Attorney General Eric Holder snapped at a Congressional hearing yesterday that Osama bin Laden will never be brought in alive.

According to Politico:

“Let’s deal with reality,” Holder said. “You’re talking about a hypothetical that will never occur. 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. That’s the reality. … He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that.”

Really?

Did the top lawyer in the country just base the policy of the United States of America on an assumption of the suicidal moral courage of our most hated enemy?  Or the cold-blooded devotion of bin Laden’s bodyguards to whack him?

Right.  Because bin Laden is just like Saddam Hussein.  Or Slobodan Milosevic.  Or former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Ooops.  They all went quietly.

You know, there is a reason that many of these criminal masterminds get old and stay in power.  They are not fighters.  They are not willing to blow themselves up.  Osama would never fly a plane into a building.

So don’t assume he wants to take a bullet.  His legacy would have been assured of eternal terrorist glory if he went down in a hail of bullets in Afghanistan nine years ago.

And think of the forum a trial would give him, even if it was held in secret.  The publicity would be amazing.

Please, Mr. Holder, tell me this was just a moment of anger at obtuse Republican questioning on the truly important topic - eliminating civilian trials as an option for terror suspects .  Or maybe it was a moment of embarrassment because you still have no idea where or what kind of trials the 9/11 suspects are going to get.

Because the way it stands now, it sounds like we are either totally clueless or that you just admitted that we will summarily execute bin Laden, even if he surrenders waving a white flag.

And let’s not go there …