Obama's Slippery Slope. Ginning-Up the "Terror" Threat, Shredding the Constitution
During last week's appearance on "Meet the Press," Holder claimed that Justice Department interrogators "needed greater flexibility" to question terrorism suspects and that the administration now seeks to "carve out a broad new exemption to the Miranda rights established in a landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling."
According to that precedent, prosecutors are barred from using statements made by suspects before they have been warned that they have a right to remain silent and to consult with an attorney.
That ruling was based on decades of evidence that police, including federal gumshoes, had coerced false confessions from suspects and then used their tainted statements in order to secure convictions and prison sentences--whether or not the individual was actually guilty of a crime.
Investigative journalist Charlie Savage reported May 10 in The New York Times that the "change" regime, providing a new, Orwellian twist to the meaning of the word, will ask Congress to loosen Miranda requirements against a "backdrop of criticism by Republicans who have argued that terrorism suspects--including United States citizens like Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the Times Square case--should be imprisoned and interrogated as military detainees, rather than handled as ordinary criminal defendants."
In other words, far from being a proposal that will "keep us safe," the administration's tinkering with constitutional protections is a cynical political calculation by spineless Democrats, caricatured by their Republican colleagues as "soft on terrorism," to deflect criticism in an election year.
Link:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19203
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