Osama Bin Laden Killed in US Military Operation in Pakistan; USA Has Body

Top Comments on Twitter and Facebook:

Obama sure uses a lot of "I's" in his message... "I authorized...I've oversaw..." Meanwhile, our brave troops are in harms way!

I thought Bin Laden was dead 9 years ago. Just when Barry’s popularity needs a BIG boost. I’m skeptical. sorry.

This is the case of a president that wants to assure his re-election and is and will do everything in his power to make it happen.  This is only the beginning of his smoke and mirrors!

Crowds cheering USA and waving American flags appear at

The timing of this is really weird. It's possible Pakistan and U.S has known his whereabouts for a while & this is a political stunt.

Osama killed by American hands. To the Navy Seals who got the S.O.B., I & all Americans offer heartiest congratulations & deepest gratitude.

If Osama is really dead, good… He can rot in Hell. However, I am very skeptical! I think it is very convenient timing for Obama’s reelection… a bit too convenient!

In his last attack on the world, Osama blew up all of our twitter feeds.

OOPS: MSNBC (and Geraldo on Fox) Says “Obama,” Not Osama Killed http://bit.ly/lgptA7

FBI: 10 Most Wanted list with Bin Laden has not been updated with "Dead/Capture" http://goo.gl/pg7fn

Phillies Crowd Erupts in ‘U-S-A’ Cheers on News of Bin Laden Death http://bit.ly/jr7yuH

Ground zero crowd cheering USA, fire trucks passing by honking in support http://t.co/Kq5m7vF

PRESIDENT OBAMA ANNOUNCES: BIN LADEN STILL DEAD http://j.mp/k2OFgH

FDNY celebrate bin Laden kill.  NYTimes front page http://cl.ly/6Nte

Video:  Osama Bin Laden is Dead

Osama Bin Laden Killed in US Military Operation in Pakistan

WASHINGTON--Osama bin Laden has been killed, President Barack Obama announced Sunday night.

President Obama made the announcement almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Within an hour of the news breaking, thousands of spectators were gathering outside of the White House chanting "USA, USA" and singing "God Bless America." Elsewhere in the United States, crowds gathered and fans at baseball games burst into spontaneous cheers.
"Justice has been done," the president said.

CNN and other news agencies reported that the US is in possession of the body and that identification has been absolutely confirmed. No details of bin Laden's death have been yet released.

The operation that killed the al-Qaida leader in a mansion outside of Islamabad was apparently the culmination of weeks of intelligence gathering and no less that five top secret national security meetings between Obama and his war cabinet.

US military and diplomatic installations are on a state of heightened alert and members of the Obama administration and the President have been alerting members of Congress and foreign leaders all night long.

Bin Laden was apparently killed in a "human operation" that was based on actionable intelligence in a mansion outside of Islamabad, Pakistan, according to CNN. He was killed in a highly secure compound, built in 2005, that was a virtual fortress of 15-foot-high walls and barbed wire.

The entire operation lasted just 40 minutes and was conducted by an elite team of US Navy SEALS, CIA officers, and other special military commandos. Pakistani intelligence officials apparently were key to the success of the mission, initial reports suggested.
The announcement comes nearly a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks which started a tireless hunt for the terrorist mastermind and al-Qaida leader.

Challenging the might of the "infidel" United States, Osama bin Laden masterminded the deadliest militant attacks in history and then built a global network of allies to wage a "holy war" intended to outlive him.

The man behind the suicide hijack attacks of September 11, 2001, and who U.S. officials said late on Sunday was dead, was the nemesis of former President George W. Bush, who pledged to take him "dead or alive" and whose two terms were dominated by a "war on terror" against his al-Qaida network.

Bin Laden also assailed Bush's successor, Barack Obama, dismissing a new beginning with Muslims he offered in a 2009 speech as sowing "seeds for hatred and revenge against America."
Widely assumed to be hiding in Pakistan -- whether in a mountain cave or a bustling city -- bin Laden was believed to be largely bereft of operational control, under threat from U.S. drone strikes and struggling with disenchantment among former supporters alienated by suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004-06.

But even as political and security pressures grew on him in 2009-2101, the Saudi-born militant appeared to hit upon a strategy of smaller, more easily-organized attacks, carried out by globally-scattered hubs of sympathizers and affiliate groups. Al=Qaida sprouted new offshoots in Yemen, Iraq and North Africa and directed or inspired attacks from Bali to Britain to the United States, where a Nigerian Islamist made a botched attempt to down an airliner over Detroit on Dec 25, 2009.

