From the "oy gevalt" file:A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the...
This is priceless — and uncannily insightful about the demonization of anyone who has the temerity to question the Bush administration's policies:WASHINGTON, DC — Breaking a 211-year media silence, retired Army Gen. George Washington appeared on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday to speak out against many aspects of the way the Iraq war has been waged. Washington, whose appearance marked the...
I guess I should've held my breath after all -- the Justice Department announced today that it will appeal Judge Cardone's decision to set Posada free:One month after a stinging loss, the Justice Department Tuesday appealed a Texas federal judge's dismissal of immigration fraud charges against Cuban exile militant Luis Posada Carriles. In May, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone threw out...
I intend to follow the Charles Taylor trial on Opinio Juris in the coming months. True international trial junkies, though, will want to add an invaluable new blog to their RSS readers: The Trial of Charles Taylor: International Criminal Justice in the Making. Sponsored by the Open Society Institute, the blog contains daily coverage of the trial, expert...
The G-8 Summit is scheduled to get underway on Wednesday, and with the summit will come protesters — as many as 100,000, according to estimates. Those intending to protest have already been tarred by the violent clashes between anarchists and the police last week at a pre-summit protest in Rostock; police in Heiligendamm are gearing up for similar protests...
Charles Taylor's trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone is set to begin on Monday. The trial, which is expected to last between 12 and 18 months, may not be the trial of the century, but it is certainly a landmark: Taylor is the first president of an African country to be tried for serious international crimes by...
The Economist Intelligence Unit has released its new "Global Peace Index," which ranks 120 nations according to their relative peacefulness. The organization based the rankings on 24 peacefulness indicators, divided into three categories: (1) measures of ongoing domestic and international conflict, such as the number of external and internal conflicts fought between 2000 and 2005, the estimated number of...
I've just finished reading Tom Bowers' fascinating — and disturbing — book on the failures of denazification after WWII, Blind Eye to Murder. In the final chapter, Bowers discusses the 1977 kidnapping and eventual murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the wealthy president of the Federation of German Employers and a former SS officer, by the Red Army Faction (RAF). ...
Last week, I discussed the disturbing case of Francois Xavier-Byuma, a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group who had been arrested and accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide. As I noted in that post, the accusations were leveled by a gacaca judge whom Byuma had been investigating in connection with the rape of a young girl. The situation...
The United Nations announced last week that the government of Burundi has agreed to establish a criminal tribunal and truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) to deal with the widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed during Burundi's 12-year civil war, in which more than 300,000 people were killed:Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights,...
The Economic Mobility Project has released a fascinating and disturbing report entitled "Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?" The entire report is well worth a read, but what I found particularly striking was how poorly the U.S. does in terms of economic mobility relative to other developed Western countries, particularly the much-maligned ones in Scandinavia: The report...
While we are on the topic of Nazis, a more contemporary story: recently discovered documents have reignited controversy in the Netherlands over whether KLM played an active role in helping Nazi war criminals flee Europe at the end of WW II.KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, has always denied that it had a policy of assisting Nazis to escape justice at the...
