OTTAWA (REUTERS) - An arms dealer wanted on fraud charges in Germany Thursday sought to draw the government into a political storm over cash payments to a former prime minister, saying a request to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to help him avoid extradition was "well received."
German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber told a parliamentary committee that former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had raised his case with Harper last year "and the message was very well received."
Both Harper and Mulroney have denied even discussing Schreiber's case. But a series of allegations by Schreiber have proved a thorn in their sides. Schreiber made some of the allegations during a prolonged legal fight to avoid extradition.
"It was a shock for me when Prime Minister Harper said publicly on television Mr. Mulroney never spoke with him about me or my letter," said Schreiber, who was delivered from jail in handcuffs to testify to the committee.
It was perhaps the most anticipated committee appearance on Parliament Hill in years, because of what Schreiber might say about Mulroney or other politicians.
Schreiber, whose donations also helped topple former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, is awaiting extradition to Germany to faces charges of fraud, bribery, tax evasion, corruptly accepting secret commissions and forging documents.
Schreiber paid Mulroney C$300,000 (now worth $300,000) in cash in three meetings after Mulroney stepped down as prime minister in 1993, and said Mulroney had promised to help promote a project to build German light-armored vehicles in Canada.
Schreiber said Thursday that he had been ready to pay C$500,000, but Mulroney had not performed.
Mulroney and Harper were at that time in different right-wing political parties, but the two have since become friends, with Mulroney acting as an informal mentor to Harper.
Schreiber had initially said he would not testify to the committee, but he later answered selective questions.
He said he had sealed his business deal with Mulroney two days before Mulroney ceased being prime minister. Mulroney denies that and denies any wrongdoing.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
German arms dealer extends scope of favor charges
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Vast Nazi Archive Opens to Public, Ending 60 Years of Holocaust Secrecy
by Arthur Max
AP
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands
After more than 60 years, Nazi documents stored in a vast warehouse in Germany were unsealed Wednesday, opening a rich resource for Holocaust historians and for survivors to delve into their own tormented past.
The treasure of documents could open new avenues of study into the inner workings of Nazi persecution from the exploitation of slave labor to the conduct of medical experiments. The archive's managers planned a conference of scholars next year to map out its unexplored contents.
The files entrusted to the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, have been used to find the fate of missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. The U.S. government also has referred to the ITS for background checks on immigrants it suspected of lying about their past.
Inquiries were handled by the archive's 400 staff members in the German spa town of Bad Arolsen. Few outsiders were allowed to see the actual documents, which number more than 50 million pages and cover 16 linear miles of gray metal filing cabinets and cardboard binders spread over six buildings.
On Wednesday, the Red Cross and the German government announced that the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive had ratified a 2006 agreement to open the files to the public for the first time.
"We are there. The doors are open," said ITS director Reto Meister, speaking by telephone from the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was visiting with a delegation of U.S. congressional staff members.
Survivors have pressed for decades to open the archive, unhappy with the minimal responses usually in form letters from the Red Cross officials responding to requests for information about relatives.
"We are very anxious," said David Mermelstein, 78, an activist for survivors' causes in Miami, Fla., who wants to scour the files for traces of his two older brothers whom he last saw as he passed through a series of concentration camps.
"Now I hope we will be able to get some information. We have been waiting, and time is not on our side," said the retired businessman.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem began receiving digital copies of the entire archive in August, allowing survivors and historians more access points.
Izzy Arbeiter, 82, the head of a survivor's organization in the area of Boston, Mass., said he hoped to go to the museum next month to browse the files.
"My goodness, I don't know where I would start, there are so many things I am interested in," he said. "The history of my family, of course. My parents. One of my brothers is missing. We never knew what happened to him."
Yad Vashem said the opening of the archive was "a breakthrough" for survivors and others.
"Our understanding and knowledge of the personal story of the Holocaust will be deepened," said Yad Vashem's chairman Avner Shalev.
The records are unlikely to change the general story of the Holocaust and the Nazi era, probably the most intensely researched 12-year period of the 20th century.
But its depth of detail and original documentation will add texture to history's worst genocide, and is likely to fuel a revival of academic interest in the Holocaust.
Among its files, seen by The Associated Press during repeated visits to Bad Arolsen in the last year, are the list of deportees from the Netherlands to Auschwitz on which Anne Frank's name appears, the list of employees of Oskar Schindler's factory who were sheltered from death, medical records showing the number of lice on the heads of prisoners, the list of inmates evacuated by the Nazis from the Neuengamme labor camp who later died on prisoner boats mistakenly bombed by the British air force.
Defying its orderly appearance, the archive is a labyrinth of paper that has never been organized by a historian or even by a professionally trained archivist. Its main database comprises 50 million entries of names, often duplicated in different spellings, referring to 17.5 million victims of Nazi persecutions.
The Bad Arolsen facility, which has received 50 applications this month alone from researchers and institutions seeking to examine the archive, has opened a visitors room with 10 computer terminals to enable searches of files that have been scanned. But less than half of the 50 million pages have been digitized and are available on computer.
Though the archives are now open to the public, Erich Oetiker, the ITS deputy director, said anyone seeking specific information would need professional assistance and all visitors are asked to make an appointment in advance.
While it is not set up to receive unannounced visitors off the street, he said, "we will refuse nobody, but we have very limited staff to provide support." Guided tours are also available.
Visitors have to show ID and cannot access a special category of documents correspondences between the ITS and private or official inquirers that are less than 25 years old. Researchers must sign a waiver stating that they are personally responsible for respecting privacy laws.
The ITS gets about 700 requests each month for information about relatives, and has not yet cleared away a backlog of inquiries that reached nearly half a million a few years ago.
The Tracing Service, the Washington museum and Yad Vashem intend to hire new staff to help to ferret out specific documents.
"The challenge now is organizing the material in such a way that people can easily find what they want and what they need," said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Washington museum.
The museum took the first step by creating a database to search an inventory of more than 21,000 collections of documents, each ranging a few pages to thousands.
Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of the war, and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a multinational commission that normally met once a year.
Access to the archives had been closely guarded by Red Cross officials who viewed requests for academic information as a distraction from what they saw as their humanitarian task of answering requests about individuals.
In 2001 the State Department, urged on by the Holocaust museum, began pushing the 11-member governing commission to open the doors to the rapidly dying survivor population and for research.
The decision was adopted in May 2006, but it took 19 months to complete the required ratification process.
Investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report in New York.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Abu Dhabi Buys Stake In Sunnyvale-Based AMD
SUNNYVALE (AP)
With oil prices surging and U.S. stock prices slumping, chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s sale of an 8.1 percent stake to the Abu Dhabi government's investment arm represents the latest plunge by a wealthy Middle Eastern nation into a troubled U.S. corporation.
It also raises fresh questions about the appropriateness of Middle Eastern firms owning large chunks of U.S. businesses that specialize in advanced technologies.
Sunnyvale-based AMD, the world's No. 2 microprocessor maker, needs the $622 million investment from the Mubadala Development Company to help lift the company out of a deep financial slump.
AMD has lost more than $1.6 billion so far this year, and has just $1.5 billion in cash on hand as it works to pay down $5.3 billion in debt. The financial woes have caused AMD's stock to fall more than 35 percent since the start of the year, a slide that has wiped out nearly $4 billion in shareholder wealth.
The infusion, announced Friday, is a necessary jolt for AMD is it hunts for money to fund its counteroffensive against Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, and amid a huge spike in investments in U.S. companies from Middle Eastern nations.
Middle Eastern investments in U.S. companies has increased more than fivefold in 2007, leaping from $4.5 billion on 32 deals last year to nearly $25 billion on 42 deals so far this year, according to data compiled by Thomson Financial.
The money invested in the past two years is more than the entire total invested from 1990 to 2005, according to the latest Thomson data. During that period, $24.8 billion in investments were made in 258 deals.
Oil-rich countries have been enriched further in recent months by a run-up in the price of a barrel of oil, which has been hovering in the $90 range while many U.S. stocks continue to suffer from the housing and lending morass that's led some banks to absorb billions of dollars in losses.
The biggest deal so far this year involving Middle Eastern firms was General Electric Co.'s $11.6 billion sale of its plastics division, completed in August, to petrochemicals manufacturer Saudi Basic Industries Corp., a public company based in Riyadh that is 70-pecent owned by the Saudi Arabian government.
Firms based in the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven oil-rich states, have invested nearly $10 billion in real estate, financial, power generation and other types of companies in the United States.
Earlier this year, Mubadala bought a 7.5 percent stake in the management operations of private-equity firm Carlyle Group for $1.35 billion, and this week unveiled a partnership with military contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. to collaborate on aerospace and aviation technologies.
The deal with AMD makes the Abu Dhabi government-run investment fund AMD's third-largest shareholder, according to AMD's latest regulatory filings, a development that AMD vows will not trigger a review by the U.S. government because it's a minority investment and Mubadala will not get a board seat.
