Eye on Freedom

The arrests on Thursday of three men in Norway and Germany accused of orchestrating a terrorist bomb plot seemed like another routine raid by a Western government in the continuing campaign against groups linked to Al Qaeda. But one detail stuck out: Norwegian officials said one of the men was a Chinese Uighur, and all three supposedly belonged to a group that advocates separatism in western China.

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In the wake of the Times Square bomb attempt, it is important to remember the purpose of the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling which is to prevent some poor schnook from making statements incriminating himself inadvertently. By administering Miranda warnings, police are free to use a suspect’s statements against him in a subsequent criminal proceeding. This provides an incentive for police to administer such warnings. It is important to remember, however, that there is no requirement that police administer such warnings in every case. Police are free not to administer such warnings if they have no need to use a suspect’s statements against him in a subsequent criminal proceeding.

In the case of the Times Square bomber, the police had his car, the witness who sold him the car, all manor of physical evidence found in the car and his home, and evidence of intent to flee the country all before he was ever placed in custody. In the case of the Christmas Day bomber, police arrested him with bomb elements burning in his underwear and a plane full of people who witnessed him trying to explode a bomb. In both cases, there is no need for additional statements to convict these guys. Consequently, it is MUCH more important that we learn of their co-conspirators in these plots both inside and outside the U.S. in order to prevent future attacks rather than pile on additional evidence in the zeal to obtain a better criminal case.

The Attorney General suggested we need new laws for administering Miranda warnings. Hardly. We need the Attorney General and his Justice Department to exercise some common sense. Is it more important to advise a terror suspect to shut up and consult a lawyer in the hope of removing one would-be terrorist from the streets, especially when the other evidence against him is overwhelming, or is it more important that we talk to him under those circumstances to try and extract as much actionable intelligence as possible to prevent future attacks? What if one of these guys had a partner who got away? Wouldn’t it be nice to know who the partner was so he did not strike us too?

To take just a few examples, they provided al-Qaeda detainees with a brochure that instructed them on how to claim falsely that they had been tortured; fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security and precipitated fabricated reports that prisoners had been tortured and force-fed; provided the detainees with other virulently anti-American propaganda (for example, informing them about the Abu Ghraib scandal, comparing U.S. military physicians to Josef Mengele, and labeling DOJ lawyers “desk torturers”); gave the enemy-combatant terrorists a hand-drawn map of Gitmo’s layout, including guard towers; helped the enemy combatants communicate messages to the outside world; informed the detainees of the identities of other detainees in U.S. custody; and posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

And that’s not the worst of it — not by a long shot. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has uncovered the Gitmo Bar’s shocking effort to identify CIA interrogators. The lawyers — from the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, perversely calling themselves “the John Adams Project” — actually had investigators stalk U.S. intelligence officers, surveilling them near their homes and photographing them with or near their loved ones. The photos were then smuggled into Gitmo and shown to top terrorists to determine whether they recognized which intelligence agents had questioned them.

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