The latest criticism of the Bush Administration's plan for military tribunals comes from an unlikely source: Philip Lacovara is a former deputy solicitor general of the United States and former counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor. During the Nixon era, he was in charge of the government's criminal and internal security cases before the Supreme Court. Now he serves on the board of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights and he criticizes the planned military tribunals in the op-ed Trial and Errors in today's Washington Post.

He debunks the Administration's (and its apologists') repeated ad nauseum assertion that the Ex Parte Quiran case from World War II authorizes the planned commissions:

In defending these military commissions, representatives of the Bush administration constantly refer to the well-known Quirin case -- in which the Roosevelt administration established a military commission during World War II to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had sneaked into the United States and thereby forfeited their status as soldiers entitled to be treated as POWs.

What they fail to note is that the Supreme Court decision in that case accorded much more in the way of legal rights to those eight Nazis than the administration is proposing today. The accused saboteurs retained the right to confidential communications with their counsel, access to all relevant evidence and Supreme Court review of the lawfulness of the proceedings against them. In a subsequent case involving the notorious Japanese Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this important principle, granting even enemy leaders the right to have civil courts review the lawfulness of their prosecution and conviction by military commissions.