“Right, Hermann, we are taking this holocaust business with the utmost seriousness. As a result, the punishment to be handed down will be severe. This Court decrees that you must reduce your level of Jew-killing to no more than 1942 levels. Over the next couple of decades. Please.”

Big thanks to Radio Z – 95.8 FM Nuremberg for spreading some melancholia through the airwaves.
Here’s the playlist.

evangelista – i lay there in front of me covered in ice
the chap – i saw them
alexis gideon – ock waves (creation myth)
cortney tidwell – son and moon (hands off cuba remix)
tone – i am long
phoenix – love like a sunset (animal collective remix)
culture reject – museums
devendra banhart – baby
phil retrospector – forbidden young folks
soulo – yorktown for nine months
dub tractor – sorry
bibio – haikuesque (the gentleman loser´s whispers in the rain mix)
tim & puma mimi – chocolate junkie
leyland kirby – when we parted, my heart wanted to die (friedrichshain memories)
cio d’or – goldbrokat
shackleton – mountains of ashes
aoki takamasa – rn2-09 pt 1 + pt 2
sigha – rawww
2562 – superflight
drums of death – got yr thing (starkey remix)
joe goddard – sour grapes
die voegel – blaue moschee

Here’s an interesting YouTube clip (it’s short, just over a minute) of interpreting legend Peter Less talking about remaining impartial while interpreting at the Nuremberg Trials. Less, who won the ATA’s Gode Medal (one of the translation world’s highest honors) in 2006, fled to Switzerland as a teenager but his mother, father, sister and grandmother remained behind and died in the Holocaust.

Less went on to become one of the first trained conference interpreters in Europe and subsequently found himself interpreting for some of the people responsible for the Nazi regime’s worst atrocities. He then emigrated to the U.S. and practiced law in Chicago for over 50 years. There’s a full interview between Tanya Gesse and Peter Less here, on the website of the International Association of Conference Interpreters.

Nuremberg Christmas Market (image from www.zimbio.com)

I have to be in Munich for a few days this week, so I took a daytrip today to visit the Nuremberg Christmas Market, which is just an hour and 45 minutes away on a regular (non-fancy) Deutsche Bahn train.

I’m not a huge fan of Christmas ornaments or freezing cold weather, but things I *can* get behind are a festive atmosphere, mulled wine (gluhwein), cakey Christmas cookies (lebkuchen) and hot-off-the-grill small sausages (rostbratwurstl), all of which are available in abundance in Nuremberg this time of year.

It was snowing today in Nuremberg, and while my friends searched out all manner of Christmas ornaments made of straw, wood and even prunes (click here or google zwetschgamännla), I occupied myself with lots of snacking and drinking.  I’ve come to love buying gluhwein in all sorts of cheesy commemorative mugs, and the wine sellers ensure you bring the mugs back by charging a 2-euro deposit for every gluhwein you order.  And if you just *have* to have that mug, well, at 2 euros, that’s the cheapest souvenir you can buy.

Even gluhwein proved to be no match for the cold after three hours, so in search of a heat source of the fossil-fuel-generated kind, my friends and I ate a fast, cheap and good dinner at the self-service chain, Vapiano.  I’ve eaten before at this type of place in Munich, where you’re provided a card on arrival, and then you choose food from different stations (in my case, a pasta station) where the food is made fresh in front of you, have the food ‘charged’ to your card, and then you pay for whatever’s on your card as  you leave the resto.  For 5.50 euros, I ate an enormous bowl of freshly-made spaghetti with pesto.  It was a nice break from all the schweinshaxe and general pig-and-potatoes diet I’ve been ODin’g on this weekend.

Nuremberg’s Christmas market was a sight to see, and I’d highly recommend a visit, especially for the Christmas fanatics among you.

To reach Nuremberg from the UK, I flew into Munich and then caught a Deutsche Bahn train from the Hauptbahnhof.  The trains leave almost every hour and tickets were 20 euros roundtrip.  The trains get standing-room-only crowded, so wait on the platform early.

Vapiano was about a five-minute walk from the Nuremberg train station at Konigstrasse, 17, 90402 Nuremberg.

During his 36-minute speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway Thursday, President Barack Obama explained to an audience of 1,000 how the United States has a “moral and strategic interest” in abiding by a code of conduct when waging war – even one that pits the US against a “vicious adversary that abides by no rules.”

“That is what makes us different from those whom we fight,” Obama said. “That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

Obama’s high-minded declaration, made on the 61st anniversary of Human Rights Day, rings hollow in light of fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees have been tortured and where human rights organizations such as the International Committee for the Red Cross are refused access to the prisoners.

