by Keith Morelli
TAMPA TRIBUNE
TAMPA - Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who remained in a Virginia prison on contempt of court charges despite his acquittal on serious terrorist charges, has lost 32 pounds in a month-long hunger strike, according to an Islamic group's executive director who visited Al-Arian on Monday.
Sami Al-Arian (2002)
Al-Arian is on his second hunger strike to protest his detention. His family last year moved to Egypt and he is expected to be deported as soon as he is released from prison. But his refusal to testify before a federal grand jury is delaying his release.
"I was really shocked to see how skinny he is and how much weight he lost," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "His hunger strike began on March 3, and now he looks like a totally different person from the person I knew five years ago."
Still, Awad said, Al-Arian's spirits are high. "Amazingly, he is composed and he made sense. He was very sharp, very alert.
"He believes in his just cause and we were there to support him," Awad said.
Al-Arian is on his second hunger strike. On March 3, he first refused food and water. He had been taken to a medical facility in North Carolina for treatment but was returned to the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va. He is now taking only liquids and has lost 32 pounds.
"This defies logic," Awad said Monday night. "It violates the spirit of justice that this country is so proud of. We just hope that people of conscience and responsible people in the government will look at this case because it is publicized worldwide."
Visiting Al-Arian were representatives of the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), CAIR, and American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections (AMT).
After the visit, the contingent called on the House Judiciary Committee to intervene in the case.
The former professor was tried in federal court two years ago, and acquitted of many of the more serious charges. The jury deadlocked on nine charges and Al-Arian ended up pleading guilty to lesser counts.
"The last thing you want to see," Awad said, "is a political prisoner dying on hunger strike."
Monday, March 31, 2008
Al-Arian Gets Visitors During Hunger Strike
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Barack Obama - The Wizard of Oz
by Evelyn Pringle
Scoop.co.nz
The most trusted leaders of the Democratic party, such as John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, ought to be ashamed of themselves for supporting Barack Obama. With use of the internet, a fifth grader could connect the dots to show a picture of a guy who was picked up in college and carried up the political ladder by a corrupt gang of influence peddlers.
John McCain is just drooling waiting for Obama to become the nominee so that he can come out with the trail of dirt that the Democratic party is too afraid to reveal this late in the in the game. If nominated, Obama will not survive a month when faced with the Republican attack machine.
If he becomes the nominee, the web of corruption leading to Obama's rise to power that this investigative journalist was able to untangle in less than three weeks, will be front page news right up until election day, handing the Republicans their only chance in hell of winning the White House.
Instead of the leaders of the Democratic party doing their homework, a small group of investigative reporters in Chicago will be credited with exposing the corrupt backbone of Obama political career and the mainstream media need only follow their lead if the Democrats hold him out to be a viable candidate.
The list of reporters deserving of credit for doing the investigative work that should have been done by the leaders of the Democratic party before they got behind Obama, includes, but is not limited to, Chicago Sun-Times reporters, Tim Novak, Dave McKinney, Fran Spielman, Chris Fusco, Natasha Korecki, Steve Warmbir and Lynn Sweet. Chicago Tribune reporters especially deserving of credit include Jeff Coen, Bob Secter, John Chase, Virginia Groark, Rick Pearson, David Jackson, John McCormick, Mickey Ciokajlo, Rudolph Bush and Dan Mihalopoulos.
This article is the first in a series that will give the details of Obama's rise to fame.
As for the most recognized allegation against Obama, that helped slumlords operate in Chicago, while accepting their campaign contributions, its true. Obama was a member of the political machine that helped a whole gang of slumlords funnel local, state and federal tax dollars, over the backs of poor people in need of affordable housing, to line their own pockets and fund the campaigns of politicians in positions to recommend and award contracts.
The Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland law firm, where Obama worked for nearly a decade, served as a hub for a slew of slumlord deals, many that benefited the firm's founder, Allison Davis, and Obama's claims that he knew nothing about the inner workings of this small firm, represent an insult to the intelligence of the American public.
Tony Rezko was Obama political Godfather. Obama received his first contributions of $2,000, to launch his political career as a state senator on July 31, 1995, from Rezko. Obama started out saying that Rezko only raised $50,000 or $60,000 for his political career but after a year of lying his way through the primaries, the latest total he gave to the Sun-Times and Tribune during interviews on March 14, 2008, adds up to $250,000.
For a year, he also minimized his relationship with Rezko by telling the media that he only had dinner or lunch with Rezko one or twice a year. But when confronted by Sun-Times reporters during the March 14 interview, with the allegation that an FBI mole saw him coming and going to Rezko’s office often and that three sources said he talked to Rezko on the phone daily, Obama changed his tune.
Now the story is that he may have talked to Rezko daily at times during campaigns but sometimes he went for a whole month without talking to him. “I have to say we're talking over the course of 10 years,” Obama said, “there might have been spurts where I talked to him daily.”
But then he added: "There might have been stretches over a month where I wouldn't have talked to him at all."
This story is a far cry from the picture Obama gave to the public of him and Rezko meeting once or twice a year, and he never did respond to the allegation by the Times reporter that an FBI mole “saw you coming and going from Rezko’s office a lot.“
Without Rezko's fundraising, Obama would not have been elected to the Illinois senate, or the US Senate, and he would not have sold the books he wrote about himself because like the Wizard of Oz, Obama is nobody special.
Even with Rezko's massive fund raising, Obama could not beat former Black Panther, Bobby Rush, in his 2000 bid for a seat in Congress. And the only reason he won the US Senate race was because his viable opponents had to drop out due to the public airing of personal scandals. Beating Alan Keyes is hardly a victory to brag about.
The media needs to quit grouping all the Obama backers under the name Antoin "Tony" Resko because the list of contributors to his political campaigns includes the names of many individuals and entities with their own agendas.
The trail of corruption involving the people raising money for Obama's political career stretches from the city of Chicago to the Illinois tollway to the O'Hare airport all the way over to Iraq. And testimony in Rezko's corruption trial reveals that an equal number of Democrat and Republican crooks benefited from all the moneymaking schemes.
Rezko is not a Democrat; he's an equal opportunity profiteer. He supported President George Bush and attended a Christmas party at the White House in December 2003, at the same time that he was a top fundraiser for Obama's US Senate campaign.
Rezko co-hosted a $3.8 million Chicago fundraiser for Bush in 2003, and on December 9, 2003, he donated $4,000 to Bush, as a "self-employed businessman," and gave another $2,000 on December 19, 2003, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Prior to backing Rod Blagojevich for governor of Illinois, Rezko threw his money behind Republican candidates for governor, including George Ryan, who was convicted of doling out leases and contracts to cronies and sentenced to prison for more than 6 years.
Rezko then switched horses and chose Blagojevich in 2002 and Obama has supported Blagojevich, even when his administration was embroiled in corruption investigations.
Recent testimony in the Rezko trial by his co-conspirator, Chicago businessman, Stuart Levine, explained that Rezko had plans for Blagojevich to be Presidential, not Obama. However, anybody following the trial knows that Blagojevich is more likely to be headed to the "Big House" rather than occupying the White House.
Obama's entering into real estate deals with Rezko, while it was public knowledge that he was under investigation for funneling illegal contributions to Illinois politicians, was not a "boneheaded" move, it was motivated by pure greed. While knowing that he would get caught up in a major scandal, Obama went ahead with the deal because he and his wife wanted that mansion, with four fireplaces, six bathrooms, and a wine cellar, period.
On March 16, 2008, the Boston Globe added an interesting twist to the story when reporting that Donna Schwan, of MetroPro Realty, which listed the mansion and lot next door for the owners, "said it is her recollection that the Obamas may not have made the highest bid, and that other bidders may have matched Rezko's bid," but the willingness of both buyers to close in June 2005, "was decisive."
Which logically means had Rezko not been willing to buy the lot in June, the deal was off.
According to an article by Edward McClelland in the February 1, 2008 Salon Magazine, when asked who approached her about the house, Donna Schwan told Salon, "I honestly don't remember. Tony Rezko lived across the street, so he'd been interested in the lot."
Any claim that Obama was unaware of the investigations into the corrupt dealings of Rezko with Illinois politicians in June 2005 is ridiculous. On February 15, 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported:
"Gov. Rod Blagojevich long has vowed to purge the Illinois tollway of cronyism, yet two of his closest friends and political advisers have links to food vendors awarded lucrative contracts to operate inside the toll road's sleek new oases, government records show."
"The Subway sandwich shops and Panda Express Asian restaurants now being installed in the tollway's seven revamped rest stops are controlled by firms with strong ties to the food-service empire of Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a Blagojevich confidant who has seeded the governor's cabinet with former business underlings."
Christopher Kelly, Blagojevich's chief fundraiser, "who also recommended the tollway's executive director for his job, is an investor in at least one Rezko-controlled food firm," the Tribune wrote. On March 16, 2005, the Tribune reported that:
"City officials alleged Tuesday that a minority contractor at O'Hare International Airport acted as a front for a firm run by Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a top adviser and fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich....
"Rezko, a member of Blagojevich's kitchen cabinet of advisers, has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks following questions about his links to operators of new tollway oasis franchises. The revamp of the oases is a showcase project for the Blagojevich administration."
On May 15, 2005, the Sun-Times reported that the accusations by his father-in-law that Blagojevich doled out jobs for campaign contributions had "resulted in dozens of grand jury subpoenas being sent to the governor's office, his unpaid advisers, agency directors and his top fund-raisers".
Among those subpoenaed for documents, sources told the Times, were "Blagojevich's biggest money men, Christopher Kelly and Antoin "Tony" Rezko."
On May 20, 2005, less than a month before Obama bought the mansion, the Tribune reported that Resko, "has had a business relationship with First Lady Patti Blagojevich for eight years, the governor's office acknowledged Thursday."
Six month before Obama bought the strip of land from Rezko's "wife" to enlarge his yard, on August 28, 2005, Natasha Korecki reported in the Sun-Times that, "there's so much corruption to investigate in the Chicago area, the FBI is adding manpower."
Robert Grant, FBI Special Agent in Charge, told the Times that he had reorganized the bureau to add a third public corruption squad, giving Chicago the largest corruption unit in the country, even bigger than those in New York and Los Angeles.
"It is the second time in two years the FBI in Chicago has expanded its public corruption force," Korecki noted.
On November 6, 2006, the Times asked Obama why he did not reveal the land deal with Rezko before it was reported by the Tribune stating: "Why did you not publicly disclose the transaction after Rezko got indicted?"
"At the time, it didn't strike me as relevant," Obama answered. It seems like a lot of events were not relevant a couple months before he announced his candidacy for president.
In the November 2007, Chicago Magazine, James Merriner described a "fashion show" that took place in the first week in November 2006, to benefit St Jude Children's Research Hospital, which he said, "attracted little if any media coverage, which may have been exactly as its organizers and sponsors had hoped."
"The invitation to the affair," he wrote, "offered a veritable guidebook to political influence in Illinois, much of it centered on one St. Jude benefactor, Antoin "Tony" Rezko."
"Just three weeks earlier," Merriner pointed out, "Rezko had been indicted on charges of extorting kickbacks from businesses seeking contracts from the Blagojevich administration."
The "fashion show" was chaired by Rita Rezko, co-chaired by the Governor's wife, Patti Blagojevich, and Michelle Obama was a special guest that day, according to Merriner.
Two weeks after the "fashion show," on November 17, 2006, the Sun-Times reported that Blagojevich's wife Patti got nearly $50,000 from a real estate deal in late 2002 involving Rezko.
In terms of dollar amounts of campaign contributions directly from Rezko in Illinois, the top four earners were, the now deceased President of the Cook County Board, John Stroger, Blagojevich, Chicago Mayor, Richard Daley, and Obama - in that order.
Rezko was the head of Stroger's campaign finance committee at the same time that he served on Obama US Senate finance committee.
When it came time for Stroger's reelection campaign, in the midst of the erupting Rezko scandals in the media, on April 8, 2005, the Tribune reported that Stroger "has selected beleaguered businessman and political powerbroker Antoin "Tony" Rezko as one of the honorary chairs of his campaign fundraiser next month."
Stroger appointed Rezko's wife Rita to the Cook County Employee Appeals Board, which hears cases filed by fired or disciplined workers, at a part-time salary of $37,000 a year.
