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General sports articles that range from teams to drug testing to amateur sports.

Native Americans Approve Redskins Name

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INDIANS TO REDSKINS NAME-CHANGE ADVOCATES: GET A LIFE

Nine in 10 Native Americans say they are not offended by the Washington Redskins name, according to a new Washington Post poll. This is basically the same result produced by the last major survey on this matter, conducted by Annenberg Public Policy Center in 2004.

Thus, the national movement to force the Redskins to change their name, though successful with many white liberals, has utterly failed to move the needle when it comes to Indians — the allegedly aggrieved group.

Here was the question:

The professional football team in Washington calls itself the Washington Redskins. As a native American, is that name offensive, or doesn’t it bother you?

90 percent answered “does not bother me.” 9 percent said “offensive.” 1 percent had no opinion.

According to the Post, responses were broadly consistent regardless of age, income, education, political party, and proximity to reservations. Even among those who self-identified as liberal, 80 percent were not offended.

I love the quotations from Indians in the Post’s article. They include:

*I’m proud of being Native American and of the Redskins. I’m not ashamed of that at all. I like that name.

*I really don’t mind it. I like it. . . . We call other natives ‘skins,’ too.

*The name is nothing to me.

*For me, it doesn’t make any difference.

*Let’s start taking care of our people and quit worrying about names like Washington Redskins.

*It’s 100 people okay with the situation, and one person has a problem with it, and all of a sudden everyone has to conform,. You’ll find people who don’t like puppies and kittens and Santa Claus. . . .

The name-change project has been driven by left-winger Ray Halbritter of the Oneida Nation. Halbritter and certain others associated with the Oneida Nation have become rich thanks to casinos.

Their wealth and involvement in Democratic politics have gained them the influence they deploy in the effort to force the Redskins to change their name. However, as the Washington Post’s poll shows, Halbritter and his fellow casino-enriched tribe members are out of touch with ordinary American Indians.

Halbritter and others who make it their business to get worked up over very little will continue their crusade against the Redskins. They will argue that it is inappropriate for the name of a professional sports team to offend even a small percentage of a population that historically has been badly mistreated in America.

But the poll demolishes the only good argument for a forced name change. That argument isn’t that the name “Redskins” offends some people — as the last Indian quoted above says, nowadays you can find people who are offended by just about anything.

The potentially winning argument is that “Redskins” is a racial slur. But if 90 percent of those said to be victims of the alleged slur aren’t offended, this argument evaporates. How can a word that’s inoffensive to the supposed target be a slur?

Hail to the Redskins!

MLB: The PED Problem Expanded

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When I was an MLB executive, I was involved in player relations. Of primary concern was player health and safety and the use of “recreational drugs,” alcohol, marijuana and cocaine was examined in detail. The effort became one of establishing a method for identifying and treating those with drug abuse problems. 

Where the use of illegal drugs, marijuana, and cocaine involved potential law enforcement issues, the abuse of alcohol was paramount and the most common. MLB and the MLBPA established a player support program for alcoholic players and other drug abusers.

In the 1980’s, the use of performance enhancing drugs in the steroid class became very apparent by the changing physique of certain players and dramatic improvement in performance. Homerun production increased to levels never seen before.

MLB and the union instituted a drug testing program that has resulted in significant reduction is such drug use, but positive tests show that it is still a problem. 

The problem of recreational drugs has also declined as players realize that there is no performance, hence, career-enhancing effect. The problem of alcohol continues, but the discovery of this problem is  difficult and often goes undetected.    

This article discussed these problems. They are real, threaten the long-term health of players  and must be dealt with more thoroughly. 

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PEDs Not The Only Drugs Affecting Performance

by Megan Kim3 May 2016, 11:54AM

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

Just how much responsibility does the league have in treating substance abuse?

Right now, the baseball world is reeling from the recent suspensions of Toronto’s Chris Colabello and Florida’s Dee Gordon. There will no doubt be plenty of buzz around the validity of the current MLB drug policy, and for good reason. However, amidst the renewed interest in PED use, it may be a good time to remember that they’re not the only type of drugs that are being abused.

Bret Boone, former MLB second baseman, recently announced the release of his new book, which comes out May 10. In the book, he details his struggles with alcoholism and how his dependency derailed his career.

From the outside, Boone’s steep drop in performance could easily be attributed to aging, and most people did exactly that. After all, it isn’t uncommon for players to begin to decline as they get older. As it was, though, Boone reveals the fall-off in his level of play was due to his dependence on alcohol, which brings to light an issue that isn’t discussed nearly as often as PED’s — substance abuse that has absolutely nothing to do with steroids or similar drugs.

Boone’s struggle is reportedly well-documented in his upcoming book, but his case isn’t the only high-profile one in recent years. Just last season, C.C. Sabathia shocked the baseball world when he checked himself into rehab before the New York Yankees’ final game of the regular season.

In terms of baseball, the decision may have been a costly one: The Yankees went on to lose the wild card game to the Astros. Of course, even if Sabathia had been on the mound that evening, a game can’t be won without scoring runs — and the Yankees didn’t, getting shut out by Dallas Keuchel.

Wild card game loss or not, it’s difficult to blame Sabathia for taking care of himself. In his essay for The Players’ Tribune, Sabathia offered up a poignant quote. “So many of the major choices in my life, going back to when I was just a kid, have been baseball decisions. But this was a life decision.”

To the credit of the entire Yankees organization, everyone, from players to coaches to management, was supportive of Sabathia’s decision. However, Sabathia’s highly visible situation raised an interesting point: Is the league doing enough to help players who are struggling from substance abuse?

The Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, agreed upon by the MLBPA and the league, will end its term in December 2016 and presumably be renegotiated or revised for the next collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This current iteration covers protocol for evaluating and treating players who have a problem with drugs of abuse in addition to PED’s. Alcohol falls under the “drugs of abuse” category, as do other recreational drugs (including but not limited to cocaine, LSD, opiates, and marijuana).

It’s difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program when it comes to drugs of abuse, in part because players who take part in a treatment program are entitled to confidentiality. The treatment programs vary by case and may include any combination of counseling, inpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, and follow-up testing. In cases of drugs of abuse, unlike in cases of positivePED results, players’ names are not released to the public.

In addition, there is no routine testing for drugs of abuse. A player is tested for drugs of abuse only when there is reason to believe that such a test is necessary. Players are entitled to their privacy, and no doubt testing for drugs of abuse on top of PED’s would introduce a whole new set of problems (not least of which is the legality of some of drugs of abuse — alcohol is legal, and so is marijuana in certain regions).

Of course, some drugs of abuse are illegal. If a player tests positive for an illegal substance like cocaine, they may be suspended. The length of suspension depends on both the substance and whether the player has a history of drug abuse. Alcohol isn’t illegal, though, and suspensions for alcohol abuse would be based on a blatant refusal to adhere to a treatment plan.

In any case, the lack of regular testing for drugs of abuse means that players can potentially slide under the radar for as long as they can keep signs of drug or alcohol addiction to a minimum. Boone did, and everyone attributed his slide to other causes. Only now, well after the end of his career, are we hearing about his battle with alcoholism. Sabathia did, and only his own admission of his struggle alerted the public to his alcohol problem at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Baseball Code Is Tired

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6:12 PM, MAY 16, 2016 | By LEE SMITH

Rougned Odor (Credit: Keith Allison)

Yesterday, Texas Rangers’ pitcher Matt Bush hit Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Jose Bautista with a pitch. Running from first on a groundball to third, Bautista slid hard, late, and illegally into Rangers’ second baseman Rougned Odor. The infielder threw wildly on the double play, but didn’t miss when he lined up Bautista and clocked him squarely in the jaw.

As if to demonstrate exactly how ridiculous and out of place fighting is in baseball, journalists and commentators clearly thrilled by the violence had trouble describing what kind of punch Odor threw at the Toronto slugger. It was a right jab, said some; no, opined other scribes, ’twas a mighty right hook. Actually, it was a regular right cross, a well-timed, well-placed punch thrown by someone who clearly knows what he’s doing. However, it barely dazed Bautista. The chin, as Canelo Alvarez’s knockout of Amir Khan two weeks ago reminded us, is humanity’s on-off switch. Hit someone there right, and it shuts down the nervous system. But Bautista, obviously surprised by the punch, didn’t even buckle. Sports sites featured the punch like it was the biggest thing that happened in baseball all weekend, which is a shame because it overshadowed a really good baseball story—Matt Bush’s big-league debut after 12 years in the wilderness.

Odor will almost surely be suspended for several games, and likely Bautista, too, for a nasty slide. But they’re getting off lucky because they could have been hurt badly, perhaps even with career-ending injuries. But, say some, that’s the way baseball should be played—hard and in observance of baseball’s unwritten rules. After all, Bautista flipped his bat in a playoff game against the Texas club last year—and in this perverse, pseudo-macho understanding of baseball, he got what was coming to him seven months later with a 98 mph fastball in the back.

It was Bautista’s three-run homer in the seventh inning of game five of the ALDS last year that put the Blue Jays ahead for good and sent them to the ALCS—but it was the bat flip that fans seem to remember, most of them favorably. It wasn’t as momentous as all that—as the actual home run, for instance—but it punctuated the moment, like a mic drop. “I didn’t plan anything that I did,” Bautistasaid at the time of his bat flip. “And so I still don’t even know how I did it.”

The person who was most upset with Bautista’s show of emotion? Yep, the pitcher who gave up the blast, Sam Dyson. “I told [on-deck batter Edward Encarnacion] Jose needs to calm that down, just kind of respect the game a little more,” Dyson said. “He’s a huge role model for the younger generation that’s coming up playing this game, and I mean he’s doing stuff that kids do in Wiffle ball games and backyard baseball. It shouldn’t be done.”

What nonsense. Dyson got beat. He got beat by another man in front of tens of thousands of people in the ballpark and millions more watching on TV. And that is precisely what makes baseball a great human drama—two people challenging each other, with success and failure on the line, on either side of which is shame, shame in front of others for losing. Loss and the prospect of loss is part of the event. Bautista wasn’t rubbing Dyson’s face in it, he deserved to exult. In that moment, Bautista was out of his body, enjoying the homer, the spectacle, the event as much as anyone watching.

Cut to yesterday. Matt Bush wasn’t even on the Rangers roster last year. He was still in prison, serving a 51-month term for DUI with great bodily harm. Bush was the first overall pick in the 2004 amateur draft, drafted by the San Diego Padres out of a San Diego high school as an infielder, with a good bat, good hands, good speed and range, and a rocket for an arm. The 18-year-old Bush didn’t hit much in the minor leagues—some reports say he was too hung over to hit. Drinking was a big problem, so was his lousy, entitled attitude, and his careless violence, like beating up a high school freshman, and throwing a baseball at a woman who messed with him at a party.

