Carta a Jürgen Klinsmann, ex entrenador de Bayern München

Hallo, Klinsi:

ojala que todos te recordarán como el mago del mundial 2006 en Alemania, y no como el coach que fracasó con las estrellas del Bayern.

En Alemania todavía reina la nostalgia de aquel ‘sueño de verano’, la milagrosa resurrección del fútbol alemán. Vos fuiste el héroe de esta gesta, más que cualquiera de los jugadores estrella. Tus paisanos te adoraron, porque les permitiste volver a sentirse orgullosos de ser alemanes.

El Bayern, ya en crisis, quiso comprar este sueño, por esto te contrataron. Pero el Bayern es otra cosa que la “Mannschaft”, como llaman a la selección alemana. El Bayern no es un lugar para revoluciones, es un lugar para hacer plata. No es un club deportivo, sino una licencia para imprimir dinero. Es como el Real Madrid... y por eso los dos están fracasando.

Vos querías obligar al Bayern a jugar fútbol moderno, ofensivo, elegante. Esto tarda, como todas las revoluciones. Mientras tanto, tal vez se pierde - ¿y qué?

Te echaron. ¿Y qué? Las leyendas no se pueden despedir.

Tu fan Paolo Lüers

Posdata: Aquí en este paisito, lo mismo le pasó a un hombre llamado Rodrigo. Lo llamaron para salvar a un club conocido como ARENA, pero no le dieron el poder de poner en su lugar a todo el equipo de estrellas. Jugaron mal, perdieron, y lo echaron.

Moraleja: No tomés el mando de un equipo de jugadores que no puedes mandar a la mierda...

(Publicado en Más!)

¿Cuál es el pecado?

A mi también me hubiera gustado que la constitución del bloque opositor ARENA-PCN-PDC se hay manifestado en un hecho más agradable que la elección de Ciro Cruz Zepeda como presidente de la nueva Asamblea Legislativa - un hecho capaz de marcar la pauta de una agenda propositiva de la oposición y de poner en manifiesto su vocación de reforma. Por ejemplo que hubieran impulsado, conjuntamente y como iniciativa emblemática de la oposición, la reforma electoral integral.

Pero, primeras cosas primero. Hubo necesidad de ratificar la unidad de la oposición en la primera sesión de la nueva Asamblea, el 1 de mayo - y en esta plenaria inaugural lo que está en la agenda es la constitución de la Junta Directiva, nada más. Las reformas vienen después – y ojala sin perder tiempo.

¿Por qué la necesidad de usar esta primera sesión de la Asamblea y la elección de su presidente para ratificar la unidad de los partidos de oposición? Porque había que cortar en seco el intento del FMLN y de ciertos prominentes Amigos de Mauricio de dividir la oposición, con los métodos que ellos han criticado durante décadas: compra de diputados, chantaje, promesas de beneficios por parte del futuro ejecutivo...

El encachimbamiento del Frente con la elección del presidente de la Asamblea no se debe en nada a la falta de idoneidad de Ciro Cruz Zepeda, tampoco a la “oportunidad perdida de una concertación entre los dos partidos grandes”. Sobre esa paja derraman lágrimas en público. Pero su ira se debe a qué a la hora de las horas todos los 47 diputados del PDC, del PCN y de ARENA votaron en bloque, incluyendo los diputados que habían sido sujeto de presión, ofertas, y enamoramientos por parte del FMLN, del CD y de los Amigotes. Todo un despliegue de ‘reclutamiento’ y al final sólo un nuevo diputado para la bancada de ‘el cambio’, Orlando Arevalo.

Es en este momento de frustración que llamaron a sus brigadas móviles a tomarse la Asamblea. Es en este momento en que empezaron a arremeter contra ‘el bloque de derecha’, que según ellos es muestra de ‘falta de voluntad de concertar’ y atenta contra ‘la voluntad de un pueblo’ que --según ellos-- ha votado por ‘el cambio’.

Pero cuidado, el electorado votó por el cambio del ejecutivo – y nadie lo está boicoteando, por lo contrario. El electorado no votó por una mayoría de la izquierda en la Asamblea, por lo contrario. Hoy argumentan como si el pueblo hubiera votado por un presidente de la Asamblea y una maniobra oscura de los tres partidos de oposición les hubiera robado esta victoria poniendo a don Ciro...

El electorado votó por un cambio en el ejecutivo y puso como contrapeso una Asamblea Legislativa con mayoría de los partidos de oposición. Punto. Esa voluntad popular se expresó en la elección de la Junta Directiva y su presidente. Nos guste o no la figura de Ciro Cruz Zepeda o el hecho que el votante le volvió a dar al PCN la clave de la mayoría parlamentaria, esa es la realidad que emana de las elecciones del 18 de enero. Todo lo demás son sueños mojados.

Se entiende que al FMLN y al presidente electo les hubiera gustado una división de los partidos minoritarios. O el plan B --dejar al PCN afuera, repartiendo el pastel entre ARENA y FMLN-- para después jalarlo a una nueva edición de alianza azulgrana. Cualquier cosa para conseguirle mayoría simple al gobierno entrante, al precio que sea.

Después de fracasar rotundamente los planes A (comprar diputados) y B (convencer a ARENA a abandonar a sus aliados y repartir el pastel entre los grandes), dirigentes del FMLN como Lorenzana todavía hablan abiertamente de la posibilidad de cambiar la correlación en la Asamblea. No se sabe si piensan aumentar las ofertas o aumentar las amenazas. O si simplemente piensan que pueden ganar esta batalla en la opinión pública, deslegitimando la unidad de la oposición y creando presión popular a que ‘el cambio’ se aplique en la Asamblea. Y después en la Corte...

Pero la gente no es tan dunda que piensan. La gente sabe que ‘el cambio’ no es la nueva ideología oficial del Estado, sino la consigna de un partido que logró ganar el poder ejecutivo. En Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua y Bolivia los partidos del Socialismo del Siglo 21 han logrado crear esta confusión: de repente el estado es declarado ‘bolivariano’, ‘revolucionario’, ‘socialista’. Ideologías impuestas por el partido de gobierno a toda la sociedad, y en nombre de esta nueva identidad nacional reclaman que la Fuerza Armada, las cortes, las instituciones todas apoyen al gobierno y su ideología.