According to documents filed in the Rezko corruption case, this was Rita's sole income when she supposedly came up with a $125,000 down payment and secured a $500,000 mortgage to buy the $625,00 lot next to Obama. Less than a year after Obama bought his strip of land, Rita sold the rest of the lot to attorney Michael Sreenan, and made a profit of more than $50,000.
On February 27, 2007, the Sun-Times pointed out that Obama's "new neighbor, Michael Sreenan," had contributed $5,000 to Obama's campaigns. Less than a year after buying the lot, Sreenan put it up for sale for $1.5 million in October 2007.
Of course John Stroger will not be answering any questions about corruption, or any other matter, because he died on January 18, 2008. His former chief of staff and godson, Orlando Jones, will not be talking either because he was found dead of self-inflicted gun wounds in September 2007, "just as a corruption inquiry targeting him was heating up," according to a September 7, 2007 report by CBS News channel 2 Chicago.
"Jones left his position in county government to create a lobbying firm in association with Tony Rezko, who has been indicted on fraud charges," CBS reported.
Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica told CBS that Orlando Jones’ death raised many questions about the Cook County president’s office. “Some of these matters Jones was involved in that are currently being investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office are reaching to the highest level of county government,” Peraica said.
Obama endorsed John Stroger's son, Todd Stroger, in his bid for Cook County Board President after his father died. Todd was in the news as recently as March 24, 2008, when the Sun-Times published a front-page article reporting that his cousin Donna Dunnings, the county’s new chief financial officer, was receiving a 12% pay increase.
Dunnings’ salary will be the largest increase of any county employee, with the average increase being around 5%. She will make nearly $160,000 with the pay increase, or roughly $5,000 more than her predecessor made at the job, according to the Times.
Mayor Daley endorsed Obama immediately after he announced he was running for president and in return, Obama endorsed Daley's reelection for Mayor right smack in the middle of major federal investigations of corruption in the Daley Administration.
Obama's ties to the corrupt Daley machine began when he was dating his wife Michelle and she brought him into the fold. Valerie Jarrett, the deputy chief of staff to Mayor Daley, hired Michelle as her assistant in 1991. Daley made Jarrett the chairman of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development and Michelle worked as her assistant in that Department during 1992-93.
From there Michelle moved up the political tiers to the University of Chicago and ultimately got an overnight pay raise from about $121,000 to close to $317,000, after Obama became a US Senator, as a vice president at the University of Chicago.
Susan Sher, was corporation counsel in the Daley Administration when Michelle was hired back in the early 1990s, and Sher is now Michelle's boss at the University of Chicago, according to the April 22, 2007 Chicago Tribune.
Shortly after Obama entered the US Senate, Michelle was also handed a position on the board of TreeHouse Foods. Wal-Mart is the largest customer of TreeHouse Foods. Factoring in stock options and other payments, the value of her compensation package for serving on the board in 2006 was $101,083, according to the Tribune report.
On May 14, 2007, during a meeting with the AFL-CIO in New Jersey, Obama was asked about Wal-Mart and he said: "I won't shop there." Michelle resigned from the board of TreeHouse eight days after husband said he would not shop at Wal-Mart, CBS News reported on May 27, 2007.
When it came time for Obama's US Senate campaign, Valerie Jarrett became the campaign finance chairman and worked hand and hand with fellow finance committee members, Rita and Tony Rezko, and his former boss at the law firm, Allison Davis, in fundraising endeavors. The committee raised more than $14 million, according to Federal Election Commission records, Tim Novak reported in the Sun-Times on April 23, 2007.
Jarrett is now the CEO of Habitat Co, a real estate development and management firm which manages the housing program for the Chicago Housing Authority, the entity mandated to administer public housing, and she serves as an unpaid advisor to Obama's Presidential campaign.
Mayor Daley's brother Bill also became an Obama advisor. Mayor Daley's chief image defender, David Axelrod, is a top strategist for Obama's campaign and he was also the media consultant for Obama's US Senate campaign.
On April 1, 2007, Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who is now chairman of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Ben Wallace-Wells in the New York Times: “David Axelrod’s mostly been visible in Chicago in the last decade as Daley’s public relations strategist and the guy who goes on television to defend Daley from charges of corruption”.
The scandals involving the Daley administration have no beginning and no end. In January 2004, the Sun-Times published a three-part series exposing widespread corruption in the Hired Truck Program and revealed that some companies were being paid for doing little or no work and that some had mob connections or were tied to city employees.
On January 25, 2005, the Associated Press reported that trucking company manager, John Cannatello, the 16th person charged in the scandal, was charged with getting $6.6 million in city hauling work "by giving campaign contributions and cash to officials and falsely claiming his firm was eligible for jobs set aside for women-owned businesses."
According to the article, city officials said the Hired Truck program, "which at its height doled out $38 million worth of work in one year to contractors without bids, was designed to save taxpayers money by outsourcing hauling jobs that otherwise would require the city to buy trucks and insurance."
On June 6, 2006, the Sun-Times reported that the brother-in-law of Cook County Commissioner, John Daley, was sentenced to 18 months in prison "for taking about $5,400 in bribes to steer city business to a Hired Truck company."
Of course John Daley is another brother of Mayor Daley.
On January 6, 2006, the New York Times ran the headline, "Corruption Scandal Loosening Mayor Daley's Grip on Chicago," and reported that a "wide-ranging federal investigation into what prosecutors describe as "pervasive fraud" in hiring and contracts at City Hall has led to 30 indictments, including two senior administrators close to the mayor, and a dozen cabinet-level resignations. "
The Tribune broke the hiring scandal on April 29, 2005, after federal agents carried out an all-night raid of Daley's patronage office at City Hall and less than three months later, Robert Sorich, the patronage chief in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, and three former city officials, were arrested and charged with fraud to rig city hiring for 12 years.
During the criminal trial, prosecutors produced a list of more than 5,700 politically connected job applicants, and Patricia Molloy, a longtime secretary in Mayor Daley's office, testified that aides kept track of applicants and their political sponsors during much of Daley's time in office, according to a July 7, 2006 report by Rudolph Bush and Dan Mihalopoulos in the Tribune.
City officials testified that they "were heavily involved in politics and directed city workers and aspiring public employees to knock on doors and work the phones for political candidates endorsed by the mayor," the July 7, 2006 Tribune report noted.
"Witnesses who marshaled pro-Daley political groups testified that they took campaign orders from top Daley aides," the Tribune wrote, "and later got jobs and promotions from the mayor's office for loyal and effective political workers."
Sorich and three others were convicted on July 5, 2006, of carrying out what prosecutors described as fraud in hiring, "complete with sham interviews, rigged test scores and color-coded charts to track political sponsors," according to the July 6, 2006 Sun-Times.
Chicago attorney, Michael Shakman, whose federal lawsuit against the city led to anti-patronage decrees, told the Tribune on July 7, 2006, that Daley was to blame for the political hiring system. "You have to lay the responsibility squarely at the feet of Mayor Daley," he said. "These [defendants] are his people, who never would have thought of doing this without his approval."
At the sentencing hearing in November 2006, US District Judge David Coar told Sorich: “If I thought that by sentencing you I could stop this type of hiring corruption in the city of Chicago, I would throw this building at you…. But it won’t," the Tribune reported on November 21, 2006.
Obama is a political psychopath. He exhibits no shame, no matter where his money comes from. On September 5, 2007, the New York Post reported that, "Alexi Giannoulias, who became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, has pledged to raise $100,000 for the senator's Oval Office bid."
"Giannoulias is so tainted by reputed mob links," the Post noted, "that several top Illinois Dems, including the state's speaker of the House and party chairman, refused to endorse him even after he won the Democratic nomination with Obama's help."
If the Democratic party places Obama on the ballot against John McCain, Democratic voters will have no choice in this election. Once the whole truth becomes public, and it will the minute he becomes the nominee, no honest American could support sending Obama and his corrupt gang of cronies to the White House.
Friday, March 28, 2008
FBI Focusing on 'About Four' Suspects in 2001 Anthrax Attacks
by Catherine Herridge and Ian McCaleb
FOXNews.com
WASHINGTON —
The FBI has narrowed its focus to "about four" suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Army’s bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.
Among the pool of suspects are three scientists — a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist — linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.
The FBI has collected writing samples from the three scientists in an effort to match them to the writer of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to two U.S. senators and at least two news outlets in the fall of 2001, a law enforcement source confirmed.
The anthrax attacks began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, further alarming a nation already reeling from the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Five people were killed and more than a dozen others were infected by the deadly spores in the fall of 2001.
A leading theory is that the anthrax was stolen from Fort Detrick and then sealed inside the letters. A law enforcement source said the FBI is essentially engaged in a process of elimination.
Much of the early public focus fell on a Fort Detrick scientist named Steven Hatfill, who is suing federal authorities for identifying him as a person of interest. Now the FBI is focusing on other scientists at the facility.
"Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It's the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States," a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.
Asked to comment on the likelihood that the anthrax originated at the facility, the expert said:
"It's not suprising, except that it would underscore that there was serious security deficiencies that existed at one time at Fort Detrick — the ability of researchers to smuggle out some type of very sophisticated anthrax weapon and in some quantity. And, nevertheless, it was possible."
In December 2001, an Army commander tried to dispel the possibility of a connection to Fort Detrick by taking the media on a rare tour of the base. The commander said the Army used only liquid anthrax, not powder, for its experiments.
"I would say that it does not come from our stocks, because we do not use that dry material," Maj. Gen. John Parker said. The letters that were mailed to the media and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy all contained powdered anthrax.
But in an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.
"Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared ... to duplicate the letter material," the e-mail reads. "Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, 'But I told the General we didn't make spore powder!'"
Asked for comment, an Army spokeswoman referred all calls to the FBI. The FBI would not comment about the pool of suspects, but a spokeswoman said the investigation clearly remains a priority.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Partying Like It’s 1929
by Paul Krugman
THE NEW YORK TIMES
If Ben Bernanke manages to save the financial system from collapse, he will — rightly — be praised for his heroic efforts.
But what we should be asking is: How did we get here?
Why does the financial system need salvation?
Why do mild-mannered economists have to become superheroes?
The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.
Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.
This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.
As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten — and now we’re relearning it, the hard way.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand what banks do.
Banks exist because they help reconcile the conflicting desires of savers and borrowers. Savers want freedom — access to their money on short notice. Borrowers want commitment: they don’t want to risk facing sudden demands for repayment.
Normally, banks satisfy both desires: depositors have access to their funds whenever they want, yet most of the money placed in a bank’s care is used to make long-term loans. The reason this works is that withdrawals are usually more or less matched by new deposits, so that a bank only needs a modest cash reserve to make good on its promises.
But sometimes — often based on nothing more than a rumor — banks face runs, in which many people try to withdraw their money at the same time. And a bank that faces a run by depositors, lacking the cash to meet their demands, may go bust even if the rumor was false.
Worse yet, bank runs can be contagious. If depositors at one bank lose their money, depositors at other banks are likely to get nervous, too, setting off a chain reaction. And there can be wider economic effects: as the surviving banks try to raise cash by calling in loans, there can be a vicious circle in which bank runs cause a credit crunch, which leads to more business failures, which leads to more financial troubles at banks, and so on.
That, in brief, is what happened in 1930-1931, making the Great Depression the disaster it was. So Congress tried to make sure it would never happen again by creating a system of regulations and guarantees that provided a safety net for the financial system.
And we all lived happily for a while — but not for ever after.
Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe.
For example, in the old system, savers had federally insured deposits in tightly regulated savings banks, and banks used that money to make home loans. Over time, however, this was partly replaced by a system in which savers put their money in funds that bought asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that bought collateralized debt obligations created from securitized mortgages — with nary a regulator in sight.
As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.
In fact, however, we were partying like it was 1929 — and now it’s 1930.
The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills. And the result, now as then, is a vicious circle of financial contraction.
Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed are doing all they can to end that vicious circle. We can only hope that they succeed. Otherwise, the next few years will be very unpleasant — not another Great Depression, hopefully, but surely the worst slump we’ve seen in decades.