The Padres moved Bush to the mound in 2007, then dealt him to the Blue Jays organization in 2009. Bush played in the Tampa Bay Rays system from 2010 until spring training 2012 when he ran over a 72-year-old man and was sent to jail. Here’s ESPN’s account of Bush’s prison term, his comeback, how he was scouted in the parking lot of a Golden Corral, how the Texas organization has taken chances on other hard-luck cases with talent, like Josh Hamilton. It’s a really moving story, especially the concern Bush’s dad feels for his troubled but gifted boy. Maybe finally he is really learning how to become a man and accept responsibility, and he will become a man before the father dies and leaves his son alone in the world.

Maybe that’s why Bush threw at Bautista yesterday—perhaps he was trying to prove he’s a big leaguer, a solid teammate. A man who knows he has responsibilities and fulfills them. Or maybe someone told him that Bautista had to eat a fastball, because that’s what the big league code of honor dictated. After all, he flipped his bat last October.

The last guy you want to confuse with a stupid code that requires athletes to throw baseballs at their colleagues’ bodies and heads is a kid who because he was unable to manage his reckless self-pity nearly killed a man. Baseball, like Bryce Harper says, is supposed to be fun, and he’s right that the code is tired. But there is something serious about the game, too, which is the drama staged between the pitcher and hitter, because it’s about failure and success, embarrassment and shame, humility and pride, and how adults are to manage these things in public and private, too. I hope Matt Bush succeeds.

Top Ten Spies of All Time

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Spies have been an invaluable tool for Generals from Julius Ceasar to the present day. Here is a list of the ten most famous. My favorite is the last listed, the Russian spy in Japan from 1933 on. He told the Russians that the Japanese were not attacking in the East which allowed the Russians to move troops to the defense of Moscow in 1941. And that made a critical difference.  

 

Top 10 Famous Spies

JAMIE FRATER AUGUST 24, 2007

 

In and out of wartime, spies play an essential role in information gathering for their nations (and, on occasion, as double-spies for other nations). The spies listed here are the most famous in history.

1. Mata Hari Born: 1876; Died: 1917

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Mata Hari in a dancing costume

Spied For: Germany (and Possibly France)

Mata Hari was the stage-name for Dutch-born Margaretha Geertruida (Grietje) Zelle who was an exotic dancer and high class prostitute in Paris. In 1905, after divorcing her husband, she began her career as an exotic dancer, taking the name Mata Hari (meaning “sun” or “Eye of the Dawn”). She posed herself as a princess from Java. Posing as an exotic person was possible in those days because the lack of telecommunications. During this period of her life she was often photographed in scant clothing or nude.

She mixed with the upper class and became a courtesan to many important high-ranking military men and politicians. This put her in a very good position to gather information. During World War 1, the Netherlands remained a neutral nation, enabling Mata Hari, a Dutch national, to cross national borders freely. At one point she was interviewed by British Intelligence and she admittedly to being a spy for the French. The French later denied this. It is still unknown whether this was true.

In January, 1917, the German Military Attache in Madrid sent an encoded radio signal to Berlin, stating that they were receiving excellent information from a German spy codenamed H-21. French intelligence intercepted the messages and were able to identify H-21 as Mata Hari. On February 13, 1917, Mata Hari was arrested in her Paris hotel room. She was subsequently tried for espionage and found guilty. She was executed by Firing Squad on the 15th of September, 1917 at the age of 41.

2. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Born: 1915, 1918; Died: 1953

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The Rosenbergs

Spied For: The Soviet Union

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American Communists who were executed for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. They met in the Young Communist League in 1936, where he was a leader. They had two sons. Julius was recruited by the KGB in 1942 and was regarded as one of their top spies. He passed classified reports from Emerson Radio, including a fuze design which was later used to shoot down a U-2 in 1960.

Julius also recruited many people sympathetic to the cause to assist the KGB. He provided the KGB with thousands of documents from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics including a complete set of design and production drawings for the Lockheed’s P-80 Shooting Star. A former machinist at Los Alamos (the US Nuclear Development Area), Sergeant David Greenglassconfessed to having passed secret information on to the USSR, and in doing so, implicated his brother-in-law: Julius Rosenberg. He initially denied any involvement by his sister Ethel. The Rosenbergs were arrested.

In 1951 the case against the Rosenbergs began. Greenglass, the prosecution’s main witness, told the court that his sister Ethel had typed nuclear secrets he gave her at a meeting in their home, and that he gave Julius a sketch of a cross-section of an implosion type nuclear bomb. Both Rosenbergs were found guilty and sentenced to death. Their conviction gave fuel to Senator McCarthy’sinvestigations into anti-American activities. They were both executed by electric-chair in Sing Sing Prison in 1953.

3. Aldrich Ames Born: 1941

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Ames in FBI custody (1994)

Spied For: The Soviet Union

Ames is a former CIA Counter-intelligence Officer who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1994. On his first assignment as a case officer, he was stationed in Ankara, Turkey, where his job was to target Soviet intelligence officers for recruitment. Due to financial problems in his personal life as a result of alcohol abuse and high spending, Ames began spying for the Soviet Union in 1985, when he walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington to offer secrets for money.

Ames was assigned to the CIA’s European office where he had direct access to the identities of CIA operatives in the KGB and Soviet Military. The information hesupplied to the Soviets lead to the compromise of at least 100 CIA agents and to the execution of at least 10. He ultimately gave the USSR the names of every CIA operative working in their country; for this they paid him 4.6 million dollars. Ames used the money to live well beyond his means as a CIA agent, buying jewelry, cars, and a $500,000 house.

