Romantic era.
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Horszowski was born in Lemberg
Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) and was initially taught by his mother, a
pupil of Karol Mikuli (himself a pupil of Chopin). He became a pupil of Teodor
Leszetycki in Vienna at the age of seven; Leszetycki had studied with
Beethoven's pupil Carl Czerny.
In 1901 he gave a performance of
Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in Warsaw and soon after toured Europe and the
Americas as a child prodigy. In 1905 the young Horszowski played to Gabriel
Fauré and met Camille Saint-Saëns in Nice. In 1911 Horszowski put his
performing career on hold in order to devote himself to literature, philosophy
and art history in Paris.
Having returned to the concert stage
with the encouragement of Pablo Casals, he settled in Milan after the First
World War. After the Second World War he frequently gave recitals with artists
such as Casals, Alexander Schneider, Joseph Szigeti and the Budapest Quartet.
He often appeared at the Prades Festival and the Marlboro Festival. From 1940
he lived in New York City. In 1957 Horszowski gave a memorable cycle of
Beethoven's entire solo works in New York, and in 1960 of Mozart's piano sonatas.
His very diverse and extensive repertoire also embraced such composers as
Honegger, d'Indy, Martinů, Stravinsky, Szymanowski and Villa-Lobos.
Horszowski was widely recorded, and
can be heard on the HMV, Columbia, RCA, Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch, and
other labels. He also taught at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, counting
among his pupils Richard Goode, Anton Kuerti, Murray Perahia, Peter Serkin, and
Steven DeGroote.
Horszowski, who had the longest career
in the history of the performing arts, continued performing until shortly
before his death, which occurred in Philadelphia one month before his 101st
birthday.
Whilst Mieczysław Horszowski's family was of Jewish
origin (which made him a fugitive from Europe in the 1930s), he was himself an
early convert to Roman Catholicism, and a very devout one. As the French critic
André Tubeuf has written (in his notes to the EMI re-issue of Horszowski's
1930s-era recordings of the Beethoven cello sonatas with Pablo Casals),
"Horszowski was both very Jewish and very Catholic, in both cases as only
a Pole could have been."
In 1981, the 89-year-old Horszowski
married Bice Costa, an Italian pianist. Bice later edited Horszowski's memoirs
and a volume of his mother's correspondence about Horszowski's early years. She
also recovered and recorded some songs composed by Horszowski on French texts
ca. 1913-1914.
Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht (22
January 1877 – 3 June 1970): Currency Commissioner and President of the
Reichsbank under the Weimar Republic, and President of the Reichsbank under the
Nazi regime between 1933 and 1939. Schacht was one of the primary drivers of
Germany's policy of redevelopment, reindustrialization and rearmament, and was
a fierce critic of his country's post-WW1 reparation obligations. Released from
effective service to the Nazi government in 1939, Schacht ended WW2 in a
concentration camp, and was tried and acquitted at Nuremberg for his role in
Germany's war economy.
Gustave Gilbert, an American Army
psychologist, was allowed to examine the Nazi leaders who were tried at
Nuremberg for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the
Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test was administered. Hjalmar Schacht scored 143, the
highest among the Nazi leaders tested, albeit adjusted upwards to take account
of his age.
Schacht was born in Tingleff, Imperial
Germany (now in Denmark) to William Leonhard Ludwig Maximillian Schacht and
Danish baroness Constanze Justine Sophie von Eggers. His parents, who had spent
years in the United States, originally decided on the name Horace Greeley
Schacht, in honor of the American journalist Horace Greeley. However, they
yielded to the insistence of the Schacht family grandmother, who firmly
believed the child's given name should be Danish. Schacht studied medicine,
philology and political science before earning a doctorate in economics in 1899
— his thesis was on mercantilism.
He joined the Dresdner Bank in 1903,
where he became deputy director from 1908 to 1915. He was then a member of the
committee of direction of the German National Bank for the next seven years,
until 1922, and after its merger with the Darmstädter und Nationalbank
(Danatbank), a member of the Danatbank's committee of direction. In 1905, while
on a business trip to the United States with board members of the Dresdner
Bank, Schacht met the famous American banker J. P. Morgan, as well as U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt.
