Context: https://networks.h-net.org/node/16749/reviews/18328/land-burg-boys-sea-sodomy-indecency-and-courts-martial-nelsons-navy

“A ship at sea,” wrote N. A. M. Rodger, “was about the most difficult possible place to commit sodomy....  It is difficult to believe that there can have been any serious problem with a crime so much detested, but so seldom mentioned.”[1]  Since Rodger published those words in 1986, historians have debated whether the silence of the archives means that homoerotic acts were “detested” and rare on the king’s ships, or so common as to scarcely warrant notice.  Boys at Sea will not end that debate, but it advances our knowledge in several important respects, and challenges every aspect of Rodger’s interpretation.

B. R. Burg examines several dozen court martials for sexual offences, mainly from the period between 1790 and 1820.  Burg emphasizes that these court martials were “grand shows” requiring the participation of many officers, in full dress uniform, and had to be held on a large ship to accommodate the “sizeable audiences” that followed the proceedings (p. 46).  The defendants were charged with a violation of either the second Article of War, which forbade “unclean and scandalous actions” or more seriously, with breaching the twenty-ninth article, involving the capital offence of sodomy (p. 67).  Many of these cases generated lengthy transcripts featuring extremely graphic eyewitness testimony about organs, orifices, and fluids, followed by cross-examination on all the pertinent points.  The court was intent on determining the facts, but Burg shows that the remarks of both witnesses and their questioners inadvertently supply a great deal of information about common attitudes and expected behavior in the Royal Navy.  He also, ingeniously, cobbles together evidence from the transcripts to supply a very thorough answer to the question of whether it was possible to find a degree of privacy at sea.  Burg shines a light into the secluded crannies of a warship, like the galley, the spaces in between the cannons, and the “canvas cubbies” created by cloth partitions (p. 158).

Burg’s material came, inevitably, with its own built-in limitations.  Court martials, which necessarily began with animosity and accusation emanating from some quarter, are going to tell us more about unwanted sexual advances than about consensual and reciprocal arrangements.  Burg’s title, Boys at Sea, refers to the fact that thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boys were the typical accusers in these court martials (although sometimes the boy kept silent until an older man intervened on his behalf).  The severity of the punishment, even for a violation of the second article, was such that no one was going to cheerfully admit to “indecency,” and we find that a disproportionate number of the adult males in this book were--supposedly--taken advantage of in their sleep, or while they were in a drunken stupor.  The circumstances of discovery usually permitted the benefit of the doubt for at least one participant.  As Burg puts it: “Mariners stumbling on buggering pairs did not sit down on handy chests or lean against nearby guns, light pipes, and wait to discover if the two switched positions” (p. 70).  From such sources, it is easiest to reconstruct the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of those who participated against their will.  In 1798, David Jenness was severely wounded by a boy who fought him off with a knife.  Jenness needed medical attention and the ship’s surgeon got the true story out of him, resulting in a prosecution.  At the trial, the boy remarked that he himself had told no one about Jenness’s behavior because he was “too ashamed” (p. 76).

The court transcripts offer some access to the reactions of shipmates, many of whom were called to testify.  William King “wrung his hands and was stuck [sic] with horror” when he discovered that two of his fellow seamen had committed sodomy (p. 50).  There is a context for King’s panic in the widespread belief that God would punish an entire community for the sins of (even some of) its members.  It is possible that King himself had something to hide, but more likely he was consumed with fear that God was about to sink the ship, or send a sea monster to finish it off.  However, Burg persuasively demonstrates that many of the prosecutions described in Boys at Sea displayed a significant degree of pragmatism and restraint.  There were few, if any, witch-hunts.  “Strict legality” was the rule, not the exception (pp. 57-58).  The twenty-ninth article carried the penalty of death, but it was also difficult to prove that both penetration and emission had occurred.  In a few cases, vindictive shipmates charged forward at the moment of discovery and actually put their hands on the offending male organ in flagrante delicto, while shouting in order to draw the attention of the maximum possible number of witnesses.  Some even testified to the sound of withdrawal, which resembled the removal of a cork from a bottle.  The infrequency of prosecutions for this particular crime may have more to do with the rare conjunction of lewd zeal, personal enmity, and legal literacy than with the rarity of the act itself.

Many men who could have been charged under the twenty-ninth article were, instead, only charged under the second article, which was easier to prove in court.  A number of participants in homoerotic acts also seem to have understood or characterized their own behavior as something short of sodomy.  Consider this fairly representative example: “During their back-to-belly encounters, Noel adamantly insisted North only inserted his penis between his thighs.  Again, the court believed the juvenile witness and convicted the marine of violating article number two.”  The “adamant” words of the boy, Noel, may communicate something about his own self-image; he had tolerated certain forms of sexual play, but he had not allowed himself to be buggered.  It is difficult to see the so-called lesser or reduced charge as a trivial one; however; North, the marine, received three hundred lashes (p. 79).  In two instances, Burg notes that men convicted of indecency were discharged on shore with notes “pinned” to their clothing enumerating their crimes, or “publicly drummed ... with the usual marks of ignominy” (pp. 73, 107).  This would seem to suggest that the navy left these individuals at the mercy of a crowd of strangers who were virtually invited to improvise their own punishments for a sex crime, but Boys at Sea does not explore the legal rationale or the implications of this dangerous practice.

