West writes beautifully of an obscure subject. Part of her motive was to cover a subject that had been partially excluded from the media because of the mass of news about World War II. She had covered the trials for a newspaper and actually had a magazine assignment for the New Yorker. I must confess that all the detail about ultimately inconsequentila who West always seems to refer to as "little" (were they all really so little ?) is something of a slog.

Her descriptions of individuals are worth studying at length. For example the very first, of William Joyce as he appeared at his trial in 1945.

Who would have thought that this book shows up with a June 2009 review on the Huffington Post, with a nod to issues raised by Cheney and that lot.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariel-gonzalez/the-meaning-of-treason_b_222094.htm...

Her final solution on page 367, "The unilateral abandonment of espionage is really the only real remedy and this is as unpractical as unilateral disarmament". ( )

This is not merely a discussion of how the meaning of the word "treason" has been conveniently changed, but an active campaign for retaliation against thoughtcrime. This book was written at about the same time as Orwell's 1984, and can be thought of as the government's side of the argument. ( )