During the First World War, Schacht
was tasked to serve on the staff of General von Lumm, the Banking Commissioner
for Occupied Belgium. Schacht was responsible for organizing the financing of
Germany's purchasing policy within the country, and was summarily dismissed by
General von Lumm when it was discovered that he had used his previous employer,
the Dresdner Bank, to channel the note remittances for nearly 500 million
francs of Belgian national bonds destined to pay for the requisitions.
Subsequent to Schacht's dismissal from
the public service, he resumed a brief stint at the Dresdner Bank, before
moving on to various positions within rival establishments. In 1923, Schacht
applied and was rejected for the position of head of the Reichsbank, largely as
a result of his dismissal from von Lumm's service.
Despite the small blemish on his
record, in November 1923, Schacht became currency commissioner for the Weimar
Republic and
participated in the introduction of the Rentenmark, a new currency the value of
which was based on a mortgage on all of the properties in Germany. After his economic policies helped reduce German inflation and
stabilize the German mark (Helferich Plan), Schacht was appointed president of
the Reichsbank at the requests of President Friedrich Ebert and Chancellor
Gustav Stresemann. He collaborated with other prominent economists to form the
1929 Young Plan to modify the way that war reparations were paid after
Germany's economy was destabilizing under the Dawes Plan. In December 1929, he
caused the fall of the Finance Minister Rudolf Hilferding by imposing upon the
government his conditions for the obtention of a loan. After modifications by
Hermann Müller's government to the Young Plan during the Second Conference of
The Hague (January 1930), he stepped down from the position of Reichsbank
Chairman on March 7, 1930. During 1930, Schacht campaigned against the war
reparations requirement in the United States.
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By 1926, Schacht had left the small
German Democratic Party, which he had helped found, and was increasingly
lending his support to the Nazi Party, to which he became closer between 1930
and 1932 (although he never officially became a member of the party). Close for
a short time to Heinrich Brüning's government, Schacht shifted to the right by
entering the Harzburg Front in October 1931.
Schacht's disillusionment with the
existing Weimar government did not indicate a particular shift in his overall
philosophy, but rather arose primarily out two issues: first, out of his
objection to the inclusion of Socialist Party elements in the government, and
the effect of their various construction and make-work projects on public
expenditures and borrowings (and the consequent undermining of the government's
anti-inflation efforts)[4]; second, on his fundamentally unwavering desire to
see Germany retake its place on the international stage, and his recognition
that "as the powers became more involved in their own economic problems in
1931 and 1932 . . . a strong government based on a broad national movement
could use the existing conditions to regain Germany's sovereignty and equality
as a world power."[5] Schacht was convinced that if the German government
were ever to commence a wholesale reindustrialization and rearmament in spite
the restrictions imposed by Germany's treaty obligations, it would have to be
during a period lacking clear international consensus among the Great Powers
After the July 1932 elections, which
saw the Nazis obtain more than a third of the seats, he helped the Nazi Wilhelm
Kepler to organize a petition of industrial leaders requesting that President
Hindenburg nominate Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. He returned as
Reichsbanck Chairman on March 17, 1933 after Hitler's rise to power.
Though never a member of the Nazi
Party, Schacht helped to raise funds for the party after meeting with Adolf
Hitler. In August 1934 Hitler appointed Schacht as his Minister of Economics.
Schacht supported public works programs, most notably the construction of
autobahns (highways) to attempt to alleviate unemployment - policies which had
been instituted in Germany under legislation drawn up by Kurt von Schleicher's
government in late 1932, and had in turn influenced Roosevelt's policies. He
also introduced the 'New Plan', Germany's autarchic attempt to distance itself
from foreign entanglements in its economy, in September 1934. Germany had
accrued a massive foreign currency deficit during the Great Depression, and it
continued into the early years of the Nazis' reign. Schacht negotiated several
trade agreements with countries in South America, and South-East Europe,
ensuring that Germany would continue to receive raw materials from those
countries, but that they would be paid in Reichsmarks; thus ensuring that the
deficit would not get any worse; whilst allowing the Nazis to deal with the gap
which had already developed. Schacht also found an innovative solution to the
problem of the government deficit by using mefo bills. He was appointed General
Plenipotentiary for the War Economy in May 1934 and was awarded honorary
membership of the Nazi Party and the Golden Swastika in January 1937.
