Putting things in perspective

I don't think they [the Bush Administration] expected to launch these historic war-crimes trials, the first war-crimes trials since World War II, with an acquittal on the more serious of the two charges. The whole importance of war-crimes trials is their symbolic significance, the message they send the world. If the first guy who had been trotted out at Nuremberg had been acquitted on one of two charges—first of all the notion that the first guy at Nuremberg would have been a driver for Hitler is on its face kind of laughable—but then the notion that he would have been acquitted would have been an international embarrassment, frankly.

-Jonathan Mahler, discussing the trial of
Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan,
in an interview with Dan Ephron
in the August 11, 2008 Newsweek