The Nuremberg trials were not trials but just a stylized lynching. Yet, under international law, they set a valuable precedent. It is illegal to wage an aggressive war. Ironically, today the war criminals who promote "aggressive war" could also stand trial for war crimes. This is what General Pace of the Marine Corp was saying when he testified before Congress: "All military officers have a moral and a legal duty to refuse an illegal order." This is also what got Admiral Fallon fired. He would not order the attack on Iran. And so it goes.
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Thank you and remember:
Peace is patriotic!
Michael Santomauro
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Croatian police have completed the exhumation of remains from mass grave in a Zagreb suburb, on one of more than 200 known sites where thousands of Germans, both soldiers and civilians, were buried in the closing days of the Second World War. Yugoslav communist partisans carried out executions across the country as the Nazi regime crumbled and fell in 1945. So far the Croatian interior ministry has compiled a list of the sites more than 200 German mass graves. Yet just a handful of the sites have so far been investigated. One was discovered two years ago at Harmica, where an estimated 5,000 soldiers of the German Wehrmacht were shot and buried, including 500 officers. 
... Wiesenthal's account of his experiences during the years of the Holocaust is clearly fabricated ... Wiesenthal's claims about tracking war criminals in the post-war years are likewise riddled with exaggerations, if not outright falsehoods ... Over the years, Wiesenthal repeatedly announced that he knew precisely where Mengele was. Most of these pronouncements, it seems, were mere guesses designed to win media attention. 
A veteran diplomat says he has resigned from his post because he had a hard time defending the policies of Israel's current government, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday. Ilan Baruch says he quit because "Israel's foreign policy is wrong," pointing to the Palestinian issue. Should this trend continue, he warned, Israel will turn into a pariah state and face growing de-legitimization. Baruch told Israel TV Wednesday that Israel's standing was in danger because of its policies, which he said were "difficult to explain." 
It's time for Israel to come out of the closet. After five decades of maintaining a nuclear weapons program without acknowledging its existence, Israel should proactively announce and provide information about its nuclear weapons status. Though Israel's bombs have long been an open secret, unprecedented international scrutiny in coming years will make this "nuclear opacity" increasingly untenable. 
In Hungary, German and Hungarian troops fight furiously against massive Soviet assault forces. Many tanks are engaged in the large-scale combat. Civilians, including women, help in the defense of Budapest. From the German weekly newsreel, "Deutsche Wochenschau," of Feb. 10, 1945. With English subtitles. Runtime: 2:44 mins. 
Even as the Southern Poverty Law Center points out that the number of US hate groups has topped 1,000 for the first time, the civil rights organization is receiving flak from critics on the right who say an overbroad definition of "hate" vilifies innocent people and stifles vigorous debate about issues critical to America's future ... Neo-Nazi-like hate groups grew by nearly ten percent since 2009, to 1002; anti-immigration vigilante groups grew by trhee percent, to 319; and antigovernment "Patriot" groups -- defined as "conspiracy-minded organizations that see the federal government as their primary enemy" -- grew by 60 percent, to 824. 
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years. 
Sixty-six years after the bombing of Dresden - one of the most controversial allied operations of World War II which killed around 25,000 civilians - a debate about who was to blame for the conflict still rages ... On one side in this contest over the past are the far-left, dressed very much like the far-right, all in black but waving the English flag - the Cross of St George - to symbolise I suppose their siding with Britain. On the other extreme, the neo-Nazi march, with its Elgar ... Germans as perpetrators, certainly, but Germans as victims? That is a locution with which not everyone is easy - Germans as victims too. Past and present can confuse in Dresden . 
The United States has vetoed an Arab-sponsored UN resolution branding Israeli settlements illegal, prompting angry Palestinians to vow to re-evaluate the entire Middle East peace process ... The resolution, sponsored by 130 countries, reaffirmed "that the Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and constitute a major obstacle to the achievement of a just, lasting and comprehensive peace."... Fourteen of the 15 Security Council members voted in favor of the resolution but the US veto effectively killed the move. ... The United States has traditionally used its veto power in the Security Council, a body Israel deems as deeply biased, to shield the Jewish state from censure. 
... Since my Mexican tourist visa waiver will expire end of February, I have to leave the country. I will temporarily live with friends in Central America . Should there be no silver lining at the horizon by the end of April/early May, I will return to Europe . Since I am prohibited to be a spouse to my wife and a father to my daughter, I will at least be a father to the children from my first marriage by temporarily returning to Germany . 
