The re-armament and re-activation of Germany as a military power

[Magda Hassan]

I thought a thread about this subject may be very worthwhile as Germany is definitely on the march again. Let's not repeat history. Starting with Rick Rozoff's excellent recent articles on this subject.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658


Stop NATO
July 12, 2009


New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage, Part 1
Rick Rozoff


When the post-World War II German states the Federal Republic of Germany and the
German Democratic Republic, West and East Germany, respectively, were united in
1990, it was for many in Europe and the world as a whole a heady time, fraught
with hopes of a continent at peace and perhaps disarmed.

Despite US pledges to the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev,
that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would not move "one inch"
eastward, what German reunification achieved was that the former German
Democratic Republic joined not only the Federal Republic but NATO and the
military bloc moved hundreds of kilometers nearer the Russian border, over the
intervening years to be joined by twelve Eastern European nations. Five of those
twelve new NATO members were republics of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
itself, neither of which any longer exists.

Far from issuing in an era of disarmament and a Europe free of military blocs -
or even of war - the merging of the two German states and the simultaneous
fragmentation of the Eastern Bloc and, a year later, the USSR was instead
followed by a Europe almost entirely dominated by a US-controlled global
military alliance.

Within mere months of reunification Germany, then governed by the Christian
Democratic Union/Christian Social Union-led government of Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, set to work to insure the fragmentation of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia would parallel that of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with
each broken down into all of its constituent republics.

The Kohl government and its Free Democrat Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher immediately pushed for recognition of the Yugoslav republics of Croatia
and Slovenia. Croatia was the site of the Nazi-administered Independent State of
Croatia during World War II and Slovenia had been parceled out among Germany and
its Italian and Hungarian fascist allies.

What the rulers of newly unified Germany accomplished is best expressed in a
line from Victor Hugo's poetic drama Cromwell: Strike while the iron is hot and
in striking make it hot.

By the end of 1991 Germany had browbeaten the other members of the European
Community, now the European Union, into recognizing the secession of both
republics.

As the above pressure was being applied by Berlin the Deputy Foreign Minister of
Serbia Dobrosav Vezovic warned "This is a direct attack on Yugoslavia," one
which "erases Yugoslavia from the map of the world." [1]

Germany was now back on the road to redrawing the map of Europe and would
shortly embark on the use of military force outside its borders for the first
time since the Third Reich.

Berlin later deployed 4,000 troops to Bosnia in 1995, its largest mission abroad
since World War II, but its return to direct military aggression after an almost
55-year hiatus would occur with NATO's war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

The standard Western rationale for that war, Operation Allied Force, is that it
was an intervention to prevent alleged genocide in the Serbian province of
Kosovo, a crisis that had flared up almost instantaneously, and the 78-day
bombing war was then justified by what the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard
once termed the teleological suspension of ethics.

It was no such thing. The separation of Kosovo from Serbia and the further
dissolution of the former Yugoslavia to the sub-federal republic level was the
final act of a decade-long drama, but one envisioned before the lifting of the
curtain on the first one.

In January of 1991 former US Congressman Joseph DioGuardi in his capacity of the
President of the Albanian American Civic League wrote to German Chancellor Kohl
demanding the following:

"The European Community, hopefully led by the Federal Republic of Germany,
recognizes the Republic of Kosova as a sovereign and independent state as the
only logical and effective solution to protect the Albanian people in Kosova
from their Serbian communist oppressors." [2]

Five months earlier, in August of 1990, DioGuardi had escorted six US Senators,
including Robert Dole, on a tour to Kosovo.

A year before the war began German newspapers ran headlines on the order of
"Mr. Kinkel threatens a NATO intervention in Kosovo," referring to then
German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, who is also quoted in 1998 as saying "Of
course you have to consider whether you are permitted from a moral and ethical
point of view to prevent the Kosovo-Albanians from buying weapons for their
self-defense." [3]

Canadian professor and political analyst Michel Chossudovsky has written
extensively and trenchantly on the role of the German BND
(Bundesnachrichtendienst/Federal Intelligence Service) in arming and training
the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army before and in preparation for the NATO
onslaught against Yugoslavia on his Web site Global Research at
http://www.globalresearch.ca

It was in Kosovo that Germany, which had deployed troops to Bosnia and run a
military hospital in Croatia earlier in the 1990s, crossed the post-World War II
red line when the Luftwaffe (with its Tornado multirole combat fighters) engaged
in combat operations for the first time since 1945.

The precedent was exacerbated when Germany followed up the bombing by military
occupation as over a thousand of its troops accompanied their NATO allies into
Kosovo in June of 1999. A German general assumed command of the 50,000-troop
NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR).

Quoting from memory an account by an American reporter of the words of an older
ethnic Albanian witnessing the arrival of the first German troops in Kosovo:
"Where have you been? We missed you. The last time you were here you drew the
borders the right way."

The Rubicon had been crossed, Germany had been declared by its Western allies
cleansed of its Nazi past and was free to dispatch troops and wage war again,
this time on the world stage.

As a Der Spiegel feature put it this past February, "The phase of German
military intervention that began 10 years ago during the Kosovo war is in no way
coming to an end, despite the fact the majority of Germans wish it would. On the
contrary: The era of foreign deployments for Germans and their military forces
has just begun." [4]

The lid of Pandora's chest had been thrown open and by 2007 "According to
Germany`s Defense Ministry, roughly 8,200 soldiers are serving in missions in
Afghanistan, Lebanon, Bosnia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kosovo and Sudan,
making Germany one of the top contributors to international missions." [5]

How post-Cold War unified Germany and the German public were being prepared for
the new international military role was insightfully analyzed a year before the
Kosovo War by Diana Johnstone. The following is an excerpt from her article
"Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass" which is far more penetrating than it
may be comparatively lengthy:

"In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher [to become foreign
minister later in the same year, 1998] pressed for disavowal of 'pacifism' in
order to 'combat Auschwitz,' thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood
of self-righteous indignation, German politicians across the board joined in
using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had been the logic
up until reunification, but on the contrary, for 'bearing their share of the
military burden'.

"In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban
on military operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again
be a 'normal' military powerthanks to the 'Serb threat.'

"On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass transfer
of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the Germans, this can
be seen as a comforting psychological projection which served to give Germans a
fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of the new 'criminal' people,
the Serbs, But the hate campaign against Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop
there.

"If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down,
now Germany can unite and send military forces back into Yugoslavia and what
is more in order to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to
those it imposed when it occupied the country in 1941 well, quite a number
of people might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and
many of the very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to
what amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since World
War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse." [6]

The campaign was not without effect in Germany as subsequent events have proved
and has been accompanied by the rehabilitation, honoring and even granting of
veteran benefits to Nazi collaborators, including former Waffen SS members, in
Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine in recent years.

Following its military interventions in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, Germany sent
troops to Macedonia in 2001 after armed continents of the Kosovo-based National
Liberation Army (NLA), an offshoot of the Kosovo Liberation Army led by Ali
Ahmeti, also a founder of the KLA, invaded the country in the summer of 2001. In
connivance with the 50,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, Ahmeti's brigands brought
fighters, arms and even artillery past American checkpoints on the
Kosovo-Macedonia border to launch deadly raids against government and civilian
targets.

In one incident 600 Bundeswehr soldiers were caught in the crossfire between the
NLA marauders and government security forces (7)

Years later Benjamin Schreer, military expert at the German Institute for
International and Security Affairs in Berlin, reflected on the consequences of
what Johnstone had described: "The decision of the SPD [Social Democratic Party]
and Greens to send German troops into Kosovo in 1999 has transformed the
Bundeswehr....The Bundeswehr is now operating on a global scale." [8]

The press wire report from which the quote was taken provides these details:

"The mission in Afghanistan had German troops, roughly 100 special forces who,
for the first time since World War II, took part in ground combat.

"The Kommando Spezialkraefte, known by its acronym KSK, is a highly trained and
well-equipped special unit that has successfully been assigned to Kosovo and
Afghanistan. Most of their operations, however, are classified." [9]

After September 11, 2001 German military missions and deployments were expanded
exponentially and in addition to Germany deploying AWACS to the US in Operation
Eagle Assist it also "took part in [Operation Active Endeavor] which has German
units monitor the Mediterranean waters....In Afghanistan and East Africa, German
troops battle...with sea units, ground troops and special forces.

"The Bundeswehr, once restricted by the German constitution to exclusively
domestic protection, can now send armed troops to foreign countries." [10]

Having exploited as well as in an integral way engineered the breakup of
Yugoslavia, with Kosovo as the altar and Serbia as the paschal lamb whose
slaying wiped clean decades of German guilt, Berlin was now free to play the
role assigned to it by NATO: That of an international military power operating
on four continents, a far wider range of deployment and engagement than had been
achieved by either Bismarck or Hitler.

In a feature called "Preparing Germany's Military for War," it was reported in
2005 that then German Defense Minister Peter Struck was "proposing that...his
department considers missions other than peace-keeping and stabilization for the
Bundeswehr" and that "the Bundeswehr could be asked to play a stronger role in
Africa in the future." [11]

While visiting German troops in Uzbekistan on his way to Afghanistan, Struck was
quoted as saying "For those of us who were born after the war this is an
unfavorable idea but we must be realistic. It is possible that we will consider
going to other countries and separate warring parties by military means" and
that the Bundeswehr must be prepared to "carry out peace enforcement missions
anywhere in the world." [12]

In late 2006 Struck's successor, Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, released a
133-page White Paper which stated "The Bundeswehr is to be thoroughly
restructured into an intervention force." [13]

In an article entitled "Germany plans to remake its Army into a rapid-reaction,
humanitarian-intervention force," Newsweek commented: "The pace of change has
indeed been unsettling. It took a constitutional-court ruling in 1994 to permit
German soldiers to be deployed abroad at all. Today, close to 10,000 Bundeswehr
troops find themselves stationed in places as far-flung as Bosnia, Djibouti and
southern Sudan...." [14]

Germany has become so comfortable with its current global military status that
last week Chancellor Angela Merkel conferred the first combat medals on German
soldiers since World War II.

"The new Cross of Honour for Bravery, is the military's first such medal since
the end of World War II when it stopped awarding the Iron Cross tarnished by its
use in Nazi Germany. Some see this as another sign of Germany emerging from its
post-World War II diplomatic and military shell since the country's
reunification in 1990." [15]

A column in the Times of London embraced this further reemergence of a
militarized Germany, and one moreover of an expeditionary and aggressive nature
- the soldiers awarded by Merkel were veterans of the Afghan war - with this
panegyric:

"When Germany once again has the confidence proudly to parade its military
heroes, its journey from the darkness of diplomatic and military purdah - via
reunification in 1990 - is surely complete.

"Germany's new medal, the Honour Cross, stands as a bold response to the
growing role played in the world by German military.

"The presentation by Chancellor Angela Merkel marks a potent moment in Germany's
return to the heart of the community of nations." [16]

Last November German Defense Minister Jung laid the foundation stone for "the
first national memorial to soldiers killed serving in the country's post-World
War II military."

Combat deaths and their commemoration, for decades considered matters of a dark
and distant past, are now commonplace as "Germany...has emerged gradually from
its postwar diplomatic and military shell, increasingly
puts soldiers in the line of fire in places such as Afghanistan." [17]

The process of German reunification, the first effect of which was to place the
entire territory of the nation in NATO, had been consummated with the rebirth of
a major military power thought by many to have reached its final quietus in
1945.

The mainstream weekly Der Spiegel wrote in 2005 in a feature aptly named
"Germany's Bundeswehr Steps out on the Global Stage" that "With reunification,
the nation had not just regained full sovereignty: it also became subject to
rules that had effectively been put on ice during the Cold War. On the new
international stage, political influence was reserved for those who were willing
and able to assert their interests in concert with their partners. If need be,
by force. If need be, by military means."

The celebratory piece went on to say:

"Today the Bundeswehr has become one of the most powerful tools available to
German foreign-policy makers.

"[T]he German government is in the process of fostering a totally different
breed of soldier. The elite members of the Kommando Spezialkrafte (Special
Forces Command), or KSK...are highly trained professionals who can hold their
own with their colleagues from the British SAS or American Delta Force....

"Germany has 'finally reached a state of normality,' and its democracy will now
be 'defended directly' wherever threats arise. That could be anywhere, soon even
in Africa." [18]

In the culmination of almost twenty years of German and allied efforts to
subvert and tear apart the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, its
truncated successor the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and finally Serbia,
almost on the first anniversary of the Western-supported secession of Kosovo in
February of 2008 Berlin announced that it was donating 200 vehicles to the newly
formed Kosovo Security Force, a revamped Kosovo Liberation Army headed up by a
KLA commander who has already proclaimed his intention to join NATO.

The German offering is "a substantial contribution to the build up" of the
fledgling army of an illegal entity not recognized by over two-thirds of the
world including Russia, China and India. [19]

In an interview with Radio Kosova this February Colonel Dieter Jensch, senior
official of the German Defense Ministry, boasted that "The Bundeswehr is helping
the Kosovo Security Force through material assistance, which includes the
donation of 204 vehicles and other technical equipment, and we have assigned a
team of 15 professional military officers to help in building the KSF
structures."

The account from which the above emanates added "The assistance is valued at 2.6
million Euros. Germany will also send 15 military personnel to help build KSF
structures and to train the members of this force.

"The building of the Kosovo Security Force and its professional training is
expected to cost 43 million Euros. Germany is among the first countries to help
in building this force. It has already sent 15 military officers to help in
building the structures of this force and to train its members." [20]

Yesterday the Balkans and today the world.


