words Sonder-Wagen, Sonderfahrzeug, Spezialwagen and S-Wagen ,Special van, special vehicle; are used. In a letter dating from April 11th 1942 with hindsight to camouflage the word Entlausungswagen [delousing-van] is used...

Jewish Virtual Library: From Shootings to Gas Vans


Jewish Virtual Library


Also see TV series narrated by Linda Hunt Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution at PBS.Org

And see
BBC TWO, January 2005

also check out the following websites:

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel-Aviv University.

The Dachau Gas Chambers.an essay by Harry W. Mazal OBE

Academic Info
Holocaust Studies - Directory of Online Resources


friends of simon wiesenthal center for holocaust studies


For more on this matter here are some books I would recommend :

Carsten, F. L. : The Rise of Fascism , pub.

Carroll, James : Constantine’s Sword: The Church and The Jews-
A History , Pub. 2001.

Cohen- Sherbok, Dan: The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Anti-Semitism, pub. 1992.

Cohn, Norman : Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pub. 1996.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S.: The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, Pub. 1986

Gilbert, Martin: Auschwitz and the Allies, pub. 1990

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah : A Moral Reckoning :The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, pub. 2002

Kertzer, David I. : The Popes Against The Jews: The Vatican's Role in The Rise of Modern Anti‑Semitism, pub. 2001

Rees, Laurence : Auschwitz: A New History ,pub. 2005

and so it goes,
GORD.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

SHOAH /HOLOCAUST: Hidden History of Slovakia -

" The idea of struggle is as old as life itself. In this struggle the stronger, the more able, win, while the less able , the weak, lose. Struggle is the father of all things...It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world , but solely by means of the most brutal struggle ." Hitler 1928 ( Auschwitz, Rees, p. 7 )

SS Essential Philosophy in regards to the enemy :
" Anyone who shows even the slightest vestige of sympathy towards them ( prisoners ) must immediately vanish from our ranks. I need only hard, totally committed SS men. There is no place amongst us for soft people." German SS Leader Theodore Eicke ( Auschwitz , Rees p. 8 )



Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees

Also see TV series narrated by Linda Hunt Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution at PBS.Org

And see BBC TWO, January 2005




There are those who wish to forget about the Nazi Holocaust altogether. They believe that there is no purpose served by dredging up the past . What's done is done, they say. Some argue that the Holocaust was all the result of a few madmen and they paid the price for their deeds. This a convenient belief for many people. But it ignores the historical facts.

The historical facts are that large numbers of Western and Eastern Europeans took part willingly in the killing of some six million Jews along with the murder of , at least , another six million non-Jewish people. Homosexuals, communists, socialists, liberals , intellectuals , Gypsies etc. and others were also regarded as fit only for extermination.

The Christian Churches, Catholic and Protestant on the whole, the governments and other institutions and the people of Europe again and again failed to stop the killing or even to speak up or protest against the killings. Other countries like Britain, Canada and the United States and others refused to take in the refugees whose lives were in jeopardy.

When World War II ended only a small fraction of those who took part directly or aided and abetted in these War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity were brought to justice. Various governments and institutions for their own political reasons or to foster their own agendas were uninterested in bringing those who were guilty to justice. It is believed that somewhere around 20,000 war criminals were allowed to escape by way of what was referred to as the " Rat Line ". This was the legacy left to the later generations of Western Civilization. The lesson being not what crimes one has committed but whether or not one can get away it.

And the lesson is that expediency and Realpolitik and furthering some nationalist' agenda whether it is that of Great Britain or France or Austria or Canada or the United States or Poland or the Soviet Union that is more important than keeping one's word( that is to punish all of the perpetrators ) and taking the moral high ground and bringing all who were guilty to justice.

For instance Charles De Gaulle of France decided it would be better for his country to give each other a big hug arrest a few of the usual suspects and move on . This was shameful and an insult to those French citizens who did try to stand up to the Nazi Germans and those who fought in the resistance , it was an insult to any individual who refused to follow orders who tried to save a fellow citizen who just happened to be Jewish . Instead it was kept as a dirty unmentionable secret which couldn't be mentioned over dinner. Then one day those same voices of hate begin to rise again .

So here is the example of the role played by Slovakia in the Nazi's " Final Solution " . Slovakia as such is not alone in forgetting or burying its past in regard to its active role in the Holocaust. Other countries such as Croatia which played an active role in the Holocaust have done everything they could to downplay or try to erase the horrifying part they played in the Shoah. We will take a look at Croatia's part in the destruction of the Jews at another time.

The Hidden History of Slovakia part 1 of 3



This is an example of how nations occupied or friendly to Nazi Germany also took part in the rounding up of Jews and transporting them to an unknown fate. In the case of Slovakia the people were indifferent to the ultimate fate of those transported and were willing to pay the Nazis to take away their Jewish population.



This also illustrates how the Nazis as part of their mission to make the Genocide of the Jews profitable for individual members of the elite SS or for the Reich or at least break even as it were. This was Capitalism and corruption at its worst.If German corporation could make vast amounts of money off of the forced labor of Jews and other prisoners why shouldn't members of the SS skim a little off the top for themselves.

Also note that other countries such as France , Austria, Poland etc. were in fact eager to turn their Jewish citizens over to the Nazis for " Special Treatment ".

So here's the rest of this documentary about the Nazis and Slovakia
also see : 1942-Hidden History of Slovakia II at YouTube



1942-Hidden History of Slovakia III
" There was no God in Auschwitz "





and so it goes,
GORD.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Canada and the Holocaust " NONE IS TOO MANY "

Anyway as has been discussed there are many people and nations which would rather forget about the Holocaust/Shoah. One of the reasons for this is that some nations took part in the killing of the Jewish people or stood by and did nothing. Our country , Canada that is did not play some heroic part in trying to save European Jews . We did not enter the war on behalf of the Jewish people but rather to defend Great Britain . We can either claim that certain people in positions of power in our government and our bureaucracies were anti-Semitic and were setting immigration policies based upon their anti-Semitism or we can accept the fact that a large proportion of our Christian citizenry were in fact anti-Semitic. Our shame is that we could have taken in a much large number of German and European Jews but we refused to as Canadians believed as did other countries that it was not our problem. This is part of the reason that there are those Canadians who believe as I do that it is our duty to take in refugees when we can so that we don't make the same mistake again .

Auschwitz- Trailer for BBC Documentay



With the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 there was a dramatic increase in the number of German and European Jews who were desperate to leave Germany and Europe . As for Canada the response to the European Jewish Refugees was that no Jews would be permitted into the country from 1933 t0 1945.

Jewish Virtual Library

Canadian Policy Towards European Jewish Refugees " NONE IS TOO MANY "

First, in 1930, the Canadian government barred all immigration from Europe with the exception of those with sufficient funds to support themselves on farms and those with immediate family already in the country. The second order came the following year with a further set of restrictions. Only British and American citizens with independent means or who were in the farming, mining, lumbering, or logging industries were considered for residency.