In early 1985, the CIA began to notice that they were losing their “assets” at a very rapid rate. For unknown reasons they were not willing, in the early stages, to believe that they had been infiltrated by the KGB, instead presuming the leak to be via bugging devices. When the FBI were finally brought in to investigate, Ames became the primary suspect. Fearing he would defect on a CIA trip to Russia, The FBI arrested him at the airport with his wife. He was given a life sentence and is incarcerated in the US Penitentiary in Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

4. Giacomo Casanova Born: 1725; Died: 1798

Giacomo-Casanova
Casanova, the great lover

Spied For: Venetian Inquisitors

Casanova, born in Venice, is most well known for his womanizing and his book The Story of My Life which gives the best account of life in the eighteenth century that we have. Due to the financial support for many patrons of his mother (an actress) he was able to go to school to receive a very good education. This enabled him to become a lawyer. Over many years his romantic affairs with women in power made him a very powerful man. He gained and lost riches at a rapid rate (in one case he lost the equivalent of over 1 million Euros in one night).

Between the years of 1774 and 1782, he worked as a spy for the Venetian Inquisitors of State. It is not known what his role involved as his famous diary ended the year he began his work. In 1782 he was exiled from Venice for spreading libel against one of the City patricians.

After his exile he became a librarian and lived out his life in the service of the Chateaux of Dux in Bohemia.

5. Klaus Fuchs Born: 1911; Died: 1988

Fuchssecuritybadge
ID photo of Klaus Fuchs

Spied For: The Soviet Union

Fuchs was a German-born theoretical physicist who worked in Los Alamos on the atom bomb project. He was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first fission weapons and early models of the hydrogen bomb. Whilst attending university in Germany, Fuchs became involved with the Communist Party of Germany. After a run-in with the newly installedNazi government, he fled to England where he earned his PhD in physics. For a short time he worked on the British atomic bomb project.

It was while he was working for the British that he began to give information to the Soviets. He reasoned that they had the right to know what the British and the Americans were developing. In 1943 he was transferred to the United States to assist on the Manhattan project. From 1944 he worked in New Mexico at Los Alamos.

For two years he gave his KGB contacts theoretical plans for building a hydrogen bomb. He also provided key data on the production of uranium 235, allowing the Soviets to determine the number of bombs possessed by the United States. On his return to the United Kingdom in 1946, he was interrogated as a result of the cracking of some Soviet ciphers. He was tried and sentenced to fourteen years in prison, the maximum term under British law for passing military secrets to a friendly nation. he was released after nine years and immediately moved toGermany where he lived out the remainder of his life.

6. Major John Andre Born: 1750; Died: 1780

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British Officer John Andre

Spied For: The British

John Andre was a British officer hanged as a spy during the AmericanRevolutionary war. At the age of 20 he joined the British Army and moved to North America to join the occupying forces. He was a great favorite in society, both in Philadelphia and New York during their occupation by the British Army. During his nearly nine months in Philadelphia, André occupied Benjamin Franklin’s house, where it is said he took items from Franklin’s home when the British left Philadelphia.

In 1779, he became adjutant-general of the British Army with the rank of Major. In April, he was placed in charge of the British Secret Intelligence. By the next year (1780) he had begun to plot with American General Benedict Arnold, who commanded West Point, and had agreed to surrender it to the British for £20,000 — a move that would enable the British to cut New England off from the rest of the rebellious colonies.

Using common clothes and a false passport, Andre traveled toward New York with documents supplied by Arnold. He was stopped by three men at gunpoint. During the following conversation in which both parties were confused over the allegiance of the others, Andre admitted he was British. The three men searched him and found the papers he was hiding. He was put on trial before a board of senior officers. On September 29, 1780, the board found Andre guilty of being behind American lines “under a feigned name and in a disguised habit”, and that:

“Major Andre, Adjutant-General to the British army, ought to be considered as a Spy from the enemy, and that agreeable to the law and usage of nations, it is their opinion, he ought to suffer death.”

He was hanged as a spy at Tappan on October 2, 1780.

7. Nathan Hale Born: 1755; Died: 1776

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The execution of Nathan Hale

Spied For: The Continental Army

Nathan Hale was a captain in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He is Widely considered to be America’s first spy after he volunteered for an intelligence-gathering mission, but was caught by the British. He is best remembered for his speech before his hanging, in which he said: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”.

Hale was born in Connecticut and went to Yale University where he graduated with first class honors. After leaving University he became a teacher until the break-out of the Revolutionary war in 1775. He immediately joined a Connecticut militia, becoming a first Sergeant. During the Battle of Long Island, Hale volunteered to go behind enemy lines to monitor the movements of the British. He disguised himself as a Dutch teacher and made his way to New York. He was captured in a tavern after he was tricked into betraying himself as a patriot. He was apprehended near Flushing Bay in Queens.

He was reportedly questioned and found with physical evidence. According to the traditions at the time, he was found guilty of being an illegal combatant – a crime carrying the death penalty. He was taken to what is now 66th Street and Third Avenue and hanged. He was 21 years old. A British officer wrote this of Hale at the execution:

“He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good Officer, to obey any orders given him by his Commander-in-Chief; and desired the Spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.”

