Gitmo detainees get more rights than Nazis at Nuremberg

Washington Times:

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.

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.

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It would be a ridiculous idea to extend constitutional protection to the terrorist at Gitmo, because once started down that slippery slope, it would be hard to stop short of giving Miranda rights to enemy detainees. We will have gone from waterboarding to get information to save American lives to telling captured terrorist they do not have to talk to us at all. That is where the ACLU and the terrorist right crowd is headed.