It’s no longer a “war on terror,” and we are no longer dealing with “terrorism” or “terrorists.” Oh, no. Obama will give a 6,000 word speech in Egypt on American-Islamic issues and NEVER use any of those hateful terms.
Nope. We’re now a nation that is managing an “overseas contingency operation,” rather than fighting a war on terror. We’re trying to reduce “man-caused disasters” rather than terrorism (at least while my lawsuit against DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano for sexually discriminating by calling it “man-caused” rather than “human-caused” is still pending). And, whatever you want to call the people who are launching murderous attacks against innocent and unarmed civilians, don’t you DARE call them “terrorists.”
Well, whatever we choose to call them (I like “meanies,” because it avoids all those hateful politically incorrect words, but still says they’re mean), Obama has stopped waterboarding them and started mirandizing them.
I feel so cozy and safe under Barack Obama. If we ever suffer a massive overseas contingency man-caused disaster, we can know that he will give a really cautiously-worded speech in retaliation. And who would want something like THAT directed against them?
Miranda Rights for Terrorists
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.”
That effort, which elevates the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and diminishes the role of intelligence and military officials, was described in a May 28 Los Angeles Times article.
The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.
Under the “global justice” initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.
Thanks in part to the popularity of law and order television shows and movies, many Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning – so named because of the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona that required police officers and other law enforcement officials to advise suspected criminals of their rights.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.
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.”
But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy. “When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the ‘right to remain silent,’” says Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation–lawyering up.”
According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are advising detainees to do. “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”
Rogers adds: “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”
One thing is clear, though. A detainee who is not talking cannot provide information about future attacks. Had Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had a lawyer, Tenet wrote, “I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.”
Posted by Stephen F. Hayes on June 10, 2009 02:05 PM | Permalink
I liked hearing “You have the right to remain silent” from Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet; I HATE hearing it from Obama to a terrorist who knows the murderous plans of his terrorist buddies (Sorry: I meant to say “meanie”).
Stephen Hayes cites George Tenet because he was a CIA Director who had been appointed by Democrat Bill Clinton. A corroborating source is fellow career intelligence professional and former CIA Director General Michael Hayden, who said, “fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations [of terrorists Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Ramzi bin al Shibh].”
What do you truly think we would have learned from these hard-core terrorist murderers if we’d given them lawyers instead of an invitation to experience some pain? I mean, seriously, if you think that being nice to these guys in the presence of their lawyers would have yielded intelligence information, then I can paint string yellow and sell it to you as 24k gold chains.
This is amazing folly on an unimaginable scale.
“The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”
Can you even imagine this?
Only a couple of weeks after the FBI managed to infiltrate and interdict a domestic terrorist attack by African-American Muslims radicalized in the prison system, and only days after an African-American convert to Islam who changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad murdered an unarmed American soldier to punish the military for their “insults” to Islam. we are putting a Gitmo terrorist (named Ahmed Ghailani) on trial in the US court system.
What in the hell is going on? Two wildly divergent theories:
President Barack Obama has said keeping Ghailani from coming to the United States “would prevent his trial and conviction.” Taking a drastically different stance, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio labeled Tuesday’s move “the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.”
But no. We’re going to let them in under Obama. We’re going to let them make a mockery of our court system. We’re going to let them in to radicalize more and more of our inmates into the ways of terrorist jihad.
Obama’s new foreign policy is a disgrace. Giving foreign terrorists captured on the battlefield miranda protections and providing them with lawyers is an insult to our warriors who hunt these killers down.
Tags: Abdulhakim, African-Americans, FBI, George Tenet, Ghailani, lawyer, Little Rock, man-caused disasters, Michael Hayden, Mike Rogers, miranda rights, Mohammed, Muslims, Napolitano, overseas contingency operation, prison system, radicalize, terrorists
Start Thinking Right 
June 11, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Miranda Rights for suspects. Do you remember how people are innocent until proven guilty?