Obama has substituted words for action on issues surrounding torture since his first days in office nearly one year ago. Last June, on the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama said the US government “must stand against torture wherever it takes place” and that his administration “is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims.”

But it’s clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by Bush administration officials.

That’s the point the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made shortly after Obama’s acceptance speech. Officials from the civil rights organization issued a withering indictment of the Obama administration’s handling of clear-cut cases of war crimes they say were committed by former Bush officials who the Obama administration not only refuses to prosecute but has gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up.

“We’re increasingly disappointed and alarmed by the current administration’s stance on accountability for torture,” said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, during a conference call with reporters. “On every front, the [Obama] administration is actively obstructing accountability. This administration is shielding Bush administration officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture.”

Before leaving office, Dick Cheney said he approved waterboarding on at least three “high value” detainees and the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 other prisoners. President Bush made a somewhat vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques.

The ACLU and other civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney’s comments amounted to an admission of war crimes.

Under the Convention Against Torture, the clear record that the Bush administration used waterboarding and other brutal techniques to extract information from detainees should have triggered the United States to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders. In the case of the US’s refusal to do so, other nations would be obligated to act under the principle of universality.

But Jaffer said that while “the Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity.”

Defending John Yoo

Indeed, last week, Obama’s Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit filed against torture memo author John Yoo by Jose Padilla, a US citizen who was arrested in 2002 for allegedly planning to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” and detained in a Navy brig on US soil for three years as an enemy combatant, where he says he was tortured as a direct result of Yoo’s legal authorization.

The Obama administration argued, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that DOJ lawyers who advise on torture or other human rights abuses are entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits.

“The Holder Justice Department insists that they are absolutely not responsible, and that they are free to act according to a far lower standard of conduct than that which governs Americans generally,” wrote Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert in a column published on the Harper’s web site. “Indeed, this has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations.”

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the Obama administration “has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions.”

“If successful in [the Padilla] case, the Obama Administration will succeed in returning the world to the rules leading to the war crimes at Nuremberg,” Turley said. “Quite a legacy for the world’s newest Nobel Peace Prize winner.”

What’s remarkable about the Obama Justice Department’s amicus brief in the Padilla case is that it didn’t need to be filed to begin with. Yoo hired a private defense attorney, albeit one who is paid for with taxpayer dollars, earlier this year when the Justice Department backed out of representing Yoo due to undisclosed conflicts.

Suicides

In court papers filed last week, the Obama administration took a hard line in another case, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling that gave detainees the right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment doesn’t apply to the cases of Yasser Al-Zahrani and Salah Al-Salami, two Guantanamo prisoners who committed suicide in June 2006.

The fathers of the men, who were never charged with a crime, sued Bush administration Defense Department officials in federal court, arguing that the torture their sons endured drove them to hang themselves on June 10, 2006 after being detained for four years.

But the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the “detention, transfer, treatment or conditions of confinement” of “enemy combatants.”

Moreover, in court papers filed in June, the Obama administration said, “Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military and diplomatic efforts and lead to ‘embarrassment of our government abroad.’”

Besides, the Obama administration said, just as John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials are entitled to “qualified immunity” because the “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

Earlier this week, a report prepared by the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Policy & Research called into question the veracity of the government’s official version of the deaths of the two men and that of a third prisoner, who was also found hanging in his cell on June 10, 2006. The government attributed the suicides to “asymmetrical warfare.”

“Both the time and exact manner of the deaths remain uncertain, and the presence of rags stuffed in the detainees‘ throats is unexplained,” the report said.

CIA Renditions and State Secrets

The Obama administration has also mounted an aggressive defense of the Bush administration in another high-profile case, this one related to a lawsuit filed in 2007 against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing. Jeppesen DataPlan is accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were brutally tortured during the course of their interrogations.

The Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, arguing that national security would be threatened if the lawsuit moved forward, and urged a federal court to throw out the suit. The Bush administration had previously used the privilege as a means to conceal evidence of government misconduct and illegality, critics charged. Still, the judge in the Jeppesen case threw out the lawsuit. The ACLU, which filed the complaint on behalf of five former Guantanamo Bay prisoners, appealed the decision.

Last February, less than a month after Obama was sworn into office and after promising to break free from the abuses committed by the Bush administration, Obama’s Justice Department shocked civil liberties and human rights advocates when attorneys appeared in federal court in San Francisco and invoked the same state secrets privilege that Bush used to keep the Jeppesen case from moving forward.

