The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Wanted: Dead
Eric Holder’s evasive bravado is getting to be a theme. In November, as we noted then, the attorney general dodged a senator’s perfectly reasonable question of what the administration planned to do in the event that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad or another Guantanamo detainee had a civilian conviction overturned by saying: “Failure is not an option.”
He’s at it again, the Associated Press reports:
Terrorists in court “have the same rights that Charles Manson would have, any other kind of mass murderer,” the attorney general said. “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.”
The comparison to convicted killer Manson angered Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who said it showed 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.
Holder, his voice rising, charged that Culberson’s arguments ignored basic facts about the law and the fight against terrorists.
“Let’s deal with reality,” Holder said. “The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom.”
Pressed further on that point, Holder said: “The possibility of catching him alive is infinitesimal. He will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people so he can’t be captured by us.”
Remember how liberal weenies scorned President Bush for his cowboylike declaration: “Wanted: Dead or Alive”? At least Bush mentioned “alive”! And while Holder may be right that bin Laden is likelier to be killed than captured, it is the height of recklessness if the administration really has no plan for dealing with the latter contingency.
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