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Thread: Eric Holder: Suspending Miranda is now OKAY?

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    Default Eric Holder: Suspending Miranda is now OKAY?

    Source: NYTimes (LINK)

    Holder Backs a Miranda Limit for Terror Suspects
    By CHARLIE SAVAGE

    WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Sunday it would seek a law allowing investigators to interrogate terrorism suspects without informing them of their rights, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. flatly asserted that the defendant in the Times Square bombing attempt was trained by the Taliban in Pakistan.

    Mr. Holder proposed carving out a broad new exception to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling. It generally forbids prosecutors from using as evidence statements made before suspects have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.

    He said interrogators needed greater flexibility to question terrorism suspects than is provided by existing exceptions.

    The proposal to ask Congress to loosen the Miranda rule comes against the backdrop of criticism by Republicans who have argued that terrorism suspects — including United States citizens like Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case — should be imprisoned and interrogated as military detainees, rather than handled as ordinary criminal defendants.

    For months, the administration has defended the criminal justice system as strong enough to handle terrorism cases. Mr. Holder acknowledged the abrupt shift of tone, characterizing the administration’s stance as a “new priority” and “big news” in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

    “We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”

    The conclusion that Mr. Shahzad was involved in an international plot appeared to come from investigations that began after his arrest and interrogation, including inquiries into his links with the Taliban in Pakistan.

    “We know that they helped facilitate it,” Mr. Holder said of the Times Square bombing attempt. “We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.”

    Mr. Holder’s statement, and comments by President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, were the highest-level confirmation yet that the authorities believe the Pakistani branch of the Taliban was directly involved. Investigators were still pursuing leads based on what Mr. Shahzad has told them, and the officials did not describe their evidence in detail.

    Mr. Brennan appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction.

    “He was trained by them,” Mr. Brennan said. “He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack.”

    He added: “We have good cooperation from our Pakistani partners and from others. We’re learning more about this incident every day. We’re hopeful we’re going to be able to identify any other individuals that were involved.”

    Even before the attempted Times Square attack, the administration had been stretching the traditional limits of how long suspects may be questioned without being warned of their rights.

    After the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jet on Dec. 25, for example, the F.B.I. questioned the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for about 50 minutes without reading him his rights. And last week, Mr. Brennan said, the F.B.I. interrogated Mr. Shahzad for three or four hours before delivering a Miranda warning.

    In both cases, the administration relied on an exception to Miranda for immediate threats to public safety. That exception was established by the Supreme Court in a 1984 case in which a police officer asked a suspect, at the time of his arrest and before reading him his rights, about where he had hidden a gun. The court deemed the defendant’s answer and the gun admissible as evidence against him.

    Conservatives have long disliked the Miranda ruling, which is intended to ensure that confessions are not coerced. Its use in terrorism cases has been especially controversial because of concerns that informing a suspect of his rights could interrupt the flow of the interrogation and prompt him to stop disclosing information that might prevent a future attack.

    Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on “This Week” on ABC that he supported Mr. Holder’s proposal. However, he also suggested that enacting it would not quell conservative criticism, arguing that it would be even better to hold suspects like Mr. Shahzad as military detainees for lengthier interrogation.

    “I would not have given him Miranda warnings after just a couple of hours of questioning,” Mr. Giuliani said. “I would have instead declared him an enemy combatant, asked the president to do that, and at the same time, that would have given us the opportunity to question him for a much longer period of time.”

    Any effort to further limit the Miranda rule will be likely to face challenges. In a 2000 case, the Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to strike down a statute that essentially overruled Miranda by allowing prosecutors to use statements defendants made voluntarily before being read their rights.

    Despite the political furor over reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights, it is not clear that doing so has had a major impact on recent interrogations.

    For example, even after Mr. Shahzad was read his rights, he waived them and continued talking. With Mr. Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to light a bomb hidden in his undergarments, the pre-Miranda interrogation lasted until he was taken into surgery for the burns he suffered. Afterward, he did not resume cooperating and was also read his Miranda rights, although the sequence of events is uncertain. Relatives later persuaded him to start talking again.

    In Congressional testimony last week, Mr. Holder defended the legality of the delays in both cases, noting that the Supreme Court had set no time limit for use of the public-safety exception. But on Sunday, he seemed to indicate uneasiness about the executive branch unilaterally pushing those limits, and called for Congressional action to allow lengthier interrogations without Miranda warnings in international terrorism cases.

    “If we are going to have a system that is capable of dealing in a public safety context with this new threat, I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception,” Mr. Holder said. “And that’s one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do: to come up with a proposal that is both constitutional but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

    Philip B. Heymann, a Harvard law professor and high-ranking Justice Department official in the Carter and Clinton administrations, said the Supreme Court was likely to uphold a broader emergency exception for terrorism cases — especially if Congress approved it. “Not having addressed how long the emergency exception can be, the Supreme Court would be very hesitant to disagree with both the president and Congress if there was any reasonable resolution to that question,” he said.

    Still, Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Congress had no authority to “chip away” at the Miranda ruling because it was based in the Constitution. He predicted that any effort to carve a broader exception would be vigorously contested.

    “The irony is that this administration supposedly stands for the rule of law and the restoration of America’s legal standing,” he said. And Virginia E. Sloan, president of the bipartisan Constitution Project, said the existing public safety exception to Miranda seemed to be working, so there was no need to erode constitutional protections in ways that could later be expanded to other kinds of criminal suspects.

    “It makes good political theater,” she said, “but we need to have a clear problem that we are addressing and a clear justification for any change. I haven’t seen that yet.”

