Obama's Hopey, Change Circus

Upon his capture, the most beautiful words a terrorist can hear are the following:

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”

If you read the above paragraph, you have just been "Mirandized." That is the Miranda Warning that law enforcement officers must recite to every criminal suspect they question -- if they want to introduce something as evidence in any criminal proceeding.

The ringleaders for Obama's Hopey Change Circus, Mssrs. Holder and Gibbs, maintain that the proper procedure for bringing terrorists to justice is arrest them and give them full Constitutional protection as afforded to every American citizen. From the Weekly Standard, Thomas Joscelyn writes:

During an interview on MSNBC Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the Obama administration’s handling of Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Gibbs argued that the administration was right to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, instead of as an enemy combatant. “Just because you make somebody an enemy combatant [it] doesn’t make them talk,” Gibbs argued. He then pointed to an example from the Bush years to supposedly support his point.

“Jose Padilla was made an enemy combatant so that we could get him to talk,” Gibbs said. “And guess what happened when we made him an enemy combatant, he didn't talk. He did talk when he was transferred back into a civilian court.”

President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, made the same point on Tuesday in an op-ed for USA Today. Brennan argued: “Terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate when transferred to military custody, which can harden one's determination to resist cooperation.”

Brennan and Gibbs are wrong. In fact, Jose Padilla only started cooperating once he was transferred into the military’s custody and interrogated.

Joscelyn also calls their bluff:

Thus, when Padilla was initially detained by the FBI in May 2002 authorities knew he was up to no good. The FBI questioned Padilla for several hours but got nowhere. A copy of the FBI’s 302 memo written after the initial questioning of Padilla shows that al Qaeda’s man gave the bureau nothing. Padilla talked about his personal history but said nothing about his real intentions or his nefarious friends.

So a month later, in June 2002, Padilla was transferred back into military custody. Things changed in a hurry. Waterboarding is my friend.

The memo then reads: “Since that time [June 9, 2002], additional and more detailed intelligence information about Jose Padilla has been developed and made available in unclassified form.”

As a retired LEO, I have had to deal with the consequences of Miranda v. Arizona. In NYS the restrictions are even greater. If a suspect is already in criminal proceedings from a prior arrest, the right to counsel automatically attaches and you cannot interrogate him under any circumstances unless he first confers with his lawyer. This means that even if the suspect wants to confess and voluntarily waives his right to counsel, he cannot and you cannot until he talks with his lawyer,

Obama, Brennan, Holder and Gibbs want to reduce terrorism to the level of a convenience store robbery.

They want to turn this:

USS ARIZONA

Into This:

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Obama's Hopey, Change Circus