Mark Garlasco Of Human Right Watch Suspended After Blog Mere Rhetoric Reveals His Nazi Collection Obsession

Babba comments that Garlasco goes by the name of Flak88 in his Nazi Memorabilia discussion groups. 88 is White Power code for Heil Hitler. H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

You might have a bit of trouble believing it, but it's true.

UPDATE (FROM COMMENTER TOTAL):

The Flak 88 was a legendary German anti-air and anti-tank artillery piece in WWII. I would like to believe that he's just talking about the artillery pieces, but since there is undoubtedly a double meaning, I'm not sure what he is implying exactly. It could be coincidental or it could be intentional. The one thing for sure is that the negatives seem to keep piling up against Garlasco and there is nothing that he or HRW can do to salvage his shattered reputation.

From the New York Times:

A leading human rights group has suspended its senior military analyst following revelations that he is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press

Marc Garlasco

The group, Human Rights Watch, had initially thrown its full support behind the analyst, Marc Garlasco, when the news of his hobby came out last week. On Monday night, the group shifted course and suspended him with pay, “pending an investigation,” said Carroll Bogert, the group’s associate director.

“We have questions about whether we have learned everything we need to know,” she said.

The suspension comes at a time of heightened tension between, on one side, the new Israeli government and its allies on the right, and the other side, human rights organizations that have been critical of Israel. In recent months, the government has pledged an aggressive approach toward the groups to discredit what they argue is bias and error.

Injected suddenly into that heated conflict, word of Mr. Garlasco’s interest seemed startling to many. The disclosure ricocheted across the Internet: Mr. Garlasco, an American, was not only a collector, he has written a book, more than 400 pages long, about Nazi-era medals. His hobby, inspired he said by a German grandfather conscripted into Hitler’s army, was revealed on a pro-Israel blog, Mere Rhetoric Mere Rhetoric, which quoted his enthusiastic postings on collector sites under the pseudonym “Flak88” — including, “That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!”

It was a Rorschach moment in the conflict between Israel and its critics. The revelations were, depending on who is talking, either incontrovertible proof of bias or an irrelevant smear.

The Mere Rhetoric posting said Mr. Garlasco’s interests explained “anti-Israel biases.”

After the report about Mr. Garlasco came out, Mr. Dermer called it “perhaps a new low.”

At first, Human Rights Watch, a global organization with headquarters in New York, issued an unequivocal statement of support for Mr. Garlasco, saying he “has never held or expressed Nazi or anti-Semitic views.”

Ms. Bogert at the time said his work has been “extensively reviewed, lawyered, scrutinized, pulverized by our program and legal staff, and we have not in six years ever had cause to question his professional judgment.”

Mr. Garlasco, who worked at the Pentagon helping to target bombs in the second Persian Gulf war, has since traveled the world for Human Rights Watch, investigating and writing reports of the alleged use of white phosphorus munitions in Gaza, cluster munitions in Russia and Georgia, and other military practices in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.

Ms. Bogert called the attacks on Mr. Garlasco and her group “a distraction from the real issue, which is the Israeli government’s behavior.”

But some who firmly support Human Rights Watch were left unsettled by the researcher’s extracurricular activities.

Helena Cobban, a blogger and activist who is on the group’s Middle East advisory committee, asked on her blog, Just World News, if Mr. Garlasco’s activities were “something an employer like Human Rights Watch ought to be worried about? After consideration, I say Yes.”

More from JPost (with thanks to Total):

"I thought that nothing could top a human rights organization trying to raise money in Saudi Arabia, but I was apparently wrong," said Ron Dermer, referring to HRW's fundraising efforts in the kingdom earlier this year, using its reports against Israel as a sales pitch. "A war crimes investigator who is an avid collector and trader in Nazi memorabilia is perhaps a new low."

Oh, really Ms. Bogert? It seems the real problem is the hypocritcal behaviour of your lousy excuse for a human rights watchdog. Raising money in Saudi Arabia with an anti-semetic marketing pitch? What a way to promote human rights! Forget about your Nazi-obsessed collector/documented civilian killer.

And still more, from the Jerusalem Post Blogs section:

Before joining HRW, he worked as a senior intelligence analyst on Iraq at the Pentagon. It is obviously somewhat unclear how any of this qualifies Garlasco for his work at HRW, where he "specializes in battle damage assessment, military operations, and interrogations."

In this context it is also quite revealing to consider a letter written by HRW Associate Director Carroll Bogert to protest the publication of news about the controversy surrounding Garlasco in the British paperThe Guardian.

Bogert argues in this letter that "[the] fact that Marc Garlasco has been cited by your newspaper 19 times since he joined Human Rights Watch six years ago ... testifies to his authority as a military expert."

Really? It's that easy to become a military expert?

But it is definitely worthwhile to read the entire letter, because it provides an excellent illustration of the rigid ideological stance of HRW. Consider this line of "argument":

The fact that the Israeli foreign ministry is spreading such ad hominem attacks against him [i.e. Garlasco] should have been a warning sign, not a green light to publish. The allegations of pro-Nazi sympathies are part of a larger campaign to smear non-governmental organisations which criticise the Israel Defence Forces' conduct of the Gaza offensive."

Unmistakably, this echoes one of the favorite mantras of (semi-) professional Israel-bashers: Whatever comes from the Israeli government or any group or individual that can be labeled as "pro-Israel" should be dismissed out of hand as "propaganda."

Since Bogert brings up criticism of the IDF's conduct during the recent campaign in Gaza - which she of course describes as an "offensive" despite the fact that it came after some 3000 rocket and mortar attacks launched from Gaza in 2008 alone - it is most interesting to see how Garlasco once explained the high civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Some of Garlasco's relevant statements have been posted on several blogs, highlighting his explanation in a CBS interview:

'I don't think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they're not killing civilians,' Garlasco points out. 'If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting killed?' Pelley asks. 'Because the Taliban are violating international law,' says Garlasco, 'and because the U.S. just doesn't have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people's homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs.'"

Sounds like the dilemmas the IDF is facing in Gaza, doesn't it?

So how come Garlasco shows so much understanding for the predicament faced by US forces in Afghanistan, and so little for the challenges the IDF faces in trying to defend southern Israel against the rocket threat from Gaza?

This question becomes even harder to answer once you check out the entire CBS interview, which sheds some more light on what Garlasco was doing in the Pentagon:

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes how many civilians he was allowed to kill around each high-value target - targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership. 'Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem,' Garlasco explains. 'But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.' Garlasco says before the invasion of Iraq he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets - Iraqi officials. But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, 'a couple of hundred civilians at least' were killed."

In other words, in his previous job Garlasco contributed to the unnecessary deaths of "a couple of hundred civilians at least," and in his current job he goes after those faced with the same difficult task of fighting wars that inevitably cost the lives of innocent civilians.