I’m away on vacation with the family this week — in an interesting place that I’ll have more to say about once I’m back.

’Til then, I’ll have a three-part series on the home-page this week, starting today, called, “Obama Goes to Court”. I wrote it after the breaking news at the end of last week about how the administration was having the FBI give Miranda warnings to enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan. Most of the outraged commentary afterwards focused on the Miranda part of that sentence, but what’s driving this train — and what we should be focused on — is the FBI part of the sentence.

That is to say, the issue is not Miranda, it is the decision to treat terrorism as a criminal-justice problem rather than a national-security/war challenge. Once you go down that road, Miranda is simply one of many criminal procedure protocols that gets triggered.

As President Obama will undoubtedly say — once he gets beyond his embarrassment, if he is capable of any, about scoffing at Sarah Palin and others who (correctly) predicted that Obama would be giving our enemies Miranda warnings — is that he is not the first president to do this (Clinton was) and that he is merely ensuring that “the rule of law” (the Supreme Court’s Miranda jurisprudence plus the McCain Amendment) is complied with. But that will be disingenuous, as I explain in Part III. Meanwhile, the history of how we got here is an interesting one, and that’s Parts I and II. I happened to have participated in some of the major battles (on the losing side, of course). Hate to say, “I told you so . . .”