General Discussions
This is the place to discuss general issues related to the U-boat war or the war at sea in WWII.
Military tribunals
Posted by:
Ken Dunn
()
Date: December 09, 2001 03:14PM
<HTML>Hi All,
The following was published in a North Carolina newspaper today. It is relevant to this forum as well as to current events. As to current events, I personally believe that the only rights terrorists that target civilians should have is the right to a slow painful death.
However, I don’t consider those men that were landed by U-boat in America during WWII to be terrorists. They were spies/saboteurs serving their country which was at war with us and as such simply deserved to be shot as allied spies/saboteurs were (with the exception of the two who tried to give themselves up – their fate should be determined by their countrymen). Anybody that goes on that type of mission during a war expects to be shot if they are caught.
That said, there is food for thought in the following article for all sides of the argument:
Sunday, December 9, 2001
President Bush's order to try foreign terrorists at military tribunals recalls a harrowing moment in U.S. history. In the summer of 1942, eight Nazis came ashore in America with plans of destruction. After their capture, FDR called for a secret military trial - and appointed a North Carolina lawyer to defend them.
Sabotage and secrecy - Lessons from a WWII tribunal
Robust defense by war veteran defied FDR
In June 1942, barely six months after Pearl Harbor, eight Nazi saboteurs came ashore in New York and Florida armed with explosives and plans to blow up bridges, power plants and aluminum factories.
Their capture two weeks later touched off an uproar among a skittish public. There was a long line of volunteers to shoot the saboteurs summarily, and a very short line of those who thought the Germans were entitled to the legal protections the Constitution guarantees American citizens.
Their first line of defense Kenneth Royall a well-known North Carolina lawyer and Army officer, appointed by President Roosevelt to represent the Nazis at a secret military tribunal - the first since the conspiracy trials that followed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
What unfolded during the summer of 1942 has sparked renewed interest today, as America debates President Bush's recent executive order establishing military tribunals for foreigners accused of terrorist activities.
The central question then as now: Do accused war criminals have the same rights that our civilian courts extend to American citizens?
At that time, Roosevelt wanted the saboteurs executed, the sooner the better. He didn’t want any foolishness about civilian courts - and as Commander in Chief, he no doubt expected Col. Kenneth Royall, a tall, brusque Goldsboro native and decorated veteran of World War 1, to follow orders.
Instead, Royall defied Roosevelt's order to stay out of civilian courts, forced an unprecedented summer session of the U.S. Supreme Court and won an important point in the court's final decision. A president cannot by simple executive order stop defendants - even foreign nationals bent on mayhem - from seeking review in the American court system.
Royall's role not well known
The tale of the tribunal is a fascinating one replete with major figures from American history, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose public relations ploy to take undeserved credit for discovering the Nazi saboteurs came to light years after the trial.
There was Attorney General Francis Biddle, the saboteur’s chief prosecutor, who came to support Royall’s appeal of Roosevelt's authority because he believed a court test of the president’s war powers was appropriate - and that Roosevelt would win. And Supreme
Court Associate justice Felix Frankfurter, Royall’s legal mentor since his law school days at Harvard.
While Royall was a central figure in the tribunal his role is but a historical footnote today. Documentation of this part in the drama was unearthed recently from a series of dusty boxes in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill.
Royall had just returned to active duty when a White House messenger arrived at his Pentagon office with a presidential appointment to defend the Nazis before a military tribunal. The appointment probably came at Frankfurter's suggestion. Royall later said, but he didn’t really want the job.
Royall weighed his military orders against the demands of his profession to provide a vigorous defense - and decided to buck his Commander in chief.
He wrote Roosevelt that he believed the president did not have the authority to appoint a secret tribunal to try the accused, and asked him to modify his order. Roosevelt refused, and Royall let the president know he might appeal to the courts anyway.