However, some experts doubt that claim, citing the sensitivity of AMD's technology, which besides being used widely in consumer personal computers and corporate servers is also used in Defense Department computers and other government machinery.
John Reynolds, an attorney at Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, said the transaction could face scrutiny by Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, a 12-member panel headed by the Treasury Department, because the U.S. government is very interested in acquisitions by government-run investment funds, known as sovereign wealth funds, such as Mubadala.
China, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern and Asian countries have set up such funds, which control an estimated $2.5 trillion in assets.
In addition, if AMD has government contracts for classified work, interest from CFIUS and Congress "is apt to be considerable, even if the investment is non-controlling," Reynolds said.
Generally, passive investments of less than 10 percent of a company's shares do not trigger review by CFIUS. But that is not a hard-and-fast rule, Reynolds said, and an ownership stake below 10 percent is not automatically shielded from review.
AMD shares slid 6 cents to $12.64 in Friday trading.
Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's
by John Loftus
FrontPageMagazine.com
Finally, there are some definitive answers to the mystery of the missing WMD. Civilian volunteers, mostly retired intelligence officers belonging to the non-partisan IntelligenceSummit.org, have been poring over the secret archives captured from Saddam Hussein. The inescapable conclusion is this: Saddam really did have WMD after all, but not in the way the Bush administration believed. A 9,000 word research paper with citations to each captured document has been posted online at LoftusReport.com, along with translations of the captured Iraqi documents, courtesy of Mr. Ryan Mauro and his friends.
This Iraqi document research has been supplemented with satellite photographs and dozens of interviews, among them David Gaubatz who risked radiation exposure to locate Saddam’s underwater WMD warehouses , and John Shaw, whose brilliant detective work solved the puzzle of where the WMD went. Both have contributed substantially to solving one of the most difficult mysteries of our decade.
The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at these disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The "Bush lied, people died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq. Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam's WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.
The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003. His nuclear weapons equipment was hidden in enormous underwater warehouses beneath the Euphrates River. Saddam’s entire nuclear inventory was later stolen from these warehouses right out from under the Americans’ noses. The theft of the unguarded Iraqi nuclear stockpile is perhaps, the worst scandal of the war, suggesting a level of extreme incompetence and gross dereliction of duty that makes the Hurricane Katrina debacle look like a model of efficiency.
Without pointing fingers at the Americans, the Israeli government now believes that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear stockpiles have ended up in weapons dumps in Syria. Debkafile, a somewhat reliable private Israeli intelligence service, has recently published a report claiming that the Syrians were importing North Korean plutonium to be mixed with Saddam’s enriched uranium. Allegedly, the Syrians were close to completing a warhead factory next to Saddam’s WMD dump in Deir al Zour, Syria to produce hundreds, if not thousands, of super toxic “dirty bombs” that would pollute wherever they landed in Israel for the next several thousands of years. Debka alleged that it was this combination factory/WMD dump site which was the target of the recent Israeli air strike in Deir al Zour province..
Senior sources in the Israeli government have privately confirmed to me that the recent New York Times articles and satellite photographs about the Israeli raid on an alleged Syrian nuclear target in Al Tabitha, Syria were of the completely wrong location. Armed with this knowledge, I searched Google Earth satellite photos for the rest of the province of Deir al Zour for a site that would match the unofficial Israeli descriptions: camouflaged black factory building, next to a military ammunition dump, between an airport and an orchard. There is a clear match in only one location, Longitude 35 degrees, 16 minutes 49.31 seconds North, Latitude 40 degrees, 3 minutes, 29.97 seconds East. Analysts and members of the public are invited to determine for themselves whether this was indeed the weapons dump for Saddam’s WMD.
Photos of this complex taken after the Israel raid appear to show that all of the buildings, earthern blast berms, bunkers, roads, even the acres of blackened topsoil, have all been dug up and removed. All that remains are what appear to be smoothed over bomb craters. Of course, that is not of itself definitive proof, but it is extremely suspicious.
It should be noted that the American interrogators had accurate information about a possible Deir al Zour location shortly after the war, but ignored it:
"An Iraqi dissident going by the name of "Abu Abdallah" claims that on March 10, 2003, 50 trucks arrived in Deir Al-Zour, Syria after being loaded in Baghdad. …Abdallah approached his friend who was hesitant to confirm the WMD shipment, but did after Abdallah explained what his sources informed him of. The friend told him not to tell anyone about the shipment."
These interrogation reports should be re-evaluated in light of the recently opened Iraqi secret archives, which we submit are the best evidence. But the captured document evidence should not be overstated. It must be emphasized that there is no one captured Saddam document which mentions both the possession of WMD and the movement to Syria.
Moreover, many of Saddam's own tapes and documents concerning chemical and biological weapons are ambiguous. When read together as a mosaic whole, Saddam's secret files certainly make a persuasive case of massive WMD acquisition right up to a few months before the war. Not only was he buying banned precursors for nerve gas, he was ordering the chemicals to make Zyklon B, the Nazis favorite gas at Auschwitz. However odious and well documented his purchases in 2002, there is no direct evidence of any CW or BW actually remaining inside Iraq on the day the war started in 2003. As stated in more detail in my full report, the British, Ukrainian and American secret services all believed that the Russians had organized a last minute evacuation of CW and BW stockpiles from Baghdad to Syria.
We know from Saddam’s documents that huge quantities of CW and BW were in fact produced, and there is no record of their destruction. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Therefore, at least as to chemical and biological weapons, the evidence is compelling, but not conclusive. There is no one individual document or audiotape that contains a smoking gun.
There is no ambiguity, however, about captured tape ISGQ-2003-M0007379, in which Saddam is briefed on his secret nuclear weapons project. This meeting clearly took place in 2002 or afterwards: almost a decade after the State Department claimed that Saddam had abandoned his nuclear weapons research.
Moreover the tape describes a laser enrichment process for uranium that had never been known by the UN inspectors to even exist in Iraq, and Saddam's nuclear briefers on the tape were Iraqi scientists who had never been on any weapons inspector’s list. The tape explicitly discusses how civilian plasma research could be used as a cover for military plasma research necessary to build a hydrogen bomb.
When this tape came to the attention of the International Intelligence Summit, a non-profit, non-partisan educational forum focusing on global intelligence affairs, the organization asked the NSA to verify the voiceprints of Saddam and his cronies, invited a certified translator to present Saddam’s nuclear tapes to the public, and then invited leading intelligence analysts to comment.
At the direct request of the Summit, President Bush promptly overruled his national intelligence adviser, John Negroponte, a career State Department man, and ordered that the rest of the captured Saddam tapes and documents be reviewed as rapidly as possible. The Intelligence Summit asked that Saddam's tapes and documents be posted on a public website so that Arabic-speaking volunteers could help with the translation and analysis.
At first, the public website seemed like a good idea. Another document was quickly discovered, dated November 2002, describing an expensive plan to remove radioactive contamination from an isotope production building. The document cites the return of UNMOVIC inspectors as the reason for cleaning up the evidence of radioactivity. This is not far from a smoking gun: there were not supposed to be any nuclear production plants in Iraq in 2002.
Then a barrage of near-smoking guns opened up. Document after document from Saddam's files was posted unread on the public website, each one describing how to make a nuclear bomb in more detail than the last. These documents, dated just before the war, show that Saddam had accumulated just about every secret there was for the construction of nuclear weapons. The Iraqi intelligence files contain so much accurate information on the atom bomb that the translators’ public website had to be closed for reasons of national security.
If Saddam had nuclear weapons facilities, where was he hiding them? Iraqi informants showed US investigators where Saddam had constructed huge underwater storage facilities beneath the Euphrates River. The tunnel entrances were still sealed with tons of concrete. The US investigators who approached the sealed entrances were later determined to have been exposed to radiation. Incredibly, their reports were lost in the postwar confusion, and Saddam’s underground nuclear storage sites were left unguarded for the next three years. Still, the eyewitness testimony about the sealed underwater warehouses matched with radiation exposure is strong circumstantial evidence that some amount of radioactive material was still present in Iraq on the day the war began.
Our volunteer researchers discovered the actual movement order from the Iraqi high command ordering all the remaining special equipment to be moved into the underground sites only a few weeks before the onset of the war. The date of the movement order suggests that President Bush, who clearly knew nothing of the specifics of the underground nuclear sites, or even that a nuclear weapons program still existed in Iraq, may have been accidentally correct about the main point of the war: the discovery of Saddam’s secret nuclear program, even in hindsight, arguably provides sufficient legal justification for the previous use of force.
Saddam’s nuclear documents compel any reasonable person to the conclusion that, more probably than not, there were in fact nuclear WMD sites, components, and programs hidden inside Iraq at the time the Coalition forces invaded. In view of these newly discovered documents, it can be concluded, more probably than not, that Saddam did have a nuclear weapons program in 2001-2002, and that it is reasonably certain that he would have continued his efforts towards making a nuclear bomb in 2003 had he not been stopped by the Coalition forces. Four years after the war began, we still do not have all the answers, but we have many of them. Ninety percent of the Saddam files have never been read, let alone translated. It is time to utterly reject the conventional wisdom that there were no WMD in Iraq and look to the best evidence: Saddam’s own files on WMD. The truth is what it is, the documents speak for themselves.