1) New York Times, December 18, 1991
2) Albanian American Civic League, January 6, 1991
3) Suddeutsche Zeitung, July 30, 1998
4) Der Spiegel, February 9, 2009
5) United Press International, March 20, 2007
6) CovertAction Quarterly, Fall 1998
7) Michel Chossudovsky, Washington Behind Terrorist Assaults In Macedonia
Global Research, September 10, 2001
Michel Chossudovsky, America at War in Macedonia
June 2001
Rick Rozoff, Human Rights Watch: Dear Mr. Ahmeti
August 1, 1009
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yugoslavia...ssage/3364
8) United Press International, August 30, 2005
9) Ibid
10) Ibid
11) Deutsche Welle, June 6, 2005
12) Ibid
13) Newsweek, November 13, 2006
14) Ibid
15) Deutsche Welle, July 6, 2009
16) The Times, July 7, 2009
17) Associated Press, November 28, 2008
18) Der Spiegel, June 17, 2005
19) Associated Press, February 13, 2009
20) Kosova Information Center, February 9, 2009

[Magda Hassan]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691


Stop NATO
July 14, 2009


From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
Rick Rozoff


The reunification of Germany in 1990 did not signify a centripetal trend in
Europe but instead was an anomaly. The following year the Soviet Union was
broken up into its fifteen constituent federal republics and the same process
began in Yugoslavia, with Germany leading the charge in hastening on and
recognizing the secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the nation that grew out
of the destruction of World War I and again of World War II.

Two years later Czechoslovakia, like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia a
multiethnic state created after the First World War, split apart.

With the absorption of the former German Democratic Republic into the Federal
Republic, which since 1949 had already claimed an exclusive mandate to govern
all of Germany, the entire nation was now subsumed under a common military
structure and brought into the NATO bloc.

Wasting no time in reasserting itself as a continental power, united Germany
inaugurated its new claim as a geopolitical - and military - power by turning
its attention to a part of Europe that it had previously visited in the two
World Wars: The Balkans.

With military deployments and interventions in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and
Macedonia from at least as early as 1995-2001 onward, the German Bundeswehr had
crossed a barrier, violated a taboo and established a new precedent that
paralleled the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the latter in flagrant
contravention of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler's sending the Wehrmacht
into the Rhineland in that year has been observed by historians to have marked a
decisive turning point in plans by the Third Reich towards territorial expansion
and war. In fact, the standard argument runs, the provocation in 1936 made
possible the next year's bombing assault on the Spanish town of Guernica, the
Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia and the Anschluss takeover of Austria in 1938,
the attack on Poland in 1939 and with it the beginning in earnest of a second
European conflagration which wouldn't end before some fifty million people had
been killed.

The comparison between German military deployments in the Rhineland in 1936 and
later ones in the Balkans in the 1990s will only appear extreme if the history
of the years immediately following World War II are forgotten.

In the last of three meetings of the leaders of the major anti-Axis powers in
the Second World War - Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States - in
Potsdam, Germany after the defeat of the Third Reich, Winston Churchill [later
replaced by his successor as prime minister, Clement Attlee], Joseph Stalin and
Harry Truman met and discussed precise plans for Europe in general and Germany
in particular for the post-war period.

The Potsdam Conference issued a Protocol which stipulated that there was to be
"a complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany" and all aspects of
German industry that could be employed for military purposes were to be
dismantled. Additionally, all German military and paramilitary forces were to be
eliminated and the production of all arms in the nation was prohibited.

It is now evident in retrospect that two nations whose heads of state were
present either had no plans at the time to adhere to the Potsdam Agreement or if
so quickly abandoned them.

A British document from the months preceding the surrender of Nazi Germany in
May of 1945 and the subsequent Potsdam Conference of July 17-August 2 called
"Operation Unthinkable: 'Russia: Threat to Western Civilization'" was
declassified and made public in 1998. A photocopy of the Joint Planning Staff of
the British War Cabinet report identified by the dates May 22, June 8, and July
11, 1945 is available for viewing on the website of Northeastern University in
Boston at: http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/pages/002.htm

"The overall political objective is to impose upon Russia the will of the United
States and the British Empire.

"A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will....That is for
the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have
it."

A few years ago a Russian appraisal of the document would state "This was the
groundwork for the notorious Operation Unthinkable, under which World War II was
to develop immediately, without interim stages, into a third world war, with the
goal of ensuring the total defeat of the Soviet Union and its destruction as a
multinational community." [1] The total defeat of the Soviet Union and its
disappearance as a multinational community in fact occurred in 1991.

The British wartime document consistently refers to the then Soviet Union as
Russia, incidentally, and as such suggests plans not only for war but for a
change of political system and a vivisection of the sort seen later in a
post-war - that is, post-World War III - Russia.

When revelations concerning Operation Unthinkable became public in the late
1990s the strongest response to them came, not surprisingly, from post-Soviet
Russia.

In March of 2005 Russian historian Valentin Falin was interviewed by the Russian
Information Agency Novosti website in a feature called "Russia Would Have Faced
World War III Had It Not Stormed Berlin" and spelled out the details of
Churchill's plans:

"The new war was scheduled to start on July 1, 1945. American, Canadian, and
British contingents in Europe, the Polish Expeditionary Corps and 10-12 German
divisions (the ones that had not been disbanded and kept in Schleswig-Holstein
and Southern Denmark) were supposed to participate in the operation." [2]

In further observations that provided the article its title, Falin added,
"Behind the determination of the Soviet leadership to capture Berlin and reach
the demarcation lines established during the 1945 Yalta conference attended by
Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill was a task of great importance - to make all
possible efforts to foil a political gamble envisioned by the British leader
with the support of influential US circles, and to prevent the transformation of
World War II into World War III, where our former allies would have turned into
enemies." [3]

The Russian scholar, author of the book The Second Front, argued further that
the taking of Berlin, which cost the lives of 120,000 Soviet soldiers, preempted
Western plans for what may well have triggered a continuation of the Second
World War into a third one.

"The battle for Berlin sobered up quite a few warmongers and, therefore,
fulfilled its political, psychological and military purpose. Believe me, there
were many political and military figures in the West who were stupefied by easy
victories in Europe by the spring of 1945.

"One of them was US General George Patton. He demanded hysterically to continue
the advance of American troops from the Elbe, through Poland and Ukraine, to
Stalingrad in order to finish the war at the place where Hitler had been
defeated.

"Patton called the Russians 'the descendants of Genghis Khan.' Churchill, in his
turn, was not overly scrupulous about the choice of words in his description of
Soviet people. He called the Bolsheviks 'barbarians' and 'ferocious baboons.' In
short, the "theory of subhuman races" was obviously not a German monopoly. [4]

In a subsequent interview with the same source, Falin provided more information:

"U.S. Under-Secretary of State Joseph Clark Grew wrote in his diary in May 1945
that as a result of the war the dictatorship and domination of Germany and Japan
passed over to the Soviet Union, which would present as much threat to Americans
in the future as the Axis powers. He added that a war against the Soviet Union
was as imminent as anything in this world can be. Grew was supposed to be a
friend of the late President Roosevelt." [5]

Recalling the dimensions of the proposed Operation Unthinkable - the
combined attack (and invasion) force was to consist of 112-113 divisions
including 10-12 Wehrmacht divisions - the Russian historian added that "The file
on Operation Unthinkable declassified in 1998 says nothing about the propaganda
chimeras about Moscow's alleged plans of occupying 'defenseless Europe' and
pushing to the Atlantic coast, as the Chiefs of Staff worked on practical
operations directives." [6]

Falin wrote an article a year later titled "Cold War an offspring of 'hot war'"
in which he says that the British "MI5 head, Sir Stewart Menzies, held a series
of secret meetings with his German counterpart, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, in the
unoccupied part of France to discuss making Germany a friend and the Soviet
Union an enemy." [7]

Sixty five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany there is more rather than less
examination of the accusation that American and British government and military
figures conspired with the Nazis before World War II and with German Defense
Ministry and Wehrmacht officials in the waning days of the war.

In commenting on the rising tide of WWII revisionism in the West, reaching its
nadir - to date - on this July 3rd with the passage of a resolution called
Reunification of Divided Europe by the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which in effect makes
the former Soviet Union (and by implication current Russia) co-responsible for
provoking WWII, veteran Russian journalist Valentin Zorin reminded his readers
of several events usually swept under the carpet by leading Western circles and
their compliant media and scholars:

"The infamously failed Munich conspiracy of the western politicians and the Nazi
Fuehrer sought to make the German Army march against the Soviet Union. In those
days Moscow was pressing for forming an anti-Hitler coalition and invited a
British and French delegation to that end. The talks proved long and fruitless.
London and Paris actually sabotaged the talks while urging the Fuehrer to attack
the USSR.

"Even after the war had broken out, top-echelon leaders in London and Paris
would not give up their attempts to make Hitler's divisions turn about and
attack the Soviet Union. A several-month-long period of strange developments
came to be known as a Phoney War. While deliberately inactive at the front, the
British and French rulers engaged themselves in secret bargaining with Hitler.

"The secrecy of the bargaining was buried for a good half century later, on the
17th of August 1987, when Hitler's Deputy in the Nazi Party Rudolph Hess,
tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life in prison, died at Berlin's Spandau
Prison in unexplained circumstances. 10 days before Germany attacked the Soviet
Union Hess flew solo to Scotland to start secret talks with the circles close to
the British government. It later transpired that the talks focused on ending
fighting between the UK and Germany and agreeing on joint action against the
Soviet Union...." [8]

It's important to point out that neither the academician Falin nor the
journalist Zorin is invested in invoking the events of 1939-1945 in defense of
the former USSR and its leadership at the time or in settling scores regarding
conflicts of past decades. Instead they and others, including Russia's current
political leadership, are far more concerned - more alarmed - about matters of
the present and the impending future.

With the NATO Alliance, which in recent years has come to refer to itself
routinely as Global and 21st Century NATO, encroaching upon contemporary Russia
from most all directions and with increasingly brazen historical revisionism
growing out of Western post-Cold War triumphalism reaching the point that Nazis
and their collaborators are being exonerated while modern Russia is being
tainted ex post facto as a villain in the Second World War, the prospect of a
"transformation of World War II into World War III" mentioned above is not so
far-fetched.

As Valentin Zorin's article also says, "Some quarters would like to redraw the
post-war boundaries in Europe and the Far East, question the validity of the UN
Charter and bury the Nuremberg Tribunal rulings in oblivion. It is these
modern-day revenge-seekers that channel and obviously fund the large-scale
propaganda campaign of falsifying the history of the Second World War." [9]

It's been seen above that the leaders of Britain, the United States and Soviet
Russia agreed in the summer of 1945 at the Potsdam Conference to the total
demilitarization of Germany. All indications were that once that systemic
disarming of the nation was completed Germany would never militarize again.

Instead in 1950, while fighting a war in Korea which included troops from most
of its new NATO allies and which escalated into armed conflict with China, the
United States started the process of forcing the rearming of West Germany and
its eventual incorporation into NATO. Members of the US-led military bloc pushed
for the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC) with an integrated army,
navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of all its member states.

A European Defence Community treaty was signed in May of 1952 but defeated by
Gaullists and Communists alike in France. With that nation in opposition, the
EDC was dead but the US and Britain found other subterfuges to remilitarize the
Federal Republic.

With the creation of the Western European Union in 1954 West Germany was
permitted - for which read encouraged - to rearm and was given control over its
own armed forces, the Bundeswehr.

The following year the Federal Republic of Germany was inducted into NATO. The
Soviet Union and its allies responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact later in
1955.

Two of the fundamental purposes in launching the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance
in 1949 were to base nuclear weapons, which the US had a monopoly on at the time
of the bloc's founding, in Europe and to rearm Germany as a military bulwark on
the continent and for use abroad.

Anyone still in thrall to the notion that NATO was planned as a defensive
alliance against a Soviet military threat in Europe would do well to recall
that:

The Warsaw Pact was formed six years after and in response to NATO, especially
to NATO's advance into Germany.

The Warsaw pact, already long moribund, officially dissolved itself in 1991.
Eighteen years later NATO still exists without any pretense of a Soviet or any
other credible threat.

In the past decade alone it has expanded from 16 to 28 member states, all of the
twelve new ones in Eastern Europe and four of those bordering Russian territory.

During the same ten year period it waged its first air war, against Yugoslavia,
outside the bloc's own defined area of responsibility and its first ground war,
in Afghanistan, a continent removed from Europe, half a world away from North
America and nowhere near the North Atlantic Ocean.

That NATO officially expanded into the former Warsaw Pact by admitting the Czech
Republic, Hungary and Poland at its sixtieth anniversary summit in 1999 while in
the midst of its first war, the 78-day bombing onslaught against Yugoslavia -
ten years after the end of the Cold War - is an irrefutable retroactive
indictment of its true nature and purpose since inception.

The bloc continues to maintain nuclear warheads in Europe, including on air
bases in Germany, with long-range bombers and missiles able to deliver them.
NATO recently renewed the commitment to its nuclear doctrine, which continues to
include the first use of nuclear weapons.

The world's largest and only surviving military bloc, one which now takes in a
third of the planet's nations through full membership or various partnerships,
was born out of the last days of World War II in Europe. It's fundamental
purpose was to unite the military potential of the countries of the continent's
west, north and south into a cohesive and expanding phalanx for use at home and
abroad. Victors and vanquished of the most mass-scale and murderous conflict in
history - Britain, the US and France and Germany and Italy - were gathered
together under a joint military command.

