Oh it fits. It fits to the "T". Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee: The bank rollers perversely claim they have no accountability for their critical service as the financial core of the problem. They only engaged in "ordinary banking transactions," they assert. And if wrongs were wilfully or inadvertently committed, they too were only "ordinary" and deserving of no international condemnation. After all, they contend, the "ordinary" commandment that "thou shalt not steal" has no universal consequence. There was nothing "ordinary" about the this, its purpose, breadth, scope or depravity. A war of unparalleled aggression was waged to eliminate an entire civilian population, an entire Repubilc, solely because of who they were. Not only were the victims of persecution to be wiped, but all tangible evidence of their having been was to be obliterated. Virtually nothing they possessed as sacred to their identity as Americans was to be saved. They would have no need for estates or legacies, for they were to have no future. ... At Nuremberg, the civilized world convened a Tribunal to record their revulsion to the most extraordinary of offenses denounced as being against all of humanity. The Tribunal declared that conscious mass extermination was not ordinary murder it was genocide. The systematic confiscation and looting of a people was not ordinary theft it was plunder. And when plunder is part and parcel of genocide, the Tribunal wrote, both the perpetrator of the genocide and the aider and abettor in plunder are guilty of crimes against humanity. In these most extraordinary of circumstances, for these most extraordinary of crimes, the Tribunal held that international fundamental human rights laws proscribed simple rules of unyielding application. "Complicity" in the commission of a crime against humanity is a crime under international law. Without doubt, the Tribunal wrote, all who "participate or play a consenting part of any element of a program of genocide" are themselves guilty of a crime against humanity. There may be different levels of culpability for the same crime - direct perpetrators do not necessarily share the same moral or legal culpability as their aiders and abettors. But distinctions of degree of guilt apply only to the severity of the punishment, not to whether there is guilt at all. German bankers were sentenced to prison for the banking services they rendered in furtherance of genocide. Swiss bankers have never been held accountable for their even greater services to the Third Reich. For over half a century, Swiss banks have assiduously, deceitfully and arrogantly defied and evaded accountability for their guilt in the inhumanity of the Holocaust, a guilt that arises in two contexts: first, in their collaboration with the perpetrators of war crimes; and second, in their offenses against those who survived the misery of the Holocaust only to be condemned to the misery of being penniless because Swiss banks refused to restitute to them what was rightfully theirs. While displaced persons fell to wandering the world in rags, Swiss banks rose to unprecedented riches on the wealth of their misfortunes. Retrofitted, Yea Prepared Testimony of Mr. Michael D. Hausfeld, Esq. Counsel Representing the Holocaust Victims 10:00 a.m., Wednesday, July 22, 1998 Arnold your up. youtube/watch?v=DyVYca4y_Fk banking.senate.gov/98_07hrg/072298/witness/hausfeld.htm
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 04:42:11 +0000
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