RUTHFULLY YOURS

Eric Holder does a 180 on bin Laden.By JAMES TARANTO

What do Eric Holder and Yasser Arafat have in common?No, the attorney general (unlike his boss) has not won a Nobel Peace Prize. And at a youthful 60, he should have quite a few years before he makes the inevitable transition to stable condition.

Holder is just changing his story to suit his audience. Which brings us back to Arafat, who was notorious for conciliating in English while inciting violence in Arabic. Holder seems to be doing the same thing–telling one story in English and the other in British, while forgetting that the two tongues are mutually intelligible. He is two attorney generals in one divided by a common language!Holder on the Beeb

In an interview with the BBC, Holder says the killing of Osama bin Laden was “not an assassination.” That much is true; it was the legitimate killing of an unlawful enemy combatant. But Holder means something different. In the BBC interview, he claims, as the Beeb puts it, that “the operation was a ‘kill or capture mission’ and that Bin Laden’s surrender would have been accepted if offered.”

“If the possibility had existed, if there was the possibility of a feasible surrender, that would have occurred,” Holder says. “But their protection, that is the protection of the force that went into that compound, was I think uppermost in our minds.”

Sounds reasonable enough. But read this report from the Washington Post, March 16, 2010:

Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told lawmakers at a hearing Tuesday.

“Let’s deal with the reality here,” Holder said in response to aggressive questioning by Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.). “The reality is we will be reading Miranda rights to a corpse.” . . .

Holder grew most heated, however, amid GOP attacks over the hypothetical capture of bin Laden. No law enforcement response would be necessary, Holder said, because “he will be killed by us or by his own people. I was being a little flippant. . . . He is not going to be alive.”

At the time, the administration was planning to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other top terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to New York for trial in a civilian court. Culberson wanted to know in which venue the administration intended to try bin Laden if he was captured. Holder declined to answer on the ground that “the possibility just simply does not exist.”

Do not be misled by the rhetorical consistency between the two Holder statements. Yes, in both the congressional testimony and the BBC interview Holder denies the existence of the possibility of taking bin Laden alive. But the meaning of that denial is quite different in 2011 than in 2010.

Now, it is a factual claim about bin Laden’s behavior when U.S. servicemen confronted him. Last year, there was no way for Holder to know the circumstances of that confrontation, except inasmuch as he was privy to the administration’s planning for it. Thus his 2010 denial of the possibility that bin Laden would be captured alive has to be understood as a statement of policy–one that contradicts what he now says the policy was.

Perhaps there’s an explanation. Maybe sometime after Holder’s testimony, the administration developed a contingency plan in case bin Laden surrendered, having realized that it would be legally problematic to kill him if that happened.

More likely, though, Holder is just changing his story to suit his audience. Which brings us back to Arafat, who was notorious for conciliating in English while inciting violence in Arabic. Holder seems to be doing the same thing–telling one story in English and the other in British, while forgetting that the two tongues are mutually intelligible. He is two attorney generals in one divided by a common language!