Here we go again. I thought my rant against Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) yesterday (LINK) would have tided me over for the week, but not so.
I don’t know if this is worse than Tepco ignoring warnings that its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was susceptible to tsunamis, but it’s deceitful nonetheless (in my opinion, anyway)…
The BBC and Der Spiegel news agencies are reporting today that Germany’s intelligence agency destroyed files on its former Nazi members. But not like right after World War II. In 2007.
According to both papers, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (holy moly), or BND, shredded personnel files of about 250 of its former Nazi officials. The BND said the incident, which has hindered an investigation into the agency’s shady Nazi roots, was “regrettable and annoying.”
Hm. Well, because my faith in people is at an all-time low this week (mainly because of Penn State’s football coach Jerry Sandusky), I’m gonna call bull pucky on that one. I could be wrong, but I think the BND meant to say “timely and fortuitous.”
Earlier this year, the head of the BND (who was retiring already and wouldn’t have to deal with any of this), appointed a four-historian commission to investigate the agency’s origins—namely, its Nazi ties.
According to the BBC, the BND’s founder, Reinhard Gehlen, was a Nazi spy during World War II. Also, about 10% of the BND’s recruits during the Cold War had served in the SS or Gestapo.
Now it turns out that someone in the agency destroyed files on its Nazis. And although no one on the investigating commission is publicly crying foul, I’ll go ahead and do it for them. I don’t believe it was an accident. (That would almost be suspension of disbelief for me this week.)
The commission told Der Spiegel that the destroyed papers included files on BND officials who were “in significant intelligence positions in the SS, the SD [the SS and Nazi Party’s intelligence agency] or the Gestapo.” Furthermore, some of them had been investigated for possible war crimes after 1945.
Supposedly, some people in the BND don’t want to publicize the agency’s roots. (They’re not happy about this current investigation, of course.) But the file shredding was an accident. Yeah, right. Pull the other leg.