If the transition from WW II to a far deadlier, because nuclear, WW III was
averted, an argument nevertheless exists that the Second World War never ended
but shifted focus. As an illustrative biographical case study of the seamless
adaptation, the New York Times ran a reverential obituary three years ago from
which the following is an excerpt:

"Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German Panzer division officer
during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces in Central
Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in Bonn. He was
99....By the start of World War II, he was commander of a Panzer, or armored,
division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France, sweeping
around the Maginot line's obsolete fortifications in eastern France and rushing
to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian front, he joined the
General Staff in Berlin. Restored to tank duty, he fought the American Army in
western Germany...." [10]

It would be intriguing to learn what Count von Kielmansegg thought at the end of
his nearly century-long life about the return of his homeland to the ranks of
nations sending troops to and waging war against others both near and far.

It would prove equally edifying to hear whether he thought that his career as a
military commander ever truly changed course or rather pursued a logical if not
inevitable path from the Wehrmacht to NATO.

Lastly, it doesn't seem unjustified to believe that the Count might at the end
of his days have been proud of a Germany that had become the third largest
exporter of weapons in the world, one which had arms agreements with 126 nations
- over two-thirds of all countries - and that had troops deployed to war and
post-conflict occupation zones in at least eleven countries at the same time and
would soon, at this year's NATO summit, use its army at home again.


Part I
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14332
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world\
-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff[/URL]


1) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
2) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 28, 2005
3) Ibid
4) Ibid
5) Russian Information Agency Novosti, June 30, 2005
6) Ibid
7) Russian Information Agency Novosti, March 3, 2006
8) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
9) Voice of Russia, July 3, 2009
10) New York Times, June 4, 2006

[Magda Hassan]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40717


Stop NATO
July 16, 2009


Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power
Rick Rozoff


The reemergence of Germany as an active military power in Europe and
increasingly worldwide occurred entirely under the auspices of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, which West Germany joined in 1955 and the East was
brought into with reunification in 1990. The citizens of the former German
Democratic Republic were given no opportunity to discuss much less vote on the
issue.

The first post-World War II deployment of German military forces outside its
borders - and outside of NATO's self-defined security zone - in active military
roles rather than in multinational exercises and United Nations missions was
fostered and initiated under the chancellorship of Christian Democrat Helmut
Kohl in the first half of the last decade.

But it was the Social Democrat-Green Party coalition government of Gerhard
Schroeder and Joschka Fischer, what the Western press regularly referred to
(with no tincture of irony and less understanding of political history) as a
Red-Green alliance, that involved Germany in its first wars since the fall of
Berlin in 1945. In fact two wars in less than two and a half years.

Chancellor Schroeder and his foreign minister Joschka Fischer provided Tornado
warplanes for the 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in the spring of
1999 and troops for the post-invasion occupation of Afghanistan after October,
2001. Both were NATO operations and the second was in response to the first-ever
activation of the Alliance's Article 5 mutual military assistance clause.


Humanitarian Intervention: 1939 And 1999


Writing in his memoirs years after the event, Schroeder justified his
participating in the first unprovoked military assault against a European nation
that had not threatened any other country since Hitler's blitzkrieg campaigns of
1939-1941 by describing his motivations at the time, 1999:

"Now, on the cusp of the 21st century, the real challenge seemed to me not just
to douse the most recent fire in the Balkans, but to bring peace to the
region....The goal was exclusively humanitarian."

Sixty years before the war upon which he reflected a predecessor of Schroeder as
chancellor of Germany said:

"I ordered the German Air Force to conduct humanitarian warfare....In this
campaign I gave an order to spare human beings."

The latter is from Adolf Hitler's speech in Danzig/Gdansk on September 19, 1939.

It's also worth noting that one of the main justifications Hitler used for the
invasion of Poland eighteen days before that speech was the alleged abuse and
persecution of ethnic minorities. ("More than 1,000,000 people of German blood
had in the years 1919-20 to leave their homeland. As always, I attempted to
bring about, by the peaceful method of making proposals for revision."}

In an interview with an American television station during the war against
Yugoslavia German Foreign Minister Fischer said, "I think tradition and
historical experiences, historical fears are very important. And for us now we
have to find our role. And this is, on the military level, a very difficult one,
but we are taking part in the air campaign. We have ships in the Adriatic."

The air campaign wreaked death and destruction from the skies for 78 days, not
sparing factories, bridges, refugee columns, passenger trains, religious
processions, apartment complexes, hospitals and the Chinese embassy.


Weakening United Nations, Strengthening NATO


The aggression Fischer endorsed and help to direct, malicious and cowardly as it
was, was also conducted without UN authorization and in flagrant violation of
the principles upon which the United Nations Organization was formed.

Article 33 of the United Nations Charter states:

"The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the
maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a
solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial
settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means
of their own choice."

The mediation indicated is to be conducted as a last resort in the UN Security
Council and not unilaterally at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.

The Nuremberg Tribunal convened after the defeat of the last European power that
arrogated to itself the right to attack other nations on the continent and to
redraw its borders and defined crimes against peace as the worst violation of
international law.

Principle Vl of the 1950 Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal characterized
crimes against peace as the "Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a
war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or
assurances" and as the "Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the
accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under."


From The Balkans To South Asia And Middle East: Air War Followed By Ground War,
Naval Blockades


Although the tool employed to pry open the door barring the resumption of
military aggression in Europe was so-called humanitarian intervention, that
rationale would be discarded immediately after 50,000 NATO troops marched into
the Serbian province of Kosovo. Few wars in moderns times have not hid behind
the pretext of defending the national security and safety of the citizens of the
aggressor and of protecting innocents from harm and mistreatment.

The Schroeder-Fischer administration put Germany back into the business of
waging war from the skies and on the ground and the country has continued to
travel the same route ever since. Troops, armored vehicles and Tornados were
transferred to South Asia and warships to the coasts of Lebanon and Somalia.

Humanitarian intervention was an ad hoc ruse employed to launch NATO as an
active 'out of area' warfighting machine and a political body to circumvent and
replace the United Nations. Once the first part of that objective had been
achieved it was dropped as quickly as it had been concocted and wars could then
be conducted for traditional reasons: Territorial designs, the acquisition of
resources, control of vital transport routes including sea lanes, punishing
recalcitrant adversaries, revenge.

In the process Germany became the first major post-Cold War international
military power. So much so indeed that even Time Magazine couldn't ignore the
transformation - the Transformation as will be seen later - and in January of
this year ran a feature entitled "Will Germany's Army Ever Be Ready for Battle?"

In two sentences the Time report summed up how much territory has been traversed
since what many in the world thought was the end of German militarism in 1945.

"The German army as it stands today is a relatively young creation, born after a
period of demilitarization following the end of World War II. [T]he Bundeswehr
has become increasingly engaged in international missions and is coming under
pressure to step up its involvement in out-and-out warfare."

The turning point was, of course, 1990.

"Since the 1990s, after reunification, German forces have become more involved
in military missions abroad....There are currently 247,000 soldiers enrolled in
the Bundeswehr and German troops are now serving all over the world, in places
such as Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Lebanon." [1]


Why Wars Are Really Launched


By 2006 "Germany [had] about 9,000 soldiers deployed in German missions around
the world, a level [that] could increase to...14,000 troops in five theaters of
operation." At the time Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung identified a main
purpose of such missions and humanitarian intervention was conspicuously not
mentioned:

"Eighty percent of our trade occurs on the seas, which naturally includes the
security of energy supplies and raw materials."

The exact words could have been used in 1914 and 1941.

In discussing the White Paper his ministry had just released, one which
highlighted the transformation of the Bundeswehr into an international
intervention force, Jung reiterated that NATO relations "remain the
basis for Germany and Europe's shared security" and that Germany's alliance with
the United States was of "paramount importance" to the nation. [2]

Jung added that "the government needs the ability to use the Bundeswehr inside
of Germany...." [3]

Later that year Chancellor Angela Merkel initiated the next step in Germany's
expanding militarization and demanded an end to caps on defense spending. "You
cannot say that the planned defense budget for the next 20 years is sacrosanct.
A German government cannot say, 'Please, don't take part in any new conflicts in
the next decades, because we can't afford it.'" [4]

As she spoke German armed forces were deployed on eleven international military
missions and would soon begin a twelfth by sending warships and troops to
enforce the naval blockade of Lebanon's Mediterranean coast.


The Transformation


A German news report in the autumn of 2006 revealed that "An official plan to
modernize the Bundeswehr - to turn it from an unwieldy behemoth created to
defend its own borders into a lithe organization ready to take on asymmetric
threats around the world - has been underway for several years.

"Known in policy circles simply as 'the transformation,' it is due to be
completed by 2010." [5]

That conversion process included acquiring 600 Taurus air-launched cruise
missiles. "Taurus is a 1,400kilogram, all-weather guided missile with a range
of more than 350 kilometers. The system will equip Tornado, Eurofighter and F-18
aircraft of the German and Spanish air forces." [6]

It also, in 2006, included plans to spend six billion euros on "new navy
frigates, submarines, helicopters and armored personnel vehicles."

In relation to Defense Minister Jung's earlier comments, "Germany's military
leadership has especially focused on modernizing the country's navy fleet." [7]

At roughly the same time it was announced that Germany would acquire 405 Puma
tanks, "the most modern infantry tank on the market," comparable to the US
Abrams tank used in Iraq. This month Berlin formally placed an order for the
Pumas and a spokesman for its manufacturer said "NATO countries already equipped
with the Krauss-Maffei Wegmann's Leopard tanks - such as Spain, Turkey, Greece
and Australia - would be ideal customers." [8]

The Puma, which "sets new global standards for armored vehicles," was first
unveiled at the Bundeswehr's fifty-year anniversary celebrations in Munster in
2006. "New types of missions...require a highly mobile weapons system that is
ready for international deployment...." [9]

The preceding autumn Germany acquired two new submarines to add to eleven
already in the Baltic Sea which then Defense Minister Peter Struck described as
"a milestone" for his nation's navy. [10]

The Tornado multirole warplane first used against Yugoslavia in 1999 and since
deployed to Afghanistan is reported to be capable of delivering nuclear
warheads, including the twenty the US maintains at the German air base at
Buechel.

Since 1989 German Tornado fighter-bombers have been based at the Holloman Air
Force Base in New Mexico in the Southwestern United States. The American base
"is the only location where the German Air Force trains aircrews in Tornado
aircraft operations and tactics." [11] Last year the US Defense Security
Cooperation Agency advocated the continuation of the arrangement, stating that
it would "contribute to the foreign policy and national security objectives of
the United States by improving the military capabilities of Germany and
enhancing standardization and interoperability with U.S. forces." [12]


Bundeswehr In South And Central Asia


In 2006 NATO first requested that the Luftwaffe send Tornado planes to
Afghanistan where Berlin has stationed 3,700 troops, the third largest
contingent in NATO's International Security Assistance (ISAF) force, with the
only the US and Britain providing larger numbers of troops. Germany has its own
base in Uzbekistan near Termez and as such has the only foreign forces left in
that nation since the US and other NATO forces were expelled in 2005. As of
three years ago Germany had transported over 125,000 troops through the base.
[13] Last year the German military announced plans to build a 67-kilometer
railway line from Uzbekistan to Northern Afghanistan, complementing the air
bridge it already operates.

In 2007 Germany delivered the first six Tornados to the war front in Afghanistan
even though "More than three-quarters of Germans - 77 percent - said the country
shouldn't comply with NATO's request to send Tornado jets to Afghanistan...."
[14]

Plans for the warplanes were that they "would operate across the entire country,
taking aerial pictures of Taliban positions and passing the information on to
other NATO partners who would carry out strikes." [15]

A German defense official at the time finally acknowledged that "What happens in
Afghanistan is combat. Our troops have already been engaged in that, also in the
north." [16]

Though a year earlier a Defense Ministry spokesman, with no reference to alleged
peacekeeping and certainly not to humanitarianism, admitted that "German
military aircraft are seeing action in the volatile southern region of
Afghanistan" and that "German military aircraft are supporting NATO operations
in volatile southern Afghanistan." [17]


No More 'Humanitarian' Bombs


In a Der Spiegel feature called "Slouching Towards Combat," a warning was issued
that "He who spies targets, contributes to later bombing attacks with all the
consequences that go along with them, including the ominous collateral damages
previously known from the war in Kosovo." [18] The admonition fell on deaf ears
in Berlin.

The same source had earlier sounded another alarm, one worth quoting in length.

"Now it's Tornado surveillance jets, equipped with cameras - and cannons. The
Germans are allowing themselves to get deeper and deeper involved in the
Afghanistan conflict, and there is no end in sight.

"Between Christmas and New Year [2006], US C-17 transport planes will unload
heavy German Marder tanks at the German military's central headquarters in
Mazar-e-Sharif.

"German Tornado jets were already deployed in combat situations about eight
years ago - in order to 'avert a humanitarian catastrophe' in the Kosovo
conflict, as the Bundestag resolution...stated then. It was the first time that
German troops were deployed in combat since World War II. This time the Tornados
are meant to fly as reconnaissance planes - but that can of course be changed at
any time. They fire armor-shattering uranium munitions from their cannons and
drop laser-guided precision bombs on the farms where the Taliban take refuge.

"But they also drop so-called 'general purpose bombs' - regular explosives of
the kind commonly used for carpet bombing during World War II and in Vietnam."
[19]

In 2007 Germany additionally sent several Kleinfluggeraet Zielortung drones to
the war theater, a type "much better suited to relay target information for
artillery used by the Dutch troops in their fight against the Taliban...." [20]

At the same time former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who had first
sent German combat troops to Afghanistan and for the first time ever to Asia,
urged the current government to "widen its military operation into the southern
part of the war-afflicted country." [21]

Early in 2007 Germany signaled its intent to send its most sophisticated battle
tank, the Leopard 2A6, to Southern Afghanistan, although German troops are
stationed in the until recently comparatively peaceful North.

