They say that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and while that has been resorted to in recent decades by history professor’s as a joke towards their students, those who would lead our country should also take note. While declaring his support for the recent Supreme Court ruling granting captured terrorists rights to civilian courts, Barack Obama cited possibly the worst historical example to back up his opinion:
Obama, a former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, cited “that principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process — that’s the essence of who we are. I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday.”
(Though Obama was clearly referring to the principle of giving criminals a day in court, it’s worth pointing out the distinction here, that the Nuremberg trials did not give Nazi war criminals access to U.S. courts, but to a special international military tribunal created by the U.S., USSR, France and the U.K. Though Nuremberg currently is considered a model for international law, it’s not as if Rudolph Hess had access to challenge his detention in U.S. federal court.)
This is the entire essence of the Supreme Court ruling, which it appears Obama has yet to read. The Supreme Court did not simply rule that detainees in Guantanamo have the right to question their detention, they already had that right via the Military Commission Act, what the ruling stated was that detainees had the right to do so in a civilian court. Conservatives have argued that at no point in our nations history did we grant access to civilian courts for captured enemy combatants, and Obama has inadvertently reminded his supporters of that.
As Ed Morrissey notes:
It’s not as if the military tribunals offered by Congress and the Bush administration fell below Nuremberg standards, either. They allowed for even more rights for the defendants than Nuremberg, or would have if the Supreme Court hadn’t twice stopped them before determining whether they worked. In fact, the tribunals as conceived in the last iteration closely match what American soldiers receive for their own trials under the UCMJ.
If Obama really understood the Nuremberg example, he would be criticizing the Boumediene decision, not praising it. The fact that he uses Nuremberg as an example shows how little he comprehends either, and the war on terror.
What the ruling in Boumediene has actually done is grant rights to unlawful combatants that would not otherwise be granted to lawful combatants. If we are at war with a nation and capture an enemy soldier in full uniform, that soldier has rights granted via the Geneva conventions. The Geneva conventions however has listed explicit conditions which had to be met in order to qualify as a POW:
- (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
- (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
- (c) that of carrying arms openly;
- (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Illegal enemy combatants do not meet these conditions which was why Congress deemed it necessary to pass the Military Commission Act. This ruling will now offer an incentive in future conflicts for enemy soldiers to not abide by the laws and customs of war, offering them greater privileges for operating outside of those guidelines than within them.
Had Barack Obama learned his history regarding the Geneva conventions and the Nuremberg trials this would be abudnantly clear to him, instead he has chosen to ignore history in favor of ACLU talking points.
