While praising the absolutely disastrous Boumediene decision by SCOTUS the other day, Barack Obama made a reference back to the Nuremberg trials. It seems he may be a bit confused about some elements of history, though.

Obama, a former senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, cited “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.”

(Though Obama was clearly referring to the principle of giving criminals a day in court, it’s worth pointing out the distinction here, 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.)

Yeah, see, Nazi war criminals weren’t give access to American (or other domestic) courts as the SCOTUS just ruled terrorist suspects have the right to. In fact, as Jake Tapper notes, they were tried by military tribunals — the system Congress was interested in setting up when SCOTUS made its ruling.

As Ed Morrissey notes:

Rudolph Hess didn’t get habeas corpus in American courts for a good reason: he was captured by the British, not the Americans. However, those Nazi civilians and military personnel captured by the Americans didn’t get access to American civil courts either, not even as oversight over the due process of Nuremberg as Congress allowed in its tribunal system. They got tried by a tribunal system that worked hard (with the Soviet exception) to establish its credibility through its work, but not in self-flagellation over the imposition of the tribunals on Nazi sensitivities.

But one mustn’t allow things like facts to interrupt a narrative, right Senator?