korean crisis escalates grand chessboard tension

north korea attack may be response to drills
from danger room: It’s not the diplomacy-minded former president who is ready to spy, it’s the secretive nuclear submarine named for him. The surveillance and attack capabilities it’s supposed to have could keep the tense situation on the Korean peninsula from spiraling out of control. In the wake of yesterday’s North Korean artillery barrage against a South Korean island, the U.S.S. George Washington is sailing to South Korea to participate in joint exercises.

A statement from the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, which patrols the western Pacific, says the drill was planned before the “unprovoked” North Korean attack, but will demonstrate “the strength of the [South Korea]-U.S. Alliance and our commitment to regional stability through deterrence.” In other words: to stave off another attack, not to initiate a retaliation.

The George Washington aircraft carrier is equipped with 75 planes and around 6,000 sailors. But it’s not coming alone. It’s got the destroyers Lassen, Stethem and Fitzgerald with it, and the missile cruiser Cowpens in tow. Rumor also has it that the carrier strike group will link up with another asset in area: The undersea spy known as the Jimmy Carter, which can monitor and potentially thwart North Korean subs that might shadow the American-South Korea exercises.

According to plugged-in naval blogger Raymond Pritchett, word’s going around Navy circles that the first surveillance assets that the United States had in the air over yesterday’s Korean island battle were drones launched from the Jimmy Carter.

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75th anniversary of the (other) reichstag fire

from 9/11 blogger: 75 years ago today Hitler and the Nazis blamed the burning of the Reichstag (parliament building in Berlin) on (communist) terrorists, despite the lack of evidence, and less than a month later the Enabling Act was passed, giving Hitler dictatorial powers. It didn't take much longer after 9/11 for the Bush gang to get their Patriot Act. Anyone who refuses to see the parallels must be deaf, dumb and blind.

executed reichstag arsonist finally wins pardon

from guardian: An unemployed Dutch bricklayer who was made a scapegoat for one of the defining moments of 20th-century German history has been pardoned for his crime 75 years later.

Marinus van der Lubbe, 24, was beheaded after being convicted of setting fire to the Reichstag, an event Hitler used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and establish a dictatorship.

But Van de Lubbe's conviction has been overturned by the federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, after a lawyer in Berlin alerted her to the fact that he had yet to be exonerated under a law passed in 1998. The law allowed pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the concept that Nazi law "went against the basic ideas of justice."

But the exoneration is only symbolic and will not lead to compensation for Van de Lubbe's heirs.