This was risky business, given the times. The public was already in a frenzy over the FBI's announcement of the arrest of the saboteurs. The FBI had portrayed the capture of the eight Nazis as a result of brilliant sleuthing - a fiction that would not come to light for years - and whipped up fervor against the enemy.
FDR: “Surely they are guilty”
The truth was that some of the saboteurs had lived in America, and had volunteered for the sabotage job in hopes of escaping Nazi Germany. When a German sub put four of them ashore on Amagansett Beach on long Island, a lone Coast Guardsman discovered them almost immediately and put out the alert. The saboteurs eluded capture for nearly two weeks - despite the efforts of two of them to turn themselves up.
One of them, George Dasch, made repeated phone calls to the FBI trying to get an audience with Hoover. Royall said in his taped memoirs in 1960 that the FBI’s response was, "You stop bothering us about this matter. We have crazy people calling us up all the time about this." Eventually Dasch persuaded the FBI to take the $84,000 he carried in out-of- date U.S. currency. "Then they came," Royall said. "Thus the FBI got their glory for discovering spies!"
Hoover didn’t tell Roosevelt the FBI almost botched the case. The president, wary of the publicity a public trial in civilian courts would bring, decided a military tribunal with a secret trial and a quick execution was preferable. He informed Attorney General Biddle he wanted the group tried by court martial in the case of two saboteurs who held American citizenship, he said, "Surely they are guilty as it is possible to be and it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory." The other six, he said, should be tried the same way.
There was a problem. Court martial law required a public trial and other protections, such as judicial review, similar to the civil courts. Roosevelt told Biddle he simply would not abide by any court order in the case. In his memoirs, Biddle says Roosevelt wrote him "I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?"
It meant that a constitutional confrontation was in the offing - a test, Royall said years later, of American democracy.
Roosevelt settled on a military tribunal It would be a secret trial with almost no information released, and unlike a military court martial where the Articles of war required a unanimous vote for the death penalty, the tribunal would need only a two-thirds vote.
Royall was troubled by Roosevelt's preemption of the due process that defendants would get in a civil court or a court martial. His decision to argue that the Constitution’s protections extended even to enemies of the nation would expose the Constitution "to one of its most rigorous tests," wrote Eugene Rachlis in his 1954 book "They Came to Kill: The Story of Eight Nazi Saboteurs in America."
The trial began in Washington on July 8 - less than a month after the saboteurs came ashore - in a heavily guarded makeshift courtroom on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice.
No substantive information was released about the tribunal during its course that summer. The trial record, declassified years later showed that Royall succeeded in forcing prosecutors to try all eight prisoners at once rather than one-by-one, but got nowhere in his formal objections to the lack of normal due process.
Royall and Col. Cassius Dowell a career Army lawyer, who agonized over defying the president's order, thought Roosevelt was just flat wrong.
"Bear in mind that President Roosevelt was a preacher of civil liberties, and here was the real test of whether he was just talking or believing 'liberty,"' Royall recalled in his memoirs, "and he turned his back on what many thought were the requirements, of 'liberty.'"
Royall's actions criticized
Three weeks into the secret military trial Royall and Dowell quietly filed a motion in US. District Court arguing that the military commission was improper and unconstitutional. The court denied it, and Royall and Dowell appealed to the US. Supreme Court - then on its customary summer vacation.
Going to the Supreme Court put much of the case out in the open.
The news was electrifying. The New York Daily News reported, "A smashing climax to the trial of the eight Nazi saboteurs was recorded here last night" when Royall and Dowell appealed to the Supreme Court to reverse the president. 'Its historical significance is that it pits the authority of the Supreme Court directly against that of the President," the Daily News said.
The idea that an American military officer would go to such extraordinary lengths to defend a Nazi struck many Americans as unpatriotic. The Charlotte News published a vitriolic editorial headlined "A Braying Ass" and opined, "There will be those who will want (Royall) thrown in with the accused and made to stand trial himself... Speaking for his country and its highest principles, he made a perfect ass of himself."
