And yet that’s exactly what Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, did when he sent out a press release boasting of an exchange he had today with FBI Director Robert Mueller during a hearing to examine the intelligence failures leading up to the unsuccessful Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253. From Sessions’ release:

FBI DIRECTOR MUELLER: “In this particular case, in fast-moving events, decisions were made—appropriately, I believe, very appropriately—given the situation…”

SEN. SESSIONS: “I don’t think you can say it’s appropriate. We don’t know what that individual knows, learned while he was working with al Qaeda, and we may never know, because he now has got a lawyer who’s telling him to be quiet.”

Let’s recall a point Spencer made on MSNBC last month in response to Pat Buchanan’s laments that the Nigerian suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was not immediately subjected to “hostile interrogation” — or what most of us would call torture.

We’ve seen we’ve gotten a lot of bad information from torturing people. I don’t really understand the argument that because every single time we have a new emergency, we have to forget about the hard lessons we’ve learned in the past over this. And then secondly, by every standard that we’ve seen so far, every piece of reporting, the guy cooperated. He immediately said he’s a member of al Qaeda. He started talking threateningly about how there were other attacks coming. So I’m not sure where we make this jump to the idea that we’re not getting information from the guy.

Right.

The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has said Mr. Abdulmutallab provided “useable, actionable intelligence,” but declined to specify what it was. A law enforcement official said Mr. Abdulmutallab explained who gave him the bomb, where he received it and where he was trained to use it, among other things.

Eventually, Mr. Abdulmutallab stopped talking and asked for a lawyer, which he received about 30 hours after his arrest. It was not clear when in that timeline that the F.B.I. read him his Miranda rights.

But Sessions continued:

SESSIONS: “It’s not just the ability to prosecute this individual, but whether, if he were properly interrogated over a period of time, we may find out that there are other cells, other plans, other Abdulmutallabs out there boarding planes that are going to blow up American citizens.”

Here we go. What does Sessions mean by “properly interrogated”? What evidence is there, in the wake of news reports that Abdulmutallab immediately started talking upon his arrest, to suggest that he was not properly interrogated?

Make no mistake — when Sessions is talking about “proper interrogation,” this is a euphemism. He’s talking about waterboarding. He’s talking about torture. Elements of the Republican Party have become so completely Cheney-ized that they view due process, which is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, as “inappropriate” and maintain that torture should be the tactic of first resort whenever someone is suspected of being a terrorist.

And as Adam Serwer deftly pointed out this morning, Senator-elect Scott Brown (R-Mass.) represents the GOP’s continued acceptance of torture as standing operating procedure during interrogations. From Brown’s acceptance speech last night:

And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation — they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.

Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country.

Serwer notes:

This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing. Brown’s rhetorical framing, that jettisoning the legal system we’ve had for 200-plus years represents “tradition” while granting suspected criminals the right to legal counsel represents liberalism gone mad is new, and I suspect we’ll hear it again. “New rights” recalls the term “judicial activism,” which conservatives have redefined to mean “decisions Republicans don’t like” instead of decisions that overturn precedent. “New rights” can be broadly defined as upholding the legal rights of individuals based on the Constitution, rather than arbitrarily according to the whim of politicians. For Brown and the GOP, if you’re accused of terrorism, you’re automatically guilty, so legal representation is frivolous. These guys look at the Constitution like David Vitter and John Ensign look at the Ten Commandments.

Let’s also be clear: Brown, a former military lawyer, isn’t merely talking about denying people their day in court, he’s talking about torturing people who are suspected of being terrorists. Brown says he doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, which is on par with thinking evolution is fake and global warming is a hoax. He thinks not torturing people suspected of a crime or detained by the military is granting them “new rights.” We know where this goes.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new face of the Republican Party.

But it’s a persistent thing. Tom Ridge, the former homeland security secretary, blanched, “He gets his Miranda warnings? The only information we get is if he volunteers it?” And sure enough, now that Abdulmutallab has gotten his lawyer and invoked his rights, the cry intensifies. Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard laments, “Now he’s got a lawyer, and we can’t interrogate him, we can’t smack him around, we can’t lay a finger on him.”

Well, yes, we can’t smack him around, and that’s a good thing, particularly if we want good intelligence and to promote the rule of law. Just because the guy lawyers up doesn’t mean we can’t interrogate him.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials I’ve talked to in the last several hours have been flabbergasted to hear this line of argument, because at its heart, it betrays a fundamental ignorance of the process. One who has experience in these matters called it “flat-out ignorance” to claim that the “criminal justice system or law enforcement methods impede the collection of actionable intelligence. There is no basis in fact.”

Why? Let me turn this over to a U.S. official deeply familiar with intelligence matters who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Abdulmutallab case. “I cannot speak from first-hand knowledge of the present matter, but if a terror suspect like Abdulmutallab invokes [his] right to silence, it does not mean law enforcement officials must cease the interview,” the official said. “It simply means inculpatory information probably will not be used in court.”

