Saturday, May 23, 2009

THE DARK CONTINENT

Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers

By SPIEGEL Staff

05/20/2009 12:23 PM

The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler's foreign helpers.

He's been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan, not John; not yet.

Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbürg concentration camp until shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and he was a Travniki, one of the 5,000 men who helped Germany's Nazi regime commit the crime of the millennium -- the murder of all the Jews in Europe, the "Final Solution."

He was part of it, if only a very minor cog in the vast machinery of murder. Ivan Demjanjuk stayed in post-war Germany for seven years before he emigrated to the US in 1952 with his wife and daughter on board the General Haan. Once he arrived, he changed his name to John. His time as a supposed DP or "displaced person," as the Anglo-American victors called people made homeless by the war, was over.

DP Demjanjuk had lived in the southern German towns of Landshut and Regensburg where he worked for the US Army. He moved to Ulm, Ellwangen, Bad Reichenhall, and finally to Feldafing on Lake Starnberg. Feldafing belongs to the area covered by the Munich district court, which is why Demjanjuk has been sitting in Munich's Stadelheim prison since he was deported from the US last week. His cell measures 24 square meters, which is extraordinarily spacious by usual prison standards.

Last Big Nazi Trial in Germany

He faces charges of aiding and abetting the murder of at least 29,000 Jews in Sobibor. The trial could start in late summer, provided Demjanjuk, now almost 90, is deemed fit to stand trial. Witnesses will be called to testify, but none of them will be able to identify him. The only evidence lies in the files, but that evidence is strong. Twice, in 1949 and 1979, former Travniki Ignat Danilchenko, who is now dead, stated that Demjanjuk had been an "experienced and efficient guard" who had driven Jews into the gas chambers -- "that was daily work."

Demjanjuk has denied this charge throughout. He says he was never in Flossenbürg or in Sobibor, never pushed people into the gas chambers. The ex-American has adopted the same tactic of denial as many other defendants who stood trial for war crimes after 1945.

The Holocaust in numbers.
DER SPIEGEL

The Holocaust in numbers.

But it's already clear that this last big Nazi trial in Germany will be a deeply extraordinary one because it will for the first time put the foreign perpetrators in the spotlight of world publicity. They are men who have until now received surprisingly little attention -- Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers. Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers -- they all took part in Germany's Holocaust.

Experts such as Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans -- about as many as Germans and Austrians -- "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder." And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler's henchmen.

Just for example, on June 27, 1941, a colonel in the staff of the Germany's Northern Army Group in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas passed a petrol station surrounded by a crowd of people. There were shouts of bravo and clapping, mothers raised their children to give them a better view. The officer stepped closer and later wrote down what he had seen. "On the concrete courtyard there was blonde man aged around 25, of medium height, who was taking a rest and supporting himself on a wooden club which was as thick as an arm and went up to his chest. At his feet lay 15, 20 people who were dead or dying. Water poured from a hose and washed the blood into a drain."

The soldier continued: "Just a few paces behind this man stood around 20 men who -- guarded by several armed civilians -- awaited their gruesome execution in silent submission. Beckoned with a curt wave, the next one stepped up silently and was (…) beaten to death with the wooden club, and every blow met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience."

Orgy of Murder Like a Lithuanian National Ceremony

When all lay dead on the ground, the blonde murderer climbed on the heap of corpses and played the accordion. His audience sang the Lithuanian anthem as if the orgy of murder had been a national ceremony.

How could something like that happen? For a long time now, this question hasn't just been directed at the Germans, whose central responsibility for the horror is undisputed -- but also at the perpetrators in all countries.

What led Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu and his generals, soldiers, civil servants and farmers to murder 200,000 Jews (and possibly twice that many) "of their own accord," as historian Armin Heinen puts it. Why did Baltic death squadrons commit murder on German orders in Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine? And why did German Einsatzgruppen -- paramilitary "intervention groups" operated by the SS -- have such an easy time encouraging the non-Jewish population to wage pogroms between Warsaw and Minsk?

It's completely undisputed that the Holocaust would never have happened without Hitler, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and the many, many other Germans. But it's also certain "that the Germans on their own wouldn't have been able to carry out the murder of millions of European Jews," says Hamburg-based historian Michael Wild.

It's a perception that many survivors never doubted. When the Association of Surviving Lithuanian Jews convened in Munich in 1947, they passed a resolution that bore an unmistakable title: "On the guilt of a large part of the Lithuanian population for the murder of Lithuania's Jews."

In the Third Reich with its well-functioning bureaucracy, there were comprehensive registers of the Jewish population. But in the territories conquered by the German army, Hitler's henchmen needed information of the type supplied in the Netherlands by registry offices whose staff went to a lot of trouble to compile a precise "Register of Jews."

And how would the SS and police have been able to track down Jews in the cities of Eastern Europe with their broad mix of ethnic groups if they hadn't had the support of the local population? Not many Germans would have been able "to recognize a Jew in a crowd," recalls Thomas Blatt, a survivor of Sobibor who wants to testify as a witness at Demjanjuk's trial.

At the time, Blatt was a blonde-haired boy and tried to pass for a Christian child in his Polish home town of Izbica. He didn't wear a yellow star and tried to appear self-confident when he ran into uniformed people. But he was betrayed a number of times -- the Germans paid for information on the whereabouts of Jews -- and he always escaped with a lot of luck.

Denunciation Was Common

Denunciation was so common in Poland that there was a special term for paid informants "Szmalcowniki" (previously a term for a fence). In many cases, the denouncers knew their victims. And while the French, Dutch or Belgians could submit to the illusion that the Jews deported to the east from Paris, Rotterdam or Brussels would be all right in the end, the people in Eastern Europe learned through the grapevine what lay in store for the Jews in Auschwitz or Treblinka.

For sure, many counter-examples can easily be found. A senior officer in Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for the murder of more than 100,000 people, complained that the Ukrainians lacked "pronounced anti-Semitism based on racial or ideological reasons." The officer wrote that "there is a lack of leadership and of spiritual impetus for the pursuit of Jews."

Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews without being paid for their services. It's clear that the perpetrators always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then carrying out their bloody handiwork.

Of course only Hitler and his entourage or the army could have stopped the Holocaust. But this doesn't invalidate the argument that without the foreign helpers, countless thousands or even millions of the approximately six million murdered Jews would have survived.

In the killing fields of Eastern Europe, there were up to 10 local helpers for every German policeman. The ratio is similar in the extermination camps. Not in Auschwitz, which was run almost entirely by Germans, but in Belzec (600,000 killed), Treblinka (900,000 deaths) or in Demjanjuk's Sobibor. There, a handful of SS members were assisted by some 120 Travniki men.

Without them, the Germans would never have managed to kill 250,000 Jews in Sobibor, says former prisoner Blatt. It was the Travniki who guarded the camp, drove all the Jews from the railway wagons and trucks after their arrival in the camp, and who beat them into the gas chambers.

Was the Holocaust a European Project?

Such a stupefying number of victims raises disturbing questions, and Berlin historian Götz Aly already started asking them a few years ago: was the so-called Final Solution in fact a "European project that cannot be explained solely by the special circumstances of German history"?

Many Foreign Perpetrators Acted Voluntarily

There is no final verdict yet on the European dimension of the Holocaust. The French and Italians started late -- when most of the perpetrators were already dead -- to deal comprehensively with this part of their history. Others, such as the Ukrainians and Lithuanians, are still dragging their feet; or they have only just begun, like Romania, Hungary and Poland.

Since 1945 the countries invaded and ravaged by Hitler's armies have seen themselves as victims -- which they doubtless were, with their vast numbers of dead. That makes it all the more painful to concede that many compatriots aided the German perpetrators.

In Latvia, local assistance was greater than anywhere else. According to the American historian Raul Hilberg, the Latvians had the highest proportion of Nazi helpers. The Danes are at the other end of the scale. When the deportation of Denmark's Jews was about to begin in 1943, large parts of the population helped Jews to escape to Sweden or hid them. Some 98 percent of Denmark's 7,500 Jews survived World War II. By contrast, only nine percent of the Dutch Jews survived.

