MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
While we argue about economics, candidates and option backs, political voices as disparate as revolutionary Anonymous (youtubing in a typical Guy Fawkes mask), the ACLU, right-wing Forbes Magazine, left-wing Mother Jones and the libertarian Reason Magazine are railing against two sections of the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Defense appropriations are nothing new, of course, but Sections 1031 and 1032 are said to allow, even require, military personnel to engage in domestic law enforcement—a violation of Posse Comitatus. Someone must be for those provisions, because each house of Congress has quietly passed the bill, and the Big Four (Levin, Graham, McCain and Sessions) are now working on a reconciliation to be sent to President Obama, who has the option of a veto. Some outlets claim he has vowed to veto it, but others claim he only wants to veto it because it doesn't provide enough secrecy.
ACLU: Indefinite Detention, Endless Worldwide War and the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act
As Congress considers the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the 2012 fiscal year, a handful of senators have turned the bill into a vehicle for dangerous provisions that would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and imprison people, including U.S. citizens, without charging them or putting them on trial.
Earlier this year, the House passed its own version of the bill, with an even smaller group of members pushing for inclusion of a provision that would authorize worldwide war, and worldwide imprisonment, in virtually any country where a terrorism suspect lives, even here in America itself.
Now, both houses of Congress are now rushing to come up with a joint version and rush it through Congress within the next week or two. The "Big Four" leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee are huddling behind closed doors and may very well spring a new bill on Congress, once again without so much as a hearing.
Forbes: The National Defense Authorization Act is the Greatest Threat to Civil Liberties Americans Face
If Obama does one thing for the remainder of his presidency let it be a veto of the National Defense Authorization Act – a law recently passed by the Senate currently which would place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists.
Mother Jones: Gitmo Law Could Someday Apply to American Citizens
Defenders of the detention provisions in the defense funding bill currently under debate in Congress are arguing that they do not authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens. They're saying the Supreme Court already did that.
"There is no bar to this nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said during his floor speech defending the detention provisions Tuesday. "That's not me, that's not Sen. Graham, that's not Sen. McCain. That's the Supreme Court of the United States recently."
Levin was referring to 2004's Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a US national captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, could be held in military detention but not without habeas review.
That case, however, involved an actual battlefield in an actual war. The current version of the defense funding bill—formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA—goes further. It says the military can detain anyone deemed to be "a part of" or deemed to have "substantially supported" Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or "associated forces." Terror suspects would not have to be on an actual battlefield or fighting in an actual war, as Hamdi was, to be detained by the military. And although Americans, unlike foreigners, are not required to be held in military detention if apprehended on American soil, the NDAA affirms that they can be, based on the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda. (Levin said in his floor speech that despite its threat to veto the bill, the administration had approved that language.)
Reason: "Shut Up. You Don't Get a Lawyer!": The Defense Authorization Act Guts Civil Liberties
"It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next," says Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) in support of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). "And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.'"
No recent piece of legislation has been more controversial than the NDAA, which passed the Senate last week and includes provisions that apparently grant the president unlimited power to detain American citizens arrested in connection to terrorism. The House approved its version of the NDAA earlier this year, so the legislature must hammer out differences and present a final version to President Barack Obama. For his part, Obama has threatened to veto the legislation not because it tramples on civil liberties but because it subject executive actions to congressional oversight.
Oh yeah, the Grey Lady is against it, too:
President Obama: Veto the Defense Authorization Act
The Senate is debating the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a series of provisions that mandate military interrogation and detention for any suspected member of Al Qaeda, and authorize indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without trial. (The law is written so broadly that parts of it could also cover U.S. citizens.)
The provisions were co-sponsored by Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, both of whom should know better. Their excuse was that some Republicans had proposed worse rules. But the smart response to that situation would have been to block faulty legislation outright, not to make a really bad deal.
A deal, by the way, that Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said was hashed out behind closed doors without consultation with his committee, or the Intelligence Committee, or the Defense Department, the F.B.I. or the intelligence community.
These new policies would all but remove the F.B.I., federal prosecutors, and federal courts from the business of interrogating, charging and trying suspected terrorists. Never mind that they have a track record of doing just that, legally and in the open. Instead, it would put those functions in the hands of the military, which is not very good at it, and doesn’t want to do it.
Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, introduced a very sensible amendment this week, with Mr. Leahy’s backing. It would have stripped the detainee measures out of the Defense Authorization Act. That proposal was defeated on Tuesday, 61-37. Click here to see how your Senator voted. (If your Senator’s a Republican, he or she almost certainly voted “no.”)
Comments
I'm no lawyer, but this doesn't sound like a "violation" of the Posse Comitatus Act, but an "extension" or "clarification" (or some other weasely word). From Wikipedia:
That doesn't make me sleep any better, however.
by Verified Atheist on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 1:55pm
Well, your source calls it a "repeal" of Posse Comitatus, but that is only a wiki editor's opinion. But it does seem that the idea that Posse Comitatus restricts the power of the President to use US armed forces for law enforcement becomes moot once this is passed.
by Donal on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 2:06pm
Oh I certainly hope that my President vetoes this garbage.
I can't think right now, but I just reviewed three (?) links regarding measures that would make me even poorer. ha Having to do with Section 8's.
I recall the movies, hundreds of them, whereby the local police just flash a badge and commandeer your auto!
I do not care 'why' a president vetoes a bill, just so he vetoes it. ha
This is a good blog.
I heard nothing of this!
by Richard Day on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 5:05pm
It has been well under the radar. The first thing I saw was the Anonymous video on OB's Facebook page.
by Donal on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 5:09pm
But we've had over a thousand hits from people googling the issue.
by Donal on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 11:09am
Here's the Guy Fawkes style youtube:
by Donal on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 8:53pm
What are you sheeple baaing about? This is what you want, it is what you have always wanted, you a-hole Americans finally have your hell on earth. Now get out there next November and re-elect your good shepherds.
by Levin Aipac (not verified) on Wed, 12/14/2011 - 10:08am
There's one in every 1385 hits.
by Donal on Wed, 12/14/2011 - 10:33am