John Loftus is President of IntelligenceSummit.org, which is entirely free of government funding, and depends solely upon private contributions for its support. The full research paper on Iraqi WMD, along with the supporting documents and photographs can be found at www.LoftusReport.com
A Special Relationship
[2] see also Aktionseinheiten
[3] see also Die zweite Welle and "Transsilvanien ist unser"
[4] Ungarn - Slowakei: Ungarn empört über slowakische Bestätigung der Benes-Dekrete; Die Presse 28.09.2007
[5] Im Spätsommer 1989 lief ein Foto durch die Presse, das Walburga von Habsburg, die Tochter des ehemaligen österreichischen Thronfolgers Otto von Habsburg (CSU), beim Durchschneiden des österreichisch-ungarischen Grenzzauns zeigt. Beide arbeiteten damals an führender Stelle der "Paneuropa Union" - gemeinsam mit deren heutigem Präsidenten Bernd Posselt. Posselt steht heute auch der Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft vor, in der das Haus Habsburg hohes Ansehen genießt. See also Paneuropa-Picknick
[6] Vertrag zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Republik Ungarn über freundschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Partnerschaft in Europa, unterzeichnet am 06.02.1992
[7] Gemeinsame Erklärung zwischen der Regierung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Regierung der Republik Ungarn über die Förderung der deutschen Minderheit und des Unterrichts von Deutsch als Fremdsprache in der Republik Ungarn, unterzeichnet am 25.09.1992
[8] see also Beachtliches Gewicht, Heute ist es das Gleiche and Revisionsoffensive
Thursday, November 15, 2007
State Dept. official's brother has Blackwater ties
The inspector general says he will step aside from any future probe of the security contractor because his sibling is a member of its advisory board.
by Paul Richter
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- The State Department's internal watchdog, accused of politicizing his office, told a congressional panel Wednesday that he will step aside from any future probe of Blackwater USA because his brother serves on the advisory board of the controversial security contractor.
The testimony by Howard J. Krongard, the department's inspector general, came as a surprise at a congressional hearing about his performance. At first, Krongard denied that his brother, former CIA official Alvin B. Krongard, had any interest in Blackwater, the State Department's primary private security contractor in Iraq being investigated for deaths of civilians.
However, members of the House panel suggested he was in error. During a hearing break, Krongard called his brother and said he learned that, in fact, Alvin Krongard agreed earlier this year to be a member of Blackwater's advisory board, a position that pays travel expenses for meetings and offers $3,500 for each gathering attended.
"I had not been aware of that," Krongard said after the break. "I want to state right now on the record that I recuse myself from any matters having to do with Blackwater."
Krongard, a former corporate lawyer, has been under fire from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman, for impeding State Department investigations, including a Blackwater probe.
Republicans on the committee have argued that the accusations were politically motivated, but the disclosure by Krongard's brother put them on the defensive and undermined their defense of the inspector general.
"He has done you tremendous damage," Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) told Krongard. "I don't know what kind of conversation you had with him, but I would have been one unhappy guy."
Blackwater has been the department's principal security contractor in Iraq. It has become the target of several investigations in the aftermath of a Sept. 16 incident in Baghdad that killed 17 Iraqi civilians.
Waxman has accused Krongard of poor management and of impeding several investigations to protect the Bush administration from political embarrassment. He and others on the committee have charged that Alvin Krongard's ties to Blackwater were the reason Howard Krongard sidelined an investigation into weapons smuggling charges.
Democrats produced a letter from chief executive Erik Prince inviting Krongard to join the panel, which advises Blackwater on how to expand its business.
Howard Krongard has denied the charges leveled at him by seven current and former State officials. "I want to say in the strongest terms I never impeded any investigation," he said.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Arthur Bremer Is Alone
The man who shot George Wallace is now out of prison, but questions about his stability remain.
Catharine Skipp and Arian Campo-Flores
NEWSWEEK
In the frigid hours before dawn last Friday, Arthur Bremer emerged from the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown. He looked far different from the man who entered in 1972 for shooting Alabama Gov. George Wallace, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Gone were the blond head of hair and eerily cemented smile; now 57, Bremer is balding and paunchy, with a long, gray beard. Sporting civilian clothes and bearing three boxes of belongings, he exited through the prison's rear delivery gate and was whisked away in a convoy of six dark vehicles carrying state and federal law-enforcement officers. His destination was unknown, his prospects uncertain. "Arthur Bremer is alone," says a Maryland corrections spokesman. "He has no one."
Bremer's release raises unique concerns. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz says no assassin has ever been freed from custody in the United States. Bremer failed in his attempt, but only narrowly. Back then, he was solitary and misanthropic, brimming with anger and craving notoriety. In prison, he withdrew, behaving well enough to shave 17? years off his 53-year sentence. Now that he's been released, he'll remain under state supervision until 2025 and will be barred from attending political events; the Secret Service will likely be watching him as well. "He wants to have a low profile and be alone and be left alone," says David Blumberg, chairman of the Maryland Parole Commission. Whether Bremer retains any homicidal tendencies 35 years after his crime remains a mystery—especially since he refused any mental-health evaluation or treatment during his confinement. "I don't believe he will be a danger," says Blumberg. "But he will have to acclimate to making decisions that he hasn't had to make since 1972."
Blumberg describes Bremer as compliant and unobtrusive. Bremer never caused problems and devoted himself to a quiet clerical job in the prison library—a coveted senior position that he worked hard to attain. That offered him his only real opportunity for socializing, and he became "the go-to man for help with reading, writing or comprehending," says Blumberg. Though Bremer's parents visited him for many years, both are now deceased. He's estranged from all four of his siblings, except the youngest, Roger, with whom he reconnected in the past year, says Blumberg. Nevertheless, he says, Roger declined to allow his brother to stay with him upon release. (Roger did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Despite Bremer's docility, he has never expressed remorse for trying to kill Wallace, whose views on race apparently rankled him. In a 1997 written appeal after he was denied parole, he disparaged the governor as a "segregationist-dinosaur." "Can we get the Confederate flag off your Maryland license plate and be halfway fair to Arthur H. Bremer?" he wrote to the parole commission (a special license plate at the time featured the flag). "I got a 'Bama lynching at my parole hearing and the Chairman is whistling Dixie."
That unrepentant attitude disturbs the Wallace family. Though the governor, who died in 1998, eventually forgave his assailant and wrote several letters to him over the years—to which Bremer never responded—other family members weren't as magnanimous. "I just don't know if justice has been served when I consider how much my father suffered," says George Wallace III, 56. (He, too, reached out to Bremer in the early 1990s and suggested a meeting. Bremer's response, according to the account Wallace's son says two FBI agents gave him: "He jumped up on the bars of his cell … and started making sounds like a monkey.") "While he has complied with the laws of Maryland," says Wallace, "is he as stable as you would want?"
That is a legitimate worry, says Dietz. "In the absence of treatment, and where the original problem is one of personality—which is what the testimony was in the Bremer case—one does not expect for there to be improvement," he says. However, he adds, research shows that as violent offenders age, the likelihood of recidivism declines. What's almost certain is that Bremer will have a difficult time reintegrating himself to society. People who have been locked up for decades, says Dietz, often "turn to their old social mechanisms of coping—social withdrawal, isolating themselves, figuring out whom to blame, building their anger and repeating criminal acts."
Bremer's personality disorders became apparent at an early age. Raised in Milwaukee by a boozing father and an emotionally distant mother, he was a loner who fantasized about suicide. As he grew older, he became angrier and more alienated. He decided to assassinate a political figure, fixating initially on Richard Nixon before settling on Wallace, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. On May 15, 1972, he shot the governor and three others (all of whom survived) at a campaign rally in Laurel, Md. Months later, in the courtroom where he was convicted of attempted murder, a judge asked if he had anything to say. His response: "[The prosecutor] tells me he'd like society to be protected from someone like me. I would have liked it if society had protected me from myself." Now that he's re-emerged, both concerns seem as relevant as ever.
Oil Price Rise Causes Global Shift in Wealth
Iran, Russia and Venezuela Feel the Benefits
By Steven Mufson
WASHINGTON POST
High oil prices are fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history. Oil consumers are paying $4 billion to $5 billion more for crude oil every day than they did just five years ago, pumping more than $2 trillion into the coffers of oil companies and oil-producing nations this year alone.
The consequences are evident in minds and mortar: anger at Chinese motor-fuel pumps and inflated confidence in the Kremlin; new weapons in Chad and new petrochemical plants in Saudi Arabia; no-driving campaigns in South Korea and bigger sales for Toyota hybrid cars; a fiscal burden in Senegal and a bonanza in Brazil. In Burma, recent demonstrations were triggered by a government decision to raise fuel prices.
