From Nuremberg to Guantánamo

James Carroll makes a good point in his op/ed piece today in the Boston Globe.  After WWII and the defeat of Germany, there was considerable political pressure to simply execute many of the Nazi leaders, but the US chose to follow the rule of law – something it has avoided in dealing with the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay:

After World War II, many Allied leaders, led by Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, assumed that captured Nazis, whose war crimes were evident, should be summarily executed. But others, led especially by US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, understood the importance of dealing with the major criminals according to scrupulous legal procedures. The result was the Nuremberg Tribunals, where the rights of defendants, even those defendants, were affirmed. Those trials, lasting from 1945 to 1949, involving more than 200 accused war criminals, demonstrated the values for which the United States had just fought the brutal war. More than that: In a recovery from brutality, the Nuremberg trials rescued those values.

The opposite has been occurring in Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners were taken there in the first place in an obvious end run around the jurisdiction of courts inside the United States, a blatant statement that traditional legal procedures would not apply. (The US military base itself is a blatant statement that, concerning Cuba, normal requirements of national sovereignty do not apply.) Such cynical exceptionalism was reinforced when the captured men were categorized as “enemy combatants" instead of “prisoners of war," a ploy to dodge standards set by the Geneva Accords of 1949 (which themselves came out of the spirit reflected at Nuremberg). Little thought seems to have been given even now to the consequences for Americans when they are captured in future conflicts by enemies who will surely cite Guantanamo as precedent for methods tantamount to torture.

Also worth reading is this piece by journalist Carol Williams about how and why she and other reporters were booted off Guantanamo last week by the Pentagon:

Rumsfeld’s gatekeepers have long made clear that they view outside scrutiny of the detention operations as a danger to the Bush administration’s secretive and often criticized campaign to indefinitely detain "enemy combatants." But this time, their actions seemed counterproductive because booting out the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and Charlotte (N.C.) Observer only provoked fresh demands to learn what the government is hiding.

Finally, Der Spiegel reports this morning about the anger of the family members of two Saudi Gitmo detainees who committed suicide last week.  They are making accusations that the young men had been beaten.