Patterico's Pontifications

1/23/2010

Good News: Miranda Rights Work

Filed under: Crime,Terrorism — DRJ @ 6:10 pm



[Guest post by DRJ]

The bad news is they stopped the Christmas Day bomber from talking:

“In interviews with The Associated Press, U.S. officials described for the first time the details of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s arrest Dec. 25 at Detroit Metro Airport.

Captured after a bomb hidden in his underwear ignited but failed to explode, Abdulmutallab spoke freely and provided valuable intelligence, officials said. Federal agents repeatedly interviewed him or heard him speak to others. But when they read him his legal rights nearly 10 hours after the incident, he went silent.”

The linked article has more details on how Abdulmutallab was handled, what he said, and when he said it. It also confirms that the “on-scene investigators never discussed turning the suspect over to military authorities,” nor did they involve the special counterterrorism unit “because it was not yet up and running.”

— DRJ

15 Responses to “Good News: Miranda Rights Work”

  1. I can’t begin to tell you how safe I feel with this Administration in charge of things. Really, they have top-notch people in charge…

    Scott Jacobs (d027b8)

  2. You’re saying in the Professor Farnsworth ironic sense of the word, from Futurama, right, And Scott
    you have to say ‘we have best men working on it’

    ian cormac (a80ed2)

  3. With friends in high places, al-Qaeda terrorists can go about their assigned duties confident that Obama’s minions will do everything in their power to keep America safe for martyrdom operations.

    72 virgins if you blow yourself and a bunch of infidel Americans to kingdom come, or a few years being coddled at Club GITMO if you can’t keep your powder dry. Now is this a great country, or what?

    ropelight (5baf47)

  4. The next bombing will be better managed by the Obami although it will result in the loss of an airplane and 300 deaths. The Fort Hood report is a nice model for the response. The word “Muslim” will not be found in the report.

    Mike K (2cf494)

  5. It seems the idea that terrorists might be treated as an enemy combatant at war against us has never occurred to anyone in the Obama administration. Instead they treat these guys like they got caught robbing the local 7-11.

    Liberals like to point out that the people we are holding in Gitmo are probably poor shepherds that got swept up in bounty hunts. But when we catch someone in the middle of a terrorist attack Obama still doesn’t want to send him to Gitmo.

    MU789 (514c52)

  6. And they wonder why the average voter doesn’t trust the Democrats with National Security?

    AD - RtR/OS! (c0c796)

  7. this new generation of terrorists is distinguished by their ineptness, which is mostly thanks to their inexperience both at the grunt and middle levels of the organization. New recruits and officers promoted thanks to hellfire breakfasts for the old officers. Giving abdullamatab the right to remain silent is a mistake; a proper interrogation could have yielded much information because abdullamatab probably didnt get much training at resisting questioning – he was singing like a bird before miranda came in, apparently. Another unforced error by the obama administration. And they dont have a new high value interrogation program in place yet, what the hell. This is the security and safety of american and foreign lives at stake.

    Chaos (7c068a)

  8. Oh c’mon guys!,
    Look at what a great country we are! We have an African-American in office!
    OK, so he never even ran a Girl Scout Troop.
    But hey He’s a nice guy and did I mention, he’s African-American!
    He can get his message across better than anyone else, I mean really, isn’t the whole country just a more hopeful and sunshiny place now?
    Sarc off/
    His inexperience, lack of work ethic and personal deficit in the American ethos will be very hard to fix in 3 years from now. God Bless America.

    ptichforksntorches (888cb1)

  9. If you read the actual story line. They got only 50 minutes of questioning out of the bomber. Then the president and his supporters had the balls to say he was thoroughly questioned.

    Skidmarks (f07c2e)

  10. “Giving abdullamatab the right to remain silent is a mistake;”

    That’s how rights work in some minds: The president gives them out.

    imdw (017d51)

  11. You can of course recall that the Anointed One and his minions rolled out a story big time last April. The proudly announced that the evil ways of the Bushie-ites in interrogation had been replaced–by a new, improved, sparkly clean High Value Interrogation procedure. New, improved—and it turns out 8 or 9 months later— non-existent.

    You know you lie to the American people often enough, and when, not if, they find out, you just might have a credibility problem. These clowns aren’t smart enough to remember their lies.

    Mike Myers (3c9845)

  12. We need to consider what happened in context. I can be as critical of the Obama Admin. as anyone, but the FACTS are that the officials who responded to the Detroit incident are the same now as they were under the Bush Admin., and what they were trained to do now is the same as in the Bush Admin.

    Note that the AP article says the first federal law enforcement officers were Customs and Border Protection, along with local police. That’s because the FBI isn’t stationed at airports.

    Well, while they are fine people, Customs and Border Protection officers are not FBI agents. They are not trained the same, they generally don’t have the same level of education, and they certainly don’t have the same mission responsibilities.

    I actually give them a little credit for not immediately Mirandizing the guy. That is pretty much SOP, and the fact that they did give some thought to their options is nice to see. Normally, once a person is taken into custody, the law enforcement agent doing so is trained to advise them of their rights so that anything they MIGHT say after that can be used. I don’t expect that the Customs and Border Protection agents have a lot of training about when and whether to treat someone as a potential terrorist or a criminal. Calling in the CIA or military interrogators is not going to be something that comes to mind right off the top.

    The fact that someone thought “we can rely on the public safety exception” to Miranda in their effort to find out if there were other bombers aboard other planes is actually encouraging. It’s more than I would have expected.

    But, when the guy was in custody, after undergoing medical treatment, and they wanted to conduct a custodial interrogation, it’s pretty much accepted practice that they are going to read him his rights.

    On the other hand, valid criticism can be made of the fact that the High Value Detainee Interrogation program was not yet up and running. Further, enough time passed for people higher up at Justice, the WH, and the DOD to consider the question of whether he should have been transferred to DOD custody once he was out of surgery. I don’t think we have a clear indication yet of whether that question was considered, and what the reasoning was for leaving him in law enforcement custody after the first several hours passed.

    WLS Shipwrecked (3d3fb8)

  13. That’s how rights work in some minds: The president gives them out.

    Comment by imdw — 1/24/2010 @ 7:06 am

    The whole world is American! Which is why we are in Iraq–because it really is part of the USA. And Yemen, too.

    Of course, if you think that the rest of the world must be protected from the USA, then this sort of sophomoric sophistry might even make a tad bit of sense. You would be an idiot, of course.

    iconoclast (5a35c3)

  14. Treating an act of war by a terrorist the same as a shoplifter is just plain damn stoopid.

    peedoffamerican (7f3c14)

  15. And everything he said before Miranda will be inadmissible.

    KJB (9d7ca5)


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