Para que esto no pase, ni en grande ni en chiquito, está la unidad de la oposición. Y eso de ninguna manera atenta contra la necesidad de concertación. Habrá que concertar muchas cosas, empezando con las elecciones de fiscal general y magistrados, y luego para viabilizar las reformas políticas necesarias. Pero no será una concertación entre dos partidos, sino una concertación entre gobierno (y los partidos y grupos que lo apoyan) y una oposición unida.

Claro que le encantaría a Funes a sentarse a concertar con una oposición dividida, reducida por la deserción de diputados y debilitada por conflictos internos. Con la recomposición de la dirección de ARENA, con el cese de hostilidades dentro de ARENA y con la constitución exitosa del bloque opositor, parece que va a tener que sentarse a concertar con una oposición fuerte. Por más que este le disguste, es mejor para una concertación exitosa. El sistema, para poderse fortalecer y reformar, necesita que ambos –gobierno y oposición- sean fuertes y vitales.

(EL DIARIO DE HOY, Observador)

Columna transversal: Detrás de la controversia, una persona real

Hay una controversia sobre el aborto, no sólo en El Salvador, sino a nivel mundial. Hubo una controversia muy polémica sobre un reportaje del New York Times, que falsamente publicó que en El Salvador una mujer había sido condenada a 30 años de cárcel por haber abortado. En esta controversia intervinieron articulistas, notas noticiosas, ONGs pro y contra el aborto, jueces y fiscales opinando y contra opinando...

Todos tienen, desde su punto de vista, argumentos de peso. ¿Pero alguien se preocupa de la persona real detrás de la controversia? Parece que sólo las mujeres que ahora promueven la reapertura del caso.

La mujer está desde hace siete años en la cárcel de Ilopango, condenada a 30 años de cárcel. Primero la acusaron de aborto, pero ella no abortó. Después la acusaron de homicidio agravado, por la muerte de su hija recién nacida. Fue encontrada culpable y condenada a 30 años de prisión.

No tiene la culpa que de repente se encuentra en el ojo del huracán de la controversia sobre el aborto. No hizo nada para provocar esto. Más bien se debe a las falsas denuncias de grupos que abogan por la legalización del aborte, se debe a un reportaje muy poco profesional del New York Times, y se debe a la desmesurada reacción de los adversarios del aborto. Pero de repente, esta mujer se encuentra en el centro de esta batalla sobre el aborto. Es absurdo, porque ella es madre de tres hijos que tuvo a pesar de su situación social precaria, y tampoco procedió a abortar cuando salió embarazada por cuarta vez, a pesar de haberse sometido a una operación de esterilización en el Hospital de San Bartolo. Operación que obviamente falló.

Hoy aparecen muchos indicios que la mujer tampoco es culpable de homicidio. Fue condenada, como muchos salvadoreños que viven en pobreza e ignorancia y no gozan del derecho a una defensa adecuada. Es hasta ahora que la mujer dispone de abogados que cuestionan los expedientes forenses, en los cuales se basó su condena por homicidio. Resulta que ahora que tiene defensores, ellos consultan con expertos nacionales e internacionales que dictaminan que la recién nacida niña murió en el parto por falta de atención adecuada. El parto fue no atendido, porque la madre decidió mantener secreto su embarazo y tampoco buscó ayuda cuando fue sorprendida por los dolores.

Si tienen razón los expertos, la mujer es culpable de ignorancia y negligencia, pero no de homicidio. Si hubiera tenido una defensa apropiada en el 2002, nunca la hubieron podido condenar de homicidio. Hubiera pagado una condena por negligencia, y a esta altura se estaría dedicando a cuidar de sus tres hijos.

En esta semana se presentó al Tercer Juzgado de Sentencia la solicitud de revisión del caso, alegando que la mujer no ha gozado del derecho de una defensa apropiada y en base de dictámenes forenses cuestionables.

Escribo estas líneas, no para decir si esta mujer es culpable o no. Esto lo tienen que decidir los jueces. Pero me atrevo a decir dos cosas: Primero, la mujer tiene derecho a que vuelvan a abrir su caso, ya que en el primer juicio no han intervenido ni expertos forenses ni defensores competentes.

Segundo, no puede ser que la controversia sobre el aborto que existe en nuestra sociedad y en la opinión pública le reste a Karina Clímaco --así se llama la mujer en Ilopango-- posibilidades de ser escuchada en la opinión pública y de tener un juicio justo. Ni los fanatismos de los dos bandos que discuten sobre los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres, ni la mala conducta profesional del New York Times, ni la controversia que esta mala conducta provocó, ni nada debe comprometer el derecho que esta mujer tiene a un juicio justo, a una opinión pública que no la vuelva a condenar de antemano, a medios de comunicación que la escuchen, y a una defensa digna.

(El Diario de Hoy, páginas editoriales)

Carta a Juan Ramón Medrano, ex-comandante ‘Balta’ de la BRAZ y nuevo jefe del CAM

Carta a Juan Ramón Medrano, ex-comandante ‘Balta’ de la BRAZ y nuevo jefe del CAM

Querido Balta:

Tengo que confesarte que cuando leí de tu nombramiento como jefe del CAM, me dio risa. ¡El orgulloso comandante de la temible brigada guerrillera BRAZ, comandando a la brigada de panzones que multan a los bolos quienes se orinan en el parque!

Pero luego me puse a pensar otra cosa: Balta nunca ha sido militar. Muy comandante haya sido, pero sobre todo fue constructor de guerrilla. Fue el hombre que agarró a una multitud de milicianos, muchos de ellos los típicos lúmpenes, bolos y pleitistas de la zona costera, y los transformó en combatientes disciplinados y motivados. Construyó una tropa temible, pero respetada.

¿Y por qué Balta no puede hacer lo mismo ahora: agarrar a una tropa de milicianos instalados en el CAM por dirigentes de las FPL, y transformarlos en un cuerpo disciplinado y profesional? A lo mejor la idea de Norman de poner como jefe del CAM a un ex-comandante no fue tan descabellada, sino expresión de una visión moderna, democrática de la policía comunitaria...

