So, since the 1981 assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, Egypt has had on the books an “Emergency Law” which basically means that they can “arrest people without charge, detain prisoners indefinitely, limit freedom of expression and assembly, and maintain a special security court…”. All this in the name of combating terrorism and drug trafficking. But as any demonstrator in Egypt knows, the definition of terrorism is overly broad and has been used all too often to silence dissenting voices.

What creeps me out is the fact that given recent legislative pushes around the nation, I can see the US under similar laws that could be used an abused at the will of the government in the near future. Obama has already shown that he has the authority to put US citizens on CIA hit lists. Please see my previous post.

Now, because of the failed car bomb in New York, everyone is engaging in a race to the bottom on who can strip away the most rights to secure our “freedom” from the terrorist threat.

The Obama administration is considering trying to make the Miranda warning more flexible when it comes to terror suspects.

We have senator Joe Lieberman proposing legislation that would take away the citizenship of anyone suspected of terrorism, presumably as a way to get around those pesky civil rights.

Problems with these new legislative pushes are three fold:

1) The Miranda rights are ever present. The cop uttering the words doesn’t suddenly grant a person those rights. He’s just informing them of those rights. I’m not sure if Faisal Shahzad was aware of his rights before being told. But he had them, one way or the other. If he was aware of his rights and didn’t want to talk, the public safety exception to Miranda would be useless if he decided not to talk. He could have stuck up his middle finger and said, “I want a lawyer” and that would have been that.

2) You have Miranda rights whether you are a US citizen or not. You get arrested in the United States of America, you get read these rights. Granted these rights end when you leave US boarders, but here in the US we are supposed to have the rule of law.

3) This idea that military tribunals are some how better than criminal courts at putting away “bad guys” is absurd.

I know that there are some who, for various reasons, would like to see these rights and freedoms of the accused curtailed. A lot of die-hard Obama supporters would say that Obama would never use such powers for ill gains. Even if that were true, what do we do with the next administration, or the one after that? In this democracy where we swing back and forth between Democratic and Republican administrations it seems asinine to give “your guy” any powers you wouldn’t want “their guy” to have.