Even the judge was baffled. She asked a Justice Department attorney if the change in leadership would lead to a change in the administration’s legal position with regard to state secrets, but the answer was a resounding “no.”

An appellate court ultimately ruled in April that the case could move forward. The panel noted that state secrets can only be cited with regard to specific evidence, and not used as a means to dismiss an entire lawsuit. Justice Department attorneys will be back in court Tuesday to appeal the decision, once again asserting state secrets to try and have the case dismissed.

Sen. Russ Feingold, (D-Wisconsin), who heads a subcommittee on the Constitution, said Obama’s use of state secrets during his first 100 days in office was “troubling” and earned the president a “D” for the way in which his administration has handled civil liberties lawsuits filed against the Bush administration, including the Jepessen lawsuit.

Going a step further, the Obama administration has tried to block Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, from obtaining documentary evidence to support his claims that he was tortured while in US custody and that the British government was complicit.

In a legal brief, the ACLU said Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness, and during one gruesome torture session “a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds.”

The Obama White House, repeating threats first leveled by the Bush administration, told British government officials that intelligence sharing between the US and Britain would cease if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret US documents related to allegations about Mohamed’s torture were made public by a British High Court.

Those threats were reiterated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the CIA and Obama’s National Security Adviser James Jones, according to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

“The United States Government’s position is that, if the redacted paragraphs are made public, then the United States will re-evaluate its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United Kingdom with the real risk that it would reduce the intelligence it provided,” the High Court wrote in a ruling in February when it agreed to keep the paragraphs blacked out. “There is a real risk, if we restored the redacted paragraphs, the United States Government, by its review of the shared intelligence arrangements, could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains.”

The Obama White House actually issued a statement after the High Court ruling thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information” and added that the order would “preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens.”

It’s unclear why the Obama administration believed national security would be at risk if details of Mohamed’s torture were released. That’s the realization a two-judge panel arrived at when it decided last October to reverse its earlier decision, ruling that the paragraphs at issue should be disclosed because there was a “compelling public interest” and “for reasons of democratic accountability and the rule of law.”

The High Court found that there was insufficient evidence to support White House claims that intelligence sharing between the US and Britain would be endangered because there wasn’t an “explicit statement of consequences [of disclosure by the Court] by the Obama Administration.”

Most notably, however, the judges concluded that the seven paragraphs in question had nothing to do with “secret intelligence” as the Obama administration had claimed. Rather, they were related to the culpability of British intelligence agents in Mohamed’s torture.

Following the High Court’s reversal, The New York Times published a scathing editorial attacking the Obama administration’s hard-line position in the Mohamed case, saying, “The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.”

Mohamed was freed in February after being imprisoned for seven years, and was sent back to Britain. Terrorism-related charges against him were dropped last year when his attorneys sued to gain access to more than three dozen secret documents.

Torture Photos

Obama also reversed a commitment he made earlier this year to release photos of US soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama said his decision stemmed from his personal review of the photos and his concern that their release would endanger American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the reversal came after several weeks of mounting accusations portraying him as weak on national security.

It became clear that the president had succumbed to a propaganda barrage unleashed by former Bush administration officials, their congressional allies, the right-wing news media and holdovers that retain key jobs under Obama.

His administration decided to fight an appeals court order to the Supreme Court that it originally said it would honor, while his appointees personally worked with lawmakers in Congress to pass legislation that would authorize the secretary of defense to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act and keep the photographs under wraps.

The legislation was passed in November and Obama swiftly signed it into law. By blocking the release of photographs, Obama essentially killed any meaningful chance of opening the door to an investigation of the senior Pentagon and Bush administration officials responsible for implementing the policies that directly led to the abuses captured in the images.

Obama’s decision to fight to conceal the photos marked an about-face on the open-government policies that he proclaimed during his second day in office.

On January 21, President Obama signed an executive order instructing all federal agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of Freedom of Information Act requests and promised to make the federal government more transparent.

“The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears,” Obama’s order said. “In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.”

But the ACLU pointed out Thursday that it has seen a limited impact from that sweeping executive order.

“We have not seen the presumption translated into the release of more information,” Jaffer said. “There are several cases [in] which we are just at a loss to understand why the information we are requesting is still being withheld.” This information includes documents related to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program and transcripts of Combatant Status Review Tribunals in which detainees “describe the abuse they suffered at the hands of their CIA interrogators.”