Got that? Mirandization is about admissibility in court. This ought to explain why law enforcement and intelligence officials aren’t complaining about Abdulmutallab. It’s just Obama’s political enemies, who have no problem inventing a concern based on absolutely nothing and then promoting their ignorance about security matters to a pliant media.

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The Journal and Buchanan somehow overlook the five different wars — or five fronts in the “Terror War” — that Glenn Greenwald aptly points out today. We are, after all, engaged in consistent deadly bombings and raids aimed at terrorists and their sympathizers in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.

Still, The Journal’s editors are wringing their hands over the administration’s decision to “treat terrorists like routine criminal suspects” with a right to a lawyer and a defense, rather than classifying Abdulmutallab as a “illegal enemy combatant who should be interrogated first with the goal of preventing future attacks and learning more about terror networks rather than gaining a single conviction.”

Here we have another version of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “torture works” argument — notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.  The Journal and Buchanan apparently believe that the U.S. government ought to have grabbed Abdulmutallab and whisked him away to a secret prison where we could interrogate him under torture, what Cheney and The Journal’s editorial board would call “enhanced interrogation techniques” — even though the FBI, which conducts lots of interrogations, has argued in memos that such tactics are unlikely to yield useful information and make prosecution of actual terrorists impossible. U.S. military leaders and at least one Republican senator have also agreed they may aid terrorist recruitment to boot.

It’s worth noting that the Bush administration treated Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber” who similarly attempted to blow up a plane shortly before Christmas in 2001, as a criminal. Reid was convicted in federal court and is now serving a life sentence in a federal prison.

In contrast, most of the suspects — including 520 Guantanamo Bay detainees — that the Bush administration treated as “enemy combatants” ended up being transferred or released. The Bush administration failed to collect any usable evidence against them, and as a result could neither try them nor continue to hold them without charge. As Republicans are quick to point out, some of those people have since joined terrorist groups back home. Indeed, reports are emerging that some may have been behind last week’s bombing attempt.

Actually, The Journal is right that, as I noted yesterday, the Obama administration’s handling of Abdulmutallab is inconsistent with the treatment of some other alleged terrorists, whom the administration has insisted it will try in military commissions rather than ordinary civilian courts. But rather than highlight the need to interrogate Abdulmutallab under torture, it underscores just how wrongheaded the warrior approach has actually been.

As Greenwald points out, our five-front war is “constantly delivering death to the Muslim world,” leading many Muslims to believe, not surprisingly, that we’re at war with Muslims, not just with terrorists.

However, prosecuting terror suspects as ordinary criminals — who, just like suspects in drug gangs and other organized crime often provide valuable information and rat out their criminal colleagues — shows Muslims and others that unlike the terrorists, we do believe in and adhere to the rule of law.

I know this isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that the Obama administration keeps getting attacked for trying to address. At a recent rally in New York against Attorney Eric Holder’s decision to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his suspected Sept. 11 co-conspirators in federal court, for example, anti-Obama protesters denounced the administration’s decision to accord the defendants the rights that come with a federal court trial, all the while vigorously waving the American flag and citing “our freedoms” protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Street protesters riled up by conservatives with a political agenda may be forgiven for forgetting what’s actually in the Constitution or what the flag is supposed to stand for. But The Wall Street Journal — and even Pat Buchanan — surely know better.

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Brzezinski jumps at the chance to name Pat Buchanan “because he says what we are all thinking.”

Yeah, I don’t think that’s true.

In case anyone missed the point, Buchanan argues that the prize committee “reinforced the impression that Obama is someone who is forever being given prizes — Ivy League scholarships, law review editorships, prime-time speaking slots at national conventions — he did not earn.” The idea that Obama didn’t “earn” his 2004 DNC speech is, needless to say, sort of crazy.

Since then, Republicans have increasingly turned against Sotomayor, with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) the only one on the Judiciary Committee to support her nomination. In her report, Totenberg said Sotomayor will be lucky to get even ten Republican votes, and half of those are lawmakers who are retiring. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on Sunday that he’s still “going back and forth” on whether he’ll vote for the nominee, despite the large Latino population in his home state.

While some Republicans, like Graham, realize the Hispanic vote is growing and will be important to Republican influence in the future, many more are simply eager to appeal to their conservative white base in upcoming elections. And with influential conservative TV pundits like Pat Buchanan saying that white working class folks are the most discriminated-against group in America today, as he did on MSNBC, and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck saying President Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people,” the Republicans’ immediate fears seem to be getting the best of them.

Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women. As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.

Buchanan’s role as the last really unreconstructed racist in American public life has been a fascinating sideshow to the seemingly inevitable Sotomayor confirmation.

At about 10 am on July 8th, in the District of Columbia Superior Court, Judge Anderson dismissed the case against Marcus Epstein, who had pled guilty to a class 6 felony hate crime; the prosecutor declined to continue sentencing. It was determined that Epstein, head of Pat Buchanan’s American Cause and executive director of Tom Tancredo’s Team America, had completed his sentence.

Much more about the case here.