Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Wiser
Spying on allies-everyone does it, but it's not as serious as when someone betrays agents to an enemy or compromises codes. Or, in the '50s, people like Klaus Fuchs or Ted Hall. Fuchs did ten years, while Hall wasn't arrested due to the need to keep the Venona COMINT program secret. Hall's co-workers, though...they felt he should've been shot.
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"Great Britain [Great Powers] do[es]
not have
friends. Great Britain [Great Powers] has [have]
interests." Lord Acton (IIRC, though oft repeated by others and wrongly attributed.
So, if, say, tomorrow something changed, fundamentally, in the US-Australian relationship that meant our bought and paid for US national traitors in the US and your bought and paid for national traitors in Oz were the origin of material that led to the deaths of some US-suborned traitors here and some Australian suborned traitors in the US, that would justify the death penalty?
And I am talking nationals of a foreign country who have been suborned to spy on their country, not the legitimate diplomatic personnel whose job it is to 'spy' on the country they are stationed in (one group are spies, the other agents, and there is a difference, tho I can never remember it).
Treason is
treason, no matter how you slice and dice it, surely? And in wartime the actual number of deaths caused by a specific Spy are not normally taken into account when they are executed, as they mostly are.
There are, for example, many older Australians who would very likely be happy to see any Australian traitors involved in the CIA interference very likely to have been part of The Dismissal to be declared traitors and hung, peacetime or no. And I'd be there metaphorically knitting as the tumbril rolled by with the traitors in it ...
And for those who think that was justified, they would be cheering at the gallows for the supposed commie spies in the ALP from assorted periods.
And I don't think the Israelis, for example, would necessarily agree with you, either ... though they don't tend to execute people as much (in prisons, anyway).
Phil