On July 29, Royall argued to the Supreme Court: "It is trite but still true to say that the soundness of any system of government proves itself in the hard cases where there is an element of public clamor. Such circumstances test the real ability of a government and its judicial system to protect the rights of an unpopular minority.”
He said the saboteurs' landing did not constitute an invasion justifying martial law. Under questioning, he maintained that even if Adolf Hitler and seven German generals landed on the banks of the Potomac River, they would be entitled to access to the civilian courts. Military tribunals, he argued, are appropriate for theaters of military operations in foreign countries, or where martial law has been imposed.
Two days later the Supreme Court announced a brief summary of its decision in a four-minute session. The president had the authority to appoint a military tribunal in wartime. The defendants were not entitled to a writ of habeas corpus. A fuller decision would be announced later.
FDR announces executions
The secret military trial ended a few days later. The military commission adjourned on a Saturday afternoon to deliberate. On Monday it met again in secret and summoned the prosecution and defense to announce it had reached a verdict - but it would not say what the verdict was. The president would make any such announcement.
Royall's job was over. He returned to his Pentagon duties.
The commissions decision was flown to Roosevelt at Hyde Park NY, where that same evening he signed legislation that authorized “an appropriate medal” for J. Edgar Hoover, who had attended the trial regularly, for arresting the saboteurs.
Five days later, on Aug. 8, six of the eight Nazis were electrocuted at the District jail - just 57 days after the first four came ashore. Dasch, who had turned state's evidence, and Peter Burger, one of the American citizens who had gone along with Dasch’s plan to turn himself in - were spared the death penalty. Dasch’s sentence was commuted to 30 years' hard labor, Burger to life. They later were released from prison and returned to Germany.
Royall did not know of the executions until after the White House made the announcement, five minutes after the last sentence was carried out.
That fall, the Supreme Court delivered its full opinion in the saboteur case. On Oct. 29, 1942 - 72 days after the executions - the court ruled in Royall’s favor on one point: The court rejected the government's contention that no court could hear the plea of the saboteurs. “Constitutional safeguards for the protection of all who are charged with offense are not to be disregarded;” the court held, but it added that the court did not have a “clear conviction” that Roosevelt's military tribunal was in conflict with the Constitution or the laws of the country.
One law professor later wrote that "the Supreme Court stopped the military authorities and required them as it were, to show their credentials."
Saboteurs praise Royall
After the trial Royall was lionized for his defense of the Nazis. His old mentor Frankfurter wrote, "Now that the grim business is over, I should like you to know how greatly I esteem the admirable manner in which you discharged the difficult and in- congenial task entrusted to you by the Commander In Chief."
Royall himself said in later years that he felt his defense of the Nazis was the most important legal work of his career.
Not long before they were electrocuted, the six condemned men drafted a statement. "Before all we want to state that defense counsel ... has represented our case as American officers unbiased, better than we could expect and probably risking the indignation of public opinion. We thank our defense counsel."
Royall’s career was hardly diminished by his strong defense of Nazis. He was promoted in time to brigadier general made under secretary of war and then appointed by President Truman in 1947 to be secretary of war. He later became secretary of the Army and went on to head a famous New York law firm. He died in 1971 in Raleigh. His son, Kenneth Royall Jr., became a power in the state legislature in the 1970s and '80s, and died in 1999.
Scott Silliman - director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University School of Law, testified in Congress last week on military tribunals, echoing themes Royall emphasized in 1942. Silliman spent 25 years as a military attorney in the Air Force - and says Royall’s performance in 1942 set a standard.
"He set the example for military attorneys in uniform for the last 50 years," said Silliman. "I will tell you that he is the model - that devotion to the client comes above wearing one's uniform."
Regards,
Ken Dunn</HTML>
The following was published in a North Carolina newspaper today. It is relevant to this forum as well as to current events. As to current events, I personally believe that the only rights terrorists that target civilians should have is the right to a slow painful death.