Even if Mr. Bernanke pulls it off, however, this is no way to run an economy. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the 1930s, and get the financial system back under control.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 4-12
"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a reintegration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole ... This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."1In our zeal to condemn the status quo, radicals often carelessly toss about epithets like "fascist" and "ecofascist," thus contributing to a sort of conceptual inflation that in no way furthers effective social critique. In such a situation, it is easy to overlook the fact that there are still virulent strains of fascism in our political culture which, however marginal, demand our attention. One of the least recognized or understood of these strains is the phenomenon one might call "actually existing ecofascism," that is, the preoccupation of authentically fascist movements with environmentalist concerns. In order to grasp the peculiar intensity and endurance of this affiliation, we would do well to examine more closely its most notorious historical incarnation, the so-called "green wing" of German National Socialism.
Despite an extensive documentary record, the subject remains an elusive one, under appreciated by professional historians and environmental activists alike. In English-speaking countries as well as in Germany itself, the very existence of a "green wing" in the Nazi movement, much less its inspiration, goals, and consequences, has yet to be adequately researched and analyzed. Most of the handful of available interpretations succumb to either an alarming intellectual affinity with their subject (2) or a naive refusal to examine the full extent of the "ideological overlap between nature conservation and National Socialism."3 This article presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich. A preliminary survey of nineteenth and twentieth century precursors to classical ecofascism should serve to illuminate the conceptual underpinnings common to all forms of reactionary ecology.
Two initial clarifications are in order. First, the terms "environmental" and "ecological" are here used more or less interchangeably to denote ideas, attitudes, and practices commonly associated with the contemporary environmental movement. This is not an anachronism; it simply indicates an interpretive approach which highlights connections to present-day concerns. Second, this approach is not meant to endorse the historiographically discredited notion that pre-1933 historical data can or should be read as "leading inexorably" to the Nazi calamity. Rather, our concern here is with discerning ideological continuities and tracing political genealogies, in an attempt to understand the past in light of our current situation — to make history relevant to the present social and ecological crisis.
THE ROOTS OF THE BLOOD AND SOIL MYSTIQUE
Germany is not only the birthplace of the science of ecology and the site of Green politics' rise to prominence; it has also been home to a peculiar synthesis of naturalism and nationalism forged under the influence of the Romantic tradition's anti Enlightenment irrationalism. Two nineteenth century figures exemplify this ominous conjunction: Ernst Moritz Arndt and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.
While best known in Germany for his fanatical nationalism, Arndt was also dedicated to the cause of the peasantry, which lead him to a concern for the welfare of the land itself. Historians of German environmentalism mention him as the earliest example of 'ecological' thinking in the modern sense.4 His remarkable 1815 article On the Care and Conservation of Forests, written at the dawn of industrialization in Central Europe, rails against shortsighted exploitation of woodlands and soil, condemning deforestation and its economic causes. At times he wrote in terms strikingly similar to those of contemporary biocentrism: "When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important — shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity."5
Arndt's environmentalism, however, was inextricably bound up with virulently xenophobic nationalism. His eloquent and prescient appeals for ecological sensitivity were couched always in terms of the well-being of the German soil and the German people, and his repeated lunatic polemics against miscegenation, demands for teutonic racial purity, and epithets against the French, Slavs, and Jews marked every aspect of his thought. At the very outset of the nineteenth century the deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism was firmly set in place.
Riehl, a student of Arndt, further developed this sinister tradition. In some respects his'green' streak went significantly deeper than Arndt's; presaging certain tendencies in recent environmental activism, his 1853 essay Field and Forest ended with a call to fight for "the rights of wilderness." But even here nationalist pathos set the tone: "We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German."6 Riehl was an (implacable opponent of the rise of industrialism and urbanization; his overtly antisemitic glorification of rural peasant values and undifferentiated condemnation of modernity established him as the "founder of agrarian romanticism and antiurbanism."7
These latter two fixations matured in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the völkisch movement, a powerful cultural disposition and social tendency which united ethnocentric populism with nature mysticism. At the heart of the völkisch temptation was a pathological response to modernity. In the face of the very real dislocations brought on by the triumph of industrial capitalism and national unification, volkisch thinkers preached a return to the land, to the simplicity and wholeness of a life attuned to nature's purity. The mystical effusiveness of this perverted utopianism was matched by its political vulgarity. While "the Volkish movement aspired to reconstruct the society that was sanctioned by history, rooted in nature, and in communion with the cosmic life spirit,"8 it pointedly refused to locate the sources of alienation, rootlessness and environmental destruction in social structures, laying the blame instead to rationalism, cosmopolitanism, and urban civilization. The stand-in for all of these was the age-old object of peasant hatred and middle-class resentment: the Jews. "The Germans were in search of a mysterious wholeness that would restore them to primeval happiness, destroying the hostile milieu of urban industrial civilization that the Jewish conspiracy had foisted on them."9
Reformulating traditional German antisemitism into nature friendly terms, the völkisch movement carried a volatile amalgam of nineteenth century cultural prejudices, Romantic obsessions with purity, and anti-Enlightenment sentiment into twentieth century political discourse. The emergence of modern ecology forged the final link in the fateful chain which bound together aggressive nationalism, mystically charged racism, and environmentalist predilections. In 1867 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term 'ecology' and began to establish it as a scientific discipline dedicated to studying the interactions between organism and environment. Haeckel was also the chief popularizer of Darwin and evolutionary theory for the German-speaking world, and developed a peculiar sort of social darwinist philosophy he called 'monism.' The German Monist League he founded combined scientifically based ecological holism with völkisch social views. Haeckel believed in nordic racial superiority, strenuously opposed race mixing and enthusiastically supported racial eugenics. His fervent nationalism became fanatical with the onset of World War I, and he fulminated in antisemitic tones against the post-war Council Republic in Bavaria.
In this way "Haeckel contributed to that special variety of German thought which served as the seed bed for National Socialism. He became one of Germany's major ideologists for racism, nationalism and imperialism."10 Near the end of his life he joined the Thule Society, "a secret, radically right-wing organization which played a key role in the establishment of the Nazi movement."11 But more than merely personal continuities are at stake here. The pioneer of scientific ecology, along with his disciples Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bolsche and Bruno Wille, profoundly shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of environmentalists by embedding concern for the natural world in a tightly wovenweb of regressive social themes. From its very beginnings, then, ecology was bound up in an intensely reactionary political framework.
The specific contours of this early marriage of ecology and authoritarian social views are highly instructive. At the center of this ideological complex is the direct, unmediated application of biological categories to the social realm. Haeckel held that "civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life."12 This notion of 'natural laws' or 'natural order' has long been a mainstay of reactionary environmental thought. Its concomitant is anti-humanism:
Thus, for the Monists, perhaps the most pernicious feature of European bourgeois civilization was the inflated importance which it attached to the idea of man in general, to his existence and to his talents, and to the belief that through his unique rational faculties man could essentially recreate the world and bring about a universally more harmonious and ethically just social order. [Humankind was] an insignificant creature when viewed as part of and measured against the vastness of the cosmos and the overwhelming forces of nature.13Other Monists extended this anti-humanist emphasis and mixed it with the traditional völkisch motifs of indiscriminate anti-industrialism and anti-urbanism as well as the newly emerging pseudo-scientific racism. The linchpin, once again, was the conflation of biological and social categories. The biologist Raoul Francé, founding member of the Monist League, elaborated so called Lebensgesetze, 'laws of life' through which the natural order determines the social order. He opposed racial mixing, for example, as "unnatural." Francé is acclaimed by contemporary ecofascists as a "pioneer of the ecology movement."14
Francé's colleague Ludwig Woltmann, another student of Haeckel, insisted on a biological interpretation for all societal phenomena, from cultural attitudes to economic arrangements. He stressed the supposed connection between environmental purity and 'racial' purity: "Woltmann took a negative attitude toward modern industrialism. He claimed that the change from an agrarian to an industrial society had hastened the decline of the race. In contrast to nature, which engendered the harmonic forms of Germanism, there were the big cities, diabolical and inorganic, destroying the virtues of the race."15
Thus by the early years of the twentieth century a certain type of 'ecological' argumentation, saturated with right-wing political content, had attained a measure of respectability within the political culture of Germany. During the turbulent period surrounding World War I, the mixture of ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity and genuine environmental concern proved to be a very potent potion indeed.
THE YOUTH MOVEMENT AND THE WEIMAR ERA
The chief vehicle for carrying this ideological constellation to prominence was the youth movement, an amorphous phenomenon which played a decisive but highly ambivalent role in shaping German popular culture during the first three tumultuous decades of this century. Also known as the Wandervögel (which translates roughly as 'wandering free spirits'), the youth movement was a hodge-podge of countercultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a strong communal impulse in a confused but no less ardent search for authentic, non-alienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. They have been aptly characterized as 'right-wing hippies,' for although some sectors of the movement gravitated toward various forms of emancipatory politics (though usually shedding their environmentalist trappings in the process), most of the Wandervögel were eventually absorbed by the Nazis. This shift from nature worship to Führer worship is worth examining.
The various strands of the youth movement shared a common self-conception: they were a purportedly 'non-political' response to a deep cultural crisis, stressing the primacy of direct emotional experience over social critique and action. They pushed the contradictions of their time to the breaking point, but were unable or unwilling to take the final step toward organized, focused social rebellion, "convinced that the changes they wanted to effect in society could not be brought about by political means, but only by the improvement of the individual."16 This proved to be a fatal error. "Broadly speaking, two ways of revolt were open to them: they could have pursued their radical critique of society, which in due course would have brought them into the camp of social revolution. [But] the Wandervögel chose the other form of protest against society — romanticism." 17
This posture lent itself all too readily to a very different kind of political mobilization: the 'unpolitical' zealotry of fascism. The youth movement did not simply fail in its chosen form of protest, it was actively realigned when its members went over to the Nazis by the thousands. Its countercultural energies and its dreams of harmony with nature bore the bitterest fruit. This is, perhaps, the unavoidable trajectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them. Eschewing societal transformation in favor of personal change, an ostensibly apolitical disaffection can, in times of crisis, yield barbaric results.
The attraction such perspectives exercised on idealistic youth is clear: the enormity of the crisis seemed to enjoin a total rejection of its apparent causes. It is in the specific form of this rejection that the danger lies. Here the work of several more theoretical minds from the period is instructive. The philosopher Ludwig Klages profoundly influenced the youth movement and particularly shaped their ecological consciousness. He authored a tremendously important essay titled "Man and Earth" for the legendary Meissner gathering of the Wandervögel in 1913.18 An extraordinarily poignant text and the best known of all Klages' work, it is not only "one of the very greatest manifestoes of the radical ecopacifistmovement in Germany,"19 but also a classic example of the seductive terminology of reactionary ecology.
"Man and Earth" anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement. It decried the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature. In emphatic terms it disparaged Christianity, capitalism, economic utilitarianism, hyper consumptionand the ideology of 'progress.' It even condemned the environmental destructiveness of rampant tourism and the slaughter of whales, and displayed a clear recognition of the planet as an ecological totality. All of this in 1913 !
It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Klages was throughout his life politically archconservative and a venomous antisemite. One historian labels him a "Volkish fanatic" and another considers him simply "an intellectual pacemaker for the Third Reich" who "paved the way for fascist philosophy in many important respects."20 In "Man and Earth" a genuine outrage at the devastation of the natural environment is coupled with a political subtext of cultural despair.21 Klages' diagnosis of the ills of modern society, for all its declamations about capitalism, returns always to a single culprit: "Geist." His idiosyncratic use of this term, which means mind or intellect, was meant to denounce not only hyperrationalism or instrumental reason, but rational thought itself. Such a wholesale indictment of reason cannot help but have savage political implications. It forecloses any chance of rationally reconstructing society's relationship with nature and justifies the most brutal authoritarianism. But the lessons of Klages' life and work have been hard for ecologists to learn. In 1980, "Man and Earth" was republished as an esteemed and seminal treatise to accompany the birth of the German Greens.
The Youth Movement and the Weimar Era
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 13-17
[...]