Though a anti-Semitic, Schacht
disagreed with what he called "unlawful activities" against Germany's
Jewish minority and in August 1935 made a speech denouncing Julius Streicher
and the articles he had been writing in Der Stürmer.
Schacht began to lose power after the
implementation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 by Hermann Göring. He resigned as
Minister of Economics and General Plenipotentiary in November 1937 at the
request of the Minister of Economics, Göring, due to disagreements with Hitler
and Göring over military spending, which he believed would cause inflation. He
was re-appointed President of the Reichsbank until Hitler dismissed him from
his position in January 1939. After this Schacht held the title of Minister
without Portfolio, mainly an honorific title, and received the same salary that
he did as President of the Reichsbank until he was fully dismissed in January
1943.
To greater and lesser degrees, Schacht
was involved in numerous attempted coups in the years between his dismissal
from the Reichsbank and his imprisonment. Indeed, Schacht was one of the main
driving forces behind the 1938 planned coup. At Schacht’s denazification trial
(subsequent to his acquittal at Nuremberg) it was declared by a judge that
“None of the civilians in the resistance did more or could have done more than
Schacht actually did.”.
As a result of the various putsch
attempts between 1938 and 1941, Schacht was arrested on 23 July 1944, accused
of having participated in the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler [1]. He was
sent to Ravensbrück and Flossenburg and finally to Dachau, where he remained
until his liberation and subsequent re-imprisonment by Allied army in April
1945. He was arrested by the Allies and accused of war crimes at the Nuremberg
Trials, but was acquitted and released in 1946. He was again arrested by
Germans, tried in a denazification court and sentenced to eight years in a work
camp, but was released early in September 1948. He formed the Düsseldorfer
Außenhandelsbank Schacht & Co. after his release and became an economic and
financial advisor for developing countries, in particular Non-Aligned heads of
state, often also anti-Zionists. Schacht died in Munich, Germany on 3 June
1970.
Schacht was tried for crimes against
peace in Nuremberg in 1946. His defence was that he was only a banker and
economist, even though evidence showed that he participated in meetings that
directly helped bring the Nazis to power, and that he admitted to breaking the
Treaty of Versailles. He had created schemes to regiment the German workforce
and gut the union movement, even before the election of Hitler.
Louis J Sheehan
Louis J Sheehan, Esquire
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Louis
J Sheehan Esquire
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Schacht was one of the first at
Nuremberg to offer to turn state’s evidence against his co-defendants, using
letters to approach one of the Generals overseeing the trial with the offer of
cooperation. Schacht’s move towards a plea bargain, although eventually quashed
by Justice Jackson, led Goring to make a similar overture towards the
prosecutors.
The judges were split on his case due
to a lack of evidence against Schacht during the war years, with the British
judges favoring acquittal and the Russian judges particularly opposed.
Robert Jackson, a member of the
prosecution team and an Associate Justice of the United States, was so outraged
at the trial result that he lashed out at Schacht as "the most dangerous
and reprehensible type of all opportunists, someone who would use a Hitler for
his own ends, and then claim, after Hitler was defeated, to have been against
him all the time. He was part of a movement that he knew was wrong, but was in
it just because he saw it was winning."
However, in its final decision
(barely) vindicating Schacht, the tribunal declared that “rearmament of itself
is not criminal under the Charter . . . To be a crime against Peace under
Article 6 of the Charter it must be shown that Schacht carried out his
rearmament as part of the Nazi plans to wage aggressive wars”. The judges went
on to note that as a result of Schacht’s dismissal from the presidency of the
Reichsbank in 1939, the case hung on entirely on whether Schacht had been
cognizant of the plans of the government prior to his dismissal from the
presidency of the Reichsbank. The trial judges asserted that insufficient
evidence has been presented to justify such a conclusion, and Schacht was
acquitted – one of only three defendants at Nuremberg to be so released[.
