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US Archbishop Lauds Progress on DREAM Act
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US Archbishop Lauds Progress on DREAM Act
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Vatican Does Damage Control After WikiLeaks Revelations
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Vatican Does Damage Control After WikiLeaks Revelations
The Wikileaks Web site obtained 251,287 confidential cables containing communications between 274 U.S. embassies throughout the world and the State Department over the years 1966-2010.
The site began publishing these documents on Nov. 28 and plans to post the rest over the next few months; some 1,340 have already been publicized, including at least 16 that are on topics related to the Vatican.
The Vatican press office released a statement Saturday, noting, "Without venturing to evaluate the extreme seriousness of publishing such a large amount of secret and confidential material, and its possible consequences, the Holy See Press Office observes that part of the documents published recently by Wikileaks concerns reports sent to the U.S. State Department by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See."
It continued, "Naturally these reports reflect the perceptions and opinions of the people who wrote them and cannot be considered as expressions of the Holy See itself, nor as exact quotations of the words of its officials."
The statement concluded, "Their reliability must, then, be evaluated carefully and with great prudence, bearing this circumstance in mind."
The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See released a statement condemning the leak of confidential information in the "strongest terms."
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Analyst Dissects Vatican WikiLeaks Fallout
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Analyst Dissects Vatican WikiLeaks Fallout
• It agreed to quietly encourage countries to support the Copenhagen accord on climate change, even though the Holy See does not officially take positions on draft agreements;
• It hoped that Poland would act as a bulwark against radical secularism within the European Union, especially by “holding the line” on life and family issues;
• Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger opposed Turkey’s entry into the European Union, but as pope, Benedict XVI has taken an official neutral stance, while continuing to emphasize the importance of Europe’s Christian roots.While the cables unveiled this morning don’t really contain any surprises about the Vatican itself, they do lift the veil on how American diplomats and their colleagues have viewed various moves by Rome in recent years.The revelations come mostly in cables from the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See back to the State Department in Washington, often expressing information gleaned from conversations either with church sources or with other diplomats in Rome.The cables were unveiled in the Dec. 11 issue of the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper.One 2009 cable, titled “Sex abuse scandal strains Irish-Vatican relations, shakes up Irish church, and poses challenges for the Holy See,” reports on a conversation between Julieta Valls Noyes, the number two official at the U.S. embassy to the Vatican, and her counterparts in the Irish embassy to the Holy See.Noyes writes that while the Vatican’s first concern was for the victims of abuse, it also felt that requests for its ambassador in Ireland to cooperate with the “Murphy Commission” probe threatened its sovereignty under international law.The cable reports that the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, ultimately wrote to the Irish Embassy to the Holy See to insist that any requests for information should come through proper diplomatic channels.That stance, Noyes wrote, produced backlash in Ireland: “Much of the Irish public views the Vatican protests as pettily procedural and failing to confront the real issue of horrific abuse and cover-up by Church officials,” she wrote.As the Irish situation developed in late 2009 and early 2010, Noyes went on to say, “the normally cautious Vatican moved with uncharacteristic speed to address the internal church crisis,” pointing to a meeting between Pope Benedict and Irish bishops in February 2010, but she also says that contacts both in Ireland and the Vatican expect the crisis “to be protracted over several years.”In another 2009 cable, Noyes describes a conversation with Francis Campbell, the ambassador of the United Kingdom to the Holy See, about the pope’s decision to create new structures, called “personal ordinariates,” to welcome traditionalist Anglicans upset with liberalizing moves such as the ordination of women and openly gay bishops, and the blessing of same-sex unions.The move put the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in an “impossible situation,” according to Campbell, and potentially constituted “the worst crisis in 150 years” in Anglican-Catholic relations.According to Noyes’ description of the conversation, Campbell warned that the move could unleash latent anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom, and even provoke acts of violence in isolated cases.The cable from the U.S. diplomats expressed doubt about “whether the damage to inter-Christian relations was worth it,” especially, it said, “since the number of disaffected Anglicans that will convert is likely to be a trickle rather than a wave.”Another cable from January 2009 from Noyes, written in the wake of a global controversy provoked by Pope Benedict’s decision to lift the excommunications of four traditionalist Catholic bishops, including one who is a Holocaust denier, said the case revealed a serious “communications gap” in the Vatican.That gap, according to the cable, leads to “muddled, reactive messaging that reduces the volume of the moral megaphone the Vatican uses to advance its objectives.”The Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, is