MIRANDA RIGHTS FOR TERRORISTS?

I'm sure that, being the high-minded and unequivocally moral individual that you are, Genoves, you hold our elected officials to somewhat higher standards than the rest of us mere mortals do. That is not only your prerogative; it is a laudable trait.

In this case, however, I wonder how you can arrive at so stark and merciless a judgement regarding the President of the United States as to label him "a liar." The report you cite does not allow of any such broad-brush unequivocal conclusion. The report merely parrots what some Republicans have said and mentions, editorially, that this decision does not dovetail with a statement that President Obama made in March on a television interview program.

Now, if we were to label as "a liar" anyone whose later decisions contradict earlier pronouncements -- especially in Washington, DC! -- then we'd have to come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an honest person anywhere in the world.

I believe it is called "changing one's mind" when most of us do something similar. If genoves/massagato considers anyone who ever changes his or her mind a liar, then he's a fool.

Quite often, over the last two presidential terms, in fact, we saw a president who damned well SHOULD have changed his mind almost every time he made it up, but was just too bone-headed stubborn to do it. Good thing Obama shows more flexibility when it's needed.

Everybody else who has that little patchwork-quilt-like computer-generated design for an avatar, who's just too lazy, like me, to figure out how to use an actual picture, has a nicer design than I do. I'm particularly envious of Merry Andrew's. How do I get the server to design me a new one?

Do you believe everything you read?

Out of context?

He says one thing before election and does another. He is an egregious liar and it will catch up to him soon. Here is exactly what he said on 60 Minutes--

OBAMA: Well, there is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting rough who are truly dangerous individuals that weve got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up. The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that, somehow, the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists. I fundamentally disagree with that. Now, do these folks deserve miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.

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CAN YOU SAY IT MORE STRONGLY? O F C O U R S E N O T--said Barack Hussein Obama.

Merry Andrew wrote:

Now, if we were to label as "a liar" anyone whose later decisions contradict earlier pronouncements -- especially in Washington, DC! -- then we'd have to come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an honest person anywhere in the world.

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That's strange--Move On .org excoriated President Bush over and over for his alleged lie about WMD's. No one has ever PROVED that was a lie but the left wing machine ground it out for years.

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Obama thinks he is still in the ghetto doing the "numbers" with his home boys.
He stands on all "three" sides of an issue at the same time. But,as time goes on he will have to let Pelosi and Reid know what he wants.

I want to see exactly how Obama, the liar, will handle the Health Care issue with regard to the pre-paid Medical Insurance for Union members and also with regard to the issue as to whether illegal aliens will be covered by any of the new medical subsidies. It will be interesting but I warn everyone that his verbal evasions and double talk will have to be scrutinized carefully.
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Does Merry Andrew remember the phrase--Read my lips--from the elder Bush? Despite Merry Andrew's baloney about the lack of transparency from DC, WORDS DO HAVE MEANINGS AND CONSEQUENCES.

Obama once said that Terrorists should not receive Miranda warnings. The v ery least he must do is to explain to the American public exactly why he has changed his mind.

The problem is that Obama thinks he can "jive" the American people. For a while--probably. By next year,his honeymoon will be over and the elections of 2010 will be upon us.

He will be looking at an Unemployment Rate of at least 10%( which will really be 16% under the BLS definition under U-6) accompanied by staggering deficits and mounting inflation.

Then, we shall see if he can talk his way out of that!

None of them were or could have been considered enemy combatants.

All of them are or were American citizens.

There never has been any question of their legal staus and whether or not an option other than prosecution in a criminal court might be appropriate.

There is no evidence that any of them were or are part of a larger organization with the expressed intent to commit similar acts of mayhem.

It seems reasonable to me that in certain cases the decision to read a detainee Miranda rights might be appropriate based on the manner in which the government planned to deal with him or her. If this is an exceptional tactic used in select cases, I don't have a problem with it. I expect that there will eventually (if not already) be a case where the tactic is regretted, but it's unrealistic to believe that individual mistakes will never be made.

I'm prepared to believe OBama when he asserts that the approach is not SOP for all detainees. If he's lying, we'll find out soon enough, but I don't find any reason at this point to believe he is.

It seems clear that he would prefer to deal with terrorists as criminals rather than enemy combatants, but I don't believe he is prepared to throw out any option because it doesn't conform to a criminal prosecution.

I think there's plenty to criticize him for without misrepresenting what he's doing. I found such a practice infuriating when it was employed by Bush critics, and I don't find it any more endearing because Obama is the target.