While remaining the potent figurehead of al-Qaida, bin Laden turned its core leadership from an organization that executed complex team-based attacks into a propaganda hub that cultivated affiliated groups to organize and strike on their own. With his long grey beard and wistful expression, bin Laden became one of the most instantly recognizable people on the planet, his gaunt face staring out from propaganda videos and framed on a U.S. website offering a $25 million bounty.

Officials say U.S. authorities have recovered bin Laden's body, ending the largest manhunt in history involving thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers in the rugged mountains along the border.

Whether reviled as a terrorist and mass murderer or hailed as the champion of oppressed Muslims fighting injustice and humiliation, bin Laden changed the course of history.

ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

The United States and its allies rewrote their security doctrines, struggling to adjust from Cold War-style confrontation between states to a new brand of transnational "asymmetric warfare" against small cells of Islamist militants. Al=Qaida's weapons were not tanks, submarines and aircraft carriers but the everyday tools of globalization and 21st century technology -- among them the Internet, which it eagerly exploited for propaganda, training and recruitment.

But, by his own account, not even bin Laden anticipated the full impact of using 19 suicide hijackers to turn passenger aircraft into guided missiles and slam them into buildings that symbolized U.S. financial and military power. Nearly 3,000 people died when two planes struck New York's World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers rushed the hijackers. "Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs," bin Laden said in a statement a month after the September 11 attacks, urging Muslims to rise up and join a global battle between "the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels." In video and audio messages over the next seven years, the al-Qaida leader goaded Washington and its allies. His diatribes lurched across a range of topics, from the war in Iraq to U.S. politics, the subprime mortgage crisis and even climate change.

A gap of nearly three years in his output of video messages revived speculation he might be gravely ill with a kidney problem or even have died, but bin Laden was back on screen in September 2007, telling Americans their country was vulnerable despite its economic and military power.

MILLIONAIRE FATHER

Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire businessman Mohamed bin Laden, he lost his father while still a boy -- killed in a plane crash, apparently due to an error by his American pilot. Osama's first marriage, to a Syrian cousin, came at the age of 17, and he is reported to have at least 23 children from at least five wives.

Part of a family that made its fortune in the oil-funded Saudi construction boom, bin Laden was a shy boy and an average student, who took a degree in civil engineering. He went to Pakistan soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and raised funds at home before making his way to the Afghan front lines and developing militant training camps. According to some accounts, he helped form al-Qaida ("The Base") in the dying days of the Soviet occupation. A book by U.S. writer Steve Coll, "The Bin Ladens," suggested the death in 1988 of his extrovert half-brother Salem -- again in a plane crash -- was an important factor in Osama's radicalization.

Bin Laden condemned the presence in Saudi Arabia of U.S. troops sent to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion, and remained convinced that the Muslim world was the victim of international terrorism engineered by America. He called for a jihad against the United States, which had spent billions of dollars bankrolling the Afghan resistance in which he had fought.

TRAIL OF ATTACKS

Al-Qaida embarked on a trail of attacks, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six and first raised the specter of Islamist extremism spreading to the United States.
Bin Laden was the prime suspect in bombings of U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 as well as attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224. In October 2000, suicide bombers rammed into the USS Cole warship in Yemen, killing 17 sailors, and al-Qaida was blamed. Disowned by his family and stripped of Saudi citizenship, bin Laden had moved first to Sudan in 1991 and later resurfaced in Afghanistan before the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996. With his wealth, largesse and shared radical Muslim ideology, bin Laden soon eased his way into inner Taliban circles as they imposed their rigid interpretation of Islam. From Afghanistan, bin Laden issued religious decrees against U.S. soldiers and ran training camps where militants were groomed for a global campaign of violence.

Recruits were drawn from Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even Europe by their common hatred of the United States, Israel and moderate Muslim governments, as well as a desire for a more fundamentalist brand of Islam. After the 1998 attacks on two of its African embassies, the United States fired dozens of cruise missiles at Afghanistan, targeting al-Qaida training camps. Bin Laden escaped unscathed. The Taliban paid a heavy price for sheltering bin Laden and his fighters, suffering a humiliating defeat after a U.S.-led invasion in the weeks after the September 11 attacks.

ESCAPE FROM TORA BORA

Al-Qaida was badly weakened, with many fighters killed or captured. Bin Laden vanished -- some reports say U.S. bombs narrowly missed him in late 2001 as he and his forces slipped out of Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains and into Pakistan.

But the start of the Iraq war in 2003 produced a fresh surge of recruits for al-Qaida due to opposition to the U.S. invasion within Muslim communities around the world, analysts say. Apparently protected by the Afghan Taliban in their northwest Pakistani strongholds, bin Laden also built ties to an array of south Asian militant groups and backed a bloody revolt by the Pakistani Taliban against the Islamabad government.

