JUST ASKIN'

Marco Rubio weighs in:

Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio questioned Tuesday whether Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in Saturday's botched Times Square car bombing, should have been read his Miranda rights by officials following his arrest.

"If this individual has information that could help us prevent future attacks and loss of life, nothing should stand in the way of that, including Miranda," Rubio told reporters in Washington....

Nothing? Nothing at all?

News reports tell us that Shahzad has two small children, a son and a daughter. When Rubio says "nothing should stand in the way," does it means what to him whatit means to John Yoo?

In Yoo's debate with Doug Cassel, the Notre Dame law professor asked: "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

John Yoo: "No treaty."

Doug Cassel: "Also no law by Congress --that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo [while Yoo was a Justice Department attorney]."

John Yoo: "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

If Shahzad were uncooperative, does Marco Rubio think it would be OK to crush his son's testicles to extract information? Shouldn't someone covering Rubio's campaign ask him that?

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And then (via Adam Serwer) there's Joe Lieberman's proposal:

I think it's time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship, and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act.

Yup -- Joe wants to deprive the accused of citizenship. I suppose, in Joe's utopia, loss of citizenship would have been the fate of Brandon Mayfield, an Oregonian convert to Islam who was accused of involvement in the 2004 Madrid train bombings on the basis of an erroneous fingerprint match, and ultimately jailed for two weeks. In 2006, the government -- yes, while Bush was still president -- paid him a $2 million settlement. Lieberman's law, I suppose, would have saved the government the $2 mil -- Mayfield would have lost his citizenship upon his arrest, after which I imagine he could have been shunted off to any of several fine penal institutions around the world, from which he might still never have emerged.

Though, hey, it's a war, isn't it? I guess Mayfield's freedom and Shahzad's son's testicles would just be collateral damage, right?