Senator McCain, in the midst of an otherwise strong appearance yesterday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” made an outrageously in-apt comparison. The host, Timothy Russert, asked the Republican from Arizona about the prisoners that America is detaining at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “Now, I know that some of these guys are terrible, terrible killers and the worst kind of scum of humanity. But, one, they deserve to have some adjudication of their cases,” Mr. McCain said. “Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.”

Mr. McCain is due some deference on this sort of issue because of the suffering he endured during his own ordeal as a prisoner of the Vietnamese communists during wartime. But with all due respect to the senator, Eichmann was tried in 1961 and executed on May 31, 1962. That was 17 years after the end of World War II.

Other Nazi war criminals were tried in the proceedings known as the Nuremberg trials. They began in November 1945, more than half a year after the Allied victory in the war in Europe and more than two months after the Allied victory in the Pacific. The trials lasted until 1949, four years after the end of World War II.

By either the Eichmann standard or the Nuremberg standard, the detainees at Guantanamo have plenty of years to go. The war on Islamic extremist terrorism, after all, has not ended yet. Now, it may be that because victory in this war is still years away, America should try somehow to adjudicate the cases of the detainees before the war is over. But this would be a standard more lenient than the one America and its allies used in World War II. It is misleading for a politician to represent such practice as consistent with how America treated the Nazis. It’s particularly disappointing coming from a politician like Mr. McCain who has such an impressive record as a staunch supporter of President Bush in the war on terror.