And I don't get what it is about the AHA vis-a-vis Klehr and Haynes you are pushing. Klehr and Haynes have written tons of peer-reviewed articles, and their books have been so influential that even very radical historians -- in the pages of The Nation, no less -- have engaged them in respectful debate and conceded they've proven much that had heretofore been denied.

One woman did. I forget her name. Navansky? No. And he and Alterman are both working on books I believe.

Haynes and Klehr hang out at HNN. That's George Mason University. That's like FedSoc Central. All their work is based on Weinstein and this "unprofessional" fraud and liar is now our national archivist.

In June 2001, ex-KGB courier Alexander Vassiliev, co-author with Allen Weinstein of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (1999), sued the publisher, Frank Cass Ltd., for libel in Britain's High Court. Vassiliev contended he had been defamed in an essay by law professor and filmmaker John Lowenthal, "Venona and Alger Hiss," in the Cass journal, Intelligence and National Security (INS). It is much easier to win a libel suit in Britain than in America, for in British law, the defendant must produce evidence to show that the words complained of were factually true or, if matters of opinion, were "such that an honest person could express them in the light of what he knew," whereas in America it is up to the plaintiff to prove his charges. It is for this reason that David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt over her book Denying the Holocaust in Britain rather than in the United States (see Jamil Zainaldin, "The Price of Truth: History, Deborah Lipstadt, and the Libel Trial," Perspectives, January 2002, 27–30). Moreover, in the United States, a complaint concerning a published work (such as The Haunted Wood) must show that malice was premeditated. In Britain, damages may be awarded to a plaintiff even if defamation was not intended.

Lowenthal's essay had criticized The Haunted Wood, along with many other texts claiming to demonstrate Hiss's guilt, for misinterpreting sources and ignoring exculpatory evidence. In particular, Lowenthal censured Haunted Wood for selectively replacing KGB and Venona code names and cover names with those of Hiss and others, without citing any authority or source, other than FBI surmise, for doing so. Moreover, The Haunted Wood's conclusions stemmed from materials to which the coauthors (or their publisher) had purchased access. The KGB files on which they purported to rely were and remain closed to all others. In consequence, wrote Lowenthal, "the co-authors' references and their own narrative statements cannot be checked or verified by anyone else. Because they derive from excerpts 'quoted' out of context from KGB files closed to other researchers, the KGB materials they publish offer no credible support for the proposition . . . that Hiss was [an] espionage agent."2

They lost the case.

Similarly reluctant to release disputed material is the historian Allen Weinstein, whose book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978) purported to prove Hiss's guilt partly on the basis of interviews with informants. But six of Weinstein's seemingly damning interviewees, when queried by Victor Navasky, then editor of The Nation magazine, denied they had told Weinstein what he published in Perjury; they had been misquoted, misrepresented, or misconstrued.4 One of them, Samuel Krieger, got libel damages and a public apology after Weinstein failed to produce promised tapes of his interview. In 1978 Weinstein pledged to deposit all his tapes and interview notes along with other data in the Truman presidential library within the year. A quarter century after that promise, and a decade after Jon Wiener again addressed this breach of historical ethics, many of Weinstein's most crucial and controversial source materials remain undeposited and unavailable to historians, other than those to whom Weinstein has given selective access.5 Given these circumstances, much of the evidence for Perjury's conclusions remains as unverifiable as the extracts from KGB documents in Haunted Wood, "fatally tainted," as Navasky put it, by Weinstein's "unprofessionalism."

Wiener's critique of Weinstein's ethical conduct, initially scheduled to appear in AHA Perspectives in December 1990, was delayed until February 1992 ("The Alger Hiss Case, the Archives, and Allen Weinstein," 10–12), in part to allow Weinstein an opportunity to respond, which he declined. Wiener then registered a formal complaint that Weinstein had violated the AHA's 1987 Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct. This was recused by the AHA's Professional Division on the ground that Wiener's essay in Perspectives had already made the charges public knowledge.

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2004/0405/0405vie1.cfm

I have evidence that you are a Neocon spy for Israel, Mona. It's in records I have viewed in Tel Aviv, but no one else may see them. Not even you, but you will be tried in the court of public opinion.

because i would lose the case in a real court of law....

;-)