The US is now Mirandizing high-value detainees?

posted at 2:29 pm on June 10, 2009 by Karl

The Weekly Standard reports:

[T]he 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…

Can’t imagine why that would be. Although it sounds like a bad joke, Rep. Rogers notes that it would fit in with Obama’s “Global Justice Initiative.” It also fits in with Obama’s general pattern of neutering the CIA.

As Gary Schmitt wrote when news of the “Global Justice Initiative” first surfaced:

The idea that we should return to the “good ol’ days” when the core of our counterterrorism strategy was to arrest terrorists and put them on trial is an idea that should be thoroughly debated before we head back down that road. Lest anyone forget, the first World Trade Center bombing—which only by luck did not result in hundreds or possibly thousands dying—happened on the FBI’s watch and while DOJ and FBI officials were worried about building a court case against the plotters. And of course the ’90s saw al Qaeda and terrorists kill hundreds in attacks against Americans with the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole. The question someone should ask is: how many died on 9/11 and before when the FBI was taking the lead in counterterrorism, and how many have died since?

We can hope Rep. Rogers was misinformed in Afghanistan, but this policy seems all-too-plausible, coming from the Obama administration.

Update: “Now, do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.” (h/t thegoldfarb.)

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