Siendo así, te felicito, Balta. Siempre has sido un hombre que no rehúsa retos difíciles ni misiones imposibles. Siempre debajo de tu uniforme había un pensador político. No hay peligro que el estar al mando del CAM te emborrache de ilusiones de poder o te enferme de ambiciones. Tal vez sos el único que puede agarrar el CAM, despolvarlo, quitarle el carácter paramilitar y ponerlo a trabajar para la comunidad.

Te saludo, Paolo Lüers

Spain considers prosecuting U.S. officials for torture

It is an interesting legal question: Can a Spanish criminal court prosecute U.S. officials for laying the groundwork for the torture of Spanish citizens held at Guantanamo Bay? A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, has ordered an inquiry into whether six senior Bush administration officials -- including former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales -- were responsible for "an authorized and systematic plan for torture," according to a court document. Times editorial writer Marjorie Miller asked British barrister and law professor Philippe Sands, author of the book "Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values," to explain the legal underpinnings of such a procedure.

The Spanish case targets the government lawyers -- including former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales -- whose legal opinions laid the groundwork for so-called harsh interrogations. Why the lawyers?

When the administration decided to move to aggressive techniques, it seems they turned to lawyers who could be relied upon to sign on. They systematically excluded from the process those lawyers who would have given contrary advice. But for the lawyers, these abuses, this torture, would not have happened.

So the administration got bad advice from lawyers; they didn't have to take it. Why does that make the lawyers guilty?

The lawyers appear to have been part of a plan to subvert the law. First the administration fixed on a policy of cruelty, then they found the lawyers to sign off on it. On my reading, the lawyers acted not in the service of providing fearless, independent legal advice, but provided support to a predetermined policy of abuse. In that way, they became complicit in a policy of torture.

Is there legal precedent in going after the lawyers?

There is legal precedent. The precedent includes U.S. military tribunals in Germany in the 1940s. More recently, you've got actions in Britain, Spain and the United States where lawyers, for example, designed money-laundering schemes intended to subvert rules that criminalize money laundering. There are plenty of cases to show that, where lawyers act in a way to subvert the rules, they can themselves become complicit in crime.

Still, why not the torturers or the top political leaders?

I focused on the lawyers because I wanted to understand the circumstances in which they became complicit, but of course it goes even higher. As of April 29, the case in Spain has taken a broader and more extensive turn. Judge Baltasar Garzon will look at the Bush Six and all those individuals who bear responsibility for the policy of torture and abuse. The case will look not just at the "framers of the legal decision," as President Obama put it. It will look at those higher up and perhaps also those lower down who contributed to the implementation of the decision.

Why is Spain involved?

It is based on abuse allegedly meted out on five Spanish nationals or residents. The legal basis in Spanish law is the prohibition under the 1984 Torture Convention and of the Geneva Conventions of torture and of inhuman and degrading treatment. The United States is a party to those treaties and, therefore, is bound by its commitments. The complaint is based squarely on these international laws, as well as Spanish laws.

Would legal action in the U.S. take precedence over the Spanish case?

That's a crucial question. I have no doubt that if the United States were to carry out its own investigation, foreign judges would back off. The question, therefore, is what sort of investigation would achieve that objective? Does it have to be a formal criminal investigation, or could it be a congressional or other inquiry that might have the power to make certain recommendations? I think it's an open question, but the reality is that if the Obama administration were to give a green light to a full non-criminal inquiry, a sort of blue ribbon truth commission that some have proposed, and if that group had the power to make recommendations as to whether crimes were committed, it would probably have the effect of suspending foreign investigations, at least until it announced its conclusions.

Why did you take on this issue?

I am a lawyer. I teach international law, but I am also a practicing lawyer. I spend half my time advising governments on issues, some of which are extremely sensitive. I see my role as a lawyer to advise government what the limits of their actions are: to help them achieve what they want to achieve, but not just to sign on the dotted line. I am acutely aware of the responsibility of lawyers. What the documents that emerged suggested to me was that those lawyers had abdicated their professional responsibilities. I wanted to understand how that happened. I could not understand how these lawyers essentially had rubber-stamped a policy of cruelty. In my view, they had ceased to act as lawyers.

(The Los Angeles Times)

Obama should look far and wide for his Supreme Court nominee

By the end of the week, we'll probably know who President Obama plans to nominate as retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter's successor.

With all respect to the crack economic team the president has working overtime to keep as many of us as possible off the unemployment rolls and our 401(k)s off the do-not-resuscitate list, this will be the most important appointment he has made so far. Because he swept to electoral victory on the promise of fundamental change, I would urge him to break with the recent past and nominate someone from outside the federal judiciary, perhaps even someone who is not now a sitting judge.

Souter is the last Supreme Court justice whose opinions really have surprised court watchers. There's a reason for that: He's the only justice on the court who took his seat without having his name attached to a string of decisions on federal law that predicted -- and in some sense, bound him to -- a particular jurisprudential tendency.

When President George H.W. Bush appointed Souter, he'd been a federal appeals court judge for a matter of months. Most of his legal career had been spent on the New Hampshire Supreme Court and as the state's attorney general. He brought that experience to bear on the federal cases that subsequently came before him on the high court, and his common-sensical judicial profile emerged as those of the better justices so often have, on a case-by-case basis.

To admire that is to acknowledge the continuing relevance of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' great declaration of judicial realism: "The life of the law is experience."

Ideologues, however, hate surprises, which is why those on both sides of the Washington aisle took a lesson from the Souter nomination. The safe thing, they concluded, was to nominate only prospective Supreme Court justices who have a track record of written opinions on federal legal questions that can be parsed and scrutinized, line by line. (President George W. Bush's disastrous attempt to nominate then-White House counsel Harriet E. Miers only reinforced the lesson.)

Thus, the federal appellate courts have become what amounts to the Supreme Court's farm clubs. The brevity of Souter's service notwithstanding, the fact remains that every current member of the high court came directly from a federal appellate circuit.

But what the ideological purists gained in predictability, the country lost in experience. The notion that a prospective justice's only relevant qualifications come from being a member of the federal judiciary may be convenient -- in a crabbed sort of way -- but it's flagrantly ahistorical.

