It shouldn't come as a complete surprise that, as Stephen Hayes reported in The Weekly Standard, detainees in Afghanistan are now being advised of their Miranda rights by American interrogators -- that they have a right to be silent, a right to a lawyer, a right to have that lawyer paid for, etc. This is, after all, a logical extension of Bush administration critics' insistence that such detainees -- though unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions -- must be given every jot and tittle of the rights civilian Americans enjoy on American soil.
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It's nonetheless news, if only because Barack Obama on the campaign trail said that "of course" they would not get Miranda warnings. Now, "of course" seems to have been subordinated to the higher principle of "yes, we can."
This is in line with the Obama administration's "global justice initiative," which elevates the role of the FBI and the Justice Department in global anti-terrorism operations. In its pursuit of the future, the administration is going back to 1990s policies of treating terrorism as a matter of solely criminal law and not seeking to go on the offensive against those who hate our civilization and want to do us great harm.
But this is not just a matter of one administration changing the policies of its predecessor. The extension of Miranda rights is also a symptom of two larger maladies that threaten to harm the body public.
The first of these resides in the culture of military law. Hayes' story is based on the eyewitness testimony of Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., a former FBI agent and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, who actually saw Miranda rights being administered in Afghanistan. But Rogers has said he witnessed this as early as last July, when George W. Bush was still president, though the practice seems far more widespread now. We can't blame it all on Obama.
Some of the blame belongs to our plethora of military lawyers. Jack Goldsmith, in his book "The Terror Presidency," which was marketed as a critique of the Bush administration in which Goldsmith served, also lamented our "over-lawyered war."
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