Last year Germany assumed command of NATO's Rapid Reaction Force in Afghanistan.
A news report on that development added that "When the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) deployed in Afghanistan in
early 2002, some 850 German troops were in its ranks.

"That number has increased more than fourfold.


War Of West, NATO, Civilization: From Afghan Capital To North To Southern War
Zone


"Confined at first to Kabul, the Germans' mission was widened to the northern
part of the country, where they took command in 2006....A few days ago the
German Defence Ministry announced it was raising the ceiling on its troop
deployments in Afghanistan from 3,500 to 4,500. And the next escalation is due
on Monday as Germany takes over the [Rapid] Reaction Force in the north." [22]

Earlier in the year an American presswire report titled "Germany enters Afghan
war" said that "Germany...will now send battle forces to Afghanistan.

"NATO has for the second time requested that the German government deploy a unit
of 250 battle soldiers to Afghanistan as part of a rapid-response force.....The
unit would have to enter bloody combat if needed...." [23]

Der Spiegel reported last October that Germany, which has disguised its role in
the war in Afghanistan behind the mask of so-called provincial reconstruction
and other civilian projects, had spent over 3 billion euros on the Afghan War
and that "Germany's military expenditures in Afghanistan are nearly four times
as high as its civilian aid." [24]

This year, as part of Washington's and NATO's massive escalation of the war in
Afghanistan, German troop strength is to be boosted from 3,700 to 4,400 no later
than next month and Berlin has agreed to send four AWACS for the war effort in
South Asia.

As German combat deaths increased to 35 late last month, Defense Minister Franz
Josef Jung demonstrated no reservations about sacrificing more soldiers and to
any who had misgivings about a war that will soon be eight years old and that is
only intensifying he blustered: "My answer is clear: we are in Afghanistan
because we have to protect there the security of citizens in Germany." [25] A
decade before some reference to the well-being of the local population would
have been invoked, however disingenuously.

A week before, Jung, casting aside all use of peacekeeping, reconstruction and
other euphemisms, told a German public television station: "If we are attacked
we will fight back. The army has the necessary answers. In recent battles we
have done well and we will continue to do so in the future." [26]

Former defense minister Volker Ruhe, in referring to the fact that the
Bundeswehr is conducting the largest and longest military operation in its
history, said: "It is delusive if the Government pretends that the
Afghanistan operation is a sort of armed development assistance. It is a war of
NATO, of the West, of civilisation...." [27]

Afghanistan and Central Asia are not the only places where the German military
is waging a "war of NATO, of the West, of civilisation."


Battle Duty: Germany Returns To Middle East


After Israel's war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 NATO nations began a naval
blockade of the country's coast. It was announced shortly thereafter that
"Germany is to take the lead in patrolling the Lebanese coast and the German
parliament is expected to vote next week on the historic deployment of the
German army in the Middle East.

"Up to 3,000 troops and some 13 vessels are then planned to be sent to the
troubled region. They are to prevent sea-based arms smuggling mainly from Syria
to Hezbollah militants." [28]

That is, the German military returned to the Middle East for the first time
since World War II.

Describing the mission as it was being planned, Defense Minister Jung stated,
"German soldiers have to be prepared against the will of ships' captains to
board ships suspected of smuggling weapons. In this regard, one can speak of
battle duty." [29]

In late 2008 there were 1,000 German troops stationed on eight ships off the
Lebanese coast.

By February of last year "Germany contributed 2,400 personnel, including 625
soldiers, to the naval mission and led the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
for 17 months, with a maritime force consisting of among others two frigates and
two supply ships. The multinational force also includes ships from France, Spain
and Portugal." [30]

Two years later a Lebanese news report, "German Tanks to Lebanon to Control
Border with Syria," said that "Germany has decided to provide Lebanon with 50
Leopard tanks in addition to other military equipment to upgrade its border
control with Syria" and that "a German military delegation is expected to arrive
in Lebanon early in 2009 for discussions with Lebanese military officials
regarding providing the Lebanese army with more military supplies." [31]

Since the early 1990s Germany has not so much sold but given Israel six Dolphin
submarines capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles. One of those submarines
recently crossed the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean in what Reuters
characterized as a "signal to Iran."

Germany has military personnel assigned to NATO in Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq,
where in the latter instance they are part of the NATO Training Mission - Iraq
in Baghdad.

Beginning in 2006 major German news sources revealed that the foreign
intelligence agency BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) during the Schroeder-Fischer
years had provided the US information on bombing targets in Iraq leading up to
and during the attack against the nation in 2003.

If so, it would represent nothing new. More than two years before, in February
of 2001, the BND released a report which stated it possessed "evidence" that
"Iraq has resumed its nuclear programme and may be capable of producing an
atomic bomb in three years" and was working on chemical and biological weapons.
[32]

Berlin also trains Iraqi and Afghan officers and troops on its own soil.


Germany Military Returns To Africa And Targets Gaza


Germany has provided troops for the NATO mission in the Darfur region of Sudan
and the European Union deployment in Congo as well as a nominal force for the
EU's military role in Chad and the Central African Republic in the
conflict-ridden triangle of those two nations and Sudan.

In 2005 the government of Togo, a former German colony, accused Berlin of
complicity in plotting its overthrow. Three years earlier Germany sent troops to
join French, British and American allies in Ivory Coast after an invasion of and
coup attempt in that nation.

Late last year Germany joined the European naval deployment in the Horn of
Africa to complement its involvement with the NATO mission there. The Cabinet
authorized "as many as 1,400 German Navy soldiers and one warship go to the Gulf
of Aden off the coast of Somalia as part of a joint EU effort" which "together
with German soldiers involved in Enduring Freedom and NATO's Allied Provider
missions, could be moved back and forth at will...." [33]

Before the deployment was authorized defense chief Jung said "German warships
should be used against pirates wherever German interests are threatened." [34]

During and immediately after the Israeli offensive in Gaza from December 27,
2008-January 18 2009 it was announced that "Germany plans to send experts to
detect Gaza tunnels" [35] and that "Technical experts from Germany are to travel
to Egypt in the coming days to help secure its border with the Gaza Strip." [36]

In the middle of the war Chancellor Angela Merkel "suggested German
peacekeepers be sent to Gaza" and Eckart von Klaeden, a foreign policy spokesman
for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said "the use of German troops was
feasible but they must have 'robust' powers." [37]

In January a meeting was held in London of the Gaza Counter-Arms Smuggling
Initiative (GCASI) and was followed up last month in Ottawa, Canada.

It was reported in a story called "Canada hosts a summit of NATO countries
participating in the Israeli siege of Gaza Strip" that the second meeting of the
Gaza Counter-Arms Smuggling Initiative was held with the "declared goal of
tightening the Israeli siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip." [38]

The GCASI members are Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands,
Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States.

While the assault on Gaza was still underway a feature called "Israeli
unilateral ceasefire to pave the way for deployment of NATO forces" offered this
analysis of the role that the Gaza Counter-Arms Smuggling Initiative was
intended to play:

"Germany, Great Britain and France already offered to send their naval forces to
guard the Gaza Strip coastal waters. With the naval forces of leading European
NATO powers already deployed off the coast of Lebanon and allegedly to
thwart pirates off the Somali coast, the extension of NATO presence to the
coastal waters of the Gaza Strip is designed to create a permanent hold on the
entire area from the Horn of Africa and beyond, through the Suez Canal and up
the eastern Mediterranean coast." [39]


Training Armed Forces For New Caucasus Wars


A German Defense Ministry envoy visited the Georgia capital of Tbilisi this
January and met with Deputy Defense Minister Giorgi Muchaidze, who said that
"Georgia approaches closer to NATO standards" in large part because "Germany
has been helping Georgia's Defence Ministry for a long time" and "Up to 2,000
officers were trained in Germany." [40]

Germany conducts comparable military training for the armed forces of
Azerbaijan, like Georgia which fought a war with Russia last August a nation
that may resume armed hostilities any day over so-called frozen conflicts in the
South Caucasus.

In late May of this year Georgian Deputy Defense Minister Giorgi Muchaidze paid
a three-day visit to Berlin where "The sides held military and political
negotiations in the framework of the cooperation of Defense Ministries of
Georgia and Germany in 2009. The parties also discussed the situation in Georgia
after the August war...." [41]


Article 5 War Clause: Defending NATO Members, Allies From Baltic To Black Sea


In June Defense Minister Jung was in Lithuania preparatory to Germany resuming
its command of the NATO Baltic air patrol and he and his Lithuanian counterpart
"agreed on the need to implement the commitment on Ukraine and Georgia's future
membership of the alliance."

As to what support for Ukraine's and Georgia's "NATO aspirations" entailed, Jung
said "this process must involve all new members of the alliance, whereas NATO
itself must ensure collective defence and strengthen its military response
forces so that it can give an immediate response when the need arises." [42]


Defending Berlin With Warships Off Cape Town


In 2006 Germany led 19-day joint military maneuvers in South Africa where Berlin
has long-standing ties to the defense establishment going back to the
longstanding cooperation between West Germany and the former apartheid regime
there. The exercises off Cape Town included an estimated 1,300 soldiers and
sailors, warplanes and warships.

A description of the war games said "Two of the world's most advanced warships,
South Africa's SAS Amatola and Germany's FGS Hamburg, together with fighter
aircraft were protecting a virtual Berlin from attack.

"Berlin was successfully defended." [43]

A year later NATO held naval exercises in South Africa in which warships from
the navies of Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United
States participated.

The drills marked the "the first time that South Africa engage[d] its newly
acquired frigates as well as its submarines in a training exercise with foreign
forces in local waters.

"South Africa's new warships were acquired from a German company." [44]
....
The road from Bosnia and Kosovo has been a long one for the Bundeswehr. It has
crossed four continents and no less than fourteen war and conflict zones. It has
permitted a military buildup unimaginable a generation ago and has led to German
military forces being dispersed to many nations and regions they had never been
to before.

It has also permitted Germany to become the third largest arms exporter in the
world and the supplier of advanced weapons - tanks, warplanes, submarines - to
scores of nations.


Part I
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14332
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff/"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world\
-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff/[/URL]


Part II
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14377
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-\
and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/[/URL]


1) Time Magazine, June 27, 2009
2) Deutsche Welle, October 25, 2006
3) Ibid
4) Deutsche Welle, September 7, 2006
5) Ibid
6) Defense News (US), November 10, 2005
7) Die Welt, August 25, 2006
8) United Press International, July 8, 2009
9) Agence France-Press, May 8, 2006
10) Xinhua News Agency, October 19, 2005
11) Defense Security Cooperation Agency, July 18, 2008
12) Ibid
13) Der Spiegel, Febuary 8, 2009
14) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, February 7, 2007
15) Ibid
16) Ibid
17) Pakistan Tribune, October 5, 2006
18) Der Spiegel, December 22, 2006
19) Der Spiegel, December 21, 2006
20) United Press International, March 12, 2007
21) Islamic Republic News Agency, August 19, 2007
22) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, June 29, 2008
23) United Press International, January 31, 2008
24) Der Spiegel, October 12, 2008
25) Associated Press, July 2, 2009
26) Agence France-Presse, June 24, 2009
27) Defense Professionals (Germany), June 26, 2009
28) Deutsche Welle, September 8, 2006
29) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 26, 2006
30) Deutsche Welle, February 29, 2008
31) Naharnet, December 23, 2008
32) BBC News, February 25, 2001
33) Deutsche Welle, December 10, 2008
34) Der Spiegel, November 21, 2008
35) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 19, 2009
36) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 14, 2009
37) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 7, 2009
38) Al-Jazeerah, June 11, 2009
39) Arab Monitor, January 17, 2009
40) Trend News Agency, January 14, 2009
41) Trend News Agency, June 2, 2009
42) Interfax-Ukraine, June 10, 2009
43) Xinhua News Agency, March 14, 2006
44) BuaNews (South Africa), August 28, 2007

[Magda Hassan]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40763


Stop NATO
July 18, 2009


Germany And NATO's Nuclear Nexus
Rick Rozoff



The reunification of Germany and the start of NATO's post-Cold War expansion,
drive east and beginning of its transformation into a global military force
occurred on the same day, October 3, 1990.

On that date East Germany was absorbed into the Federal Republic and
simultaneously into NATO, the first of thirteen additions to the bloc from that
time to the present year.

United since 1990 within its pre-1938 borders, Germany has cast aside most all
post-Potsdam Agreement and Nuremberg Principles constraints and become a
military power engaged in wars on the European and Asian continents (Yugoslavia
in 1999, Afghanistan since 2001) and naval surveillance and interdiction
operations in the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

NATO membership was the gateway for Germany to send troops, warplanes and
warships outside its borders and overseas for the first time since the end of
World War II; to date to Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan,
Sudan and off the coast of Somalia as well as deploying AWACS, Tornado warplanes
and tanks to the US since the activation of NATO's Article 5 in 2001. The latter
also led to the participation of the German Navy in the nearly eight-year-old
Operation Active Endeavor monitoring and interdiction patrols throughout the
Mediterranean Sea.

The nation has the third largest military budget of all European states, only
surpassed by Britain and France. Germany's military spending is larger than
Russia's, for example, even after German spending dropped and Russian increased
last year. The numbers were $46.8 and $40 billion, respectively.