Take, for example, the five jurists many legal historians would regard as the most important of the 20th century. In the first rank, you'd have to place Holmes, for judicial intellect; Earl Warren for leadership and vision; and William J. Brennan Jr. for courage, conscience and the political skill to run a brilliant rear-guard action through the Burger court years that solidified and extended the Warren court's legacy. Just a bit behind those three come the great defenders of the 1st Amendment, William O. Douglas and Hugo Black, though much of their most admired work was iconoclastic and delivered in dissent.

Not one of these five justices had served on the federal bench before joining the high court.

Holmes and Brennan came from the Massachusetts and New Jersey supreme courts. Black sat briefly -- and very early in his career -- on an Alabama "police court," but was appointed because of his tenure in the U.S. Senate. Neither Warren nor Douglas ever had donned a judicial robe before being appointed to the high court.

Neither, for that matter, had justices Robert H. Jackson or Felix Frankfurter, who weren't exactly judicial slouches.

Obama knows all this well, which is why he should have the courage to reach beyond the narrow strictures of the recent past and look to the private bar, the statehouses, state courts and, perhaps, legal academia for the next nominee. It would be a salutary event, if his own election could free us to consider an accomplished life's experience, along with gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation, when we weigh a nominee's contribution to the court's "diversity."

Doing that also might free us from some of the worst rancor that has marked so many recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings. While nominating exclusively from the federal appellate bench gives the ideologues among us -- depending on which side of the aisle they occupy -- either a comforting certainty or a clear target, it also powerfully enables the kind of single-issue litmus test confirmations that now seem standard operating procedure in the Senate.

It's hard for even the most partisan senator to arrive with an interest-group-approved checklist of issues on which to interrogate a nominee if they don't have a string of prior decisions to defend.

(The Los Angeles Times)

What newspapers do

THREE NEWSPAPERS are being honored tonight for a kind of journalism that is acutely endangered. The Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers, founded by former Globe publisher Bill Taylor in 2001, honors traditional newspaper values of balance, accuracy, and transparency that are too often lost in all the talk about broken business models and online competition.

The winner and finalists of this award, administered by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, offer just a glimpse of the best work newspapers do. All involved intensive investigations, months in the making, that few other media currently invest the time, staff, and money to pursue. When people talk, some of them blithely, about life without newspapers, this is what will be lost:

It took thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews for The Charlotte Observer, winner of the award, to uncover horrifying patterns of worker abuse at a North Carolina poultry processing plant. Reporters went far beyond giving plant operators the standard chance to respond; they held stories for months while they located managers who would comment. But that took time and money.

The Columbus Dispatch spent six months analyzing whether proposed legislation targeting illegal immigrants would be right for Ohio. Forgoing easy "balance" by quoting advocates on either side of an emotional issue, the paper's team delved into databases to trace immigration's actual effect on jobs, education, crime, and healthcare. No other institution had done this.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's reporters took personal risks to go deep inside the city's new and dangerous street gangs. The stories successfully trod a delicate line, neither denying the humanity of gang members nor glorifying urban violence. This award is particularly poignant, because the Post-Intelligencer folded its print edition last month and slashed its online newsroom to roughly 20 staffers.

Quality journalism - the type that verifies claims, shines its light into every corner, and demands attribution - is expensive. A blogger with a slingshot can hit a few targets, but can't easily take on entrenched institutions. In 2002, the Globe exposed the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston - an effort that cost the paper on the order of $1 million.

Newspapers matter in other ways, too. Just this week, a story about the pending shutdown of the landmark Chez Vous roller rink in Roxbury, a bulwark of stability in a volatile neighborhood, won a reprieve for the owner when her creditors read about its importance in the Globe. Unlike the Web, which is transient and diffuse, newspapers command the collective attention of a place, providing the civic glue that is so important in an increasingly atomized society.

It isn't news that The Boston Globe is facing an existential crisis. But journalism of the sort only great newspapers provide is essential to every person in a democracy. We don't yet know all the answers to this crisis. But we know the stakes.

(The Boston Globe, publicado el 16 de abril 2009)

Making the Punishment Fit the Crime

When illegal immigrants apply for jobs, they sometimes present made-up Social Security numbers. Too often prosecutors charge them with felony identity theft — which outrageously overstates the crime. The Supreme Court has called a halt to the practice, ruling 9 to 0 that federal identity-theft law does not apply.

Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, a Mexican citizen, gave his employer counterfeit papers that contained his real name and another person’s Social Security number. When caught, he was charged not only with improperly entering the United States and misusing immigration documents, but also with aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence.

Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the court, relied on a straightforward reading of the identity-theft statute, which requires that the defendant “knowingly” use another person’s identification. The government, Justice Breyer said, failed to meet that test in this case.

The ruling is faithful to the statute’s text and to Congress’s intent in passing it. The law was aimed at criminals who steal the identity of a particular individual and do not just use random numbers. Mr. Flores-Figueroa, who used his own name on his counterfeit card, was not trying to steal anyone’s identity. He was trying to work in the United States without proper documentation — a crime, but a far less serious one.

The federal aggravated-identity-theft law has become a favorite of overzealous prosecutors. Last year, after a raid at a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, nearly 300 immigrants were charged with identity theft. Prosecutors used the threat of long sentences and unwarranted charges to coerce the workers into forgoing a trial and pleading guilty to lesser charges.

A guiding principle of American law is that the punishment must fit the crime. The Supreme Court upheld this principle by insisting that undocumented immigrants who use false papers to get work be punished only for what they did.

Carta de las FARC a Mauricio Funes

MAURICIO FUNES, Presidente de la República de El Salvador

Por: SECRETARIADO DEL ESTADO MAYOR CENTRAL

Nos sumamos a los abrazos de victoria de los pueblos al pulgarcito de América como motivo de su triunfo electoral, Presidente Funes, florecido en la persistente y heroica resistencia del pueblo de El Salvador. Desde el inmenso corazón de los guerrilleros de Manuel Marulanda Vélez, felicitaciones Presidente. Felicitaciones salvadoreños todos.

