Bin Laden will never be caught alive, says US attorney general

Osama bin Laden will never face trial in the United States because he will not be captured alive, the US attorney general told Congress today.

In testy exchanges with House Republicans, Eric Holder compared bin Laden to mass murderer Charles Manson and predicted that events would ensure “we will be reading (a right to remain silent) to the corpse of Osama bin Laden”, not to the al-Qaida leader as a captive.

Mr Holder rejected criticism from Republican members who contend it is too dangerous to put terror suspects on trial in federal civilian courts as he has proposed.

The attorney general said it infuriates him to hear conservative critics complain that terrorists would get too many rights in the court system.

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 John Culberson, a Republican who said it showed the Obama administration does not 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,” Mr Culberson said.

Mr Holder said Mr Culberson’s arguments ignored basic facts about the law and the fight against terrorists.

“Let’s deal with reality,” Mr Holder said. Bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom”.

Pressed further on that point, he 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.”

Much of the hearing centred around the Obama administration’s stalled plan to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, on trial.

Last year, Mr Holder announced the trial would take place in a federal civilian court in New York City, not far from the site of the destroyed World Trade Centre.

In the face of resistance from New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and other local politicians, that plan was shelved and the White House is now considering putting Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators into a military commission trial.

Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat, bemoaned what he called a “cowardly” desire to avoid a civilian terror trial in a major city.

If a terrorist had killed thousands of Philadelphians, Mr Fattah said, “we would expect him to come to Philadelphia” to face trial “if he would live long enough”.

“It doesn’t befit a great nation to hesitate or equivocate on the question of following our own laws,” he said.