“None of this however, phases the authors ” sb “fazes the authors”

“moves in to get the attention on the” sb “attention of the”

The Vatican ratlines required and enjoyed the cooperation of the OSS / CIA. Collusion between covert agencies of the US military, Nazi war criminals and their Vatican collaborators is extensively documented; calling them entirely separate is intellectually bankrupt, indeed. Google “Licio Gelli” for details.

Regarding the Nazi pedigree of the CIA’s unconventional warfare methods, you might supplement the ample documentation Burghardt supplies by researching Jesse Leaf, sometime Chief CIA analyst on Iran who resigned from the CIA in 1973.
http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/langguthleaf.html

“…taken quite openly…” Actually, many or most of the prominent scientists and engineers imported by the US military were committed Nazis and consequently ineligible for immigration. Some were major war criminals. The OSS / CIA baldly lied about this in order to get them into the country.
http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/miscell/clip_00.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Operation_Paperclip_file.html

Calling Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, whose well-deserved epithet dates from before Burghardt’s birth, “boringly normal” radically denies the facts. Barbie not only deported thousands to death camps, he personally participated in thousands of murders. Who are you kidding?
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/barbie.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Barbie#War_crimes

Your denial of WW2′s relevance is hard to take seriously, particularly from someone who pretends to some knowledge of history, and might even lead an unbiased reader to question your good faith. The patterns exhibited in that enormous fascist assault on democracy prefigure the current crisis in many ways and are in turn clarified by it: Use of a false-flag attack as a pretext for aggressive war, the suspension of fundamental civil rights, perversion of the law against the worker and in favor of the rich, the promotion of ethnic hatred and religious tyranny, the generational continuity of wealthy perpetrators, the creepy reappearance of Wehrmacht helmets, “New World Order”, “Homeland”, and antisemitism.
http://www.1215.org/lawnotes/work-in-progress/hitler/hitler-history.htm

Burghardt’s characterization of counterinsurgency as a tool used entirely by the right against the left is accurate. Calling him ideologically bankrupt on this account, through your implicit equation of low-tech partisans with well-equipped soldiers mustered by the rich, just because they engage each other in “unconventional” war, is absurd, as it’s precisely the lack of parity that makes such fighting unconventional.

If the right uses unconventional warfare on the left, it equals murder and mayhem,

If the left uses unconventional warfare on the right, it is a struggle for social justice.

i.e. the United states using Afgan bandits to fight Russian troops = wrong
Russia using Viet Cong to fight American troops = right

The ratlines existed and priests were involved, and the US certainly recruited people from the German military and intelligence services (as did the Soviets), but the two are quite separate. People that the US wanted to recruit did not need the ratlines. They were quite simply recruited in Germany and any that were taken to the US were taken quite openly by the US military.

Bear in mind also that the Waffen SS were not part of the “ordinary” SS and had no particular experience in fighting partisans. Indeed, as elite troops (the veterans compare themselves to the US Marines), they were unlikely to be wasted fighting partisans in the rear.

Moreover, all this harping about WWII, which ended, don’t forget, 63 years ago, simply indicates Mr Burghardt’s ideological bankruptcy. The reason why the US is going down the toliet is PRECISELY because American thinking is stuck in a 1965 time warp (at best!) whereas the rest of the world has long moved on. 2009′s problems will not be solved by exhuming 1945!

As for Barbie, he wasn’t a “pathological killer”, even assuming that Mr Burghardt knows what that means. The problem with Barbie was that he was boringly normal! Nor have I ever heard of any connection between him and the CIA!