No podemos dejar de pensar en esta aurora de la democracia verdadera, de la soberanía del pueblo, del futuro de justicia y bienestar de los salvadoreños, en los combatientes del Frente Farabundo Martí que abrieron este camino con su sangre generosa, en Schafik con su Roja Bandera tremolando la esperanza de un pueblo, en las víctimas de la barbarie del partido de Dawinson respaldado por la geopolítica criminal del gobierno de Washington, y en la voz de monseñor Romero denunciando en medio de las balas las injusticias de la tiranía. A todos ellos, a los que pusieron en marcha el sueño de los humildes desde las laderas de Guazapa, desde la cátedra y todos los centros educativos, desde el periodismo comprometido con el pueblo, desde los cantones de los pobres y el ámbito de las capas medias: honor eterno desde las montañas de Colombia. A ellos, los hoy triunfantes que somos también los pueblos del continente, les debemos esta alegría. Farabundo Martí y Augusto Cesar Sandino siguen vivos, con su Estado Mayor internacionalista, en la lucha de los pueblos del Istmo centroamericano.

El proyecto de Bolívar de conformar en este hemisferio una Gran Nación de repúblicas, como mecanismo para asegurar nuestra independencia, nuestros recursos, nuestra dignidad y garantías sociales, en esta hora del naufragio del sistema capitalista mundial, es una necesaria alternativa y un objetivo estratégico irrenunciable de los gobernantes progresistas y de los pueblos de Nuestra América, que hoy como hace 200 años, lanzan su nuevo grito de independencia definitiva.

El Salvador, el pulgarcito de América, con toda seguridad, seguirá alumbrando el camino.

Presidente Funes: le deseamos éxitos en su gestión de gobernante que seguramente buscará “la mayor suma de felicidad posible, la mayor suma de seguridad social y la mayor suma de estabilidad política”.

Cordial abrazo. Compatriotas,

Secretariado del Estado Mayor Central de las FARC-EP

(Publicado en la página Web de las FARC-EP con fecha del 4 de mayo 2009)

Carta al ex presidente Fredy Cristiani

Estimado Fredy:

Todos dicen que sos el más indicado para sacar adelante a ARENA. Yo también.

Sólo me preocupa una cosa: Muchos en ARENA hablan que con vos el partido “vuelve a sus raíces”. ¡Cuidado! ¿Cuáles raíces? Cada uno, FMLN y ARENA, tiene algunas raíces, a los cuales mejor no volver nunca. Igual que no queremos que el Frente regrese a sus raíces secuestrando a embajadores y empresarios, no queremos que ARENA vuelva a sus raíces desapareciendo a estudiantes, profesores y sindicalistas.

Pero no sólo es la raíz paramilitar que comparten los dos partidos grandes. La otra raíz común es lo autoritario, las decisiones a dedo, el miedo a la democracia…

Estoy seguro que vos, Fredy, aunque sos figura histórica de ARENA y como tal tenés capacidad de unificar y entusiasmar a las bases, no quieres que ARENA vaya para atrás, sino para adelante. Adelante es: democracia; dedocracia es para detrás…

En vez de soñar con volver a las raíces, hágase el impulsor de la renovación.¡Pongan al museo los retratos del mayor y el himno de las tumba de los rojos – y construyan un partido civil, democrático que sepa impulsar las reformas que necesita el país. Eso es el antídoto al cambio que predican el FMLN.

Suerte, Paolo Lüers

(Publicado en Más!)

¡Puerca Gripe!

Hace unos días discutía sobre la influenza A (H1N1), o sea la puerca gripe, les decía a unos amigos que a mi no me parecía lo que nos estaban vendiendo por la televisión. La verdad es que la comunidad médica y científica nos ha dicho muy poco para llegar a conclusiones claras. Pero cada vez más se escuchan voces diciendo que el comportamiento de esta “puerca gripe” no es distinta a las gripes estacionales que todos los años tenemos. Y entonces ¿por qué la emergencia?, ¿Son inventos del gobierno, como opina un amigo trotskista mexicano?

Otro amigo en el D.F. me dicen: “¡aquí no pasa nada guey! Normalmente hay 400,000 enfermos de las vías respiratorias en el DF si solo son 2,500 pues estamos muy bien”. Más que eso estamos constatando, según pasa el tiempo, que la influenza A H1N1 tiene una mortalidad muy baja, solo ha ocasionado victimas mortales en la ciudad de México y un caso en Texas. Hay 16 victimas confirmadas en el DF de los 500 casos confirmados (AFP). Esto significa que hay 3% de mortalidad en México; aun así es grave. Pero resulta que la gripe porcina no es la que mata, sino las complicaciones que al estar en lugar insalubre las que hacen que se desarrolle una neumonía que resulta ser esta la causante de las muertes. En resumidas cuentas, que la gripe bien tratada no mata. (AFP).

Distinto es el caso de la influenza H5N1 (o gripe aviar), la cual si tiene una mortalidad muy alta y es la responsable directa de la muerte de los pacientes (El País). Ahora esto no quiere decir que México actuara mal al dar el grito de alarma, era lo que se tenía que hacer; pero lo que refleja es un gran agujero en el sistema de salud de la ciudad de México, ya que si esta no puede cuidar a sus enfermos de gripe, allí si peligra en serio la seguridad de un gran grupo de ciudadanos.

El peor escenario de la puerca gripe es que llegue a mutar, como sabemos la gripe es un virus muy impredecible, he ahí los verdaderos escenarios del pánico. Por eso creo que es más importante en estos momentos estar seguro de que la población esté protegida contra la neumonía que contra esta variedad de gripe, que tan fácilmente puede mutar y que efectivamente bien tratada no es mortal. ¿Por qué deberíamos de hacer grandes inversiones económicas en prevenir lo impredecible?

Los verdaderos problemas son el pánico y el impacto sobre la crisis financiera mundial ya existente. El uso indebido de retrovirales que lo que hará es simplemente la supervivencia de cepas más resistentes y de mayor mortalidad. Hasta la FAO ha tomado medidas antipánico pidiendo el cambio de la gripe porcina a influenza A H1N1 para evitar el deterioro del comercio del cerdo (BBC). Al fin de cuentas la puerca gripe ocasionará estragos.