In the United States, the rising bill for imported petroleum lowers already anemic consumer savings rates, adds to inflation, worsens the trade deficit, undermines the dollar and makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to balance its competing goals of fighting inflation and sustaining growth.
High prices have given a boost to oil-rich Alaska, which in September raised the annual oil dividend paid to every man, woman and child living there for a year to $1,654, an increase of $547 from last year. In other states, high prices create greater incentives for pursuing non-oil energy projects that once might have looked too expensive and hurt earnings at energy-intensive companies like airlines and chemical makers. Even Kellogg's cited higher energy costs as a drag on its third-quarter earnings.
With crude oil prices nearing $100 a barrel, there is no end in sight to the redistribution of more than 1 percent of the world's gross domestic product. Earlier oil shocks generated giant shifts in wealth and pools of petrodollars, but they eventually faded and economies adjusted. This new high point in petroleum prices has arrived over four years, and many believe it will represent a new plateau even if prices drop back somewhat in coming months.
"There's never been anything like this on a sustained basis the way we've seen the last couple of years," said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economics professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Oil prices "are not spiking; they're just rising," he added.
The benefits, to the tune of $700 billion a year, are flowing to the world's oil-exporting countries.
Two of those nations -- Iran and Venezuela -- may be better able to defy the Bush administration because of swelling oil revenue. Venezuela has used its oil wealth to dispense patronage around South America, vying for influence even with longtime U.S. allies. And Iran could be less vulnerable to sanctions designed to pressure it into giving up its nuclear program or opening it to inspection.
The world's biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, is using its rejuvenated oil riches to build four cities. Projects like these are designed to burnish the country's image, develop a non-oil economy and generate enough employment to maintain social stability.
One is King Abdullah Economic City, a mega-project on the kingdom's west coast. According to Emaar, a real estate development firm in Dubai, the city will cost $27 billion and be spread across an area three times the size of Manhattan. A contractor who works there said a wide, palm tree-lined boulevard cuts a dozen miles across an ocean of sand and ends at the Red Sea. Construction workers in hard hats are navigating excavators, dredging land and digging foundations for a power plant, a desalinization plant and a port. The project will eventually include an industrial district, a financial island, a university and a residential area, and is expected to house 2 million people.
Despite mega-projects like this, Saudi Arabia is running a budget surplus. It has paid down much of the foreign debt it accumulated in the late 1990s and is adding to its foreign-exchange reserves.
Russia, the world's No. 2 oil exporter, shows oil's transformational impact in the political as well as the economic realm. When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, less than two years after the collapse of the ruble and Russia's default on its international debt, the country's policymakers worried that 2003 could bring another financial crisis. The country's foreign-debt repayments were scheduled to peak at $17 billion that year.
Inside the Kremlin, with Putin nearing the end of his second and final term as president, that sum now looks like peanuts. Russia's gold and foreign-currency reserves have risen by more than that amount just since July. The soaring price of oil has helped Russia increase the federal budget tenfold since 1999 while paying off its foreign debt and building the third-largest gold and hard-currency reserves in the world, about $425 billion.
"The government is much stronger, much more self-assured and self-confident," said Vladimir Milov, head of the Institute of Energy Policy in Moscow and a former deputy minister of energy. "It believes it can cope with any economic crisis at home."
With good reason. Using energy revenue, the government has built up a $150 billion rainy-day account called the Stabilization Fund.
"This financial independence has contributed to more assertive actions by Russia in the international arena," Milov said. "There is a strong drive within part of the elite to show that we are off our knees."
The result: Russia is trying to reclaim former Soviet republics as part of its sphere of influence. Freed of the need to curry favor with foreign oil companies and Western bankers, Russia can resist what it views as American expansionism, particularly regarding NATO enlargement and U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe, and forge an independent approach to contentious issues like Iran's nuclear program.
The abundance of petrodollars has also led to a consumer boom evident in the sprawling malls, 24-hour hyper-markets, new apartment and office buildings, and foreign cars that have become commonplace not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg but in provincial cities. Average income has doubled under Putin, and the number of people living below the poverty line has been cut in half.
But many economists have called petroleum reserves a bane, saying they enable oil-rich countries to avoid taking steps that would diversify their economies and spread wealth more equally. Russia, for example, has rising inflation, soaring imports and a lack of new investment in the very industry that is fueling the boom.
'Our Oil Wealth Is a Curse'The problems are worse in Nigeria, which is battling an insurgency that has curtailed output in the oil-rich Niger River Delta. The central government has been disbursing its remaining oil revenue, though corruption has undermined the program's effectiveness. The government has also cut domestic gas subsidies, raising prices several times over in the name of improving health, education and infrastructure.
"Our oil wealth is a curse rather than a blessing for our country," said Halima Dahiru, a 36-year-old housewife, as she waited for a bus near a Texaco station in Kano, the commercial capital of northern Nigeria. Billows of dust enveloped the gas station as vehicles frenetically cruised along the laterite-covered road, adding to the harmattan haze that blankets the city.
"You go to bed and wake up the next morning to hear the government has increased the price of petrol, and you have to live with it," she said. "The only sensible thing to do is to adjust to the new reality because nothing will make the government listen to public outcry."
Newly oil-exporting countries such as Sudan and Chad and the companies operating there -- including Malaysia's Petronas and France's Total -- are winners. Sudan's capital, Khartoum, is booming, with new skyscrapers and five-star luxury hotels, despite U.S. and European sanctions aimed at pressuring the country to halt attacks against people in the western Darfur region.
Chad's government has used some of its oil revenue to buy weapons rather than develop the country's economy. In eastern Chad, there are hardly any gas stations; people buy their gas -- often for motorcycles, not cars -- from roadside stands that sell it out of glass bottles.
Oil-importing countries face their own challenges. The hardest hit are the poorest. Last year, Senegal's budget deficit doubled, inflation quickened and growth slowed. The cash-strapped state-owned petrochemical business had to shut down for long periods.
In China, the government increased domestic pump prices on Oct. 31 by nearly 10 percent with shortages, rationing and long lines throughout the country. Violence broke out at some gas stations, including an incident last week in Henan province in which one man killed another who had chastised him for jumping to the front of a line for gas.
A scarcity of diesel fuel even hit China's richest cities -- Beijing, Shanghai and trading ports on the east coast -- which in the past have been kept well supplied. In Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai, the wait at some gas stations this week was more than three hours, and lines stretched more than 200 yards.
Rumors circulated that gas stations or the government was hoarding fuel in anticipation of further price increases, prompting the official New China News Agency to warn that anyone caught spreading rumors about fuel-price increases will be "severely punished."
Li Leijun, 37, a taxi driver, said he was so angry that he was unable to buy fuel that he argued with gas station attendants and called the police. "I still didn't get any diesel," he said.
Since shedding orthodox Maoist economic policies, China's leaders have unleashed decades of pent-up demand. China consumes 9 percent of world oil output, up from 6.4 percent five years ago, according to the International Energy Agency. Yet it still subsidizes fuel. As a result, consumption this decade has skyrocketed at an 8.7 percent annual rate despite soaring prices and concerns about the environmental impact of profligate fuel use.
Consumption in South Africa is also defying high prices as long-impoverished blacks join the middle and upper classes. Cars are a status symbol, and gasoline consumption jumped 39 percent in the decade after the end of apartheid in 1994. New-vehicle sales last year rose 15.7 percent over 2005.
Highly developed consumer nations have been better able to adapt. In Japan, which relies on imports for nearly 100 percent of its fuel, nearly everyone is a loser -- with the big exception of Toyota.
Yet Japan has been weaning itself off oil for years. It now imports 16 percent less oil than it did in 1973, although the economy has more than doubled. Billions of dollars were invested to convert oil-reliant electricity-generation systems into ones powered by natural gas, coal, nuclear energy or alternative fuels. Japan accounts for 48 percent of the globe's solar-power generation -- compared with 15 percent in the United States. The adoption rate for fluorescent light bulbs is 80 percent, compared with 6 percent in the United States.
Still, rising fuel prices are pushing up the prices of raw and industrial materials, as well as food, which relies on fertilizers and transportation. Because of rising wheat prices, Nissin Food Products, the instant-noodle industry leader, will increase prices 7 to 11 percent in January, the first price hike in 17 years.
Greasing Toyota's GearsA winner is Toyota. Soaring gasoline prices have buffed the image of the hybrid Prius and Toyota's other fuel-efficient models, such as the Camry and Corolla. Although stagnant in Japan, sales were strong in North America, Europe, Asia and emerging markets. In October, Prius sales stood at 13,158 vehicles, up 51 percent from 8,733 in October last year. Worldwide, the number of hybrid cars sold by Toyota surpassed 1 million in May.
Britain's national average gasoline price topped 1 pound per liter, or about $8 a gallon, for the first time this week because of record oil prices.