June 12, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Either you are a true citizen of the world who believes that murderous foreign terrorists are as much “citizens” of the United States as any born-and-bred American, or you are too ignorant to understand that the justice system and Constitutional guarantees ONLY apply to American citizens.
We never could have won any war we ever fought if we had applied your “reasoning.”
Imagine how WWII would have gone if FBI agents had to be present with every unit in order to read enemy combatants their constitutional right and assign them a lawyer.
June 12, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I’m a citizen of the world, just like Reagan.
June 12, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The very fact that you call yourself “Godless American” more than proves that you don’t have the faintest clue what Reagan stood for. Reagan would have politely suggested you find yourself a Bible and read Psalm 53:1 – and seriously consider upgrading your status.
It wasn’t as a “citizen of the world” that Reagan escalated the Cold War to the point where it broke the Soviet Union. It was as an American President standing up against its enemies and vowing to defeat them.
June 12, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Though he did call himself a citizen of the world. We’re all in this together. Whatever rules are good enough for us, are good enough for everyone else. Speaking of WWII, remember how there were trials after the war? We didn’t take each Nazi and kill them, we tried them and those found guilty were sentenced. Why is that a problem now?
June 12, 2009 at 8:31 pm
You say it yourself:
After the war is over, I would only be too happy to support war crimes trials for terrorists who murdered civilians.
But the war isn’t over yet.
It is news to me that the only alternative to mirandizing terrorists is to “take each Nazi [or fill in the blank] and kill them.” It seems to me that keeping them at Gitmo until we defeat our enemy has worked FAR better for us than any alternative I have heard so far.
What we MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT DO was attempt to try those Nazi soldiers even as we were fighting the war. And what we MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT DO was let any of the soldiers we captured fighting against us go free because we couldn’t produce enough “evidence” against them in a court room. That would have been insane. Just as it is insane now.
I imagine I’m a “citizen of the world” too, given the fact that I live on the planet. But first and foremost, I am a citizen of the United States.
If aliens invade, I’m quite certain I would do everything I could as a “citizen of the world” to fight them. But in the meantime, as a citizen of the United States of America, I served MY COUNTRY in the United States Army and fought for it against those who threatened its citizens or its national security.
June 12, 2009 at 9:16 pm
The only problem is that many of those being detained weren’t caught on a battle field, they were picked up after crappy intel. They aren’t all militants. That’s what happens when you contract out for intel and translators who get paid when they give names. That’s what happens when you resort to torture. You get bad intel, so bad that you jail innocent people.
June 13, 2009 at 5:57 am
OFpWiT jjnlgqrecrei, [url=http://mirrrfqgukmc.com/]mirrrfqgukmc[/url], [link=http://oqrrpvcovrrx.com/]oqrrpvcovrrx[/link], http://hmixoubomtwo.com/
June 13, 2009 at 4:45 pm
First of all, when you do a hand-waving “many of those” and “they” I have no idea who specifically you are talking about. If you’re going to make such a statement, what is your evidence?
Secondly, the fact that more than 1 in 7 Gitmo detainees have returned to fight us again after being freed – when these were considered the least dangerous ones who were “cleared,” the actual evidence is against you.
The remaining Gitmo detainees are, with very few exceptions, considered the very worst and most difficult of cases.
Providing terrorists – who don’t even deserve to be given Geneva and Hague protections (the acts were intended for UNIFORMED SOLDIERS pursuing the LAWFUL ORDERS of a LEGITIMATE CHAIN OF COMMAND). To give these terrorists equal protections to uniformed soldiers will make uniformed soldiers a thing of the past. The NEW MODEL of warfare will be the non-uniformed “soldier” who targets civilians while concealing himself among them in order to maximize the fear and unrest of other nations. No one should want that; but that is what we are getting: the legitimization of terrorism.
We are in war. No sane nation offers lawyers to their captured enemy. Period.
October 7, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I have devised a PR plan that will torpedo Obama’s ship. I need an email address.
(917) 517.2749