8. Belle Boyd Born: 1844; Died: 1900

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Confederate Spy, Belle Boyd

Spied For: The Confederates

Bella Boyd, born Maria Isabella Boyd, was a confederate spy in the American Civil War. She operated from her father’s hotel and gave valuable information to Confederate generals. Her career in espionage had a rather startling beginning: when a group of Union soldiers broke into her parents home with the intention of raising the US flag, one of them insulted Belle’s mother. Belle pulled out a pistol and shot one of them. She was 17 years old. A board of inquiry acquitted her but she was placed under surveillance. She profited from this by charming military secrets out of at least one of the Union sentries guarding her. She later wrote of him:

“To him, I am indebted for some very remarkable effusions, some withered flowers, and a great deal of important information.”

Belle passed the secrets she learned to the generals through her slave Eliza Hopewell. One evening in mid 1862 she overheard a general laying out plans for a move that would temporarily lower the Union military presence at Front Royal. That evening Belle rode to a confederate general and confided the details to him. When the confederates rode on Front Royal, Belle ran through bullets to greet the captain. For her contributions she was awarded the Southern Cross of Honor.

Belle was arrested after her lover gave her up on July 29, 1862. She was held for a month in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington but was freed one month later. She was arrested again but was set free on that occasion also. After a short time living in England, she returned to the united States and toured the country giving talks on her time as a Civil War spy. She died, during her tour in Wisconsin, ofTyphoid at the age of 56.

9. The Cambridge Five Born: 20th Century; Died: 20th Century

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Cambridge Five Wanted Poster

Spied For: The Soviet Union

The Cambridge Five was a ring of Soviet spies in the UK who passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and into the early 1950s. It has been suggested they may also have been responsible for passing Soviet disinformation to the Nazis. Whilst they are called the Cambridge Five, the fifth member is still unknown. Here is a short profile of each of the four known members:

Kim Philby: Of the five, Philby is believed to have done the most damage to British and American intelligence, providing classified information to the Soviet Union that caused the deaths of scores of agents. He was born in India to St. John Philby, a British officer and eventual advisor to the King of Saudia Arabia.

Donald Duart Maclean: Donald was recruited as a straight penetration agent while still an undergraduate at Cambridge. His actions are widely thought to have contributed to the 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin and the onset of the Korean War. Maclean was brevetted a colonel in the Soviet KGB.

Guy Burgess: Burgess and Anthony Blunt contributed to the Soviet cause with the transmission of secret Foreign Office and MI5 documents that described Allied military strategy. He was most useful to the Soviets in his position as secretary to the British Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil.

Anthony Blunt: Blunt was an English art historian, formerly Professor of the History of Art, University of London and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. After visiting Russia in 1933, Blunt was recruited in 1934 by the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB). A committed Marxist, Blunt was instrumental in recruiting Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

They were originally known as the Cambridge Spy Ring because all became committed communists while attending Cambridge University in the 1930s. There is some conjecture as to when they were actually recruited to Soviet intelligence, but Anthony Blunt claimed that it did not happen at Cambridge. Rather, they were recruited after they graduated.

10. Richard Sorge Born: 1895; Died: 1944

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Soviet Spy in Japan

Spied For: The Soviet Union

Richard Sorge is considered to have been one of the best Soviet spies in Japan before and during World War II, which has gained him fame among spies, and espionage enthusiasts. Sorge was born in Azerbaijan during the reign of the Czars. His great uncle was an associate of Karl Marx. In October 1914 Jorge volunteered to serve during World War I. He joined a student battalion of the 3rd Guards, Field Artillery. During his service in the Western Front he was severely wounded in March 1916 when shrapnel cut off three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. During his convalescence he read Marx and adopted communist ideology.

After being fired from a teaching and mining job, he fled to the Soviet Union where he was recruited as a spy for the and using the cover of being a journalist was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist uprisings taking place. In 1922 the Communists relocated him to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community.

In May 1933 the Soviet Union decided to have Sorge organize a spy network in Japan. On 14 September 1941 Sorge advised the Red Army that the Japanese were not going to attack the Soviet Union until a) Moscow was captured, b) the size of the Kwantung Army was three times that of the Soviet Union’s Far Eastern forces and c) a civil war had started in Siberia.

Sorge was arrested on October 18, 1941 in Tokyo, in the house of his lover after a policeman picked up a note that he threw on to the road instead of destroying, warning him that he was being watched. Even under torture, he denied all ties with the Soviets. Sorge was not exchanged for Japanese prisoners of war, because the Soviet government as well as Sorge himself denied that he was spying for USSR. He was hanged on November 7, 1944, 10:20 a.m. Tokyo time. The Soviet Union denied all knowledge of him until 1964.

 

NCAA weighs risky court filing that could shape organization’s future

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May 12, 2016

  • Lester MunsonLegal Analyst
    NCAA leaders are facing a potentially historic decision this week that could either lead to the preservation of the organization’s idea of athletic amateurism or radically transform college sports into the pay-for-play system that the NCAA has fought for decades.

The decision looming for NCAA president Mark Emmert and his top lawyer, Donald Remy, results from the ongoing court case that first pit former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon against the NCAA in 2014. O’Bannon won the initial court decision when a federal judge ruled that the NCAA violated antitrust laws because it restricted benefits to college athletes beyond providing them scholarships.

Remy and the NCAA appealed, though, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which gave the NCAA a bittersweet victory: Its schools didn’t actually have to pay athletes $5,000 each, as the initial court decision required, but the NCAA remained in violation of antitrust laws.