Obama and Congress

In April, a set of legal memoranda written by Yoo and former OLC heads Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury were released. The memos authorized the CIA to implement a list of torture techniques to be used against so-called “high-value” prisoners, including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, placing insects inside a confinement box to induce fear, exposing detainees to extreme heat and cold, and shackling prisoners to the ceilings of their prison cells or in other painful “stress positions.” The release prompted renewed pressure on members of Congress to investigate the Bush-era abuses.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and his counterpart in the House, Rep. John Conyers, floated competing proposals early in the year for a 9/11-style “truth commission” and a blue-ribbon investigative panel to look into the circumstances that led the Bush administration to formulate a policy of torture.

Obama signaled that he was open to the idea of a “truth commission,” but said he was concerned “about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations.”

Yet he immediately shifted his stance after Republicans pilloried him in numerous op-ed columns in major publications and on cable news programs for backtracking on early promises to “look forward” instead of backwards.

That led Obama to call lawmakers to the White House for a closed-door meeting in late April to talk them out of moving forward with independent investigations. The president even discouraged oversight hearings into the Bush administration’s use of torture.

Underscoring Obama’s position on the issue, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at the time, “The president determined the concept didn’t seem altogether workable in this case.”

“The last few days might be evidence of why something like this might just become a political back and forth,” Gibbs said.

While Republicans criticized the idea, Democrats weren’t eager to get behind the plan either, and it was scrapped as lawmakers said they were forced to deal with more pressing issues like the economy and health care.

Upcoming Hearings on Torture?

However, according to Christopher Anders, the ACLU’s senior legislative counsel, Leahy and Conyers have both said they intend to hold hearings next year once a long-awaited report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is released that delves into Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury’s legal work surrounding torture.

Leahy and Conyers “said a number of times that they would have hearings when the OPR report comes out,” Anders said in an interview. “It would be a big surprise if they didn’t conduct hearings. We fully expect them to hold hearings.”

Anders added that while there is a time and place for independent commissions, the issue of torture is really a matter for Congress to probe.

“These are the hard issues that Congress should really be tackling” Anders said. “It’s squarely under their jurisdiction.”

Spokespeople for Conyers and Leahy did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment.

Additional Revelations

Much of what the public knows thus far about the Bush administration’s torture policies is due to the ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government. Since 2004, the organization has obtained more than 100,000 pages of documents that show the Bush White House signed off on and authorized torture against detainees at Guantanamo Bay and at prisons in Iraq.

Several weeks ago, the organization obtained hundreds of new documents, one of which was a one-page questionnaire, apparently from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, that asked (presumably inquiring of the CIA), “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw?’”

The rack and screw is a medieval torture device. As Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the ACLU, pointed out in an interview, “Anytime you need to ask a question like that it is deeply disturbing and shows you’ve strayed from constitutional norms.

“You’re asking a question as to whether the conduct you’re about to authorize relates to rack and screw, and that in and of itself should be evidence enough that you’re going too far. It never should get to that point.”

But the release of these explosive documents, as well as others that showed the Bush White House was deeply involved in discussions surrounding the destruction of 92 torture tapes, was met with absolute silence by Congress and the White House.

The ACLU said that as much as the Obama administration may hope that additional revelations related to the Bush administration’s policy of torture will slip underneath the radar, numerous documents expected to be released in the weeks and months ahead will ensure the issue remains front and center for years to come, and calls for accountability will continue.

“The lesson that this is giving to the rest of the world is that countries do not have to be accountable for their actions even when torture and abuse occurs,” the ACLU’s Anders said. “That’s going to make it much more difficult for the United States to push other countries on human rights issues across the board, and it’s going to make it much easier for other countries to shirk their own duties to bring accountability for their own actions in the past.”

Still, that didn’t stop Obama from lecturing the Oslo audience about the importance of upholding human rights.

Jaffer said there is “an obvious tension on what the president is saying on the commitment to human rights and the work we’re doing here in the United States to actually hold people accountable for the violations of both domestic and international law.”

“A lot of what was authorized by senior Bush administration officials was illegal not only under international law but domestic law as well,” Jaffer said. “Many of the methods that were approved by CIA and [Department of Defense] interrogators had previously been described by multiple US administrations as war crimes and some of them have been prosecuted as war crimes.

“Waterboarding in particular is something that has been prosecuted as a war crime before September 11. And yet we are not holding people accountable for having used those techniques, authorized those techniques. Increasingly, we’re frustrated by the gap between the Obama administration’s rhetoric on accountability and reality. We see the Obama administration actively obstructing accountability on every front.”