Significant factors in establishing Schacht's innocence included the fact that
he had lost all of his important posts before the war, had kept in close
contact with dissidents such as Hans Bernd Gisevius throughout the war, and had
spent most of the last year of the war as a concentration camp prisoner
himself. His defenders argued that he was just a patriot, who was trying to
make the German economy great. Furthermore, it was argued that when he saw what
atrocities Hitler was committing the evidence suggests he did not
approve[citation needed], and that fundamentally he was not a Nazi party member
and shared very little of their ideology.
Schacht wrote 26 books during his
lifetime, of which at least four have been translated in English:
* The End of Reparations, published in 1931
* Account Settled, published in 1949 after his
acquittal at the Nuremberg Trials
* Confessions of the Old Wizard, an
autobiography published in 1953
* The Magic Of Money, published in 1967
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In May 2004, the White House
dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that
country's interior minister. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats carried instructions
from the State Department transmitted via the CIA's Berlin station because they
were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels,
according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.
Coats informed the German minister
that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for
five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a
request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if
Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action
program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among
countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with
similar allegations.
The Masri case, with new details
gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic
officials, offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda
members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to
detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how
complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in
secret.
The CIA, working with other
intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including
several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist
networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its
foreign partners have made.
Unlike the military's prison for
terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been
freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check
the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that
decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called
"rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.
The CIA inspector general is
investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous
renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.
One official said about three dozen
names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes
several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA
interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college
professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.
"They picked up the wrong people,
who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague
association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.
While the CIA admitted to Germany's
then-Interior Minister Otto Schily that it had made a mistake, it has labored
to keep the specifics of Masri's case from becoming public. As a German
prosecutor works to verify or debunk Masri's claims of kidnapping and torture,
the part of the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained
publicly silent. Masri's attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S.
courts this week.
Masri was held for five months largely
because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit
"believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said.
"She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."
The CIA declined to comment for this
article, as did Coats and a spokesman at the German Embassy in Washington.
Schily did not respond to several requests for comment last week.
CIA officials stress that
apprehensions and renditions are among the most sure-fire ways to take potential
terrorists out of circulation quickly. In 2000, then-CIA Director George J.
Tenet said that "renditions have shattered terrorist cells and networks,
thwarted terrorist plans, and in some cases even prevented attacks from
occurring."
The Counterterrorist Center
After the September 2001 attacks,
pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts
of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the
Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one
of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With
operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on
tips and leads with dramatic speed.
The possibility of missing another
attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and
someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like
others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of
the secretive nature of the subject.
To carry out its mission, the CTC
relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries,
analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone
off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport
where local authorities wait.
Members of the Rendition Group follow
a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks,
they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an
enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for
what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility
operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia,
including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in
classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have
been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.
In the months after the Sept. 11
attacks, the CTC was the place to be for CIA officers wanting in on the fight.
The staff ballooned from 300 to 1,200 nearly overnight.
"It was the Camelot of
counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We
didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun."
Thousands of tips and allegations
about potential threats poured in after the attacks. Stung by the failure to
detect the plot, CIA officers passed along every tidbit. The process of vetting
and evaluating information suffered greatly, former and current intelligence
officials said. "Whatever quality control mechanisms were in play on
September 10th were eliminated on September 11th," a former senior
intelligence official said.
J. Cofer Black, a professorial former
spy who spent years chasing Osama bin Laden, was the CTC's director. With a
flair for melodrama, Black had earned special access to the White House after
he briefed President Bush on the CIA's war plan for Afghanistan.
Colleagues recall that he would return
from the White House inspired and talking in missionary terms. Black, now in
the private security business, declined to comment.