Does the Holocaust represent the low point not only of German history, but of European history as well, as historian Aly argues?

There is evidence challenging the widely-held notion that foreign perpetrators were forced to help the Germans commit murder. It's true that local helpers risked their lives by refusing to assist the German occupiers. That applied to the police units and civil servants in occupied Western Europe as much as it did to newly-formed auxiliary police in the east. But it's also true that in many places people volunteered to serve the Germans or participated in crimes without being forced to.

The Holocaust in numbers.
DER SPIEGEL

The Holocaust in numbers.

There is also the often-repeated claim that the governments of countries allied with Hitler had no choice but to hand over Jewish citizens to the Germans. That's not true either. The Balkan countries in particular quickly understood how important the "solution to the Jewish Question" was to Hitler and his diplomats -- and they tried to extract the highest possible price for their complicity.

There's also reason to doubt the assumption that the helpers were pathological sadists. If that were true, they should be easy to identify, for example within the group of 50 Lithuanians who served under the command of SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Joachim Hamann. The men would drive around the villages up to five times a week to murder Jews, and ended up killing 60,000 people. It only took a few crates of Vodka to get them in the mood. In the evenings the troop would return to Kaunas and boast of their crimes in the mess hall.

None of the Lithuanians had been criminals before. They were "totally and utterly normal," believes historian Knut Stang. Almost everywhere after the war, the murderers returned to their ordinary lives as if nothing had happened. Demjanjuk too was a law-abiding citizen. In Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived, he was regarded as good colleague and a friendly neighbor.

It's the same as with the German perpetrators. There's no identifiable type of killer -- that's a particularly disturbing conclusion reached by historians. The murderers included Catholics and Protestants, hot-blooded southern Europeans and cool Balts, obsessive right-wing extremists or unfeeling bureaucrats, refined academics or violent rednecks.

Among them was Viktor Arajs (1910-1988), a learned lawyer from a Latvian farming family who commanded a unit of more than 1,000 men that murdered its way around Eastern Europe on behalf of the Nazis. Or the Romanian Generaru, son of a general and commander of the ghetto in Bersad in Ukraine, who had one of his victims tied to a motorbike and dragged to death.

Anti-Semitism Was Rife Across Europe

And anti-Semitism? In the 1930s, anti-Semitism grew across Europe because the upheaval after World War I and the global economic crisis had unsettled people. In Eastern Europe, the tendency to regard Jews as scapegoats and to try and exclude them from the job market was especially strong. In Hungary, Jews were banned from public office at the end of the 1930s and were forbidden to work in a large number of professions. Romania voluntarily adopted Nazi Germany's racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. In Poland, many universities restricted access for Jewish students.

The extent of the hatred of Jews is also reflected in the fact that after the end of the war in 1945, mobs in Poland killed at least 600, and possibly even thousands of Holocaust survivors. However, excessive nationalism appears to have been the more important factor, at least in Eastern Europe. Many there dreamed of a nation state devoid of minorities. In this sense, the Jews were simply one of several groups that people wanted to rid themselves of. As World War II raged, the Croats didn't just murder Jews but also killed a far larger number of Serbs. Poles and Lithuanians killed each other. Romania liquidated Roma and Ukrainians.

It's hard to determine what motivated people to kill. Often nationalism or anti-Semitism were just excuses. During the war, no one had to go hungry in Germany, but living conditions in Eastern Europe were squalid. "For the Germans, 300 Jews meant 300 enemies of humanity. For the Lithuanians they meant 300 pairs of trousers and 300 pairs of boots," says one eyewitness. That was greed on a personal level. But it also featured on a collective level. In France, 96 percent of aryanized companies remained in French hands. The Hungarian government used the assets seized from Jews to extend its pension system and reduce inflation.

Jews Were Scapegoats for Soviet Crimes

Imaginary revenge also played a part. Pogroms in Poland by local people against Jews in 1941 were based on the assumption that the Jews formed some sort of base for Soviet rule, because communists of Jewish descent had for a time been over-represented in some areas of the Soviet bureaucracy. As a result, many people blamed Jews for the crimes committed during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. Stalin's secret police the NKWD had actual and presumed opponents of the regime in the Baltic States, eastern Poland and Ukraine shot or deported to Gulags. As the German troops advanced, the Soviets left behind a deeply traumatized society between the Baltic and the Carpathians -- and many fresh mass graves.

Hitler hadn't worked out all the details of the Holocaust from the start, instead assuming he would be able to drive out all Jews from his sphere of influence after a quick victory over the Soviet Union. But the German advance into the Soviet Union started faltering in autumn 1941, which raised the problem of what to do with the people crammed into ghettos, especially in Poland. Many Gauleiter, SS officers and top administrators called for their territory to be made "judenfrei" ("free of Jews" -- which meant liquidating them. The construction of extermination camps began, first in Belzec, then Sobibor, then Treblinka.

Brief Holocaust Training Course

It was a gigantic killing program in which most of Poland's Jews, 1.75 million, were murdered. The SS preferred to recruit its helpers among Ukrainians or ethnic Germans in prisoner-of-war camps where Red Army soldiers like Demjanjuk faced the choice of killing for the Germans or starving to death. Later, increasing numbers of volunteers from western Ukraine and Galicia joined the unit. The men had to sign a declaration that they had never belonged to a communist group and had no Jewish ancestry. Then they were taken to Travniki in the district of Lublin in south-eastern Poland where they were trained for their deadly profession on the site of a former sugar factory. In mid-1943 some 3,700 men were stationed in Travniki. Training for the Holocaust took several weeks. The SS men showed the new recruits how to carry out raids and how to guard prisoners, often using live subjects. Then the unit would drive to a nearby town and beat Jewish residents out of their homes. Executions were carried out in a nearby forest, probably to make sure that the recruits were loyal.

At first the Travniki were used to guard property and to prevent supply depots from being plundered. Then their German masters sent them to clear ghettos in Lviv and Lublin, where they were remorseless in rounding up their Jewish victims. Finally they were put to work in eight-hour shifts in the extermination camp. "Everyone jumped in where he was needed," recalled one SS officer. Everything worked "like clockwork."

Historians estimate that a third of the Travniki absconded despite the punishment that entailed if they were caught. Some were executed for disobedience. And the others? Why didn't they try to get out of the killing machine? Why didn't Demjanjuk? Die he allow himself to be corrupted by the feeling of "having attained total power over others," as historian Pohl argues. Was it the prospect of loot? In Belzec and Sobibor the Travniki engaged in brisk bartering with the inhabitants of surrounding villages and paid with items they had seized from the prisoners.

Perhaps there was something else, something even more disturbing that many people have deep in their psyche: following orders from authorities even if they ran counter to their conscience. Total and utter obedience.

Germany Relied on Outside Help in the Monstrous Murder Project

Germany's troops didn't have the whole of continental Europe under the gun to the same extent. Outside the Third Reich and the occupied territories the Germans needed the help of foreign governments in their monstrous murder project -- in the west as well as the south and southeast of Europe. Their support was strongest among the Slovaks and Croats whom Hitler had given their own states. The Croatian Ustasha fascists set up their own concentration camps where Jews were killed "through typhoid, hunger, shooting, torture, drowning, stabbing and hammer blows to the head," says historian Hilberg. The majority of Croatian Jews were killed by Croats.

Anti-Semitism wasn't so deep-rooted in Italy and was ordered by the state out of consideration for the Germans. An Italian military commander in Mostar (in today's Bosnia) refused to chase Jews from their homes because he said such operations "weren't in keeping with the honor of the Italian army." That wasn't the only the only such case. But it's clear that Benito Mussolini's puppet government of 1943 eagerly took part in persecuting Jews. More than 9,000 Italian Jews were deported to their deaths.