Amid a reinvigorated al-Qaida propaganda push, operatives or sympathizers were blamed for attacks from Indonesia and Pakistan to Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Spain, Britain and Somalia.
Tougher security in the West and killings of middle-rank Qaida men helped weaken the group, and some followers noted critically that the last successful al Qaida-linked strike in a Western country was the 2005 London bombings that killed 52.

But Western worries about radicalization grew following a string of incidents involving U.S.-based radicals in 2009-10 including an attempt to bomb New York's Times Square. In a 2006 audio message, bin Laden alluded to the U.S. hunt for him and stated his determination to avoid capture: "I swear not to die but a free man."

© 2011 Thomson/Reuters

Crowd in Front of White House

Related:

• NEW YORK CITY GOES WILD AT NEWS OF OBL DEATH
• PAKISTANI TELEVISION AIRS VIDEO OF FIRE AT OBL COMPOUND
• BASEBALL FANS REACT TO BIN LADEN NEWS WITH STADIUM-ROCKING ‘U-S-A!’ CHANTS
• BIN LADEN TOOK A PATH OF FANATICISM AND TERROR
• WSJ: REACTION TO BIN LADEN DEATH ROLLS ACROSS THE WEB

Krauthammer & Sowell: Obama Disconnected

Krauthammer: Obama Disconnected

"Notional" Security

by Thomas Sowell

The latest "screw-up" that let a man with explosives get on a plane on Christmas day is only part of a larger laxness and irresponsibility when it comes to national security. This administration pays lip service to national security and gives out with a lot of rhetorical notions that makes it notional security instead of national security.

The Muslim major who was arrested for the murders of American soldiers at Fort Hood had left so many clues to his hatred of this country that all you had to do was count the dots, without even connecting them, to see where he was coming from. But for a fellow officer to alert higher authorities to the danger would have meant risking damage to his own career moreso than to that of Major Nidal Hasan.

That is because we have become so obsessed with political correctness that both common sense and self-preservation have to take a back seat. We don't dare "profile" anybody going through security checks because that's not politically correct. Far better to be blown to smithereens than to be politically incorrect.

Probably the country with the strongest security checks for airline passengers-- and the strongest reason for such checks-- is Israel. Israel profiles. I have been to Israel more than once and it is clear that they profile.

Fortunately, my wife and I obviously don't fit their profile, whatever that may be. Others who have been to Israel are amazed when I tell them that we have gone through Israeli security four times and they have never opened our luggage.

That is all the more surprising, since we take a lot of luggage. We have stopped in Israel while on trips completely around the world, including countries both above and below the equator, so we had to have clothing for hot weather and cold weather, since the seasons are the opposite in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, I carry a lot of photographic equipment in a large, separate piece of luggage.

In short, our luggage could carry enough explosives to blow up any building in the country. But, whatever their security system and whatever their profile, they didn't seem to want to waste any time on us.

The last time we flew into Israel was from Cairo, where the Israeli security officials at the Cairo airport detained the lady in line in front of us for 45 minutes, opened her luggage, spread the contents across the counter, and asked her all sorts of questions. When they had finally finished with her and my wife and I stepped up to the counter, the official in charge waved us on impatiently, saying, "Hurry up, you'll miss the plane."

This was no special treatment for us. They had no idea who we were. We were just not the kind of people they spent time on, for whatever reason.

Recently, an Israeli security official was interviewed on Fox News Channel by Mike Huckabee. The official said that he has testified before Congress and offered to help with suggestions on how the American airport security system could be improved-- and he clearly thought it needed a lot of improvement.

Apparently the only response he got from American security officials was a polite letter. "They didn't tell me to go to Hell," he said. "They were polite."

There is no stronger indication of danger than officials who don't want to hear what anybody else has to say, even when those who offer to help have a system that works better than ours.

The fundamental issue goes beyond the Fort Hood massacre or the Christmas bomber. These are just symptoms of a larger set of attitudes and expediences reflecting the same outlook.

Putting terrorists on trial in American criminal courts, under rules designed for American citizens, tells you all you need to know about whether the Obama administration is serious about security or is still playing the political correctness game.

Terrorists are not covered by the Geneva convention for the simple reason that they do not abide by the Geneva convention. They are enemy combatants and you do not turn enemy combatants loose to go back to killing Americans while the war is still on-- not if you are being serious, as distinguished from being political or ideological.

You Have To Start Wondering Which Side Team Obama Is On!?!