"But there is very little publicity about it -- you don't see many headlines saying, 'Oil at all-time record high,' " said Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a published by the Energy Institute in London. "It's different from the United States. Here, everyone has just accepted that it is expensive."
While British drivers are feeling the pinch, the government is gaining revenue, Skrebowski said, because about 80 percent of the cost of gas is tax. Because Britain produces almost all the oil it consumes, its economy has been cushioned against increasing oil prices, Skrebowski said.
But Britain's North Sea oil production is dwindling, having peaked in 1999 at 2.6 million barrels per day. Today, production is 1.4 million to 1.6 million barrels per day, Skrebowski said, while domestic oil consumption is about 1.7 million barrels a day. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took office in June, has made energy independence a priority.
Meanwhile, analysts said, Europeans buying oil priced in dollars are finding the rising prices somewhat cushioned by the strength of their currency. The value of the dollar has been sliding to record lows against the euro and the British pound.
Argentina has tried to keep fuel prices for consumers at artificially low levels.
President N¿stor Kirchner in recent years has leaned heavily on energy companies to keep prices down, going so far as to call for a public boycott of Royal Dutch Shell when the company raised pump prices. Individual suppliers -- wary of attracting the ire of the government -- have adopted a policy of raising prices gradually and by small amounts.
As the market pressures have mounted, Kirchner has signed a series of agreements with Venezuelan President Hugo Ch¿vez. This year, the two created a project called Petrosuramerica, a joint venture designed to promote cooperative energy projects and provide energy security to Argentina.
In Brazil, the region's largest economy, high oil prices have had a different political effect. Last year, the country became a net oil exporter, thanks to major increases in domestic oil exploration and the country's broad use of sugar-based ethanol as a transport fuel.
But new oil wealth can trickle away even more easily than it comes. Last month, Standard & Poor's downgraded Kazakhstan's credit rating after the country's banks lost billions on purchases of subprime mortgages.
Correspondents Peter Finn in Moscow, Blaine Harden in Tokyo, Ariana Eunjung Cha in Shanghai, Kevin Sullivan in London, Craig Timberg in Johannesburg, Stephanie McCrummen in Nairobi, Monte Reel in Buenos Aires and Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, and special correspondents Aminu Abubakar in Kano, Nigeria, and Alia Ibrahim in Beirut contributed to this report.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
The Cancer From Within
by David Antoon
“I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. ...”
—Oath of Office
“Our mission is to educate, train, and inspire men and women to become officers of character motivated to lead the United States Air Force in service to our nation.”
—Air Force Academy mission statement
“We will not lie, steal, or cheat. ...”
—Air Force Academy honor code
“Military professionals must remember that religious choice is a matter of individual conscience. Professionals, and especially commanders, must not take it upon themselves to change or coercively influence the religious views of subordinates.”
—Religious Toleration (Air Force Code of Ethics, 1997)
Forty-two years ago, at the age of 18, I took the oath of office on my first day as an Air Force Academy cadet. The mission of the academy was not only to train future leaders for the Air Force but for America as well, because, in the end, most academy graduates do not serve full military careers. The honor code became an integral part of everyday life. These are the values that I, and most graduates of the 1960s and early ’70s, took with us from our four years at the academy.
I, as did many graduates, underwent pilot training followed by tours of duty in Vietnam. Like military men and women of today, we did our best to become technically competent and professional leaders. Never, during my four years at the academy and subsequent pilot and combat training, was the word warrior used; nor, whether as a cadet or officer, did I ever encounter “Christian supremacist” rhetoric.
In April of 2004, my son, after receiving a coveted appointment to the United States Air Force Academy, asked me to accompany him to the orientation for new appointees. This 24-hour visceral event changed my life forever, and crushed my son’s lifelong dream of following in my footsteps.
The orientation began with a one-hour “warrior” rant to appointees and parents by the commandant of cadets, Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida. The fact that the word warrior had replaced leadership was a signal of what was to follow. I later learned that cadets, to determine when a new record was established, had created a game in which warrior was counted in each speech Weida gave.
My son and I then made our way to the modernist aluminum chapel, where I expected to hear a welcome from one or two Air Force chaplains offering counsel, support and an open-door policy for any spiritual or pastoral needs of these future cadets. In 1966, the academy had six gray-haired chaplains: three mainline Protestants, two priests and one rabbi. Any cadet, regardless of religious affiliation, was welcome to see any one of these chaplains, who were reminiscent of Father Francis Mulcahy of “MASH” fame.
Instead, my son’s orientation became an opportunity for the academy to aggressively proselytize this next crop of cadets. Maj. Warren Watties led a group of 10 young, exclusively evangelical chaplains who stood shoulder to shoulder. He proudly stated that half of the cadets attended Bible studies on Monday nights in the dormitories and he hoped to increase this number from those in his audience who were about to join their ranks. This “invitation” was followed with hallelujahs and amens by the evangelical clergy. I later learned from Air Force Academy chaplain MeLinda Morton, a Lutheran who was forced to observe from the choir loft, that no priest, rabbi or mainline Protestant had been permitted to participate.
I no longer recognize the Air Force Academy as the institution I attended almost four decades earlier. At that point, I had no idea how invasive this extreme evangelical “cancer” had become throughout the entire military, that what I had witnessed was far from an isolated case of a few religious zealots.
In order to better understand this shift to a religious ideology at this once secular institution, I called the Academy Association of Graduates (AOG). Its response: “We don’t get involved in policy.” What I didn’t know was that the AOG, like the academy, had affiliations with James Dobson’s and Ted Haggard’s powerful mega-churches. When Dobson’s Focus on the Family “campus” was completed, the academy skydiving team, with great ceremony, delivered the “keys from heaven” to Dobson. During some alumni reunions, the AOG arranged bus tours of Focus on the Family facilities in nearby Colorado Springs, Colo. I also learned that the same Monday night Bible studies discussed at orientation were taught by bused-in members of these evangelical mega-churches and that some spouses of senior academy staff members were employed by these same religious institutions. It seemed that my beloved United States Air Force Academy had morphed into the Rocky Mountain Bible College.
The academy chaplain staff had grown 300 percent while the cadet population had decreased by 25 percent: from six mainline chaplains to 18 chaplains, the additional 12 all evangelical. The academy even gained 25 reserve chaplains, also nonexistent in earlier times, for a total of 43 chaplains for about 4,000 cadets, or one chaplain for every 100 cadets.
In the following weeks, a uniformed Army Maj. Gen. William Boykin began sharing his Christian supremacist views from church pulpits around the country, declaring that he was “God’s Warrior” and that “America is a Christian nation.” He demeaned the entire Muslim world by stating that his God was bigger than a Muslim warlord’s god and that the Muslim’s god “was an idol.” He received little more than a token slap on the wrist. At the time, Joseph Schmitz, then the Department of Defense inspector general (Schmitz is currently the chief operating officer of Blackwater International), found that Boykin had committed no ethics violations.
Days later, the May 10 edition of The New Yorker featured the Abu Ghraib torture article by Seymour Hersh, who more than three decades earlier had brought us the story of My Lai.
As a late critic of the Vietnam War, in which I lost many high school and academy classmates, I was skeptical and critical of the drum beat for war orchestrated by the Bush administration. When then-Secretary of State Colin Powell again sold his soul in front of the United Nations and the world, the die was cast. I say again because as a major on his second tour in Vietnam, Powell whitewashed reports of the My Lai massacre and attempted to discredit and silence those few, most notably Ron Ridenhour, who had the courage to get the story into Hersh’s hands.
These were some of my thoughts on the day my son had to decide whether or not to accept his appointment to the Air Force Academy. It was a time in my life when fatherhood and truth were confronted with faux nationalism. With tremendous courage and sadness my son declined his appointment and ended his dream—and my dream for him—to attend the Air Force Academy. Though deeply saddened, we were not sorry.
In what would have been my son’s academy summer encampment, chaplain Watties “suggested” that cadets return to their tents and tell their tent mates they would “burn in hell” if they did not receive Jesus as their savior. At the same time, the academy commandant, Weida, made a habit of including biblical passages in official e-mails and correspondence to subordinates and cadets. He had developed a secret “chant and response” with the cadets: When he yelled “Airpower,” the evangelical cadets in the know would respond “Rock, sir” in reference to the Bible story that Jesus built his house upon a rock.
Coincidentally, at this time and at the invitation of the academy, the Yale Divinity School was observing the pastoral care program for sexual assault victims at the academy. Under the leadership of professor Kristen Leslie, the Yale team issued a stunning report on the divisive and strident evangelical pressures by leadership and staff at the academy.
The response from academy leaders was telling. They at first denied the reports of Watties’ “hell-fire” threats. Under media pressure, they later claimed the violations were committed by a visiting reserve chaplain, when in fact they were by the recent Air Force Chaplain of the Year himself: Watties. In an interview after receiving his Chaplain of the Year award, Watties boasted of baptizing young soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s swimming pool. It is difficult to think of more inflammatory and Crusader-like behavior in an Arab nation.