These anti-immigration policies reflected the mood of the country. Xenophobia and anti-Semitism were rampant with unemployment and poverty on the rise during the Depression. Taking in refugees increased competition for the already scarce number of jobs. In addition, French newspapers and publications attacked Judaism and protested the admittance of Jewish refugees into Canada. Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King was sympathetic to the plight of the Jews but was constrained by the widespread opposition to immigration of any kind. In the face of such resistance, the Canadian immigration policy remained stringent. Between 1921 and 1931, only 15,800 Jewish immigrants were allowed into Canada.



On May 15, 1939, the St. Louis, a steamship carrying 907 German Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, set sail from Hamburg, Germany for Havana, Cuba. However, on May 30, when it reached the Havana port, the Cuban government refused to recognize the passengers' entrance visas and none was allowed to disembark. No other Latin American country would admit the refugees, and the St. Louis had to leave port. Canada and the United States were the Jews' last hope, but Mackenzie King ignored the protests of Canadian Jewish organizations and said the crisis was not a "Canadian problem." Frederick Charles Blair, the director of the Immigration Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources was quoted as saying, "No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere." Canada only took in 8,000, or one percent of the 811,000 Jewish refugees admitted into countries across the world. Mackenzie adopted the policy of "none is too many" regarding the immigration of European Jewry seeking refuge from the Nazis.


Also see TV series narrated by Linda Hunt Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution at PBS.Org

And see BBC TWO, January 2005

Sunday, February 24, 2008

AUSCHWITZ AND the Final Solution and Anti-Semitism



Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees

Also see TV series narrated by Linda Hunt Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution at PBS.Org

And see BBC TWO, January 2005

With a number of recent high profile Hollywood films such as Schindler's List and The Pianist and iconic books such as The Diary of Anne Frank it is easy to assume that everyone is familiar with the Holocaust and Auschwitz.

Yet a recent BBC survey suggests that almost half the adult population (45%) claim to have never even heard of Auschwitz.

Amongst women and people aged under 35 the figure is even higher at 60%.

Even among those who have heard of Auschwitz, 70% felt that they did not know a great deal about the subject.

Most of them (76%) were unaware of its roots as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners; the majority (74%) did not know that people other than Jews were killed there and only a few recognised the name of the camp commandant or knew who finally liberated the camp at the end of the war.

The BBC's research informs a definitive new series which has been made to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2005.

Written and produced by Bafta Award-winning producer Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution' offers a unique perspective on the camp in which more than one million people were ruthlessly murdered.

"We were amazed by the results of our audience research" says series producer Laurence Rees. "It's easy to presume that the horrors of Auschwitz are engrained in the nation's collective memory but obviously this is not the case.

"We were particularly startled by the fact that less than 40% of younger people have even heard of Auschwitz.

"The research reinforced the importance of making this series and trying to ensure the atrocities that unfolded at Auschwitz are never forgotten."

------
As this and other surveys done have shown that there are large numbers of people in Britain and North America who know little or nothing about Auschwitz or the Holocaust / Shoah. It is therefore necessary to discuss and go over the details of this dark period in the more recent history of Western Civilization. So the more accurate information presented in the various media including the internet is necessary to counter act the Misinformation of the numerous revisionists websites which make the bogus claim that the Holocaust did not take place.

From SS SHOOTINGS TO GAS CHAMBERS: The Final Solution




There are those who believe that Christianity 's values are superior to other religions. Christianity some claim embraces the values of love and tolerance but the history of Christianity does not support such a view. One can list a rogues gallery of the horrors visited upon the world by Christianity.

As I have discussed in previous posts this list would include the preaching and spreading of anti-semitism which began with the writers of the New Testament Gospels continued by the Early Church Fathers to the Crusades and into the 19th and 20th century up to the end of World War II. Auschwitz and the Nazi's Final Solution to exterminate all of European Jewry was the almost inevitable outcome of twenty centuries of Anti-Semitism preached by the Christian Churches. As I have said before it is not surprising that the majority of Christians over the centuries have been anti-Semitic to one degree or another given the relentless preaching of the Church that the Jews were guilty of killing Jesus that is deicide. And the Church emphasized that it was not just those Jews in positions of authority in Jerusalem who were guilty of deicide but that all the Jews of Judea and all their descendants up to the present time were or are guilty of this crime..( It should be noted that it was not until Vatican II that the Catholic Church finally reversed its teachings against the Jews and declared that the Jews were innocent of this so-called crime but did not fully apologize for the harm the Catholic Church had done )

The Jews were further characterized by the Church as a race which was being used by evil forces or by the devil and Satan to attack and undermine Christianity. Since Jesus represented God and the forces of " Good " then those who killed Jesus must represent the forces of evil which of course in the Christian view was God's eternal enemy Satan and the Anti-Christ. As time went by this led to more and more bizarre accusations against the Jews. The Jews were falsely accused of secretly killing Christians in order to use the victims blood in their rituals . The Jews were falsely accused of secretly conspiring to take control of Europen society and governments . Later in the 19th century this conspiracy would be described as being a world wide conspiracy in which the Jews were working stealthily to take control of all the governments of the world. These ideas were not merely held by a few uneducated malcontents but rather this view was a mainstream prejudice fostered by the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches . Secular institutions and individuals were also to a lesser or greater extent anti-Semitic. It was for instance the secret police of Tsarist Russia in 1905 which published the infamous and bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion which claimed to show the link between the supposedly diabolical Jews and those liberals , socialists and others who were agitating for reform in Russia and throughout Europe . So the Russian authorities were using the already existing and prevalent hatred and fear of the Jews to undermine those who were justifiably agitating for reforms .Later in the 1920s the industrialist Henry Ford among others such as the extremely popular radio personality Father Coughlin would help to foster the belief that the Protocols were authentic and proved that the Jews for centuries were involved in a world wide conspiracy. Hitler also borrowed heavily from the Protocols and other anti-Semitic tracts .

It is no wonder then that the Nazis were able to begin their anti-Semitic program once they took power in Germany in 1933.. It is difficult for many Europeans and Westerners these days to accept the fact that these virulent and ugly forms of Anti-Semitism were common place in Europe and in the United States and Canada and elsewhere. . What is more remarkable is that in the 19th and early 20th centuries there were some Christians and secularists who did not buy into these bizarre conspiracy theories concoted by the sick and paranoid minds of the majority of Europeans. The attitude is that the Nazis did not represent ordinary Europeans or North Americans or others in their hatred of the Jews . It is argued that Hitler and a few thousand other madmen were responsible for the Holocaust but the historical facts suggest otherwise.

The shame of the Holocaust should not just be placed on the heads of a few madmen but in fact belonged to large number of ordinary Western and Eastern Europeans. As the Nazis conquered one country after another they usually could rely on those in authority and the ordinary citizens to help carry out the rounding up and transpoting the Jews of a particular nation to some unknown destinations. Tiny Denmark was the only country to actually stand up to the Nazis and refused to round up or transport the Danish Jews. No other occupied country could boast to saving as large of a percentage of their Jewish population. Ninety five percent of Danish Jews survived the Second World War.