Some 29,000 Jews from Belgium were murdered, many after being denounced in return for cash. Denunciations also happened in the Netherlands and France. Local authorities obediently paved the way for the deportation of Jews and later said they hadn't suspected what fate the Jews faced. That excuse was used by henchmen, opportunists and pen-pushing bureaucrats -- a category of perpetrator that was denied for a long time after the war in France as the country sought to build a myth that the entire French people had been involved in the heroic resistance.

France was divided into two parts. Hitler's troops had occupied three fifths of the country but the southern part of the country remained unoccupied until November 1942 and was ruled by a right-wing government based in Vichy that collaborated with the Germans.

How Many Were Betrayed?

The first major roundup of Jews took place in mid-July 1942 in occupied Paris when almost 13,000 Jews who had no French passport where taken from their homes by French policemen. At least two thirds of the Jews deported from France were foreigners. The remaining third consisted of naturalized French citizens and children born in France to stateless Jews. Police "repeatedly expressed the desire" that the children should be deported as well, one SS officer noted in July 1942. Almost all deportations ended in Auschwitz.

In total almost 76,000 Jews were deported from France and only 3 percent of them survived the Holocaust. It's unknown how many of them were betrayed by the local population. In the Netherlands there's a figure that gives an indication of the extent of denunciation. The country had an authority that hunted Jews on behalf of the Nazis and that listed the property of Jews who had gone into hiding or already been deported. The "Household goods registry office" paid 7.50 guilders for every Jew who could be located -- that's about €40 in today's money. Dutch journalist Ad van Liempt has analyzed historical records and estimated that between March and June 1943 alone, more than 6,800 Jews were tracked down in this way, and that at least 54 people had taken part in this hunt once or even several times. "Most of them made this their main occupation for months," he says.

The head of the unit was a car mechanic called Wim Henneicke who evidently had good connections in the Amsterdam underworld. He built up an extensive network of informants who told him where Jews were hiding. Some 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands were murdered in concentration camps, a far greater proportion than in Belgium or France.

However, in contrast with France, Dutch collaborators were quickly punished after the war. Some 16,000 were put on trial by 1951, and most of them were convicted.

Demjanjuk is a different category of perpetrator. He's not a collaborator or head-hunter, not a policeman of the sort that contributed to the Holocaust far away from the actual killing. He was at the scene, prosecutors say in their detailed arrest warrant.

The Terrible World of the Holocaust Helpers

In the coming days doctors will decide will decide whether and for how long Hitler's last henchman from Sobibor can be put on trial. The German government wants him to face trial. "We owe that to the victims of the Holocaust," says Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Those who suffered in the camps under Travniki men like Demjanjuk don't feel any desire for revenge when they talk about him today. American psychoanalyst Jack Terry, who was imprisoned in Flossenbürg concentration camp while Demjanjuk was a guard there, says it would suffice if Demjanjuk "had to sit in his cell for even just one day."

And Sobibor survivor Thomas Blatt says he "doesn't care if he has to go to prison, the trial is important to me. I want the truth."

Demjanjuk could provide information about Sobibor -- and about the terrible world of the Holocaust helpers.

Reporting by Georg Bönisch, Jan Friedmann, Cordula Meyer, Michael Sontheimer, Klaus Wiegrefe




BREAKTHROUGH IN TRIBUNAL INVESTIGATION

New Evidence Points to Hezbollah in Hariri Murder

By Erich Follath

05/23/2009 01:31 PM

The United Nations special tribunal investigating the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri has reached surprising new conclusions -- and it is keeping them secret. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, investigators now believe Hezbollah was behind the Hariri murder.

It was an act of virtually Shakespearean dimensions, a family tragedy involving murder and suicide, contrived and real tears -- and a good deal of big-time politics.

The terror attack in Beirut on Valentine's Day, 2005: Intensive investigations in Lebanon are all pointing to Hezbollah and not Syria.
REUTERS

The terror attack in Beirut on Valentine's Day, 2005: Intensive investigations in Lebanon are all pointing to Hezbollah and not Syria.

On February 14, 2005, Valentine's Day, at 12:56 p.m., a massive bomb exploded in front of the Hotel St. Georges in Beirut, just as the motorcade of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri passed by. The explosives ripped a crater two meters deep into the street, and the blast destroyed the local branch of Britain's HSBC Bank. Body parts were hurled as far as the roofs of surrounding buildings. Twenty-three people died in the explosion and ensuing inferno, including Hariri, his bodyguards and passersby.

The shock waves quickly spread across the Middle East. Why did Hariri have to die? Who carried out the attack and who was behind it? What did they hope to achieve politically?

The Hariri assassination has been the source of wild speculation ever since. Was it the work of terrorist organization al-Qaida, angered by Hariri's close ties to the Saudi royal family? Or of the Israelis, as part of their constant efforts to weaken neighboring Lebanon? Or the Iranians, who hated secularist Hariri?

At the time of the attack, it was known that Hariri, a billionaire construction magnate who was responsible for the reconstruction of the Lebanese capital after decades of civil war, wanted to reenter politics. It was also known that he had had a falling out with Syrian President Bashar Assad after demanding the withdrawal of Syrian occupation forces from his native Lebanon. As a result, the prime suspects in the murder were the powerful Syrian military and intelligence agency, as well as their Lebanese henchmen. The pressure on Damascus came at an opportune time for the US government. Then-President George W. Bush had placed Syria on his list of rogue states and wanted to isolate the regime internationally.

In late 2005, an investigation team approved by the United Nations and headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis found, after seven months of research, that Syrian security forces and high-ranking Lebanese officials were in fact responsible for the Hariri murder. Four suspects were arrested. But the smoking gun, the final piece of evidence, was not found. The pace of the investigation stalled under Mehlis's Belgian successor, Serge Brammertz.

The establishment of a UN special tribunal was intended to provide certainty. It began its work on March 1, 2009. The tribunal, headquartered in the town of Leidschendam in the Netherlands, has a budget of more than €40 million ($56 million) for the first year alone, with the UN paying 51 percent and Beirut 49 percent of the cost. It has an initial mandate for three years, and the most severe sentence it can impose is life in prison. Canadian Daniel Bellemare, 57, was appointed to head the tribunal. Four of the 11 judges are Lebanese, whose identities have been kept secret, for security reasons.

As its first official act, the tribunal ordered the release, in early April, of the four men Mehlis had had arrested. By then, they had already spent more than three years sitting in a Lebanese prison. Since then, it has been deathly quiet in Leidschendam, as if the investigation had just begun and there were nothing to say.

Hezbollah supporters in Beirut listen to a speech given by the movement's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Hariri's growing popularity could have been a thorn in the side of Lebanese Shiite leader Nasrallah.
AP

Hezbollah supporters in Beirut listen to a speech given by the movement's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Hariri's growing popularity could have been a thorn in the side of Lebanese Shiite leader Nasrallah.

But now there are signs that the investigation has yielded new and explosive results. SPIEGEL has learned from sources close to the tribunal and verified by examining internal documents, that the Hariri case is about to take a sensational turn. Intensive investigations in Lebanon are all pointing to a new conclusion: that it was not the Syrians, but instead special forces of the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah ("Party of God") that planned and executed the diabolical attack. Tribunal chief prosecutor Bellemare and his judges apparently want to hold back this information, of which they been aware for about a month. What are they afraid of?

According to the detailed information provided by the SPIEGEL source, the fact that the case may have been "cracked" is the result of a mixture of serendipity à la Sherlock Holmes and the state-of-the-art technology used by cyber detectives. In months of painstaking work, a secretly operating special unit of the Lebanese security forces, headed by intelligence expert Captain Wissam Eid, filtered out the numbers of mobile phones that could be pinpointed to the area surrounding Hariri on the days leading up to the attack and on the date of the murder itself. The investigators referred to these mobile phones as the "first circle of hell."

