Free Republic

In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. “I’d been a part of the deliberations which established this high-value interrogation unit [HIG],” Blair explained at a...

Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday defended the Mirandizing of Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing, while senators had a mixture of praise and criticism for the timing of Shahzad’s arrest. Asked during an Appropriations hearing whether the reading of Miranda rights had impeded the investigation, Holder said, “No, it did not. As we have seen in prior investigations, the giving of Miranda warnings has not deterred people from talking to us, and Mr. Shahzad is, in fact, continuing to cooperate with us.”