La mejor que podemos hacer es tomar medidas racionales. Los casos como el de la gripe española son ejemplos claros de cómo el pánico es un muy mal consejero a la hora de enfrentar este tipo de problemas. Entre las distintas apariciones que hizo la gripe española, fue hasta la segunda o tercera oleada que produjo victimas, si la primera vez se hubiera dejado al cuerpo crear sus propias defensas y no medicar en exceso no hubiera mutado la enfermedad produciendo victimas mortales (El País).

La gripe porcina ya pasó muchas fronteras, la importancia ya no está en detenerlo, sino en mitigar sus efectos e identificarlo a la mayor brevedad posible. No nos gastemos nuestras defensas en lo que no está en nuestro control y reservemos nuestros retrovirales y vacunas para combatir las verdaderas pandemias que este nuevo siglo nos promete.

Más información:
http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/recommendations.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8021958.stm

Planet Earth: Too Big to Fail

The Obama administration has given itself an extraordinarily powerful tool that could help the president achieve all three of his top domestic goals at once--but only if he has the political moxie to deploy it to its full extent.

That tool is the proposed Endangerment Finding--a formal declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that global warming indeed threatens human health and welfare. Once the administration issues the final declaration, the Clean Air Act is triggered, giving the administration sweeping authority to decide how to reduce global warming pollution from power plants, vehicles, and other sources, how much, and how fast. According to a groundbreaking new analysis from New York University, the administration could even unilaterally establish a cap-and-trade system very similar to what Congress is considering.

Obama's landmark proposal means that the administration no longer has to go through Congress to make the green economy a reality. No horse-trading with hostile Republicans. No need to throw tens of billions of dollars at the oil and coal industries to win the votes of polluter-friendly members of Congress. No need for sixty votes in the Senate (or even, for that matter, fifty). It will be the EPA looking at the science, listening to public comment and deciding how best to protect the planet, public health and the economy.

With this authority, the administration can do what has been widely dismissed as politically infeasible, but what scientists and others warn is environmentally and economically essential: reducing US global warming pollution from 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Doing this raises the possibility of giving our children a green and bountiful planet to grow up in and spur the creation of millions of new, high-paying green jobs; it would also go a long way toward achieving Obama's goal of cutting healthcare costs to pay for his $50 billion to $65 billion healthcare plan.

How? Pollution from fossil fuel power plants (mostly coal) adds $167 billion to America's annual healthcare bill, as a result of increased asthma attacks, respiratory diseases, heart attacks, lung cancers, mercury poisoning and other impacts that come with coal's soot and smog. Acting against global-warming pollution would cut other kinds of toxic pollution too, as businesses invest in energy efficiency and clean energy and move away from polluting sources of energy. Add the tens of billions of dollars of additional healthcare costs from auto tailpipe pollution, and the savings are even higher--potentially paying for the entire additional cost of President Obama's healthcare plan.

Despite these benefits, the administration has suggested it might slow-walk its way to climate regulation, in hopes that Congress will produce a bill more precisely suited to greenhouse gas regulation than the Clean Air Act Authority.

We've seen the consequences of this kind of caution and delay before--and they're not pretty. During the Clinton administration, Greenpeace and other environmental groups sued the EPA to require it to issue the endangerment finding. Under pressure from industry, the Clinton administration did nothing and punted the decision to Bush. It took until 2007 for the Supreme Court to decide that the government had to make a decision about the finding and until last week for the government to actually do it. In the meantime, the United States has put a decade's worth of avoidable pollution into the atmosphere.

Furthermore, there's a real risk that Congressional action, even if it comes, will be inadequate. Although the House of Representatives may be moving (slowly) toward passing a climate bill that constitutes a good first step, it still falls somewhat short of what scientists say is necessary. And it's difficult to imagine this Senate, overstuffed as it is with polluter sympathizers, getting sixty votes for anything that reduces emissions to a level even close to what climatologists say gives us a real shot of avoiding a planetary emergency.

But if President Obama learns from the mistakes of his predecessors and quickly establishes aggressive targets, he will set the bar for Congress to meet. If senators want to lower costs for polluters by passing a more efficient system specifically tailored to global warming, they can do so. But to persuade President Obama to sign it, they'll have to make it strong enough so that it at least equals what he does through executive action.

Make no mistake: this is hardball. But for better or worse, hardball is what it's going to take to solve the climate crisis, create a green economy and meet the president's healthcare goals. At the end of the day, President Obama can't afford to let Congress set the schedule--or unilaterally decide the fate of the planet.

Tomado de The Nation http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090511/radford?rel=hp_currently

"¡Nos vemos en la Asamblea, Mauricio Gorbachov!"

"Tengo información que ARENA quiere que Mauricio sea el Gorbachov del FMLN, que al llegar a ser presidente destruye su propio partido...", dice Roberto Lorenzana, diputado del FMLN y miembro de la Junta Directiva de la Asamblea Legislativa.

¡Que extraño y significativo que a un dirigente del FMLN se le cruza por la cabeza comparar a Mauricio Funes con Mijail Gorbachov, el secretario general del Partido Comunista que terminó con la dictadura soviética y abrió el camino a la revolución democrática en Europa Oriental! Las palabras de Lorenzana dan una pista de las concepciones y los miedos que siguen reinando en las filas del Frente, sobre todo entre los antiguos cuadros del Partido Comunista como Lorenzana, quienes todavía sufren el trauma de la revolución pacífica que hizo colapsar al modelo soviético.

En las palabras de Lorenzana se manifiesta el miedo del Frente de la erosión que puede sufrir su modelo de partido centralista, vertical, conducido por cuadros leninistas. Es el mismo miedo que los hizo depurar otra y otra vez al partido, hasta que quedara libre de cualquiera que podría abrazar las ideas de Gorbachov que, como expresa Lorenzana, destruyen al propio partido.

¿Cuáles han sido las ideas tan contrarrevolucionarias de Mijail Gorbachov, con las cuales 'destruyó' al poderoso Partido Comunista soviético? Glasnost y perestroika. Mientras que la perestroika se ocupaba de la liberalización económica de la Unión Soviética, la glasnost pretendía liberalizar el sistema político férreamente controlado por el Partido Comunista y establecer la libertad de prensa y la pluralidad de partidos.

