When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.
Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal – read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.
If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.
Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”
……A lawyer who has worked on detainee issues for the U.S. government offers this rationale for the Obama administration’s approach. “If the US is mirandizing certain suspects in Afghanistan, they’re likely doing it to ensure that the treatment of the suspect and the collection of information is done in a manner that will ensure the suspect can be prosecuted in a US court at some point in the future.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/06/miranda_rights_for_terrorists.asp
The ACLU must be doing cartwheels. Islamic terrorists, especially foreign ones, do not rate the same civil rights as American citizens. No where in the Constitution is that provided.
During the campaign, THE ONE mocked the idea of granting Miranda rights to terrorists, and after the election, reiterated:
“Now, do these folks deserve miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/06/flashback_obama_said_terrorist_1.asp
Since he’s flip-flopped again, who’s he pandering to now?
Islamic terrorists are still committing atrocities and plotting more attacks against the U.S., but Obama wants to make sure they get read their rights.
Yep, the country’s in good hands.