After a visit to the Eastern front in occupied Soviet territory, Hitler flies to Finland for a historic meeting on June 4, 1942, with Finland's great commander, Marshal Mannerheim, on his 75th birthday, and with Finnish president Ryti. Excerpt from the weekly German wartime newsreel, "Deutsche Wochenschau." With English subtitles. Runtime: 5:37 minutes. 
I've been called everything from an extreme liberal to an ultra-conservative. I am neither. I have been labeled a "Nazi" because of my numerous interviews with Hitler's adjutants, secretaries, doctors, and military leaders, both SS and Wehrmacht ... I have tried to approach history as a non-partisan, ignoring nationality and ideology, and to portray the horrors of war through the sufferings of ordinary people as well as in the imaginations of the mighty. Throughout it all, I have tried to present living history, human history, with subjective objectivity, in my obsessive search for reality. 
... Thus the Soviet Jews obtained a weighty share of state, industrial, and economic power at all levels of government in the USSR ... It can't be denied that History elevated many Soviet Jews into the ranks of the arbiters of the fate of all Russians ... From the astonishing disclosure in 1990 we learned that the famous mobile gas chambers were invented, as it turns out, not by Hitler during the World War II, but in the Soviet NKVD in 1937 by Isai Davidovich Berg, the head of the administrative and maintenance section of the NKVD of Moscow Oblast (sure, he was not alone in that enterprise, but he organized the whole business). 
... Egypt also suddenly dared to "disturb the peace." Its people, who have had enough of the country's corrupt government and the tyrannical silencing of their voices, have taken to the streets. Riots. The Western world, including Israel, has tensed in the face of this great danger - the stability in the Middle East is about to be undermined. Indeed, that stability should be undermined. The stability in the region, something which Westerners and Israeli have come to yearn, merely means perpetuating the status quo. That situation might be good for Israel and the West, but it is very bad for the millions of people who have had to pay the price. 
Though the U.S. presidential primaries are still a year from now, a different sort of contest is underway in Israel. Beginning Saturday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour will be the third potential GOP presidential candidate to visit the Jewish state since the first of the year, and the second during the protests in neighboring Egypt. Barbour will arrive on the heels of Mike Huckabee, who spent much of the week touring the country, and Mitt Romney, who swung through in January. And like Romney and Huckabee, Barbour is expected to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and tour some holy sites. 
Jewish leaders and political groups in Germany condemned a proposed national day of remembrance for the twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II. The proposal was to be heard in parliament Thursday. Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told reporters that "One could almost call [the proposal] a kind of retaliation" against remembrance of the victims of German war crimes ... Opposition political leaders and a group of historians have condemned the proposal as revisionist and avoiding German guilt. Kramer said such a memorial day could have a "catastrophic effect" on Germany's image abroad. 
Germany's defeat in May 1945, and the end of World War II in Europe, did not bring an end to death and suffering for the vanquished German people. Instead the victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era that, in many ways, was worse than the destruction wrought by war. In a sobering and courageous new book, After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation, British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation. 
... In our Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made himself a dictator, closing newspapers, suspending habeas corpus, and locking up editors and legislators. Woodrow Wilson went to war to "to make the world safe for democracy" alongside five of the most rapacious empires on earth: the British, French, Russian, Italian and Japanese. During World War II, our ally that did most of the fighting and dying was the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin ... If the advancement of our democratic ideals imperils what the U.S. government says are our vital interests, is there not something fundamentally wrong with our Middle East policy? 
... In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries ... It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but, boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I know ... The "Get Tough America" policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, have earned us a name for obscene brutality. 
The long suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the world [the Feb. 1945 destruction of Dresden] / If the British Commonwealth and the United States last a thousand years, men may say that this was their darkest hour. Were all the crimes against humanity committed during World War II the work of Hitler's underlings? That was certainly the impression created by the fact that only Germans were brought to trial at Nuremburg ... What is less widely recognized ... is that the Western democracies were responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole course of World War II. 
Abraham Lincoln's reputation as the great champion of America's slaves has taken a battering amid new evidence that the revered president wanted to send many of them to toil in British colonies in the Caribbean. Academics Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page claim that documents uncovered in British archives show that Lincoln was rather less enamoured by the prospect of a racially-united America than is often assumed. ... According to evidence from the British legation in Washington that has turned up at the National Archives in Kew, the president was deadly serious about black colonisation right up until his assassination in 1865. 
