Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, February 03, 2010 6:21:31 PM
A Tale of Two Terrorists
The Justice Department defended the lengthy
interrogation of one terror suspect days before the Christmas bomber
was hastily Mirandized.
The
Obama administration's decision to read the Christmas Day bomber his
Miranda rights has rightly come under withering criticism. Instead of a
lengthy interrogation by officials with al Qaeda expertise, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab was questioned for 50 minutes by local FBI agents and
then later advised of his "right to remain silent."
It's well understood that the focus on gaining evidence for a
criminal trial was an intelligence failure of massive proportions. Not
well understood is that the most powerful recent argument for
aggressively interrogating terrorists, keeping them in military
detention, and prosecuting them in military commissions comes to us
from the Obama Justice Department itself.
On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S.
attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a
secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the
prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is
facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped
because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional
right to a speedy trial.
Mr. Bharara, on behalf of the Justice Department, filed a memorandum
with the court stating that Ghailani's claims are dangerous and off the
mark. Interrogating terrorists must come before criminal prosecution,
he wrote in language so strong that even a redacted version of his
filing (which we have obtained) serves as a searing indictment of the
administration's mishandling of Abdulmutallab.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204575039201390613906.html