The left is already up-in-arms claiming that President Obama is leading “Bush’s third term,” and this news isn’t likely to dispel that notion. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Obama administration is scrapping Miranda rights for terror suspects, which is a step farther than Bush went with his counter-terrorism policies:
New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades. …
A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat.”
This is a necessary response to the Obama administration’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism. After Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested, he was read his Miranda rights in less than an hour, which is problematic for obvious reasons. Once the rights are read, it becomes more difficult to collect crucial information from the terror suspect that could impact national security.
Of course, the decision has the left predictably infuriated.
“The number of instances in which Obama has violently breached his own alleged principles when it comes to the War on Terror and the rule of law are too numerous to chronicle in one place,” wrote Glenn Greenwald at Salon today. “No rational person can argue that or even tries to any longer. It’s just a banal expression of indisputable fact.”
Like many on the left, Obama was a vocal opponent of Bush’s terror policies. But the president is learning, begrudgingly, that his old philosophy just doesn’t mesh with reality.