Captain Eid's team eventually identified eight mobile phones, all of which had been purchased on the same day in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They were activated six weeks before the assassination, and they were used exclusively for communication among their users and -- with the exception of one case -- were no longer used after the attack. They were apparently tools of the hit team that carried out the terrorist attack.

But there was also a "second circle of hell," a network of about 20 mobile phones that were identified as being in proximity to the first eight phones noticeably often. According to the Lebanese security forces, all of the numbers involved apparently belong to the "operational arm" of Hezbollah, which maintains a militia in Lebanon that is more powerful than the regular Lebanese army. While part of the Party of God acts like a normal political organization, participating in democratic elections and appointing cabinet ministers, the other part uses less savory tactics, such as abductions near the Israeli border and terrorist attacks, such those committed against Jewish facilities in South America in 2002 and 2004.

The whereabouts of the two Beirut groups of mobile phone users coincided again and again, and they were sometimes located near the site of the attack. The romantic attachment of one of the terrorists led the cyber-detectives directly to one of the main suspects. He committed the unbelievable indiscretion of calling his girlfriend from one of the "hot" phones. It only happened once, but it was enough to identify the man. He is believed to be Abd al-Majid Ghamlush, from the town of Rumin, a Hezbollah member who had completed training course in Iran. Ghamlush was also identified as the buyer of the mobile phones. He has since disappeared, and perhaps is no longer alive.

Revelations Will Likely Harm Hezbollah

Ghamlush's recklessness led investigators to the man they now suspect was the mastermind of the terrorist attack: Hajj Salim, 45. A southern Lebanese from Nabatiyah, Salim is considered to be the commander of the "military" wing of Hezbollah and lives in South Beirut, a Shiite stronghold. Salim's secret "Special Operational Unit" reports directly to Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, 48.

A Lebanese demonstrator holds a portrait of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri and a sign reading "justice" in Arabic.
AFP

A Lebanese demonstrator holds a portrait of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri and a sign reading "justice" in Arabic.

Imad Mughniyah, one of the world's most wanted terrorists, ran the unit until Feb. 12, 2008, when he was killed in an attack in Damascus, presumably by Israeli intelligence. Since then, Salim has largely assumed the duties of his notorious predecessor, with Mughniyah's brother-in-law, Mustafa Badr al-Din, serving as his deputy. The two men report only to their superior, and to General Kassim Sulaimani, their contact in Tehran. The Iranians, the principal financiers of the military Lebanese "Party of God," have repressed the Syrians' influence.

The deeper the investigators in Beirut penetrated into the case, the clearer the picture became, according to the SPIEGEL source. They have apparently discovered which Hezbollah member obtained the small Mitsubishi truck used in the attack. They have also been able to trace the origins of the explosives, more than 1,000 kilograms of TNT, C4 and hexogen.

The Lebanese chief investigator and true hero of the story didn't live to witness many of the recent successes in the investigation. Captain Eid, 31, was killed in a terrorist attack in the Beirut suburb of Hasmiyah on Jan. 25, 2008. The attack, in which three other people were also killed, was apparently intended to slow down the investigation. And, once again, there was evidence of involvement by the Hezbollah commando unit, just as there has been in each of more than a dozen attacks against prominent Lebanese in the last four years.

This leaves the question of motive unanswered. Many had an interest in Hariri's death. Why should Hezbollah -- or its backers in Iran -- be responsible?

Hariri's growing popularity could have been a thorn in the side of Lebanese Shiite leader Nasrallah. In 2005, the billionaire began to outstrip the revolutionary leader in terms of popularity. Besides, he stood for everything the fanatical and spartan Hezbollah leader hated: close ties to the West and a prominent position among moderate Arab heads of state, an opulent lifestyle, and membership in the competing Sunni faith. Hariri was, in a sense, the alternative to Nasrallah.

Syrian President Bashar Assad with his wife Asma: Although the Syrian government is not being declared free of the suspicion of involvement, at least President Assad is no longer in the line of fire. There is hardly anything to indicate he was aware of the murder plot.
DPA

Syrian President Bashar Assad with his wife Asma: Although the Syrian government is not being declared free of the suspicion of involvement, at least President Assad is no longer in the line of fire. There is hardly anything to indicate he was aware of the murder plot.

Whether Lebanon has developed in the direction the Hezbollah leader apparently imagined seems doubtful. Immediately after the spectacular terrorist attack on Valentine's Day in 2005, a wave of sympathy for the murdered politician swept across the country. The so-called "cedar revolution" brought a pro-Western government to power, and the son of the murdered man emerged as the most important party leader and strongest figure operating in the background. Saad al-Hariri, 39, could have become prime minister of Lebanon long ago -- if he were willing to accept the risks and felt sufficiently qualified to hold office. After the Hariri murder, the Syrian occupation force left the country in response to international and domestic Lebanese pressure.

But not everything has gone wrong from Hezbollah's standpoint. In July 2006, Nasrallah, by kidnapping Israeli soldiers, provoked Israel to launch a war against Lebanon. Hezbollah defied the superior military power, solidifying its image as a resistance movement in large parts of the Arab world. If there were democratic opinion polls in the Middle East, Nasrallah would probably be voted the most popular leader. The highly anticipated June 7 elections will demonstrate whether the Lebanese will allow Nasrallah to radicalize them again. Once again, he is entering into the election campaign in a dual role. He is both the secretary-general of the "Party of God," represented in the parliament since 1992, and the head of Hezbollah's militia, part of a state within a state that makes its own laws.

Hezbollah currently holds 14 of 128 seats in parliament, a number that is expected to rise. Some even believe that dramatic gains are possible for Hezbollah, although landslide-like changes in the Lebanese parliamentary system are relatively unlikely. A system of religious proportionality ensures, with list alliances arranged in advance, that about two-thirds of the seats in parliament are assigned before an election. In the cedar state, a Sunni must always be prime minister, while the Shiites are entitled to the office of speaker of parliament and the Christians the relatively unimportant office of the president.

Hezbollah has not managed to upset this system, adopted decades ago, even though it objectively puts its clientele at a disadvantage. As a result of differences in birthrates, there are now far more Shiites than Sunnis or Christians in Lebanon. Some say that Nasrallah isn't even interested in securing power through elections, and that the "Party of God" would be satisfied with a modest share of the government. By not taking on too much government responsibility, Hezbollah would not be forced to dissolve its militias and make significant changes to its ideology of resistance.

The revelations about the alleged orchestrators of the Hariri murder will likely harm Hezbollah. Large segments of the population are weary of internal conflicts and are anxious for reconciliation. The leader of the movement, which, despite its formal recognition of the democratic rules of the game, remains on the US's list of terrorist organizations, probably anticipates forthcoming problems with the UN tribunal. In a speech in Beirut, Nasrallah spoke of the tribunal's "conspiratorial intentions."

The revelations are likely to be just as unwelcome in Tehran, which sees itself confronted, once again, with the charge of exporting terrorism. Damascus's view of the situation could be more mixed. Although the Syrian government is not being declared free of the suspicion of involvement, at least President Assad is no longer in the line of fire. Hardly anything suggests anymore that he was personally aware of the murder plot or even ordered the killing.

One can only speculate over the reasons why the Hariri tribunal is holding back its new information about the assassination. Perhaps the investigators in the Netherlands fear that it could stir up the situation in Lebanon. On Friday evening, the press office in Leidschendam responded tersely to a written inquiry from SPIEGEL, noting that it could not comment on "operational details."

Detlev Mehlis, 60, the German senior prosecutor and former UN chief investigator, has his own set of concerns. He performed his investigation to the best of his knowledge and belief, questioning more than 500 witnesses, and now he must put up with the accusation of having focused his attention too heavily on Syrian leads. The UN tribunal's order to release the generals who were arrested at his specific request is, at any rate, a serious blow to the German prosecutor.

