“As Abdulmutallab keeps talking, Republicans won’t take yes for an answer.” That was Keith Olbermann tonight [kk: last night by now], talking about the Republican response to the news that Abdulmutallab is continuing to give authorities actionable intelligence using traditional, non-coercive interrogation methods.
It’s a development that conflicts with their meme about how Abdulmutallab should have been taken to Guantanamo and tortured to force him to say everything he knew — that he couldn’t possibly provide actionable intelligence under the same normal interrogation procedures that have been successfully used on every other terrorist suspect arrested inside the United States since 9/11.
In service to this deeply held belief, Republican leaders and right-wing pundits have developed a narrative that says Abdulmutallab stopped talking to FBI agents the moment he was read his rights under Miranda. According to this narrative, FBI agents questioned Abdulmutallab for about 50 minutes immediately after his arrest on December 25. Then he went into surgery to treat his burns, and when he came out, he was “Mirandized” and from that point on refused to say a single word. Furthermore, the narrative continues, the decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights was made without consulting any of the intelligence agencies.
The trouble with this narrative is that it’s largely untrue.
Take the claim that Abdulmutallab clammed up after being read his Miranda rights. The reverse is true:
The decision to advise the accused Christmas Day attacker of his right to remain silent was made after teleconferences involving at least four government agencies — and only after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had stopped talking to authorities, according to knowledgeable law enforcement officials.
As the above snip also makes clear, the decision to invoke Miranda was not made unilaterally:
Among those involved in the hastily called teleconferences were representatives from the Justice Department and the FBI, along with officials from the State Department and the CIA.
“It was a [law enforcement] community-wide conference, and they discussed a number of things,” one source said on condition of anonymity. “That’s when decisions were made on which course was going to proceed, to Mirandize him or otherwise.”
The source said that Abdulmutallab was not read his rights until he made it clear that he was not going to say anything else.
Via Adam Serwer at The American Prospect, who points out additionally that the intervention of his family members — which included the reassurance that Abdulmutallab would be treated humanely — was key to securing Mutallab’s renewed cooperation.
Yesterday, Eric Holder sent a letter to Mitch McConnell that addressed the Miranda issue, as well as the numerous other misstatements of fact that McConnell and many other Republican leaders and conservative pundits and media outlets have been passing around.
Adam Serwer points to the AG’s correctives to the Republican leadership’s misinformation with regard to the state of the law on civilian versus military trials and access to legal counsel (emphasis is in original):
Republicans have been trying to use Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair‘s testimony before the Senate a few weeks ago to argue the decision about how to deal with Abdulmutallab wasn’t made in consultation with intelligence and military officials, but here Holder says the opposite is true. “No agency supported the use of law of war detention for Abdulmutallab,” writes Holder, “and no agency has since advised the Department of Justice that an alternative course of action should have been, or should now be, pursued.”As to whether or not Abdulmutallab should have been allowed access to counsel, Holder offers a doozy:
Some have argued that had Abdulmutallab been declared an enemy combatant, the government could have held him indefinitely without providing him access to an attorney. But the government’s legal authority to do so is far from clear. In fact, when the Bush administration attempted to deny Jose Padilla access to an attorney, a federal judge in New York rejected that position, ruling that Padilla must be allowed to meet with his lawyer. Notably, the judge in that case was Michael Mukasey, my predecessor as Attorney General. In fact, there is no court-approved system currently in place in which suspected terrorists captured inside the United States can be detained and held without access to an attorney; nor is there any known mechanism to persuade an uncooperative individual to talk to the government that has been proven more effective than the criminal justice system.
Scott Horton teases out several largely unexamined assumptions that underlie the Republican insistence that suspected terrorists (without the qualifier “suspected” for Republicans) must be kept out of the criminal justice system, and rebuts each one. The assumptions are: (1) “[t]he idea that criminal justice is ‘weak’ and war is ‘strong’ … (2) [t]he idea that the criminal justice and war paradigms are mutually exclusive … (3) [t]he idea that military commissions will lead with more certainty to convictions and long sentences … (4) [the idea that] [t]here is [a] meaningful difference in the Bush and Obama approaches; and (5) [t]he idea that justice is […] a weakness.”
Rebuttals are here, along with Scott’s conclusion:
When the Republicans rant about trials and arrests, they want to distract us from the mistakes they made over the last eight years, which cost the nation precious blood and treasure, and which continue to hamper us in the battle against terrorism. Much of the argument offered by the Republican leaders is not carefully studied strategy, but rather an attempt to cover up horrendous mistakes of the past. The real worry is not that the Obama Administration has deviated from the course that the Bush-Cheney team set, but that it [is] more a prisoner of the past than it needs to be.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.