ENEMY COMBATANT?

Sen. Lindsey Graham

Lindsey Graham (Benghazi! Benghazi!) is up for reelection in South Carolina next year, and there are rumors that the Tea Party may support a candidate to challenge him forcing him into a Republican Party primary run-off.  Thus Graham may think he has to prove his manly-man creds with combative stances against President Obama's policies, which he has admitted are "good politics".

Even though the man suspected of detonating two bombs during the Boston Marathon has already received his Miranda rights, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham Monday continued to press for the suspect to be "interrogated" and treated as an "enemy combatant" for intelligence-gathering purposes. But Graham said the information gathered shouldn't be used in court because the suspect is a U.S. citizen.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a 19-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Kyrgyzstan, was charged Monday in federal court for last week's bombing, which he allegedly set off with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed last week during a police search for the suspects.

Dzhokhar Tsnarnaev

The Justice Department has declined to treat Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant, which would have allowed authorities to question him without an attorney present.

The authorities questioned Tsarnaev for 16 hours before he was read his Miranda rights.  During that time, he confessed to the crimes, thus the confession cannot be used in court to make the case against him.  Once he was read his Miranda rights, Tsarnaev stopped talking.  Since there's probably enough evidence besides the confession, the prosecutors probably still have a strong case for Tsarnaev's conviction as one of the Boston bombers. 

It’s...dismaying that authorities dribbled out bits of Tsarnaev’s confession Monday and Tuesday after saying he’d been read his rights. They never directly said he kept talking after he’d been Mirandized, but they created that impression.

I've read elsewhere that the confession came after the reading of Miranda rights, and I see the source of the information now.  Was this deliberate obfuscation by the authorities intended to confuse?

Despite previous statements about Tsarnaev's capture, it now appears he had no gun, and the authorities won't say what all the gunfire at the scene was about.

Although police feared he was heavily armed, the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing had no firearms when he came under a barrage of police gunfire that struck the boat where he was hiding, according to multiple federal law enforcement officials.

Authorities said they were desperate to capture Dzhokhar Tsarnaev so he could be questioned. The FBI, however, declined to discuss what prompted the gunfire.

In time, I trust all the information in the news reports will be sorted out.  I intended my post to be about Graham and his call for Tsarnaev to be treated as an enemy combatant, but as I heard and read more news, the post grew longer.  

LITTLE iAPPS - CONFESSION: A ROMAN CATHOLIC APP

From Beliefblog:

Yes, the Roman Catholic Church still supports the new app designed to help Catholics make confession. To a point.

The Vatican qualified its support for "Confession: A Roman Catholic App,” on Wednesday, a day after the program’s developer announced it was the first app to have official church sanction.

Thanks to Whiteycat.

“It is essential to understand well the sacrament of penitence requires the personal dialogue between the penitent and the confessor and the absolution by the confessor,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told reporters on Wednesday. “This cannot in any way be substituted by a technology application.”

“One cannot talk in any way about a ‘confession via iPhone,’ ” Lombardi said.

Eons ago, we worked from lists of sins against the Ten Commandments. In the age of technology, why not an iPhone app? I used the lists to remind myself of my wickedness and then committed my sins to memory for use in the confessional, but, on one occasion, a couple of my friends tried to take their lists into the confession box, but it was so dark that they could not read off their sins. I suppose the iPhone has a light, which would eliminate that problem, but then a good many folks don't use the confessional any longer and prefer a face to face experience of confessing their sins.

For good or for ill, it's been years since I've made a formal confession to a priest. I confess to God and, at times, to a wise and trustworthy friend. My last experience of confession was embarrassing for me and, I believe, for the priest - not because of the sins I confessed, because there was nothing extraordinary in their content, but just the experience itself was awkward, and I've not tried again.

Thanks to Ann V.

UPDATE: From Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:

Our Father, who art in pixels,
linked be Thy name,
Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done,
on Explorer as it is on Firefox.
Give us this day our daily app,
and forgive us our spam,
as we forgive those
who spam against us,
and lead us not into aggregation,
but deliver us from e-vil. Amen.

Thanks to Whitecat.