So from an historical point of view all of those ordinary Christians who were quite happy to help the Nazis round up aand deport the Jews are also guilty of ethnic Cleansing and Genocide. It is this collective guilt which one could argue that Europeans and others have still refused to accept which that we have deluded ourselves into believing that the west had done all that it could to save European Jewry from the Nazis Final Solution . All of those who either actively took part in deporting the Jews from their respective countries or did not protest or did not try in other ways to help the Jews are to a greater or lesser degree guilty . But the guilt goes further than that when we examine the record of those nations especially in the West who refused to allow large numbers of Jews from Germany and elsewhere to immigrate to their country as refugees . Britain and the United States and other countries refused to take in large numbers of Jews even after it was known that the Jewish populations in German occupied countries were being systematically exterminated. Most of the six million Jews killed by the Germans were not killed at Auschwitz or other death camps but in fact were killed by shooting and placed in mass graves not far from where the Jews lived. Auschwitz was just another step in attempting to carry out the killings in a more efficient manner by using the model of the basic assembly line . But one of the other reasons for adopting this newer method of carrying out the killins of Jews was that it was quickly made apparent that the methods of mass shootings at close range had a devastating psychological effect on not only average soldiers but even on the members of the SS who took part in these killings . At the least all these killings at close range were bad for the morale of the SS. So it was believed that some other means should be found for killing such large numbers of not only Jews but also Gypsies, Poles , Slavs and others on Hitler's short list. Since certain people whom the Nazis saw as subhuman could be used as forced labor as long as they were needed and so were kept alive . Otherwise they would be considered by the Nazis as " useless eaters ". This is why the elderly and children & women with their children were often targeted first .

At Aushwitz the Jews were herded into gas chambers and then killed . The bodies were removed by Jewish prisoners, it was also Jewish prisoners who sorted through the belonings of those killed, Jewish prisoners were also put to use for example to extract the gold fillings of the dead often it was Jewish prisoners who were used to help unload the transport trains of their human cargo and to guide the newly arrived Jews to the Gas Chambers and to even reassure those on their way to their deaths that they were just going to take a shower or be deliced - In this way only a handfull of SS were needed to oversee the Jewish prisoners who were forced to help them to complete the whole process.

For instance when Hitler's army invaded Russia behind them came the special units of the SS who were to use whatever means necessary to exterminate the Jews in areas where the Germans had taken control. They would enter villages demand that all Jews be brought out and then were taken to nearby sites where they would be shot or killed by other methods. Millions were wiped out in Poland, Russia , Humngary Rumania , Croatia And Yugoslavia in this manner before the order was given that all Jews were to be transported to locations such as Auschwitz.


One of the issues raised byRees in his book Auschwitz is the notion that the Nazis wanted the camp which was series of internment camps to at the least pay for itself if not make a profit and help pay for the war effort. The camps included several hundred thousand prisoners who could be used as slave labor at first to hep build the camps and then to maintain the infrastructure . Later these slave -laborers could be rented out or contracted out for a set fee which would be less than what they would pay a civilian laborer to the private Industrialists who had industrial plants connected to the camps or nearby ie farben and Bayers etc. This was capitalism taken to the nth degree.

One of the other countries which refused to give up their Jewish citizens was Italy under the rule of the Fascist government of Moussolini.

There were various issues which became problems for the allies concerning the plight of the Jews. Failing to put forth a reasonable plan for taking in large numbers of Jews from the occupied countries . The Allies were unable or reluctant to use their power and resources to foster public sympathy for the Jews who were as far as they knew being sent to labor camps after being uprooted from their communities and their countries of origin One ends up with the nagging feeling that the feelings of the Allies were at the least ambivalent if not indifferent to the plight of the Jews..

Another issue which was raised by Jewish groups was that they pleaded with the allies once it became a possiblity to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other camps or to bomb the Transport trains or to bomb the camps themselves.

Laurence Rees in his book Auschwitz claims that there was no way for the Allies to save all or even half of the Jews who were slated for death. So he argues that it is unreasonable to place much blame on the Allies for not doing more to save Jews through military actions after 1942 or so. But according to others who have spent time studying the Holocaust believe that much more could have been done or at the least tried inorder to save at least a few Jews. Rees claims that the Allies did not have the ability to do anything. But according to other researchers the issue was that in fact the Allies were at times flying over or near these camps in carrying out bombing raids some ten to fifteen miles nearby inside Poland . There are niumber of things the Allies could have tried. For instance bombing the railway tracks leading to the various camps or bombing the railways going in and out of Germany and Poland and Russia and Austria and Hungary and Rumania etvc. These might also have been attacked using partisns and the resistance movements the Allies were in touch with.

The other actions could have included something as basic or simple as getting partisans and others to do survellance and gather intelligence on the camps and to make contact with inmates or even to help small numbers to escape in order to again find out what was taking place and how bad things were in the camps or was what the Allies were being told merely rumors. The other suggestions made by Jewish groups was to try to coordinate some sort uprising in the camps. This could again been done by coordinating members of the resistance and partisans by handing out weapons to inmates for instance- the other would be dropping weapons into the camps while doing a bombing run on them . The bombing would be distracting and lead to some chaos in the camps during which time outside members of the local resistance accompanied by specialist squads of paratroopers a hundred or more are dropped into the area. Such a concerted effort even if it failed it would have still had some positive effect . In wartime a boost to morale is just as important as a real military victory. The Jews and others in the camps at Auschwitz or elewhere would have felt that they hadn't been completely abandoned which is how many survivors have claimed they felt -that God and the Allies had abandoned them. Once they knew they were not forgotten and abandoned more uprisings might have occurred even if they were unsuccessful. The other part of this is that if some major actions had been taken against the camps the Germans might have had to change their tactics or some officers might have started to question the whole enterprise while also acknowledging that after the war there would be a reckoning and that what they were doing would not be forgotten .

Even if all the Allies had done was to drop pamplets on the camps informing the inmates that they were not forgotten while also letting the Germans and the SS know that the Allies were aware of what was happening and that all those involved would be punished. But unfortunately the Allies it seems had no shortage of excuse even when someone in aiuthority such as Winston Chrurchill gave the order to those below him to get whatever they could out of the airforce and military to take whatever actions that were possible even he was ignored by the career civil servants and political appointees who did not want to change the policies which were decided upon at the beginning of the war . They believed that once a policy was decided upon that was the end of the matter even when new information became available which then questioned the adherence to those policies in a dogmatic manner. So the politicians , civil servants and military leadership were able to conjure up as many excuse necessary in order not to help the Jews . Was it at bottom really a matter of their own anti-semitism or merely ambivalence and indifference. Even near the end of the war the Allies were still reluctant to take in large numbers of European Jews. They feared this would lead to a flood of European Jews seeking refuge and this might lead to more anti-Semitism in theri respective countries. But as I have said given the resources available to the Allies surely they could have developed a propaganda or information campaign to explain the plight of the Jews and that to not help them would constitute a moral failing on the part of the Allies and their people .
If for instance Arabs along with Lawrence of Arabia had been able to derail turkish trains during WWI then why couldn't specialist be dropped behind enemy line to help derail the transport trains .Even if a few of these actions had been tried then history itself wouldn't judge the Allies as harshly as they now are.

