Comparing Guantánamo to Nuremburg

I want to recommend a very short article on the Common Dreams website called "Guantánamo Trials Fail the Nuremberg Test" . Here are a couple of excerpts:

With preparations begun for the first military-commissions trial for detainees at Guantánamo — six “high-level” prisoners who could get the death penalty — the customary attacks on the fairness of the proceedings there are mounting here and abroad. Adding to the discord is the refusal of Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser for the military commissions, to exclude any evidence against the defendants that has been extracted through waterboarding.

Particularly troublesome to the Bush administration’s continued insistence that there are careful standards of due process at Guantánamo Bay was the resignation last October of Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo. In an article for the Los Angeles Times (Dec. 10), he wrote he had “concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system.” Precipitating Davis’ act of conscience was the supervisory appointment over him of Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes, long criticized for having been instrumental in authorizing what are euphemistically called “coercive interrogation techniques” on terrorism suspects, some of which are purportedly torture.
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In Sen. Christopher Dodd’s superb book, “Letters from Nuremberg: My Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice” (Crown, 2007), he quotes his father, Thomas Dodd, who became the No. 2 prosecutor in the American team at Nuremberg: “Those of us who were privileged to serve at the Nuremberg Trial are proud of the entire proceeding. … Every right of the defendants was scrupulously observed. They were given every possible opportunity to make every explanation and every possible defense.

“Witnesses were obtained for them merely at their request. Documents were made available, library facilities were at their disposal, and throughout every hour of the trial they were afforded every opportunity to answer every charge.” As others and I have reported, the procedures at Guantánamo — by glaring contrast — are the very opposite of those at Nuremberg.

As a nation, we lost the moral high ground quite some time ago. I wonder if we will ever get it back.