Legal News

Holder on bin Laden: We?ll Be Reading Miranda Rights to His Corpse

By Ashby Jones

Well, we still don’t know the details on the trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, but U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has a pretty good idea of what the Justice Department would do to Osama bin Laden were U.S. forces to find him: not all that much. That’s because Holder feels bin Laden won’t be captured, he’ll be killed.

That’s what Holder told Congress on Tuesday. Click here for the WaPo article; here for the National Law Journal article.

In exchanges with Republicans on the a House budget subcommittee that the WaPo called “testy,” (big surprise there, eh?), Holder predicted that at the end of the day “we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden” not to bin Laden as a prisoner.

During the hearing, Holder also made clear that he still doesn’t know what’s to become of KSM.

“I think that we are weeks away from making that determination,” Holder said. “I don’t think we’re talking about months. I think we’re talking about weeks away.”

During his testimony, Holder compared terrorists to a well-known American mass-murderer, Charles Manson. In response to GOP criticism that captured alleged terrorists should face trial in a military system, not in federal court, Holder said that terrorists in court “have the same rights that Charles Manson would have, any other kind of mass murderer. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to be coddled, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be treated with kid gloves.”

Not everyone was on board with the comparison, though. Rep. John Culberson, (R-TX), said Holder’s statement showed, in the WaPo’s words, “the Obama administration doesn’t understand the American public’s desire to treat terrorists as wartime enemies, not criminal defendants.”

“My constituents and I just have a deep-seated and profound philosophical difference with the Obama administration,” Culberson said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 17, 2010 (boomark / email).