Somehow I missed this when it came out, but last week Richard Serrano and David Savage wrote a piece in the LA Times about what really happened during the questioning of Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab:
FBI agents questioned him at the hospital for just under an hour. They did not give him the Miranda warning, which advises suspects that anything they say can be used against them at trial, citing an exemption that allows them first to seek crucial information on any pending crime….”He was making comments like, ‘Others were following me.’ And that is a circumstance where you’ve got a potential disaster, that there are others out there and you don’t have to Mirandize him right away.”
But the questioning stopped when doctors said they needed to sedate Abdulmutallab to treat his injuries. At that point, the sources said, the agents backed off….When Abdulmutallab awakened, a second team of FBI agents was sent in. Authorities thought he might be willing to say even more to the second set of agents.
“We had to see if he was still willing to talk,” another source said. “And it was pretty quickly apparent to them that he wasn’t. He had had a change of mind. It was only after establishing that with some confidence that they decided to go ahead and Mirandize him.”
But by that time, the second source said, “We had already talked to him for almost an hour and he provided a lot of information.”
This is probably old news to most readers, but I figure if I missed, others might have too. So here it is. Bottom line: Abdulmutallab was treated the same way the Bush administration treated Richard Reid and every other terrorism suspect caught on U.S. soil since September 11th.
