We Won’t Be Breaking or Prosecuting the Next KSM
Victoria Toensing, the former Justice Department official who established that department’s terrorism unit comments, in light of court rules and the Senate games, is America still capable of interrogating terrorist suspects effectively?
Can we break the next KSM?
Pollock: I’m afraid not, Stuart. I think most Americans would be shocked to learn tha, according to the new Army Field Manual, detainees in Pentagon custody get better treatment than common criminals would get in an American police station. They can’t even have a good-cop/bad-cop routine done on them.
Now, as for what the CIA is allowed to do to the so-called high level al Qaeda detainees, the rules are unclear. But frankly, you know, the climate of fear that’s being created by these debates in Congress, particularly proposed language from McCain, which wouldn’t really say what they can and can’t do, I think what that means is there’s not going to be more aggressive interrogation techniques.
Varney: Is waterboarding out for both Army personnel and for the CIA?
Pollock: I think for now, especially if the McCain language passes, waterboarding is out. Yeah.
What kind of information did we get out of KSM that we will no longer be able to get again? (Thank you, John McCain)
During questioning, KSM also provided many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans. For example, he described the design of planned attacks on buildings inside the United States and how operatives were directed to carry them out. He told us the operatives had been instructed to ensure that the explosives went off at a point that was high enough to prevent the people trapped above from escaping out the windows.
KSM also provided vital information on al Qaeda’s efforts to obtain biological weapons. During questioning, KSM admitted that he had met three individuals involved in al Qaeda’s efforts to produce anthrax, a deadly biological agent, and he identified one of the individuals as a terrorist named Yazid.
But….. after the dust settles and the dead Americans are buried surely we can prosecute the next KSM? Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, says no thanks to Miranda:
Attention class: THANKS TO THE McCAIN AMENDMENT, WE ARE ALREADY OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE MIRANDA WARNINGS IF WE HAVE ANY HOPE OF USING CONFESSION EVIDENCE IN EVENTUAL TERRORIST TRIALS.
This is very frustrating because people like yours truly implored Congress not to pass, and the president not to sign, the McCain Amendment for just this reason. The McCain Amendment vested alien enemy combatants held outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts with Fifth Amendment rights. This was something the senate had carefully refrained from doing in 1994 when it consented to the UN Convention Against Torture (which President Clinton then ratified).
In 2000, in Dickerson v. United States, the Supreme Court upended 30+ years of contrary jurisprudence by holding that the rights invented by the 1966 Miranda decision are now considered part of the core guarantee of the 5th Amendment’s right against compulsory self-incrimination.
But…….. we will have “preserved” Common Article 3 in all of its vagueness and that is “above all” to John McCain and Lindsey Grahem.
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