Stephen Hayes at The Weekley Standard reports that the Obama administration has secretly instructed American agents to give Miranda warnings to captured alien 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. [Read More]
Interestingly, this is another Barack Obama backtrack (or, outright lie). On March 22, 2009 President Obama said in an interview on 60 minutes, “Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.”
Andy McCarthy at The Corner rightly connects the dots between the return to the law enforcement approach to dealing with terrorism and the McCain Amendment in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act.
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