Boumediene and the Nuremberg trials

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held 5-4 in the Boumediene case that non-citizen enemy combatants, captured and imprisoned abroad, are entitled to access to United States courts and to petition for writ of habeas corpus. John McCain has criticized this decision; Barack Obama has applauded it.

I am not going to debate the merits of the decision here. But Barack Obama's statement over the weekend, supporting the decision, is, frankly, bizarre. Senator Obama stated that the Court's decision carries on this country's tradition exemplified by the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Nuremberg trials did not involve American courts or apply United States law, including our law regarding habeas corpus. The Nuremberg trials were conducted before an international military tribunal and applied international law. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as a prosecutor at the trials (the chief prosecutor I believe), not as a judge. In short, Barack Obama doesn't know what he's talking about here.

There is an understandable tendency, when a politician makes a boneheaded statement, to simply shrug and say what the heck, he (or she) is just a politician, what can you expect? But Barack Obama touts himself as a constitutional law professor (in fact he was a visiting lecturer for several years at a Chicago law school). Cass Sunstein, a well-known Professor at the University Of Chicago Law School has stated that Obama knows this stuff [constitutional law] cold, a statement that causes me to wonder about both of them.

If Barack Obama is this uninformed on a subject about which he claims expertise, I can't help but wonder about the reliability of his numerous other pronouncements on various issues.