O’Bannon and his lawyers pushed forward and asked the U.S. Supreme Court in March to consider reinstating the cash payments to athletes. That request pushed Emmert, Remy and the NCAA into a dicey position, which will lead to a critical court filing on Friday:

  • Should the NCAA accept the Court of Appeals decision, grateful that its schools will not be paying $5,000 per season to athletes but, in accepting the decision, actually end up acknowledging that its rules violate antitrust laws? If so, the NCAA could be subject to court scrutiny on all rules it enacts that regulate college athletics. If that’s the approach the NCAA wants to take, its legal team will file a court brief Friday resisting the O’Bannon request for a Supreme Court review.
  • Or should the NCAA fight the Court of Appeals decision and join O’Bannon in seeking a final and conclusive ruling from the Supreme Court but one that makes the organization immune to antitrust attacks from athletes? The risk for the NCAA in this option revolves around the fact that if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of O’Bannon, the court could decide the NCAA must pay players an unlimited amount of money. If the NCAA lawyers, though, want to roll the dice and seek a final ruling, they would file on Friday a petition asking for the court to take the case.

The decision has not been an easy one for the NCAA leadership. Since Remy took over as the NCAA’s top lawyer in January 2011, he has been timely, decisive and effective in defending a mass of litigation filed by current and former athletes against the organization. Remy and the law firms he hires have rarely asked for extensions on deadlines for filing long and complex briefs. But for this decision, Remy has twice asked Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy for extra time to decide whether to appeal the decision. Kennedy granted both requests. The second extension expires Friday.

The extra time gave Remy and his lawyers a chance to ponder the risks they face.

The O’Bannon decision, described as “momentous” by the Ninth Circuit, was the result of “the first trial ever devoted to amateurism in college sports,” according to Rutgers Law School professor Michael A. Carrier, an expert on antitrust litigation who has authored three major law review articles on these issues. In 15 days of trial in 2014 before U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, two dozen witnesses testified, producing thousands of pages of dense and occasionally difficult descriptions of the economics of college sports.

Although antitrust laws had previously been applied to NCAA attempts to govern the televising of college football and to set a salary cap for assistant basketball coaches, the O’Bannon decision marked the first time antitrust rules were applied to athletes.

Few petitions to the Supreme Court are granted each year, but the notion of athletic amateurism could be of such sufficient importance that justices accept it as one of the 60 to 70 they decide annually. Only four votes from the current eight justices are needed to accept the case. In addition to examining amateurism, the Supreme Court might decide to take the case because of a legal doctrine called the Rule of Reason. The Ninth Circuit made its decision under a bizarre use of this doctrine, which is a highly important one that affects large segments of the American economy.

The doctrine requires a four-step analysis of any rule that restricts market freedoms.

The first step is to determine whether there is a restriction that limits competition. The NCAA’s ban on cash payments to athletes obviously restricts competition, preventing schools from offering players money in recruiting. The second step requires the NCAA to offer a justification for the restriction. The NCAA’s justification is its commitment to amateurism and its argument that amateurism is responsible for the popularity of college football and men’s basketball. The third step requires O’Bannon to prove that the ban on pay is not reasonably necessary. And the final step is a balancing of the effects of amateurism and leads to a determination of whether the ban on pay is a legal restriction.

Most experts who have studied the Ninth Circuit’s O’Bannon ruling agree that the court swung and missed on the fourth step — the balancing of the good and bad effects of the NCAA’s principle of amateurism.

Carrier, the Rutgers professor who has studied 700 Rule of Reason cases and is a leading authority on the doctrine, believes the Ninth Circuit “completely ignored the balancing stage” of the required analysis. In a recent article in the University of Michigan Law Review analyzing the O’Bannon decision, he concluded that the “Ninth Circuit’s omission of the balancing stage prevents the consideration of the anticompetitive (bad) and procompetitive (good) effects at the heart of the matter.”

If Carrier is correct, it might open the door to Supreme Court consideration.

The attorney representing O’Bannon in his petition to the Supreme Court, Jonathan Massey, focused his effort on the failure to complete the fourth step of the process. In a masterful petition, Massey explained that instead of balancing the good and bad effects of amateurism, the Ninth Circuit justified the nonpayment of athletes by saying that not paying them is what makes them amateurs. As Massey observed, the Ninth Circuit’s attempt at reasoning resulted in a “tautology,” a meaningless repetition of an idea instead of a use of logic.

Remy has been aggressive and steadfast in his defense of amateurism in the five years of the O’Bannon litigation and in similar antitrust attacks on the NCAA. It would not be a big surprise if the NCAA and Remy decided on the high-risk alternative in their filing Friday by seeking a Supreme Court decision that could exempt the NCAA from further antitrust scrutiny. But it would also not be a surprise if the NCAA suggested to the high court that it refuse to consider the O’Bannon petition and instead consider only the NCAA’s petition instead.

 

New York Times: How Could It Get This Wrong

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From the New York Times of Monday May 8, 2016.

Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of the Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786.

So, the Imam Suhaib Webb uses his name for his handle, and the Times can’t get that right!!  More importantly, and there is a story here, where did Pimpin4Paradise786 come from? This may be a member of the Times Editorial Board’s “Handle.” It seems to comport with the intellectual vigor of that board.    

 

Facebook Edits Trending Articles

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There has long been  a sense that Facebook uses political criteria to edit its “Trending” list.  Here is proof that conservative “trending’ articles are suppressed and non-trending “liberal” articles are promoted. The effect of this is that a misleading impression of liberal issues is created.

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

 

Some Thoughts on the Politics, Profits, and Prophecies of Climate Change

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This article does a great job of explaining the climate change issue. Regardless of which side you find yourself on, this article is for you. 