In addition to the youth movement and protofascist philosophies, there were, of course, practical efforts at protecting natural habitats during the Weimar period. Many of these projects were profoundly implicated in the ideology which culminated in the victory of 'Blood and Soil.' A 1923 recruitment pitch for a woodlands preservation outfit gives a sense of the environmental rhetoric of the time:
"In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all Germansouls the Germanforest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty — it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German "League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest." 24
The mantra-like repetition of the word "German" and the mystical depiction of the sacred forest fuse together, once again, nationalism and naturalism. This intertwinement took on a grisly significance with the collapse of the Weimar republic. For alongside such relatively innocuous conservation groups, another organization was growing which offered these ideas a hospitable home: the National Socialist German Workers Party, known by its acronym NSDAP. Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement's incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.
NATURE IN NATIONAL SOCIALIST IDEOLOGY
The reactionary ecological ideas whose outlines are sketched above exerted a powerful and lasting influence on many of the central figures in the NSDAP. Weimar culture, after all, was fairly awash in such theories, but the Nazis gave them a peculiar inflection. The National Socialist "religion of nature," as one historian has described it, was a volatile admixture of primeval teutonic nature mysticism, pseudo-scientific ecology, irrationalist anti-humanism, and a mythology of racial salvation through a return to the land. Its predominant themes were 'natural order,' organicist holism and denigration of humanity: "Throughout the writings, not only of Hitler, but of most Nazi ideologues, one can discern a fundamental deprecation of humans vis-a.-vis nature, and, as a logical corollary to this, an attack upon human efforts to master nature."25 Quoting a Nazi educator, the same source continues: "anthropocentric views in general had to be rejected. They would be valid only 'if it is assumed that nature has been created only for man. We decisively reject this attitude. According to our conception of nature, man is a link in the living chain of nature just as any other organism'." 26
Such arguments have a chilling currency within contemporary ecological discourse: the key to social-ecological harmony is ascertaining "the eternal laws of nature's processes" (Hitler) and organizing society to correspond to them. The Führer was particularly fond of stressing the "helplessness of human kind in the face of nature's everlasting law."27 Echoing Haeckel and the Monists, Mein Kampf announces: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."28
The authoritarian implications of this view of humanity and nature become even clearer in the context of the Nazis' emphasis on holism and organicism. In 1934 the director of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, Walter Schoenichen, established the following objectives for biology curricula: "Very early, the youth must develop an understanding of the civic importance of the 'organism', i.e. the co-ordination of all parts and organs for the benefit of the one and superior task of life."29 This (by now familiar) unmediated adaptation of biological concepts to social phenomena served to justify not only the totalitarian social order of the Third Reich but also the expansionist politics of Lebensraum (the plan of conquering 'living space' in Eastern Europe for the German people). It also provided the link between environmental purity and racial purity:
Two central themes of biology education follow [according to the Nazis] from the holistic perspective: nature protection and eugenics. If one views nature as a unified whole, students will automatically develop a sense for ecology and environmental conservation. At the same time, the nature protection concept will direct attention to the urbanized and 'overcivilized' modern human race.30
In many varieties of the National Socialist world view ecological themes were linked with traditional agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban civilization, all revolving around the idea of rootedness in nature. This conceptual constellation, especially the search for a lost connection to nature, was most pronounced among the neo-pagan elements in the Nazi leadership, above all Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Walther Darn~. Rosenberg wrote in his colossal The Myth of the 20th Century: "Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colors, thereby fostering racial chaos."31
Such musings, it must be stressed, were not mere rhetoric; they reflected firmly held beliefs and, indeed, practices at the very top of the Nazi hierarchy which are today conventionally associated with ecological attitudes. Hitler and Himmler were both strict vegetarians and animal lovers, attracted to nature mysticism and homeopathic cures, and staunchly opposed to vivisection and cruelty to animals. Himmler even established experimental organic farms to grow herbs for SS medicinal purposes. And Hitler, at times, could sound like a veritable Green utopian, discussing authoritatively and in detail various renewable energy sources (including environmentally appropriate hydropower and producing natural gas from sludge) as alternatives to coal, and declaring "water, winds and tides" as the energy path of the future. 32
Even in the midst of war, Nazi leaders maintained their commitment to ecological ideals which were, for them, an essential element of racial rejuvenation. In December 1942, Himmler released a decree "On the Treatment of the Land in the Eastern Territories," referring to the newly annexed portions of Poland. It read in part:
The peasant of our racial stock has always carefully endeavored to increase the natural powers of the soil, plants, and animals, and to preserve the balance of the whole of nature. For him, respect for divine creation is the measure of all culture. If, therefore, the new Lebensraüme (living spaces) are to become a homeland for our settlers, the planned arrangement of the landscape to keep it close to nature is a decisive prerequisite. It is one of the bases for fortifying the German Volk. 33
This passage recapitulates almost all of the tropes comprised by classical ecofascist ideology: Lebensraum, Heimat, the agrarian mystique, the health of the Yolk, closeness to and respect for nature (explicitly constructed as the standard against which society is to be judged), maintaining nature's precarious balance, and the earthy powers of the soil and its creatures. Such motifs were anything but personal idiosyncracies on the part of Hitler, Himmler, or Rosenberg; even Göring — who was, along with Goebbels, the member of the Nazi inner circle least hospitable to ecological ideas — appeared at times to be a committed conservationist.34 These sympathies were also hardly restricted to the upper echelons of the party. A study of the membership rolls of several mainstream Weimar era Naturschutz (nature protection) organizations revealed that by 1939, fully 60 percent of these conservationists had joined the NSDAP (compared to about 10 percent of adult men and 25 percent of teachers and lawyers).35 Clearly the affinities between environmentalism and National Socialism ran deep.
At the level of ideology, then, ecological themes played a vital role in German fascism. Itwould be a grave mistake, however, to treat these elements as mere propaganda, cleverly deployed to mask Nazism's true character as a technocratic-industrialist juggernaut. The definitive history of German anti-urbanism and agrarian romanticism argues incisively against this view:
Nothing could be more wrong than to suppose that most of the leading National Socialist ideologues had cynically feigned an agrarian romanticism and hostility to urban culture, without any inner conviction and for merely electoral and propaganda purposes, in order to hoodwink the public [ . . . ]In reality, the majority of the leading National Socialist ideologists were without any doubt more or less inclined to agrarian romanticism and anti-urbanism and convinced of the need for a relative re-agrarianization.36The question remains, however: To what extent did the Nazis actually implement environmental policies during the twelve-year Reich? There is strong evidence that the 'ecological' tendency in the party, though largely ignored today, had considerable success for most of the party's reign. This "green wing" of the NSDAP was represented above all by Walther Darné, Fritz Todt, Alwin Seifert and Rudolf Hess, the four figures who primarily shaped fascist ecology in practice.
Blood and Soil as Official Doctrine
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 17-20
Blood and Soil as Official Doctrine
"The unity of blood and soil must be restored," proclaimed Richard Walther Darré in 1930.37 This infamous phrase denoted a quasi-mystical connection between 'blood' (the race or Volk) and 'soil' (the land and the natural environment) specific to Germanic peoples and absent, for example, among Celts and Slavs. For the enthusiasts of Blut und Boden, the Jews especially were a rootless, wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land. German blood, in other words, engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil. While the term "blood and soil" had been circulating in volkisch circles since at least the Wilhelmine era, it was Darré who first popularized it as a slogan and then enshrined it as a guiding principle of Nazi thought. Harking back to Arndt and Riehl, he envisioned a thoroughgoing ruralization of Germany and Europe, predicated on a revitalized yeoman peasantry, in order to ensure racial health and ecological sustainability.
Darré was one of the party's chief "race theorists" and was also instrumental in galvanizing peasant support for the Nazis during the critical period of the early 1930s. From 1933 until 1942 he held the posts of Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. This was no minor fiefdom; the agriculture ministry had the fourth largest budget of all the myriad Nazi ministries even well into the war.38 From this position Darré was able to lend vital support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He played an essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist tendencies in National Socialism:
It was Darré who gave the ill-defined anti-civilization, anti-liberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban sentiments of the Nazi elite a foundation in the agrarian mystique. And it seems as if Darré had an immense influence on the ideology of National Socialism, as if he was able to articulate significantly more clearly than before the values system of an agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and — above all — to legitimate this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly oriented toward a far-reaching reagrarianization.39This goal was not only quite consonant with imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum, it was in fact one of its primary justifications, even motivations. In language replete with the biologistic metaphors of organicism, Darré declared: "The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space."40
Aside from providing green camouflage for the colonization of Eastern Europe, Darré worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the Third Reich's agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the "Battle for Production" (a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program read "Keep the soil healthy!" But Darré's most important innovation was the introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled "lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise," or farming according to the laws of life. The term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much reactionary ecological thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures came from Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic cultivation.41
The campaign to institutionalize organic farming encompassed tens of thousands of smallholdings and estates across Germany. It met with considerable resistance from other members of the Nazi hierarchy, above all Backe and Goring. But Darré, with the help of Hess and others, was able to sustain the policy until his forced resignation in 1942 (an event which had little to do with his environmentalist leanings). And these efforts in no sense represented merely Darré's personal predilections; as the standard history of German agricultural policy points out, Hitler and Himmler "were in complete sympathy with these ideas."42 Still, it was largely Darré's influence in the Nazi apparatus which yielded, in practice, a level of government support for ecologically sound farming methods and land use planning unmatched by any state before or since.
For these reasons Darré has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the contemporary Green movement. His biographer, in fact, once referred to him as the "father of the Greens."43 Her book Blood and Soil, undoubtedly the best single source on Darré in either German or English, consistently downplays the virulently fascist elements in his thinking, portraying him instead as a misguided agrarian radical. This grave error in judgement indicates the powerfully disorienting pull of an 'ecological' aura. Darré's published writings alone, dating back to the early twenties, are enough to indict him as a rabidly racist and jingoist ideologue particularly prone to a vulgar and hateful antisemitism (he spoke of Jews, revealingly, as "weeds"). His decade-long tenure as a loyal servant and, moreover, architect of the Nazi state demonstrates his dedication to Hitler's deranged cause. One account even claims that it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler of the necessity of exterminating the Jews and Slavs.44 The ecological aspects of his thought cannot, in sum, be separated from their thoroughly Nazi framework. Far from embodying the 'redeeming' facets of National Socialism, Darré represents the baleful specter of ecofascism in power.
Fascist Ecology in Context
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 24-25
Fascist Ecology in Context
To make this dismaying and discomforting analysis more palatable, it is tempting to draw precisely the wrong conclusion — namely, that even the most reprehensible political undertakings sometimes produce laudable results. But the real lesson here is just the opposite: Even the most laudable of causes can be perverted and instrumentalized in the service of criminal savagery. The "green wing" of the NSDAP was not a group of innocents, confused and manipulated idealists, or reformers from within; they were conscious promoters and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination. Their 'ecological' involvements, far from offsetting these fundamental commitments, deepened and radicalized them. In the end, their configuration of environmental politics was directly and substantially responsible for organized mass murder.
No aspect of the Nazi project can be properly understood without examining its implication in the holocaust. Here, too, ecological arguments played a crucially malevolent role. Not only did the "green wing" refurbish the sanguine antisemitism of traditional reactionary ecology; it catalyzed a whole new outburst of lurid racist fantasies of organic inviolability and political revenge. The confluence of anti-humanist dogma with a fetishization of natural 'purity' provided not merely a rationale but an incentive for the Third Reich's most heinous crimes. Its insidious appeal unleashed murderous energies previously untapped. Finally, the displacement of any social analysis of environmental destruction in favor of mystical ecology served as an integral component in the preparation of the final solution:
To explain the destruction of the countryside and environmental damage, without questioning the German people's bond to nature, could only be done by not analysing environmental damage in a societal context and by refusing to understand them as an expression of conflicting social interests. Had this been done, it would have led to criticism of National Socialism itself since thatwas notimmune to such forces. One solution was to associate such environmental problems with the destructive influence of other races. National Socialism could then be seen to strive for the elimination of other races in order to allow the German people's innate understanding and feeling of nature to assert itself, hence securing a harmonic life close to nature for the future.64This is the true legacy of ecofascism in power: "genocide developed into a necessity under the cloak of environment protection."65
The historical record does, to be sure, belie the vacuous claim that "those who want to reform society according to nature are neither left nor right but ecologically minded."68 Environmental themes can be mobilized from the left or from the right, indeed they require an explicit social context if they are to have any political valence whatsoever. "Ecology" alone does not prescribe a politics; itmustbe interpreted, mediated through some theory of society in order to acquire political meaning. Failure to heed this mediated interrelationship between the social and the ecological is the hallmark of reactionary ecology.