the only senior papal aide to use a Blackberry, according to the cable, and most senior Vatican officials don’t even use e-mail accounts.Because senior Vatican officials typically do not understand the nature of modern communications, the cable asserted, they often speak in “coded” language impossible for the outside world to decipher. Noyes cited an example from the Israeli ambassador to the Holy See, who said he had been given a letter from the Vatican which supposedly contained a positive message for his country, but it was “so veiled he missed it, even when told it was there.”Part of the communications problem, the cable asserted, is structural: Lombardi is not part of the pope’s inner circle, so he “is the deliverer, rather than a shaper, of the message,” and he is “terribly overworked.”In the wider Catholic world, the cable added, there are communications success stories – pointing in particular to the way the Catholic group Opus Dei responded to the frenzy created by the novel and movie “The Da Vinci Code.”In general, the cable reported there's ferment in the Vatican about the need for better communications strategies, but little concrete sense of what to do about it.“Our Vatican contacts seem to be talking about nothing but the need for better internal coordination on decisions and planned public messages,” it said. “But if or when change will come remains an open question.”For the moment, it doesn't seem that today's disclosures are likely to create a diplomatic crisis, especially given that the Vatican announced preemptively that it did not want the WikiLeaks revelations to disrupt U.S./Vatican ties.For one thing, Vatican officials realize that at least some of the critical assessments expressed in the leaked cables, especially on the PR front, are widely shared inside the Vatican itself. In addition, the Obama White House has tried to send reassuring signals to Rome, including the recent appointment of a presidential delegation to attend the Nov. 20 consistory for the creation of 24 new cardinals. It was the first time a U.S. president sent an official delegation to a consistory, and it was seen in the Vatican as a diplomatic way of expressing respect.At mid-morning, Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, released a statement in both Italian and English on the WikiLeaks disclosures."Without venturing to evaluate the extreme seriousness of publishing such a large amount of secret and confidential material, and its possible consequences" the statement read, "the Holy See Press Office observes that part of the documents published recently by Wikileaks concerns reports sent to the U.S. State Department by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See.""Naturally these reports reflect the perceptions and opinions of the people who wrote them," the statement said, "and cannot be considered as expressions of the Holy See itself, nor as exact quotations of the words of its officials. Their reliability must, then, be evaluated carefully and with great prudence, bearing this circumstance in mind."U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Miguel Diaz likewise issued a statement, condemning the leaks "in the strongest possible terms" while declining to comment on their authenticity.The United States and the Holy See are working together on multiple fronts, Diaz said, from fixing the global economy to human rights, climate change and interfaith dialogue, and those partnerships "will withstand this challenge."
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Pagan Holiday: Campaign to Publicly Shame Stores Not Celebrating Christmas
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Faith TX Megachurch Launches Campaign to Publicly Shame Stores Not Celebrating Christmas
Pastor Dr. Robert Jeffress is warning all retailers in the Dallas metro area that his congregation
is on the lookout for “naughty” businesses who don’t show outward signs of supporting Christmas — and supporting those “nice” businesses that do.
Jeffress’ 13,000-member First Baptist Church launched its “Grinch Alert” campaign Thursday, a web-based declaration of war on those who have declared war on Christmas. The pastor says his megachurch was motivated to create www.GrinchAlert.com after a number of businesses had removed Christmas trees and replaced traditional Christmas greetings with generic “holiday” language.
Gawker reports:
It all started when a local Christian radio station heard about a Southlake, TX bank that had “fallen into the trap of political correctness” and elected not to display a Christmas tree this year. They took this as a personal affront. (Martyrdom complex?) They did a broadcast shaming that bank, which relented and put a tree in its lobby.
Heartened by this success, First Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress launched GrinchAlert.com, a catch-all message board for publicly shaming those who fail to “show outward signs of supporting Christmas.”…
“I wanted to do something positive to encourage businesses to acknowledge Christmas and not bow to the strident voices of a minority who object to the holiday,” Jeffress told KCBI-FM, one of the largest Christian radio stations in the country. The church is enlisting the help of the whole community in adding names of stores to the online “naughty” and “nice” lists, which the radio station pledged to read on the air each morning at 7:40 a.m. CST.
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Faith Muslim Doctor Faces Blasphemy Charge for Putting Business Card in Trash Can
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Faith Muslim Doctor Faces Blasphemy Charge for Putting Business Card in Trash Can
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — Police say a Pakistani doctor has been arrested on suspicion of blasphemy after he threw away a business card of a man who shared the name of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.
It is the latest case involving the country’s contentious law on blasphemy against Islam.
