David Matthews

The fuss about reading Miranda rights to terror suspects strikes me as, well, suspect. Are we to suppose that captured terrorists routinely sing like Pavarotti until read their rights, whereupon they are rendered mute? As if it would not have occurred to them not to cooperate with their captors until informed of the right to remain silent.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R–SC) said at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing this week that he believes Miranda warnings are counterproductive. Graham told POLITICO he is working on legislation to redefine the public safety exemption to Miranda warnings “so law enforcement can go to a judge somewhere and make the case that the detainee is a suspected member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban and have the judge approve continued interrogation without Miranda rights.” The law would apply to U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals. (Sen. Lindsey Graham: Miranda rights ‘counterproductive’).

The law would be directed only at those who join terrorist organizations as designated by the State Department. “It would be members of Al Qaida — not Timothy McVeigh,” said Graham, without explaining why the exception for a McVeigh type.

Meantime, a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report states, “Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law. However, for homeland security and other purposes, the FBI is notified when a firearm or explosives background check involves an individual on the terrorist watch list.” Of background checks on 1,225 people on the watch list, 91 percent were approved for gun transactions.

Even Joe Lieberman thinks this “dangerous loophole” is “stunning and infuriating.” (Huma Khan and C. Byron Wolf, ABC News/Politics, Guns and Terror: Should People on U.S. Watch List Be Barred from Buying Firearms?). The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, of which Lieberman is chairman, is considering legislation to bar people on many U.S. watch lists from purchasing guns.

Whoa, nelly, says Graham, concerned about the bill’s impact on constitutional rights of individuals whose names may be on the watch list in error. Graham said, “Before we subject innocent Americans who have done nothing wrong, I want us to slow down and think about this.”

Graham and his ilk like to carry on about the sanctity of the Constition, the founders’ original intent, and all that. Yet they tend to be almost blithe in their consideration of which parts should be held sacrosanct and which might be treated as more open to, I am tempted to say “liberal,” interpretation.

Graham rears up in righteous umbrage at the possibility that suspected terrorists might be accorded protection against self-incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment (no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”). We might speculate as whether this is the source or the consequence of his conviction that terror suspects should be regarded not as criminals but as enemy combatants, but the relevant point here is that the Fifth Amendment is not one the good Senator is willing to go to the wall for. Not so the Second, whose inviolability demands that no law or regulation may be enacted to make it difficult for a terrorist to obtain guns if that would so much as inconvenience an innocent American who wishes to purchase a firearm.

Not everyone sees these issues the way Graham does, but he is far from alone, and  I am unable to fathom that kind of thinking. Once more I feel myself a man out of tune and out of touch with his time.

David :: May.08.2010 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: 2 Comments »

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