Instead what we have gotten over the years are researchers and commentators making excuses for the Allies inaction before and during the war . Besides the Nuremberg trials which only prosecuted a small percentage of those involved in the Final Soluton or even the murders of millions of non-Jews . What's the lesson sometimes people ask . The lesson is that human beings are capable of the most brutal and unimaginable treatment of their fellow human beings.

The other lesson is that those who could have helped often as not failed to do the least that they could have done.

Thirdly most people would just as soon forget such horrors and in fact would be happier to not know about them.

Did the more virulent anti-Semite finally come to realize how dangerous and deadly their views were ? For the most part no since most anti-Semites continued to believe as they had before and during the war . Even after the war and the revelations about the Final Solution became public these Anti-Semites still clinged tenaciously to their Anti-Semitic views and so continued to believe that the Jews were evil and cunning and dangerous and were the minions of Satan or the Anti-Christ . When some Jews who survived Auschwitz or Dachau etc. returned to their native land they often found that those Christians who now occupied their homes or controlled their former businesses refused to give them back and then they were told to go away and that Jews were not welcome in their town.


For more on this matter here are some books I would recommend :

Carsten, F. L. : The Rise of Fascism , pub.

Carroll, James : Constantine’s Sword: The Church and The Jews-
A History , Pub. 2001.

Cohen- Sherbok, Dan: The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Anti-Semitism, pub. 1992.

Cohn, Norman : Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pub. 1996.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S.: The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, Pub. 1986

Gilbert, Martin: Auschwitz and the Allies, pub. 1990

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah : A Moral Reckoning :The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, pub. 2002

Kertzer, David I. : The Popes Against The Jews: The Vatican's Role in The Rise of Modern Anti‑Semitism, pub. 2001

Rees, Laurence : Auschwitz: A New History ,pub. 2005

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Bush /Cheney & The Nazi Mindset - Olbermann: Lynching is Not a Joke




In this post I compare some of the features of the mind-set and psychology or pathology of Bush and Cheney and the Neoconservatives to that of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis and the SS. This includes their scapegoating and blaming other when things go wrong ; their unbridled and faulty optimism. Their inability to adapt to changing situations in a reasonable manner. Their collective self-delusions. Their belief that they are fulfilling some momentous, historical ,or possibly biblical ,apocalyptic destiny.

Rees, Laurence : Auschwitz: A New History ,pub. 2005

Note these comparisons being made in this post are mine and should not be blamed if they are found to be faulty or in bad taste on the author of Auschwitz Laurence Rees . Consider it a thought experiment.

The first innovation at Dachau was , that unlike a normal prison , the inmate had no clue as to how long his sentence was likely to last ...There was no end date for the prisoner to focus upon , only the permanent uncertainty of never knowing if freedom would come tomorrow , or next month, or next year. ( Auschwitz, p. 6 )

AND:

Dachau is infamous for the physical sadism practiced there: whippings and other beatings were common place. Prisoners could be murdered and their deaths be dismissed as killed whilst attempting to escape . (Auschwitz, Rees ,p.6 )


This reminds one of how the Bush Regime treats detainees at Guantanamo and their other prisons such as the ones in Iraq which hold over 30, 000 prisoners. People are kidnapped from Afghanistan or some other country flown to Guantanamo or some secret prison are incarcerated but not necessarily told what they are charged with or told how long they will be kept, adding to the anxiety of the prisoner is that they are not permitted to contact their family and the families of detainees may not be told of their whereabouts , nor are they given legal counsel or allowed to examine the evidence against them or meet their accusers since everything related to the case is a matter of National Security. National Security is an excuse used over and over again by American officials especially in cases where the evidence is all hearsay or non-existent since many are taken into captivity after some unscrupulous person or group hands the person over to American personnel in exchange for large sums of money.

It is further claimed by American Conservatives and the Bush administration that the problem with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Prison was not the so-called " abuses " but the cynical use of the pictures at these facilities to claim that American personnel were doing something wrong which according to many American Conservatives and true American Patriots these individuals were just doing their duty- And the Conservatives claim the soldiers must be strong and do whatever is necessary to put these people in their place , to make them more submissive and to extract whatever information they can from these " detainees".

When the Nazis did free prisoners from the various camps the prisoners had to sign a form or affidavit as Rees in his book Auschwitz points out :

... each had to sign a form that ( they ) had no complaints and that (they ) will not go against the law ( Auschwitz , Rees , p. 30 )


We know that " Detainees " held by the Americans once released could be released only if they signed an agreement not to talk about the prison or how they were treated or in some cases where they were actually held . They were warned that if they broke the agreement they or others known to them might suffer the consequences.

Also like the Nazis the Americans also believe it is an accptable practice to engage in reprisals against civilians when American troops have come under attack. Those people wounded or killed or raped in such reprisals should not blame the American soldiers or Private Contractors but should blame the " Terrorists ". When the " Terrorists" stop killing American soldiers then these reprisals will become unnecessary. As far as many American soldiers and private contractors are concerned is Iraq is one big " Free Fire Zone ".

The idea of struggle is as old as life itself. In this struggle the stronger, the more able, win, while the less able , the weak, lose. Struggle is the father of all things...It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world , but solely by means of the most brutal struggle ." Hitler 1928 ( Auschwitz, Rees, p. 7 )

SS Essential Philosophy in regards to the enemy :

" Anyone who shows even the slightest vestige of sympathy towards them ( prisoners ) must immediately vanish from our ranks. I need only hard, totally committed SS men. There is no place amongst us for soft people." German SS Leader Theodore Eicke ( Auschwitz , Rees p. 8 )


... Thus any form of sympathy , any form of compassion; was a a demonstration of weakness . If an SS man felt these emotions come to him; it was a sign that the enemy had succeeded in deceiving him .( Auschwitz , Rees p. 8 )

and as he goes on to explain :

... the SS members were conditioned to despise their own feelings of concern when , for example, they witnessed the beatings of an inmate. They were taught that any lingering of compassion was caused by the trickery of the victim. As " enemies of the state " these cunning creatures were said to use any method- not least an appeal to pity of those who held them captive -in an attempt to pursue their malicious goal. The memory of the " Stab in the Back " - the myth that Jews and communists had plotted behind the lines cause Germany to lose World War I- was never far away , and fitted perfectly into this vision of a dangerous but concealed enemy . ( Auschwitz, Rees , p. 8 )


