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Don't look now, but Obama may have actually earned his Hitler mustache--By covering for Bush/Cheney
Josef Altstötter. Wilhelm von Ammon. Günther Joel. Herbert Klemm. Ernst Lautz. Wolfgang Mettgenberg. Rudolf Oeschey. Oswald Rothaug. Curt Rothenberger. Franz Schlegelberger.
These were the Nazi judges found guilty in the Judges Trial, the third of twelve Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, following the initial trial of the highest level Nazis. The principal charges they were convicted of were:
* War crimes through the abuse of the judicial and penal process, resulting in mass murder, torture, plunder of private property.
* Crimes against humanity on the same grounds, including slave labor charges.
(Rothaug was acquitted of the first, convicted of the second.)
 The Judges Trial was immortalized in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, and Montgomery Clift. Now that is an all-star cast. And the quality of the cast was a way of underscoring the seriousness and importance of the film's message--the message of the original trial itself.
Judgment at Nuremberg was the sort of movie that helped me feel like I was not a freak when I was growing up. It helped me feel that I was the real American, and bigoted wingnuts I ran into from time to time were the despicable un-American scum.
But now, Obama & his "Department of Justice" has effectively declared that those men were unjustly convicted. They were right, and the men who prosecuted them were wrong. They may have been guilty of bad advice, or bad legal decisions, but misconduct? Come on!
This isn't just a matter of "being on the wrong side of history." This is changing sides more than 60 years after the fact, on the great issue of what constituted good and evil in World War II. Sure, we expect the sociopathic neocons to come down on the side of the Nazis, and clueless fratboy Bush to sign on with his signature, "Whatever." But Obama was supposed to be elected to clean up that mess. To restore us to constitutional rule, at the very least. Instead, he has given his impremature to reversing the judgment at Nuremberg.
Now, to be sure, the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility found that there had been misconduct, and that sanctions were appropriate. And they were over-ridden by a career attorney--David Margolis--not an Obama appointment. But it's also the case that Obama & Holder knew that it would play out this way, that Margolis was determined from the outset to shield Woo Yoo and Bybee, and by letting it play out this way, by the sin of ommission they are fully responsible for this outcome.
This is an act of pure evil. It doesn't get any evilier than this. You make think the act of torture is as evil as it gets. But sending the message that those who set torture in motion were just a bit careless, nothing more--that opens the way for a future descent into the abyss, in which acts of torture become the norm.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke.
Obama & Bush, together in "whatever." The banality of evil on steroids.
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