A few words, re: the Human Rights Watch investigator and the Nazi thing…

So, a few words on the Human Rights Watch investigator and the Nazi thing — a story which has been all over the New York Times, the Guardian and other similar publications.

To summarize: Human Rights Watch’s senior military analyst, Marc Garlasco, was discovered by a right-wing Israeli-American blog to have written a monograph on Nazi weapons, to be a collector of Nazi memorabilia and to have extolled the virtues of SS uniforms on an internet bulletin board under the pseudonym Flak88:

German Flack guns used 88 millimeter ammunition and are popularly nicknamed Flack 88s. “88″ is also used as a greeting and symbol by neo-Nazis; in their numerology, it stands for “Heil Hitler.”

As part of Garlasco’s job, he travelled to the Middle East to investigate the Israeli military. Human Rights Watch has investigated Israel in the past; something, naturally, that has annoyed the Israeli government.

It must be said that Human Rights Watch does not appear to have an institutional anti-Israel bias; their investigatons target, basically, the entire world.

With that said, finding out a senior investigator for HRW has a Nazi fascination has been manna from heaven for pro-Israeli activists. Simply put, they lucked out.

I’m not going to write a 1000-word piece on this nonsense; I’m too cramped for time. Too much going on. Frankly, I have better things to worry about.

But I will say this: Garlasco, dude. You’re a senior investigator for one of the world’s best-known — and most feared — NGOs. People will look for any opportunity to crucify you.

So, of all the possible hobbies in the world, you post to the internet about Nazi weapons, praise SS uniforms and write a monograph of Nazi weapons?

Noone is accusing Garlasco of being a Nazi.

However, Garlasco is currently on paid leave from Human Rights Watch while they investigate him. Garlasco, in all likelihood, committed career suicide through his hobby. His top Google results speak of “Mark Garlsco’s downfall” and call him a “nazi-phile,” “nazi obsessed” and speak of “Marc Garlasco’s nazi fetish.”

Being a weapons investigator is extremely difficult work; only a few thousand people in the world are qualified. You must be able to identify the type, variety, caliber and origin of a weapon used. Abu Muqawama captured Garlasco’s genius and talent at military trainspotting:

Garlasco used to serve in the Pentagon and was chief of high value targeting during the opening stages of the Iraq War. Now he travels the world for HRW making sure countries (and non-state actors) are only using the weapons international law says they are allowed to use. Garlasco is such a dork he’s fascinating:

Gazans have noticed that there are bombs that produce mushroom clouds in various shades of red. Here, Garlasco admits, “I can only speculate. It looks like Israel is maybe using a new weapon that it was not using before: DIME – the dense inert metal explosive, consisting of 25 percent TNT and 75 percent tungsten, a heavy metal. You mix the two, in a fine grain, like pepper, and when the bomb hits the ground it aerosolizes. In less than a second, the mist dissipates and explodes.”

He says the advantage of DIME is that “it strikes a very small area, 10 to 20 meters, and the fire it ignites burns out very quickly; if it hits us now, we will die, but no one around us will be hurt. The problem is that when you are killed – you are ripped to shreds and there is nothing left.” And he doesn’t give a flip whether you’re Israeli or Palestinian.

All that thrown away over a hobby. Even a 14-year-old could tell you that including 88 in your internet handle, praising SS uniforms and writing a book on Nazi weapons is a bad idea for Human Rights Watch employees.

With that said, here’s a Flack 88 gun made out of Legos.