As published for The Corner on nationalreview.com on February 8, 2010:

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan lashed out at Republicans for daring to criticize the Obama administration’s bungling of the interrogation of Abdulmutallab, the Christmas bomber — and said Republicans should have known he would automatically be Mirandized once the FBI began questioning him.

Brennan claimed that he spoke with four Republicans on Christmas night — Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Kit Bond, and Pete Hoekstra — and told them that Mr. Abdulmutallab “was in F.B.I. custody” and that they should have understood that “F.B.I. custody” meant reading Miranda rights in a civilian process.  “None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point,” Brennan said.

The problem with Brennan’s claim?

As I point out in Courting Disaster, just a few months earlier, the Obama administration announced that its new FBI-led “High-Value Interrogation Group” (HIG) would not necessarily Mirandize suspects it was questioning.

In its story on the announcement, the Washington Post reported:

Interrogators will not necessarily read detainees their rights before questioning, instead making that decision on a case-by-case basis, officials said. . . . “It’s not going to, certainly, be automatic in any regard that they are going to be Mirandized,” one official said, referring to the practice of reading defendants their rights. “Nor will it be automatic that they are not Mirandized.”

In other words, Republicans were assured by the Obama administration that the decision on reading Miranda rights to captured terrorists would be made a on “case-by-case” basis.

So if Brennan is wondering why the Republicans he spoke with did not just assume Abdumutallab would be automatically Mirandized, it is because the Obama administration told them so.

Of course, the HIG was not interrogating Abdulmutallab because — despite all the fanfare with its announcement — it had not yet been stood up. But how were Republicans to know that? Especially since Obama’s own director of national intelligence didn’t know that either?

Read the article here