Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Rights

"He's a citizen of the United States, so I say we uphold the laws and the Constitution on citizens...If you are a citizen, you obey the law and follow the Constitution. He has all the rights under the Constitution...We don't shred the Constitution when it is popular. We do the right thing."

~Glenn Beck

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Glenn Beck is right. (Although Glenn does make other statements during that segment like favoring torturing non-citizens, when torture is ineffective and more importantly immoral and illegal under U.S. and international law.) Every citizen is entitled to Miranda rights save some legal exceptions like the public safety exception, which allows authorities to question terrorist suspects about whether they acted alone or if they know of other threats. In the case of Faisal Shahzad, the public safety exception was employed, then they Mirandized him and he continued to talk.

But John McCain thinks Mirandizing him was a mistake. And now Joe Lieberman is introducing a bill that would allow the State Department to revoke an American's citizenship if they are "a member of a terrorist group, even before trial or capture." They could then appeal the decision--and the burden of proof would at least be on the State Dept.--but if their citizenship is revoked before they have a chance to appeal, I don't see this working well in practice.

This should be self-evidently a bad idea. If the government can revoke someone's citizenship without sufficient judicial constraint, there is bound to be abuse. And if even if their citizenship could be revoked, the Supreme Court has ruled that they are still entitled to rights under U.S. law.

Last word:

The appalling behavior of John McCain and Joe Lieberman this past week underlines what a bullet this country missed by electing Barack Obama president...

Now recall that McCain and Lieberman were celebrated in Washington for their alleged maturity, wisdom, and elder statesmen experience. They are in fact adolescent hysterics, whose terrorized Manichean view of the world sees nothing but an existential struggle and the imperative to win it. We would have been electing Cheney to a third term. And we barely knew it.

~Andrew Sullivan

Reactions to the Times Square Plot

Four days ago, an amateur car bomb failed to go off in New York City's Times Square. A T-shirt vendor noticed smoke coming out of an awkwardly parked Nissan Pathfinder and alerted a nearby police officer. The authorities responded swiftly, evacuating the area and defusing the bomb.

Reactions have been oddly muted, nowhere near the frenzy after the underwear bomber Omar Abdulmutallab failed to blow up a plane above Detroit. My rationale is that the difference in reaction is due to the difference in terrorist methods. There is so much security around airplanes that the fact that Abdulmutallab got as far as he did represents a failure somewhere in the system. But there seems to be no good way to stop someone from parking a car bomb in Times Square. In this case, the system worked as well as it could.

Meanwhile, Adam Serwer at Tapped had been pushing the line that conservatives have been quiet because the suspect at the time was "a middle-aged white guy" instead of a radical Muslim. But now that a Pakistani-American has been arrested and has reportedly confessed, Republicans are still fairly silent.

Still, even though I'm not quite as cynical as Serwer--"If the attack was carried out by Muslim extremists, the conservative response will be that this would never have happened if Obama were still torturing people. If it turns out to be a domestic right-wing extremist, well, it'll be a tragic but understandable response to government tyranny."--I have to admit he has a point. Would Scott Brown have said, "No one likes paying taxes obviously," if a Muslim had flown a plane into a building with IRS offices instead of Andrew Joseph Stack III?

Also, Andrew Sullivan rounds up more reactions, and Megan McArdle opines on why terrorist attacks are so infrequent.