One of the four, Jamal al-Sayyid, the former Lebanese general security director, has even filed a suit against Mehlis in France for "manipulated investigations." In media interviews, such as an interview with the Al-Jazeera Arab television network last week, Sayyid has even taken his allegations a step further, accusing German police commissioner Gerhard Lehmann, Mehlis's assistant in the Beirut investigations, of blackmail.

Sayyid claims that Lehmann, a member of Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) proposed a deal with the Syrian president to the Lebanese man. Under the alleged arrangement, Assad would identify the person responsible for the Hariri killing and convince him to commit suicide, and then the case would be closed. According to Sayyid, the authorities in Beirut made "unethical proposals, as well as threats," and he claims that he has recordings of the incriminating conversations.

Mehlis denies all accusations. Lehmann, now working on a new assignment in Saudi Arabia, was unavailable for comment. But the spotlight-loving Jamil al-Sayyid could soon be embarking on a new career. He is under consideration for the post of Lebanon's next justice minister.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.


http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,626412-2,00.html





Consumer spending falls at fastest rate since 1980

ONS confirms GDP fell 1.9% in the first three months of the year, with only government spending continuing to grow

UK households are cutting back on spending at the fastest rate since 1980, contributing to the worst economic slowdown in three decades.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed consumer spending fell by 1.2% in the first three months of the year. People spent less on housing, household goods and services, while those who went on holiday abroad also spent significantly less.

Consumers tightened their belts in the face of job losses, pay cuts or freezes and sharply reduced City bonuses. The figures showed employees' compensation falling by 1.1% in the quarter, the largest fall since records began in 1955. Wages and salaries declined, with lower bonus payments in the financial sector than normal, while employment also fell.

The data was released as part of the ONS's latest assessment of the UK economy, which confirmed that gross domestic product shrank by 1.9% in the first quarter, its sharpest decline since 1979. GDP stood 4.1% lower than a year ago, the biggest annual fall since 1980.

The figures also showed that business inventories suffered their biggest fall in half a century, taking City economists by surprise and underlining the severity of the recession. Only government spending made a positive contribution to the economy, growing by 0.3% in the first quarter.

Yesterday, Britain suffered a downgrade of its economic outlook by Standard & Poor's, which means it could lose its cherished top-tier credit rating. The ratings agency expressed alarm about the country's ballooning budget deficit and switched its outlook from "stable" to "negative".

"The breakdown of first-quarter GDP gives a pretty grim picture of weakness right across the economy in the early months of this year," said Jonathan Loynes of Capital Economics.

"With key components like household spending and investment set to fall considerably further in response to the weakness in the housing market, the labour market and bank lending, we remain unconvinced that recent 'green shoots' will translate into a return to decent growth next year."

Inventories shrink, but serious obstacles remain

Faced with a slump in demand, companies ran down stocks at an unprecedented rate in the first quarter. Inventories fell by £6bn, the biggest decline since records began in 1948, with big falls in the car and construction industries. This contributed 0.6 percentage points to the quarterly decline in GDP.

Firms also cut investment to save money. Business investment fell by 5.5% in the quarter.

With world trade collapsing, British exports and imports fell sharply. Exports of goods such as cars dropped 8.3% in the quarter, while imports dropped 8.2%.

Exports of services were down 3%, mainly due to financial and insurances services and royalties.

The grim economic picture prompted a warning from the Economist Intelligence Unit today.

It said the most "brutal" slump in Britain since the Great Depression would prolong the property downturn for up to two more years and see unemployment rise to close to 11% by its peak in 2011.

Most economists think the first quarter marked the low point in the recession, although recovery is likely to be slow.

"From here on, the slower pace of destocking will help output in the coming quarters," said Philip Shaw, the chief economist at Investec. "We remain hopeful that GDP will be able to rise again later this year, probably in the third quarter."

Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight said: "There are mounting signs in the latest data and surveys that the rate of economic contraction has moderated appreciably so far during the second quarter.

"Nevertheless, serious obstacles to economic recovery remain and we suspect that further, albeit much more modest, contraction will occur over the rest of the year."


America’s pro-business leaders: the real culprit behind economic crisis

23 May, 2009, 12:20

The global crisis was not born directly out of the US economy; the global financial crisis was born out of America’s pro-business political establishment, which perpetuates the system’s endemic failures.



Presently, much of the world is comfortable with the idea that the ongoing economic tailspin is the handiwork of a few misguided American CEOs who got a little too fat and greedy trying to hunt down the elusive American Dream.

And how could we forget those sensational stories about middle-aged executives throwing million-dollar pool parties, adorning their Jacuzzis with gold fixtures and jumping ship with the booty as the company sinks to the murky depths? With these fantastic stories of self-indulgence being played up in the media, it was hard to believe that the crash was not due to a handful of reckless CEOs who really should have known better.

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And then the public got the supreme satisfaction – dare I say pleasure – of watching as the masters of the financial universe got knocked down to earth with the rest of us overspent mortals. Many CEOs were even sent away to some posh detention center for white-collar crooks. Yes, the lush lawns of these prison facilities may be meticulous, with cells larger than your average middle-class home, but it was still fun to watch anyways. Perhaps only European football or the 24-hour porn channel attracts a bigger audience these days.


Vladimir Kremlev for RT. (Click to enlarge)
Unfortunately, however, it was not just a few token corporate heads that rolled in the wake of the Big One; the contagion quickly spread around the globe like swindler’s flu, gnawing away at the support beams holding up weak and strong economies alike.

Suddenly, miraculously, Barack Obama appeared in Washington like Moses on the mount to find his people engaged in an orgy of crude behavior. The arrogant corporate chieftains, who imitated veritable governments by stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, felt the fury and wrath of the Oval Office like never before. Obama even attacked executive bonuses that were being cashed at the same time the government was bailing out their wheezing companies.

All things considered, it was a dazzling performance by a refreshingly articulate young leader. But unfortunately, the tricks of syntax notwithstanding, Obama’s performance was akin to the court jester amusing the king with a juggling routine on a listless Sunday afternoon. Why? Because it exonerated the true culprit of the heist of the century: America’s insanely pro-business political system.

In US taxpayers we trust

In reality, it was not the Evil Bankers and Corrupt CEOs who got America and the global village stuck in its worse economic slump since the Great Depression. Although the reptilian bottom feeders of the corporate world, transformed by the media into strangely likeable comic book villains, played a large role in creating this economic tragic-comedy of epic proportions, their overall contribution was rather slim.

Architectural preservationists love to chastise their government leaders whenever a historic building is demolished in order to pave the way for something ‘new and improved.’ So where was the public outcry when the architecture behind the economy was equally reduced to ruins in the name of progress?

The true culprits behind the Global Crash of 2008 are an assortment of US political legislation that gave Corporate America the green light to pursue their own infinitely narrow vision of the American Dream. In other words, the government repeal of social and labor legislation is what really brought down the flimsily US-built house of credit cards. The business executives just took the rap for the crime, not to mention a 3-trillion dollar bailout to keep their mouths shut.

Since the creation of the Bretton Woods economic system [In July 1944, 730 delegates from 44 nations assembled at the Mount Washington Hotel, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, where a new system of rules and organizations, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, were institutionalized], the United States has been pursuing a global economy that is free of all regulation, void of democratic oversight and beneficial only to the corporate world. In other words, a laissez-faire economy that defends the interests of the large corporations to the detriment of the individual.

But things were starting to coalesce in favor of Monsters, Inc. look before World War II. Even before the Civil War, corporate power was entrenching itself deep into the fabric of American life. Here are just three of the hundreds acts of government legislation that have pushed the agenda of big business, while severely disenfranchising the majority.

Dartmouth College Case (1819)

This particular court case was for the world of business what the Communist Manifesto was for the Communist Party. In an effort to keep Dartmouth College a private institution as opposed to public, the lawyer Daniel Webster argued on behalf of individuals to uphold private property without interference from the state. So far so good, right? But what transpired is that corporations began to argue the case on behalf of themselves as well, thus handing over to these monolithic organizations all of the powers that were intended for the (human) individual.

