Reading Abdulmutallab’s Rights
Feb 1, 2010 terrorism, torture
The nontroversy over the underpants bomber’s Miranda warning has hit a peak with this LA Times story today:
FBI agents questioned him at the hospital for just under an hour. They did not give him the Miranda warning, which advises suspects that anything they say can be used against them at trial, citing an exemption that allows them first to seek crucial information on any pending crime.
During the questioning, one source said, Abdulmutallab suggested that other terrorism attempts were in the works. “He was making comments like, ‘Others were following me.’ And that is a circumstance where you’ve got a potential disaster, that there are others out there and you don’t have to Mirandize him right away.”
But the questioning stopped when doctors said they needed to sedate Abdulmutallab to treat his injuries. At that point, the sources said, the agents backed off.
[...]“We had to see if he was still willing to talk,” another source said. “And it was pretty quickly apparent to them that he wasn’t. He had had a change of mind. It was only after establishing that with some confidence that they decided to go ahead and Mirandize him.” (Emphasis mine)
In other words, he sang like a bird for a while, which is exactly what the Army manual says will happen. When he stopped talking, they read him his rights and processed him just like any other suspect. For some reason, this decision is controversial and will likely dominate the news cycle today, which is a sign of just how badly Jack Bauer and Dick Cheney have damaged the discourse.