Some colleagues said his fervor was in
line with the responsibility Bush bestowed on the CIA when he signed a top secret
presidential finding six days after the 9/11 attacks. It authorized an
unprecedented range of covert action, including lethal measures and renditions,
disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks against the al Qaeda enemy,
according to current and former intelligence officials. Black's attitude was
exactly what some CIA officers believed was needed to get the job done.
Others criticized Black's CTC for
embracing a "Hollywood model" of operations, as one former longtime
CIA veteran called it, eschewing the hard work of recruiting agents and
penetrating terrorist networks. Instead, the new approach was similar to the
flashier paramilitary operations that had worked so well in Afghanistan, and
played well at the White House, where the president was keeping a scorecard of
captured or killed terrorists.
The person most often in the middle of
arguments over whether to dispatch a rendition team was a former Soviet analyst
with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC's
al Qaeda unit, according to a half-dozen CIA veterans who know her. Her name is
being withheld because she is under cover.
She earned a reputation for being
aggressive and confident, just the right quality, some colleagues thought, for
a commander in the CIA's global war on terrorism. Others criticized her for
being overzealous and too quick to order paramilitary action.
The CIA and Guantanamo Bay
One way the CIA has dealt with
detainees it no longer wants to hold is to transfer them to the custody of the
U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, where defense authorities decide whether to
keep or release them after a review.
About a dozen men have been
transferred by the CIA to Guantanamo Bay, according to a Washington Post review
of military tribunal testimony and other records. Some CIA officials have
argued that the facility has become, as one former senior official put it,
"a dumping ground" for CIA mistakes.
But several former intelligence
officials dispute that and defend the transfer of CIA detainees to military custody.
They acknowledged that some of those sent to Guantanamo Bay are prisoners who,
after interrogation and review, turned out to have less valuable information
than originally suspected. Still, they said, such prisoners are dangerous and
would attack if given the chance.
Among those released from Guantanamo
is Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, apprehended by a CIA
team in Pakistan in October 2001, then sent to Egypt for interrogation,
according to court papers. He has alleged that he was burned by cigarettes,
given electric shocks and beaten by Egyptian captors. After six months, he was
flown to Guantanamo Bay and let go earlier this year without being charged.
Another CIA former captive, according
to declassified testimony from military tribunals and other records, is
Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, a Mauritanian and former Canada resident, who says he
turned himself in to the Mauritanian police 18 days after the 9/11 attacks
because he heard the Americans were looking for him. The CIA took him to
Jordan, where he spent eight months undergoing interrogation, according to his
testimony, before being taken to Guantanamo Bay.
Another is Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni,
an Egyptian imprisoned by Indonesia authorities in January 2002 after he was
heard talking -- he says jokingly -- about a new shoe bomb technology. He was
flown to Egypt for interrogation and returned to CIA hands four months later,
according to one former intelligence official. After being held for 13 months
in Afghanistan, he was taken to Guantanamo Bay, according to his testimony.
The Masri Case
Khaled Masri came to the attention of
Macedonian authorities on New Year's Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of
five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off
steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the Tabanovce
border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate
of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in
a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent telephone interview
from Germany.
The police treated Masri firmly but
cordially, asking about his passport, which they insisted was forged, about al
Qaeda and about his hometown mosque, he said. When he pressed them to let him
go, they displayed their pistols.
Unbeknown to Masri, the Macedonians
had contacted the CIA station in Skopje. The station chief was on holiday. But
the deputy chief, a junior officer, was excited about the catch and about being
able to contribute to the counterterrorism fight, current and former
intelligence officials familiar with the case said.
"The Skopje station really wanted
a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game," a CIA officer said.
Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the
deputy dealt directly with the CTC and the head of its al Qaeda unit.
In the first weeks of 2004, an
argument arose over whether the CIA should take Masri from local authorities
and remove him from the country for interrogation, a classic rendition
operation.
The director of the al Qaeda unit
supported that approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should
be imprisoned and interrogated immediately.
