The right doesn't really know how to respond to Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar's capture. The typical response is to guffaw about Miranda laws, as John Hinderaker does here:
That's great, and we sincerely congratulate the administration on this accomplishment. We can't help noting, though: why didn't they pay for a lawyer and read Baradar his rights? If negotiating with a criminal defense lawyer is the most effective way to get information from a captured terrorist--here, among other things, the authorities are trying to learn the whereabouts of the Taliban's long-lost leader, Mullah Omar--why didn't they follow that paradigm with Mr. Baradar?
This is a maddening phenomenon I've written about before, basically the right manufactures a myth -- Obama wants enemy combatants captured on foreign battlefields, as opposed to terrorists captured on American soil, read their miranda rights -- and then mocks Obama for not adhering to a policy he never actually supported. This isn't beating a straw man to death; it's urinating on it after it's been set on fire. What both the administration and experienced counterterrorism officials have argued is that telling someone they have the right to shut up is irrelevant, and extracting intelligence has to do with the skill of the interrogator and the mind-set of the suspects.
Maybe it's impossible for Hinderaker to understand the difference between capturing the military leader of a foreign political faction that the U.S. is currently fighting in a zone of active combat and apprehending someone on United States soil, where the FBI has jurisdiction, but that would mean admitting he can't comprehend basic facts.
-- A. Serwer
