Usama bin Laden
Usama bin Laden will never be captured alive, Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers on Tuesday.
“The possibility of capturing him alive is infinitesimal,” Holder said. “He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so that he is not captured by us. We know that. … The possibility simply does not exist.”
That assessment, which Holder said was based on “all the intelligence I have had to review,” came during an often-heated hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee.
Republicans pressed Holder over recent decisions to prosecute terrorism suspects in civilian courts, and they suggested he intends to treat terrorism suspects as “common criminals.”
Holder said such suggestions tend to “get my blood boiling,” calling them “anything but the truth.”
He said the “apt” comparison is to mass murderers like Charles Manson, who is currently serving a life sentence for orchestrating a killing spree in the 1960s.
Trying to explain the analogy, Holder said mass murderers like Manson still reserve the right to go before a jury and have the charges against them proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Holder was asked whether that means Usama bin Laden, if captured, would be tried in a civilian court and afforded the same rights as Charles Manson.
“In some ways I think they’re comparable people, in some ways,” Holder said.
Rep. John Culberson, R-Tex., called that response “incredible.”
“This is where the disconnect between this administration in your mindset is so completely opposite that of where the vast majority of the American people are,” Culberson said. “This is war, and in a time of war we as a nation have never given Constitutional rights to foreign nationals, enemy soldiers, certainly captured overseas.”
Holder insisted there is no major split between the administration and the American people, and he said he understands the nation is at war.
“That is why we have 30,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, why we are taking all kinds of other measures — some of which I can’t talk about — in Pakistan,” Holder said. “We are not fighting this from a law enforcement, preventive mode. We are using law enforcement as one of the tools, but we are also using military means to defeat this enemy.”
As for the Charles Manson analogy, Holder said he was simply trying to think of a mass murderer.
“The comparison is not [between] the average American and these terrorists,” he said. “The comparison is between people who have committed the most heinous acts and have been charged in [civilian] courts.”
Still, Culberson found the Charles Manson analogy ill-advised.
“By granting Usama bin Laden the right to appear in a U.S. courtroom, you are clothing Usama bin Laden with the protections of the U.S. Constitution,” he said.
Holder characterized the whole discussion as outside “reality.”
“You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur,” he said. “The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Usama bin laden. He will never be in an American courtroom. That’s a reality.”
Holder may be the first U.S. official to say unequivocally that bin Laden will never be captured alive, but he is not the first to raise such a possibility.
In October 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said bin Laden may never be captured, adding that capturing or killing the Al Qaeda leader would be “very difficult.”
“It’s a big world,” he told USA Today. “There are lots of countries. He’s got a lot of money, he’s got a lot of people who support him and I just don’t know whether we’ll be successful. Clearly, it would be highly desirable to find him.”