Bin Laden won't be taken alive
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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday that al-Qaida world network leader Osama bin Laden will never appear in a U.S. courtroom because he won't be brought in alive.
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Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has claimed responsibility for the botched Christmas Day bombing of a US airliner and said strikes on US targets will continue, in an audio statement broadcast on Al-Jazeera satellite television.[Xinhua] |
"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," Holder said during a House appropriations subcommittee hearing, when he was defending his decision to try 9/11 suspects in criminal courts instead of military tribunal.
"He will be killed by us or he will be killed by his own people, so he's not captured by us," said Holder, rejecting criticism from Republicans that bin Laden will be given the same Constitutional rights afforded to the average American if he is captured and brought to a criminal court for trial.
Holder defended criminal trials as a better way to prosecute terrorism suspects, saying that past trials have been successful and proved to be easier to get guilty pleas from suspects.
"They are tested ... they are secure, we have tried these cases in a safe manner," he said. "Our allies around the world support us in bringing these cases in (criminal) courts."
The Obama administration is under increasing pressure from both parties of Congress on where and how to prosecute the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators.
Holder said last November that the five terrorism suspects were to be transferred from U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to New York City for trials in a civilian federal court.
President Barack Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of commitment to the rule of law, but critics contended that Mohammed could use the trial to air his political views and New Yorkers expressed their worries about security risks in a courthouse just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attacks.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that took nearly 3,000 lives, which sparked wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and prompted former President George W. Bush's war on terror. The alleged architect of terror was captured in Pakistan in 2003.
