The United States should come up with a policy that allows "72 or 96 hours" before American citizens suspected of terrorism are read their Miranda rights to allow intelligence to be gathered after an attack, retired Lieutenant General Allen West said Wednesday.
"After that period, his or her Miranda rights are read," West told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "Now he's lawyered up and is not going to say anything. Just the same as if you are a natural-born American citizen and you leave this country.
"On the battlefield, you lose your citizenship, you lose your rights . . . We need better policies and procedures to talk about how we deal with this."
The discussion centered around New York City bombing suspect Ahmad Rahami, as officials wrangle over whether to charge him as a criminal or treat him as an enemy combatant.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged the Afghan-born man with four counts, including use of weapons of mass destruction and bombing a place of public use.
"His father even told the FBI a couple of years ago that, 'My son is a terrorist,'" said West. "Again, we have hamstringing ourselves and come up with policies and procedures to let people know we're not going to create gaps which you can be exploited."
West also commented about the overnight riots in Charlotte, North Carolina, following the police shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott, 43, officers said was armed when they approached him in a parking lot Tuesday afternoon.
"You have to stop having these individuals out there in the communities that are spurring on this idea of social justice or a wrongdoing," said West. "We need to sit back and allow the system and the process to take place. There will be an investigation if there was wrongdoing, we'll get the facts.
"Look at what happened in Milwaukee where people took to the streets and the narrative turned out to not be the true narrative, the same as in Ferguson, Missouri. When the narrative of hands up, don't shoot turned out to be a completely wrong narrative."
West also commented on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's outrage over a shooting in Tulsa, where an unarmed black man, Terrence Crutcher, was shot and killed by a female officer after allegedly refusing to follow commands she and another officer had given.
Clinton told talk show host Steve Harvey Tuesday that maybe she can, "by speaking directly to white people," call for improvements in policing.
"The problem with Hillary Clinton is that she knows that she's losing support in the black community," said West. "I think she's only 76 percent. That's one of the lowest you've seen with any recently Democratic presidential nominee . . . There's a duplicity and hypocrisy out there. This is about electoral patronage."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.