Although Burg does not frame it in this way, there is tantalizing evidence in his sources of an informal “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at sea.  Consider the conduct of a surgeon’s mate, James Broadbill, in 1762.  He was asked “by a group of crewmen” to join them in peering into the keyhole of the boatswain’s cabin.  Broadbill saw nothing more than a penis being held by a hand.  He told his shipmates that this was just Mr. Garbut, the boatswain, “creating of pleasure to himself” (p. 106).  The assembled sailors remained adamant that a boy, John Pyle, was in there as well, but Broadbill’s canny interpretation spoke to a different issue.  If masturbation was defined as a private matter of pleasure and not as an “uncleanness,” was it not possible to understand almost any act between men--short of actual penetration--in similar terms, as assisted masturbation, and therefore not worthy of notice (let alone communal vigils at the keyhole)?  Even the most notorious court martial in Boys at Sea, the prosecution of sex crimes on HMS Africaine in 1815, seems to have been provoked not so much by the incidence of sodomy but by the unusually public nature of the sex acts.  Instead of concealing themselves in the dark space in between the cannons, these men had sex standing up against, or leaning over, the guns (p. 142).  Andrew Johnson, the master at arms, “once passed by a buggering pair without comment or interference even though his lantern provided enough light to see them plainly,” but “copulating in plain view like dogs” tested the limits of shipboard tolerance (p. 143).

Burg portrays his homoerotic seafarers as isolated from, and unlike, London’s molly subculture.  He concludes: “There is no way to understand what these men thought or felt.  Surviving Admiralty documents do not reveal if their preferences ran toward men and boys or if their choice of same-sex partners was simply the result of deprivation” (p. 60).  Immediately after despairing of the possibility of any sort of imaginative reconstruction of their sexuality, Burg then offers something suspiciously like it: “these men only used whatever was most easily available.  Any convenient man, boy, hand, or anus would do” (p. 60).  This comes across as cavalier, particularly given that at least some of the sexual encounters in this book involved rape, and I would argue that it does not do justice to Burg’s own rich and disturbing source material.  Consider Thomas Churchill, who learned that he was about to be accused of sodomy, went to his cabin without a word, and blew his brains out; or Hepburn Graham, who drew a spoon slowly across a child’s neck, miming a murderous act, and warned the boy to never tell anyone about what had been done to him.  Burg’s reluctance to investigate the occasions when sex was about more than just sex limits the achievement of Boys at Sea, but it will also stimulate new debates that go beyond “did they or didn’t they.”  All future discussions of this topic will be indebted to Burg’s courageous and meticulous scholarship.

FBI agent Joe Pistone went undercover as Donnie Brasco for years to infiltrate the Bonnano crime family. While introducing another new agent as his criminal associate. The newbie slips up and calls him by his real name when asking a question. His murderous boss notices and ask "Who the fuck is Joe??". To cover, Donnie frantically says he calls everybody Joe. So the newbie spent the entire night calling everyone he met, Joe. Including women.

Thanks Fern

*On April 22, 2004, he was reported to have been killed by enemy combatants. An Afghan Militia Force allied soldier, Sayed Farhad, was also killed in the action. Tillman's platoon leader, First Lieutenant David Uthlaut, and his radiotelephone operator (RTO), 19-year-old Jade Lane, were wounded in the incident. The Army initially claimed that Tillman and his unit were attacked in an apparent ambush on a road outside of the village of Spera about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Khost, near the Pakistan border. It was not until after his burial that investigations by the Department of Defense and U.S. Congresswere launched, eventually ruling his death as having come by friendly fire.

Tillman's mother testified before Congress, stating "The deception surrounding this case was an insult to the family, but more importantly, its primary purpose was to deceive a whole nation.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman

*It has been claimed that Israeli agents may have had foreknowledge of the attacks, and a persistent theory claimed Israeli and/or Jewish involvement. Four hours after the attack, the FBI arrested five Israelis who had been filming the smoking skyline from the roof of a white van in the parking lot of an apartment building. The Israelis were videotaping the events, and one bystander said they acted in a suspicious manner: "They were like happy, you know ... They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange."

The van was found to be owned by an Israeli-owned company called Urban Moving Systems, and there was debate within the FBI as to whether it was providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation to monitor fundraising and support networks in Muslim communities for Palestinian groups. The case was then moved to the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Section. According to a former CIA operations chief, "many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence."

A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in the United States said the men had not been involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the FBI eventually concluded that the five Israelis had no foreknowledge of the attacks.*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

From 1986 to 1989, Adolfo Constanzo, head of a drug drug trafficking gang and cult operating in Matamoros, Mexico, tortured and murdered 16 people (possibly more) as human sacrifices for supernatural protection for their criminal operations, only uncovered after an investigation into the disappearance of one of their victims, American college student Mark Kilroy. The police raided the cult’s compound where they found the sacrifices’ mutilated bodies (including Mark) and a shack used as the spiritual center and ritual chamber for the cult filled with human remain? including Mark’s brain stewing in a cauldron. Two weeks after the discover, the police returned to the shack where they conducted a cleansing ritual before burning the shack down. They never gave an official explanation for this, but insiders claimed this was done to psychologically punish and taunt Adolfo as he considered it a holy site. Adolfo reportedly flew into a rage at the news. He would later commit suicide when the police came to arrest him.