Judgment at Washington

MANIFESTO

All of the angst the Allies evinced as they tried judges who sanctioned decisions by the Third Reich seems oh so quaint now as it's been discovered that

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

It surprises me not a whit that

perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés.

But I'm most distressed by the fact that

The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.

In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the Justice Department's collusion in all of this: This is, after all, a department that's been run by the likes of John Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, and, soon after World War II, the hideous Herbert Brownell. We also shouldn't forget that during most of these years, the FBI was headed by one of the great civil limitarians of them all, one John Edgar Hoover.