Osama Will Not Be Caught Alive: US Attorney General
US Attorney General Eric Holder has said that al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden will never face a trial in America, for he will never be caught alive, reported AFP.
Holder, who had a heated exchange with Republican congressmen, predicted: “we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden rather than to the US public enemy number one in captivity.”
“Let’s deal with reality,” the attorney general was quoted as saying, “Bin Laden will never appear in an American courtroom.”
He proposed to try terror suspects in US federal civilian courts, to which Republican critics said that it would put Americans at risk, leading Holder to react angrily.
“They have the same rights that a Charles Manson would have, any other kind of mass murderer,” he was quoted as telling a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.
“The notion that a defendant in an Article III (civilian) court is somehow being treated in an inappropriate, special way – that he’s being coddled, is anything but the truth… These defendants charged with murder are treated just like any other murder defendant would be.”
John Culberson, Republican Representative, said that Holder’s analogy to Manson, a convicted killer, showed that Obama administration has a profound disconnect with an American public that wants the terror suspects to be tried as war criminals and not as criminal defendants.