In response to the Yale report, the academy demanded that chaplain Morton denounce the report she had co-signed. When she refused, she was transferred to East Asia, ultimately resigning from the Air Force in protest. Morton was the only officer who put her oath of office “to support and defend the Constitution” above careerism.
Then-DoD Inspector General Schmitz, noted for his Christian supremacist rhetoric in the book “Blackwater,” sent a team led by evangelical “born again” Lt. Gen. Roger Brady to investigate the academy. Schmitz had recently found no ethics violations in the actions of Gen. Boykin and allowed Boykin’s promotion to senior military officer in charge of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and “extraordinary rendition.” The “Brady Report” found the academy only to have an “insensitivity” problem. Air Force Academy graduate Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, “silenced” and removed from the major general promotion list, was secretly promoted with back pay the following year at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
Following the release of the “Brady Report,” West Point graduate and Secretary of the Air Force Mike Wynne, ignoring the existing code of ethics, issued another “code of ethics” that allowed evangelical proselytizing. A month later, in an effort to appease the religious right, Wynne issued an even softer “code of ethics.” Amazingly, Wynne’s document is in complete violation of the code of ethics issued in 1997 by Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall prohibiting proselytizing by commanders and other officers.
The pre-existing Air Force code of ethics in The Little Blue Book states:
“Military professionals must remember that religious choice is a matter of individual conscience. Professionals, and especially commanders, must not take it upon themselves to change or coercively influence the religious views of subordinates.”
Here are just a few violations of that principle over the last three years: Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry hung a banner in the team locker room reading: “Competitor’s Creed: I am a Christian first and last. ... I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.” Baseball coach Mike Hutcheon, recruited from evangelical Christian Bethel College, forced players to lead team prayer during practice. When asked about locker room prayer in March 2007, Lt. Gen. John Regni, the academy superintendent, responded “we have chaplains that are attached to each of the teams and they are very important in that area.” In a July 12, 2005 interview with the New York Times, Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson, Air Force deputy chief of chaplains, stated, “...we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched.” For over a decade, the official academy newspaper ran ads stating: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the World. If you would like to discuss Jesus, feel free to contact one of us! There is salvation in no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” The ads were signed by 16 department heads, nine permanent professors, both the incoming and outgoing deans of faculty, the athletic director and more than 200 academy senior officers and their spouses.
Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, in just a few short years has received complaints from more than 6,000 service members and discovered church-state violations at the academies, at military installations in Iraq and around the world, and even within the inner corridors of the Pentagon.
In 2005, when Weinstein filed suit against the Air Force for constitutional violations of church-state separation, the House of Representatives, with little public notice, passed a chilling bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act, H.R. 2679, provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions that violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorney’s fees. According to The Washington Post, the purpose of this bill is to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion.
In December 2006, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation brought media focus to the Christian Embassy Evangelical Organization and its now famous video, which clearly showed the egregious ethics and constitutional violations of several flag officers and the breadth of the problem. Air Force Academy graduate Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, who suggested in the film that his religious beliefs trump country and his oath to the Constitution, was cited last year for sending e-mails to military subordinates and contractors advocating they vote for a particular candidate for Congress, arguing that there are “not enough Christians in Congress.” West Point graduate and Army Brig. Gen. Robert Caslen, who was filmed stating “We are the aroma of Jesus Christ here in the Pentagon,” is now commandant of cadets at West Point. West Point graduate Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, another Christian Embassy star, was the “voice” and “face” of the press conferences at Qatar. His office is famous for the creation of the “Rambo” Jessica Lynch fabrications and the manipulation of the killing of Pat Tillman into a recruiting and media event. West Point graduate and evangelical Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, involved in the investigation of Tillman’s death, stated publicly that Pat Tillman’s family was not at peace with his death because they are atheists who believe their son is now “worm dirt.” Air Force Academy graduate Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, assigned as the senior U.S. military officer in Turkey at the time the Military Religious Freedom Foundation brought the Christian Embassy into media focus, was questioned by Turkish officials about his membership in a radical evangelical cult.
Many are aware of the mercenary army, Blackwater USA, led by Eric Prince, former Ambassador Cofer Black and Joseph Schmitz, the same Joseph Schmitz mentioned above. It is here where the ties become complex and suggestive of an even grander “crusade.”
As described by Jeremy Scahill in his book “Blackwater,” Prince, who attended the U.S. Naval Academy, comes from a wealthy theo-con family, is a “neo-crusader,” and a Christian supremacist. He has been given billions of dollars in federal contracts to create a private army. COO Schmitz, another Naval Academy graduate, is a member of the Order of Malta, a Christian supremacist organization dating back to the Crusades, and happens to be married to the sister of Jeb Bush’s wife, Columba. And Cofer Black, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department and former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who was quoted by the BBC as saying “Capture Bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box on dry ice,” brings his own skill set to the Blackwater team as vice chairman.
The Christian supremacist fascism first reported at the Air Force Academy is endemic throughout the military. From the top down, there has been a complete repudiation of constitutional values and time-honored codes of ethics and honor codes in favor of religious ideology. And we now have a revolving door between Blackwater USA, which is Bush’s Praetorian Guard, and the U.S. military at every level. The citizen-soldier military dictated by our founding fathers has been replaced with professional and mercenary right-wing Christian crusaders in control of the world’s most powerful military. The risks to our democratic form of government cannot be overstated.
This evangelical Christian supremacist fascism within our military and government is a cancer. Officers, especially commanders, who violate the original code of ethics, must be rooted out of the military. The undermining of the Constitution, especially by senior military officers, must end.
As I look back at my 30 years as an active-duty officer, two combat tours in Vietnam, decorations including air medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross, I realize that not once was my service in support or defense of the Constitution. For the very first time, I am upholding my oath of office.
FBI's Latest Outreach Outrage
by Steven Emerson
IPT NEWS
Much has been written about the U.S. government's current bout of schizophrenia in its outreach to the American Muslim community, specifically related to the Department of Justice. While federal prosecutors in Dallas have labeled several Islamist organizations as unindicted co-conspirators – describing them as front groups for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood - in the terrorist financing trial against the Holy Land for Relief and Development (HLF), the FBI is meeting with the very same groups to hold outreach events and the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ is setting up booths at their conferences.
As wrongheaded and shortsighted as these policies are, they do not hold a candle to a recent outreach event held by the FBI's Detroit field office at the end of last month. As reported in the Detroit Free Press (see: Detroit's FBI chief: Violence extremism cuts across religions), two top FBI officials from that office "spoke to about 50 Muslims inside the Islamic Organization of North America, or Tanzeem-e-Islami." The Free Press described the organization as merely "a Sunni mosque with a primarily Pakistani congregation" and tells us that the meeting was nothing more than "part of an effort by the FBI to reach out to Muslims and other communities."
While outreach to the Muslim community remains an important endeavor, officials at the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have become far less discerning in determining who the gatekeepers and spokesmen for the American Muslim community should be.
 Israr Ahmad | |
The secret Israeli service Musad [sic] orchestrated these terrorist attacks ... [which] are a vital link in the chain of events that the Jews are undertaking to fulfill their dream of world domination.
It turns out that Dr. Ahmad is a rather prolific writer on such topics, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories permeate his writing. Canada's National Post reported in 2006 that, according to Ahmad:
Islam's renaissance will begin in Pakistan … because the Arab world is living under subjugation. Only the Pakistan region "has the potential for standing up against the nefarious designs of the global power-brokers and to resist the rising tides of the Jewish/Zionist hegemony."
And that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Ahmad's opinions about Jews. Also reported in the National Post:
Another of his books repeats the Jewish conspiracy theories popular among neo-Nazis, claiming that Jews have "a deeply ingrained tendency to conspire and to maneuver things surreptitiously for their own gain."
The Jews exert a "wicked web of control and exploitation" through their ownership of banks, insurance companies and stock exchanges, he claims.
He compares Jews to parasites, calls the Holocaust "Divine punishment" and foresees the "total extermination" of Jews at the hands of Muslims.
Ahmad lives in Pakistan and didn't attend the meeting. But what's the best that can be said about the FBI, whose officials meet with members of a group founded by such a hate-filled man?
Ahmad's views are not limited to anti-Jewish rhetoric. He's also a leading advocate of Islamic supremacy and the revival of the Caliphate. A simple trip to the Islamic Organization of North America's website would have led the FBI to articles calling for this. Some of the links are now defunct (perhaps due to bad press from the National Post), but their content can be judged clearly by their titles. According to the National Post, the Tanzeem-e-Islami's "goal is to establish the system of social justice of the Caliphate [Islamic state] firstly in Pakistan and then in the whole world," and that Ahmad's "ideal state" would include the following three principles:
"(1) Sovereignty belongs to Almighty Allah alone; (2) No legislation can be done at any level that is totally or partially repugnant to Koran and Sunnah, and; (3) Full citizenship of the state is for the Muslims only."