Anthroposophy and the World League fro the Protection of Life
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 44-45
Among the ultra-right adherents of Anthroposophy today are officials of the World League for the Protection of Life (WSL), a small but influential and very wealthy environmental organization in the Federal Republic. The garden at its educational center is cultivated according to biodynamic methods, and visitors are served organic refreshments. Yet this organization was founded in 1958 by former members of the National Socialist party, and today it links protection of 'life' (that is, 'right-to-life') themes and the environment with racism and a revival of völkisch ideology. The 'life' it is most interested in protecting is of course German 'life'; thus the WSL is rabidly anti-abortion, believing that German women should be devoted to giving birth to 'Aryan' babies.
The spiritual leader of the WSL and its key figure for most of its history has been Werner Georg Haverbeck. Born in 1909, Haverbeck became an active Nazi at an early age; it should be recalled that Nazism was largely a youth movement, so that members like Haverbeck are still alive. 33 Haverbeck joined the SA in 1928 and from 1929 to 1932 was a member of the Reich Administration for the National Socialist Student League (Reichsleitung der NSDAP-Studentenschaft) and a leader of the Reich Youth Leadership of the Hitler Youth (Reichjugendfuhrung der Hitlerjugend). He served as a leading official of the Strength Through Joy organization, which controlled recreational activities under the Third Reich; in 1933 Rudolf Hess saw to it that Haverbeck's passport was stamped "This man is not to be arrested." He survived the R6hm purge to help organize the Nuremberg Party Congress and join Hess's staff. It was Hess who converted him to Anthroposophy. During the war he conducted radio propaganda in Denmark and worked in South America; by the end of the war he was an officer.34
After the Allies rudely aborted Haverbeck's many efforts on behalf of the Third Reich, he contented himself for a time working as a pastor for the Anthroposophical Christian community. He founded an educational center called the Collegium Humanum in 1963, where today ecofascist, esoteric, völkisch, Anthroposophist, neopagan, and primitivist groups meet and hold workshops. He co-founded the WSL and served as its president from 1974 to 1982. In 1981, he was a signatory of the notorious Heidelberg Manifesto, a document drawn up by a group of professors to warn the German people of the dangers that immigration posed to them. Its first draft began:
With great concern we observe the subversion of the German people through the influx of many millions of foreigners and their families, the foreignization of our language, our culture, and our nationhood . . . . Already many Germans have become foreigners in their living districts and workplaces, and thus in their own Heimat.35Routine as this language may sound now, when opposition to immigration in the Federal Republic is much more tolerated and neofascists pander to it relentlessly, the Manifesto had to be toned down at the time (1981) because of the public outcry it raised.
In accordance with Anthroposophical root-race beliefs, Haverbeck is notable for propounding the thesis that the two world wars in this century in fact constituted a thirty years' war waged by foreign ·aggressors against the German people and their spiritual life. Apparently, German spiritual life stood in the way of "the strivings for world domination by the Anglo-Saxon race," behind which lay "the intensive image of a call to world dominance, like the old Jewish consciousness." Indeed, Haverbeck maintains, the two world wars amounted to a conspiracy against the German people and spiritual life. It is a "historical lie" that the Nazis ran "mass-murder camps," argues Haverbeck, and is actually "enemy propaganda." It was Russia that was the aggressor in the Second World War.36
Rudolf Bahro: Volkisch Spirituality
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 48-50
Rudolf Bahro: Volkisch Spirituality
If fascists are using ecological themes to update their racial and nationalist aims, other thinkers are developing an ecological spiritualism along New Age lines that bears no small resemblance to the völkisch Germanic spirituality of the 1920s. Indeed, "a great part of the literature about close-to-nature spirituality that the alternative scene is reading is permeated with reactionary, völkisch, or even National Socialist content," writes Ditfurth. "We find neofascist and ultra-right positions not only in the various political and even ecological groups, but also ... in neopagan, esoteric and occult circles."44
Perhaps the most prominent figure in this connection is Rudolf Bahro. Many German 'new social movement' circles previously accepted Bahro as a social theorist contributing to a 'socialism with a human face' and continue to regard him as part of the independent left; leftist periodicals publish uncritical interviews with him. In the Anglo-American world, too, many ecological radicals still consider Bahro as representing something 'leftist.' Yet Bahro no longer considers himself a leftist; indeed, he is a vehement critic of the left 45 and of "comrades without fatherland."46 In fact, as antifascist researcher Roger Niedenführ argues, since the mid-1980s Bahro has been contributing to the development of a "spiritual fascism" that has the effect of "rehabilitating National Socialism," openly calling for reclaiming the "positive" side of the Nazi movement. Not only does Bahro appeal to a mystical Germanist spirituality like the völkisch ideologues of the 1920s, he even sees the need for a "Green Adolf" who will lead Germans out of their own "folk-depths" and into ecological "salvation.
Bahro originally became well known as the author of The Alternative in Eastern Europe, which he wrote during the 1970s while he was a dissident Marxist and party member in the former East Germany. In 1977, the ruling Communist government sentenced him to prison; in 1979, he was deported. Once arrived in what was then West Germany, Bahro became involved with the nascent German Greens, affirming that "red and green go well together."48 In the early 1980s peace movement, he alarmed many by enunciating nationalistic arguments against the deployment of Pershing missiles. 49 He began to speak less in political terms and more in religious terms, asking that "the emphasis [be] shifted from politics and the question of power towards the cultural level ... to the prophetic level. ... Our aim has to be the 'reconstruction of God.' " 50 He became a vocal 'fundamentalist' critic of the realo wing of the Greens (those who became generally committed to exercising parliamentary power) and ultimately left the party in 1985. In a parting speech in Hamburg, he said there were structural similarities between the Greens and the Nazi movement that the Greens were not taking advantage of but should; then he gave his 'fundamentalist' alternative: "the other republic that we want will be an association of communities of life-communities in which God and Goddess are at the center."51
Bahro thereafter moved increasingly toward the New Age esoteric milieu. His major concern remained "the ecological crisis," whose "deep structures" must be investigated, but he now thinks ecology "has nothing to do with left and right."52 Today Bahro is one of the leading spokespeople and theorists of New Age ideas in the Federal Republic. "The most important thing," he rambles,
is that . . . [people] take the path "back" and align themselves with the Great Equilibrium, in the harmony between the human order and the Tao of life. I think the "esoteric"-political theme of "king and queen of the world" is basically the question of how men and women are to comprehend and interact with each other in a spiritually comprehensive way. Whoever does not bring themselves to cooperate with the world government [Weltregierung] will get their due.53In 1989, Bahro cofounded a combination educational center and commune near Trier, the Lernwerkstatt (an "ecological academy for one world"), whose purpose is to synthesize spirituality and politics, "to come to a new personal and social orientation." It presents lectures, cultural events, and weekend workshops on various New Age themes, including deep ecology, ecofeminism, Zen Buddhism, holistic nutrition, Sufism, and the like — as well as German identity.54 His 1987 book Logik der Rettung marked an overt embrace of authoritarian theological concepts that shocked many former admirers.55
Liberating the 'Brown Parts'
Excerpt from
Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience
by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier
1995, AK Press
ISBN 1-873176 73 2
pp 50-53
Liberating the 'Brown Parts'
Since the mid-1980s, Bahro has been remarkably open about proclaiming his embrace of the spiritual content of fascism for the 'salvation' of nature and humanity. In The Logic of Salvation, he asks, "Is there really no thought more reprehensible than a new 1933?"— that is, Hitler's rise to state power. "But that is precisely what can save us! The ecology and peace movement is the first popular German movement since the Nazi movement. It must co-redeem [miterlösen] Hitler."80 Indeed, "the Nazi movement [was] among other things an early reading of the ecology movement."81 Germans are to look for "the positive that maylie buried in the Nazi movement" and reclaim it, he says, "because ifwe do not, wewill remain cut offfrom our roots, the roots from which will grow that which will save us."82 Today one must "liberate" the "brownparts" in the German character.83 The fact is, says Bahro, that today "there is a call in the depths of the Volk for a Green Adolf."84
When Bahro's critics reproach him for this assertion, Bahro responds that no, he does not mean Adolf Hitler. That his leftist critics think he means Adolf Hitler shows that the left "responds only with fear, instead of comprehending that a Green Adolf would be an entirely different Adolf from the one we know about.,"85 Yet as Kratz points out, Bahro himself is evasive about what this 'Green Adolf' actually would be: perhaps a personified Führer, perhaps a spiritual elite, or perhaps some inner self-recognition that within each of us there is supposedly a 'Green Adolf,' to whom we must subordinate ourselves voluntarily through spiritual insight. This evasiveness is itself a matter of concern. Kratz believes that Bahro really means a personified Führer; for one thing, Bahro invokes the 'sleeping emperor' myth,86 the nationalistic notion that the Emperor Barbarossa is sleeping in the Kyffhäuser Mountain and will one day come back as the Führer and rescue Germany from dire straits 87 — an idea that is also one of the foundations of the Nazi Führer principle.
For Bahro, this Führer will clearly be a spiritualistic leader. In a foreword to a book by his colleague Jochen Kirchhoff, he argued that National Socialism had had the right spiritual aims: it sought to manifest the 'German essence' on the material plane. It went wrong in the execution — for one thing, it was very violent. But even this was understandable since, arising as it did in the 1920s, it was the task of National Socialism to make the first real spiritual revolt against the overwhelming materialism of the age. Thus, the materialistic thinking of the Weimar era, against which National Socialism rebelled, was the real cause of the Nazis' material "vehemence"— that is, mass murder.88
The materialistic thinking of Weimar modernity that the Nazis were so correct to oppose, says Bahro, is also today the immediate cause of the ecological crisis. Only the spiritualization of consciousness, Bahro believes, can prevail over biosphere-destroying materialism. Hence Germans today have no alternative but to invoke the spiritually "deep forces" from the Nazi movement — in order to "be present with our whole potential."89
But it must be a strictly spiritual endeavor: undertaking concrete political resistance on the material plane is, for Bahro, itself an integral component of materialistic secularism, an expression of negative spirituality. Thosewho engage in politics on the material plane today, he says, in fact politically resemble - Nazis! True, the Nazis had to struggle in the twenties, but at least they had the right spiritual ideas. But "revolt (under the conditions of our imperial situation) is fascistic. That is to say, it redeems [rettet] nothing."9o Bahro's religious dispensation thus does not synthesize spirituality and politics at all, as critic Niedenführ points out; on the contrary, it simply eliminates political action.91
Repelled by these ideas, critics have denounced The Logic of Salvation as fascistic or 'fascistoid' — potentially fascist. Bahro responds that such "faint-hearted antifascism" has "refused" to "look for the strength that lay beneath the brown movement."n Precisely because the left rejects the insights of spirituality, it can never see the necessity of völkisch-authoritarian structures and therefore can never give material form to the 'German essence,' he believes. Bahro replied further in his next book, Rückkehr:
It can be instructive that there was a strong wing of the Nazis that wanted to be socially and culturally revolutionary. This wing was not consolidated, and the Hitler movement went on to serve a regenerated German capitalism.... We can no longer allow fascism to be a taboo subject.It should be noted that fascism has hardly been a 'taboo subject' in the Federal Republic — on the contrary, it has been much discussed. What has been rightly rejected — and hardly merely 'taboo,' since a taboo begs to be broken — is sympathy for the Nazis. Bahro continues:
I can't rule out the possibility that at the end of the 1920s I wouldn't have gone with the Nazis. And it's very important that we be prepared to ask such a question. As for what would have happened later, I don't know. There were people in the Nazi movement who gave it up before 1933; there were people who saw the light with the Röhm affair; some went into the resistance; others were executed. But we're not supposed to imagine what we ourselves would have done. And I was ready and am ready to go into such questions. I think that if we are serious about forming a popular movement and overcoming the ecological crisis, and if we are really to address what comes out of the depths, we will have to have a lot to do with what it was that found expression then and that is seeking another, better expression this time. That can go well only if there is a great deal of consciousness about whatever unhappy mechanisms lie in all of us, the resentment reactions, mere rebellion instead of revolution.93Posing as a courageous inquiry into the breaking of taboos, such practices do nothing more than give people permission to envision themselves as Nazis — a horrifying dispensation in any era, but particularly in one when present-day Nazis routinely attack foreigners in German towns and cities and when fascist parties are having electoral victories.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Live From Lhasa
Shaky cell-phone videos from Tibet foretell doom for the Chinese empire.
by Anne Applebaum
SLATE
Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China's Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border?