Police official Mushtaq Shah says the Muslim doctor was detained Friday in the southern city of Hyderabad after a complaint was lodged alleging his actions had insulted the Prophet Muhammad.
Pakistan’s blasphemy law has received widespread attention following the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death last month for insulting Islam. Critics say the law is often misused to settle grudges, persecute minorities and fan religious extremism.
AFP:
Naushad Valiyani was detained on Friday following a complaint by a medical representative who visited the doctor in the city of Hyderabad.
“The arrest was made after the complainant told the police that Valiyani threw his business card, which had his full name, Muhammad Faizan, in a dustbin during a visit to his clinic,” regional police chief Mushtaq Shah told AFP.
“Faizan accused Valiyani of committing blasphemy and asked police to register a case against the doctor.”
Shah said the issue had been resolved after Valiyani, a member of Pakistan’s Ismaili community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, apologised but local religious leaders intervened and pressed for action.
“Valiyani had assured Faizan that he did not mean to insult the Prophet Mohammed by throwing the visiting card in the dustbin,” Shah said, adding that the police had registered a case under the Blasphemy Act.
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New trial sought for powerful ex-Pa. state senator
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New trial sought for powerful ex-Pa. state senator
Defense attorneys argue that U.S. District Judge Ronald Buckwalter was on solid legal ground in imposing the sentence, which federal prosecutors called "unreasonable" and "unduly lenient" in an appeal filed last summer.
"If the convictions are not reversed, the sentence must be affirmed," the defense argued in documents filed late Friday with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Prosecutors had sought at least a 15-year term for Fumo, a 67-year-old Philadelphia Democrat who was convicted last year of 137 fraud and obstruction counts after a five-month trial. Authorities said Fumo defrauded the state Senate, a museum and a nonprofit of millions of dollars.
In their appeal, they said "breathtaking" corruption had been exposed in the case and said Fumo over the course of three decades in the state Senate used his control of a Senate panel and one nonprofit and influence over another "to support a lavish lifestyle and illegally amass political power."
Prosecutors argued in their appeal that Fumo should have faced up to 21 to 27 years in prison and that the amount of fraud was greater than $4 million, twice the total assessed by the judge. They also said the judge failed to explain how he calculated the fraud total or sentencing range.
Fumo's attorneys, however, said the district court committed "no significant procedural error" in sentencing him to 55 months' imprisonment followed by three years of supervision, a $411,000 fine and more than $2.3 million in restitution—although they objected to interest on the latter. Saying the government was arguing "narrow issues of procedural error," they said the amounts had been calculated fairly and the decision to credit Fumo for "good works" was well grounded.
Fumo's attorneys also, however, asked the appeals court to grant Fumo a new trial, charging that the court failed to ensure an impartial jury. They said members of the panel improperly learned that the senator had been convicted in a previous corruption trial but the verdict had been overturned on appeal and that one juror had posted on the Internet about the status of deliberations. They also argue that some of the evidence allowed at trial was prejudicial.
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The war against Israel as a continuation of the bloody Nazi-Vatican-Islamic counter reformation
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Nazi Palestine's Grand Mufta
Declassified Papers Show U.S. Recruited Ex-Nazis
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us/12holocaust.html?ref=usBy SAM ROBERTS
Published: December 11, 2010
After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.
With the Soviet Union muscling in on Eastern Europe, “settling scores with Germans or German collaborators seemed less pressing; in some cases, it even appeared counterproductive,” said a government report published Friday by the National Archives.
“When the Klaus Barbie story broke, about his escaping with American help to Bolivia, we thought there weren’t any more stories like that, that Barbie was an exception,” said Norman J. W. Goda, a University of Florida professor and co-author of the report with Professor Richard Breitman of American University. “What we found in the record is that there were a fair number, and that it seems more systematic.”
In chilling detail, the report also elaborates on the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the
British.
In fact, the report says, the Muslim leader was paid “an absolute fortune” of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year). It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party’s elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated more than 350,000 Jews there.
On Nov. 28, 1941, the authors say, Hitler told Mr. Husseini that the Afrika Corps and German troops deployed from the Caucasus region would liberate Arabs in the Middle East and that “Germany’s only objective there would be the destruction of the Jews.”
The report details how Mr. Husseini himself was allowed to flee after the war to Syria — he was in the custody of the French, who did not want to alienate Middle East regimes — and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israeli Arab leaders and “were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism.”
“You have an actual contract between officials of the Nazi Foreign Ministry with Arab leaders, including Husseini, extending after the war because they saw a cause they believed in,” Dr. Breitman said. “And after the war, you have real Nazi war criminals — Wilhelm Beisner, Franz Rademacher and Alois Brunner — who were quite influential in Arab countries.”
