Nigerian Terrorist Given Miranda Rights After 1 Hour
At first I thought that this was potentially just a bunch of Republicans complaining in the same vein that they often freak out if Pres. Obama uses a teleprompter for a nationally televised speech that happens to be in a junior high school, but then I got a reading:
WASHINGTON, Feb 3 (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday rebuffed criticism that intelligence was lost by giving a lawyer and other legal rights to the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a U.S. airliner.
In a letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Holder also said he made the decision to charge the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, with crimes in the regular U.S. court system.
Holder rejected widespread criticism by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress over how the suspect was interviewed by FBI agents for only about an hour before he stopped cooperating and then was read his Miranda rights, providing him a lawyer and full U.S. constitutional legal rights.
That does not make that much sense.
We give Miranda rights to criminals because they are quite different from terrorists. Here is just a short list of the differences:
- Criminals usually are not protecting large, complex networks.
- Criminals are often motivated by greed or other baser urges.
- We are fighting terrorists and nations who harbor terrorism actively, and these terrorists have valuable information about both, potentially.
- Criminals that get Miranda rights usually are Americans.
The idea that they are entitled to such Miranda rights is rather odd.
In the past, society has determined that people who are involved in warfare be tried by special military tribunals, (which terrorism falls into easily enough as it is often addressed militarily and is done for ideological purposes unlike most crime). There is a legal precedent backing that.
Thus, a terrorist ought to first and foremost be detained and interrogated.
I disagree with what happened int his circumstance.