Others were doubtful. They wanted to
wait to see whether the passport was proved fraudulent. Beyond that, there was
no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be -- a German citizen of Arab
descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife.
The unit's director won the argument.
She ordered Masri captured and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan.
On the 23rd day of his motel
captivity, the police videotaped Masri, then bundled him, handcuffed and
blindfolded, into a van and drove to a closed-off building at the airport,
Masri said. There, in silence, someone cut off his clothes. As they changed his
blindfold, "I saw seven or eight men with black clothing and wearing
masks," he later said in an interview. He said he was drugged to sleep for
a long plane ride.
Afghanistan
Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was
cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The
first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator:
"You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country
where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will
know."
Masri was guarded during the day by
Afghans, he said. At night, men who sounded as if they spoke American-accented
English showed up for the interrogation. Sometimes a man he believed was a
doctor in a mask came to take photos, draw blood and collect a urine sample.
Back at the CTC, Masri's passport was
given to the Office of Technical Services to analyze. By March, OTS had
concluded the passport was genuine. The CIA had imprisoned the wrong man.
At the CIA, the question was: Now
what? Some officials wanted to go directly to the German government; others did
not. Someone suggested a reverse rendition: Return Masri to Macedonia and
release him. "There wouldn't be a trace. No airplane tickets. Nothing. No
one would believe him," one former official said. "There would be a
bump in the press, but then it would be over."
Once the mistake reached Tenet, he
laid out the options to his counterparts, including the idea of not telling the
Germans. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, and Deputy
Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage argued they had to be told, a position
Tenet took, according to one former intelligence official.
"You couldn't have the president
lying to the German chancellor" should the issue come up, a government
official involved in the matter said.
Senior State Department officials
decided to approach Interior Minister Schily, who had been a steadfast Bush
supporter even when differences over the Iraq war strained ties between the two
countries. Ambassador Coats had excellent rapport with Schily.
The CIA argued for minimal disclosure
of information. The State Department insisted on a truthful, complete
statement. The two agencies quibbled over whether it should include an apology,
according to officials.
Meanwhile, Masri was growing
desperate. There were rumors that a prisoner had died under torture. Masri
could not answer most questions put to him. He said he steadied himself by
talking with other prisoners and reading the Koran.
A week before his release in late May
2004, Masri said he was visited in prison by a German man with a goatee who
called himself Sam. Masri said he asked him if he were from the German
government and whether the government knew he was there. Sam said he could not
answer either question.
"Does my wife at least know I'm
here?" Masri asked.
"No, she does not," Sam
replied, according to Masri.
Sam told Masri he was going to be
released soon but that he would not receive any documents or papers confirming
his ordeal. The Americans would never admit they had taken him prisoner, Sam
added, according to Masri.
On the day of his release, the
prison's director, who Masri believed was an American, told Masri that he had
been held because he "had a suspicious name," Masri said in an
interview.
Several intelligence and diplomatic
officials said Macedonia did not want the CIA to bring Masri back inside the
country, so the agency arranged for him to be flown to Albania. Masri said he
was taken to a narrow country road at dusk. When they let him off, "They
asked me not to look back when I started walking," Masri said. "I was
afraid they would shoot me in the back."
He said he was quickly met by three
armed men. They drove all night, arriving in the morning at Mother Teresa
Airport in Tirana. Masri said he was escorted onto the plane, past all the
security checkpoints, by an Albanian.
Masri has been reunited with his
children and wife, who had moved the family to Lebanon because she did not know
where her husband was. Unemployed and lonely, Masri says neither his German nor
Arab friends dare associate with him because of the publicity.
Meanwhile, a German prosecutor
continues to work Masri's case. A Macedonia bus driver has confirmed that Masri
was taken away by border guards on the date he gave investigators. A forensic
analysis of Masri's hair showed he was malnourished during the period he says
he was in the prison. Flight logs show a plane registered to a CIA front
company flew out of Macedonia on the day Masri says he went to Afghanistan.
Masri can find few words to explain
his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he
said. "I think it's just like in the Arab countries: arresting people,
treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no
laws."