King on Holder: 'You wonder which side they’re on'

A "furious" Rep. Peter King, the hawkish, maverick Long Island Republican, blasted a "disgraceful" Eric Holder for opening an investigation of CIA interrogators and chided his own party for what he described as a weak response to the move in an interview just now with POLITICO.

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."
"It’s a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he’s lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

King, channeling both the sense of outrage and of political opportunity felt in parts of the GOP, defended in detail the interrogation practices — threats to kill a detainee's family, and or to kill a detainee with a power drill — detailed in a CIA inspector general report released yesterday.

"You're talking about threatening to kill a guy, threatening to attack his family, threatening to use an electric drill on him — but never doing it," King said. "You have that on the one hand — and on the other you have the [interrogator's] attempt to prevent thousands of Americans from being killed."

"When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something — or that they actually used the power drill," he said.

Pressed on whether interrogators had actually broken the law, King said he didn't think the Geneva Convention "applies to terrorists," and that the line between permitted and outlawed interrogation policies in the Bush years was "a distinction without a difference."

"Why is it OK to waterboard someone, which causes physical pain, but not threaten someone and not cause pain?" he asked, warning of a "chilling" effect on future CIA behavior.

"You will have thousands of lives that will be lost, and the blood will be on Eric Holder's hands," he said.

King faulted his own party leaders for an insufficient response to yesterday's announcement.

"They’ve declared war on the CIA. We should resist and fight back as hard as we can," he said. "It should be a scorched earth policy. ... This isn't just another policy. This goes to the heart of our national defense. We should do whatever we have to do."

By Ben Smith

-------------

Cheney, Republicans Blast Interrogation Probe

Former vice president, top Republican senators criticize decision to begin a new criminal probe of past interrogation tactics. Cheney said, "the people involved deserve our gratitude.

WASHINGTON -- Top Republican senators said on Monday they were troubled by Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to begin a new criminal probe of past interrogation tactics used by the CIA during President George W. Bush's war on terror, and expressed concern it could hamper U.S. intelligence efforts.

A newly declassified version of a CIA report revealed Monday that CIA interrogators once allegedly threatened to kill the Sept. 11 attack mastermind's children and suggested another would be forced to watch his mother sexually assaulted.

The fresh crop of damaging revelations only intensified the long-running political fight about the secret interrogation program -- whether it protected the United States then, and whether spilling its secrets now will weaken the nation's future security.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney refuted Holder's decision, saying it "serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this administration's ability to be responsible for our nation's security."

Cheney told The Weekly Standard, a conservative journal, "The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by Al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."

Holder said Monday he had chosen a veteran prosecutor, John Durham, to open a preliminary investigation to determine whether any CIA officers or contractors should face criminal charges for crossing the line on rough but permissible tactics. Durham already is investigating the destruction of CIA interrogation videos.

At the same time, President Barack Obama ordered changes in future interrogations, bringing in other agencies besides the CIA under the direction of the FBI and to be supervised by his own national security adviser. The administration pledged that questioning would be controlled by the Army Field Manual, with strict rules, and said the White House would keep its hands off the professional investigators doing the work.

Despite the announcement of the criminal probe, White House aides declared anew that Obama "wants to look forward, not back" at Bush-era tactics.

White House officials said they plan to continue the controversial practice of rendition of suspects to foreign countries, though they said that in future cases there would be greater safeguards to ensure such suspects are not tortured.

Monday's five-year-old report by the CIA's inspector general, newly declassified and released under a federal court's orders, described severe tactics used by interrogators on terror suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Seeking information about possible further attacks, interrogators threatened one detainee with a gun and a power drill, choked another and tried to frighten still another with a mock execution of another prisoner.

And other once-secret documents released late Monday show that parts of the CIA's tough treatment program continued even after Bush's September 2006 transfer of agency prisoners to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, appointed by Bush in 2006, expressed dismay at the prospect of prosecutions for CIA officers. He noted that career prosecutors already had reviewed and declined to prosecute the alleged abuses.

Obama has said interrogators would not face charges if they followed legal guidelines, but the report by the CIA's inspector general said they went too far -- even beyond what was authorized under Bush era Justice Department legal memos that have since been withdrawn and discredited. The report also suggested some questioners knew they were crossing a line.

"Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this (but) it has to be done," one unidentified CIA officer was quoted as saying, predicting the questioners would someday have to appear in court to answer for such tactics.

The report concluded the CIA used "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane" practices in questioning "high-value" terror suspects.

In one instance cited in the new documents, Abd al-Nashiri, the man accused of being behind the 2000 USS Cole bombing, was hooded, handcuffed and threatened with an unloaded gun and a power drill. The unidentified interrogator also threatened al-Nashiri's mother and family, implying they would be sexually abused in front of him, according to the report.

