But the order specified some details that distinguished the tribunals from courts-martial.
Only the Netherlands has pursued the logic of the dual categories of offenses by reducing the number of criminal tribunals from three to two.
As recent efforts to try international crimes in Cambodia and Sierra Leone show, building new tribunals from scratch is slow and expensive and requires arduous negotiations.
But in international tribunals, from the International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) to the European Court of Human Rights, judges are typically elected albeit by national representatives, not popular franchise.
Bush's order, after all, had bypassed Congress -- the body empowered by the Constitution to convene military tribunals -- and had exempted the tribunals from federal judicial review or any other civilian oversight.
Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham, whose alternative proposal would ban the tribunals from admitting coerced or secret evidence, will either stand up to their party leaders or find a way to declare technical victory while caving in.
Thanks to the labors, however imperfect, of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and of ad-hoc tribunals from Sierra Leone to Cambodia, it has been established that politicians and warlords who commit terrible crimes against the vulnerable can no longer count on impunity.
In a new blow to the Bush administration's troubled military commission system, a military judge has disqualified a Pentagon general who has been centrally involved in overseeing Guantánamo war crimes tribunals from any role in the first case headed for trial.
In his roles at the ICTY and ICTR he had to design prosecutorial strategies for both those ground-breaking tribunals, from scratch.
What started though as a sordid affair of insincerity somehow has resulted in the establishment of several international tribunals from ex-Yugoslavia (ICTY) to Sierra Leone and finally in the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC).
