O'Reilly vs. Beck On Miranda Rights For American Islamoterrorists

To view the debate visti http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/checker.aspx?v=XdqGuzIrVr.

I sympathize with Beck's point that terrorists like the attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad should be afforded Miranda rights because he is an American citizen, that no American citizen should have less rights than any other American citizen.

The point that I think goes ignored in this whole debate is that Miranda rights are not actually a right in the historical Constitution as understood by its original meaning, but rather it is a right created by the Supreme Court in their famous 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona. The dissent of Justice Byron White in that case expressly pointed out that the right created had no basis in American constitutional history. He opened his dissenting opinion by pointing out that "the proposition that the privilege against self-incrimination forbids in-custody interrogation without the warnings specified in the majority opinion and without a clear waiver of counsel has no significant support in the history of the privilege or in the language of the Fifth Amendment." Chief Justice William Rehnquist agreed with White, though later in his career he abandoned his opposition to the Miranda right on the basis that it had already become deeply embedded in America's law enforcement culture. When Miranda v. Arizona came before the Supreme Court, however, there was not major terrorist threats to the United States. What they largely must have had in mind were typical individual criminal defendants, from the less serious crimes to the most serious offenses, but not those who train with a foreign enemy or sympathize with a foreign ideology and intend to commit acts of mass murder on our soil as acts of war against our country. The Miranda right does in fact have a public safety exception, but that exception is so narrowly interpreted and applied as to be practically meaningless. It is not, therefore, outlandish to suggest that in light of the radical Islamic terrorist threat that these rights should perhaps be reexamined, that those that are enemy combatants should not be afforded this right. To suggest that enemy combatants should not have Miranda rights is not out of line with the Constitution as originally understood and may in fact make sense in light of the present day threats from Islamoterrorism that did not exist when the Supreme Court first created the right. Tweet