¹revoke \ri-’vōk\ verb

1. to annul by recalling or taking back; rescind <revoke a will>
2. to bring or call back

intransitive verb

1. to fail to follow suit when able in a card game in violation of the rules

ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Anglo-French revocer, revoquer, from Latin revocare, from re- + vocare to call, from voc-, vox voice [14th century]
-revoker noun

²revoke \ri-’vōk\ noun

1. an act or instance of revoking in a card game

ETYMOLOGY: [1709]

Nuremberg_2946
from Flickr user Michael Dawes

Confused? Don’t be; check out what this post is about by reading up on the concept behind Photographic Friday.

This photograph is protected by a Creative Commons license held by the author. All rights under this license are retained by the author. For more information regarding the particular license protecting this photograph, please click here. If this is your photograph and you’d prefer to have it removed from my site, please email me at habbitualaddict [at] gmail [dot] com.

Definition retrieved from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary on 11 December 2009.

(Roger’s Note: a couple of points to mention: that the Bush Administration torture policy and the Obama Administration complicity do not begin to match the scope of the Nazi holocaust does not make them any less guilty of serious crimes against human nature.  And of course, it was not Nazi German justice that brought war criminals to account at Nuremberg but rather that of the victorious Allies.  For the government of the very same nation that committed war crimes to bring its own officials to justice for such crimes would set a new precedent.  In the world of realpolitik we don’t really expect that to happen.  Why then, do we press for justice?  I leave it to the reader to answer that important question for her or himself.)

1, December 9, 2009

http://jonathanturley.org/2009/12/09/obama-administration-files-to-dismiss-case-against-john-yoo/

O lápis é uma das invenções mais usadas e mesmo indispensáveis na vida diária, mas mesmo assim, não se sabe exatamente qual a sua origem.
A primeira menção feita de um lápis de grafite é de um trabalho enciclopédico do médico, botânico e zoólogo suíço-alemão Honrad van Gesner publicado em 1565.
Neste trabalho, Gesner descreve um instrumento de escrita, constituído de uma vareta de grafite colocado dentro de uma moldura de madeira.
O uso de lápis extendeu-se por dois séculos e foi na década de 1760 quando a empresa alemã Faber fundou uma fábrica na cidade de Nuremberg, Alemanha, para produção em larga escala dos lápis.

. ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ .

El lápiz es uno de los inventos más utilizados y hasta indispensables en la vida diario, pero sin embargo, no se conoce exactamente cual es su origen.
La primera mención que se hace de un lápiz de grafito se encuentra en un trabajo enciclopédico del médico, botánico y zoólogo suizo-alemán Honrad van Gesner publicado en 1565.
En dicho trabajo, Gesner describe un instrumento para escribir, consistente en una barra de grafito colocada dentro de un armazón de madera.
El uso de lápices se extendió a lo largo de dos siglos y fue en la década de 1760 cuando la compañía alemana Faber fundó una fábrica en la ciudad de Nuremberg, Alemania, para la producción a gran escala de los lapices.

Roger Hollander, December 5, 2009

I remember from my studies in political science many years ago coming across a study with respect to the opinion of Americans about the provision of the Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments to the Constitution).  Although when asked if they support the Bill of Rights most answered in the positive, when asked about the views on the contents of the rights contained in the individual Amendments (without identifying them as rights contained in the Bill of Rights), most were not in favor.  And this was before the hijacking of the political discourse in the United Sates by the religious radical right.

Some shocking statistics have emerged recently in a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.  Two thousand adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States were asked between October 28 and November 8, 2009 their opinions about torture.  A majority, 54% opined that torture was often (19%) or sometimes (35%) justified.

I doubt if these figures would have been nearly as high prior to 9/11.  There is no doubt in my mind that they are to a large degree a product of the fear-mongering and misinformation that we have been subjected to from the extreme right, the majority of Republican and Democrat politicians, and the lapdog corporate mainstream media.

I would like to see the results of this survey if the respondents were fully informed of the overwhelming opinion of experts in the field that torture is counter-productive in eliciting reliable actionable information and reminded that the victims of torture are “suspects,” not convicted terrorists and that a policy of torture makes American prisoners of war more vulnerable to torture.

I would like to see the results of this survey if the respondents were shown these photos:

I would particularly like to see the results of this survey if the respondents were able to be present in the torture sessions depicted in these photos (of course I would not advocate such an experiment).

