Hullabaloo

Thursday, June 11, 2009

 
Miranda On The Battlefield

by digby

While most of the news media were focusing on the Holocaust Museum Shooting yesterday, this is what consumed the round table on Bret Baier's Fox news broadcast. Steven Hayes (of "Cheney was right about the Iraq Al Qaeda connection" fame) is all worked up about this report that the US is allegedly giving Miranda warnings to foreign fighters in Afghanistan:

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.

I'll wait for someone other than a lone right wing congressional nutball to confirm that they actually are giving Miranda warnings to foreign fighters. But the fact that the FBI is back in the mix is good news. The covert actions of the CIA, as usual, have been cloddishly ineffective and counterproductive. They don't know zilch about interrogations and investigations. The FBI is far better suited to this task, since that's what they are trained to do. Let the spies be spies, the analysts be analysts, the special forces be soldiers and the cops be the interrogators. Everyone has their job.

It is somewhat amusing, however, that the right wing is now the sworn enemy of the FBI, which they consider to be a bunch of panty-waisted wimps beholden to silly rules like the Fourth Amendment. These people just won't rest until we have a full-blown Stasi style secret police.

Until it comes after them, of course, at which point they'll start squealing like little schoolboys about freedom and jackboots and political persecution. It's just how they are.

Update: Jake Tapper reports:

The Obama administration announced this week that some detainees captured and held abroad have been read Miranda rights to preserve evidence for a potential prosecution.

Administration officials say the Bush administration did this as well in some instances relating to certain criminal cases.

The question of detainees being Mirandized was raised by theWeekly Standard's Steven Hayes who wrotethat "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 Obama administration took issue with the notion that this was a blanket policy change, one ordered by the Justice Department.

"There has been no policy change and no blanket instruction issued for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas," Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. "While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas, at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees."

I doubt very seriously that this explanation will get in the way of the impending hissy fit. Their eyes were already rolling back in their heads and they were all clutching their white hankies like their lives depended on it. You could feel the rising hysteria coming through the TV screen.


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digby 6/11/2009 10:00:00 AM |