On Friday, while the manhunt for suspected Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev continued, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) published aseries of tweets suggesting that he wanted to revive the George W. Bush-era debates about whether terrorism suspects can be denied many constitutional rights and tried by a military tribunal. In a statement Graham released yesterday with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Rep. Pete King (R-NY), however, the four conservatives acknowledge that shunting Tsarnaev into a military commission is not a lawful opinion. Tsarnaev is an American, and federal law does not permit U.S. citizens to be tried under the military commissions system.
On CNN this morning, Graham articulated what now appears to be the conservative position on how Tsarnaev should be treated:
Click here to watch the segment...GRAHAM: This man, in my view, should be designated as a potential enemy combatant and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of, and that evidence cannot be used against him in trial. That evidence is used to protect us as a nation. Any time we question him about his guilt or innocence, he’s entitled to his Miranda rights and a lawyer, but we have the right under our law — I’ve been a military lawyer for 30 years — to gather intelligence from enemy combatants. And a citizen can be an enemy combatant.He is not eligible for military commission trial. I wrote the military commission in 2009. He cannot go to military commission.
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