And Dr. Ahmad is not shy about his objective. An official bio states:
For the last forty years or so, Dr. Israr Ahmad has been actively engaged not only in reviving the Qur'an-centered Islamic perennial philosophy and world-view but also reforming the society in a practical way with the ultimate objective of establishing a true Islamic State, or the System of Khilafah.
And Tanzeem extremism is not an abstract threat. There are real time examples on North American soil. Just last month, the New York Times reported on an Islamic extremist in North Carolina, 21-year old Samir Khan, in an article titled, "An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers." As reported in the Times, before hooking up with Tanzeem, Khan:
[m]irrored his teenage peers, from their slang to their baggy pants, until August 2001 when, at age 15, he said, he attended a weeklong summer camp at a mosque in Queens, which was sponsored by a fundamentalist but nonviolent group now known as the Islamic Organization of North America (IONA).
"They were teaching things about religion and brotherhood that captivated me," Mr. Khan said. He said he went back to school knowing "what I wanted to do with my life: be a firm Muslim, a strong Muslim, a practicing Muslim."
And now Khan is a leading jihadi webmaster. And Dr. Ahmad would be proud of Khan, as Ahmad himself came to the United States to spread his radical version of Islam, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) in 1995 – the same group that's listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF Hamas fundraising trial, and whose 2007 convention in Illinois included a booth sponsored by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
At the 1995 conference, Ahmad reportedly told the audience, "The process of the revival of Islam in different parts of the world is real. A final showdown between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world, which has been captured by the Jews, would soon take place. The Gulf War was just a rehearsal for the coming conflict." Ahmad said that all Muslims, including those in the room and the rest of the American Muslim community, should be ready for just such a battle.
Tanzeem-e-Islami member and student of Ahmad, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, was the "prayer leader" at the Al-Rahman Islamic Center and alleged spiritual leader of a 17-member cell that purchased three tons of ammonium nitrate to bomb several targets in Ontario including the parliament building in Ottawa, and the CN Tower and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service offices in Toronto. The arrests of Abdul Jamal and his followers were a part of a series of raids in Europe and North America – that began in Bosnia with the arrest of a two-man cell charged in a plot to attack the British embassy in Sarajevo – all connected to a worldwide Internet terrorism network with links to al Qaeda in Iraq, among other terrorist elements.
Tanzeem-e-Islami members have also partnered with the Muslim Brotherhood front group, the Muslim American Society (MAS), whose President was forced to resign in September from his appointment on the Virginia's Commission of Immigration, when his radical speeches were posted on the Internet. The groups issued a joint press release in 2004 discussing their "unity of purpose." As further evidence of their cooperation, recently, both groups became members of an outfit calling itself the Northern California Islamic Council.
Exacerbating this abject ignorance of some FBI officials are the remarks by Special Agent in Charge Andrew Arena to Tanzeem-e-Islami members describing the dangers of extremists in every religion. According to the Free Press, Arena told the assembled audience, "There are plenty of people out there in my faith, the Christian faith, who use these extremist views to support their thoughts on racial superiority, be it the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Aryan Nation, all these people, these groups...they're all based on a religious view." So aside from providing an Islamic supremacist sect with more ammunition to justify its own anti-Western views, what exactly is Arena hoping to accomplish with his meeting?
Ironically, Agent Arena could not have been more oblivious to the nature of the group he was addressing. The same story states, "Arena said after the meeting that in ‘every religion, you have individuals who try to hijack the faith...the Muslim faith, the Jewish faith, the Christian faith.'" In case the examples of Ahmad's hatred and Islamic supremacy listed above are not enough to convince Agent Arena just who the hijackers in this scenario are, here are some more of Dr. Ahmad's religious stylings:
In an article titled, "Why Israel Is Unacceptable," Ahmad refers to Israel as a disease, asserting:
Pakistan was born nine months earlier than Israel. In my opinion this was not a coincidence. For, in accordance with a saying of the Prophet (SAW) - "Allah (SWT) has not created a disease without creating its cure" - Pakistan was created as an "antidote" to the state of Israel and will face up Israel in the final confrontation of Truth and falsehood.
And he engages in more of his trademark, virulent anti-Semitism, writing:
It is a historical fact that Jews have always exploited their friends and allies to their own advantage.
Dr. Ahmad delves further into Nazi rhetoric, informing his readers that:
[t]he Jews have exploited the Protestants to accomplish most of their ill-conceived objectives, such as: the promotion of secularism and the establishment of interest-based banking system. The banking system was used as a bait to clutch the whole of Christian world into the jaws of interest-based lending and, thus, into perpetual debt.
And, unsurprisingly, he views the Arab-Israeli conflict through a, some may say, "hijacked" religious lens:
We need to understand that the conflict over Palestine is not between the Arabs and Israel, instead, it is between Muslims and Jews.
Lest FBI officials claim that the members of Tanzeem-e-Islami should not be held responsible for the hate-filled rantings of its leader, a Tanzeem-e-Islami publication calling for the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate titled, "Why Tanzeem-e-Islami?" (published in Flushing NY in 1997), has a page for a signed "Oath of Allegiance For Joining Tanzeem-e-Islami" which includes a "pledge to Dr. Israr Ahmad, Ameer of Tanzeem-e-Islami."
It seems obvious that many government officials are hardly discerning when it comes to decisions regarding Muslim outreach and partnership programs. After all, headquarters-directed FBI outreach policies, of which this incident is symptomatic, require routine meetings and cooperation with members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and ISNA. Even so, the Detroit field office's meeting with a Tanzeem-e-Islami chapter stands out as highly dubious, given its founders' unapologetic brand of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.
Meeting with organizations such as the Islamic Organization of North America accrues no benefits to the FBI and only serves to empower extremists such as Ahmad in his quest to spread his puritanical, hateful, and intolerant ideology. These FBI outreach policies imposed by headquarters are undermining our national security by reaching out to radicals in our midst.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Putin warns of outside forces that wish to split Russia and take over its natural resources
AP
MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin said Sunday that there are people in the world who wish to split up Russia and take over its vast natural resources, and others who would like to "rule over all mankind," a veiled reference to the United States.
Speaking in front of Moscow's iconic St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, Putin told a group of military cadets and youth group members that while "an overwhelming majority of people in the world" are friendly toward Russia, there are some who "keep saying to this day that our nation should be split."
"Some believe that we are too lucky to possess so much natural wealth, which they say must be divided," Putin said, speaking on National Unity Day. "These people have lost their mind," he added with a smile.
Many Russians fear that their country's rapidly declining population and enormous natural wealth could one day leave it vulnerable to outside predators.
But the theme of invasion was central to Sunday's holiday, which Putin created by decree in 2005 to commemorate the defense of Russia from a Polish-Lithuanian incursion in the beginning of the 17th century.
Putin on Sunday referred to the battle as a turning point in Russia's history that united the nation.
Not missing a chance to take a shot at the United States, Putin said there are people who "would like to build a unipolar world and rule over all of mankind." He counted them as among the minority in the world who do not maintain a "friendly attitude" toward Russia.
He said any attempt to establish a unipolar world was doomed to fail.
"Nothing of this kind has ever occurred in our planet's history, and I don't think it will ever happen," the president said.
Putin has been highly critical of the United States for the invasion of Iraq and opposes its plans to build a limited missile shield in central Europe.
Concern about outside forces wanting the division of Russia arose last month during Putin's three-hour nationally televised call-in show.
A Siberian worker asked Putin about comments he said were made years ago by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suggesting that Siberia had too many natural resources for one country.
"I know that some politicians play with such ideas in their heads," Putin replied, adding that such talk was "political erotica."
Putin, whose two-term presidency ends next year, said Russia will continue playing an active role in foreign policy and there are many people who look to Russia as a defender of small nations' rights and interests.
Intended to invoke patriotism, National United Day has been hijacked by extreme nationalist groups that call for ridding Russia of foreigners and returning the pre-communist monarchy.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
FBI Knew of O.J. Simpson Plan in Advance
FBI Learned in Advance of O.J. Simpson's Plan to Retrieve Personal Items
by Linda Deutsh and Ken Ritter
AP
LOS ANGELES
Federal agents learned three weeks in advance that O.J. Simpson and a memorabilia dealer planned an operation to retrieve personal items Simpson said were stolen from him, according to FBI reports obtained Friday by The Associated Press.
Dealer Thomas Riccio said he reported to the FBI on Aug. 21 that a collector claimed to have belongings taken from Simpson, and that Simpson wanted to videotape the confrontation with the person peddling thousands of pieces of his memorabilia.
Riccio told AP that he raised the subject while talking with the FBI about an unrelated subject: a video of Anna Nicole Smith. But he said agents dismissed his report, telling him "they didn't want to be involved in another weirsd celebrity case."
"The guy flat-out told me he had items stolen from O.J.'s house," Riccio told the AP. "I have a legitimate business."
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said Riccio did not indicate a crime would be committed.
Riccio was advised to contact a lawyer before taking any action and was told that alerting the FBI would not absolve him of any potential crime, agent Linda Kline wrote of the meeting, which occurred in Los Angeles.
