Obama: Even The Nazis At Nuremberg Had Habeas Corpus Rights, Reality: No They Didn’t
Except they didn’t, really.
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.)
The Nazis were given their day in court. But that court wasn’t an American court, and they didn’t have the right to challenge their detention which is what habeas corpus is.
It’s worth noting that the detainees in Guantanamo Bay have the same level of rights as the Nazis did. No, they can’t challenge their detentions in US courts, but they will get a chance to plead their case before military tribunals set up by the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
Now I know that Obama is weak on WWII history, but you’d expect someone who claims to be a constitutional scholar (Obama’s campaign biography claims that he taught constitutional law in Chicago after college) would grasp this stuff.
If anything, someone who claims to be well-versed in constitutional law wouldn’t be praising the Supreme Court’s recent decision about Gitmo detainees but rather questioning why the Supreme Court felt it had the power to issue a ruling at all given that Congress had already denied the SCOTUS jurisdiction in such cases.
HG
Proof
goon
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robert108
