Good on the beeb, the terrestrial première of the UK film Extraordinary Rendition (23:35 in some regions). From the filmmaker’s site-
Today’s leader column in the Guardian also highlights the film and places it in the context of the wider debate about torture in the war on terror. There’s also an interview with Jim over on the Future Movies website and the Director’s Notes film site have a podcast interview you can listen to as well as clips from the film to view.
Not quite a paperclip, but maybe he helped develop those ‘enhanced interrogations‘.
It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.
Then, instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.
Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by Germany.
He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941.
While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various solutions into Jewish prisoners’ hearts to see which killed them the fastest.
But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in 1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.
Heim’s file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP. Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he was listed as having a different SS assignment.
This “cannot be correct,” the indictment says. “It is possible that through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the (concentration camp) was concealed.”
There is no indication who might have been responsible.
The U.S. Army Intelligence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime and postwar activities, and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to the U.S. National Archives. But the Army’s electronic format is such that staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these don’t include the file requested by the AP.
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, declined to comment through a spokeswoman.
“I don’t believe there is anything appropriate for Mr. Rosenbaum to add,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney in an e-mail. Read the rest of this entry »
“The ICRC is deeply concerned about the plight of civilians caught up in the fighting and calls on all warring parties to comply with international humanitarian law, and to take precautions while conducting military operations to safeguard the lives and dignity of civilians,” Pascal Hundt, head of the ICRC’s delegation in Somalia, said.
Someone tell the Ethiopian forces who just pulled a Haditha, their US support and training really shows-
At least 12 Somali civilians have been killed after Ethiopian troops opened fire on them in the southwestern town of Baidoa, witnesses say. The incident came shortly after a roadside bomb blast hit a water tanker, killing an Ethiopian soldier and prompting other soldiers to open fire, according to one witness. Abdurahman Takow said: “At least 12 people were killed and nine others wounded by fire from Ethiopian soldiers.”
Via Atlargely-
Chris Nelson – the uber insider political newsletter scribe behind The Nelson Report and whose contacts in the national security establishment are stellar – reports the rumor that the video showed by the CIA to Capitol Hill lawmakers may have been “doctored.”
The Nelson Report – 28 April 2008
N. KOREA. . .since our Reports of Thursday and Friday last week, possibly debilitating rumors, but little “fact” has been added to the deconstruction of the CIA’s controversial “Syria briefing”.In the sexy rumor department, there are those claiming that the Israeli-supplied photos used in the “video” shown on Capitol Hill “came from a photo-shop”, specifically, “the pixels don’t match” on the alleged N. Korean nuclear expert and his Syrian compatriots.
This strikes us as amazingly easy to confirm, one way or the other, but we cite it as emblematic of the fundamental destruction of trust in nuclear-related “intelligence” since the Colin Powell “Iraq WMD” debacle at the UN, oh so many long years ago.
On the photo allegedly of a DPRK nuclear expert, Administration sources confirm that the video ID is inaccurate, but our sources say the S. Korean newspaper identification of the man as a senior political official from the Foreign Ministry is also incorrect.
On the briefing itself, we can report that Capitol Hill “customers” are not at all happy that less than an hour after professional staff with the appropriate clearances were barred from the room, the whole video was handed over to the world.
“You have to think the Administration didn’t want to have experts in the room who might dare to ask tough questions”, notes one disgruntled bar-ee, whom, we should note, said he did not believe the “pixel” mismatch rumor “because it would be so unbelievably stupid…”
The majority of our expert sources do say they feel that the video briefing can be accepted as conclusive that…assuming the photos are not a complete fabrication…the Syrian plant can now be said to definitely be a Yongbyon-type of nuclear facility.
But after that, consensus breaks down completely on whether it was a nascent bomb facility, a power station of some kind, or what.
One Congressional expert, after watching the video, comments “the very first line in the briefing is false…there’s no way the plant was ‘ready to be switched on’, so you have to question the entire premise for the raid…”
Also atlargely-
Yesterday in Mexico City, secDef Gates told reporters that a second U.S. aircraft carrier and it’s escorting fleet steaming into the Gulf was a “reminder” to Iran.
The Chair of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, has already indicated that the U.S. has “reserve capability” to attack Iran and now CBS is reporting a deliberate leak from the Pentagon that says it is developing strike options for an attack that would involve limited strikes on “plants where weapons are made” and the Qods Force Headquarters (in Tehran).
Over at VetVoice, though, diariest “DM” points out that there’s no such thing as a limited strike package against a nation like Iran.
I think the media needs to wake up to what an attack on Iran would really look like. Even assuming that the objective of the attack is limited to reducing Iranian exportation of weapons and training to Iraq, the attack itself would not be limited. Remember, Iran possesses a fairly substantial defensive and retaliatory capability.
