Let The Finger-Pointing Begin

Noun
finger-pointing:
The making of accusations, the assigning of blame.

So--who's responsible for the bright idea of Mirandizing the Christmas underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, less than an hour into questioning him about his Al Qaeda and Yemeni connections?

She did. No, he did. No, they did. No, you did. And the blame game goes on at the White House and the Department of Justice. This whole finger-pointing thing is an integral part of politics, but the Obamists have taken it to high art. In order to send up test balloons, they come up with absolutely crazed ideas then slip them out to the public just to see if the public will accept them. Obama went all his predecessors one better by appointing more insane political czars than they had in all of Russian history. If the plan plays badly, there's always the bus to throw them under. This issue, though, affects the highest levels of government, and undoubtedly includes the Attorney General and perhaps the President himself.

Even though the ultimate decision rests with Obama and Holder, it is now coming out that at least four agencies participated in this circular firing-squad, and each seems to have a representative pointing the finger at the others. Along with Justice, there was a teleconference that included the FBI, the State Department, and the CIA. I'm still waiting to find out if anyone thought to invite the Department of Defense to this little chat.

They all got their heads together (figuratively, of course) and decided on a common course as well as a story to tell the press. The unanimity of the story began to come unglued shortly after the public reaction was angrily negative. So instead of all of them being responsible, the game is to determine whom they can successfully play "tag" with. The original cooked-up story goes somewhat like this: The bomber was taken into custody and he voluntarily stated that "others were following me." He also revealed some other information, some of which remains appropriately classified. When the doctors treating his flamed-out crotch insisted that they had to treat him right away, the questioning stopped.

And then the story starts to go a little cuckoo. Given that the doctors have a duty to render medical aid at the earliest possible time, this doesn't explain why the questioning didn't continue after the underwear hottie had been treated. One source says "the questioning stopped when doctors said they needed to sedate Abdulmutallab to treat his injuries. At that point, the agents backed off." Another says "the two agents who interviewed him are very experienced counter-terrorism agents. They've been around a long time and have traveled internationally. And the Detroit area has the largest Muslim community in the country (emphasis added)." What that latter part of the statement means is up to the reader, but I certainly have my own opinion.

An unnamed source said "When Abdulmutallab awakened, a second team of FBI agents was sent in. Authorities thought he might be willing to say even more to the second set of agents." Still another unnamed source added: "We had to see if he was still willing to talk." Well, he wasn't. And somebody decided that when it became apparent that the bomber was unwilling [only at that point, mind you], the decision was made to go ahead and Mirandize him. Since when is the decision to Mirandize or not made on the basis of an obviously not-too-bright non-citizen terrorist deciding that he didn't want to talk any more? Isn't it possible that his reluctance to continue talking at that moment was outweighed by the immediate concerns of the passengers of the flight who were almost murdered en masse along with several thousand Detroit citizens on the ground below?

Tellingly, one of the unnamed sources said "We had already talked to him for almost an hour and he provided a lot of information." I might be a little naive here, but it seems that if in that short period of time the bomber provided a lot of information, he just might have a whole lot more information if the questioning went on. Instead, the consensus seemed to be that they had gotten enough information, so it was time to start treating him like an ordinary American citizen-criminal instead of the foreign belligerent terrorist bomber he had chosen to be.

And now the game begins. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair flatly said in a Senate Committee hearing: "The decision to read Abdulmutallab his rights was a mistake." That directly contravenes the testimony of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller that "the decision was, I believe, very appropriate, given the situation." OK, it seems like Mueller might be ready to fall on his sword but then he quickly obscures the situation by saying "I'm not fully familiar with who talked to whom on the afternoon." That sounds like a setup for future excuses that he had been misinformed by the mystery people he talked to.

That leads us back to Obama and Holder. Before the public outcry, the decision to stop questioning and start Mirandizing was driven from the very top. Even if they gave no direct orders to anyone on the scene of the underwear bomber interrogation, their policy of awarding constitutional protections to all terrorism suspects just as they would to American citizens left the interrogators on the scene with little choice. Who are they going to blame for that idiotic policy?

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said in an interview that "President Obama's policy of taking terrorism suspects to court rather than military tribunals [and further interrogation] was carried over from political promises made on the campaign trail." That certainly seems a plausible explanation for the outrageously misplaced decision regarding the underwear bomber and the trial of the 9-11 terrorists in a civilian court in New York City (official word on that still pending). The question remains of how long Obama and Holder can continue to hold that view, given the national outrage over the whole concept. And the companion question is "who will they point the finger at when a name (or names) is required to go with each of the individual decisions?"

Even RINO Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said that the nation's top intelligence officials were not consulted about the Miranda warning. If they had been "they would have explained the importance of gathering all possible intelligence about Yemen, where there is a serious threat from terrorists whose sights are trained on this nation. They would have explained the critical nature of learning all we could from Abdulmutallab." The "authorities" who made the on-the-spot decision to Mirandize the underwear bomber said that they had already determined from the interrogation that he had links to Al Qaeda and had lived in Yemen during his radicalization training.

One final note regarding the underwear bomber situation and the complete lack of need for Miranda warnings. Even if the trial were to go forward in a civilian court (a ludicrous concept, but still possible with Obama and Holder in charge), the interrogation could have continued and a conviction obtained anyway. This low-life's conviction could proceed quite nicely without invoking the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine. There were plenty of witnesses on the plane who could provide the testimony necessary to convict, along with gobs of forensic evidence. Nothing Abdulmutallab said before or during the early interrogation (or anything he might have said if Miranda hadn't been invoked) would be necessary to convict him solely of the attempted mass-murder over Detroit. Miranda would only affect a later decision to try him on separate charges unrelated to the Detroit terrorist act. In other words, if he later revealed, un-Mirandized, that he and Osama bin Laden conspired together to bomb Detroit (or New York, or Chicago), those words could not be used against him in a later civilian trial, nor could the prosecution use any subsequently-discovered evidence resulting from his admissions (that would be the infamous "fruit of the poisonous tree.)"