Attorney General Eric Holder told a congressional panel Tuesday that questions as to whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in civilian courts were moot because he’d undoubtedly be killed before any trial.
“Let’s deal with reality,” Holder said. “You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur. We will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom. That’s the reality. He will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people, so he’s not captured by us. We know that.”
Holder proceeded to argue that “in some ways” the actions of Charles Manson and terror leader Osama bin Laden were “comparable.” He also implied that the handling of Christmas Day bombing suspect Omar Abdulmutallab was appropriate because an hour is all that’s needed to question a terrorist and glean useful intelligence:
“I’ve heard a lot said that he was only questioned for 50 minutes. That’s a fairly long period of time,” Holder said. “If you look at the report of interview of what was gotten from him in 50 minutes—an hour, there was pretty substantial amount of information gotten from him.”































