Hope and change
Obama administration changes the rules: New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.
March 24th, 2011 at 9:21 am
So treating terrorists as criminals, instead of as illegal combatants, requires them to be treated as illegal criminals?
March 24th, 2011 at 9:31 am
Mikee: Domestic Terrorists.
You know, like people who go to Tea Parties and believe in the Right to Life and smaller government.
March 24th, 2011 at 9:58 am
Every crime will be terrorism now.
March 24th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Yes, alan, according to the Patriot Act, we’re all potential terrorists waiting for some arbitrary decision to cite us, arrest us and indefinitely detain us.
It seems to me that such a law and its imposition is government terror against the citizens…and to express such an opinion probably makes one a terror suspect.
March 24th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
What drivel. First off, the policy change is how the federal government applies one of the many 4th and 5th amendment exceptions. So they could find the information thrown out as far as being used against the suspect. I don’t believe there are issues of using the information against others, i.e., stopping other terrorists. Nor, as the article opines, can Congress change the right as it isn’t legislative but Constitutional. No matter what procedure the interrogators use, it will be up to the Court to decide if it is acceptable, written procedures or not.
And there seems to be a misconception that has crept into our culture. You always have the right to remain silent. The Miranda Warning is a judicially created step to protect those who are to stupid to remain silent. It does not create or remove the right. Now with the enhanced interrogation program, there was a test of the ability to remain silent. The argument isn’t over the right to remain silent but when extreme measures are used to break someone’s ability to remain silent, can that information be used against them in court.
Really, with the ticking bomb scenario, you get the information out of the person, stop the bomb, the case against the person is thrown out, he’s deported, the CIA arranges an accident. For a domestic terrorist we might have to let him go but the bomb is stopped and he never takes another breath that isn’t documented in his FBI file.
March 24th, 2011 at 1:53 pm
JKB: “for a Domestic Terrorist we might….” Or his brakes suddenly fail while he’s driving down the Interstate.
March 24th, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Like JKB says, they can make all the policy changes they want, courts will rule on the admissibility of the confession/statement. Courts have consistently ruled that when sopmeone is no longer free to leave they must be advised of their rights. There is no court recognized “terrorist exception” – yet
March 24th, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Why would you need miranda when they will not even tell you what you are being charged with… They could also get you on a material witness warrant..
March 25th, 2011 at 2:30 am
I blame bad crime television (I’m looking at you, CSI…) for the widespread notion that if you are not read your Miranda rights, you get off scott-free.
It does, however, make me chortle at the thought of someone finding out the hard way that it isn’t true.