THE KIND OF WISDOM ONLY GIULIANI CAN PROVIDE…. As expected, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) appeared on “This Week” and said all of the things he was expected to say. Mirandizing is bad; the civilian criminal justice system he used to embrace for trying terrorists is now bad; “enemy combatant” designations are good, etc.
But host Jake Tapper asked a good question that doesn’t come up nearly as often as it should.
TAPPER: I want to talk about the fact that you think that Shahzad should be tried as an enemy combatant. Can you point to any time when a U.S. citizen was interrogated as an enemy combatant as opposed to in the criminal system where the result, the interrogation was more successful than apparently this interrogation is going? I mean, Attorney General Holder and other law enforcement officials say…
GIULIANI: Oh, sure.
TAPPER: … this is going very well.
GIULIANI: Well, yes, that’s OK. I like that. I’m glad it’s going very well….
And then Giuliani moved on, never answering the question. That’s a shame, because I would have loved to hear the answer — if interrogations of enemy combatants have been more successful, there should be plenty of examples. And as a follow-up, if the system of trying enemy combatants in military courts, as compared to the U.S. criminal justice system, is preferable, there should be examples on this front, too. (There aren’t.)
Instead, we heard words of wisdom like this from the former mayor:
“They’re at war with us, and we’re spending time studying what rights they have. This doesn’t make much sense, Jake. We’re worried more about the rights of the terrorists, it seems — or at least pondering that — more than we are urgency about actually curing some of these things that will keep us safe and not have us rely on luck, which is how we got — got through these last two ones.”
It’s as predictable as it is tiresome. U.S. officials care more about terrorists’ rights than counter-terrorism? Please.
When I said having Giuliani on as a credible guest is a mistake, this is what I was talking about. The guy’s just a hack.
