Boston Bomber Stopped Talking Once the Judge Read Him His Rights

There are consequences to not treating a war like a war. The Obama administration’s insistence on treating the Boston bombings as a criminal matter has reportedly shut down the surviving bomber’s willingness to tell investigators what he knows.

The FBI filed a federal criminal complaint against the 19-year-old on Sunday, and federal District Court Judge Marianne Bowler arrived at the hospital where he is being treated to preside over his initial hearing Monday, when she read him his Miranda rights.

[FBI officials told The Associated Press Wednesday that Tsarnaev acknowledged to investigators his role in the attacks before he was advised of his constitutional rights. He reportedly said he was only recently recruited by his brother to be part of the attack.]

But Fox News’ sources say there was confusion about Bowler’s timing, with some voicing concerns that investigators were not given enough time to question Dzhokhar under the “public safety exception” invoked by the Justice Department.

Two officials with knowledge of the FBI briefing on Capitol Hill said the FBI was against stopping the investigators’ questioning and was stunned that the judge, Justice Department prosecutors and public defenders showed up, feeling valuable intelligence may have been sacrificed as a result.

The FBI had been questioning Tsarnaev for 16 hours before the judge called a start to the court proceeding, officials familiar with the Capitol Hill briefing told Fox News. Moreover, the FBI informed lawmakers that the suspect had been providing valuable intelligence, but stopped talking once the magistrate judge read him his rights.

We still don’t know where the brothers were radicalized, or how, or by whom. We don’t know if they were part of a larger operation, or whether they were activated by any person or group in the US or overseas. We don’t know how they obtained the expertise necessary to building a bomb. Yes, that knowledge was published by al Qaeda’s magazine. Reading articles about working with explosives and actually building explosives that work as designed are not the same thing.

The Obama administration proudly and defiantly announced that Tsarnaev would not be treated as an enemy combatant. Designating him as such would not have shut off his access to civilian trial or courts. It would have provided space to get him to talk and keep him talking. The Obama choice to shut off enemy combatant status was effectively a choice to give him the opportunity to shut up. He has taken that opportunity and run with it.

Question: Who organized the judge’s trip to the bomber’s hospital room? That didn’t happen by itself. Someone somewhere decided it was the right call, and organized it, and sent the judge in. Who? And why?