In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine’s Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attaché in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and “cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can’t do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that.”
“We have more detailed scholarly accounts today of Husseini’s wartime activities, but Husseini’s C.I.A. file indicates that wartime Allied intelligence organizations gathered a healthy portion of this incriminating evidence,” the report says. “This evidence is significant in light of Husseini’s lenient postwar treatment.” He died in Beirut in 1974.
The report, “Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War,” grew out of an interagency group created by Congress to identify, declassify and release federal records on Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to hold war criminals accountable. It is drawn from a sampling of 1,100 C.I.A files and 1.2 million Army counterintelligence files that were not declassified until after the group issued its final report in 2007.
“Hitler’s Shadow” adds a further dimension to a separate Justice Department history of American Nazi-hunting operations, which the government has refused to release since 2006 and which concluded that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for certain other former Nazis.
Like earlier reports generated by the group, this one paints a grim portrait of bureaucracy, turf wars and communication gaps among intelligence agencies. It also details blatantly cynical self-interested tactical decisions by Allied governments and a general predisposition that some war crimes by former Nazis and their collaborators should be overlooked because the suspects could be transformed into valuable assets in the more urgent undercover campaigns against Soviet aggression.
The American intelligence effort to infiltrate the East German Communist Party was dubbed “Project Happiness.”
“Tracking and punishing war criminals were not high among the Army’s priorities in late 1946,” the report says. Instead, it concludes that the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps spied on suspect groups ranging from German Communists to politically active Jewish refugees in camps for displaced people and also “went to some lengths to protect certain persons from justice.”
Among them was Rudolf Mildner, who was “responsible for the execution of hundreds, if not thousands, of suspected Polish resisters” and as a German police commander was in Denmark when Hitler ordered the country’s 8,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz.
Mr. Mildner escaped from an internment camp in 1946, and the report raises questions about whether American intelligence agents’ “lenient treatment of Mildner contributed in some way to his ability to escape” and even suggests that he may have remained in American custody helping identify Communists and other subversives before settling in Argentina in 1949.
The report cites other cases that parallel the experience of Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon. He cooperated with American intelligence agents who helped him flee to Argentina.
One of those cases involved Anton Mahler, who as a Gestapo anti-communist agent interrogated Hans Scholl, the German underground student leader who was beheaded in 1943. Mr. Mahler also served in Einsatzgruppe B in occupied Belarus, which was blamed for the execution of more than 45,000 people, mostly Jews.
“This admission on his own U.S. military government questionnaire in 1947 was ignored or overlooked by U.S. and West German authorities,” the report said.
American agents recommended that Mr. Mahler and other former Nazis be protected from politically inspired criminal proceedings in Germany.
In 1952, the report says, the C.I.A. moved to protect Mykola Lebed, a Ukrainian nationalist leader, from a criminal investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He would work for American intelligence in Europe and the United States through the 1980s, despite being implicated in guerrilla units during the war that killed Jews and Poles and being described by an Army counterintelligence report as a “well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.”
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The Moment One Man Wishes He Wasn't So Curious
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Send an email to Jeff Neumann, the author of this post, at jeff@gawker.com.
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Sudan to investigate video of woman being flogged
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Sudan to investigate video of woman being flogged
By MOHAMED OSMAN, Associated Press Mohamed Osman, Associated Press
KHARTOUM, Sudan – Sudan's judiciary opened an investigation into a video of a woman being flogged that has been widely circulated on the Internet, the state news agency reported Sunday.
The video shows a woman in a voluminous cloak on her knees screaming and pleading with blue-uniformed policemen, identified as Sudanese, who take turns whipping her across the head and feet.
There is no way to verify the identity of the woman or the location of the event shown on the two minute video.
"The investigation was started immediately after the images of the young woman, being punished under Articles 154 and 155 of the 1991 Sudanese penal code, appeared on the Internet," the judiciary said in a statement.
The statement said the investigation would look into whether the punishment was implemented improperly.
Article 154 and 155 of the Sudanese penal code mandates flogging up to 100 lashes as a punishment for adultery or running a brothel, as well as up to five years in prison.
In 2009, Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein was sentenced to 40 lashes under the country's controversial indecency law for appearing in public wearing trousers.
Under a storm of international criticism for the sentence, Hussein was eventually released with just a fine.
Sudan's government implements a conservative version of Islamic law in the north, and "public order" police enforce the laws, banning alcohol, breaking up parties and scolding men and women who mingle in public.
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