Fifth Anniversary Of NDAA “Indefinite Detention”
By Harold Pease
ActivistPost.com
DECEMBER 29, 2016
On December 31, 2011, New Year’s Eve, President Barack Obama signed into law the most constitutionally damaging law in American history, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
This New Year’s Eve we note its 5th Anniversary. Previous annual appropriations bills funding national defense were mostly procedural but it was the addition of two sections, buried deep within the over 600-page document, that potentially gutted the Bill of Rights for American citizens thought by the President to be assisting the enemy, that so upset constitutionalists and libertarians.
Subsections 1021–1022 of Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” authorized the president to apply the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the 2001 congressional document used to justify war on Iraq, now broadly to all thought to be terrorists—including Americans living in the states far from any battlefield. The military would be used to find, arrest and “detain covered persons…pending disposition under the law of war.”
Translated, this means military tribunals and prisons and no Bill of Rights. U.S. law; local law enforcement agents, juries, courts and judges would be excluded, all on the whim of but one man—the president. Moreover there exists no requirement to notify local authority when one is “kidnapped” (captured and detained), or transferred out of the country, as for example to Guantanamo Bay, or detained indefinitely. President Obama did promise that he would not use it against US citizens. This power will be transferred to Donald Trump January 20, 2017.
Constitutionalists and libertarians, notably Senator Rand Paul, have worked hard to at least modify these two sections. Newer versions do have Sections 1031-1033 that portend to affirm the rights of due process and habeas corpus but opponents of newer NDAA’s are certain that it is not enough to get back to pre-2011 constitutional protections. Senator Feinstein noted that her goal “was to ensure the military won’t be roaming our streets looking for suspected terrorists.”
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, following the Civil War, forbade the U.S. military from performing law enforcement functions on American soil. The American Civil Liberties Union warned in 2011, “Since the bill puts military detention authority on steroids and makes it permanent, American citizens and others are at greater risk of being locked away by the military without charge or trial if this bill becomes law.”
When asked if it were possible for an American to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay, Senator John McCain said yes. Senator Lindsey Graham was more blunt. “When they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”
The Rest…HERE
