ENEMY COMBATANTS?
There’s a case to be made for interrogating terror suspects before reading them their rights
If you plant pipe bombs, remotely detonate pressure cookers laced with shrapnel, or load yourself up with ammunition and rifles with the singular goal of killing as many Americans as possible to advance your brand of Islamic extremism, should you be given the option of lawyering up like the creep of the week on an episode of “Law & Order?”
Or, are you an unlawful enemy combatant in a broader war where there is a premium on gathering intelligence on your enemies and their networks in an effort to protect the American homeland?
Unfortunately, since at least the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, America mostly follows the “Law & Order” model when it comes to dealing with our homegrown terrorists — many of whom have aligned themselves with the likes of ISIS and al-Qaida and have traveled to countries where they are harbored.
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a naturalized citizen who, with his brother, planned and carried out an attack in 2013 that killed three people and injured more than 260, said the pair was angry about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the killing of Muslims there. Tamerlan Tsarneav was killed in a shootout with police.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was interrogated for 16 hours over two days before being read his Miranda rights under its publicsafety exception. A 2010 Justice Department memo advises agents to use the exception, which was established by the Supreme Court several decades ago.
Yet it is crafted so narrowly — it allows law enforcement to delay “Mirandizing” a suspect while they neutralize any immediate threat to the public — that it is meaningless when it comes to real intelligence gathering to ferret out those who have worked with others on their personal jihad against America.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was ultimately Mirandized, got not one but two high-profile defense attorneys appointed by the court, and received the death sentence he visited upon Boston.
It is a pattern that has played out with terror suspect after terror suspect.
Former U.S. Army psychiatrist and U.S.-born citizen Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 and wounded dozens more at Fort Hood in 2009. Immediately the Uniform Code of Military Justice kicked in, with its Article 12 that declares civilian police can communicate with suspects prior to Miranda but military investigators must advise suspects of their right to remain silent prior to any communication. Hasan fired his defense team twice and represented himself at trial, and in 2014 he sent a letter from death row to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi, requesting citizenship with the group and saying “it would be an honor for any believer to be an obedient citizen soldier.”
Emphasis on “soldier,” making it clear this is a war on America.
Now naturalized American citizen Ahmad Khan Rahami is accused of setting off pipe and pressure-cooker bombs in Manhattan and on the Jersey shore. His own father warned federal agents two years ago about his son’s obsession with terrorist organizations and jihadist videos, music and poetry.
His attorney is the head of the New York Public Defender’s Office and the man who defended a Libyan national for his alleged role in the 1988 bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
His lawyer will no doubt tell him to clam up.
What should happen is that Rahami be detained and interrogated for intelligence purposes to help authorities better understand the terror threat and defend against it.
When you declare war on America, as Libya did with the Pan-Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, and as al-Qaida did with embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, a Navy destroyer in Yemen, the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and numerous others before and since, you are in a different category of criminal. The list goes on. San Bernardino party shooter Tashfeen Malik, a legal U.S. resident by marriage, pledged allegiance to ISIS on Facebook, visited Pakistan and was known as “Saudi girl” because she grew up there; her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, who carried out the shooting with her, was an American-born citizen and discussed jihad and martyrdom online with his future wife; Orlando gay nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, a U.S.-born citizen, made surveillance trips to Saudi Arabia and checked the Internet as he shot 49 people to death to see if he was trending; Rahami, who traveled to Pakistan in April 2013 and March 2014, had been reported by his father to the FBI; and Tsarnaev planted bombs with his brother, who traveled to the predominantly Muslim republics Chechnya and Dagestan in 2012 — both have active militant separatist movements.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has called for Rahami to be treated as an enemy combatant and interrogated for intelligence purposes, rather than held as a civilian criminal suspect. He and other Republicans made the same request in 2013 with Tsarnaev.
Yet the Obama administration has argued terrorism matters on domestic soil should be handled exclusively by civilian law enforcement; the Constitutional authority to hold someone in wartime detention arises as part of an armed conflict.
Well, Obama and company need to wake up and smell the coffee. If the battle to stop the rising number of Islamic extremists using bombs and rifles to kill Americans isn’t an armed conflict, what is? And if targeting fellow Americans for mass death isn’t a war, then what is it?
And without the ability to gather intelligence from those directly involved, how is America supposed to win it?