The interrogator denied making a direct threat.

Another interrogator told Sept. 11 attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "if anything else happens in the United States, 'We're going to kill your children,"' one veteran officer said in the report.

Death threats violate anti-torture laws.

Investigators credited the detention-and-interrogation program for developing intelligence that prevented multiple attacks against Americans.

"In this regard, there is no doubt that the program has been effective," investigators wrote, backing an argument by former Cheney and others that the program saved lives.

But the inspector general said it was unclear whether so-called enhanced interrogation tactics contributed to that success. Those tactics included waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique that the Obama administration says was torture. Measuring the success of such interrogation is "a more subjective process and not without some concern," the report said.

The report described at least one mock execution, which would also violate U.S. anti-torture laws. To terrify one detainee, interrogators pretended to execute the prisoner in a nearby room. A senior officer said it was a transparent ruse that yielded no benefit.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Even though President Obama publically said that he wanted to move forward, not dwell on the past or prosecute anyone from the last administration, many are wondering if Holder’s announcement today, as the Obama’s are vacationing in Liberalville USA, Martha’s Vineyard, at their $35,000 a day estate could be a ploy to try to divert attention away from the disastrous Healthcare debacle and his dropping poll numbers.

Others have suggested that Team Obama and its umbrella of liberals might think twice about prosecuting past administrations, like a Banana Republic, because if present policies continue, they may find themselves in a similar place…

Team Obama has added more words to their “no use” and “replace with” lists to aid their propaganda campaigns.

Many people have also noted that perhaps President Obama owes it to the American People to read the Healthcare Bills instead of vacationing and playing golf with the President of Swiss Bank, a donator to Obama’s campaign and banker to the rich and powerful.

Posted: Daily Thought Pad - Cross Posted: Knowledge Creates Power

Congressman: Soldiers 'Mirandizing' Enemy Combatants (and Terrorists) – Have We Really Lost Our Minds?

U.S. Rep. Mike Rodgers, R-Mich., who is just back from Afghanistan, says that captured foreign fighters in that war-torn country are now getting “Miranda” warnings after capture and prior to questioning.

In a Fox News account, reproduced on the lawmaker’s Web site, Rogers says, “I witnessed it myself, talked to the people on the ground. What you have is two very separate missions colliding in the field in a combat zone. Again, anytime you offer confusion in that environment that’s already chaotic and confusing enough, you jeopardize a soldier’s life.”

What’s more, Rogers says that the new warnings advisement policy is news to the U.S. Congress, which he notes has not to his knowledge been briefed on the new procedures.

The Miranda warning is straightforward: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.”

What’s most troubling to Rogers and others is that first part about remaining silent – it severs at the get-go the route to what can be the best intelligence on the enemy’s plans to kill Americans.

“I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative,” Rogers said, according to a report in the Weekly Standard.

Rogers added: “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill U.S. soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer -- you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”

According to the Fox News report, confusion may just be the order of the day.

U.S. commanders on the ground reportedly told Fox News that soldiers are not reading Miranda rights to detainees. However, these commanders could not address whether the FBI was doing so.

What’s more, according to Fox News, the new routine of Miranda warnings has apparently not been put in place at detention facilities in Iraq or at Guantanamo Bay, according to U.S. military officials.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs offered, “I have no reason to disbelieve a member of Congress. But I don’t know any of the circumstances that are involved around it.” Gibbs did concede that the development would not surprise him.

The Justice Department was more straightforward. According to Fox News, Justice spokesman Dean Boyd denied any fundamental change in policy.

“There has been no policy change nor blanket instruction for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas,” Boyd said. “While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas, at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees.”

When Rogers said that in his opinion the use of the Miranda warnings in Afghanistan were in his opinion clearly part of President Barack Obama’s global justice initiative, he was referring to a program which has not been held as close to the chest by the administration as the apparent new Miranda warnings policy.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that the FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations -- part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around more routine open investigations and prosecutions.

Under the “global justice” initiative, which the Times reported has been up-and-running for several months, FBI agents will assume a major role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will design and execute, for example, their questioning of suspects to try to ensure that standard federal criminal prosecutions are an option.

Bottom line: the “global justice” initiative and presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a “legitimate” setting. And “legitimate” currently includes Miranda warnings for suspects.

“When they ‘Mirandize’ a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the ‘right to remain silent,’” said Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaida terrorist to remain silent.

“Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation,” Hoekstra added, according to the Weekly Standard.

Rogers commented that the writing is already on the wall: “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”

By: Dave Eberhart

Source: Newsmax - Thursday, June 11, 2009 3:34 PM

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