If a superior ordered someone to be imprisoned , someone to be executed, then- even , if, to the individual ordered to carry out the sentence, the judgement appeared incomprehensible- the order must be correct. The only protection against the of self-doubt in the face of orders were not immediately explicable was hardness, which therefore became a cult throughout the SS. " We must be hard as granite, otherwise the work of our Fuhrer will perish. " said Reinhard Heydrich, the most powerful figure in the SS after Himmler. ( Auschwitz, Rees , p. 8 )

The horrors of war the American Conservatives tell us we must get used to since these wars may go on for another fifty to a hundred years . This is the sort of thinking or mind-set of Bush and Co. and Senator John McCain who believes torture and other abuse of detainees may be horrifying but necessary and so we need to put our sympathies aside since these people are our enemies and will not stop till they destroy not just America but also Western Christian Civilization . McCain , Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld , Condoleeza Rice, Karl Rove , Gonzales , Irving Kristol and their Neoconservative advisers are always talking in Apocalyptic terms of this being a Clash of Civilizations of Christianity versus Islam , freedom versus Terrorism . Their enemy is also like the enemies the Nazis fantasized about that is they are everywhere , they hide in the crowds , they smile at us and then blow us up.

We could here compare the myth of " Stab in the Back " of the Nazis to that of the American Conservatives myth or belief that all that's wrong with America and Western Civilization is due in their view to " liberalism and liberal notions such as multiculturalism , equality and human rights and open criticism of the American military and other American institutions such as the CIA, Secret Service and FBI and belief that citizens are permitted even in times of war to protest against government policies such as people did during the Vietnam War - These liberal and unAmerican activities the Conservative Americans believe led to the defeat in Vietnam.

They also believe that it is because of these liberal views and the liberals lack of concern for national security led to the 9/11 attacks because America was seen as weak and vulnerable which these attacks proved to be the truth-

These Conservative including members of the Bush administration believe that the War in Iraq has been undermined by on-going unjustified attacks by the liberal elite and liberal biased media on the Bush administration and questioning its good sense about invading and occupying Iraq which to the conservatives is a no-brainer as they say. Saddam was evil they argue and so was removed. America they believe is permitted to protect its interest in whatever way the administration chooses to define them . When America's interest are at risk then America has no choice but to engage in a pre-emptive attack. And further America need not take seriously the views of the " Liberal" and " socialist " supported United Nations which as a body is anti-American and pro-Arab and pro-Islamic .

The American Conservatives also see the liberal media as being manipulated into sympathizing with these Islamic terrorists and the wholly ungreteful people of Iraq . The people of Iraq and Afghanistan and all Arabs and Muslims are in their view evil and untrustworthy since they hate Christianity and the One True God as they the Muslims struggle to make Islam the dominant religion in the world.

The " liberals " and the 'liberal media " can not be trusted since they will show the bodies of dead Iraqis on Television or on the Internet claiming they are innocent victims . In Iraq the Conservative American tells there are no innocents. Even a small child will one day grow up to be a terrorists it is after all in their blood and is preached they claim by the barbaric, primitive, religion of Islam. After all Islam is just a made up religion by some guy an Arab in the desert who wanted to gain some power and notoriety and to satisfy his insatiable sexual appetite.

The Bush Regime and their advisers seem to be unable to cope with what they refer to as unforseen contingencies- or as Cheney put it Known Knowns Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns or whatever - this guy knows how to use language in such an ambiguous and tortured manner . Cheney and other members of the Bush staff do this so that it is difficult at times to know exacly what they have said . They turn a phrase like this every which way to haggle their way out of any accusation . It is the ultimate in Bureaucratic Mumbo Jumbo and perverted " legaleese ". The advantage of this use of language is that when some event occurs they can plead ignorance . Such as no one would have thought the New Orleans' levees would break - of course various engineers had been warning governments since the Reagan Era of the potential problem and no one including Bill Clinton did much about it.

Another example is the looting which took place shortly after the American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Bush and Cheney were surprised it appears yet those in the Military and Intelligence community had tried to tell them that this was one of the reasons they needed more troops that is to protect public buildings such as schools , hospitals , government agencies , libraries and museums but they didn't heed this advice and then claimed they never received such advice or claimed the liberal anti-Bush media was exaggerating what was actually happening. This was followed by the former Bathists regrouping and the outbreak of secular violence which the Bush Regime was warned about. But they steamed ahead in a positive euphoria that everything would in just a few weeks or months or years sort themselves out. But they had made one blunder and miscalculation after another and so it is they who have created this mess in Iraq and the Middle East as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan etc. .

So when things go unexpectedly wrong they find themselves in need of scapegoats they search for others to blame such as Iran or Syria or the liberal media or the United Nations or European countries especially France. When they find this doesn't work they look inward to find the traitors among them and so in an act of spiritual cleansing they fire a host of people who didn't or don't fully support their policies and their susposed agenda of spreading democracy around the world or who don't pray enough or have some doubts about Bush and Cheney's decision making and abilities. . In the end who know what their real agenda was or is. And now we have Senator John McCain who wants to stay the course and to expand the war to Iran, Syria etc. Because somehow as Bush has said time and again that History will prove him right and show that he was , in fact , a visionary - again it sounds like your typical deluded demagogue who bases his decisions on what he believes God is telling him- Hitler also often claimed that he was a great man fulfilling his destiny and that like Bush he was doing God's Work.


As Rees comments on the mindset of Hitler and the Nazis :

Indeed it is a recurring theme of this history that the Nazi leadership constantly must contend with events they have not properly anticipated. They are always driven by a sense of enormous ambition and optimism- anything can be accomplished by " will " alone- and then they are pulled short either by their own lack of planning and foresight , or because their enemy is stronger than their own inflated sense of themselves ever acknowledged . ( Auschwitz, Rees, p. 31 )


For more on this matter see;

Rees, Laurence : Auschwitz: A New History ,pub. 2005

Carsten, F. L. : The Rise of Fascism , pub.

Carroll, James : Constantine’s Sword: The Church and The Jews-
A History , Pub. 2001.

Cohen- Sherbok, Dan: The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Anti-Semitism, pub. 1992.

