Following the attempted car-bombing in Times Square (a few blocks from where I work), despite the fact that law enforcement tracked down and arrested the guy within two days, and he's already confessed, you have the predictable overreacting freakout by the right.
As happened with the underpants bomber in December, the freakout has centered around what a terrible idea it was for the police to read the suspect a Miranda warning. John McCain said that "It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights" and Joe Lieberman is talking about getting around having to read the Miranda warning by stripping suspects of their citizenship and shipping them to Gitmo (which frankly is too insane for me to even discuss, but Matt Yglesias explains why it's ridiculous here).
Here's why this is unutterably stupid. When police read a suspect the Miranda warning, they are not conferring any rights on the suspect. All they are doing is advising the suspect that he has rights that are already conferred automatically by the constitution. The 5th amendment automatically provides a right to remain silent and not incriminate yourself. The 6th amendment automatically provides criminal suspects the right to have an attorney. It's not like a cop's statement that "you have the right to remain silent" magically creates that right, and that the right doesn't exist absent the statement.
Moreover, because anybody who's ever watched television has heard the Miranda warning, and knows about these rights, it's not like the police are going to somehow trick a terror suspect into giving up information if the suspect isn't told that he can remain silent. However, failing to give the Miranda warning before questioning a suspect does mean that information you get out of the suspect won't be admissable when prosecutors bring him to trial.
Really what this is about is not the Miranda warning at all, but a desire by certain folks to deny fundamental constitutional rights (like the right to counsel, or the right to remain silent, or the right to remain free of unreasonable searches and seizures) from anyone that gets labeled a "terrorist," even if that person hasn't been convicted yet, and even if the suspect is an American citizen.
This is why those same folks like to play games about who gets called a terrorist - underpants bomber and times square bomber are terrorists (because they're muslims) but the guy who flew his plane into the IRS building or the militia members who wanted to blow up cops with IEDs aren't terrorists - the label makes a difference if one group of attempted mass murderers get constitutional rights and the other doesn't.
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