By Anthony J. Sadar

Dire climate change, predicted by atmospheric models but not substantiated by reality, has become the coinage of statists.  Wealth transfer executors never had it so good.  No wonder free-market thinkers and scientists whose currency is reality are targeted by the climate police.

But what if climate model output is not good enough to justify the transfer of trillions of middle-class tax dollars to politically-favorable machinates, let alone send someone to jail under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act?  What if promoters of doom are somewhat biased in their thinking and even have some incentive for hoping for the worst where the atmosphere is concerned?

As hard as this may be to accept, it is possible that climate model results may be in serious error and doomsayers may be biased and incentivized somehow.  After all, some of the most vociferous champions of climate chaos are not scientists but political types–Democratic presidential candidates, Democratic attorneys general, Democratic president, vice president, cabinet members, and former Democratic vice president.  And, among those most likely to gain in power and profit are political types–Democratic presidential candidates, Democratic attorneys general, Democratic president, vice president, cabinet members, and former Democratic vice president.

Endorsement by politicians, along with the establishment of “settled science,” doesn’t particularly help science, rather it’s more likely to harm it.  Examples of negative impact of politics and magisteriums on science abound–from Aristotle’s geocentrism to eugenics and Lysenko’s practice of science in the service of the Soviet state.

Science thrives on open-mindedness, independent thinking, and perspective.  Yet, the current world of climate science is limited by influence from federal government largesse and academic groupthink.

Overall direction for politically-correct climate conclusions come via the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which role, since its establishment in the late 1980s, has been to assess “the scientific basis of the risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation.”

Informed challengers to the IPCC include the recently established Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a group of “nongovernmental scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change.”  Conclusions from their independent investigation of the climate issue, explained in Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus  (Heartland Institute, 2015), include:

“Climate is an interdisciplinary subject requiring insights from many fields.”

“Fundamental uncertainties arise from insufficient observational evidence, disagreements over how to interpret data, and how to set the parameters of models.”

“Climate scientists, like all humans, can be biased.  Origins of bias include careerism, grant-seeking, political views, and confirmation bias.”

The IPCC, “created to find and disseminate research finding a human impact on global climate, is not a credible source.”  For instance, “[i]n contradiction of the scientific method, IPCC assumes its implicit hypothesis – that dangerous global warming is resulting, or will result, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions – is correct and that its only duty is to collect evidence and make plausible arguments in the hypothesis’s favor.  It simply ignores the alternative and null hypothesis, amply supported by empirical research, that currently observed changes in global climate indices and the physical environment are the result of natural variability.”

From ample references to peer-reviewed works and based on NIPCC reports“drawn from its extensive review of the scientific evidence,” Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming argues that “any human global climate impact is within the background variability of the natural climate system and is not dangerous.”

Scientists have a long way to go to sufficiently understand the workings of the atmospheric environment.  So, a terrific disservice is done to the discipline of science, when power-seeking politicians and narrow-minded individuals of all stripes seek to foreclose reasonable investigation with their claims of settled science and demands for immediate action that will likely produce just another redistribution of wealth fiasco.

Anthony J. Sadar is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail http://globalwarmingtrust.com/  (Stairway Press, 2016).

The Great Western Retreat

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The Great Western Retreat
by Giulio Meotti

This first paragraph grabbed my attention as it indicates the sorry state of France. The same sorry state exists across Europe.  The West has been attacked by Islam before and has prevailed at Tours and Lepanto, for example. Thr forces that prevailed were coalition forces. Such is needed now, but as Europeans have fallen into the leftist hole, they have no will left. It is sad. 

Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools.

This massive deployment of armed forces in our own cities is a departure from history. It is a moral disarmament, before a military one.

Why does anyone choose to fight in a war? Civilized nations go to war so that members of today’s generation may sacrifice themselves to protect future generations. But if there are no future generations, there is no reason whatever for today’s young men to die in war. It is “demography, stupid.”

On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed and 1,400 wounded in a series of terrorist attacks in Madrid. Three days later, Spain’s Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was elected prime minister. Just 24 hours after being sworn in, Zapatero ordered Spanish troops to leave Iraq “as soon as possible.”

The directive was a monumental political victory for extremist Islam. Since then, Europe’s boots on the ground have not been dispatched outside Europe to fight jihadism; instead, they have been deployed inside the European countries to protect monuments and civilians.

“Opération Sentinelle” is the first new large-scale military operation within France. The army is now protecting synagogues, art galleries, schools, newspapers, public offices and underground stations. Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools. Meanwhile, French paralysis before ISIS is immortalized by the image of police running away from the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during the massacre there.

French soldiers guard a Jewish school in Strasbourg, February 2015. (Image source: Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons)
You can find the same figure in Italy: 11,000 Italian soldiers are currently engaged in military operations and more than half of them are used in operation “Safe Streets,” which, as its name reveals, keeps Italy’s cities safe. Italy’s army is also busy providing aid to migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

In 2003, Italy was one of the very few countries, along with Spain and Britain, which stood with the United States in its noble war in Iraq — a war that was successful until the infamous US pull-out on December 18, 2011.

Today, Italy, like Spain, runs away from its responsibility in the war against the Islamic State. Italy’s Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti ruled out the idea of Italy taking part in action against ISIS, after EU defense ministers unanimously backed a French request for help.

Italy’s soldiers, stationed in front of my newspaper’s office in Rome, provide a semblance of security, but the fact that half of Italy’s soldiers are engaged in domestic security, and not in offensive military strikes, should give us pause. These numbers shed a light not only on Europe’s internal terror frontlines, from the French banlieues to “Londonistan.” These numbers also shed light on the great Western retreat.