More than anything, I would like to see a revolution in thought and action in the United States that reflects a turn from racism, violence, intolerance and greed, away from religious bigotry and twoards truly human values.

W H A T : BERLIN CHRISTMAS MARKETS
W H E N : Nov, 23 2009-
W H E R E : Berlin, Germany

M O R E :

• Berlin Winter Magic
• German Christmas Markets
• More than just Christmas markets
• euromaxx: German Christmas Markets 01 Dresden
• euromaxx: German Christmas Markets 02 Nuremberg
• euromaxx: German Christmas Markets 03 Seiffen

Seiffen in Saxony is famous for its wooden Christmas ornaments.


• euromaxx: German Christmas Markets 04 Berlin
• euromaxx: German Christmas Markets 05 Aachen
• euromaxx: German Christmas Markets 06 Birmingham

~~

Temperatures have been somewhat bearable since we have gotten here, and then today we encountered the wind.  It was incredibly blustery today and the wind whipping across your body really makes it much colder.

Things are progressing nicely!  We have a vehicle, it is legally registered, and we will be moving into a flat this week.  Also, I have my license.  Hopefully, J will get his soon as he is itching to drive.  I have been driving around the area and each day I pass milestones (at least milestones for me).  I have yet to drive on the autobahn, I think that will be something I work up to.  I also think that there are just too many signs; but that is just my opinion.

I had planned to post pictures of our trip to Amberg and Nuremberg, but I had to pack the camera stuff back up.  Next time I promise…

But our trip to Amberg was awesome.  We ate in a steakhouse type restaurant, although I wouldn’t classify it as such.  The owner is French and we were able to communicate quite well in English.  They were able to make me the most delicious plate of vegetables with baked mushrooms I have ever had in my life.  I was more than pleased!  I also tried the wasser for the first time, which is sparkling water.  It was not bad and have since sort of incorporated it into my meals when offered.  Amberg’s town square was preparing for their Christmas markets to start up with little booths and a giant Christmas tree in front of an old church.  We also were able to find a neat tea shop that I am looking forward to visiting.

I also ordered a “limonade” for lunch one day and was surprised to find that it was more like sprite without calories than anything.  Lemon-flavored wasser I guess.

Yesterday, we went to Nuremberg to a Japanese restaurant.  It was really an awesome experience.  They had “running sushi” which meant that you could get a table beside this little conveyor belt and all sorts of small plates full of food would ride by.  I had bean sprout salad, kappa maki rolls, some rolls with Japanese pickle, honeydew melon, and oranges.  We had a mountain of plates but it was really delicious.  For one hour you paid just over 15 Euro per person which is about 23 dollars and for all the food that is available for you to eat, it is a deal.   When I post the pictures I will post the names of the restaurants.

After that our friend took us to one of the stadiums where Hitler had parades and spoke to the people.  It was really eerie particularly without any lights on and the chill in the air.  We walked around the steps and stood on the balcony type area where he would stand and preside over the ceremonies.  They area is enormous and from what I understand was built to show the world the strength and power of the regime.  There is a museum as well, but it was obviously closed.

We are both pretty tired with eating food from American fast food places.  We really don’t have the means to cook and really don’t know enough German to venture out into a restaurant in the town on our own.  I have already made a grocery list though .  It is unfortunately two pages! 

On November 20:

1620 – Peregrine White,  was born – first English child born in the Plymouth Colony.

1765  Sir Thomas Fremantle, British naval captain, was born.

1820 An 80-ton sperm whale attacked the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story).

1889  Edwin Hubble, American astronomer, was born.

1900 – Chester Gould, American comic strip artist, creator of Dick Tracey, was born.

1908 – Alistair Cooke, British-born journalist, was born.

1910 Francisco I. Madero issued the Plan de San Luis Potosi, denouncing President Porfirio Díaz, calling for a revolution to overthrow the government of Mexico, effectively starting the Mexican Revolution.

1917 Ukraine was declared a republic.

1925 Robert F. Kennedy, American politician was born.

1942  Joe Biden, 47th Vice President of the United States, was born.

1945 Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals started at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.

1947 Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey.

1956 – Bo Derek, American actress, was born.

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ended: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ended the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.

1975 Francisco Franco, Caudillo of Spain, died after 36 years in power.

1985 Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released.

1992 A fire broke out in Windsor Castle, badly damaging the castle and causing over £50 million worth of damage.

2008 After critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its lowest level since 1997.

1937 Parachuting Santa, George Sellars, narrowly escaped serious injury when he was able to sway his parachute just in time to avoid crashing through the glass roof of the Winter Gardens during the Farmers’ Christmas parade.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.

