Does DoJ Also Have The Right To Remain Silent?
January 22, 2010
justoneminute.typepad.com
Who decided that the Underpants Bomber deserved a lawyer and had the right to remain silent? Will Attorney General Holder enlighten us?
Sen. Jeff Sessions said the decision was made by "unnamed high-ranking official at the Department of Justice". Perhaps We the People can find out who.
There seem to be some basic and unanswered questions that might be worth asking the "suspect", if his lawyer would let us. From the Jan 7 Times:
SANA, Yemen — A senior official here said Thursday that the young Nigerian man accused of trying to bring down an airliner as it was approaching Detroit on Dec. 25 had met with operatives of Al Qaeda and probably with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Internet preacher, in Yemen before setting out on his journey.
But the official, Rashad al-Alimi, the deputy prime minister for national security and defense, cited Yemeni investigations and said that the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had acquired the explosives used in the failed attack not in Yemen, which he left on Dec. 4, but in Nigeria. There he changed planes at the Lagos airport on Dec. 24, boarding a flight to Amsterdam and then another to Detroit.
Mr. Alimi’s remarks, made at a news conference in Sana, offered Yemen’s most definitive public reconstruction of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s movements before the attack. But the account differed on crucial points from those given by British, Ghanaian and Nigerian officials: where Mr. Abdulmutallab was recruited, where he obtained the explosives, even how long he spent in the Nigerian airport.
According to previous accounts, Mr. Abdulmutallab flew from Accra, Ghana, on Dec. 24, and had a layover at the airport in Lagos on his way to boarding the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight in Amsterdam. American officials have said that Mr. Abdulmutallab told F.B.I. investigators that Al Qaeda in Yemen had trained him and furnished him with the sophisticated bomb he concealed in his underwear.
In a normal military interrogation the detainee could be confronted with discrepancies between his previous story and any new evidence. In Eric Holder's war, not so much.
Posted by Tom Maguire on January 22, 2010 | Permalink |