That covert cell phones have become the most important means of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no accident. Lhasa, Rangoon, Xinjiang, and North Korea: All of these places are, directly or indirectly, dominated by the same media-shy, publicity-sensitive Chinese regime. Though we don't usually think of it this way, China is, in fact, a vast, anachronistic, territorial empire, within which one dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, rules over a host of reluctant "captive nations." To keep the peace, the Chinese use methods not so different from those once used by Austro-Hungary or czarist Russia: political manipulation, secret police repression, and military force.
But, then, modern China bears many surprising resemblances to the empires of the past in other ways, too. Like its Soviet imperial predecessor, for example, China encompasses both an "inner" empire, of which Tibet and Xinjiang are the most prominent components, and an "outer" empire, consisting most notably of its Burmese and North Korean clients. Like its French and British predecessors, the Chinese empire must wrestle constantly with nations whose languages, religions, and customs differ sharply from its own and whose behavior is, therefore, unpredictable. And like all its predecessors, the Chinese imperial class cares deeply about the pacification of the imperial periphery, more so than one might think.
For proof that this is so, look no further than the biography of Hu Jintao, the current Chinese president—and also the former Communist Party boss of Tibet. In 1988 and 1989, at the time of the last major riots, Hu was responsible both for the brutal repression of dissident Tibetan monks and dissidents and for what the Dalai Lama has subsequently called China's policy of "cultural genocide": the importation of thousands of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibet's cities in order to dilute and eventually outbreed the ethnic Tibetan population.
Clearly, the repression of Tibet matters enormously to the members of China's ruling clique, or they would not have promoted Hu, its mastermind, so far. The pacification of Tibet must also be considered a major political and propaganda success, or it would not have been copied by the Chinese-backed Burmese regime last year and repeated by the Chinese themselves in Tibet last week. Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire.
Keep that in mind, over the next few days and months, as China tries once again to belittle Tibet, to explain away a nationalist uprising as a bit of vandalism. The last week's riots began as a religious protest: Tibet's monks were demonstrating against laws that, among other things, require them to renounce the dalai lama. The monks' marches then escalated into generalized, unplanned, anti-Chinese violence, culminating in attacks on Han Chinese shops and businesses, among them—as you can see on the cell-phone videos—the Lhasa branch of the Bank of China.
However the official version evolves, in other words, make no mistake about it: This was not merely vandalism, it could not have been solely organized by outsiders, it was not only about the Olympics, and it was not the work of a tiny minority. It was a significant political event, proof that the Tibetans still identify themselves as Tibetan, not Chinese. As such, it must have significant reverberations in Beijing. The war in Algeria brought down the French Fourth Republic. The dissident movements on its periphery helped weaken the Soviet Union. Right now, I'd wager that Hu Jintao's Tibet policy is causing a lot of consternation among his colleagues.
And if they aren't worried, they should be. After all, the history of the last two centuries is filled with tales of strong, stable empires brought down by their subjects, undermined by their client states, overwhelmed by the national aspirations of small, subordinate countries. Why should the 21st century be any different? Watching the tear gas roll over the streets of Lhasa yesterday on a blurry, cell-phone video, I couldn't help but wonder when—maybe not in this decade, this generation, or even this century—Tibet and its monks will have their revenge.
Spitzer's mouthpiece has his own secrets to hide
by Peter Lance
RAW STORY
As the sex scandal hurricane engulfed Eliott Spitzer last week, one of his closest advisors at the eye of the storm was Dietrich “Dieter” Snell. An ex U.S. Attorney from the same office conducting the prostitution probe, Snell is now defending Spitzer in the “Troopergate” scandal and reportedly raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for the international law firm he joined last year.
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A former Southern District prosecutor who later became Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, Snell is also one of the ex Feds who rewrote history in the Commission’s “Final Report” by relying entirely on the tortured “confession” of 9/11’s purported “mastermind” to pinpoint the origin of the “planes as missiles” plot.
He’s the same investigator who dismissed as not “sufficiently credible” the testimony of a decorated Navy Captain who was part of a secret data mining operation that uncovered evidence of 9/11 hijackers in the U.S. more than a year before the attacks.
A former Deputy Attorney General under “the Sheriff of Wall Street,” Snell is now attempting to quash the subpoenas of investigators probing whether Spitzer misused state troopers to investigate his chief political rival, protecting his ex boss and mentor with a “separation of powers” defense worthy of Dick Cheney.
Despite Spitzer’s sudden flameout, there are currently three separate probes pending of Troopergate, the scandal that erupted when Spitzer’s aides reportedly used State Police to investigate the travel expenses of Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno.
The New York Daily News estimated that while the initial use of state resources to benefit Bruno was $72,000.00, the cost to the taxpayers of defending Spitzer, who refused to cooperate with the New York A.G.’s office, could amount to $1.54 million. And $400,000 of that figure will probably go to Snell’s law firm.
But from this reporter’s perspective it is Dieter Snell himself who ought to be in the hot seat answering questions, not about a petty state corruption probe but questions that go to the heart of the greatest mass murder in U.S. history: 9/11.
It was just four years ago Saturday, March 15th, 2004, when Snell led me into a windowless conference room at 26 Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI’s New York Office (NYO). It was then the temporary New York quarters of the 9/11 Commission’s staff.
Months earlier, Commission Chairman Gov. Tom Kean had read my first investigative book for HarperCollins, 1000 Years for Revenge, which presented probative evidence that Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first WTC bombing in 1993, had designed “the planes” operation as early as the fall of 1994 in Manila and that his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) had merely carried out the plot after Yousef was captured in February of 1995.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), one of the top FBI oversight lawmakers on the Hill, had read the book and pronounced it a “must read for the FBI, Congress, the 9/11 Commission and anyone whose job it is to protect national security,” so Gov. Kean directed Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow to arrange for my testimony.
Cherry Picking the Evidence
But I was cautious. A source I had on the Commission staff told me that Zelikow and staffers on both side of the aisle were “cherry picking” the evidence, in an effort to remove Yousef, from the 9/11 scenario.
Why? Because as I’d reported in 1000 Years, the FBI’s NYO could have stopped Yousef in the fall of 1992 while he was building the 1,500 pound urea nitrate-formaldehyde device that he detonated on the B-2 level below the Twin Towers on February 26th, 1993, killing six and injuring 1000.
It was a plot directly funded by al Qaeda and tied to the cell around blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. If the Bureau’s elite Joint Terrorism Task Force had simply done its job and stopped Yousef then, he would never have executed the first attack on the Towers or escaped New York the night of the bombing to commence the 9/11 plot from Manila, half a year later.
1000 Years For Revenge contained probative evidence suggesting that prosecutors in the SDNY – including Dietrich Snell – had received evidence from the Philippines National Police (PNP) in early 1995 that, if acted upon, would have tipped the Feds to the 9/11 plot six years earlier.
Snell had prosecuted Yousef in 1996 for Bojinka, a non suicide plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific that was separate from the “planes as missiles” scenario, and as I saw it, he should have been called before the 9/11 Commission as a witness, testifying under oath about what he and other SDNY officials knew of this second suicide plot involving airliners.
The Fox and the Chicken Coop
Instead, Snell was given a senior Commission leadership role and put in charge of determining the single most important conclusion in the Commission’s investigation: the origin of the plot. Without knowing precisely when the plot began, no U.S. officials could be held accountable for failing to stop it.
So four years ago, when I learned that Snell would take my “testimony,” I was properly skeptical.
Also, my source had warned me that despite the televised public Commission hearings, and the appearance of transparency, more than 90 percent of the witness intake to the Commission had been anecdotal and unrecorded.
So I prepared my “testimony” ahead of time.
In the presence of an FBI agent assigned to the Commission staff, Snell sat across from me at a conference table. There was no stenographer or recording equipment present. The sandy-haired former AUSA took out a small spiral notebook and began to take notes as I read my statement.
Because I was writing a second book on the failures of the Feds on the road to 9/11, and because Snell had played such a key role in the prosecution of Yousef, I ended up asking him as many questions as he asked me.
I wanted to know why he had flown over eleven PNP officials to testify at the Bojinka trial but not Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza, the top PNP investigator who had interrogated Yousef’s partner Abdul Hakim Murad, a pilot trained in four U.S. flights schools. It was Murad who was to have been the original lead pilot of the plot – the role later assumed by hijacker Mohammed Atta.
I wanted Snell to answer why he and other SDNY Feds had kept the hunt for KSM secret for more than two and a half years, only quietly passing his name to the press in January of 1998 when the plot was well underway, when they had arrested Yousef, his nephew, via a very public $2 million rewards program that had caused one of Ramzi’s cohorts to “rat him out.” Why not use the same method to capture his uncle KSM who was executing the “planes operation?”
“That’s Classified”
But each time I asked a question, Snell would smile and say, “That’s classified” or “I can’t discuss that.” At the end of my testimony I told him I would send along the transcript of my March 19, 2002 interview with Col. Mendoza, which documented Yousef’s creation of the planes-as-missiles plot in 1994.
I had evidence from the PNP that Yousef’s Toshiba laptop, passed on to the CIA in January of 1995, contained the full blown “9/11” plot, including seven targets: the WTC, the Pentagon, the White House, CIA headquarters, the Transamerica and Sears Towers, and an unnamed nuclear facility.
But as it turned out, that was evidence that Snell, as an alumnus of the SDNY, did not want to hear. Why? Because it corroborated the findings of the PNP that Ramzi Yousef was the architect of the 9/11 attacks and that, in turn, put blood on the hands of the FBI’s NYO for failing to stop him back in 1992.
Given Snell’s apparent bias, I sent the additional evidence directly to Commission co-chairman Tom Kean. In a cover letter, I asked him to make sure that it was a part of the permanent Commission record.
But when the Commission’s final report was published, that evidence was flushed – reduced to a single footnote that didn’t even mention Col. Mendoza by name, even though he was the investigator who had first uncovered Yousef’s suicide-hijack plot.
Rewriting History
In the Commission’s final Staff Statement #16, largely authored by Snell, the Commission removed Yousef from the “planes as missiles” plot and supported the fiction that the plot didn’t even begin to germinate until 1996, well after Yousef’s capture. The new finding, per Snell, was that KSM merely “pitched” the idea to Bin Laden in ’96 but it didn’t get a green light from the Saudi billionaire until 1998.
Worse, Snell and the staffers based their evidence for the origin of the plot entirely on the word of KSM, who we now know was subjected to waterboarding and torture in his interrogation.
Taking the sole word of KSM on the origin of the plot was a bit like taking the word of David Berkowitz for when he committed his first “Son of Sam” murder. But as the primary author of Staff Statement #16, the Commission’s last word on the plot origin, that’s what Dietrich Snell decided to do.
To this day, KSM’s questionable testimony has served to define the official record on the origin of the 9/11 plot, even though Snell himself admitted under oath, at the March 2005 German trial of an al Qaeda suspect, that he himself had never met Khalid Shaikh, that he’d merely submitted questions to KSM’s interrogators, and that he (Snell) had no control over how or even whether questions were asked.
Back on the Ides of March, 2004, as I left 26 Federal Plaza, I had no idea that a group of Army investigators in the year 2000 had been on a parallel investigative track to mine. But Snell would soon reject their evidence as well.
Discrediting the Able Danger Findings
In the early winter of 2000, a multi-million dollar data mining operation funded by the U.S. Army uncovered evidence that Mohammed Atta and three other 9./11 hijackers were present in the country months before the 9/11 Commission would conclude they’d arrived, thus making a number of U.S. agencies, including the FBI, culpable for their failure to stop them.
