SURE IT WAS A KANGAROO COURT...:

Lessons From Nuremberg (WILLIAM SHAWCROSS, April 9, 2011, NY Times)

GEORGE ORWELL is usually a footsure guide across political battlegrounds. In late 1943, when the tide had turned in the Allies’ favor, he wrote about postwar trials. Oddly, he advocated Hitler and Mussolini slipping away. His verdict for them would not be death unless the Germans and Italians themselves carried out summary executions (as they eventually did in Mussolini’s case).

He wanted “no martyrizing, no St. Helena business.” Above all, he disdained the idea of a “solemn hypocritical ‘trial of war criminals,’ with all the slow cruel pageantry of the law, which after a lapse of time has so strange a way of focusing a romantic light on the accused and turning a scoundrel into a hero.”

For once Orwell missed his step. The Allies did stage a trial of the Nazi war criminals, at Nuremberg. (My father, Hartley, was the chief British prosecutor.) The trial had flaws. To some it will always seem to be “victors’ justice” and it can be called hypocritical in that the Soviet Union, guilty of many of its own crimes against humanity, was an equal partner with the democratic prosecutors and judges. [...]

Nuremberg, lest we forget, was a military tribunal with civilian lawyers and it offered far fewer protections to the Nazis in the dock than the military commissions at Guantánamo will give to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his co-defendants in the 9/11 attacks. Military justice worked then and it can work again today.

...but it was more than they warranted.

Posted by oj at April 9, 2011 6:01 PM
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