However, I don’t consider those men that were landed by U-boat in America during WWII to be terrorists. They were spies/saboteurs serving their country which was at war with us and as such simply deserved to be shot as allied spies/saboteurs were (with the exception of the two who tried to give themselves up – their fate should be determined by their countrymen). Anybody that goes on that type of mission during a war expects to be shot if they are caught.
That said, there is food for thought in the following article for all sides of the argument:
Sunday, December 9, 2001
President Bush's order to try foreign terrorists at military tribunals recalls a harrowing moment in U.S. history. In the summer of 1942, eight Nazis came ashore in America with plans of destruction. After their capture, FDR called for a secret military trial - and appointed a North Carolina lawyer to defend them.
Sabotage and secrecy - Lessons from a WWII tribunal
Robust defense by war veteran defied FDR
In June 1942, barely six months after Pearl Harbor, eight Nazi saboteurs came ashore in New York and Florida armed with explosives and plans to blow up bridges, power plants and aluminum factories.
Their capture two weeks later touched off an uproar among a skittish public. There was a long line of volunteers to shoot the saboteurs summarily, and a very short line of those who thought the Germans were entitled to the legal protections the Constitution guarantees American citizens.
Their first line of defense Kenneth Royall a well-known North Carolina lawyer and Army officer, appointed by President Roosevelt to represent the Nazis at a secret military tribunal - the first since the conspiracy trials that followed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
What unfolded during the summer of 1942 has sparked renewed interest today, as America debates President Bush's recent executive order establishing military tribunals for foreigners accused of terrorist activities.
The central question then as now: Do accused war criminals have the same rights that our civilian courts extend to American citizens?
At that time, Roosevelt wanted the saboteurs executed, the sooner the better. He didn’t want any foolishness about civilian courts - and as Commander in Chief, he no doubt expected Col. Kenneth Royall, a tall, brusque Goldsboro native and decorated veteran of World War 1, to follow orders.
Instead, Royall defied Roosevelt's order to stay out of civilian courts, forced an unprecedented summer session of the U.S. Supreme Court and won an important point in the court's final decision. A president cannot by simple executive order stop defendants - even foreign nationals bent on mayhem - from seeking review in the American court system.
Royall's role not well known
The tale of the tribunal is a fascinating one replete with major figures from American history, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose public relations ploy to take undeserved credit for discovering the Nazi saboteurs came to light years after the trial.
There was Attorney General Francis Biddle, the saboteur’s chief prosecutor, who came to support Royall’s appeal of Roosevelt's authority because he believed a court test of the president’s war powers was appropriate - and that Roosevelt would win. And Supreme
Court Associate justice Felix Frankfurter, Royall’s legal mentor since his law school days at Harvard.
While Royall was a central figure in the tribunal his role is but a historical footnote today. Documentation of this part in the drama was unearthed recently from a series of dusty boxes in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill.
Royall had just returned to active duty when a White House messenger arrived at his Pentagon office with a presidential appointment to defend the Nazis before a military tribunal. The appointment probably came at Frankfurter's suggestion. Royall later said, but he didn’t really want the job.
Royall weighed his military orders against the demands of his profession to provide a vigorous defense - and decided to buck his Commander in chief.
He wrote Roosevelt that he believed the president did not have the authority to appoint a secret tribunal to try the accused, and asked him to modify his order. Roosevelt refused, and Royall let the president know he might appeal to the courts anyway.
This was risky business, given the times. The public was already in a frenzy over the FBI's announcement of the arrest of the saboteurs. The FBI had portrayed the capture of the eight Nazis as a result of brilliant sleuthing - a fiction that would not come to light for years - and whipped up fervor against the enemy.
