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| 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.
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| 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.