U.S. Lawmaker Says Obama Administration Ordered FBI to Read Rights to Detainees
The move is reportedly creating chaos in the field among the CIA, FBI and military personnel, according to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.

FOXNews.com

Thursday, June 11, 2009

A senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee is accusing the Obama administration of quietly ordering the FBI to start reading Miranda rights to suspected terrorists at U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan.

The move is reportedly creating chaos in the field among the CIA, FBI and military personnel, according to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich. The soldiers, especially, he says, are frustrated that giving high value detainees Miranda rights -- the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney -- is impeding their ability to pursue intelligence on the battlefield, according to a story first reported by the Weekly Standard.

"What I found was lots of confusion and very frustrated people on the front lines who are trying to, well, make Afghanistan successful for the United States and its allies," said Rogers, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent who served in the U.S. Army, just returned from Afghanistan and a visit to Bagram Air Base, where he said the rights are being read.

"I witnessed it myself, talked to the people on the ground," he said. "What you have is two very separate missions colliding in the field in a combat zone. Again, anytime that you offer confusion in that environment that's already chaotic and confusing enough, you jeopardize a soldier's life."

U.S. commanders told FOX News soldiers are not reading Miranda rights to detainees, but those commanders could not speak to whether the FBI was doing so. The practice has not been instituted at detention facilities in Iraq or at Guantanamo Bay, according to U.S. senior military officials.

Asked if the Obama administration had ordered that Miranda rights be read to certain detainees, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "I have no reason to disbelieve a member of Congress. But I don't know any of the circumstances that are involved around it."

But Gibbs acknowledged that it wouldn't be a surprise to find out that it was happening.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd denied there has been a policy change covering detainees.

"There has been no policy change nor blanket instruction for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas," he said in a statement, adding, "While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas, at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees."

Some senators wonder what would have happened if Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, a self-confessed architect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, had been read his Miranda rights.

"I'd be very concerned if we're sending FBI agents over to Bagram Air Base in the middle of a military operation to start reading Miranda rights to detainees caught on the battlefield," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said.

Perhaps Obama may be able to explain why some detainees have had their Miranda Rights read to them. Perhaps he will not allow any explanations on the basis of national security. However, if he is like Bill Clinton, who lives and dies by the polls, when Obama discovers that the American Public is dead set against the Miranda Rights being read to the detainees, he will quickly change course.

From what I understand in the article there is no new policy, Miranda rights have been read to some detainees under the Bush administration, so there is nothing new to explain.

However, on your other point, I find it kind of small potatoes, maybe he did lie and then found out once having getting into office that he had to read Miranda rights to some detainees so he ordered the Miranda rights to be read in certain cases. It don't matter to me if he never explains it. I am more concerned over his refusal to reverse some of the other Bush detention policies and not letting photos be published under some kind of cracked brained theory that it would put our soldiers in danger as though no one to this date ever thought we ever tortured anyone since 9/11. All of this seems to go more against the stance he had on all this kind of stuff during his campaign and is more important to me than this issue.

Yes, revel, you may have a point as you wrote----.Maybe he did lie and then found out once having getting into office that he had to read Miranda rights to some detainees so he ordered the Miranda rights to be read in certain cases.

Perhaps Obama should board Air Force I so he can read the Miranda Rights to the North Koreans who threaten to fire a missle in the direction of Hawaii.

That is probably all that Obama is ready to do!

Considering that the U.S. says little to the countries that are becoming looser cannons than ever, has the Miranda Rights become our foreign policy? In effect, we have the right to remain silent?

You may be correct, Foofie. I think the assertions of the far left must be examined. The far left have always been:

l. One Worlders

2. Reflexively Cryptocommunist

3. Pacificistic

4. Anti-American

This means that there must be no distinctions made between countries. All countries are equal. The Millions murdered in Africa due to inter-tribal wars must be overlooked. The brutality of the Taliban especially against women is not our problem.

These views, because they are so intertwined with the four categories above, stifle attempts to take a position which is ( GASP) moral.

If Obama had been in India with the British, I am sure that he would have counseled the British authorities not to interfere with the practice of Suttee in which Hindi Women threw themselves on the burning funeral pyre of their dead husbands. The British prohibited it in 1829 but it is fairly certain that OBAMA would have desisted from interfering with another country's customs. After all, their customs are as good and moral as ours.

This kind of fuzzy relativistic thinking has led to more than one global problem. Some things, such as Suttee are clearly morally wrong and must, at the very least, face severe and repeated criticism.