GOP Winning War Over Miranda Rights for Terrorists

Townhall.com
by Byron York

On Capitol Hill, there's a war being fought over the War on Terror, and so far, Republicans are winning. Or at least they're winning the Battle of Miranda.

GOP lawmakers believe they are having some success in the effort to stiffen the spine of the Obama administration as it makes policy for dealing with captured terrorist suspects in the future. Even as the administration defends its decision to grant accused Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, the president himself is hinting that things might be done differently in the future.

"Should the practice of reading suspected terrorist their Miranda rights be reviewed?" CBS's Katie Couric asked President Obama during a Super Bowl interview.

"Absolutely," Obama answered. "Everything should be reviewed."

"It's important for us to recognize," Obama explained, "that when we're dealing with al-Qaida operatives, that they may have national-security intelligence that we need, and it's important to make sure that the processes and procedures we approach with respect to these folks are not identical to the ones we would use if we were apprehending the local drug dealer."

Translation: Maybe we'll do it differently next time.

While Obama hints at changes, he and his administration are still trying to justify their actions in the Detroit case. "They're changing their story constantly to try to defend their tactics," says a knowledgeable source on Capitol Hill.

For example, we know that the FBI interrogated Abdulmutallab for just 50 minutes before Attorney General Eric Holder decided to advise the suspect of his Miranda rights to remain silent and to have a court-appointed attorney. After that, Abdulmutallab shut up.

Republicans hit the administration hard on that point, especially when the White House made the unbelievable claim that agents had gotten every last bit of valuable information from Abdulmutallab in that brief talk. In response to GOP criticism, administration officials leaked the story that Abdulmutallab actually stopped talking before being read his Miranda rights, meaning Holder's decision was not to blame for cutting off the brief flow of intelligence.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, say knowledgeable sources on Capitol Hill. "It is totally false that he had stopped cooperating and then they made the decision to Mirandize him," says one GOP source. "They made the decision, and then they weren't trying to question him anymore."

After a few days of rebuttal, Republicans thought they had knocked the story down. But then came Obama, in the Super Bowl interview, when Couric said Abdulmutallab "was giving information to the FBI, then his rights were read to him and he clammed up."

"Well, that's actually not what happened," Obama said. "What happened was, he clammed up, and after we had obtained actionable intelligence from him, that's when the FBI folks on the ground then read him his Miranda rights."

No matter what the president says, Republicans are firm in their insistence that that's not the way it happened.

Just a few hours before Obama's Super Bowl interview, some top GOP lawmakers were astonished to hear White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan, appearing on "Meet the Press," claim that they had known about -- and had not objected to -- the administration's decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights.

Brennan said he called four top GOP lawmakers -- Sens. Mitch McConnell and Kit Bond and Reps. John Boehner and Peter Hoekstra -- on Christmas night, just hours after Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253. Brennan said he told the Republicans that the FBI had a suspect in custody; from that, Brennan claimed, the lawmakers should have inferred that Abdulmutallab would be read his Miranda rights.

"None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point," Brennan said. "They didn't say, 'Is he going into military custody? Is he going to be Mirandized?'"

Within hours of Brennan's TV appearance, all four GOP lawmakers took issue with Brennan's story. "Brennan never told me of any plans to Mirandize the Christmas Day bomber," said Bond. "It never came up," said Hoekstra. Spokesman for McConnell and Boehner denied it, too.

GOP lawmakers don't expect to hear that charge again. And they believe that, in the big picture, while administration officials continue to push back, Obama himself appears to be giving ground. To Republicans, that's progress.

"They're going to review this policy, whether they acknowledge it or not," says another well-placed GOP source. "And it only happened because of the concerns that we raised."

If It's War, Obama, Act Like It

The New York Post reports that Obama finds himself facing a new headache -- Yemen. Indeed, by (finally) acknowledging, "We are at war against al Qaeda," he's guaranteed that even Yemen won't be the last stop, but let's start with Yemen, since Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi is said to have advised both the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, and the crotch-bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Like Afghanistan, Yemen's population is more loyal to family and tribe than to a weak central government, and like the Saudis, Yemen at times plays footsie with Islamists. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, told Abu Dhabi TV yesterday that, yes, he'll fight terrorists who embrace violence, but he's also willing to negotiate with al Qaeda members who don't.

Indeed, also like Afghanistan, Yemen suffers from outside meddling by powerful neighbors. Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example, increasingly use it as grounds for a proxy war for regional domination, and add poverty (Yemen will soon become the first country in the world to run out of water), and the country is a perfect fit for al Qaeda.

However, the problem is actually regional. Peek from the Yemeni port of Bab el Mandab across the Red Sea strait, into Africa. Last year alone, 14 men from Minneapolis were indicted or pleaded guilty for recruiting young men to go to their ancestral homeland, Somalia, to be trained as terrorists.

Like Yemen, Somalia has suffered from decades of internal wars. Various factions are backed by the Saudis, the Iranians, the Ethiopians, the Eritreans, even the Yemenis -- assuring unending conflict. Al Qaeda's local franchise is called al-Shabab.

Other failed or soon-to-fail African states range from Djibouti in the east to Western Sahara -- a zone of trouble that ranges at least to Lebanon and Gaza. Among the neighbors that instigate wars in those countries, some are our allies (Ethiopia), some are foes (Iran), and some are both (Saudi Arabia). We can trust some local leaders, but mostly we have to rely on ourselves.

The administration has its eye on Africa. " Extremists from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are going to Somalia, and there's a fear that the tentacles will spread from there into Northern Africa, into Europe," Obama's top anti-terror adviser, John Brennan, said at a press conference last week. In addition to AQAP, he named al-Shabab, al-Qaeda in East Africa and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as groups we must watch.

In short, Obama can't deliver the peace in our time so anxiously anticipated by his supporters. This struggle will last at least as long as the Cold War (and won't be as "cold," either).

But we can't send the Marines everywhere. First, for Brennan's "watching," we need increased budgets for intelligence gathering. As the above sketchy description indicates, quality reading by humans is essential if we want to understand the nuances of the alliances between terror groups and their supporters and how terrorism migrates from one region to another.

That means limited terror-combating budgets shouldn't be poured into things like shiny new inspection tools at airports or more bureaucracy, or ordering CIA satellites to watch glaciers melt. Instead, intelligence gathering in terror-infested hot spots must widen -- and be followed up as needed with strikes and longer campaigns by US troops.

Despite Obama's use of unmanned drones to assassinate top terrorists, his bias against clandestine operations by humans is a big problem. To succeed in this war, he'll have to reverse his focus: coddle officials his political allies have publicly tangled with (CIA Director Leon Panetta) and muzzle the likes of Attorney General Eric Holder, who's threatened lawsuits against our frontline warriors.

And since we can't have a major war against our enemies, we must embrace some of the tactics that Obama's fans unfairly dub "dirty," from toppling bad overseas actors to assassinations -- and be ready to fight small wars, too.

If we're at war, we have to act like it. Forget the kid gloves.