Published on Monday, March 20, 2000 in
the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Art Attack: Gene Stilp Uses Props And
A Wicked Sense Of Humor To Focus Media Attention On Public Policy Issues
by Ralph Nader
Imagine a public interest artist using
the town square as a canvas. Now comes Gene Stilp, a 49-year-old lawyer with a
keen advocacy sense, a nose for news, and the creativity and skills to
communicate a complicated public policy initiative with a prop that's
guaranteed to generate media coverage and capture hearts and minds. Gene is
more at home in the workshop than the courtroom.
Stilp's gallery includes some unusual
works:
A 30-foot ear of corn. This mutant vegetable
greeted the participants at a Food and Drug Administration hearing on
genetically modified foods in Washington, D.C. in late 1999. With about $400,
Stilp and his activist associates assembled the enormous ear of corn out of
chicken wire, 1,000 recycled milk cartons, and twine. The prop was featured in
The New York Times, USA Today, and a myriad of electronic and print sources
throughout the country
A 24-foot SUV. Stilp supplied the Public
Interest Research Group with a 24-foot-long, 14-foot-high, 10-foot-wide
inflatable SUV to help the group call attention to the gas-guzzling SUVs that
are crowding the nations' highways. The SUV prop is hard for the media to avoid
and it helps jolt the public into thinking about the consequences of wasting
energy on oversized vehicles
The Peco burnt-toast toaster. In 1998 the
Pennsylvania state legislature debated electric deregulation. In order to call
attention to a proposed bailout of the nuclear industry, Stilp refashioned a
1963 Airstream Trailer into a 20-foot-long, 12-foot-high toaster. Two
10-foot-long, 4-foot-high pieces of blackened toast were popping out. With the
flick of a remote switch, smoke poured out of the top of the toaster to
replicate burning toast. Signs adorning the toaster proclaimed, "Don't Get
Burned By PECO."
Stilp has been a an outspoken activist
for more than two decades on issues ranging from hunger to nuclear safety. He
is always ready to help concerned citizens make their voices heard in the
corridors of power.
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Stilp's motivation to build props
stems from his desire to help groups that can't afford to buy television time
or newspaper ads. Most Stilp creations start with a creative impulse followed
by a quick trip to the hardware store or junkyard. With bailing wire and
two-by-fours, he begins the job of making an issue move from the mimeograph
machines of local and national activists to daily newspapers and evening news
shows.
Capitalizing on the national attention
generated every February by Groundhog Day, Stilp used Feb. 2 to launch the
first official Global Warming Forecasting Ground Hog. With the U.S. Capitol as
a backdrop, "Globbie," a small, but effective, groundhog sculpture,
predicted adverse climate changes for the coming year.
The corrupting influence
special-interest money has on politics is an important matter. Stilp's approach
to this issue prompted him to spend about $200 to build a full-scale replica of
the Lincoln Bed. (The Lincoln Bedroom was made notorious as a result of
President Clinton's campaign contributors being offered a chance to sleep in
the real Lincoln Bedroom in the White House.)
As the U.S. Congress gathered in
Hershey, Pennsylvania for a "civility retreat" in 1997, they were
greeted by the prop – with an attached meter that recorded donations for time
spent in the bed. This prop focused attention on campaign finance reform and
the congressional and presidential campaign finance abuse investigations, and
resulted in national media coverage of the need for campaign finance reform.
Stilp was interviewed by a host of
national correspondents while he lounged in the "Lincoln Bed." In the
coming year, Stilp hopes to transform his lifelong passion for building props
for causes into an enduring institution called the National Prop Shop. This
nonprofit enterprise will help public interest groups make use of creative props
and incorporate props into their campaign efforts. Stilp wants the activist
community to use the National Prop Shop, but ultimately he would like to see
every community have the ability to assemble local talent to build the props
they might need to dramatize local issues.
People interested in contributing
ideas, materials, or funds for this unique public institution should contact
Stilp at The Prop Shop, 1550 FVCR, Harrisburg, PA 17112.
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