I just received the following e-mail from ABC’s Terry Moran (in response to a Corner post earlier):

Kathryn:
Hi. I’m a regular reader of NRO online, which I consider an excellent site (Victor Davis Hanson is a favorite). I see I’ve been nailed for my comments on the Nuremberg trial–and properly so. “Railroaded” was foolish and wrong. It just popped out.
What I was trying to say was that–in the eyes of many lawyers today, and not just liberal human-rights activists but conservative scholars, too–the Nuremberg trial was a flawed model for dispensing this kind of justice. The Soviet Union sat in judgment on the Nazis. The main indictment concerned not the Holocaust, but the “waging of aggressive war”–a vague concept that gave rise to charges of “victors’ justice.” There was no right for defendants to confront their accusers–in other words, hearsay was allowed. The law applied in Nuremberg was ex post facto (necessarily, but problematically).
Don’t get me wrong. The trial accomplished a great deal, punishing several of those who bore most guilt for the Holocaust and enshrining the principle that genocide and other crimes against humanity cannot be committed with impunity without some international response and consequences. Justice was done at Nuremberg, albeit rough justice. The defendants were NOT railroaded.
But the trial wasn’t pretty. And that’s what I was trying–and failing–to say.
Cheers.
Terry Moran