The Editors then ask the question: will these 9/11 trials be part of this legacy?  Will these defendants be tried using the standards of the hastily passed Military Commissions Act of 2006 without the protections required of them under American or International law? Will there be due process? Will coerced evidence be introduced? And, most importantly, will they be innocent until proven guilty? If not, the editorial hints, the 9/11 Trials will likely be seen as a failure.

But what if the legacy we relied upon for the 9/11 trials was that of Nuremberg and not of Dachau?  Instead of using rules which break down our own judicial principles, these men bent on destruction could be tried based on those very principles that we as Americans fight to protect.  As Justice Robert Jackson famously explained in his opening statement in Nuremberg, we could recognize that “civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace…”

This is an important opportunity.  As one letter to the editor put it, “I hope that these prosecutions will be a sterling example of American jurisprudence…it wouldn’t do for our enemies to point to the ex post facto prohibition of our Constitution and suggest that we don’t live up to our own principles."  We can only hope that we will live up to our own principles by living up to the legacy given to us by the Nuremberg trials and not the failed trials of Dachau.