Would you have complained about the treatment of the Nazis at Nuremberg?

Nearly 100 foreign enemy combatants to be tried at Guantanamo Bay will have more rights than Nazi war criminals who faced the Nuremberg tribunal, a Senate panel was told yesterday.

Detainees in the war on terror will have the presumption of innocence and an automatic appeal, the latter not even afforded to U.S. citizens, said Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal adviser to the Convening Authority for the Office of Military Commissions.

"No such presumption existed," said Gen. Hartmann in reference to Nuremberg while speaking to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland security. "There were no rules of evidence, and virtually any evidence was freely admitted.

"That was painfully apparent to those who were found guilty and received the death penalty — they were hung within hours and days of the completion of the sentence announcement," he said.

Why give IslamoNazis any greater rights than the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other war criminals during the Second World War? And if you are willing to give them greater rights, why are you more sympathetic to our enemies during this war than you were to the last set of Jew-hating extremists to wage war against America and the civilized world? Is it simply that you sympathize with their goals – or that you hate America?

And then there is this little tidbit that needs to be burned into the brain of every judge in America.

Steven A. Engel, Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general, said that extending the peacetime notion of habeas corpus to military prisoners would be "unprecedented."

"In the nearly 800 years of the writ's existence, no English or American court has ever granted habeas relief to alien enemy soldiers captured and detained during wartime," Mr. Engel said.

In other words, the current policies of the Bush Administration are fully in accord with the Anglo-American legal tradition out of which habeas corpus grows. Those who seek to change that policy need to make a compelling affirmative case in favor of their position – and they cannot.

Oh, and as a reminder, those Japanese officials and officers tried following WWII were not even treated so well as the Nazis – in part because of their nation’s unprovoked sneak attack upon America. Have you forgotten 9/11?

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