This Must Not Happen

Davids Medienkritik reports the Berlin city government intends to raze this Checkpoint Charlie monument. On July 4.

The monument consists of over 1,000 crosses adorned with the names of those murdered attempting to escape Communist East Germany for freedom.

Edmund Burke said:

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

God forbid.

UPDATE: Later information is that the site is owned by a bank which is refusing to renew the 8-month lease & Berlin city is refusing to intervene. I’d like to know:
A) The name of the bank
B) Why the city is not preserving this memorial.

UPDATE 2: A comment correctly points out that the American philosopher George Santayana said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. Santayana was a fascinating man – philosopher, writer and traveler. Born in Spain, educated in the US, he spent much of his life in Italy. He was a generous and clever man. I’m happy that he has the attribution for this quotation.

Regime Change Before Aid

The excellent American Future is analyzing the recent report of the bipartisan Task Force on the United Nations. It’s chaired by George Mitchell, and was set up last year by the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for Commerce, Justice, and State.

The report is here. It provides an intellectual and legal framework for addressing the problem of removing predatory regimes.

The emphases below are mine.

Not surprisingly, the Task Force recommends that the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) be abolished, pointing out that seven of its current members are listed by Freedom House as the world’s “worst of the worst” abusers of human rights. But the Task Force goes further by condemning the Non-Aligned Movement:

“Democracies and nations moving toward democracy represent a growing proportion of the UN’s member-states, but they have yet to organize themselves effectively within the United Nations system to promote common interests and values. Democratic states sacrifice fundamental interests, such as human rights, in favor of regional solidarity. The so-called Non-Aligned Movement, a product of Cold War divisions, remains as a major impediment to economic development, protection of human rights, and the promotion of democracy”.

The Task Force doesn’t pull any punches in its recommendations:

“The United States government should affirm that every government has a responsibility to protect its own citizens in accordance with the following principles:

Sovereignty belongs to the people of a country, and governments have a responsibility to protect their people. If a government fails in its primary responsibility to protect the lives of those living within its jurisdiction from genocide, mass killings, and massive and sustained human rights violations, it forfeits claims to immunity from intervention (based on the principle of nonintervention in a state’s internal affairs) if such intervention is designed to protect the at-risk population.

In certain instances, a government’s abnegation of its responsibilities to its own people is so severe that the collective responsibility of nations to take action cannot be denied. The United Nations Security Council can and should act in such cases. In the event the Security Council fails to act, its failure must not be used as an excuse by concerned members to avoid protective measures”.

Regime Change Before Aid.

Don’t Give Money To Charities

My mother told me never to give money to mendicants – “It will only encourage them, dear”.

Mark Steyn’s take is similar.

If you really want to be charitable, you should send your cheque to the Pentagon or the Royal Australian Navy

Oxfam…paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the ‘tax’, they were charged £2,750 ‘demurrage’ for every day the vehicles sat in port.

This was merely the latest instalment in what’s becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective — you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all.

Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated.

Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork.

Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

So what about Africa, the darling of aging pop-singers? Well:

The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria’s past rulers stole or misused £220 billion.

That is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades. The looting of Africa’s most populous country amounted to a sum equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the continent.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has spoken of a new Marshall Plan for Africa. But Nigeria’s rulers have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. After that mass theft, two thirds of the country’s 130 million people – one in seven of the total African population – live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.

If you want to help corrupt counties, spend your money on our armed forces. Because without regime change, the people’s suffering will never change.

Search Engines Make You Free

Here’s an example of how the Main Stream Media (MSM) lies by ommission, and how easy it is to find them out.

After yesterday’s post on verbally-challenged Italian judges, I was interested to see this via Drudge:

In Italy, Anger at U.S. Tactics Colors Spy Case

MILAN, June 25 – The extraordinary decision by an Italian judge to order the arrest of 13 people linked to the Central Intelligence Agency on charges of kidnapping a terrorism suspect here dramatizes a growing rift between American counterterrorism officials and their counterparts in Europe.

European counterterrorism officials have pursued a policy of building criminal cases against terrorism suspects through surveillance, wire-taps, detective work and the criminal justice system. The United States, however, has frequently used other means since Sept. 11, 2001, including renditions – abducting terror suspects from foreign countries and transporting them for questioning to third countries, some of which are known to use torture.

Pretty damning! You can just see those Italian cops patiently assembling a case, then along come the arrogant Yanks & drag the suspect off to a torture state.

Still, I was suspicious. First, it’s in the New York Times, which I haven’t trusted since it reported Elian Gonzalez being peacefully taken from his relations, while “nuancing” this picture.

And then the story is datelined Milan, so it’s special Italian pleading. Like with the woman journalist story, where, contrary to Italian sworn statements that the vehicle was stationary, US satellite photos showed the vehicle running the checkpoint at over 60 MPH. And finally, I could not remember any reports of Italian convictions of terrorists.

Still, it’s important to be factually right on Depleted Uranium. So I Yahood and Googled “italy terror convict” to see how many bad guys have been put away by the Italy’s Finest. Here’s what I found (emphases are all mine).

Dozens of terror suspects have been arrested in Italy, since the terror attacks on the United States. Seventy-five people suspected of illegal activities linked to terrorism have been arrested during the past year. But most have either been released, acquitted during trial or convicted of only minor crimes, such as falsifying documents. One expert noted that of 500 people arrested for terrorism in the European Union, only a couple of dozen have been convicted.

So, only an idiot would leave a threat to the US to be dealt with by the Italian legal system.

Still, taking the guy off to Egypt was cruel, if the NYT is correct that it’s a torture state. (I haven’t previously heard of the the NYT condemning Arabic torture, but maybe that never made it to Drudge or LGF). So I looked for more about the suspect.

More searching, made difficult by the hundreds of lefty whinings about the snatch from the jaws of Italian justice. And, guess what I found?

The investigation concerns an Islamist Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, snatched off a Milan street in February 2003 and never seen again. He was wanted in Egypt for belonging to an outlawed Islamist militant group.

So now you know. The Italians were harboring an Egyptian citizen who was wanted there on criminal charges. The CIA considered the guy a threat to the US (remember, 3000 dead?). In the light of the complete ineffectiveness of the Italian control of terrorists, the CIA sent the guy back to his homeland.

It took me 15 minutes to find these facts. So far as I can see not one member of the MSM has shown similar diligence.