Kangaroo Court: Difference between revisions
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* It is believed by many that J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing was one of these. Oppenheimer was the leader of the Manhattan Project that developed the Atomic Bomb, but earlier in life he had some friends and family members that were associated with the Communist Party. No one really made an issue of it during the war, but during the Second Red Scare in the early 1950s some of his political and scientific rivals used his former communist sympathies as an excuse to paint him as a traitor and a Soviet spy and end his career in government work. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations later attempted to publicly rehabilitate him shortly before his death in 1967. He was later [[Vindicated by History]] when extensive analysis of KGB records proved he never betrayed the United States and rebuffed all of their many attempts to recruit him.
* At the time and since, some people argued that the Nuremberg Trials were an example of a kangaroo court. Certainly some of the offences the Germans were tried for could be equally applied to the Allies (especially the USSR) or were not recognized as crimes when they were committed, or indicted the Axis for breaching treaties they had not signed. Many of the basic rules of evidence for the civil justice systems of the democracies were removed. However, this rendition of events has been disputed by others, pointing out both the enormous crimes of those involved, and that, though terms like "genocide" were not universally agreed upon, there was at the very least a basic agreed ethical standard by which war should be conducted, and that the German generals and government obviously failed to live up to it, and noting that many of the defendants were acquitted on at least some (if not all) of the crimes they were charged with.
** In addition, the Nuremberg Tribunals were adopted as a compromise between the Allies, as an alternative to several other proposals that were far closer to this trope than the Tribunals themselves were. You can imagine what Stalin's idea on what to do with the captured Germans after the war was like, for one.<ref>Answer: Summary execution without trial for every German officer on down to the second lieutenants, and every civil servant of equivalent seniority. Churchill's own proposal was nowhere near this, errr, Stalinesque, but was still far less forgiving and more arbitrary than the actual Tribuanals themselves were.</ref>
** For that matter, at least one prominent Nazi officer -- Otto Skorzeny -- was acquitted at Nuremberg precisely because his attorney successfully argued that everything he had been accused of re: war crimes (sabotage, espionage, wearing enemy uniforms while attacking, etc.) was, although against the Geneva Conventions, still considered standard operating procedure by the OSS and British intelligence. So they could either acquit him, or convict their own special operations troops. The Tribunal acknowledged the fairness of this point and chose option #1.
** You can read more [[wikipedia:Nuremberg Trials#Criticism|here]].
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