Close Coesfeld now!
More torture by Soldiers that you won't hear about: Eighteen Bundeswehr Soldiers have been charged with abusing recruits in the Coesfeld barracks.

According to this article from January, the soldiers were accused of torturing recruits with electrical charges, water and beatings and 296 witnesses to the events were interviewed. Eight of the 38 original suspects admitted to the acts but insisted they were only following orders.

The torturers took photos as trophies of the event. In case you were wondering, these photos will not be shown on your TV day and night, run on page 1 of the New York Times or be cited as proof that Gerhard Schroeder and everyone in his government are innately and uniquely evil.

As of now, searching for "german soldier" on Google News yields "German soldiers allowed to keep mullets" as the top hit. Nothing about torture anywhere in the first page.

To be fair, the events have been in reported in Germany (a report on SWR3 radio alerted me to the story), but they're greeted with approximately 1/10000th the interest and outrage of Guantanamo (as I type this, the front page of NetZeitung carries an article Clinton's call to close Guantanamo and absolutely nothing about Coesfeld).

This despite the twin facts that the victims at Coesfeld were draftees rather than battlefield captives and the abuses there were far worse than anything reported at Gitmo.

NPR's Daniel Schorr says that Amnesty International made a “technical error” in comparing Guantanamo to a Gulag. And then proceeds to compare it to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Sigh.

Let's recap, shall we?

The internment of Japanese-Americans involved 120,000 American citizens who were going about their daily business when they were interned. Guantanamo holds 500 non-citizens who were taken prisoner on a battlefield.

Audio here (no transcript, unfortunately).

Needless to say, he accepts the AI report at face value, including the assertion that the US is the among the worst human rights offenders.

There is a "Plan B" After All
Boom Chicago has it all figured out in their "After the No: Smaller Unions Instead" video.

If you're looking for evidence... that the Euro is failing, look no further than this item from today's German News:

Failure of monetary union ruled out
The President of the German Federal Bank ("Bundesbank"), Axel Weber, has ruled out the notion that the European monetary union should be declared a failure. The issuing bank in Frankfurt (am Main) stated that it would not entertain such an absurd discussion. The federal Finance Ministry in Berlin had earlier issued a similar statement, that Finance Minister Hans Eichel definitively saw no danger that the economic and currency reform could fail. These statements came in response to a report in the Hamburg-based newsmagazine "Stern" that Eichel and Weber had discussed the topic.

You can practically hear the nervous giggle.