In the fall of 2003, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a key player in what had been termed Operation Able Danger, told 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow of the Operation’s stunning findings during Zelikow’s visit to Afghanistan, where Shafer had been hunting bin Laden with Task Force 180.
By July 12th, 2004 as the Commission was wrapping up its investigation on the origin of the 9/11 plot, one of Shafer’s Able Danger colleagues, Capt. Scott Phillpott, met with a top Commission leader to corroborate Shafer’s findings.
The senior counsel he met with was Dietrich Dieter Snell.
Like Tony Shaffer’s account, Capt. Phillpott’s input about the al Qaeda connections to the New York cell of Sheikh Rahman would have defied the spin that Snell and the Commission staff had decided to sell.
Phillpott was a Navy veteran who had previously commanded three ships, a decorated veteran with immense integrity and reliability as a witness. But after the meeting, Snell spurned Phillpott’s evidence on the hijacker’s U.S. presence, and not a word of it showed up in the final Commission Report.
Nothing more might have come of it until August of 2005, when the New York Times broke the story of how tens of thousands of pages of Able Danger evidence had been ordered destroyed in March of 2000. The scandal grew, and by mid February 2006 the House Army Services Committee called Snell to testify.
Spitzer KO’s Snell Appearance
But on the day of the hearing, February 15th, 2006, it was learned that Eliott Spitzer himself had intervened with the Committee’s counsel to keep Snell from having to account under oath for his dismissal of the Able Danger evidence. Citing Snell’s “heavy workload” in New York, Spitzer got him a pass from having to testify.
During his tenure on the 9/11 Commission, pushing the “origin of the plot” forward to 1996 and ignoring the Able Danger evidence weren’t Snell’s only lapses.
As Larisa Alexandrovna pointed out in a RAW STORY piece on February 28th, citing Phil Shenon’s recent book, The Commission, Snell also seemed to defy his own staffers who wanted to explore the Saudi government’s ties to Omar al-Bayoumi.
Al-Bayoumi was the San Diego based Saudi defense contractor whose company had multiple contracts with Prince Sultan, the father of Saudi Arabia’s then U.S. ambassador Prince Bandar. The flamboyant Bandar was so tight with the Bush family that over the years he’d earned the nickname “Bandar Bush.”
As reported in Triple Cross, Bayoumi played host to two of the 9/11 muscle hijackers, al-Midar and al-Hazmi, who flew AA # 77 into the Pentagon on 9.11:
“…using their own names, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi jetted from Bangkok to Los Angeles on January 15th. There they were met by Omar al-Bayoumi a Saudi, suspected of being an intelligence officer, who had visited the Saudi consulate in L.A. the same day. After three weeks the two would-be hijackers moved to San Diego, where they lived openly for the next five months. During that period al-Bayoumi helped them get settled, finding them an apartment across from where he lived. It was later reported by Newsweek and the Washington Times that al-Bayoumi may have been the recipient of funds sent to his wife indirectly from Princess Haifa bin Faisal, wife of the then-Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar.
In fact, new information from declassified FBI files as reflected in Ms. Alexandrovna’s account for RAW STORY shows that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were living in a residence rented by al-Bayoumi from the day they arrived in California; not weeks later as reported in the 9/11 Commission Report. With respect to Snell's possible knowledge of the Saudi connection, Ms. Alexandrova writes:
Bayoumi moved to London in 2001 and lived there until his arrest immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Following his release, Bayoumi returned to Saudi Arabia, where he was interviewed in October 2003 by the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, and Senior Counsel Dieter Snell.
Snell did not respond to requests for comment; Zeilkow could not be reached.
According to Shenon, several staff members working under Snell, “felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection,” based on “explosive material” on al-Bayoumi and Fahad al-Thumairy, a “shadowy Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles.”
Shenon recounts how Snell, in preparing his team’s account of the plot, purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government and moved the “explosive” supporting evidence to the small print of the report’s footnotes. (The Commission, pp. 398-399)
Two commission investigators who were working on documenting the 9/11 plot, Michael Jacobsen and Raj De, argued that it was “crazy” to insist on 100 percent proof when it came to al-Qaeda or the Saudi regime. In the end, however, and with a publishing deadline looming, Snell’s caution and Zelikow’s direction buried apparently promising leads.
Entering Private Practice
On April 30th, Snell left his job as Deputy Attorney General to join the law firm of Proskauer Rose, which has offices in seven U.S. cities as well as Paris, London and Sao Paulo. Within months, the firm had been retained by Spitzer’s office to defend him in the Troopergate scandal.
Last July, New York Attorney General Cuomo’s office issued a report finding that Spitzer’s staff had acted improperly but not illegally. But the Senate Committee’s probe is ongoing along with an investigation by the state’s Public Integrity Commission. Also, after closing his inquiry into Troopergate last year, Albany District Attorney David Soares has reopened it. On Thursday Snell charged Soares with continuing on a “fishing expedition” and acting as “grand jury and grand inquisitor.”
It was an ironic use of the term.
Elliott Spitzer prosecuted Wall Street white collar crime with the same venom he used on call girl services and high-end pimps. Using the Attorney General’s office as a state-based strike force against local, state, even national corruption, he redefined the modern day inquisition.
As Governor, he apparently saw himself in the same role. Last year he reportedly told Assembly Minority leader James Tedisco that he was “a fucking steamroller” who would “roll over” Tedisco “and anybody else.”
Steamroller or Sheriff, we now know that Spitzer also redefined the term hypocrisy.
On Tuesday after the New York Times broke the call girl story, Dietrich Snell, with a few key advisors, was reportedly holed up in Spitzer’s Fifth Avenue co-op working on the damage control. In defense of Spitzer, and reportedly billing the public for his hours, he continued the spin in court on Thursday.
Disgraced and out of office, it’s time that Spitzer made a full accounting of his public sins along with his private ones. In the process, his loyal retainer and counsel Dietrich Snell needs to come clean as well.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The Olympic Lever
[2], [3] Protokoll der Veranstaltung "Tibet und Olympia - Die olympischen Spiele in China - Chance oder Risiko?" am 14. November 2007 in der Vertretung des Landes Hessen beim Bund
[4] Roland Koch: "Boykott ist letztes Mittel"; Financial Times Deutschland 17.03.2008
[5] s. also Strategies of Attrition (II)
[6] s. also Strategies of Attrition (III)
Sunday, March 16, 2008
China Stop Slaughtering Tibet! - Update
UNPO.org
Following events that have struck at the heart of Tibet the UNPO Presidency, on behalf of UNPO Members, expresses its support for all those under threat from the crackdown currently being carried out by the security agencies of the Chinese state under the blanket of a media blackout.
The Hague, 21 March 2008 – It has been five days since UNPO first called for international action after Tibetan protesters were beaten and lost their lives at the hands of Chinese paramilitary forces. In that time Tibet has become closed to the outside world. Journalists have been refused access and international media broadcasts have been censored by Beijing. As international criticism grows and there have been calls, supported by UNPO, for a special session of the United National Human Rights Council to be convened, China has dug its heels in. A Chinese envoy warned today [21 March 2008] against attempts to interfere in what is seen as an ‘internal affair’ – a statement that must be seen as a response to the visit to Dharamsala by speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi on 21 March 2008.
On the ground it appears that the Chinese authorities have already begun to measure out retribution on those who took part in protests earlier in the week. Reports note a massive police presence in Tibetan towns and regions and also East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia where demonstrations showed sympathy with the Tibetan situation. The Communist Party’s desire to exert total control has even extended to the heart of Beijing. There, the campus of the Central University of Nationalities has found itself ringed with uniformed and plain clothed police officers, even photographing those who raise its suspicions. It is clear that for all its signs of development and words of democracy, China remains intent on suppressing expression in its subjugated regions.
It is the responsibility of the international community to demand answers and openness from China, and UNPO reiterates its call, first made below on 17 March 2008 for an international investigation:
UNPO Statement of Solidarity
The Hague, 17 March 2008 – The UNPO Presidency, led by President Mr Ledum Mitee, expresses its solidarity on behalf of all UNPO Members with the people of Tibet in this period of extreme tension and reiterates its support for their decades-long nonviolent campaign against Chinese suppression.
UNPO condemns the draconian Chinese response that has led to substantial loss of life and countless detentions and beatings, and calls upon the Chinese authorities at all levels to enter into a constructive dialogue designed to end the violence and promote a return to peace within Tibet as soon as possible.
UNPO urges the international community to demonstrate its commitment to human rights by responding to the crisis in Tibet with an international investigation into the events that have led to such violence within Tibet.
Speaking on recent developments, UNPO General Secretary Mr Marino Busdachin stated that “The entire world today must support the Tibetan peoples’ aspirations and His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s request for an international investigation into the criminal acts perpetrated. There must be respect for human, civil, and political rights in Tibet as in China. Free Tibet means free China.”
Oberweis urged to drop his bid
by Robert Novak
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Important Illinois Republicans are urging dairy mogul Jim Oberweis, who lost the district previously held by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, to drop out of the competition for a full term. However, it is unlikely Oberweis would consider stepping aside.
Oberweis, who had lost three previous bids for statewide office, won nominations to fill the unexpired term of the resigned Hastert and for the two-year term. After losing his self-financed campaign to businessman-scientist Bill Foster for the short term, Oberweis is given little chance in a November rerun.
Losing Hastert's predominantly Republican district means the Democrats can gain two to four additional congressional seats from Illinois in this year's elections.
GOP strategists at work
The disgraced Eliot Spitzer had hardly resigned as governor of New York when Republican strategists began calculating a return to power in Albany via New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Lt. Gov. David Paterson, Spitzer's successor as governor, is considered a weak prospect for the 2010 election and might not even be the Democratic nominee. Bloomberg, finishing two successful terms as mayor in 2009, might find life as a private citizen boring enough to try for governor.
Bloomberg, who changed his affiliation from Republican to independent, could obtain the Independence Party nomination for governor and then be endorsed by the GOP.
A footnote: Democratic state legislators watching television Monday cheered when they heard the disliked Spitzer admit his guilt. But that joy faded as the Democrats contemplated that Spitzer's fall could trigger a Republican comeback in 2010. Democrats contemplate a takeover of all branches of the state government to control decennial redistricting.
Predicting Spitzer's departure
Republican political operative Roger Stone, Eliot Spitzer's longtime antagonist, predicted his political demise more than three months in advance.
''Eliot Spitzer will not serve out his term as governor of the state of New York,'' Stone said Dec. 6 on Michael Smerconish's radio talk show. He gave no details.
Spitzer's entrapment by federal authorities investigating a prostitution ring raised speculation that Stone, with a 40-year record as a political hit man, somehow was behind it. In truth, Stone had nothing to do with the investigation and said he had not heard about it when he made a prediction based on his general view of Spitzer.
Reclusive Barack
Early morning trainers and exercisers at the Greenville, Miss., YMCA last Tuesday, Mississippi's primary day, got a taste of Sen. Barack Obama's reclusiveness, which the traveling press corps has learned to accept.
After speaking at Tougaloo College on Monday night, Obama went to the ''Y'' at 6:30 a.m. for a workout. He greeted nobody and did not respond when people there called out to him.
After finishing his workout, Obama returned to his gregarious campaign mode with a visit to black-owned Buck's restaurant in Greenville before leaving the state. He won Mississippi comfortably against Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Cox for VP?
Former conservative colleagues in the House of Representatives are boosting Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission since 2005, to be Sen. John McCain's vice presidential running mate.
A White House aide under President Ronald Reagan, Cox served 16 years as a congressman from Orange County, Calif., and was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. He was named as a federal appeals court judge to begin President George W. Bush's administration, but withdrew after Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California announced her opposition.
Former Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio, who also was a member of the House leadership before joining the Bush Cabinet, is being promoted for vice president by Washington insiders. But Cox's backers in the House argue that Portman lacks Cox's stature in the conservative movement, which they say McCain needs.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Forget Spitzer, fire Bernanke
by Chan Akya
Asia Times
There must be something about men achieving power that exposes them to frequent misuses of authority. In particular, infidelity seems a particular curse for the powerful across the world. This week's events involving the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, may however have helped to hide a more egregious misuse of authority, namely that of Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and his central banking cohorts around the world.
