Miranda Rights

There is a lot of back-and-forth discussion as to whether Dzhokhar Tsamaev (the second Boston Marathon bomber) should be granted his Miranda Rights ("You have the right to remain silent ...  etc.").  This is too obvious an observation to ignore, but Dzhokhar has a gunshot wound to his throat and cannot talk ... therefore he will remain silent no matter what,  Baa-da-bing!

(Sorry for the all the posts today ... but I couldn't resist this one.)

Tortured Logic?

Indulge me the following scenario: A Muslim man in his early twenties is picked up in Boston because his cell phone has been the source of a series of suspiciously encoded text messages to a known Al Qaeda operative in Yemen ("The pumpkin pie is in the oven," etc.) These intercepts were done by the NSA under the aegis of the American Patriot Act. (Trust me, they can do this.) He is then found to be in this country illegally ... and when his clothing is scanned by a Geiger Counter it exhibits a dangerously high level of radioactivity. His laptop computer is also found to have detailed and credible diagrams of a suitcase nuclear weapon. Other notable intelligence suggests that an illicit atomic bomb has been smuggled into the United States and is now hidden somewhere, ready to be detonated.

For you Pollyannas who believe that such an event is impossible, please explain 9/11. Now, how do you, as our head of Homeland Security, deal with this captured Muslim man to find out the who, what, when, where and how of this possible devastating terrorist attack ... knowing that it might kill hundreds of thousand of Americans and set back our economy for possibly a generation? And, obviously, time is of the essence. Would you immediately and continuously waterboard him until he spilled the beans or, perhaps, read him his Miranda rights and lawyer him up?

See No Evil

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has killed a domestic spy satellite program that would have been used ”to provided federal, state and local officials with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery — but no eavesdropping capabilities— to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.” See: No Eyes in the Sky To me, this is one more indication that the Obama administration does not have our nation’s security as its top-of-mind issue. Add this to the list of other administration backtracks that reduce our nation’s ability to combat radical-Islamic terrorism:

- the announced year-end closing of Gitmo,
- the release of top-secret terrorist interrogation memos,
- the relocating al-Qaeda Uighur terrorists to Bermuda and Palau,
- the reading of Miranda-rights to terrorists captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan,
- and Obama’s ho-hum attitude to a terrorist’s killing of an Army recruiter in Little Rock.

I wonder how much more dismantling is still to occur to the anti-terrorism battlements that were erected by the Bush administration. And this bothers me … it bothers me quite a bit.