Our Constitution has no emergency exceptions. It applies, period.
Let me remind readers of why we had the Miranda decision. We have a biographic statement of a retired Supreme Court justice in evidence. The issue was not some abstract right to counsel. The issue was that in large parts of the United States police investigation consisted of deciding who was to be found guilty and beating them until they confessed. The Supreme Court concluded that torture was unAmerican, and found an approach for dealing with the matter.
Many Americans got their jollies out of the thought of accused persons, especially persons darker in skin shade than themselves, being beaten, and were wrongly aggrieved that the Supreme Court had shut them down. These people, who are now the core of the Republican Party, have for decades been looking for a way to revoke Miranda so they could go back to the days of the third degree. Now terrorism is giving them the excuse they needs. The torturers and their legal protectors begin at the top with the current and immediately past Presidents, their Attorney Generals, their CIA directors, their Secretaries of the Air Force -- those rendition planes did not fly themselves -- and on down through the ranks.
On the matter of the emergency exception I quote with permission my good friend Tom Knapp http://knappster.blogspot.com/... He wrote below the fold