It also has the third largest army of any exclusively European state (Russia and
Turkey excluded from this category) with some quarter of a million troops.

Though not itself a nuclear power, Germany hosts an undisclosed (for apparent
reasons) number of the estimated 350-480 US nuclear warheads deployed in Europe
to this day under NATO arrangements.

According to one report of two years ago "At least 20 US atomic warheads are
reportedly still deployed underground at the German air base in the
southwestern town of Buechel, where they can be mounted on German Tornado
fighter planes...." [1]

According to a statement of the opposition Left Party, an additional 130 US
warheads may be stored at the Ramstein Air Base, headquarters for the United
States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and also a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) installation. The same report adds "German air force pilots
headquartered in Buechel will be ordered to drop nuclear bombs in case of a
military attack or war." [2]

Regarding Germany's unabashed housing of nuclear weapons, the Director of NATO's
Nuclear Policy Section Guy Roberts said in 2007 that "Each decision in this
field is up to national sovereignty. Each nation is free to decide whether or
not it wants to actively participate in the joint management of nuclear
devices." [3]

Last year German government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm made a statement that
didn't receive much coverage in the international news, to wit "For the
foreseeable future ... we remain of the view that a deterring military capacity
includes not only conventional capacity but also nuclear components.

"There is a NATO policy framework for the presence of US nuclear weapons in
Europe. But the security details and the handling of those weapons are a matter
of bilateral arrangements." [4]

For bilateral, one is to understand the United States which placed the nuclear
weapons and Germany which stores them and would deliver them if ordered to by
the US and NATO. Among the American nuclear arms in Europe are 200-350
air-launched B-61 bombs stored in air bases in Germany, Turkey, Belgium, Italy
and the Netherlands. [5]

Last year an internal U.S. Air Force report, The Blue Ribbon Review of Nuclear
Weapons Policies and Procedures, "recommended that American nuclear assets in
Europe be 'consolidated,' which analysts interpret as a recommendation to move
the bombs to NATO bases under 'U.S. wings,' meaning American bases in Europe."

The news source cited above also revealed that "Although technically owned by
the U.S., nuclear bombs stored at NATO bases are designed to be delivered by
planes from the host country." [6] If the deployment of nuclear arms at US and
NATO air bases in Europe wasn't alarming enough, in January of 2006 former
German Defense Minister Rupert Scholz was quoted as stating "Germany needed to
ponder building its own nuclear deterrence system."

In Scholz's own words, "We need a serious discussion over how we can react to a
nuclear threat by a terrorist ***state*** [emphasis added] in an appropriate
manner - and in extreme cases with our own nuclear weapons." [7]

Only hours after assuming the mantle of the French presidency in May of 2007
Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of a "holy" (his precise word) alliance with Germany and
"underscored...France's willingness to use its nuclear weapons to defend Germany
in case of a hostile attack." Sarkozy's Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie
was quoted as saying, "If Germany asked us for help, it is probable that
European solidarity would come into play. For us, nuclear weapons are the
ultimate protection against a threat from abroad." [8]

Later in the year a German news source wrote of a reiteration of the offer and
said that "President Nicolas Sarkozy has asked Germany to open talks about a
possible role the country could play in France's nuclear defence system" and
that "Sarkozy told German leaders that French nuclear weapons were also
protecting neighbouring Germany, which was one reason why they should think
about a closer cooperation in that area." [9]

NATO membership alone allows for - in fact necessitates - this policy but its
public mention at such a high level signifies a qualitatively new emphasis on
the use of nuclear weapons.

Another aspect of Sarkozy's proposed new Holy Alliance was detailed this past
February:

"German troops are to be posted in France for the first time in 60 years, in an
effort to uphold military cooperation between the ex-foes.

"Paris has agreed in principle to a proposal made by Germany earlier this year
to allow a German battalion to be stationed in eastern France." [10]

This February German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of NATO's collective defense
obligation and an account issued by her office summarized her position as
follows: "NATO has proved its worth as a defence alliance, which is why Article
5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (which lays out the right to individual and
collective self-defence) should in the Chancellor's view continue to embody the
substance of NATO. In future its main responsibility should continue to be to
ensure the defence of member states. But today we face new threats and new
conflicts. We must also prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons at all costs."
[11]

A year before five former military chiefs of staff of major NATO states -
General John Shalikashvili (former US chief of staff under Clinton and NATO's
ex-Supreme Allied Commander), General Klaus Naumann (Germany's former top
military commander and ex-Chairman of NATO's Military Committee), Lord Inge
(former British Chief of the General Staff), General Henk van den Breemen
(former Dutch chief of staff) and Admiral Jacques Lanxade (former French chief
of staff) - issued a joint 150-page document which affirmed that the option of a
nuclear first strike is indispensable, "since there is simply no realistic
prospect of a nuclear-free world." [12]

Germany's Naumann was Chairman of the NATO Military Committee during the war
against Yugoslavia in 1999.

On the eve of the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Romania - for which the
document discussed above was largely prepared - a German news source wrote that
"A French officer was quoted as saying that the document showed US determination
to hand NATO the task of fighting terrorism on all five continents" and that
"NATO will discuss the use of so-called mini-nukes behind closed doors at its
Bucharest summit...." [13]

This January a high-level task force appointed by Pentagon chief Robert Gates,
the Secretary of Defense Task Force on Defense Department Nuclear Weapons
Management chaired by former defense secretary James Schlesinger, released a
report advocating that the "United States should keep tactical nuclear bombs in
Europe and even consider modernizing older warheads on cruise missiles...." The
document states "The presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe remains a pillar
of NATO unity." [14]

A Washington Post report on the study mentions that "The Natural Resources
Defense Council, which specializes in nuclear matters, recently reported that
about 400 U.S. B-61 tactical nuclear bombs are stored at bases in several NATO
countries, including Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United Kingdom." [15]

The 1990 Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany (or the 2 + 4
Agreement) with the Federal Republic of Germany, The German Democratic Republic,
the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union in the final months of
its existence expressly prohibited the "manufacture, possession of, and control
over nuclear" weapons.

How faithfully Berlin, Brussels and Washington have abided by that pledge in
both letter and spirit has been seen. US nuclear weapons stored in Germany "can
be mounted on German Tornado fighter planes" because "nuclear bombs stored at
NATO bases are designed to be delivered by planes from the host country" and
"German air force pilots headquartered in Buechel will be ordered to drop
nuclear bombs in case of a military attack or war." And as a former German
defense minister urged "We need a serious discussion over how we can
react...with our own nuclear weapons."


Part 1
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14332
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff/"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/new-nato-germany-returns-to-world\
-military-stage-part-1-by-rick-rozoff/[/URL]

Part 2
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14377
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/from-ww-ii-to-ww-iii-global-nato-\
and-remilitarized-germany-part-ii-by-rick-rozoff/[/URL]

Part 3
Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40717
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14415
[URL="http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/germany-first-new-post-cold-war-world-military-power-part-iii-by-rick-rozoff/"]http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/germany-first-new-post-cold-war-w\
orld-military-power-part-iii-by-rick-rozoff/[/URL]

For all three previous articles combined see:
The Bundeswehr is back to the World Military Stage
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/64608


Note on references: Germany's largest presswire, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, is
only available by subscription and the cost for individuals is prohibitively
expensive. Websites in Iran, Azerbaijan and China are among the best sources for
DPA material in English, so citations are sometimes secondary.


1) Islamic Republic News Agency, September 1, 2007
2) German party marks Hiroshima anniversary, calls for removal of
warheads
Islamic Republic News Agency, August 6, 2007
3) Rainews 24 (Italy), April 10, 2007
4) Agence France-Presse, June 23, 2008
5) Ibid
6) Time Magazine, June 19, 2008
7) Deutsche Press-Agentur, January 26, 2006
8) Islamic Republic News Agency, May 17, 2007
9) Der Spiegel from Agence France-Presse, September 15, 2007
10) Press TV, February 6, 2009
11) Federal Republic of Germany, The Federal Chancellor, February 7, 2009
12) Michel Chossudovsky, The US-NATO Preemptive Nuclear Doctrine:
Trigger A Middle East Nuclear Holocaust to Defend "The Western Way
of Life"
Global Research, February 11, 2008
13) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, April 2, 2008
14) Washington Post, January 9, 2009
15) Ibid

[Magda Hassan]

Germany: World Arms Merchant In First Post-WW II Combat

by Rick Rozoff


. July 25, 2009
Stop NATO
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14527



Earlier this week German soldiers under NATO command shot to death two Afghan civilians and seriously injured two more in the north of the nation.

During the past ten days German troops in NATO's Rapid Reaction Force have been conducting a major combat operation in Afghanistan's Kunduz Province.

300 German soldiers in charge of an estimated 1,200 Afghan government troops launched an offensive with the use of armor and artillery, including Marder infantry tanks and mortars.

A Bundeswehr soldier was quoted as saying that orders were issued to employ "the full reaction force spectrum" and as a result "We are using everything we have." [1]

A German news source revealed that "It is believed to be the first time that the Bundeswehr...has deployed heavy artillery." [2]

Berlin's Defense Ministry additionally acknowledged that the "German air force had also provided close air support for the ground troops for the first time in Afghanistan." [3] And it also divulged that "on July 15 and July 19, for the first time, bombs were dropped in the North by combat aircraft after they had been requested by ground forces." [4]

On July 22 Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr, placed emphasis on the precedents established by the current offensive, describing it as "probably the biggest" operation by German forces in Afghanistan, one which includes "house-by-house searches and looking for the enemy." [5]

As the German news weekly Der Spiegel characterized the development, "For Germans, having their military on the offensive for the first time since World War II involves passing over a major psychological threshold." [6]

Indeed several precedents have been created and several thresholds have been crossed. Not only has Germany now used heavy artillery and warplanes for close air support in combat operations, it has launched a military offensive almost 5,000 kilometers from its borders, the furthest afield that any German army has ever fought.

Moreover, although reunified Germany provided warplanes for NATO's air offensive against Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan is the first time that the armed forces of that nation have conducted - and now commanded - infantry and artillery combat assaults since the defeat of Hitler's Nazi regime in 1945.

The significance of these developments, both in their own right and symbolically, has been completely ignored by the world news media; the quotes used above are with one exception exclusively from German sources.

Never slow to and never scrupulous in using strained comparisons to World War II Germany when it suits their respective governments' purpose at the time, the Western media can be depended upon to pass over the genuine article in favor of false analogies: Any number of "new Hitlers" with black, brown, white and yellow faces have been conjured up during the past fifteen years, but the revival of German militarism and the rehabilitation of Waffen SS soldiers and other Nazi collaborators in several Eastern European nations are either not deemed worthy of attention or excused as a justified response to past or current Russian actions.

The German army is back in action in Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa and its role in past wars is being viewed with an increasingly indulgent eye among the Western nations that along with it compose NATO.

Yet other prohibitions are being rudely violated, again to an oblivious press corps.

This week the mayor of the Romanian city of Constanta was obliging enough to provide an illustrative lesson. Constanta is home to an air base that is one of four new Romanian military sites acquired by the Pentagon and NATO four years ago with three more in neighboring Bulgaria. The US troops stationed at the seven bases are the first foreign military forces in Romania since 1958 and the first in Bulgaria since World War II.

Constanta's mayor, Radu Mazare, wore a Nazi military uniform at a fashion show in the city he governs and when questioned about it responded, "I wanted to dress like a general from the Wehrmacht because I have always liked this uniform, and have admired the strict organization of the German army." [7]

After coming under pressure for his action he claimed "that the uniform had no swastikas, and that it was just the uniform of a German infantry general, which had nothing to do with SS troops." [8]

To extrapolate from his comments, there would have been no fault to find with Hitler's legions in overrunning Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union - leaving tens of millions dead in their wake - if they had first divested themselves of swastika armbands and other party insignia.

It is a lesson that has been learned by the contemporary proponents and practitioners of a Europe united under a common military structure deploying expeditionary forces for wars, occupations and blockades around the world. Collectively, NATO.

Bombers sent to wreak death and destruction the length and breadth of Yugoslavia were named angels of mercy. Multinational military occupation forces firing artillery barrages and dropping 1,000-pound bombs in Afghanistan are an international security assistance force engaged in peacekeeping and provincial reconstruction.

What could be more simple? No swastikas, no war crimes.

In 2006 the German Defense Ministry released a White Paper calling for a transformation of its nation's army into one prepared for international intervention; not ad hoc, as needed or occasionally, but on a permanent basis.

The nation's defense chief, Franz-Josef Jung, in commenting on the White Paper, "which highlighted the transformation of the Bundeswehr into an international intervention force," [9] demanded that "the government needs the ability to use the Bundeswehr inside of Germany...." [10]

More thresholds were crossed and more decades-long proscriptions transgressed.

Two years ago this December German Chancellor Angela Merkel "said that Germany's growth and prosperity depended on its readiness to be engaged
internationally, in cooperation with the EU and NATO, and in the face of challenges such as Kosovo and Iran" and wrote in the Handelsblatt daily that "The classical division between inner and foreign policy is outdated," [11] thereby echoing her defense minister's comments of a year before in both vital regards.

The following May a spokesman for Merkel said that the chancellor endorsed a security paper written by her party, the Christian Democratic Union, which in the words of its author, Bundestag deputy Andreas Schockenhoff, "says it is time that Germany moved on from its postwar inhibitions about force." [12]

A news account at the time wrote that the objective of Merkel and her party was "to drop some of [Germany's] post-World War II inhibitions about robust security measures, including the use of military force abroad and at home."