Cohn, Norman : Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, pub. 1996.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S.: The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, Pub. 1986

Gilbert, Martin: Auschwitz and the Allies, pub. 1990

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah : A Moral Reckoning :The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, pub. 2002

Kertzer, David I. : The Popes Against The Jews: The Vatican's Role in The Rise of Modern Anti‑Semitism, pub. 2001




and so it goes,
GORD>

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Guantanamo Trials Rigged & Promises of No Acquittals: All Are Guilty

Accusations that Guantanamo Trials Rigged & Promises of No Acquittals

Anyway we again are presented with evidence that US trials of Guantanamo " Detainees" will be all for show . Justice will have little to do with these trials. But how could we have expected otherwise from the Bush/Cheney Regime since they claim these detainees were denied their basic rights as captured " Enemy Combatants " or as POWs because they are all guilty of being terrorists. If there a lot of acquittals then the truth would be that innocent individuals had been held in an illegal and unethical manner and had been tortured and abused against the rules of the Geneva Conventions & common decency. But if Bush, Cheney & Condoleeza Rice & Rumsfeld & Gonzales thinks these people are guilty , then , it follows that they must be.But we tend to forget Bush and Cheney are " Infallible " as we have been told by the Media . For Example Bush and Cheney & Co. may have been mistaken about whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMDs or was connected to Al Qaeda or 9/11 but after all they were right we are told to have invaded Iraq to oust Saddam .Never mind that Saddam was in great part an American fiend & ally and in part America's creation like Pres. Musharraf of Pakistan or General Pinochet of Chile . Americans are fond of their dictators who can carry out America's policies and agenda by proxy.

The Media also contrary to the " Facts on the Ground " these days tells us things are going well in Iraq . Yet there are still three million refugees living in Syria and other countries whom the American's refuse to acknowledge or help in any real substantive manner. American's so loved the Iraqi people that they wanted to free the Iraqis from Saddam's brutal regime. But the compassion of Americans does not extend to helping out refugees or taking a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis into America country as refugees . This is especially true as America builds walls around its borders to keep all those evil refugees out of America.

In an article from The Nation posted at CommonDreams.org we get some details about the Show Trials to come:
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 by The Nation
Rigged Trials at Gitmo,by Ross Tuttle


Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the legal treatment of prisoners at GuantĆ”namo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon’s announcement on February 11 that it was charging six GuantĆ”namo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes–and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration’s military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials are rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for GuantĆ”namo’s military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees in an attempt to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

Colonel Davis’s criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned this past October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior defense officials to pursue cases deemed “sexy” and of “high-interest” (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. “I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system,” he wrote. “I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively.”

When asked if he thought the men at GuantĆ”namo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes–the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. “[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions.’”

Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions’ chain of command. “Everyone has opinions,” Davis says. “But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders.”

Reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Cynthia Smith said, “The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals.”

“That he [Haynes] said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process,” says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and who has written extensively about Haynes’s conflicts with the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the Armed Forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration’s views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration’s advocacy of “extreme interrogation techniques.”

“The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job,” says Horton. “His clashes have always had the same subtext–they want to be independent, he wants them to do political dirty-work.”

Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes’s role in writing or supervising the writing of Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.


also check out article from Truthout Feb. 19,2008:


Marjorie Cohn | Tortured Evidence: Injustice at Guantanamo.

Marjorie Cohn, writing for The Jurist, says: "The Bush administration has announced its intention to try six alleged al Qaeda members at Guantanamo under the Military Commissions Act. That Act forbids the admission of evidence extracted by torture, although it permits evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if it was secured before December 30, 2005. Thus, the administration would be forbidden from relying on evidence obtained by waterboarding, if waterboarding constitutes torture."


Big Brother is working diligently we are told to uncover what journalists and academics are saying on the phone to friends outside the United States . The US Supreme Court says it is vital that Bush keep spying on US citizens without worrying about those pesky legal nice-ities such a warrant from a court.This important work will continue but give me a break they would probably continue anyway. It is just that Bush and Cheney think if they can badger legislators or the courts into giving them some form of legal sanction then no matter what they do is therefore acceptable.

And there are some 20,000 detainees being held in Iraq and the number is growing as reported in this next article : US Detention of Iraqis Grows Without End,By Christopher Kuttruff t r u t h o u t,Wednesday 20 February 2008

The United States is, once again, expanding the size of its largest detention center in Iraq. According to an October 31 report by the military paper Stars and Stripes, US forces will be increasing the capacity of detainees at Camp Bucca from 20,000 to 30,000.

An ever-increasing prison population has put extreme pressure on detainment facilities as well as on Iraq's fragile, developing judicial system. The New York Times reported on February 14 that more than half of the 26,000 detainees in US custody are still awaiting trial - many having been imprisoned for years.


Information Clearing House
Tuesday, February 19, 2008 by Agence France Presse
US Supreme Court Throws Out Wire-Tapping Case


The US Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a bid by journalists and professors to challenge the legality of the US administration’s wire-tapping program.

The program, brought in after the September 11, 2001 attacks, allows US national security agencies to monitor suspect telephone calls and emails between the United States and overseas without first obtaining a judge’s order.

In 2006 journalists and teachers filed a suit against the program maintaining it violated their right to privacy, saying because they had regular contacts with the Middle East, their freedom of expression would be restrained.

They specifically targetted the National Security Agency in the case which has now come before the country’s highest court.

A lower court judge initially ordered an end to the program immediately, but the appeals court in July overturned that ruling saying the plaintiffs had not proved that their foreign communications were being monitored.

On Tuesday the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, as usual without giving a reason, thus upholding the appeals court ruling.


Also see: Supreme Court Won't Review Bush Domestic Spying Case
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021908B.shtml
James Vicini, reporting for Reuters, writes, "The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a legal challenge to the warrantless domestic spying program President George W. Bush created after the September 11 attacks."

And from Britain another case of a post 9/11 detainee Lofti Raissi who was innocent but no one really wants to say they are sorry for this or give him appropriate compensation for putting his life in ruins.As for the general public in Britain or the United States or even Canada don't really want to know about it.

At Information Clearing House 'I Lost My Career, My life And My Dignity'

Last week, the Court of Appeal ruled that Lotfi Raissi could claim compensation for his arrest and imprisonment after being wrongly accused of training 9/11 pilots. Here, in his first interview since the landmark decision, he tells of his prison hell, nervous collapse and the terrible toll his ordeal has had on his personal and professional life

By Jamie Doward, home affairs editor

17/02/08 "The Observer" -- - Lotfi Raissi seemed destined to become one of the most reviled men in history. A pilot who had trained in the US before moving to England, he was the first person to be accused in connection with the 11 September attacks. He was alleged to be one of its chief ringleaders, teaching the 9/11 terrorists how to fly and crash planes into buildings. It's hard to think of a more damaging accusation. Harder still when Raissi, whose chubby face and small, smiling eyes makes him seem younger than his 33 years, was wholly innocent.

But this did not stop him spending almost five months in Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London after the American authorities told their British counterparts of Raissi's 'involvement' in the worst terrorist attack in US history. 'It was appalling,' Raissi said yesterday as he tried to live a normal family life, meeting his brother for a family lunch followed by watching the Manchester United-Arsenal FA Cup tie. 'I was guilty until I proved my innocence.'

Last week, three judges at the Court of Appeal ruled he should be allowed to renew his bid for compensation from the government, overturning a decision by the High Court last year. 'I had faith in the judiciary system,' Raissi said. 'Thank God justice is what I got.'

and : ... To understand how damaging the accusations were against Raissi, it is necessary to understand his background. 'My family back home in Algeria have been fighting terrorism for the past 15 years,' he said. 'My uncle is chief of an anti-terrorist branch. We abhor terrorism in any shape or form in our family. This is very damaging for us.'

