More Of Obama Bungling History As He Praises Gitmo Decision As Parallel To Nuremberg Trials

ABC News reports Barack Obama praising the Supreme Court decision in Boumediene et al v Bush that gave Habeas Corpus Rights to those in Guantanomo Bay. Obama said that "I think we should make it an issue" in the election and I happen to agree. I don't agree with him when he says the decision "said we are going to live up to our ideals when it comes to rule of law." The fact is that we were living up to our ideals just fine, that there was a system of military tribunals. The fact is that historically the rule of law never required habeas rights for enemy combatants. The fact is that the Supreme Court had told Congress to set up a military tribunal system and then five lawyers in black robes decided arbitrarily that the Congress's military tribunal system which met the court's previous demands were just not good enough.

Obama went on to make a bumbling gaffe, an especially egregious one for Obama who was apparently a former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Obama said "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." I have no problem comparing Islamoterrorists to Nazis, that is fine. But what Barack says here makes no sense. This is another idiotic statement from the great Chicago legal scholar. Jack Tapper of ABC News points out "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." Nuremberg was an example of setting up an international military tribunal. Congress had set up a military tribunal that gave Gitmo detainees the rights that the Supreme Court had demanded. But Nazis captured by the U.S. (unlike Hess who was captured by the Brits, by the way) never had the right to petition U.S. federal courts and challenge the detention. This is ludicrous. The fact is that the Nuremberg example would lead a clearheaded candidate who knew his history to oppose the Supreme Court decision as does John McCain rather than spout historical jibberish.

This is not the first time Obama has completely muddled history. He has repeatedly refered to JFK meeting with Nikita Khrushchev as a a model for Obama's promise to meet with leaders of rogue states without preconditions in his first year of office. But if he knew just a little bit of history before he drew his nonsensical parallels he would realize that meeting was a complete and utter failure. Khrushchev went to to build the Berlin wall. He went on to put nuclear weapons in Cuba. How could anyone use that as a model of diplomacy, as something to be replicated? But people don't know history so they hear his nonsense in a speech and it sounds mighty fine, it makes it sound as if there is a historical basis for Obama's naivete.

On the Gitmo ruling Obama said, "John McCain thinks the Supreme Court was wrong. I think the Supreme Court was right." Indeed.

Read Andrew McCarthy's analysis of the SCOTUS decision here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGEwMTY5YTU3NGRiOWUyMzkxZTU3MDE1ZWUwMDYxOTM=


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