Among measures advocated in the above-mentioned paper and supported by the chancellor are that "Germany's parliament should cede greater discretion over troop deployments to the executive branch" and that "a new 'national security council,' based in the chancellor's office, should coordinate security ministries." [13]

An important component of endowing Germany with a new international military role made possible by reunification and promoted by NATO is its expansion into the global arms market. Arms manufacturers have no less influence in Berlin than they do in other "free market economies," but the profit motive alone doesn't account for the unparalleled growth of German weapons exports around the world.

Providing arms and capturing the arms market in other countries ensures weapons interoperability and entails training and exercises for future joint actions against third parties. Instruction and drills include mock combat against the planes, ships, submarines, air defenses, ground forces and surveillance systems of potential and prospective adversaries.

The sort of arms Germany is selling in most every part of the world - tanks, submarines, warplanes - aren't used for escort or peacekeeping missions.

Anyone not watching the developments of the past fifteen years may have been shocked to learn this past month in the annual report issued by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) that while global military spending reached $1.5 trillion in 2008, with the US accounting for almost half of the total, Germany had superseded Britain and France and become the world's third largest weapons exporter.

German arms shipments abroad rose by 20% between 2005 and 2006 and increased by 70% in a five year period. In 2007 Berlin delivered weapons to 126 nations, almost two-thirds of those in the world. The main purchasers were Greece, Turkey and South Africa and the main export items were Leopard II tanks and 124 submarines. Small arms are not Germany's main commodity for export.

In the words of a German think tank expert, "That makes Germany the European Union's biggest military goods exporter, and worldwide it's behind only the US and Russia." [14]

Just as the bulk of Germany's military exports are advanced weapons designed for war, so its clients include several nations currently and recently involved in armed conflicts and that may soon be engaged in others, some of a catastrophic nature.

In 2005 Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, "as something as a good-bye gift," sold Israel two more Dolphin-class submarines, reported to be capable of accommodating missiles with nuclear warheads, at a nominal price. "Outgoing Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a member of the once-pacifist Green Party, agreed to the sale." [15]

This followed the delivery of three Dolphins to Tel Aviv in the 1990s - "the most expensive weapon platforms in Israel’s arsenal" [16] - by the Helmut Kohl government when "Germany had built two of these in accordance with Israel’s demands and donated them free of charge."

Regarding the first installment, "Israel might have given the other three Dolphins it already has nuclear capability, or has increased the range of the nuclear warheads or is planning to increase the range in the new ones." [17]

In reference to the newer acquisitions, "The latest submarines...would be able to carry out a first strike" and "military experts say Israel is sending a clear message to Iran...." [18]

Earlier this month Israel sent one of its Dolphin submarines through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean Sea for the first time in what the Reuters news agency referred to as "signal to Iran."

In late 2005 it was reported that Germany would add to its Luftwaffe-Israel Air Force and naval, including submarine, collaboration with Israel by forging ties between the two nations' armies.

The head of the European Branch of the Israeli military’s Foreign Relations Branch Yigal Hakon was quoted as saying, “After 40 years of unique and very special relations between our two countries, we’ve been able to develop military-to-military cooperation in almost every area.

"Now it’s time to encourage development of operational cooperation among the ground forces.” [19]

Last December Germany, in supplementing almost half a billion dollars in US military aid aimed at gaining control over the Lebanese armed forces after the war with Israel in 2006, announced that it "had decided to provide Lebanon with 50 Leopard tanks in addition to other equipment to enhance the army's monitoring capabilities of Lebanon's borders with Syria." [20] German tanks on the Syrian border complement German warships and troops off Lebanon's coast, also avowedly targeting Syria.

In 2005 Germany signed an agreement with Greece for the purchase of 333 Leopard tanks. Greece has intermittent tense relations with Turkey which in recent years have entailed confrontations between the two countries' air forces over the Aegean Sea.

Three months later Berlin reached an arrangement with Greece's rival Turkey to sell it 298 Leopard 2A4 tanks. The Schroeder-Fischer government had made a display of not selling offensive arms to nations engaged in internal conflicts, but had no scruples in selling tanks for use against the Kurdish Workers Party inside Turkey and later in Iraq.

In 2007 Germany offered to lease Marder tanks - currently used by Germany itself in Afghanistan - to Greece, permitting the country's army to "acquire immediately a considerable number of fully operational and combat-condition [armored infantry fighting vehicles], which can be used without any political, operational, functional and legal restrictions, either within, or outside the Greek territory...." [21]

In the same year Poland revealed plans to ship 10 Leopard tanks to Afghanistan. Canada simultaneously announced plans to lease 20 Leopard tanks - "probably the most modern battle tank today in the world" [22] - from Germany and purchase 100 from the Netherlands for use in Afghanistan. "[D]efence chiefs in other countries will have noted the latest demonstration of the weapon's potency." [23]

In 2005 Germany offered to sell submarines to Indonesia, with a Jakarta official stating "Germany offers us a program to acquire submarines to
strengthen our military equipment." [24]

Two years ago German Defense Minister Jung visited Japan and met with his opposite number, Japanese Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma. At the time it was reported that "Germany has reason to believe it is about to finalize a billion-dollar deal with Japan on military equipment" and that "Japanese military officials will visit Germany and examine Bundeswehr military equipment, such as the Eurofighter jet, choppers and submarines." [25]

As an aside, Japan announced this week that it may send ground troops to Afghanistan for the first time. If so, troops from the former Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis will be serving in the same theater of war for the first time also.

On his way to Japan Jung stopped in South Korea where he discussed "the
proposed sale of second-hand Patriot missiles and other military issues, officials said.

"Germany is a main source of South Korea’s submarine imports. Eurocopter, a Franco-German firm, is South Korea’s partner for the development of advanced military transport helicopters." [26]

In 2006-2007 Germany also solidified military ties with Singapore, which now has a small contingent of troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan. Three years ago Germany signed an agreement with the nation to provide 66 refurbished Leopard 2A4 tanks, which "represents a significant enhancement in the army’s capability” and offered 30 tanks into the bargain. "Training on the Leopard tanks will be provided by the German Army,” it was announced. [27]

By the following year Singapore had bought 110 Leopard 2A4 combat tanks and its Defense Minister Teo Chee Hean met with Germany's Jung at an "army tank unit training complex" near Munster where "Troops from the Singapore defence forces began training...." [28]

In 2007 Germany began talks with Pakistan to sell it three submarines, augmenting what had already been deepening military cooperation. A Pakistani news report provided this background information:

"Pakistan and Germany have deepened military and security ties over the past years.

"There are regular political-military talks with Pakistan army officials on security and military issues which include counter-terrorism and the training of Pakistani officers in Germany.

"Pakistani officers have received military training and education in Germany in recent years as part of military education and training programs."

Germany also trains military personnel from Pakistan's neighbor Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Azerbaijan and other nations either currently in a state of war, having recently concluded one or threatening the same. It provides arms to Azerbaijan and Georgia through NATO arrangements and bilaterally.

The following year Berlin completed the billion dollar sale of three 214 submarines, ones possessing "extraordinarily developed stealth characteristics and an impressive weapon and sensor payload" [29], to Islamabad.

With political and security dynamics in South America not being to the US's - and the West's - liking in recent years, efforts are underway to secure new military allies and client states to add to mainstay Colombia in offsetting the influence of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina.

A 2005 news story called "Chilean Armaments Policy Worries Neighboring Countries" reported that Germany was planning to deliver the first of 100 Leopard 2 tanks to Chile to add to its arsenal of "over 200 Leopard 1
state-of-the-art tanks from Germany, as well as 60 AMX-30 Tanks from France, and 150 M-41 from the United States." [30] A joint agreement planned to further increase the number of Leopard 2 tanks to 200.

The feature added, "Leopard 2 is one of the most up-to-date battle
tanks in the world. These tanks are similar to the M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank, which has figured in the Iraq War. Foreign analysts have said that Chile is seeking hegemonic military power in Latin America vis-a-vis Peru, Argentina and Bolivia....and, in case of armed conflict, to expand its territory in the way it has done in the past." [31]

By last year German Bundeswehr tank trainers were in the country.

This February, almost a year after Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence, Germany was the first nation to offer military equipment - 204 military vehicles - to the illegal entity.

Germany is among the largest weapons providers to South Africa, another nation that could play the role of a regional and continental policeman, and in 2006 staged joint naval war games there according to a scenario designed to "defend Berlin."
....
In the months proceeding the US and British invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 the German Social Democratic-Green coalition government was portrayed in the Western media as opposing the war, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and at the time and since Germany is routinely referred to as anti-war and even pacifist.

It's true that Germany didn't provide troops for the invasion and occupation, but hardly because of its opposition to war in principle. The government at the time, that of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in the preceding four years authorized their nation's participation in the first two wars waged by NATO - against Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan from 2001 onward - thereby involving Germany in its first wars since the end of World War II.

Berlin also voted with its allies in NATO's Military Command in February of 2003 to send AWACS and Patriot missiles to Turkey under NATO's Article 5 mutual military assistance clause. The action reprised that of Washington in sending Patriots to Israel on the eve of the first war against Iraq, Operation Desert Storm, in 1991.

German troops weren't dispatched to Iraq in large part because of popular opposition to the move, but primarily because with some 10,000 soldiers already stationed in war and post-war zones in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Africa the Bundeswehr's pool of available forces for foreign deployment had been depleted.

With the current government's announcement three years ago that the entire army is to be transformed into "an international intervention force," Berlin may never encounter the need to limit its overseas deployment again.


Part 1
New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40658
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14332

Part 2
From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40691
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14377

Part 3
Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40717
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14415

Part 4
Germany And NATO's Nuclear Nexus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/40763
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14437


1) Deutsche Welle, July 22, 2009
2) Ibid
3) Xinhua News Agency, July 23, 2009
4) Defense Professionals, July 23, 2009
5) Der Spiegel, July 23, 2009
6) Ibid
7) Sofia News Agency, July 20, 2009
8) Ibid
9) Deutsche Welle, October 25, 2006
10) Ibid
11) Deutsche Welle. December 28, 2007
12) Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2008
13) Ibid
14) Der Spiegel, May 19, 2009
15) Deutsche Welle, November 21, 2005
16) Agence France-Presse, August 23, 2006
17) Zaman, November 25, 2005
18) Associated Press, August 24, 2006
19) Defense News (US), November 15, 2005
20) Ya Libnan, December 23, 2008
21) Defense News, November 19, 2007
22) CanWest News Service, December 2, 2007
23) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 1, 2008
24) Xinhua News Agency, April 5, 2005
25) United Press International, April 23, 2007
26) Agence France-Presse, April 20, 2007
27) Agence France-Presse, December 11, 2006
28) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 27, 2007
29) Bloomberg News, June 18, 2009
30) OhmyNews International, January 1, 2005
31) Ibid

[Peter Presland]

Magda

I find Rick Rozoff to be one of the best contemporary writers on the military aspects of the Anglo American Imperial project, specifically NATO expansion and the motives and subterfuges governing it.

His recent article: "Afghanistan: Training Ground for War on Russia - NATO Trains Finland, Sweden For Conflict With Russia" was also a real eye-opener.

There's no doubt in my mind that, one way or another, the Western Establishment are absolutely determined to secure capitulation to their overall NWO vision by Russia. It seems to me that they have been absolutely unwavering in that objective for many years now. With Russian demographics the way they are, it wouldn't surprise me if Medvedev didn't occasionally contemplate capitulation too (suitably lauded as a wonderfully far-sighted historic accomodation of course). Stratfor's George Freidman (who, as an obvious mouthpiece of NWO aspirations, I treat with great caution) had an interesting piece on the demographics bit of that thesis this week. On a 20-40 year view, the Russian situation does appear to be pretty precarious (Unfortunately).

German military resurgence is all of a piece with this of course, as is that of Japan, with similar delicate PR issues to be managed. Military interoperability with NATO plus vastly increased 'boots-on-the-ground' and additional thousands of miles of land/sea borders with Russia controlled by NATO are the things being relentlessly pursued - all under the PR mantle of 'defence' - probably the biggest Orwellian inversion of language in history.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Balkanization is a geopolitical term used to describe the "process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other".

It has its origins in the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during and after WW1.

It's abundantly clear now that a deliberate and repeated Balkanization was played out in the Balkans themselves in the 1990s, with the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of small, directly controllable, client states such as Kosovo and Slovenia, and a large regional bully in Croatia.

It's also clear that the US, Germany and Britain played a deep black game in provoking ethnic tensions through the creation of false flag atrocities, which were fundamentally intended to demonize the Serbs.

Eduardo Rozsa Flores - the wannabe assassin of President Evo Morales - specialized in committing dirty trick atrocities which could be blamed on the Serbs. See here:
http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=1304

Meanwhile, as the articles above reveal:

"In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher [to become foreign
minister later in the same year, 1998] pressed for disavowal of 'pacifism' in
order to 'combat Auschwitz,' thereby equating Serbs with Nazis. In a heady mood
of self-righteous indignation, German politicians across the board joined in
using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for restraint, as had been the logic
up until reunification, but on the contrary, for 'bearing their share of the
military burden'.

"In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban
on military operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again
be a 'normal' military powerthanks to the 'Serb threat.'

"On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass transfer
of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the Germans, this can
be seen as a comforting psychological projection which served to give Germans a
fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of the new 'criminal' people,
the Serbs, But the hate campaign against Serbs, started in Germany, did not stop
there.