Consider the following definition that Chief Justice Marshall bestowed upon the corporation during this court case: “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of the law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it… Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual…”

If reading that paragraph does not cause you to tumble out of your chair, I suggest you read it again. “Invisible, intangible, immortal and individual” – isn’t that asking a little too much? Not even the heavenly ordained kings of the past were granted so much outrageous powers.

As Niral T. Shah wrote in the Dartmouth Free Press, “These decisions allowed the corporation to explode into the dominant institution of American society, affecting every imaginable facet of our lives.” Indeed, although there are some major differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, the one thing that makes them inseparable and even united is their inalienable belief in the present economic system that demands that the corporation reign supreme above all else.

As Noam Chomsky told Spiegel magazine with his usual candor, “Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.” If such a definition of the US political system were proven to be accurate, it would be very difficult not to say that the legendary land of Lincoln has all but transformed into a de facto fascist state with corporations and politicians lying together in the same stinky bed.

Glass-Steagall Act

This regulatory legislation was put into force following the Crash of 1929 with the goal of limiting the ability of commercial banks from engaging in reckless speculation. This was accomplished by essentially separating the banking sector from the investment sector. And it was none other than the co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who successfully spearheaded in 1999 the attack against Glass-Steagall.

One year after Glass-Steagall was relegated to the history books, Swiss bank UBS devoured brokerage house Paine Weber (the repeal of Glass Steagall also led to a merger in 1998 between banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate Travelers Group to form Citigroup Inc, which I sone of the world’s biggest financial services; On Nov. 24, 2008, the US announced a $50 billion bailout of this company). More interestingly, two years later, Gramm was chosen to be vice chairman of UBS’s new investment arm.

Later, Gramm lobbied hard in behalf of UBS in the US Congress to loosen rules that held in check predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to get homeowners trapped in exorbitant mortgages. In other words, the exact practices that brought the US financial system to its knees last year. For his efforts, “Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary,” Politico reported. “In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting 8,000 jobs,” the political website added.

How was UBS punished for its reckless behind-the-scenes shenanigans? Well, certainly not like it committed any major offense. According to a report by the BBC, “UBS is raising 6 bn Swiss francs ($5.3 billion) from the government… It will also be able to transfer up to $60 bn of distressed assets to a fund supported by the Swiss central bank.” The report concluded that “UBS has been one of the heaviest losers from the subprime crisis.”

If only losing was so painful for everybody! This only proves the maxim that describes the present economic system as “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.”

PATCO

On August 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) declared a strike in order to receive better pay, working conditions and a shortened workweek. Then US President Ronald Reagan accused them, as government employees, of breaking the law that forbids them to leave their posts. Two days after PATCO workers went on strike, Reagan held true to his word and fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers. Two months later, the union lost its certification.

In 2003, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, summed up the consequences of Reagan’s unprecedented action: “Perhaps the most important, and then highly controversial, domestic initiative was the firing of the air traffic controllers in August 1981… President Reagan prevailed, as you know, but far more importantly his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to hire and discharge workers.”

Reagan’s decision gave big business the green light on many other projects as well, including setting up shop on foreign soil at the expense of the domestic workforce to maximize profits. Today, US union membership remains at its lowest level in history.

In conclusion, the greedy and gluttonous behavior of the bankers and businessmen should have come as no surprise. Indeed, it is their ‘natural’ acquisitiveness, internal jealousies and enormous egos that keep the big wheels of the global economy churning forward. However, what is surprising is that our political leaders continue to underestimate these febrile passions and at the earliest opportunity destroy any legislation that protects the people from the rapacity of the corporation.

Clearly, the lessons of the Great Depression have been forgotten, or our business leaders feel that they understand the internal dynamics of the business cycles too well for such a collapse to occur again. As a result, our government leaders, under pressure from the corporate lobbyists (who have become a permanent feature of the American political system), disassembled years of crucial legislation that was enacted after the Great Depression to safeguard from another economic debacle.

Unless America brings to power a totally new political party that refuses to remain subservient to the demands of big business, it will only be a matter of time before the US taxpayers are paying for yet more corporate arrogance.

Robert Bridge, RT

Caída sin precedente de exportaciones en abril; también bajaron importaciones

Las ventas petroleras al exterior registraron un desplome histórico: Inegi


El valor de las exportaciones, actividad que contribuye aproximadamente a una quinta parte del producto interno bruto (PIB), cayó en abril de este año a un nivel sin precedente, menos 35.6 por ciento, a 17 mil 413.3 millones de dólares. En tanto, las exportaciones petroleras registraron en el cuarto mes del año un desplome histórico de casi 60 por ciento, informó el Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (Inegi).



Foto
Las ventas al exterior, que aportan una quinta parte del producto interno bruto, descendieron en el cuarto mes del año a 17 mil 413.3 millones de dólares. En la gráfica, comportamiento anual de la actividad exportadora.
Israel Rodríguez

Por su parte, el valor de las importaciones de mercancías también mostró un descenso de 38.8 por ciento, a 17 mil 294 millones de dólares; se vieron presionadas a la baja por menores compras de bienes de consumo. De esta manera, se observa que la profunda desaceleración externa e interna continúa golpeando los flujos de comercio exterior.

Arturo Vieryra Fernández, analista del grupo financiero Banamex, filial del global Citigroup explicó: La reducción en las importaciones, además de responder a menores exportaciones, reflejó la fuerte debilidad de la demanda local vía menores compras foráneas de bienes de consumo y de capital.

Superávit de la balanza

La información oportuna de comercio exterior de abril de 2009 muestra un superávit de la balanza comercial de 210 millones de dólares, saldo que se compara con el superávit de 160 millones de dólares de marzo pasado y con el déficit de mil 88 millones de dólares de abril de 2008.

El aumento en el saldo comercial observado entre marzo y abril de 2009 se derivó de la combinación de una reducción en el superávit de la balanza de productos petroleros y de una disminución del déficit de productos no petroleros.

Con el resultado de abril, en los primeros cuatro meses del presente año el déficit de la balanza comercial del país se ubico en menos mil 681 millones de pesos, por debajo del acumulado del año pasado, de menos 2.5 millones de dólares. Analistas del grupo financiero Invex estiman que el déficit comercial en 2009 se ubicará en menos 15 mil 800 millones de dólares.

En el cuarto mes del año, el valor de las exportaciones de mercancías fue de 17 mil 413.3 millones de dólares, cifra que se integró de exportaciones petroleras, por 15 mil 478 millones, y de productos no petroleros por mil 936 millones.

La caída de 35.6 por ciento en las exportaciones se originó por retrocesos de menos 59.6 por ciento de las exportaciones petroleras y de menos 30.4 por ciento de las no petroleras.

Esta última tasa se debió a descensos de 31 por ciento de las dirigidas al mercado de Estados Unidos, país al que se destina poco más del 80 por ciento del comercio exterior mexicano, y de menos 28.2 por ciento de las canalizadas al resto del mundo. Los especialistas del grupo financiero Invex consideraron que las exportaciones petroleras seguirán registrando caídas muy abruptas. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) adelantó el jueves pasado sus peores niveles de exportación en una década.

Por lo que se refiere a la caída en el valor de las importaciones de 38.8 por ciento, la tasa se derivó de decrementos de 57.9 por ciento de las importaciones petroleras y de menos 36.2 por ciento de las no petroleras.

Al considerar las importaciones por tipo de bien, en abril se presentaron variaciones anuales de menos 43.7 por ciento de las de bienes de consumo, de menos 38.9 por ciento de las de bienes intermedios y de menos 32.3 pro ciento de las bienes de capital.

Durante el periodo enero- abril de 2009, el valor de las exportaciones totales sumó 67 mil 480 millones de dólares, para un decremento anual de 30.5 por ciento. En ese lapso, el valor de las exportaciones petroleras decreció en menos 58.5 por ciento, en tanto que las no petroleras lo hicieron en 24.2 por ciento.