He was not clear how the operation would unfold. There was no mention in the report of any plans to use guns.
"I went along with O.J.'s plan," Riccio said. "It was a self-organized sting operation. Except for the final result, with him bringing people who had guns. I knew nothing about that."
Simpson, 60, and five other men were arrested after they allegedly stormed a Las Vegas hotel room with guns drawn Sept. 13 to seize items that were believed to include family photos and the suit Simpson wore the day he was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend.
Las Vegas police said the FBI did not alert them before the confrontation between Simpson and collectors Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong.
"They contacted us afterward and provided us with the documentation," said Las Vegas Police Detective Andy Caldwell, the investigator handling the case.
Caldwell said he had no information about any FBI investigation into the incident.
Riccio, who had previously sold Anna Nicole Smith's diary, said he spoke for an hour with FBI agents about a video he obtained from a doctor who recorded Smith's 1994 breast implant surgery. A Texas doctor claimed in June he gave Riccio permission to use the video after Smith died. A judge has barred release of those videos in an unrelated case.
After discussing Smith, FBI agents gave Riccio about 15 minutes to discuss Simpson, but they expressed little interfest, he said.
Riccio said he contacted the Los Angeles Police Department, where he said he was switched from department to department before finally being told to file a civil complaint.
"No one seemed to be concerned about it," Riccio said.
An LAPD spokesman declined to comment on Riccio's account.
Simpson is charged with an assortment of felonies including armed robbery and kidnapping. Three of his co-defendants have since pleaded guilty to lesser charges and said they would testify against Simpson. A preliminary hearing is scheduled next week in Las Vegas.
The FBI reports, written Aug. 21 and Sept. 19, said Riccio told agents he had been approached by Beardsley, who wanted to sell thousands of Simpson items.
The documents said Riccio described Beardsley as a fanatic and said Riccio contacted Simpson about the items. Simpson said his belongings were stolen from his Florida house by his former agent, Mike Gilbert, and others who had worked for him. A call to Gilbert Friday seeking comment was not immediately returned.
"Riccio and Simpson want to do a television broadcast confronting Beardsley regarding the items that were stolen," one report said. "Simpson wanted Riccio's assistance in setting up the operation and helping obtain interviews for Simpson through various media outlets after the fact."
Beardsley told police he had been robbed by Simpson and a group of men wielding guns. Simpson has denied there were any guns involved. He said Riccio set up the meeting and he planned to surprise Beardsley and retrieve his property.
Simpson told the AP he went to the hotel room after being alerted by Riccio that Beardsley and another collectibles dealer, Fromong, were trying to sell his possessions. Simpson knew both dealers.
Riccio has released a tape recording he made of the incident and been granted immunity by prosecutors.
Associated Press Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch reported from Los Angeles. AP writer Ken Ritter reported from Las Vegas.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Oregon ‘Peace’ Group to Mark Kristallnacht with Holocaust Denial Conference
Here's another story concerning what appears to be a trend: purported "peace activists" promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In this case, a University of Oregon peace organization called Pacifica Forum, which was founded and is led by a retired professor and a retired administrator from that university, is marking Kristallnacht with two days of speeches and conferences this weekend conducted by Mark Weber director of the Holocaust denial group Institute for Historical Review. Weber, the former editor of the National Vanguard, the main publication of the neo-Nazi National Alliance Party, has spent the past 30 years as a professional advocate of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. His opening lecture on Friday is entitled: "Free Speech vs. Zionist Power". Advertisements for the event feature the image of a snake in the shape of a Star of David with the legend "The Israel Lobby: How Powerful Is It?" November 9 marks the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which is considered by many historians to be the beginning of the Holocaust. (Pacifica Forum schedule available here.)
In 2006, the Pacifica Forum sponsored multiple talks by Valdas Anelauskas. Anelauskas, who was born in Lithuania, is an author and internet journalist who calls himself a "white separatist and racialist", and has affiliations on both the far left and far right. In an email to a reporter for the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, he stated "I believe people have to live among their own kind ... I feel no supremacy - I just want to be separate and live in my own environment." In October, 2006, Anelauskas gave a lecture on "Zionism and Russia" in which he blamed Jews for the Bolshevik Revolution, calling them "the greatest killing machine in history" and stating that American Jews suppress dissemination of this information through their control of academia and the media. He dedicated this lecture to Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf. (Read here; more here and here).
According to a news report (read here):
During a question-and-answer period, Aviva Sainz called Anelauskas' lecture "anti-Jewish garbage in a tradition that has lasted for centuries." His talk, she told him, "is in the tradition of Hitler's `Mein Kampf.' ""There's a lot of truth in `Mein Kampf,' " Anelauskas responded. Afterward, (Pacifica Forum co-leader Orval) Etter said he was "unable to say" if Anelauskas' lecture could be characterized as anti-Semitic.
Anelauskas is a friend and supporter of Ward Churchill, who assisted Anelauskas with his book Discovering America As It Is. He has endorsed in print Churchill's statement calling 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns", going so far as to use the same phrase with respect to the administration of the University of Oregon when they rescinded an invitation for Churchill to lecture there (read here). [By the way, America As It Is has been endorsed by Howard Zinn, David G. Gil, and Ward Churchill (read here).]
The founders and leaders of Pacifica Forum are Orval Etter and George Beres. Beres, who was the manager of the UO Speakers Bureau and was UO Sports Information Director, has retired from those positions and is currently a columnist for a number of internet publications including Counterpunch and is a member of the Oregon Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East. Just two days ago, a pro-free speech piece he authored was published on the anti-Semitic ziopidia.com. (Read here) In the midst of his piece is a fund raising ad reading:
"Help us increase awareness of Jewish supremacism (sic)and the sick(ening) evilness of Zionism. Donate US$10 US$20 US$50 US$100 US$200 more.... or send us an email [email address deleted] with the details of your pledge."
Beres' Counterpunch writings include one (read here) which, along with some seriously deficient historical background (he writes that Muslim anti-Christianity began in response to the Crusades, ignoring several hundred years of Muslim conquest and oppression of Christians), details some of his reasons for being anti-Israel. He says that he personally feels himself to be a victim of Israel. He says that he is of Greek extraction and grew up with many Arab Eastern Orthodox Christians. "Few in America realizes (sic) how the Eastern Church, along with innocent Muslims, is under attack in Lebanon and Palestine by (a) rare alliance between Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity. I also am a target, and am overdue in speaking out." Just how he has been a target of Judaism, he doesn't make clear.
With respect to Orval Etter, who is a 90 year old emeritus professor of public affairs and administration, the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard reports (read here) that
he organized the forum after he "became convinced that Israel was a very tyrannical state." He said he recalls reading a pamphlet that asserted that "what Israel is doing to Palestine is a holocaust."That same article states that
Pacifica Forum topics (in 2006) included a lecture by Etter on British historian David Irving, a Holocaust denier who in February was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Austria for his views. Critics say they attended another forum that featured a videotape on William Luther Pierce, founder of the National Alliance white separatist group.
It was the lecture on David Irving which first attracted Anelauskas to the group.
I have previously recently written about "9/11 truth" advocates and (alleged) peaceniks in the Aspen, Colorado area promoting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism (read here and here and here and here). I found that story of small-town bigotry shocking, but I consider this one to be more so. While both stories deal with crackpots seeking attention for themselves on the peripheries between far left and far right, the Pacifica Forum story involves academics legitimizing those peripheries by providing the most extreme forms of anti-Semitism and conspiratorial paranoia a forum within a major university (albeit in an unofficial forum). They have done this with the assistance of friends and allies on both the far left and far right and the tacit approval of those who do nothing to oppose them.
My concern with all these stories is that we must not allow racism and anti-Semitism to be legitimized in our public discourse. If we ignore these people because they're crackpots, they may or may not just go away, but the ideas they promote won't. We must expose them and counter their lies forcefully with the truth.
Thankfully, I am not alone in this thinking. According to the Register-Guard:
Local critics affiliated with Community Alliance of Lane County have scheduled a free speech vigil to be held just outside the UO hall where Weber will speak. “We are operating under the theory that the best response to hate speech is more speech,” volunteer Michael Williams said. “We want an opportunity for the community to show its opposition to the kinds of things that Mark Weber stands for.”Now that's sound thinking.
Williams said opponents don’t plan to shout slogans or prevent people from hearing Weber’s talk. “We will have a presence that is unavoidable but not obstructionist.”
David Frank, a professor in the Honors College at the UO, said he and two faculty members are planning a Holocaust symposium in response to Weber’s talk.
Weber “has the right to come to campus and make preposterous statements,” Frank said. “But we have a responsibility as scholars to demonstrate the expertise and research that shows his claims are not only false but dangerous.”
Read more about this story here: Foes target Pacifica Forum: The Register-Guard, Eugene, Ore.
Institute for Historical Research promos for the event in pdf here and here [WARNING- HOLOCAUST DENIAL WEBSITE]
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