(CCU Faculty) Interrogation in normal police procedures is intended to gain information about a crime, with the ultimate goal being to gain a conviction. When police question a suspect or person with knowledge of a crime, they are trying to build a case that will be substantial enough to ensure that the guilty parties are punished for their offense. What is most frightening about our current Democrat leadership is that they view the capture and interrogation of terror suspects with this same mindset.
The purpose of interrogation in a time of war is not primarily about securing convictions. It is about gaining information about your enemy so that you can defeat them. When we capture a terrorist, we want to learn about their organization, their plans, their current location, etc. We do this in the hope of preventing imminent plans from coming to fruition, while at the same time improving our strategy for their ultimate defeat.
This is not the priority of the current administration. The Democrat Party’s dangerous pre 9/11 mentality can most clearly be seen in two comments, one by Attorney General Holder and the second by Senate Judiciary Committee chair Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
When questioned on November 18 by Republican Lindsay Graham about whether or not Osama Bin Laden would need to have a Miranda warning read to him immediately upon capture, Holder unconvincingly responded that we would probably not need to Mirandize him because the evidence is “overwhelming.” While being interviewed on C-Span, Senator Leahy reiterated General Holder’s point: “For one thing, capturing Osama Bin Laden – we’ve had enough on him, we don’t need to interrogate him.”
What both of these quotes make clear is this: the Democrats simply want to arrest Bin Laden so that they can punish him for his previous crimes. While Bin Laden most certainly should pay for the evil he has done, his value, as well as that of his fellow members of al Qaeda, should not be based on how much we punish him for his guilt; it should be based on how our interrogations of them might lead to the destruction of their terror organizations.
One final note: the fact that we are even having a debate on when terrorists are entitled to be Mirandized, which naturally presents the potential for the invocation of the exclusionary rule against the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, makes clear that the current administration does not view the war against terrorism as a war at all.
