According to a post on The Blog of the Weekly Standard, the “Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.”
That’s right. Overseas FBI agents are being required to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured in the theater of war. The first right is of course the right to remain silent. Now how the hell are you supposed to protect your country from terrorists when the first thing you tell a suspected enemy combatant is that he has a right to keep his mouth shut?
Miranda v. Arizona (1966) was a Supreme Court decision and was a corollary to Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), another Supreme Court decision. In Miranda, the Court created seemingly out of whole cloth the right to remain silent. It is no where in the U.S. Constitution. And in Griswold, the Court created the right to privacy. Again, there is no such right in our written Constitution. In both cases, the majority created a brand spanking new constitutional right by arguing that such right derived from “penumbras” and “emanations” from our Bill of Rights. Such logic is obviously a very slippery slope. But forget the merit of such rights, and whether they actually exist. That’s really a discussion for another day. The Court has recognized them. They’re here to stay.
Once you declare that such detainees (usually enemy combatants) are entitled to our constitutional protections, one of the implications is that now the enemy combatants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That is surpassingly absurd not only because it adds another provision to the rules of engagement (which already severely hamstring our military), but more importantly because the necessary premise of war is that both sides are guilty of attempted and premeditated homicide! The whole point of war is to achieve victory by death and destruction of human life. There’s absolutely no reason to go through a trial process to determine whether the enemy combatant is guilty.
And herein lies the fundamental problem. The system by which we adjudicate our own citizens must necessarily be different from the system by which we adjudicate foreign detainees and enemy combatants. This is because, as previously mentioned, the premise upon which an individual is detained is completely different. When a United States citizen is detained, because our Constitution applies to that individual, he enjoys the presumption of innocence. A foreign detainee does not and should not. The premise of his detention if war.
Clearly, this is another step toward “internationalization”, which ineluctably means a reduction in our national sovereignty. Once we begin extending our sacrosanct Constitutional protections to foreigners, the exclusivity and sovereignty of our Constitution must necessarily go along with it piece by piece. We’ll soon be welcoming the New World Order.
American Confucius
Grappledoctor 