From yesterday’s Holder hearings:

SEN. KYL: It’s hard to understand a rationale, though, that when you kill 3,000 — almost — civilians, that that therefore calls for Article III, as opposed to a military commission. The logic of that escapes me.

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Well –

SEN. KYL: Let me –

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Federal — the federal law that governs the administration of the death penalty dictates that cases should be brought in the place where the offense occurred. So that is at least another factor that I think has to be used in trying to determine where the cases should be brought.

SEN. KYL: Well, that assumes that the person is in the United States for one thing, and he’s not.

Let me just close with this point. You said — and this really bothers me, Mr. Attorney General, with all due respect — “For eight years, justice has been delayed for the victims of the 9/11 attacks.” I want to put in the record, Mr. Chairman — ask unanimous consent to insert in the record an article called “Justice Delayed” by Andrew McCarthy.

SEN. LEAHY: Without objection.

SEN. KYL: And I’ll just quote two paragraphs from this.

“This is chutzpah writ large,” he writes. “The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenge (sic/challenging) them in the courts. Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department. That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered its services” –

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Hah!

SEN. KYL: — “to at least 18 of America’s enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people.”

And it concludes, “Within two years, KSM and four fellow war criminals stood ready to plead guilty and proceed to execution. But then the Obama administration blew into Washington. Want to talk about delay? Obama shut down the commission, despite the jihadists’ efforts to conclude it by pleading guilty. Obama’s team permitted no movement of (sic/on) the case for 11 months, and now has torpedoed a perfectly valid commission case — despite keeping the commission system for other cases — so that we can instead endure an incredibly expensive and burdensome civil (sic/civilian) trial that will take years to complete.”

The witness can surely respond to what I said.

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: I don’t even know where to begin — other than to say that, you know, this notion of leftist lawyers somehow prolonging this: The vast majority of the time in which these matters were not brought to trial, to fruition, happened in the prior administration. The Supreme Court — not, I think, a group of leftist lawyers — had concerns about the way in which some of the commissions were — the way in which the commissions were constructed.

The Congress reenacted — and, I think, appropriately so — the way in which the commissions were constructed. This is not a Congress peopled only with leftist lawyers, as Mr. McCarthy would say. So, you know, that makes for nice rhetoric and it makes for, you know, good, I guess, fodder on the talk shows and all of that stuff, you know, but I’m here to talk about facts and evidence, real American values, and not the kinds of polemics that he seems prone to — seems prone to. So, you know, that’s — I’m not worried about Mr. McCarthy.

Andrew C. McCarthy’s NYT Bestseller, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, is due out in paperback next week. Pre-order it at Amazon or BN.com.