Mientras el mundo entero reconoce a Gorbachov como el dirigente de izquierda que liberó a su país --y a la izquierda del planeta-- de las deformaciones y represiones del marxismo-leninismo, como el gran reformador, como el arquitecto de la transición pacífica de Europa Oriental del totalitarismo a la democracia - en la mente de Roberto Lorenzana todavía es el traidor que destruyó su propio partido y enterró la dictadura del proletariado.

Quiere decir que para los cuadros de dirigencia del Frente, los conceptos de Gorbachov de transparencia, democratización, pluralismo y libertad de expresión siguen siendo peligros promovidos por la derecha y por los falsos dirigentes de la izquierda (como Gorbachov y potencialmente Funes) para destruir al partido.

¿De qué otra manera podemos entender el comentario de Lorenzana?
Lo raro es que Lorenzana piensa que detrás del Gorbachov salvadoreño está ARENA. ¿No se ha dado cuenta que muchas personalidades de la izquierda democrática, que han apoyado a Funes en la recta final de la campaña electoral y ahora trabajan en sus equipos de gobierno, justifican su decisión precisamente con el argumento que fortalecer a Funes significa debilitar a los marxistas-leninistas en el FMLN y, eventualmente, transformar al partido? Sin decir la mala palabra, lo están viendo como el Gorbachov que, desde el poder, transformará al partido.
Bueno, lo que para unos es transformación, para otros, como Lorenzana, es destrucción del partido.

En este contexto, la renuncia de Roberto Lorenzana al equipo de gobierno de Funes obviamente es mucho más que una nueva división de trabajo: "Yo me dedico a dirigir la legislativa y tu el ejecutivo." Más bien suena a: "Cualquiera de tus políticas que concertés con la derecha, también las vas a tener que negociar con nosotros. ¡No vemos en la Asamblea!"

Y es en este mismo contexto que se entiende porqué el partido haya bajado a su presidente electo del avión que lo iba a llevar a Chile para no estar el 1 de mayo.

Es lógico que Funes no quería marchar con los encapuchados, con los radicales, con quienes le exigen que cumpla su promesa de cambio. Y es lógico, igualmente, que su partido no le pudo permitir zafarse. Así que Funes tuvo que ponerle buena cara al 'movimiento social' controlado por el partido.

Mientras Funes gritaba consignas como "¡QUE VIVAN LOS TRABAJADORES SALVADOREÑOS!", una brigada de choque del partido se tomó a la fuerza la Asamblea Legislativa.

(El Diario de Hoy, Observador)

Torturing for America

Barack Obama has released memos detailing torture methods approved by the Bush administration but has stopped short of punishing the perpetrators. His decision puts the US to the kind of test it has not seen since Vietnam or Watergate.

What should a president do about the crimes of his predecessor? Barack Obama had been "thinking about this for four weeks, really," says his advisor David Axelrod.

The issue seems straightforward enough. What the CIA did to prisoners on behalf of the administration of former US President George W. Bush and its appalling legal advisers during the so-called "war on terror" was torture. And torture is a serious crime, not just in the United States, but almost everywhere else in the world. The next steps seem obvious enough: indict the guilty and send them to prison, end of story. Why, as one European legal expert put it, would anyone need to think about it for four weeks?

Amnesty International protesters outside the White House mark President Obama's 100th day in office.
AFP

Amnesty International protesters outside the White House mark President Obama's 100th day in office.
Good old Europe. The answer that the president of the most powerful and oldest democracy on earth must provide could not only devastate him, but could tear apart that very same democracy. His courageous and yet half-hearted decision to release the previous administration's torture files, and to call the practice by its real name and to ban it -- while at the same time forbidding, or at least postponing, the punishment of the perpetrators -- puts the nation to the kind of test it has not seen since Vietnam or Watergate.

It will be a more difficult test this time. Past infractions at the highest levels of government were treated as the lapses of individuals. After the Watergate scandal, then-President Richard Nixon was promptly pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. Former President Bill Clinton, after perjuring himself in the Monica Lewinsky case, was dealt with in impeachment proceedings. The Vietnam War spawned a large number of half-hearted military trials of those involved in massacres committed in the name of freedom.

But Obama is faced with problems on a completely different scale. The entire Bush administration -- the attorney general, the national security adviser who went on to become secretary of state, the secretary of defense and top officials at the White House, even the former president himself, without a doubt -- all were involved. The broadest level of involvement was among second-tier officials: government lawyers who broke the law by issuing opinions on the permissibility of "alternative" interrogation methods. Finally, there was the host of torturers, whose activities on behalf of the government have been described in countless studies by American journalists and civil rights experts, as well as in reports by human rights activists.

Tacitly Participated in Torture

The crimes are not limited to the government. Lawsuits that victims of torture are now filing against the government's facilitators in private industry suggest the broad extent to which the nation is burdened with the stench of torture. Even the aircraft manufacturer Boeing has been sued for damages, because a Boeing subsidiary allegedly arranged flights to the CIA's so-called "black sites."

The grim practices were no secret. In fact, the perpetrators openly ridiculed the public's indignation. After signing a memorandum authorizing extreme interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, including forcing detainees to stand for hours on end, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scribbled at the bottom of the document: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

It was not a conspiracy committed by a handful of people. Many Americans tacitly participated in the torture. After all, it was the president himself who gave the go-ahead for treating the victims in such a way, when he said: "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people."

The torture virus eventually infected the rest of the world, including Europe and even Germany. The double standard employed by German counterterrorism personnel when confronted with the torture practices of their US allies becomes clear in a remark Ernst Uhrlau, the head of the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency, made in a 2007 interview with SPIEGEL: "US officials have (…) explained to us that the information they gained from various interrogations worldwide has been instrumental in preventing further attacks and uncovering terrorist structures. So we have benefited from all this in the sense of preventing attacks and understanding the structures of the network."

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble also found it difficult to distance himself from the use of dirty information, saying that it was perfectly legitimate for German officials to use information foreign intelligence agencies had obtained through torture -- after all, that helped prevent terror attacks. At the same time, Schäuble was apparently unwilling to consider the possibility that this might also apply to American intelligence agencies: "The president has made it clear that there is no torture. I have no reason to question that."