Ce film démontrant l’histoire de l’un des plus grands procès de l’histoire m’a fait réaliser plusieurs choses.  Tout d’abord, il y a l’aspect de la peine de mort. Plusieurs personnes importantes ont mérité cette sentence lors de ce procès. Ces personnes sont les bras droits d’Hitler, ils sont à l’origine des millions de morts durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Or, cet aspect du film m’a amené à me questionner si  ces personnes méritaient vraiment d’être exécutées. Personnellement, je crois  qu’ils méritent d’être traités autrement, ils devraient mériter une sentence équivalente à la prison à vie. Ils méritent de penser aux gestes qu’ils ont faits, de réfléchir et de culpabiliser. Un décès relié à la peine de mort est trop subite, trop facile pour eux. Leur enlever la vie est la sentence la plus agréable pour des tels criminels de guerre. D’ailleurs, nous ne savons pas ce qui se cache dernière la mort. Peut-être qu’il n’a rien, ou peut-être que nous ressuscitons sous une autre vie qui est encore meilleure que celle que nous avons actuellement. Enfin, la peine de mort est un long débat pour lequel ce film m’a fait réfléchir à propos de ce sujet. Ce film m’a aussi permis de réaliser à quel point Hitler est un homme exceptionnel dans le sens qu’il a réussi à prendre le pouvoir et à contrôler son peuple comme il le voulait. Nous devons admettre qu’il était tout un leader. Même lorsque la guerre était terminée, plusieurs personnes continuaient d’appuyer cet ancien dirigeant de l’Allemagne. Néanmoins, j’ai beau lui attribuer cette qualité, pour le reste je dois dire que c’est vraiment horrible ce qu’il a fait à l’être humain. Les images réelles des atrocités de la 2e guerre mondiale révélées dans ce film m’ont vraiment choqué. J’avais de la difficulté à croire que ces vidéos étaient vraies, car je ne pouvais concevoir qu’on avait fait une telle chose à l’être humain. Enfin, ce film m’a permis de m’informer et d’approfondir mes connaissances sur la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, mais il m’a surtout fait réfléchir sur nous, l’être humain. J’ai aussi appris à quel point le pouvoir de l’autorité peut avoir un impact sur l’homme. Hitler a réussi à convaincre des hommes qui avaient une très bonne conscience morale à faire les pires atrocités du monde par le pouvoir.

No, we are not referring to Moflash never attending the SPS show again but to the fact that it was the first time that we had participated,  and that it was the last show in the calendar for 2009. Moflash have taken part in more shows in more countries than ever before in our short 12 year history. Some companies take the view of battening down the hatches in difficult times; a stance we do not subscribe to, and to be fair, it would seem the rest of our industry also agrees as there was a strong turnout of signalling manufacturers at the show.

It was the first time that we tried a direct approach in Germany. Simon Evans said: “Although Hannover is of course a German show, we always treat it as a fully international event. However, we were surprised by the amount of international visitors at SPS, rightly or wrongly we expected the attendance to be mainly local.”

Another First was the showing of the revamped 125 series beacons which include LED XENON FILAMENT and BEACON BUZZER combinations and with sales showing a marked increase against the same period last year for the range it would seem that the new shape and increased IP protection has been a hit with existing and new customers.  Also on show was the NEW LED80 and X80 lines again with improved IP protection from the original X75 to IP67 the 80 series gives the installer an effective local signal which is low cost and can be used in the majority climatic conditions .

SPS has thrown up some opportunities which we hope will strengthen our position in what is a very tough market dominated by home grown competition. The plan for 2010 is to double the business in Germany that was achieved this year.

So thanks to everyone who visited the stand, both old and new customers. It has certainly been an interesting year and we looking forward to 2010 and the first show of the year in Hannover.

Today I am thinking about Sam, but still pretty upset to find out he was dead. So I thought I’d use this shot of him and Leni Riefenstahl as a springboard to discussing a little bit about propoganda (obviously entire books and brilliant essays are devoted to this topic, I just want to think out loud a bit). So. Sam and Leni. They were not any type of friends, but they of course knew one another, because of the international stature both held as artists.

