MIRANDA - Thursday, May 20, 2010

Last weekend, I was watching the US A G being grilled on NBC regarding the giving of “Miranda rights” to people he described as terrorists. He told us that he knew they were guilty, and assured the world that his department would do whatever they needed to assure that these guilty men would not be set free even if they were somehow acquitted by a jury of Americans acting under civilian or military law, whichever was necessary to get the job done, with or without evidence under the standards of military or civilian due process. He assured us that the application of Miranda would not stand in the way of executing or imprisoning them, lifelong if necessary, since apparently he was convinced that they were all guilty, with or without usable evidence. Since he had not seen their alleged crimes, we must understand that he was relying on a chain of evidence linking them to the criminal deed, probably a chain of hearsay without any documentation. The talking point reads like this: We all know the accused is guilty, sworn for by the Dept of
Justice (meaning the result of a star chamber-like trial) so why give them the benefit of Miranda? There is no sense in this that the US has a vested interest in being sure of the due process if it results in a conviction and punishment. I always thought that was the point of due process, the fear of unjust conviction being traditionally thought more onerous than that for an unjust acquittal. But since the press has told us that they are all guilty, we need no more cause to deny them the protections of US justice, according to the AG. And they may well be treated as though their guilt were proven by the standards of our Law, since the secret process carried out in the offices of the AG, outside the range of Due Process protections, has condemned them to any level of Justice that they may have been accorded originally by the Cheney regime.