FDR: “Surely they are guilty”
The truth was that some of the saboteurs had lived in America, and had volunteered for the sabotage job in hopes of escaping Nazi Germany. When a German sub put four of them ashore on Amagansett Beach on long Island, a lone Coast Guardsman discovered them almost immediately and put out the alert. The saboteurs eluded capture for nearly two weeks - despite the efforts of two of them to turn themselves up.
One of them, George Dasch, made repeated phone calls to the FBI trying to get an audience with Hoover. Royall said in his taped memoirs in 1960 that the FBI’s response was, "You stop bothering us about this matter. We have crazy people calling us up all the time about this." Eventually Dasch persuaded the FBI to take the $84,000 he carried in out-of- date U.S. currency. "Then they came," Royall said. "Thus the FBI got their glory for discovering spies!"
Hoover didn’t tell Roosevelt the FBI almost botched the case. The president, wary of the publicity a public trial in civilian courts would bring, decided a military tribunal with a secret trial and a quick execution was preferable. He informed Attorney General Biddle he wanted the group tried by court martial in the case of two saboteurs who held American citizenship, he said, "Surely they are guilty as it is possible to be and it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory." The other six, he said, should be tried the same way.
There was a problem. Court martial law required a public trial and other protections, such as judicial review, similar to the civil courts. Roosevelt told Biddle he simply would not abide by any court order in the case. In his memoirs, Biddle says Roosevelt wrote him "I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?"
It meant that a constitutional confrontation was in the offing - a test, Royall said years later, of American democracy.
Roosevelt settled on a military tribunal It would be a secret trial with almost no information released, and unlike a military court martial where the Articles of war required a unanimous vote for the death penalty, the tribunal would need only a two-thirds vote.
Royall was troubled by Roosevelt's preemption of the due process that defendants would get in a civil court or a court martial. His decision to argue that the Constitution’s protections extended even to enemies of the nation would expose the Constitution "to one of its most rigorous tests," wrote Eugene Rachlis in his 1954 book "They Came to Kill: The Story of Eight Nazi Saboteurs in America."
The trial began in Washington on July 8 - less than a month after the saboteurs came ashore - in a heavily guarded makeshift courtroom on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice.
No substantive information was released about the tribunal during its course that summer. The trial record, declassified years later showed that Royall succeeded in forcing prosecutors to try all eight prisoners at once rather than one-by-one, but got nowhere in his formal objections to the lack of normal due process.
Royall and Col. Cassius Dowell a career Army lawyer, who agonized over defying the president's order, thought Roosevelt was just flat wrong.
"Bear in mind that President Roosevelt was a preacher of civil liberties, and here was the real test of whether he was just talking or believing 'liberty,"' Royall recalled in his memoirs, "and he turned his back on what many thought were the requirements, of 'liberty.'"
Royall's actions criticized
Three weeks into the secret military trial Royall and Dowell quietly filed a motion in US. District Court arguing that the military commission was improper and unconstitutional. The court denied it, and Royall and Dowell appealed to the US. Supreme Court - then on its customary summer vacation.
Going to the Supreme Court put much of the case out in the open.
The news was electrifying. The New York Daily News reported, "A smashing climax to the trial of the eight Nazi saboteurs was recorded here last night" when Royall and Dowell appealed to the Supreme Court to reverse the president. 'Its historical significance is that it pits the authority of the Supreme Court directly against that of the President," the Daily News said.
The idea that an American military officer would go to such extraordinary lengths to defend a Nazi struck many Americans as unpatriotic. The Charlotte News published a vitriolic editorial headlined "A Braying Ass" and opined, "There will be those who will want (Royall) thrown in with the accused and made to stand trial himself... Speaking for his country and its highest principles, he made a perfect ass of himself."
On July 29, Royall argued to the Supreme Court: "It is trite but still true to say that the soundness of any system of government proves itself in the hard cases where there is an element of public clamor. Such circumstances test the real ability of a government and its judicial system to protect the rights of an unpopular minority.”