US President Barack Obama has boasted that as part of his legacy, he has withdrawn American military forces from the Middle East. His shameful departure from Iraq has been the main reason that the Islamic State rose to power — and the reason Obama postponed a military withdrawal from Afghanistan. This US retreat can only be compared to the fall of Saigon, with the picture of a helicopter evacuating the U.S. embassy.

In Europe, armies are no longer even ready for war. The German army is now useless, and Germany spends only 1.2% of GDP on defense. The German army today has the lowest number of staff at any time in its history.

In 2012, Germany’s highest court, breaking a 67-year-old taboo against using the military within Germany’s borders, allowed the military to be deployed in domestic operations. The post-Hitler nation’s fear that the army could develop again into a state-within-a-state that might impede democracy has paralyzed Europe’s largest and wealthiest country. Last January, it was revealed that German air force reconnaissance jets cannot even fly at night.

Many European states slumber in the same condition as Belgium, with its failed security apparatus. A senior U.S. intelligence officer even recently likened the Belgian security forces to “children.” And Sweden’s commander-in-chief, Sverker Göranson, said his country could only fend off an invasion for a maximum of one week.

During the past ten years, the United Kingdom has also increasingly been seen by its allies — both in the US and in Europe — as a power in retreat, focusing only on its domestic agenda. The British have become increasingly insular – a littler England.

The UK’s armed forces have been downsized; the army alone is expected to shrink from 102,000 soldiers in 2010 to 82,000 by 2020 – its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars. The former head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Nigel Essenigh, has spoken of “uncomfortable similarities” between the UK’s defenses now and those in the early 1930s, during the rise of Nazi Germany.

In Canada, military bases are now being used to host migrants from Middle East. Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian prime minister, first halted military strikes against ISIS, then refused to join the coalition against it. Terrorism has apparently never been a priority for Trudeau — not like “gender equality,” global warming, euthanasia and injustices committed against Canada’s natives.

The bigger question is: Why does anyone choose to fight in a war? Civilized nations go to war so that members of today’s generation may sacrifice themselves to protect future generations. But if there are no future generations, there is no reason whatever for today’s young men to die in war. It is “demography, stupid.”

Spain’s fertility has fallen the most — the lowest in Western Europe over twenty years and the most extreme demographic spiral observed anywhere. Similarly, fewer babies were born in Italy in 2015 than in any year since the state was founded 154 years ago. For the first time in three decades, Italy’s population shrank. Germany, likewise, is experiencing a demographic suicide.

This massive deployment of armed forces in our own cities is a departure from history. It is a moral disarmament, before a military one. It is Europe’s new Weimar moment, from the name of the first German Republic that was dramatically dismantled by the rise of Nazism. The Weimar Republic still represents a cultural muddle, a masterpiece of unarmed democracy devoted to a mutilated pacifism, a mixture of naïve cultural, political reformism and the first highly developed welfare state.

According to the historian Walter Laqueur, Weimar was the first case of the “life and death of a permissive society.” Will Europe’s new Weimar also be brought down, this time by Islamists?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Second Holocaust In Europe

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Nigel Jones reviews “After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift” by Giles MacDonogh
Giles MacDonogh is a bon viveur and a historian of wine and gastronomy, but in this book, pursuing his other consuming interest – German history – he serves a dish to turn the strongest of stomachs. It makes particularly uncomfortable reading for those who compare the disastrous occupation of Iraq unfavourably to the post-war settlement of Germany and Austria.
MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler’s Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.
His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.
The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide – and mass murder.
Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh – for the first time in English – is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.
Given that what amounted to a lesser Holocaust was unfolding under their noses, it may be asked why the western Allies did not stop this venting of long-dammed-up rage on the (mainly) innocent. MacDonogh’s answer is that it could all have been even worse. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, favoured turning Germany into a gigantic farm, and there were genocidal Nazi-like schemes afoot to starve, sterilise or deport the population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.
The discovery of the Nazi death camps stoked Allied fury, with General George Patton asking an aide amid the horrors of Buchenwald: ‘Do you still find it hard to hate them?’ But the surviving inmates were soon replaced by German captives – Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and even Auschwitz stayed in business after the war, only now with the Germans behind the wire.
It was Realpolitik, not humanitarian concern, that caused a swift shift in western attitudes towards their former foes. Fear of Communism spreading into the heart of Europe, and the barbarities of the Russians – who kidnapped and killed hundreds of their perceived enemies from the western zones of Berlin and Vienna – belatedly made the West realise that they had beaten one totalitarian power only to be threatened by another.
Even that hardline Kraut-hater Patton was sacked for advocating a pre-emptive strike against Russia. Building up West Germany and saving Berlin from Soviet strangulation with the 1948 airlift became the first battles of the Cold War – even if that meant overlooking Nazi crimes and enlisting Nazi criminals in the ‘economic miracle’ of reconstruction.
Although MacDonogh roundly condemns all the occupying powers, the British emerge with some credit. Apart from one Air Marshal who looted art treasures; and an MI5 interrogator nicknamed ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens who ran a private torture chamber, British hands may have been grubby, but were not deeply blood-stained. British squaddies preferred to purchase their sex privately with a packet of fags or a pair of nylons, rather than in the Soviet style.
MacDonogh has written a gruelling but important book. This unhappy story has long been cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one. Not the Allies, because it placed them near the moral nadir of the Nazis; nor the Germans, because they did not wish to be accused of whitewashing Hitler by highlighting what was, by any standard, a war crime. Giles MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth.