Barack Obama once again embarrasses himself with his poor grasp of history. Even worse, the former president of the Harvard Law Review does not seem to understand the nature of a famous court. Jake Tapper of ABC's Political Punch blog writes:

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 -- thatʼs 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.)