    Joseph Berger contributed reporting from New York.
    ================================================== =============


    So..... For eight years we put up with liberal ACLU types, writhing in the floor over the usurping of Constitutional rights for terrorists, insisting that we apply U.S. criminal justice to 'enemy combatants' detained on the fields of battle, because it was our "principles" that were most important! Now... we find that Eric Holder has had an epiphany, and finds himself in amazing parallel to the Bush Administration and Conservatives on this issue.... Now, all of a sudden, there IS a justification and reason to NOT Mirandize a suspect, and instead, put him through interrogation without legal representation! Maybe there is also reasonable justification to have a detention facility at Gitmo and Military Tribunals for these people?

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    Channeling Desh:

    It's sooo much better to have leaders that change positions, what do you want a return to somebody who sets a policy then sticks by it?!!!1!! I mean Cheney was da debil!

    /Desh
    Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
    - -- Aristotle

    Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in diverse places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.
    - -- The Buddha

    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
    - -- Aristotle

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    and this will be totally ignored by the sheeple paying more attention to the final episodes of lost and 24.
    A sad commentary on we, as a people, and our viewpoint of our freedom can be summed up like this. We have liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, yet those very people look at Constitutionalists as radical and extreme.................so those liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans must believe that the constitution is radical and extreme.

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    “We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more consistent with the threat that we now face.”


    Isn't this the EXACT same argument Bush and Cheney made in 2001? Isn't this EXACTLY what Liberals complained and moaned about for 8 years? Seems like what has changed, is Eric Holder suddenly realized what we've all known since Sept. 11, 2001!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Damocles View Post
    Channeling Desh:

    It's sooo much better to have leaders that change positions, what do you want a return to somebody who sets a policy then sticks by it?!!!1!! I mean Cheney was da debil!

    /Desh
    that or she'll be on here saying 'see, we should have waited the 8 years to come to the correct conclusion instead of jumping willy nilly and going to war.'
    A sad commentary on we, as a people, and our viewpoint of our freedom can be summed up like this. We have liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, yet those very people look at Constitutionalists as radical and extreme.................so those liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans must believe that the constitution is radical and extreme.

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    .....And nothing but crickets chirping from the left-wing contingent of pinheads here!
    Why am I not the least bit surprised???

    C'mon shitstains! Tell us all how Bush and Cheney violated civil rights and shredded the Constitution when dealing with the terrorists, but Eric Holder isn't doing the exact same thing?

    No... This goddamn administration can warrantless wiretap, interrogate without Miranda, detain for questioning, rendition, exert executive privilege, or whatever the fuck else they want to do, and you people won't bat an eye! That's because it never was about the Constitution, it never was the extremely outrageous abuse of power you claimed, and it indeed was the right and appropriate thing to do all along!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dixie View Post

    Isn't this the EXACT same argument Bush and Cheney made in 2001? Isn't this EXACTLY what Liberals complained and moaned about for 8 years? Seems like what has changed, is Eric Holder suddenly realized what we've all known since Sept. 11, 2001!
    As I said in another thread Obama is more Bush than Bush ever was!

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    Congress does not have the right to loosen our miranda rights.
    "Do not think that I came to bring peace... I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." - Matthew 10:34

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr. Spite View Post
    Congress does not have the right to loosen our miranda rights.
    Eric Holder doesn't care about what Congress can or cannot do.

    As an aside, the government has no rights whatsoever. It only has powers that we as citizens give it. Only we, the people, have rights.
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    www.gunsbeerfreedom.blogspot.com

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    all that watertard can muster up is one little line? LOL, the little hypocrite must feel like the idiot he is.

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    Quote Originally Posted by tinfoil View Post
    all that watertard can muster up is one little line? LOL, the little hypocrite must feel like the idiot he is.
    Well, can you blame him? I mean, what's he going to say? What is any of them going to say? For 8 years we watched them roll on the floor in agony over the Bush administration violating the Constitutional rights of individuals it saw as a threat. They carped to the 'libertarians' and gained sympathy for this 'injustice' that was happening under Bush, and managed to get enough bleeding hearts to support their idiocy and elect them to power on the promise to close Gitmo and change the way things were being done. Now, Eric Holder stunningly admits, it's okay to suspend Miranda rights in certain situations... the exact same policy of the Bush administration!

    So what are they supposed to say? "Sorry, we're all full of shit liars and hypocrites!"

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dixie View Post
    Well, can you blame him? I mean, what's he going to say? What is any of them going to say? For 8 years we watched them roll on the floor in agony over the Bush administration violating the Constitutional rights of individuals it saw as a threat. They carped to the 'libertarians' and gained sympathy for this 'injustice' that was happening under Bush, and managed to get enough bleeding hearts to support their idiocy and elect them to power on the promise to close Gitmo and change the way things were being done. Now, Eric Holder stunningly admits, it's okay to suspend Miranda rights in certain situations... the exact same policy of the Bush administration!

    So what are they supposed to say? "Sorry, we're all full of shit liars and hypocrites!"
    hey dixie?

    there's a reason why the constitution didn't include the phrase 'unless dire circumstances necessitate otherwise.
    A sad commentary on we, as a people, and our viewpoint of our freedom can be summed up like this. We have liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, yet those very people look at Constitutionalists as radical and extreme.................so those liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans must believe that the constitution is radical and extreme.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SmarterThanYou View Post
    hey dixie?

    there's a reason why the constitution didn't include the phrase 'unless dire circumstances necessitate otherwise.
    Yeah? Well apparently, some of you pinheads need to have an intervention with the Attorney General, because he disagrees with that.

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