"If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down,
now Germany can unite and send military forces back into Yugoslavia and what
is more in order to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to
those it imposed when it occupied the country in 1941 well, quite a number
of people might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and
many of the very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to
what amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since World
War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse." [6]

Entirely correct. One-time leftist revolutionary Joschka Fisher's implied comparison of the Serbs with the Nazis to justify the remilitarization of Germany to combat some mythical "new Auschwitz" was a complete disgrace. Fisher has my complete and utter contempt.

The fact that real history is never taught meant that 1990s Germany could re-Balkanize the Balkans, through funding and supporting, both militarily and spookily, its former Nazi quislings - such as Croatia, Slovenia, Albania and Bosnia - and simultaneously claim the moral high ground.

The NATO bombing of women and children meant we were truly through the looking glass.

Gehlen Org and the transnational nature of key financial and industrial elite structures have ensured that the Nazi International is alive and well.

[Peter Presland]

Post #7

Good stuff Jan. Thanks for that.

[Magda Hassan]

Italy, Germany and Japan: Former World War II Axis Nations Repudiate Bans against "Preparing for War"

By Rick Rozoff

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14754

Global Research, August 13, 2009
Stop NATO

A press report on August 10 revealed that the government of Italy is planning to modify if not dispense with its post-World War II constitutional limitations on conducting offensive military operations; that is, to reverse a 61-year ban on waging war.

The news story, reminding readers that "Italy's post-World War II constitution places stringent limits on the country's military engagements," stated the Italian government intends to introduce a new military code "specifically for missions abroad," one that - in a demonstration of evasiveness and verbal legerdemain alike - would be "neither of peace nor of war." [1]

On August 10 and 11, respectively, the nation's Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini were interviewed in the daily Corriere della Sera in in tandem they bemoaned what they described as undue restrictions on the Italian armed forces in performing their combat roles in NATO's war in Afghanistan.

Commenting on La Russa's and Frattini's assertions, another news account summarized them as follows:

"Italy's 2,800 soldiers operate under a military peace code, which largely restricts them to shooting back if they are attacked. Changes could give the troops heavier equipment and allow them to go on the offensive."

Frattini is quoted as saying, "We need a code for the missions that aim to bring peace, which cannot be achieved only through actions for civilians but also through real military actions." [2]

The tortuous illogicality of that claim is an attempt to circumvent both the letter and the spirit of Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution which reads in part that "Italy repudiates war as an instrument offending the liberty of the peoples and as a means for settling international disputes."

The rest of the Article includes, and in doing so anticipates the nation's inclusion in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization the following year, "it agrees to limitations of sovereignty...."

Article 11 is emblematic of similar ones in the post-World War II constitutions adopted by, or rather imposed on, those powers responsible for unleashing history's deadliest war in Europe and Asia: The members of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis or Tripartite Pact.

The 1949 Constitution of the Federal Republic, amended and extended to all of the country after unification in 1990, contains a Ban on preparing a war of aggression, Article 26, which reads: Activities tending and undertaken with the intent to disturb peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for aggressive war, are unconstitutional. They shall be made a punishable offense.

The 1947 U.S.-authored Japanese constitution contains an equivalent, Article 9, which states:

"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

"In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."

U.S. military, especially air, bases in Germany, Italy and Japan have been used in every major military campaign waged by the Pentagon from the Korean War to the current one in Afghanistan for basing bombers and for the transit of troops, weapons and equipment.

So despite constitutional requirements to repudiate and renounce and bans against preparing for war, the three former Axis nations have indeed been partners to a series of armed conflicts for sixty years.

But for most of that period, indeed for almost a half century, the nations' legal prohibitions against direct military aggression have been observed even in the breach. Italy was a founding member of NATO in 1949, though unlike most others didn't send troops for the Korean War. Along with the United States, Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg did.

Greece and Turkey deployed contingents as a precondition for NATO membership, which they received in 1952, but West Germany, which joined in 1955, didn't.

Although Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Thailand supplied troops, Japan didn't.

The war proscriptions were abandoned by two of the three nations, Germany and Italy, in NATO's war against Yugoslavia in early 1999. Both countries supplied military aircraft for the 78-day air war and the U.S. and NATO air base at Aviano served as the main hub for daily bombing runs against military targets, non-military infrastructure and civilians. U.S., British, Canadian, Spanish, Portuguese and other warplanes operated out of the base.

The semantic acrobatics of the current Italian Foreign Minister Frattini in attempting to deny that war is war have already been examined, and comparable statements by German and Italian cabinet ministers and parliamentarians in 1999 were no less convoluted and transparently false. Germany and Italy had gone to war against a nation (with no troops outside its own borders) for the first time since the days of Hitler and Mussolini and, moreover, against a nation that the two fascist leaders had attacked 59 years earlier.

The post-World War II, post-Nuremberg restriction against military aggression by the defeated Axis powers was violated and for the past decade Germany, Italy and Japan have continued asserting themselves as military powers on a regional and international scale, culminating in the three nations participating in various degrees in the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan currently.

Germany now has the maximum amount of troops parliamentary limitations - at least for the time being - allow: 4,500 and another 300 manning NATO AWACS recently deployed for the escalation of the war. It has the fourth largest contingent in Afghanistan after the U.S., Britain and Canada.

Italy has the sixth largest amount of troops, 3,250, in command of Western Afghanistan near the Iranian border, and just as the 1999 war against Yugoslavia was the first air war either nation had engaged in since World War II, so Afghanistan is the first ground war.

Germany has lost 38 soldiers so far and Italy 15.

A poll conducted by a major Italian daily in late July showed that 56% of Italians want a withdrawal of their nation's troops from the Afghan war theater, but Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Foreign Minister Frattini and Defense Minister La Russa insist they will stay and have recently added 500 more troops and committed to deploying more Predator drones, Tornado warplanes and military helicopters.

Late last month defense chief La Russa said, "It is possible we will also increase the number of helicopters to have better aerial coverage, as well as deploying our Tornadoes offensively." [3]

At the same time Foreign Minister Frattini spoke in a similar vein: "We will increase the use of Predator (unmanned surveillance aircraft) and Tornado (fighters), not just for reconnaissance but for real coverage (of
troops)."

An Italian news account at the time added, "He also said Italy would reinforce the armour of its Lince troop carriers and send new generation armoured vehicles." [4]

Five previous articles in this series have documented Germany's rise as a post-Cold War global military power [5,6,7,8,9], including the ongoing transformation of the Bundeswehr into an "international intervention force," [10] and the Merkel administration's policy "to drop some of [Germany's] post-World War II inhibitions about robust security measures, including the use of military force abroad and at home" [11] and a 2006 German Defense Ministry White Paper demanding that the army "be thoroughly restructured into an intervention force" [12], with one of its authors stating "it is time that Germany moved on from its postwar inhibitions about force." [13]

On August 8, weeks after "German troops embarked on their largest military offensive since World War II in Kunduz," it was reported that "German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said in a newspaper interview...that the country's armed forces could be in Afghanistan for up to 10 more years." [14]

That the German government is openly advocating the use of its army at home as well as abroad, and did just that by deploying Bundeswehr forces in Kehl this April against anti-NATO protesters during the 60th anniversary Alliance summit, was dangerous ground first trod by the Berlusconi government in Italy a year ago when 3,000 troops were deployed in Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin against immigrants and Roma (gypsy) communities as well as - allegedly at least - crime syndicates.

The use of the military for domestic purposes is a disturbingly reminiscent of practices not seen in Italy and Germany since the era of Mussolini and Hitler.

Two months afterwards it was reported in an article called "NATO pours rent money into Mafia coffers" that in Naples, where NATO's Allied Joint Force Command Naples was established in 2004, "government funding earmarked to support NATO end[ed] up in the pockets of Italy's most violent criminal organisation." [15]

Another news story last November recounted this:

"The head of Naples’ anti-mafia task force, Franco Roberti, censured NATO and U.S. officials for knowingly leasing houses to suspected mob bosses in a story published in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Rent paid by Americans and NATO personnel garner landlords between 1,500 and 3,000 euros a month — fees that can be two or three times above the market value." [16]

Italian troops were back on the streets of the nation's cities and the Casalese camorra was not only unmolested but enriched.

Last year Berlusconi also confirmed that the plans reached during his previous tenure as prime minister to expand the U.S. Camp Ederle at Vicenza with the nearby Dal Molin airport into "the biggest American military base outside the US" [17] would continue apace. Camp Ederle already hosts 6,000 U.S. troops and will soon house all six battalions of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, some currently in Germany. The 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years.

Late last July U.S. troops from the Vicenza-based Southern European Task Force (Airborne) contributed to a force of 1,000 soldiers deployed to Georgia for the NATO Immediate Response 2008 exercises - the largest number of American troops deployed to the Caucasus nation at one time - to train the armed forces of their host nation for a war with Russia that would ensue within days.

"U.S. personnel responsible for training members of the Georgian military remain stationed inside the volatile country, where fighting erupted Friday [August 8] between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

"The U.S. European Command said on Monday that there were no plans at this time to withdraw the U.S. military trainers from the country." [18]

In January of 2008 the Italian government announced that it was building a highway to connect Vicenza with the Aviano air base. "Airborne soldiers based at Caserma Ederle in Vicenza use Aviano for training and for hooking up with planes for long deployments: The 173rd Airborne Brigade’s last three deployments downrange have all involved launches from Aviano." [19]

Decades-long interpretations of the Japanese Constitution's Article 9 against remilitarization have agreed that the nation could not rearm for military actions abroad and could not engage in what is euphemistically called collective self-defense. The first is a self-evident prohibition against deploying troops, warships and warplanes outside of Japanese territory and waters to participate in armed hostilities.

The second is a ban on entering into bilateral and multilateral military treaties and alliances that obligate Japan to aid other nations engaged in war and join programs like the U.S.-led global missile shield project.

Over the past eight years successive Japanese governments have violated both components of the constitutional ban on stationing troops in conflict zones and on entering into joint defense arrangements which are in truth only partially defensive in nature.

Tokyo first tested the waters on stationing troops abroad when it deployed 600 soldiers to East Timor in 2002 to join those from Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Fiji, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand and the United States.

The following December the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi authorized 600 soldiers and hundreds of more support personnel to be sent to Iraq nine months after the invasion of the country by the U.S. and Britain.

The Iraqi deployment marked the first time that Japanese military forces were sent to an active war zone since World War II.

Much as with Italian and German leaders who cannot pronounce the word war even while prosecuting one, Tokyo called its deployment force the Japanese Iraq Reconstruction and Support Group. The name aside, Japaneses troops were stationed in support of allies who had invaded Iraq in violation of international law and without United Nations sanction and were at the time conducting large-scale combat operations. The nation's soldiers remained there until 2006 when the focus of the U.S. and its NATO allies started shifting back to Afghanistan.

In 2006 Japan compensated for its troop withdrawal by providing the occupation forces airlift operations in Iraq, then ended that mission last December when the Afghan War emerged as the uncontested priority of its Western military allies.

Japan has supported the latter war from its inception and "Despite its pacifist constitution, Japan has participated in an Indian Ocean naval mission since 2001 that provides fuel and other logistical support to the US-led coalition fighting in Afghanistan." [20] It provided the majority of fuel to U.S. and NATO warships in the Indian Ocean, including those firing Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan. Japan briefly withdrew its naval forces at the end of 2007, but redeployed them a year later where they remain in support of the world's major war.

What is remarkably still referred to as pacifist Japan, then, has actively supported the West's last two wars.

In an interview last month with the U.S. Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes Japanese Democratic Party Diet member Keiichiro Asao, touted to become the nation's next defense minister should his party, substantially ahead in current national polls, win the next election, spoke of the Afghan War and said "If peace talks proved successful in part of Afghanistan, even if other areas were still combat zones, 'then we might send ground troops to that area to help build back civil society.'" [21]

Troops on the ground in the world's preeminent theater of war would strip away the remaining vestiges of Japan's post-World War II demilitarization and the nation would fully join the ranks of Germany and Italy as war belligerents.

And just that has been planned for years, as in January of 2007 the Japan Defense Agency was transformed into the Ministry of Defense, a ministry that hadn't existed since the nation's defeat in World War II.

In the same month it was reported that then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma were "considering authorizing [Japan's] troops to launch pre-emptive strikes during international peacekeeping operations" and planned "to study ways to ease the constitutional ban on Japan to use force to defend its allies in so-called 'acts of collective self-defense.'

"The government plans to achieve the goal by changing the interpretation of the constitution," stated the Yomiuri daily newspaper. [22]

Three months later a report titled "Japan To Consider Fighting for Allies Under Attack" detailed that "Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is leaning toward allowing Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense in four cases," which include "the use of Japan’s missile defense system against a ballistic missile attack on an allied country, such as the U.S.," the Kyodo News Agency revealed. [23]

The other three instances in which Tokyo would be prepared to violate the constitutional ban against so-called collective defense are cases of "a counterattack when a warship sailing along with a Japanese vessel comes under attack, or when a military unit in a multinational forces is attacked, and in some situations when Japan is working as part of a UN peacekeeping operation." [24]

It's worth recalling that Prime Minister Abe continued the tradition of his predecessor Koizumi in paying annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine where Japanese war dead including 14 convicted World War II era war criminals are buried.

"'It's not appropriate for the government to specifically draw a conclusion' on the war responsibility of the war criminals," Abe told the Japanese Diet on October 3, 2006. [25]

The visits by Japanese prime ministers to the shrine from 2001-2006 outraged China, the two Koreas, Thailand, the Philippines and other nations that had already "specifically draw[n] a conclusion" about the war crimes perpetrated against their countries and peoples and the rehabilitation of the guilty parties in a bid to revive Japanese militarism.

