This amazingly well-researched diary by "occams hatchet" at Daily Kos is one of the best presentations I've seen in regards to how a war crimes trial was, and should be, conducted. I've included just the opening paragraphs and a little of the discussion of the use of the film here, and highly recommend taking a minute to read the entire post.  

- and then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.

                                  - Hermann Goering
                                    at Nuremberg

So, Dick Cheney doesn't want the latest batch of detainee-abuse photos released.

Huh - I wonder why?

Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945: The Nuremberg trials were underway. In a legal proceeding unprecedented in human history, the victorious Allied powers were prosecuting 21 Nazi defendants for their respective parts in the horrors inflicted on the world by Adolf Hitler's Germany over the previous 12 years. Fittingly, given the unprecedented scope of the atrocities, the prosecution was seeking to prove the Nazis guilty of a new crime in international law: the waging of aggressive war,  a war perpetrated against people and nations that posed no threat to Germany. Never before in history had such an ambitious prosecution been attempted, nor had such a daunting task been faced by those seeking justice.

Realizing the unique nature of the challenge facing it, the prosecution team elected to take advantage of the Nazis' own meticulous record-keeping to make their case for them.  Headed by former U.S. Attorney General and then-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the Allies intended to bury the Nazis under a mountain of their own documentation. The sheer literal weight of the evidence amassed against the defendants - including 250 tons of paper in all - insured that the tribunal, rather than looking like an episode of "Perry Mason," with a dramatic denouement presented to a gasping gallery of awestruck observers, more likely would be about as exciting as a reading of the New York City phone book.

*****

The film, "Nazi Concentration Camps," was a distillation of footage shot by Allied cameramen as their armies had liberated the death camps one by one in the final months of the war. The documentary was directed by Lt. Col. George C. Stevens, a noted Hollywood director in his own right (before enlisting, Stevens directed Woman of the Year; after the war, some of his most notable films included Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant and A Place in the Sun, the last two of which earned him Best Director Oscars).

The scenes, many of them familiar to us now, were absolutely shocking in their day: Bulldozers shoving tumbling corpses into open pits.  Bodies stacked like cordwood. Walking skeletons looking dazedly into the camera, uncomprehending. And then, just when the viewer's mind started to go numb, the camera would focus in on a single dead face among a literal pile of dead faces, eyes staring vacantly, glazed over, transforming the millions of deaths which (to paraphrase Stalin) up to that point were just a statistic, into the unspeakable tragedy of single death upon single death upon single death, repeated to horror.

The film lasted just under an hour. The effect on the mood in the courtroom can hardly be overstated.

Read the entire post here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/18/727464/-Cheney,-Nuremberg-and-aggressive-war:-the-day-the-smirking-stopped