Globe Editoral
THE NEWS that the would-be airplane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has resumed cooperation with the FBI validates the Justice Department’s decision to charge him in federal court rather than a military commission. And the creative methods employed by the FBI to obtain his cooperation refute the notion - advanced with much tub-thumping anger on talk radio - that a defendant in the criminal justice system is somehow off limits to interrogators seeking information about terrorist plots.
The FBI shrewdly sought out relatives of Abdulmutallab in Nigeria who were willing to come to the United States and prevail on him to tell what he knows about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Using family members to turn the defendant into a cooperative informant highlighted a crucial element of the interrogator’s craft: the need to establish trust between a questioner and a prisoner. The flipping of Abdulmutallab proved what intelligence professionals know well: that psychological methods of interrogation are almost always more effective than the rough stuff seen in the movies.
Senator Scott Brown and some other Republicans have castigated the Obama administration, originally, because Abdulmutallab was read his Miranda rights and allowed to “lawyer up’’ after an initial 50-minute interrogation. But if he had been turned over to a military commission, he would have had to receive the very same protections. The 50 minutes of FBI questioning without an attorney present were legally permissible only under a public safety exemption, which allowed agents to ask about such things as other explosives on Abdulmutallab’s flight or terrorists on other incoming flights.
Under the Bush administration, more than 300 terrorists were convicted in the criminal justice system, and shoe-bomber Richard Reid was granted his Miranda rights in the first five minutes of his capture. Politicians who tried to raise a ruckus about the Justice Department’s handling of the Abdulmutallab case either didn’t know that history, ignored the questionable legal status of military commissions, or failed to appreciate how effective FBI investigators really are.