This picture with Leni was taken in Munich in the early 70’s. We were serving on the jury for a photographic competition organised by Der Spiegel. A friendly argument developed during a break in the judging activities. Postal sacks filled with the competition entries swamped the corridors leaving little room for chairs. (“Leni Riefenstahl,” Sam’s blog, entry dated 3/15/07)

Leni Riefenstahl is a divisive and problematic figure for me to wrap my brain around: while her career has been largely brilliant, and I suppose each piece of art ought be considered an entity unto itself, she is a photographer and cinematographer from whom for me it is difficult to separate the facts of her life and her art. See, her body of work is great, but it also contains The Triumph of the Will, a handy piece of pure propoganda which launched her to forever-infamy and helped sway many to the National Socialist way of thinking.

Leni Riefenstahl with Heinrich Himmler at Nuremberg, 1934.

Yeah, that’s Heinrich Himmler and her at Nuremberg, 1934, setting up a cozy little scene for the camera. It’s significant and somewhat ironic to me and, you likely too, because, of course, she and Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, spinmeister, were busy here trying to launch some Nazi ships of popularity, and ultimately the career of many a Nazi ended there, eleven years later at the trials. Riefenstahl was arrested after World War II, but was not tried at Nuremberg, nor ever convicted of any crimes. Fair or unfair? Question for discussion: is propaganda a crime? A con of the highest order, making it a physical and emotionally abusive crime of course, as any manipulative act must be, but also, and perhaps more strangely, a crime against art itself? A violation of its core function? If the purpose of art is to express yourself, and we see that for some being provocative is how they do it (I do not believe the work of shock artists violates or upheaves what I’ve just advanced as the core purpose of art; I believe their work still falls beneath the aegis of self-expression, whether they understand that or not), then is propoganda a gross perversion of the core purpose, forcing a perspective on the viewer rather than expressing one’s own, muscling and manipulating and violating the relationship between seer and seen?

Leni and crew filming those all-important ‘36 Olympics.

We talked about what happens when art imitates life, and when art imitates art, but what about when life imitates art because art influences life? What would Leni’s dear friend Goebbels, the undisputed grandfather of the spin and the catchy
slogan, answer, if he had not been tipped off as to his imminent arrest and killed himself rather than face trial in the liberated Germany? What are the implications of how propoganda was used politically, with our historical understanding, when we look now at modern instances of using art to increase the popularity of a product or idea, from advertising of food and beverages to people and philosophies and lifestyles?

Golden Globe and Academy Award winner Charlize Theron for Christian Dior, “J’Adore” parfum.

Or am I all backward. Is the opposite so? Is all art propaganda of some kind? One of my favorite movies, The Cradle Will Rock, written and directed by Tim Robbins, which is set during the 1930’s, draws consistent symbolic parallels between artists and whores, and even has a line where William Randolph Hearst says, not sneeringly, but simply with a practical confidence, “And artists are whores — like the rest of us.” Has the relationship between art and advertising and commercialism and pop cultural consciousness come so far that there is no way to ever go back? And, fuck, what do I know, like is that so wrong?

“Tommy Hilfiger Celebrates Sam Haskins.”

“We have burnt our bridges. We cannot go back, but neither do we want to go back. We are forced to extremes and therefore resolved to proceed to extremes.” (Joseph Goebbels, 1943)

I do not have answers. I’m frustrated and bummed and totally confusing myself. I quit! I’ll regroup and come back to this a different day.

Eurowings BAe (Avro) 146-200 D-AJET (Lufthansa Regional) NUE, originally uploaded by Airliners Gallery.

Eurowings (Nuremberg) is gradually replacing its BAe 146-200 and 146-300 fleet with newer Bombardier CRJ900s. On Thursday (November 26) the company said goodbye at the Nuremberg base to its long-time BAe 146-200 D-AJET (msn E2201) known in the company as “A-JET”. This picture is taken on the ramp at NUE picturing D-AJET heading to runway 28 for its delivery flight to Star Peru (Lima). The aircraft was flying to Keflavik via Glasgow that day. After an overnight crew rest stop, the second day would see the aircraft flying via Kangerlussuaq (Greenland) and Iqaluit (Canada) for a second overnight stop at Montreal (Trudeau). The third day the airliner was due to stop at Orlando, continuing on to San José (Costa Rica). The last phase of the delivery flight is planned to go via Chiclayo (Peru) onward to the Lima base with a planned arrival date of November 29, 2009. Note the HF antenna on the top fuselage for communications over the North Atlantic. After being delivered on March 20, 1995 the dependable airliner operated for over 14 years with Eurowings. It is pictured in the Lufthansa Regional 2003 colors.

Copyright Photo: Gunter Mayer.

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