September 17, 2003

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN AWARD: CO-WINNERS

Horsefeathers had difficulty choosing between two such stellar candidates, so has decided to pick co-winners of this month's prize for appeasement:

John Bolton of the U.S. State Dept. who announced that:"... Syria was continuing to cooperate with terrorist groups, to pursue weapons of mass destruction and to let militants slip into Iraq. But he declined for now to endorse sanctions or punitive action, saying that "very delicate" diplomatic contacts were under way..."

Juan Antonio Samaranch, former head of the International Olympic Committee. John Burns in an article detailing the appeasement of Saddam's killers makes special note of Mr. Samaranch. Mr. Samaranch follows in the footsteps of Avery Brundage, the Hitler apologist who refused to allow Jewish athletes to participate in the 1936 Olympics. Mr. Burns writes:
"I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this. "

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