In another one of those nice coincidences that seem to happen whenever Wall Street is down and out, the unpopular governor of New York was found consorting with prostitutes through a Federal investigation that has all the hallmarks of a "hit job" ordered from the very top. Spitzer was deeply unpopular in the corridors of power, and especially with the current Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, for daring to take various Wall Street firms down a few notches earlier this decade.
After also hitting other sacred cows such as large insurance companies, Spitzer was readying ammunition to strike at the heart of the current subprime crisis by attacking the monoline insurers and rating agencies. It is almost too convenient that the disclosures of his extracurricular activities came this week. Still, let us take everything said at face value and not attempt to conjecture any conspiracy behind all this.
People in Europe and Asia always find curious the preoccupation of Americans with sex, especially as the country appears to look askance at acts of immeasurable violence. This has been the formula for Hollywood - nary a nipple in sight but more than a few torsos getting blown to smithereens.
Be that as it may, the focus of the Spitzer case on two separate legal areas, namely using a prostitute and secondly for potential money laundering, both appear strangely exaggerated in the rest of the world. So the guy was having sex with a hooker; that's essentially a problem between the married couple rather than being subject of intense public debate. Spitzer is said to have been neither crooked nor incompetent.
If anything, his personal use of prostitutes may have contradicted his public crusade against brothels and pimps. In essence, Spitzer had to resign because he was a hypocrite. Reading that line, perhaps a few of you would wonder as I did about the implications of other politicians around the world being asked to resign for being hypocritical. Nope, I couldn't think of anyone who'd survive that either.
Sleight of hand
The sorry story of the governor and his extramarital affair though helped to achieve something much more important, namely to hide a brewing problem in the securities industry.
On Monday, when the Federal Reserve announced a new facility to help banks finance themselves by posting previously unacceptable collateral, stock and credit markets jumped for joy. That is, until someone started asking slightly cute questions on the lines of just who was in so much trouble that the Fed had to rush through an ill-prepared intervention.
As with the Sherlock Holmes dictum of "who benefits from the crime", it is clear that this week's moves were intended to help beleaguered brokers. While it is perhaps impossible to speculate just which company is in most trouble because of poor disclosure and the use of opaque valuation techniques, the most important brokers whose failure would have systemic implications include the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Coming as it does so close to the expected announcement of first-quarter earnings (most brokers close their financial year in November, hence their first quarter ends February), the fear being expressed on the street was that it had to be one of the bigger firms as otherwise the Fed would not have bothered.
Brokers hold billions of dollars in the very securities that are suddenly eligible for refinancing with the Fed, such as mortgages and other securities that have proven well nigh impossible to sell to investors for the past few months. This has spilt over into the rest of the financial system, hurting various cities and towns across the US as they try to refinance themselves. That in turn must have gotten the government and its central bank all hot under the collar.
At this stage perhaps readers will be wondering why I implied a crime had taken place on Wall Street when all that seems to have happened is that a central banker has tried to quietly save one of the large financial firms in its backyard. The answer is a little more complicated than that, and touches upon the curiously ignored principles of central banking.
Walter Bagehot, the patron saint of central bankers, suggested the following basic principles for central banks to help the banks under their supervision to avoid liquidity runs.
A. Only lend against good collateral to avoid losses for taxpayers at a later date.
B. Lend at extremely high interest rates to avoid the facility being used willy-nilly by greedy bankers.
C. Make public the availability of such facilities, so as to prevent doubts and suspicions in the minds of depositors and other creditors.
This week's announcement by the Fed violates EVERY one of those principles. Firstly, the collateral being accepted by the Fed is tainted as the market’s complete lack of appetite (at any price) for the securities shows. By providing the ability to liquefy these securities, the Fed has effectively signaled that it would accept just about any junk.
Secondly, the cost of borrowing is not punitive; indeed it is agreeably low for anyone who cares to fill out a couple of forms. Thirdly, this facility was not used previously; therefore the market has been in some doubt about really how useful it could be.
In essence, this is a US$200 billion facility that is being misapplied to rescue a specific part of the financial system at a preferential rate, and without any disclosure required on usage. Given all this, it is impossible for anyone to expect that the ultimate cost of this facility will not be borne by US taxpayers.
In my last article on Europe (Euro-trash, Asia Times Online, March 11, 2008) I pointed to the failures of the European Central Bank, which similarly violated the Bagehot principles when widening the range of acceptable collateral and lowering the discount rate made available to banks at the refinancing window. The Fed has entered into an arrangement that is eerily similar to that of the European Central Bank, whose actions have resulted in parts of the European financial system essentially becoming "zombie" companies, ie dead but still walking around.
From where I sit, it appears that Bernanke has opened a whole new can of worms in his efforts at maintaining the structural integrity of the US financial system. The financial means used are clearly at odds with what Americans have preached to the rest of the world, including Asia following its 1997 crisis.
To that extent, it is clear that Bernanke suffers from a similar complex to Spitzer, ie that rules do not apply to them because of magical exclusions that are self-derived. Once we decide that both have committed acts that are essentially illegal, it then becomes a question of gauging just who committed the worse crime.
Spitzer through his actions hurt his family and a small band of friends very badly. That however pales in comparison to the wide-ranging systemic damage being wrought by Bernanke through his ill-considered actions. The wrong government official resigned this week.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Cult leader: George Bush agreed to drink our "Holy Wine."
From YouTube.com
Michael Jenkins, U.S. leader of the Unification Church (the "Moonies") claims to have persuaded George H.W. Bush to drink Holy Wine, during a visit to the presidential library at Texas A&M in 2007.
Holy Wine is the communion juice of the Moonies, symbolizing the blood and body of the Reverend Moon, Jenkins's master.
Moon owns the Washington Times, the national conservative newspaper. Jenkins also asserts that the management of Washington Times has become more open to hyping the Reverend Moon as a great spiritual leader, no longer as eager to demonstrate "editorial freedom" from founder Moon.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
The Beast Reawakens (excerpt)
Excerpt from
The Beast Reawakens
by Martin A. Lee
1997, Little Brown
ISBN 0-316-51959-6
pp 216-217
As in France, such notions were compatible with the hatred of refugees, asylum seekers, and ethnic minorities. But this animosity was obscured somewhat by the German New Right's strong endorsement of national liberation movements and "revolutionary struggles" around the world, ranging from the Basques in Spain and the IRA in Northern Ireland to the peoples 0 Eastern Eu , the Ukraine, the Afghan mujahideen, and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. In short, any mortal enemy of a superpower was deemed a de facto ally by various inchoate New Right formations that sprang up in West Germany during the early 1980s.50
This period also saw the emergence of the Greens, left-of-center peace-and-ecology party, as a mass-based opposition movement in West Germany. Galvanized by NATO's decision to station a new generation of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, the Greens adopted a neutralist stance toward the East-West conflict. Their attempts to forge a third way beyond capitalism and Communism bore certain similarities to themes stressed by New Right intellectuals and neo-Nazi militants, who tried to outflank their left-wing contemporaries by enunciating radical positions on ecology, nuclear weapons, U.S. Imperialism, and "national liberation." Some right-wing extremists went so far as to call for "revolution from below" in Germany modeled after Third World independence struggles. They often employed leftist-sounding rhetoric that appealed to the Greens' supporters, who also obsessed over questions of personal and collective identity. Many Greens were receptive to arguments that German unification was an indispensable precondition to a durable peace in Europe. Such matters were debated in New Right publications that interspersed articles by left-wing authors and neo-fascistic "national revolutionaries."51
The political cross-fertilization that ensued in West Germany around this time provided new opportunities for far Right strategists, who were continually searching for ways to transcend their marginalized status. Toward this end, they sought to piggyback on the success of the Greens, which polled enough votes to enter the West German Bundestag — a feat that had not been accomplished by a radical right-wing party since 1949. Although most Greens were indisputably antifascist, some of them lacked the political savvy to realize that neo-Nazis and other far Right miscreants had infiltrated their ranks from the outset.52 *
In 1980, the West Berlin chapter of the Greens, known as the Alternative List, expelled a contingent of "national revolutionaries" that had employed stealth tactics in an effort to take over the group. This was merely one skirmish in a battle for control of the Greens as leftists feuded with brown elements inside the party. Left-wing forces ultimately prevailed, prompting ecofascists and their fellow travelers to form a rival organization, the Democratic Ecology Party headed by Herbert Gruhl, in 1982.53
While German neo-Nazis and New Right intellectuals expressed concern for Green issues, their interest in Green issues was little more than a pretext for promoting a cutthroat social Darwinist ideology and a disguised form of racism. Gruhl, for example, trumpeted the "laws of nature" to justify a hierarchical social order. "All strivings of people . . . for organized social justice are simply hopeless," he asserted. A guest speaker at Holocaust-denial confabs and other neo-Nazi functions, Gruhl was subsequently awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Service Cross), the country's highest official honor, by the Bohn government.
____________________
* The first organization to call itself "the Greens in 1977 was led by August Haussleiter, a bullnecked, red-faced veteran of Hitler's beer hail putsch, who had a long history of involvement in extreme right-wing causes after World War II. During the 1950s, August Haussleiter's Deutsche Gemeinschaft (German Community) collaborated with the neo-Nazi Bruderschaft, which counted Otto Skorzeny among its key personnel. Shortly after the Socialist Reich Party was banned by the West German government, Haussleiter engaged in secret talks with Ernst Remer's colleagues in an effort to preserve the political punch or the SRP faithful. The SRP-linked attorney Rudolf Aschenauer was an executive board member of the DeutscheGemeinschaft. By the late 1960s, however, Haussleiter had swung toward the Left in an effort to attract student radicals. His group, Action Community of Independent Germans, began to focus on ecology and antinuclear issues. Haussleiter subsequently became a father figure for the fledgling Greens, whose initial supporters included dissident conservatives as well as left-wing activists. In 1980, he was elected chairman of the Greens, but Haussleiter was forced to step down after a months because or his checkered past.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Suburban Utah Home Searched for Ricin
FBI Agents Don Hazmat Suits to Search Suburban Salt Lake City Home After Ricin Scare
by Doug Alden
AP
RIVERTON, Utah
FBI agents wearing protective suits searched Sunday for the deadly poison ricin at a suburban home where a man possibly sickened by the deadly poison had once lived.
Authorities believed they had found all of the ricin in several vials recovered Thursday from a Las Vegas motel where Roger Von Bergendorff had been staying, but they wanted to also check the home in Riverton, outside Salt Lake City.
"We are taking all the precautions necessary to ensure public safety," FBI agent Timothy Fuhrman said at a news conference Sunday.
Nearby homes were evacuated as FBI agents, covered from head to toe in full hazardous-material protection suits, meticulously searched the home belonging to Von Bergendorff's cousin Thomas Tholen.
Von Bergendorff had been staying in the motel room where the ricin was found and has been hospitalized since Feb. 14. Von Bergendorff has been unconscious, so police and the FBI have not been able to question him about the ricin found in his room.
Health officials are still trying to confirm whether Von Bergendorff's respiratory ailment stemmed from ricin exposure.
The FBI got a search warrant for Tholen's home, where Von Bergendorff once lived. The search began Sunday morning and continued into the afternoon.
Fuhrman said it would be a long process because agents were potentially dealing with such a toxic substance. He would not say whether the FBI suspected that Von Bergendorff had manufactured or stored ricin in the home or the rented storage units.
Residents from three surrounding homes were allowed to return by Sunday afternoon, but the Tholen house was still closed off late in the day as the search continued. Authorities planned to decide soon whether to conclude the search Sunday night.
Las Vegas police said that firearms, an "anarchist-type textbook" and castor beans, from which ricin is made, were found in the room where the poison was discovered. The book was tabbed at a spot containing information about ricin.
Fuhrman said investigators were still trying to figure out why Von Bergendorff would have ricin but said there was no indication of any terrorist activity.
Neighbors say Von Bergendorff lived in the Tholen home for about a year before moving to Las Vegas about a year ago.
Police and health officials have tried to assure Las Vegas residents there is no public health threat. There was no indication of any spread of the deadly substance, they said.
As little as 500 micrograms of ricin, about the size of the head of a pin, can kill a human, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The only legal use for ricin is cancer research.
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