[Errigal]

Here's an interesting quote from President John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage. In Chapter 9, Kennedy salutes the courage of the American Senator William Taft, who spoke in October 1946 against the planned execution of eleven senior Nazis recently convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. This seems to be very similar to the debate on Saddam's execution by President George "Pontius Pilatus" Bush.

On October 6, 1946, Senator Taft appeared before a conference on our Anglo-American heritage, sponsored by Kenyon College in Ohio. The war crimes trial was not an issue upon which conference speakers were expected to comment. But titling his address "Equal justice Under Law," Taft cast aside his general reluctance to embark upon startlingly novel and dramatic approaches. "The trial of the vanquished by the victors," he told an attentive if somewhat astonished audience, "cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice."

I question whether the hanging of those, who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people, will ever discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win. About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret.

In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials---government policy and not justice-with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we may discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come. In the last analysis, even at the end of a frightful war, we should view the future with mom hope if even our enemies believed that we had treated them justly in our English-speaking concept of law, in the provision of relief and in the final disposal of territory.

In ten days the Nazi leaders were to be hanged. But Bob Taft, speaking in cold, clipped matter-of-fact tones, deplored that sentence, and suggested that involuntary exile-similar to that imposed upon Napoleon -might be wiser. But even more deplorable, he said were the trials themselves, which "violate the fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute." Nuremberg, the Ohio Senator insisted, was a blot on American Constitutional history, and a serious departure from our Anglo-Saxon heritage of fair and equal treatment, a heritage which had rightly made this country respected throughout the world. "We can't even teach our own people the sound principles of liberty and justice," he concluded. "We cannot teach them government in Germany by suppressing liberty and justice. As I see it, the English-speaking peoples have one great responsibility. That is to restore to the minds of men a devotion to equal justice under law."