Posted by
EWRoss on Thursday, June 11, 2009 8:00:00 AM
Rep. Mike Rogers, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee's Terrorism Subcommittee, recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan. He reports that FBI agents are reading high-value detainees their Miranda rights in an apparent effort to build cases against them that will stand up in US courts.
Coupled with a recent report in the Los Angeles Times about the DOJ’s “global justice” initiative, it demonstrates that the FBI is taking a greater role in managing terrorist detainees in Afghanistan. A DOJ spokesperson stated that Justice had issued no blanked guidance on Mirandizing terror detainees in Afghanistan; but, it acknowledged it had.
This, no doubt, is a reaction to CIA waterboarding, and many Americans may approve of it. But it’s a reversion to the pre-9/11 mentality of treating global terrorism as a law-enforcement problem rather than an intelligence and military problem. Reading captured top terrorists their rights and giving them access to lawyers may get them convicted in US courts, but it will seriously damage our ability to collect obtain critical and perishable intelligence that might prevent another horrific terrorist attack. It’s shooting craps with American lives.