They are all involved. Respected human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had already released reports on the issue at the time when Schäuble feigned ignorance. Hardly anyone felt the need to point out the grave injustices that were apparently being committed in the shadows of the American war against terrorism. When Wolfgang Kaleck, a German attorney, sought criminal prosecution charges against Rumsfeld and other US officials on behalf of several plaintiffs, Germany's federal prosecutor's office rejected the suit on ludicrous grounds. One of the arguments against Kaleck's suit was that the prosecution of torture had to be treated as an internal matter for the US.

The entire world looked the other way when the United States committed a crime that the world had previously committed itself to outlaw and punish. Under the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture, ratified by most countries in the world, each state pledges to impose drastic penalties for the cruel treatment of prisoners -- and to ensure that not only those issuing the orders, but also the torturers themselves, are brought to justice. The cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners is also banned under the Geneva Conventions. Today even US legal experts no longer question that the Geneva Conventions also apply in the war against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. The Geneva Conventions obligate all nations to try torturers and those who issue their orders, if apprehended, or to extradite them to a country willing to do so.

The Bushies knew perfectly well why they withdrew the US signature from the International Criminal Court (ICC) statute. If the United States had subjected itself to the ICC statute, the court's unflinching prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, would undoubtedly have petitioned for the issuance of arrest warrants against Bush and his cohorts long ago.

Obama Doesn't Know How to Deal with the Past
Germany's Code of Crimes against International Law is equally strict in its treatment of torture. Under the statute, as under similar statutes in other European countries, torture is considered an international crime which can be prosecuted even if it is committed in another country. Citing this so-called principle of "universal jurisdiction," Spanish prosecutor Baltasar Garzón has now sought the prosecution on criminal charges of six former US officials who are allegedly behind the torture scandal. And the longer Obama delays taking the -- legally unavoidable -- step of bringing charges against senior officials from the Bush administration and those who carried out the torture, the less credible becomes the reasoning of German Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms, who has argued that German courts have no business intervening as long as the American judicial system is functioning properly.

President Barack Obama orders the closure of Guantanamo.
DPA

President Barack Obama orders the closure of Guantanamo.
"We need to look forward," Obama said. These are the words of someone who doesn't know how to deal with the past. What happens if he does the unavoidable? An indictment against those issuing the commands and those receiving the commands, against those who participated in and those who justified the darkest chapter in the war against terror, would be an indictment of the American system. That system includes the steadfast belief that the country's elected leaders have the best interests of the nation at heart -- and that there is nothing wrong with taking action to champion those interests. In other words, if torture was committed, it was committed for America.

The notion that international treaties, and European positions on human rights, could impose limits on national sovereignty, or that a foreign power or non-American values exist that could question what happens in the United States does not fit into this system. "We don't have the same moral and legal framework as the rest of the world, and never have. If you told the framers of the Constitution that what we're after is to, you know, do something that will be just like Europe, they would have been appalled." These are the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was involved in the decision on whether to close the torture facility at Guantanamo.

A Holder of Unlimited Power

Scalia is a conservative -- as conservative as the American way of thinking. That way of thinking is still today based on the Constitution, which, in its original form, did not even include a reference to human rights and tolerated slavery. And although the US Constitution guarantees comprehensive civil rights and liberties today, such as freedom of the press, it contains a relatively weak delineation of the government's obligation to abide by the law. A legal concept like "human dignity," which makes it illegal in Germany to even threaten to use torture, is unknown in the United States. Whether a person who commits torture can in fact be tried in a court of law is left to the discretion of the federal attorneys, who are appointed by the president. They are in the hands of the president. And he has the power to pardon anyone -- including himself.

The holder of such unlimited power is incapable of distancing himself from a system of which he himself is a part. This is both a benefit and a drawback of any democratic country: Elected officials change, but the state remains the same. Unlike a change of power in a dictatorship, when the injustices committed by a previous dictator can be dealt with at one go, in a democracy a newly elected leader has to tread carefully when it comes to the legal opinions of his predecessor.

This is why Obama, a Democrat, is promising the people at the CIA that they will not be prosecuted, because when they tortured people, they did so strictly within the framework of the then-administration's interpretation of the law. This is a concept that is not entirely foreign to European legal thought. Under German criminal law, for instance, the actions committed by a person who could have assumed his behavior was permissible, are considered excusable, albeit not justified.

Nevertheless, the idea that "what was lawful then cannot be unlawful today" -- as the late Baden-Württemberg Governor Hans Filbinger, who had been a judge during the Third Reich, famously told SPIEGEL in a 1978 interview -- does not always apply. A serious injustice can still be deemed an injustice, even if the powers-that-be had declared it legal. Ironically, this famous principle, the fundamental concept of international criminal law, was first proclaimed by an American.

Parallels with Nuremberg

Robert Jackson, a man no less charismatic than Barack Obama, said it to the Germans against the backdrop of the smoldering ruins of World War II. Jackson was the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, and the speech he gave was so powerful that it reduced his audience to tears. Never before had an American spoken as beautifully as Jackson. "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated," Jackson said in his opening remarks. The hearts of the disenfranchised, the demoralized, the starved and the persecuted of the Nazi regime were behind the man who brought the surviving Nazi leaders to the gallows, just as the hearts of Europeans are behind Barack Obama today.

Of course, Jackson was charged with an undertaking far less complicated than Obama's. Jackson was speaking, not at the time of a new democratically elected administration, but at the zero hour of a new German legal system. Most of all, he was not talking about America, but faraway Germany. Moreover, the wrongs committed by the Nazi regime are clearly incomparable with the human rights violations of the Bush administration.

Nevertheless, the comparison with Nuremberg is not irrelevant for many in Obama's America. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, boldly confronted the Bush administration when he said that "for 60 years, a single word has best captured America's moral authority and commitment to justice: Nuremberg." But now, he continued, "what we risk today is that future generations will look back at this time (…) and be able to capture the loss of America's moral authority and commitment to injustice also with a single word: Guantanamo."

Dodd is the son of one of Jackson's close associates at Nuremberg. As such, he is also familiar with a speech his father delivered to Congress, in which he quoted Justice Jackson at Nuremberg: "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow."

Unlike Obama today, Jackson really was looking forward.

(Spiegel-Online International. Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan)