The Nuremberg comparison barely works in this case. Nuremberg was completely open....with no classified data ever injected in any single case that I know of. The Nuremberg court...was held in the place where the residents were from and where the crimes were committed...something that won’t dare happen in the Gitmo situation. From the vast number of Nuremberg players....almost all had some type of punishment....from a couple of years in prison....to a sentence of death....but from the vast audience we hold at Gitmo, I doubt that we can find realistic charges for more than five percent of the occupants we currently house.
I don’t want to sound negative about this whole thing....but the initial plan, the years & years of “gathering intelligence & interrogation”, and lack of use of the Nuremberg “rules”...make this all a pretty woeful episode for the administration. It would have been very simplistic and easy to get public support....if we simply pulled out the Numemberg gamebook and played the episode by those rules....but then you would have had to declare the boys as prisoners of war....and in the case of the Bush administration...this just ain’t gonna happen.
In my humble opinion....whatever direction Obama takes...doesn’t really matter. I think its an unfixable situation, and we are now stuck with it.
We are stuck with it, but it is not "unfixable". We simply either don't take prisoners, or the few we do take, we send to another country for interrogation.
For all the reasons that the Neuremberg comparison fails — and there are dozens — the main failure is this: At the time of Nuremberg, THE WAR WAS OVER!!!
You simply cannot hold “trials” of war criminals while the war is underway. The fact that this war is different, that it may never end, that even if it does end the end may be difficult to define: Is the problem of the enemy, not our problem. These scuzball chose the parts that they play, and they must accept the consequences. The consequences should include uncertainty as to how long they will remain locked up before file “adjudication,” and whether they will ever be afforded adjudication.
The problems that fighting terrorists creates that don’t exist in conventional warfare require that we do whatever we need to in order to win, and to keep ourselves safe. The notion furthered by the unAmerican left, and idiot judges and justices that any rights should enure to terrorists, especially outside our borders, in sheer insanity, and must be rejected at all costs.
Nuremberg? Forget about it.