Holder's terror trial response 'breathtaking'
Jim Brown - OneNewsNow - 11/23/2009 7:00:00 AM
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) in a Judiciary Committee hearing last week asked Attorney General Eric Holder a question that the nation's top cop could not answer. Graham asked: "Can you give me a case in United States history where a[n] enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?"
The inquiry was followed by an extensive silence before Holder attempted to answer, and the attorney general could only verbalize: "I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know, the determination I've made...." before Graham sternly cut him off in mid-sentence.
"We're making history here, Mr. Attorney General," Graham stated. "I'll answer it for you. The answer is 'no.'"
Robert Alt, deputy director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, says Holder's non-response raises a question about the political nature of the decision to try some Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian court. (See related video)
"You would anticipate that any legal decision of this nature would have been highly researched and that the attorney general would have been briefed on the questions of any prior usage," Alt mentions. "The fact that he couldn't even answer that question, I found startling."
Alt notes that Al Qaeda was able to use the civilian trial of blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in New York as an information-gathering tool -- a list of unindicted co-conspirators was later found in a cave in Torah Borah, Afghanistan.
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