ON June 26, Bradford Berenson, a former White House aide, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on whether suspected-terrorist detainees should have habeas-corpus rights.
In one exchange, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) lectured: “I don’t see how you can pick up someone in New York and say that his rights are different or less because he’s accused of being an enemy combatant, based on whatever information, as opposed to his being accused of being a murderer . . .”
Berenson replied: “We need to be clear about what that means. It means that if we had captured Mohammed Atta on September 10th, we would have had no choice but to treat him as a criminal defendant – ” Nadler (interjecting): “Exactly right.”
Berenson: “- which would have meant no interrogation -”
Nadler (interjecting): “Exactly right.”
Berenson: “- no intelligence, and the World Trade Center is coming down.”
Nadler: “That’s exactly right. And when we captured mass murderers in the United States, we did exactly the same. We captured Charles Manson, we did the same.”
Nadler’s district includes Ground Zero.
You can view the exchange at the 51-minute mark in the video at judiciary.house.gov/Oversight.aspx?ID=344