The reference to 'us' is a telling one. Raissi is angry not for what happened to him but because of the shame it brought on his family. Their dignity, he says, has been taken away.

As for any real evidence it didn't matter the authorities needed scape-goats after 9/11 who else to blame for their possible failure in their Intel ptior to 9/11 :

In bringing his claim for compensation, Raissi argues that he was arrested chiefly because he was Algerian, Muslim and Arab, an airline pilot - someone who effectively ticked the boxes of an identikit terrorist.

'I was arrested because of my profile,' he said. 'Why didn't they arrest the instructors who actually trained the terrorists?'

The Court of Appeal's judgment on Raissi's arrest, and the refusal to grant him bail, was damning. 'Viewed objectively, it appears to us to be likely that the extradition proceedings were used for an ulterior purpose, namely to secure the appellant's detention in custody in order to allow time for the US authorities to provide evidence of a terrorist offence,' the three judges hearing his case concluded.

But the judges were most scathing about the role of the British authorities. 'We consider that there is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that the police and the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] were responsible for serious defaults.' It is difficult to imagine a more damning assessment.

The ruling also shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the way Britain and the United States trade intelligence and raised troubling questions about the two countries' relationship when it comes to fighting terrorism. Why did Britain listen to the US? Why was it so eager to arrest Raissi, when even the American authorities had urged Britain only to make 'discreet' inquiries into his background.


And for update on the Iraq Refugee crisis see article: From Wiredispatch.com,UN says Iraqi refugees need more help
UN Refugee Chief Says World Community and Iraq Government Must Do More to Help Refugees, Feb. 18, 2008


But the world in general does not give much thought to the Iraqis killed or wounded let alone those who have become refugees. It reminds me of the plight of Jewish refugees before WWII in Germany. Hitler said to the world take them and the world for the most part said no. That is to the everlasting shame of the West. Leaders of these countries were fearful of letting too many Jews into their countries since they believed the Jews were untrustworthy and had nothing to contribute to their societies. Others claimed that allowing Jews in would lead to a rise of anti-Semitism. Other countries in the West at that time were almost as anti-Semitic as were the Nazis. Some people believed that the issue of refugees would change after the war but it didn't that much.Most counties these would just like to build bigger and better walls to keep out what they see as undesirables.

But what happen to America's promise on the Statue of Liberty of welcoming your poor , hungry and huddled masses!


Now the people in Western Nations fear and hate all Muslims and Arabs. But it is up to those in power in such cases to appeal to their peoples sense of decency and compassion for other human beings.



and so it goes,
GORD.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

BUSH/ CHENEY 'S WAR CRIMES & CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY FOR DUMMIES

The Iraq War: Legal or illegal ?
Pinky Snow the cat explains why the war is a war crime
Hope you find this as entertaining as I did




And so it goes,
GORD.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Radical Christian Missionaries in Iraq and Religious Intolerance

Radical Christian Missionaries in Iraq
"All Iraqis should be converted. All of the Middle East , as a matter of fact. It's a spiritual war.
We are fighting the forces of Darkness "

" Conflict is a natural part of the Christian Life."



The problem is the assumption by these Evangelical Christians that all other views of Christianity are false . They believe their's is the only true path to redemption and salvation. And all other religions are not just false or in error but are the tools of Satan and the Anti-Christ. The theological views of these Radical Christian Evangelicals are not just theological but also contian a political agenda.

Since these Evangelicals believe in the End-Times primarily found in The Book Of Revelation of the New Testament . They believe that Israel must be expanded to include within it all of the land which was part of ancient Judea. There must also be the rebuilding of The Temple in Jerusalem so that animal sacrifices ( especially the red heffer ) can be made to the God Jahweh. Once this is done then the clock of the end-times will be started leading to the Rapture, the time of the Tribulation, the rule of the Anti-Christ and the Battle of Armageddon . Meanwhile a remnant of the Jews in Israel will be converted to Christianity. Then Christ will return . But the Jews are merely pawns or bit players though absolutely necessary in this scenario. But before the the return of Christ the Word of God as defined by Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians must be preached to every living soul on earth so that those preached to can accept or reject this spiritual message of Jesus . This proselyticing to the world is called " The Great Commission ".

IT IS THEREFORE IN THEIR BEST INTEREST TO SUPPORT THE sTATE OF iSRAEL AND TO PROMOTE THE EXPANSION OF iSRAEL BYOND ITS PRESENT BORDERS AND TO EXPEL ALL NON JEWS FROM THAT TERRITORY.

These Evangelical Christians also believe that the more chaos there is in the world especially in the Middle East is necessary to fulfill the prophecies of the Book Of Revelation. So if one were to bring about a lasting peace in the Middle East it would mean that the Prophecies were not being fulfilled . But the hope of these Chistians is that the peace is a sham set up by the Anti-Christ who deceives the nations by claiming to bring peace to the world. In that case the peace will only last a short time as the Anti-Christ proceeds with his plans to rule the whole of the world. In any case this explains why Christian Evangelicals are against any attempt at solutions which would bring about a long lasting peace. They also equate all International organizations such as the United Nations or the World court or International agreements such as the Geneva Conventions as tools of the Anti-Christ and his minions who hate the One True God.


As Chis Hedges points out in the following article the Radical Christian Evangelicals have used their influence to contravene the tradition of the Separation of Church and State to promote their world view to the United States military and American institutions to further achieve their agenda of spreading their version of the Gospels and to silence or wipeout all who do not accept their theological views and agenda. In the article he characterizes the three former Muslims who have become Born Again Christians as frauds who make a number of unsupotable claims about numerous " sleeper Cells" in America and the West. They also claim that muslim extremists as terroists are not a minority but are are representative of the majority of Muslims.

Christian Right's Emerging Deadly Worldview: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth, By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. February 12, 2008.Christian extremists are preaching a war against tolerance to target and persecute all Muslims, including the 6 million who live in the U.S.

Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out -- a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy -- to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world's population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called Why We Want to Kill You, promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how "Muslim terrorists" invaded America 30 years ago and how "perseverance, recruitment and hate" have fueled attacks by Muslims.

These men are frauds, but this is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims, including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds listeners that "the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic terrorism," as does Mike Huckabee, who says that "Islamofascism" is "the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced." George W. Bush has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done. Bush described the "war on terror" as a war against totalitarian Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.


And:

...This creeping Christian chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding often provokes indignant rage.

The public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those outside our "Christian" culture impossible. It implicitly condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us into children with bombs.

These three con artists are not the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place. Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichƩs we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad but the ones who are rising from within our midst.

and so it goes,
GORD.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

John McCain & Bush Approve of the Use of Torture

John McCain's Tortured Logic And Flip Flop On Torture
Keith Olbermann with Rachel Maddow
Politics trumps principles and Moral Values or Ethics



see video below at end of this post of abuse, torture ,and inhumane and humiliating treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib. And these are the so-called Christian good guys.

