That is the story of last week's Boston Marathon bombing and the frantic efforts of the bombers, the brothers Tsarnaev, to evade capture, shoot it out with police (one of whom they killed, and another of whom they wounded), and - we're now told - detonate more bombs in Times Square.
The Times Square non-attack is quite interesting. The specter of it, projected in the immediate wake of the Marathon murders and maimings, is horrific . . . so horrific that the government, in leaking this tidbit from its botched interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, knew that news media were certain to lead their broadcasts with it. The press would never wonder why they, and thus we, were being told about it.
But why were they told? Remember, the Times Square bombing not only never happened, it never came close to happening. It was, at most, a passing jihadist fantasy, one that the jihadists in question peremptorily dismissed as implausible. The threat was no more real than those that regularly stream out of Islamic-supremacist mosques and, just as regularly, go studiously unreported.
Mind you, there is nothing inappropriate about government officials' speaking about matters on the public record - such as the allegations lodged in criminal complaints. But the Times Square non-attack is not mentioned in the complaint filed against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, the complaint includes no information from Tsarnaev's interrogation.
Yet somehow the airwaves are now full of startling revelations from his Miranda-aborted 16-hour post-arrest interview, including not least his confession, and, of course, his assurance, as Allah is his witness, that no one other than he and his Svengali older brother - and certainly no foreign Islamic terrorist organization - had anything to do with their terror spree.
Strange, isn't it? We are governed by leftists given to finger-wagging about their commitment to due process and the rule of law - they're not like those bad old warmongering Bushies. Still, here we are in the post-arrest phase of the civilian prosecution the administration was hell-bent on commencing - the phase when due process obliges government officials to remain mum about non-public investigative information that could taint the jury pool and undermine the defendant's right to a fair trial - and we're being inundated with stunning confession evidence.
Remember, this is the same crowd that labels the Fort Hood massacre "workplace violence" and won't honor its victims with Purple Heart medals. To do so, they sniff, might prejudice the objectivity of the trial of a jihadist mass murderer who has publicly announced he'd like to plead guilty. Now, though, in Tsarnaev's case, government agencies are leaking like sieves.
Why?
Because you are being softened up. Steered by its Gitmo Bar veterans and Lawyer Left compass, the Obama administration is executing a massive national-security fraud: the farce that the jihad against America can be judicialized, that civilian-court processes are a better answer to enemy warfare than are combat protocols.
That is why Eric Holder's Justice Department, together with the FBI, darted into federal court in Boston last Sunday evening to file the complaint against Tsarnaev. Obama was determined to end the public debate over whether the jihadist is a wartime enemy combatant or a mere criminal defendant. As in the case of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and al-Qaeda's alleged "consigliere," who was whisked into the country and into civilian court before anyone even realized he'd been captured, the administration calculated that a fait accompli is the best way to impose the president's deeply unpopular preferences.
So now, the next necessary deception in the campaign is to convince you that - all together now - "the system worked." In reality, the civilian justice system did not work, and that is because it cannot work - not if the objective is the swift acquisition of vital national-defense information.
It could not be more obvious to an objective, rational person that if the aim is intelligence collection, it is far better to interrogate a terrorist without limitations on time and subject matter, without the interference of a defense lawyer, and without empowering the detainee by giving him plea-bargaining leverage to trade for information. The Obama administration, however, is telling you, with a straight face, that the imposition of civilian due process will produce intelligence just as effectively, if not better.
Most people, of course, realize that this is impossible if Miranda warnings must be given. So the administration rolls out canard No. 1: the "public-safety exception." The public is led to believe that this exception means agents have at least 48 hours of freewheeling interrogation before Miranda kicks in and the terrorist clams up (upon lawyering up). This is brazenly false.
The public-safety exception is an exceedingly limited end-around. It applies only when arrest is accompanied by an immediate threat to public safety. It is not designed to provide the government with an information-gathering advantage against the arrestee. It is narrowly tailored to address the threat that triggers the exception.
There is no 48 hours. The exception ends when the threat ends - which, in the view of most courts, happens as soon as the detainee is rendered defenseless. This usually amounts to something closer to 48 seconds than to 48 hours. Moreover, the exception is not a license to do an extensive intelligence debriefing; the pre-Miranda questioning must be tailored to the threat - along the lines of, "Where is the gun?" or "Where are the unexploded bombs?" The public-safety exception does not cover "Where did your brother get terrorist training in Dagestan?"
For intelligence purposes, the public-safety exception to Miranda does not come close to putting arrest in the civilian-justice system on par with enemy-combatant detention. The administration rightly figures the public does not know this, but to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the relevant law, the suggestion that the two paths are comparable is insulting.
Thus canard No. 2: The judge did it. The administration and its accomplices on Capitol Hill have spread the story that the Tsarnaev interrogation was going just swimmingly when, to the shock of everyone, a magistrate judge barged into the hospital room and Mirandized the terrorist, abruptly ending the hugely successful intelligence effort. This, too, is utter nonsense.
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