He said the saboteurs' landing did not constitute an invasion justifying martial law. Under questioning, he maintained that even if Adolf Hitler and seven German generals landed on the banks of the Potomac River, they would be entitled to access to the civilian courts. Military tribunals, he argued, are appropriate for theaters of military operations in foreign countries, or where martial law has been imposed.
Two days later the Supreme Court announced a brief summary of its decision in a four-minute session. The president had the authority to appoint a military tribunal in wartime. The defendants were not entitled to a writ of habeas corpus. A fuller decision would be announced later.
FDR announces executions
The secret military trial ended a few days later. The military commission adjourned on a Saturday afternoon to deliberate. On Monday it met again in secret and summoned the prosecution and defense to announce it had reached a verdict - but it would not say what the verdict was. The president would make any such announcement.
Royall's job was over. He returned to his Pentagon duties.
The commissions decision was flown to Roosevelt at Hyde Park NY, where that same evening he signed legislation that authorized “an appropriate medal” for J. Edgar Hoover, who had attended the trial regularly, for arresting the saboteurs.
Five days later, on Aug. 8, six of the eight Nazis were electrocuted at the District jail - just 57 days after the first four came ashore. Dasch, who had turned state's evidence, and Peter Burger, one of the American citizens who had gone along with Dasch’s plan to turn himself in - were spared the death penalty. Dasch’s sentence was commuted to 30 years' hard labor, Burger to life. They later were released from prison and returned to Germany.
Royall did not know of the executions until after the White House made the announcement, five minutes after the last sentence was carried out.
That fall, the Supreme Court delivered its full opinion in the saboteur case. On Oct. 29, 1942 - 72 days after the executions - the court ruled in Royall’s favor on one point: The court rejected the government's contention that no court could hear the plea of the saboteurs. “Constitutional safeguards for the protection of all who are charged with offense are not to be disregarded;” the court held, but it added that the court did not have a “clear conviction” that Roosevelt's military tribunal was in conflict with the Constitution or the laws of the country.
One law professor later wrote that "the Supreme Court stopped the military authorities and required them as it were, to show their credentials."
Saboteurs praise Royall
After the trial Royall was lionized for his defense of the Nazis. His old mentor Frankfurter wrote, "Now that the grim business is over, I should like you to know how greatly I esteem the admirable manner in which you discharged the difficult and in- congenial task entrusted to you by the Commander In Chief."
Royall himself said in later years that he felt his defense of the Nazis was the most important legal work of his career.
Not long before they were electrocuted, the six condemned men drafted a statement. "Before all we want to state that defense counsel ... has represented our case as American officers unbiased, better than we could expect and probably risking the indignation of public opinion. We thank our defense counsel."
Royall’s career was hardly diminished by his strong defense of Nazis. He was promoted in time to brigadier general made under secretary of war and then appointed by President Truman in 1947 to be secretary of war. He later became secretary of the Army and went on to head a famous New York law firm. He died in 1971 in Raleigh. His son, Kenneth Royall Jr., became a power in the state legislature in the 1970s and '80s, and died in 1999.
Scott Silliman - director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University School of Law, testified in Congress last week on military tribunals, echoing themes Royall emphasized in 1942. Silliman spent 25 years as a military attorney in the Air Force - and says Royall’s performance in 1942 set a standard.
"He set the example for military attorneys in uniform for the last 50 years," said Silliman. "I will tell you that he is the model - that devotion to the client comes above wearing one's uniform."
Regards,
Ken Dunn</HTML>
| Subject | Written By | Posted |
|---|---|---|
Military tribunals
|
Ken Dunn | 12/09/2001 03:14PM |
|
Re: Military tribunals
|
walter M | 12/09/2001 08:23PM |
|
Re: Military tribunals
|
oliver | 12/10/2001 05:25AM |
|
Re: Military tribunals/espionage
|
Jon Balson | 12/10/2001 12:32PM |
|
Re: Military tribunals/espionage
|
oliver | 12/10/2001 03:06PM |