Bush still claims techniques such as Waterboarding are not forms of torture as he is quoted in this article in the Guardian:
Bush references London attacks to defend waterboarding, Ewen MacAskill in Washington, guardian.co.uk, February 15 2008

...But his most controversial remarks were over waterboarding. He told the BBC's Matt Frei: "To the critics, I ask them this: when we, within the law, interrogate and get information that protects ourselves and possibly others in other nations to prevent attacks, which attack would they have hoped that we wouldn't have prevented?

"And so, the United States will act within the law. We'll make sure professionals have the tools necessary to do their job within the law."

and :

...in the BBC interview, Bush was asked whether, given waterboarding and other human rights abuses, he could claim the US still occupied the moral high ground. Bush said: "Absolutely." He added: "We believe in human rights and human dignity. We believe in the human condition. We believe in freedom. And we're willing to take the lead. We're willing to ask nations to do hard things. We're willing to accept responsibilities. And - yeah, no question in my mind, it's a nation that's a force for good.

"And history will judge the decisions made during this period of time as necessary decisions."

On Guantanamo Bay, where the US has been holding hundreds for years without trial, he would "like it to be empty" but he was "comfortable with recognizing this is still a dangerous world". He said: "There's some people there that need to be tried. And there will be a trial. And they'll have their day in court. Unlike what they did to other people.

"Now, there's great concern about, you know, and I can understand this, that these people be given rights. They're not willing to grant the same rights to others. They'll murder. But, you gotta understand, they're getting rights. And I'm comfortable with the decisions we've made."


If waterboarding is not torture then what does Bush or his handlers deem to be a technique which could be called torture. His answer to this has shifted many times . But in the end he believes he is the one who decides since he is the President and the Commander in Chief. So whatever he decides is therefore given his mandate is therefore by definition legal. Bush's notion of legal is purely a matter of defining words in a particular way and then either putting those terms within the context of legislation or just creating a signing statement which over-rides an existing law . Bush also believes he can make something legal retroactively. By doing so he can cover his own ass as well as anyone else in his administration or connected with it in some substantial manner.

What is disturbing about Bush and his group of friends is that they talk about representing the moral high ground when in fact they are constantly finding new ways to justify their actions through various rationalizations and then hidden behind some form of legaleeze and parsing their statements. . Bush and co. can not for one second admit to having done wrong either morally, ethically or legally. Cheney and Rumsfeld and the Neocons have taught bush well.

Bush believes that because Terrorists are willing to commit murder and kill innocent civilians then they should not be granted the same rights as other prisoners. If so then one could then claim that anyone who murders innocent people should not be guaranteed their legal rights . So anyone in the United States arrested and accused of murder should be denied their legal rights. Of course the Neocons and large numbers of Americans would in fact agree with such a position in regard to murderers arrested inside the United States . The presumption of innocence they as a foolish and weak and ineffective response to such criminals.So why torture anyone convicted or accused of a crime in the United States.

These are the same sort of people who would have found ways to justify hunting down Christian Heretics, or Pagans or Witches . The various Inquisitions and tribunals and such which hunted down Heretics and Witches often claimed they were doing GOd's Work and could not be criticized for their actions. In deed it would seem as history shows us those who led these hunts for heretics and witches believed that those who criticized them were themselves heretics or were possessed by demonic forces. Bush and the Neocons judge any who question their ideology and their agenda and tactics not merely as having a different view but of being demonic or in common parlance UnAmerican, anti-American , subversives , radicals , anti-Christian and therefore on the side of the enemy i.e. the Terrorists. Once again we find ourselves in this Manichean world view in which there are no shades of grey or nuances in which there is only good v evil and Bush and Co. are on the side of good.

And from Information Clearing House we see how the slippery-slope of abuses and torture of "Detainees" by US forces and CIA at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other US prisons is becoming the way of all police forces in the United States. Of course those who are obsessed with " Law and Order " at any cost will find ways to justify such abuses as in the cases of the overuse of the Tazer.

Guantanamo Comes to Main Street U.S.A.By Mark A. Goldman

12/02/08 "ICH" -- -- They say that the difference between how democracy in Europe has evolved compared to that of the United States is that in Europe the government is afraid of the People whereas in the United States the People are afraid of the government. That's a dangerous state of affairs and it looks like it's going to get worse.

It's not only a matter of who you vote for... it's a matter of how well informed you are when you do vote... and Americans now are notorious for not being nearly as well informed as the citizens of many other countries are. So in America, we don't really think that deeply about the range of choices that are or are not available to us. Fatal mistake.

The video below is indicative of the evolving consciousness of law enforcement in our nation... and it's our 'Shock and Awe' government, with its penchant for gratuitous and unconscionable violence, and the People's refusal to hold them accountable, that is setting the stage for our future in this 'land of the free and home of the brave.'

When we allow fear and force to dominate the way in which our government deals with people we don't know... we open the door to despotism, for surely when we fail to protect the legitimate rights of any group or person, we sow the seeds of our own destruction. Take a look at this video if you want to know what is happening to civil liberties in our own country. I guess for some members of our community, this is not news at all.

Apparently local law enforcement officers are now being trained to treat citizens the way military personnel were trained to treat Guantanamo prisoners. Your government doesn't seem to care anymore what you think... except maybe during an election year and even then, not so much. And like the military, many police officers who have been trained to just follow orders, are doing just that...just following orders. Watch this video.

Everything by the book






and in case you missed it here is a rather graphic video of Abu Ghraib Iraq where it is well documented that torture and abuse took place. And what is more disturbing is that torture and abuse of detainees is still going on in various US run prisons.
Will Obama or Hillary insists on prosecuting all those involve even high ranking officers and officials at the Pentagon or the White House and right up to Cheney, Rimsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Gonzales & Bush .

Will we never see justice done in these cases or are the American people in agreement believing Americans can do whatever they want while expecting everybody else to maintain a higher standard human decency and rights .
scenes of torture nudity
all of these actions depicted in this video are forms of torture, abuse and inhumane treatment and constitute crimes.




And What Would Jesus Do ? According to Bush / Cheney and the American Religious Right Jesus would do the same as these soldiers showing no mercy for these " Demonic enemies of Christianity and God ". The propaganda that Bush /Cheney and the mass media feed us is that either these are just " a few bad apples " or that these abuses are necessary when dealing with such evil individuals. And it doesn't matter if they are guilty in the strict sense or not. Being Muslims they are seen by Americans as being anti-American and anti-Christianity and are therefore guilty.

The disturbing thing about all of these abuses is the silence on the part of Christian Institutions and Churches and so-called Christians. But Christians have little or no tolerance for other religions . Their hatred of Muslims goes back to at least the First Crusade in 1097 and therefore is almost as old as their hatred of Jews which goes back to a few years after the death of Christ.

and so it goes,
GORD.