Las reducciones más significativas se observaron en las ventas al exterior de productos de la industria automotriz con menos 35.3 por ciento; productos siderúrgicos, con menos 52 por ciento, y minerometalúrgicos, con menos 32.5 por ciento.

El descenso de las exportaciones de productos automotrices fue resultado de caídas anuales de menos 32.3 por ciento de las canalizadas a Estados Unidos y de menos 48.5 por ciento de las dirigidas a otros mercados internacionales.



Neocon Group Calls for Military Strikes on Media

by: Jeremy Scahill | Visit article original @ Antiwar.com


In the era of embedded media, independent journalists have become the eyes and ears of the world. Without those un-embedded journalists willing to risk their lives to place themselves on the other side of the barrel of the tank or the gun or under the air strikes, history would be written almost entirely from the vantage point of powerful militaries, or - at the very least - it would be told from the perspective of the troops doing the shooting, rather than the civilians, who always pay the highest price.

photo
Palestinian journalist wounded during fighting in Gaza. A former US Army Colonel called for attacks on Journalists in a recent essay. (Photo: Getty Images)

In the era of embedded media, independent journalists have become the eyes and ears of the world. Without those un-embedded journalists willing to risk their lives to place themselves on the other side of the barrel of the tank or the gun or under the air strikes, history would be written almost entirely from the vantage point of powerful militaries, or - at the very least - it would be told from the perspective of the troops doing the shooting, rather than the civilians, who always pay the highest price.

In the case of the Iraq invasion and occupation, the journalists who have placed themselves in danger most often are local Iraqi journalists. Some 116 Iraqi journalists and media workers have been killed in the line of duty since March 2003. In all, 189 journalists have been killed in Iraq. At least 16 of these journalists were killed by the U.S. military, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The network that has most often found itself under U.S. attack is al-Jazeera. As I wrote a few years ago in The Nation:

"The United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001, shelled the Basra hotel where al-Jazeera journalists were the only guests in April 2003, killed Iraq correspondent Tareq Ayoub a few days later in Baghdad, and imprisoned several al-Jazeera reporters (including at Guantánamo), some of whom say they were tortured. In addition to the military attacks, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government banned the network from reporting in Iraq."

A new report for a leading neoconservative group that pushes a belligerent "Israel first" agenda of conquest in the Middle East suggests that in future wars the U.S. should make censorship of media official policy and advocates "military attacks on the partisan media" (via MuzzleWatch). The report for JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, was authored by retired U.S. Army Col. Ralph Peters. It appears in JINSA's "flagship publication," The Journal of International Security Affairs. "Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight," Peters writes, calling the media "the killers without guns."

"Of course, the media have shaped the outcome of conflicts for centuries, from the European wars of religion through Vietnam. More recently, though, the media have determined the outcomes of conflicts. While journalists and editors ultimately failed to defeat the U.S. government in Iraq, video cameras and biased reporting guaranteed that Hezbollah would survive the 2006 war with Israel and, as of this writing, they appear to have saved Hamas from destruction in Gaza. ...

"Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

"The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity's interests, while our failures nourish monsters."

It is, of course, very appropriate that such a despicable battle cry for murdering media workers appears in a JINSA publication. The organization has long boasted an all-star cast of criminal "advisers," among them Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith. JINSA, along with the Project for a New American Century, was one of the premiere groups in shaping U.S. policy during the Bush years and remains a formidable force with Obama in the White House.

Reading Peters' sick and twisted essay reminded me of the report that emerged in late 2005 about an alleged Bush administration plot to bomb al-Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar, which I covered for The Nation:

"Britain's Daily Mirror reported that during an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, George W. Bush floated the idea of bombing al-Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. This allegation was based on leaked 'Top Secret' minutes of the Bush-Blair summit. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has activated the Official Secrets Act, threatening any publication that publishes any portion of the memo (he has already brought charges against a former Cabinet staffer and a former parliamentary aide). So while we don't yet know the contents of the memo, we do know that at the time of Bush's meeting with Blair, the administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against al-Jazeera. The meeting took place on April 16, at the peak of the first U.S. siege of Fallujah, and al-Jazeera was one of the few news outlets broadcasting from inside the city. Its exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to the BBC.

"The Fallujah offensive, one of the bloodiest assaults of the U.S. occupation, was a turning point. In two weeks that April, 30 Marines were killed as local guerrillas resisted U.S. attempts to capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died, many of them women and children. Al-Jazeera broadcast from inside the besieged city, beaming images to the world. On live TV the network gave graphic documentary evidence disproving U.S. denials that it was killing civilians. It was a public relations disaster, and the United States responded by attacking the messenger.

"Just a few days before Bush allegedly proposed bombing the network, al-Jazeera's correspondent in Fallujah, Ahmed Mansour, reported live on the air, 'Last night we were targeted by some tanks, twice ... but we escaped. The U.S. wants us out of Fallujah, but we will stay.' On April 9 Washington demanded that al-Jazeera leave the city as a condition for a cease-fire. The network refused. Mansour wrote that the next day 'American fighter jets fired around our new location, and they bombed the house where we had spent the night before, causing the death of the house owner Mr. Hussein Samir. Due to the serious threats we had to stop broadcasting for few days because every time we tried to broadcast the fighter jets spotted us we became under their fire.'

"On April 11 senior military spokesperson Mark Kimmitt declared, 'The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies.' On April 15 Donald Rumsfeld echoed those remarks in distinctly undiplomatic terms, calling al-Jazeera's reporting 'vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable.... It's disgraceful what that station is doing.' It was the very next day, according to the Daily Mirror, that Bush told Blair of his plan. 'He made clear he wanted to bomb al-Jazeera in Qatar and elsewhere,' a source told the Mirror. 'There's no doubt what Bush wanted to do - and no doubt Blair didn't want him to do it.'"

Lest people think that the views of people like Ralph Peters and the JINSA/PNAC neocons are relics of the past, remember that the Obama administration includes heavy hitters from this world among its ranks, as well as fierce neocon supporters. While they may no longer be literally calling the shots, as they did under Bush/Cheney, their disproportionate influence on U.S. policy endures.

»


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Los 716 mil 612 millones de pesos equivalen al gasto de 18 secretarías, PGR y Presidencia

Rebasa los cuatro rescates destinados a empresas, hipotecarias, automotrices y aerolíneas

Los 716 mil 612 millones de pesos que se esfumaron en el primer trimestre de 2009, como consecuencia del desplome de 8.2 por ciento del producto interno bruto (PIB) representan casi la cuarta parte –23.5 por ciento– de los más de 3 billones de pesos del Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federación (PEF) para 2009.

Foto
Feria del empleo en la explanada de la delegación Venustiano Carranza del Distrito FederalFoto Francisco Olvera
Susana González G.

Incluso equivalen a 92.5 por ciento que suman en conjunto los recursos anuales de 18 secretarías, la Procuraduría General de la República (PGR) y la Presidencia de la República, calculados en 774 mil 130 millones de pesos, de acuerdo con el PEF.

La merma registrada en la riqueza del país en sólo un año es de tal dimensión que representa varias veces los recursos anuales de cada una de las dependencias públicas, incluidas aquellas que más reciben, como las encargadas del bienestar social y la seguridad pública.

Así, el monto perdido del PIB equivale a 3.5 veces el presupuesto de 200.9 mil millones que se le asignó a la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), el más elevado entre todas las secretarías de Estado. Es también 8.4 veces superior a los recursos destinados a la Secretaría de Salud (SS) y hasta 10 veces mayor al correspondiente a la Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación (Sagarpa).

Para este año, a las cinco dependencias encargadas de la seguridad pública (las secretarías de Gobernación, Defensa Nacional, Marina y Seguridad Pública, así como la PGR) se les aprobó un presupuesto total de 107 mil 563 millones de pesos. Cantidad que apenas representa 15 por ciento de los más de 716 mil millones de pesos que se perdieron por la contracción de las actividades económicas en el país.

