Boston bomber: Experts continue to reveal Obama administration’s misleading themery

Boston bomber: Experts continue to reveal Obama administration’s misleading themery

Judge followed the law in Mirandizing him
Judge followed the law in Mirandizing him

I’ve written about this before: the Obama administration’s penchant for creating “information” themes that misrepresent what’s going on.  My expertise is in military operations, so my points have addressed Team Obama’s methods for misleading the public on the meaning of U.S. military activities (see here as well).  I’ve also written about the administration’s pattern of propagating its info themes by “disclosing” them as insider commentary to credulous journalists.  Sometimes the briefest web search will reveal that what has been “disclosed” is not even true – but reporters obediently retail it anyway.

Now Andrew McCarthy has posted a must-read piece at NRO in which he lays bare the Obama administration’s misleading info-themery on the marathon bomber case.  He points out that it was the Obama administration, and not a rogue judge, that caused Dzokhar Tsarnaev to be Mirandized.  He clarifies that there is no “48 hour” exception to the Miranda rule; the much-touted number “48” appears to have been derived through rectal extraction.   And he summarizes these truths: that what we learned from Tsarnaev in 16 hours of un-lawyered-up questioning does not qualify as “intelligence,” nor does the information about an abandoned plot by the Tsarnaev brothers to bomb Times Square indicate that, through the actions of law enforcement, we have “foiled” the plot.

With respect to presenting the processes of law enforcement to the public, McCarthy catches the administration in exactly the sort of false theme-mongering it has regularly engaged in regarding our military activities.  He sees what I have written about before:  reporters uncritically accepting the themes put out by the administration and weaving the news around them.

So what you may think you know about the processing of Dzokhar Tsarnaev isn’t so.  The judge, Marianne Bowler, did not Mirandize Tsarnaev “prematurely.”  She Mirandized him at the same time any other judge would have, given the time at which the Obama administration decided to treat him as a civilian criminal rather than an enemy combatant.   Tsarnaev has not been questioned for intelligence; the Obama administration has merely publicized some of his statements as if they represent intelligence – and has thereby violated the rules of prosecution.  (We may be grateful that the prosecutor won’t need Tsarnaev’s testimony to get a conviction.  But a zealous defense attorney might well poke holes in the way Tsarnaev has been handled so far – and if improprieties would get any other defendant off, they should apply to Tsarnaev’s case as well.  That’s one of the big problems with mucking around in judicial procedures for political purposes.  The rule of law – the rule that protects our rights and keeps us all equal before the law – goes by the wayside.)

If you know your field of expertise, you don’t have difficulty seeing through the misrepresentations coming from the Obama administration.  Andrew McCarthy has done a public service by highlighting the misrepresentations associated with the Boston bomber case.  Unfortunately, we can expect more of them in the days ahead.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

Comments

For your convenience, you may leave commments below using Disqus. If Disqus is not appearing for you, please disable AdBlock to leave a comment.