Law

Back in the dark days of law school, one of my professors spent almost an entire semester drilling us on how evil and rotten President Bush’s stance on detaining American citizens was. Today, the big O is going to sign the National Defense Authorization Act, which will codify indefinite detention for terrorist suspects, regardless of nationality. That means no trial, no habeas corpus, and breaks a major campaign pledge, and one of the few valid reasons for voting for Obama in 2008. Tap on my cell wall, CBS news:

The detainee provisions are just one part of the annual NDAA authorizing $662 billion (editors note: *SPIT TAKE*) in federal defense spending next year.

 While the bill never expanded the authority to detain American citizens indefinitely without charges, proponents said the legislation would codify court decisions finding the President does have the authority to declare “enemy combatants,” as commander-in-chief and under the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force against al Qaeda and its allies. The administration, which has pledged not to use this power, believes the bill leaves this legal issue unresolved.

 ”By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side.”

The ACLU is also against this bill. If a leftist president can loose both the HRC and the ACLU, who is supporting him? Haliburton? Oh, crap. Liberal pundit Glenn Greenwald has covered this extensively, and does not like it one bit, no sir.

There are several very revealing aspects to all of this. First, the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever.

Indeed, it seems clear that they are doing this precisely out of fear that the justifications they have long given for the War no longer exist and there is therefore a risk Americans will clamor for its end. This is Congress declaring: the War is more vibrant than ever and must be expanded further. For our political class and the private-sector that owns it, the War on Terror — Endless War — is an addiction: it is not a means to an endbut the end itself (indeed, 2/3 of these war addicts in the Senate just rejected Rand Paul’s bill to repeal the 2003 Iraq AUMF even as they insist that the Iraq War has ended). This is the war-hungry U.S. Congress acting preemptively to ensure that there is no sense in the citizenry that the War on Terror — and especially all of the vast new powers it spawned — can start to wind down, let alone be reversed. (Emphasis Glenn’s.)

That might sound a little agitated and spittle-flecked there at the end, but he’s right. If your blood pressure can take it, read both his linked articles for a good summation of the issues in the bill. This President campaigned on a promise of change, and then took the Bush presidency to 11. If you voted for him in 2008, would you vote for him again? Why? Forget the clowns challenging him, and any lesser-of-two-evils stuff. I mean what about him, his policies, his wars, his broken promises, or his cronies has you jazzed for Nov. 2012?

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