Es 13 veces superior a los 53 mil millones de pesos correspondientes a los ramos autónomos, es decir los poderes Legislativo y Judicial, Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) y la Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH).

La pérdida no tiene parangón con los fondos de cuatro de los programas de rescate lanzados en este año por el gobierno de Felipe Calderón para amortiguar la crisis económica y que en concreto están destinados a salvar o apoyar a empresas en paro técnico, sociedades hipotecarias, industria automotriz y aerolíneas.

Para ellos se tiene previsto un fondo de 24.5 mil millones de pesos en conjunto (desde los 2 mil millones de pesos para paros técnicos hasta los 10 mil millones para sociedades hipotecarias). Sin embargo, los recursos perdidos por la drástica caída del PIB equivalen a 30 veces esos fondos de rescate.




Elite Colleges Are Promoting a Culture of Selfish, Cutthroat Behavior and We Are All Paying the Price


By Peter Schmidt, AlterNet
Posted on May 23, 2009, Printed on May 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140202/

Like many of us, the nation's elite colleges and universities have taken a financial beating over the past year.

Among them, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford all watched their endowments shrink by about 20 percent as a result of investment losses.

Despite all their brainpower, such institutions appear to have failed to learn what every simple farmer knows: you reap what you sow. Elite colleges and professional schools bear a share of the blame for the economic crisis that now plagues them, because it is they who educated and bestowed academic credentials upon many of those who got us into this mess.

It should come as no surprise to them that many on Wall Street and in Washington have proven ethically bankrupt and without regard for people of lesser means, because their admissions policies have done much to ensure such a result.

In determining which applicants they will admit and put on the fast track, most elite higher-education institutions systematically favor people from privileged backgrounds who display selfish, cutthroat behavior. The results are campus environments where disregard for society is socially accepted, where bad people are encouraged to become worse.

Consider, for starters, how most such institutions rely on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, even though they know perfectly well that the nation's massive test-preparation industry has severely compromised the reliability of such instruments, turning them into tools for measuring, as much as anything, wealth and willingness to seek unfair advantage.

Test-preparation programs make people better test-takers not better prospective students. They raise scores mainly by teaching various test-taking tricks, such as how to quickly spot the "sucker" answers to a multiple-choice question to improve the odds of guessing correctly. Yet many are effective enough to offer those families that can afford their fees -- typically, $500 to $1,000 -- a chance to buy their children enough extra points to transform many from also-rans into shoo-ins.

In turning a blind eye to the widespread tainting of admissions test scores, higher-education institutions argue that they lack better mechanisms for efficiently judging applicants from high schools of sharply varying quality. But many education researchers disagree and say some alternatives to such tests, such as admissions systems that give substantial weight to class rank or samples of each applicant's work, are more reliable predictors of applicants' academic performance.

Moreover, selective colleges have ulterior motives for relying on standardized admissions tests that have nothing to do with academic considerations and everything to do with their bottom lines. The more high-scoring students they admit, the higher their "selectivity" ratings in the college-ranking guides that help determine how many applicants knock on their doors each year.

And not only is sifting through applications based on test scores a lot cheaper than hiring enough people to consider each candidate carefully, but relying on such scores helps skew the process in favor of wealthier applicants, who will not need financial assistance and are likely to donate generously down the road.

If young people find that artificially inflating their test scores isn't enough to get them into a choice college, they always have the option of having someone bribe their way in with a big donation.

Selective colleges are so happy to have their palms greased in such a manner that some make little effort to hide how much they lower the bar for applicants connected to generous alumni and other contributors. To improve their odds of having favors done for them by people in positions of power, many selective higher-education institutions also admit mediocre applicants at the request of state and federal officials.

They let their professors and administrators in on the game by lowering the bar for the children of employees, as a job perk. Despite all of their talk about operating athletics programs to promote sportsmanship, they assure recruited athletes the playing field will be tilted in their favor in the competition for freshman-class seats.

Through such admissions policies, colleges end up giving the nation's high school students crash courses in cynicism. They teach young people that money talks, fairness is for losers, who you know matters more than what you know, and some people are simply entitled to what others may never attain, no matter how hard they work.

Considering how much selective colleges and universities favor applicants who take such lessons to heart, should it surprise anyone that about half of all graduate- and professional-school students admit on surveys to having recently cheated?

Investors take note: MBA candidates have been found to be the biggest cheaters of all, with 56 percent admitting to having cheated in the past year, in a 2006 survey published by the Academy of Management Learning and Education. Many business schools have responded to the latest economic crisis by broadcasting their intent to beef up their ethics classes, but they might as well be promoting sobriety in a bar.

Give George W. Bush credit for this much: He admits to having gotten into Yale through his family connections, and he is quite capable of self-effacing humor. In delivering Yale's 2001 commencement address, he declared: "And to the C students I say, You, too, can be president of the United States."

Although he meant the remark as a joke, he stood as living proof that he was absolutely right, that students who have gotten through the doors of a top college need not perform well there to have other doors opened to them.

Historians of education say the Great Depression shook the nation's faith in its leadership and helped inspire many selective colleges to reform their admissions policies to do more to take in the best students and not just the best-connected.

Our latest economic crisis could inspire similar soul-searching and a renewed emphasis on meritocracy in higher education. But it also could have the opposite effect, prompting selective colleges and universities to even more heavily favor those applicants with cash and connections in an effort to repair their own finances.

If the recent devastation of their endowments should teach such institutions anything, it is that basing their admissions policies on the short-term pursuit of monetary gain is likely to cost them -- and the rest of American society -- dearly down the road.

Peter Schmidt is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the author of Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action. He blogs about race, class and college access at Color and Money.

© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140202/

New World Order documentary asserts global conspiracy

23 May, 2009, 11:56

A new American documentary is putting forward the suggestion the insanely rich and evil of this world are trying to gain total control. The film says they want to manipulate people through fear and the power of money.




“The New World Order is a crime syndicate, established by the ruling elite, the richest people in the world, the one percent that controls over 80 percent of the world’s wealth. These are the people who want to set up a one-world government so they can have more power in less people’s hands,” author Luke Rudkowski says.

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The “New World Order” is also a controversial new film that goes behind the scenes of the American anti-globalization movement.

It’s a documentary focusing on those fighting what they claim is a secret group of a wealthy elite that effectively runs the world.

Rudkowski says he’s a fighter for truth.

“We are not crazy people, we are people who just want the truth from our government, and it shows our struggle to get the message across to the American people. It also shows our success, how we have been right all this time, and how we’re getting more and more popular,” Rudkowski explains

Radio talk show host Alex Jones (whose previous interviews are also available at RT) is the main character in the film.

“The hottest thing in the world right now is the people discovering the new world order. I mean, finally the Associated Press and other major U.S. newspapers, and British papers had to admit that global elites are meeting in secret to chart the future of the world. It’s not just the enemy of people in other nations, it is the enemy of all free humanity,” Jones says.

Alex Jones and Luke Rudkowski are often criticized and labeled ‘conspiracy theorists.' The film itself also got a dose of criticism.

‘Tiresome,' ‘Tedious documentary,' ‘Paranoid and delusional’ – these are just some of the reactions of the New York Times to the film. But all publicity is good publicity – and the fact of the matter is that even the mainstream is now paying attention and reacting to talk about the New World Order.

Directors Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer both say they sought to remain objective and independent from the claims made in the film – and be as fair as possible.

“What we really wanted people to do is just to see these people as human beings, listen to what they were saying, and interpret that for themselves, and then go out and find out more about what they were saying. And then either agree or disagree with it. I support people who try to penetrate that barrier between that which we are told, and that which really is,” Neel says.

“They are a group of people, who are not willing to accept the status quo, what the generally accepted story is. Myself and Andrew as well have a strong interest in hearing about people who are willing to take that jump,” Meyer says.

The people featured in the film say it will bring the truth about the New World Order one step closer to being understood by the American public and the world.