Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) has struggled recently when talking about the Boston Marathon bombing. For example, Dan Drezner, a pretty mild-mannered guy and a center-right voice, said last week in reference to the Indiana Republican, “Will the Senator from the state of half-assed thinking please go sit in a corner?”
With this in mind, I was struck by Coats complaining in a radio interview this morning about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev having been read his rights. “There’s more that needs to be learned,” the senator said. “Unfortunately, the administration decided to let the guy lawyer up before we really had a good chance to get information from him, and now we’re not getting any.” Coats kept whining on the subject, condemning what “the administration decided.”
John Yoo, the UC Berkeley law school professor known for having written the Bush/Cheney pro-torture memos, raised similar concerns, saying “the government” read Tsarnaev his rights “for reasons that are still unknown.”
In reality, the process really isn’t especially mysterious. Adam Serwer explained:









