The hosts of Morning Joe turn to Chris Hayes to debate the merits of a Wall Street Journal editorial called “Cheney’s Revenge,” which suggests that the American people prefer the way Bush and Cheney dealt with terrorists by skipping over the Miranda rights that are normally afforded to criminals. Hayes and host Joe Scarborough disagree on whether most Americans want Miranda rights to be applied to foreign terrorist suspects.

Hayes argues that no matter what people want, due process of law is in the Constitution and applies to foreign criminals and illegal immigrants. “This is a really important point to hammer home,” Hayes says. “The Constitution does not…simply apply to citizens. This is absolutely 1,000 percent settled law and the 14th amendment means that it [applies] to anyone who’s picked up and arrested.”

Scarborough counters that the Miranda rights were not applied to Nazi prisoners of war and so do not need to be applied to those captured in the war on terror. He also points out that war criminals have different rights than regular criminals. Hayes counters by saying that, “you cannot just…prior to the actual constitutional due process, dub someone a war criminal and then deny them the due process that’s required of the Constitution.”

—Morgan Ashenfelter

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