The most dangerous application of Japanese plans for preemptive military attacks and the first of the four scenarios laid out by the government in 2007 to justify joint military action is that pertaining to so-called missile defense, which in fact is incorporating Japan into a US-led global interceptor missile grid which includes land, air and sea components and which will be integrated with the deployment of surveillance satellites and missiles in space.

On August 11 the commander of the Russian Air Force, Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin, warned that "By 2030...foreign countries, particularly the United States, will be able to deliver coordinated high-precision strikes from air and space against any target on the whole territory of Russia." [26]

The following day Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi addressed the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and warned against an "arms race in outer space," stating that "Outer space is now facing the looming danger of weaponization" and "Countries should neither develop missile defense systems that undermine global strategic stability nor deploy weapons in outer space." [27]

In 2005 the U.S. and Japan agreed to establish a missile defense facility at the American Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo. A local news sources, Kyodo, said of the project that "Japan's success will have an impact on the nuclear potential of China and Russia in East Asia. There is no doubt that the two countries will step up their efforts to develop missiles with a higher performance." [28]

In May of 2007 Pentagon chief Robert Gates "urged Japan to declare the right to collective defense so its missile defense shield can be used to intercept North Korean ballistic missiles targeted at the United States...." [29]

North Korea is the pretext employed to expand the global missile shield system with its threat of nuclear blackmail and threat of a first strike against Russia and China to the East. However, as reported of the Gates' initiative at the time, "The U.S. demand on collective defense reflects its strategy to boost its deterrence toward China and also carries Washington's hope that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will partially allow the use of such a right by revising the Constitution." [30]

In the same month, May of 2007, it was revealed that "Japan's defense ministry has been providing U.S. forces with intelligence gathered by its Air Self-Defense Force's early warning radar network since late April" and that "The ministry began permanent linking of the ASDF's intelligence gathering network with the headquarters of the U.S. 5th Air Force at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo before the two countries agreed to boost information-sharing for missile defense at a top security meeting in Washington on May 1...." [31]

Two years ago the ruling Liberal Party completed post-Cold War plans to reverse the situation where "Japan's pacifist Constitution bans warfare and overseas military action. The Japanese government's current interpretation is that the Constitution prohibits Japan from exercising the right to defend an ally under attack" [32]. That is, Article 9 will be either eviscerated of any real force or scrapped altogether.

As Japan intensifies its demand that Russia's Kuril Islands be ceded to it in a resurgence of post-World War II revanchism, Tokyo has joined its former allies in Berlin and Rome in casting off constraints placed on the use of its military abroad, including in "preemptive" actions, imposed on it after World War II.

With the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe a generation ago and with NATO moving it to take over former Warsaw Pact territory, many demons that had lain dormant for decades have been awakened from their slumber, including unabashed militarism, irredentist and other demands to redraw borders, and World World II revisionism and revanchism. And Fascism.

In February of 2007 the Bucharest Court of Appeal in Romania, which joined the German-Italian-Japanese Axis during World War II, ruled that the participation of 800,000 Romanian troops in Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was a "war for the liberation of Bessarabia and Bucovina" (modern day Moldova). [33]

In late July of this year the mayor of the Romanian city of Constanta, Radu Mazare, wore a Nazi military uniform at a fashion show in the city and said "I wanted to dress like a general from the Wehrmacht because I have always liked this uniform, and have admired the strict organization of the German army." [34]

Two years earlier Rein Lang, the Justice Minister of Estonia, a member in good standing of NATO and the European Union, celebrated his fiftieth birthday in pub in a "Hitler night" celebration which included a one-man play called Adolf in which the lone actor recited "Hitler’s monologue before [his] suicide with a swastika in the background. In this monologue the Fuhrer called on his allies to 'further promote ideas of the Third Reich.'" [35]

This July 26 veterans of the Estonian SS 20th Division celebrated a 1944 battle with the Soviet army in the latest of a series of annual commemorations of the Nazi past. The events included a march and "Supporters of fascism from the Baltic states, Holland, Norway, Denmark and even from Georgia took part in the parade." [36]

As a Russian commentator said of trends in the country, "People who make no attempt to conceal their appreciation of Nazism and Nazi ideology are running Estonia." [37]

Three months before 300 Latvians marched in the annual Legionnaires Day parade which honors the nation's Waffen SS veterans who "took part in punitive operations and mass killings of Jews, Belorussians and Latvians." [38] Latvia is also a member of NATO and the EU. The yearly marches are staged in the capital of Riga and although not endorsed by the government the latter provides police protection to the Nazi sympathizers and has arrested anti-fascist protesters in the past.

The prototype for this fascist resurgence was Croatia in 1991 with the rehabilitation and glorification of the Nazi-allied Ustashe and the new brown plague has even spread to Ukraine, where last year President Victor Yushchenko, product of the 2004 "Orange Revolution" and a U.S. client whose poll ratings recently have sunk to under 1%, "conferred posthumously the title of Hero of Ukraine on Roman Shukhevich, one of the chieftains of Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought along with the Third Reich, and has signed a decree on celebrating the day of the Insurgent Army's formation." [39]

In his waning days Yushchenko is intensifying efforts to drag his nation into NATO despite overwhelming popular opposition and has officiated over developments like the erection of statues in honor of Stepan Bandera, leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

With the return of Germany, Italy and Japan to waging and supporting wars and the revival of Nazi sentiments in Europe a student of the future could be forgiven for thinking that the Axis powers were the victors and not the losers of World War II and that the Nuremberg trials had never occurred.


1) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 10, 2009
2) Associated Press, August 11, 2009
3) Defense News, July 22, 2009
4) Reuters, July 26, 2009
5) New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14332
6) From WW II To WW III: Global NATO And Remilitarized Germany
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14377
7) Germany: First New Post-Cold War World Military Power
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14415
[Correction: 1999 marked NATO's fiftieth anniversary summit]
8) Germany And NATO's Nuclear Nexus
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14437
9) Germany: World Arms Merchant In First Post-WW II Combat
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14527
10) Der Spiegel, August 10, 2009
11) Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2008
12) Newsweek, November 13, 2006
13) Ibid
14) Deutsche Presse-Agentur, August 8, 2009
15) Sydney Morning Herald, November 6, 2008
16) Stars and Stripes, November 27, 2008
17) ANSA (Italy), September 22, 2006
18) Stars and Stripes, August 12, 2008
19) Stars and Stripes, January 2, 2008
20) Agence France-Presse, August 10, 2009
21) Stars and Stripes, July 21, 2009
22) Associated Press, January 14, 2007
23) Agence France-Presse, April 7, 2007
24) Ibid
25) Japan Times, December 28, 2006
26) Russian Information Agency Novosti, August 11, 2009
27) Associated Press, August 12, 2009
28) Kyodo News, December 21, 2007
29) Kyodo News, May 17, 2007
30) Ibid
31) Xinhua News Agency, May 13, 2007
32) Xinhua News Agency, June 30, 2007
33) InfoTag (Moldova), February 21, 2007
34) Sofia News Agency, July 20, 2009
35) Voice of Russia, July 6, 2007
36) Voice of Russia, July 27, 2009
37) Voice of Russia, July 6, 2007
38) Voice of Russia, March 13, 2009
39) Voice of Russia, October 25, 2008

[Magda Hassan]

CIA secret prisons organized from Germany

by Jan Peters


. Global Research, September 2, 2009
World Socialist Web Site - 2009-09-01

A report in the New York Times on August 13 confirms that the CIA planned and organized secret prisons from the German city of Frankfurt/Main. At least three secret prisons were administered by the CIA branch office in Frankfurt beginning in 2003.
These illegal prisons belonged to the worldwide network of "black sites" to which the CIA transferred many of its prisoners in its "war against terror." There were at least eight such secret prisons maintained by the CIA outside the US. The prisons run from Frankfurt included two that were located respectively in the Romanian capital of Bucharest and a remote part of Morocco. A third is alleged to have been in the Polish town of Kiejkuty, near the Szymany airport. A fourth prison was located in Lithuania.
The secret prisons were used to extort information from prisoners using methods of torture that would not have been possible in the US. The director of the Frankfurt CIA branch office at that time, Kyle D. Foggo, told the Times that these measures were organized from Frankfurt because "it was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters."
In September 2006, then US president George W. Bush admitted the existence of secret prisons for the first time. These torture prisons were used to systematically subject those deemed to be terrorist suspects to sleep deprivation, waterboarding and beatings in order to obtain information or extort confessions. The CIA arrested "potential mass murderers" on the "battlegrounds of the world" and imprisoned them in secret locations where the suspects were subjected to "hard, necessary and effective methods of interrogation," as Bush claimed.
The secret prisons had to be set up outside of the US, because they contravened existing US law. The fact that the methods of torture employed by the CIA also violated international law was obviously a matter of indifference for the US government as well as for the German and European authorities.
Each of these prisons was designed to accommodate six prisoners and was constructed in identical fashion in order to confuse prisoners as to their exact location. The prisons were completely isolated and designed in such a way as to prevent life threatening injuries during interrogations. The floors were covered in skid-proof material, with plywood walls to cushion the impact when prisoners collided with the walls.
According to the New York Times, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the "sleepy supply center" of the CIA in Frankfurt moved into action. The budget of this branch office was awarded an extra seven million dollars by the Bush government. At a later point this expanded budget was then trebled.
Frankfurt became the most important supply base of the US secret service in Europe. In addition, the city developed into an important logistics base for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, organizing supply flights for CIA deployments on virtually a daily basis.
Foggo, who was director of the Frankfurt CIA branch office, was well known for his organizational expertise. He worked for the CIA for over 20 years before pleading guilty to corruption charges in 2008 and receiving a sentence of three years in prison. Previously, in late 2004, he was appointed third-highest official of the CIA, following his deployment in Frankfurt. In the 1980s he was active in Honduras for the CIA. At the time, the US was conducting a dirty proxy war against Nicaragua, which was organized by the CIA in Honduras on behalf of the American government under president Ronald Reagan.
The role of the German government

Neither the office of the German chancellor, nor the interior ministry, the foreign office or the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), have commented on the New York Times article. This silence must be taken as an admission that the German government agencies were aware of what the CIA was doing.
When questioned by the media individual police officers have declared that they knew nothing about the activities of CIA agents in Germany. This was the business of the Americans, they claimed. "Even if we got wind of anything," a high-ranking official told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, "nothing would have changed anyway."
As long ago as November 2005, the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch had uncovered the illegal prisons run by the CIA, and its criminal practice of kidnapping terror suspects. After these first exposures the secretary-general of the Council of Europe opened a preliminary investigation. It was led by former Swiss public prosecutor Dick Marty, president of the Commission for Human Rights of the Council of Europe. As special prosecutor Marty carried out investigations into the secret CIA prisons from 2005 to 2007.
In June 2006 Marty submitted an initial report. It stated that it could not definitively prove the existence of the secret prisons, but presented substantial evidence to indicate the use of such facilities by the US secret services. Marty continued his investigations and prepared a second report. He discovered close cooperation between European secret services and the CIA, but met with a wall of silence and denial on the part of the European governments.
The second Marty report of 2007 criticized the German and the Italian governments in particular for systematically suppressing the truth about the prisons. In Milan, leading political agencies closed down the investigation in the same year against 26 CIA agents who had openly kidnapped the Egyptian Imam Abu Omar in Italy in February 2003 and transported him to an Egyptian torture prison.
Marty recently told the Frankfurter Rundschau that it was difficult to uncover the whole truth about all of the alleged terrorist suspects kidnapped during this period. In the main, European governments had "made little effort" to clarify what had taken place, he said.
Between 2005 and June 2009 a German parliamentary committee of inquiry investigated the methods used by the CIA and its collaboration with the BND. The list of the topics to be examined was long. It included, in addition to the secret prison system and secret CIA flights over Germany, the participation of BND agents in the Iraq war, the knowledge by German intelligence sources of CIA kidnappings of German terrorist suspects, and the monitoring of journalists by the BND.
In the event, the committee of inquiry served as a whitewash for the intelligence services and the German government. In its final report of June 19 the committee concluded that the Social Democratic Party-Green government at that time had no knowledge of either the secret transportation of suspects or the existence of secret prisons. The committee of inquiry expressed no interest in the fact that an inquiry set up by the European parliament had already uncovered some time before that between 2001 and 2005 CIA transport planes had landed on no less than 336 occasions at German airports. It is completely unrealistic to expect that the government and its intelligence services had no knowledge of such flights.
The final report of the Bundestag committee served above all to cover the tracks of the current German foreign minister and SPD chancellor candidate, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. During the period in office of the SPD-Green government (1998-2005) Steinmeier was head of the German chancellery and personally responsible for the secret services. At the end of 2002 it was Steinmeier who prevented the Turkish citizen Murat Kurnaz, who lived in the German city of Bremen, from entering the federal republic. Accused of being a terrorist, Kurnaz was detained in the US Guantánamo detention centre. The US authorities had offered to free Kurnaz in 2002 due to lack of evidence. Because of Steinmeier's refusal to readmit Kurnaz to Germany, however, he was forced to remain a further four years in Guantánamo.
Steinmeier denied any responsibility for Kurnaz's fate at the committee of inquiry. He was also acquitted of any responsibility in the case of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri is a Lebanese citizen resident in Germany who was kidnapped in 2004 by the US secret service in Macedonia and transported to Afghanistan—allegedly without the knowledge of the German government.
The record shows clearly that no account of their real role will be forthcoming from the official authorities. The extent of the complicity of the German government in the criminal activities and torture methods of the CIA will only be revealed by an independent inquiry and investigation conducted by and on behalf of the working class.