Coming Soon: Americans In GITMO

As the world prepares to enter an uncertain year 2012, one wonders what the American political class knows something the rest of us don’t.

Source: Dateline Zero

National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 has cleared both the House and Senate. And President Obama has abandoned his promised veto of the bill. This means that, as The Guardian is reporting today, the US Military is being given the “go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial.”

What’s really strange to me is that the politicians aren’t even pretending to “work for us” anymore. or, at the very least, they haven’t been doing a good job of pretending lately.

We have transparency all right — the masks are off.

So what gives? What’s the end game? Clearly they’ve been preparing for a while now. But preparing for what?

Back in December of 2008, there were news reports of Pentagon plans to have an active, armed domestic military presence inside the U.S. as soon as 2011. The Washington Postreported in 2008 that the long-term plan to have a military presence in the U.S. was intended to “bolster security,” and “to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe.”

Well, 2011 is almost over. So it looks like the active military presence won’t be happening until next year, if it’s going to happen at all. What’s we’ve had in the meantime is a growing menace of domestic drones in the sky, and an increasingly militarized police in many cities.

Here are some of the recent headlines regarding the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012:

COMING SOON: AMERICANS IN GITMO…

Bill allows indefinite detention without trial…

FORBES: ‘If Obama does one thing for the remainder of his presidency let it be a veto of the National Defense Authorization Act’…

Obama drops veto threat, expected to sign…

Obama ‘demanded law apply to U.S. citizens’…

Daily Kos: What the hell is wrong with Al Franken?

Even Al Jazeera asks: ‘How did we get here?’

It’s important to remember that President Obama never said that he wants to veto the bill because it’s wrong, unethical, and solidifies the police state that has already materialized in America.

Obama only threatened to veto the bill because he “wants the leeway to keep them in civilian custody, and maybe even give them a trial, if he so chooses,” as Jacob Sullum pointed out atReason. “Obama has threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act if the final version includes a provision approved by the Senate last week that requires military detention of some terrorism suspects,” Sullum wrote.

Politicians like things confusing. It allows members of the private class to be divided on whether or not they should be alarmed, while the political class interprets their laws any way they choose.

Over at Wired, Spencer Ackerman pointed out why the bill is a little confusing: “It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — ‘U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.’”

Incidentally, the government doesn’t seem to need laws to prevent U.S. citizens from being ‘guilty’ without a trial. As Ackerman said: “After all, Obama approved of the execution without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaida’s YouTube preacher, based entirely on the unproven assertion that Awlaki was dangerous. Awlaki was an American citizen. So Obama thinks he has the right to kill Americans the government says are terrorists, but he doesn’t want the military to lock them up forever without trial. OK then.”

Here’s a quick rundown on the bill, from the above-linked article at Reason:

Defenders of the bill’s detention provisions say they merely codify powers granted by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Congress approved after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But unlike the AUMF, Section 1031 of the National Defense Authorization Actexplicitly “affirms” the legality of military detention “without trial.” Furthermore, it says such treatment is permitted not only for “a person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks” or who “harbored those responsible” (language that echoes the AUMF) but also for anyone who joins or supports Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated forces”—a much wider net.

Section 1032 of the bill creates a presumption in favor of military detention for a member of Al Qaeda or an allied organization who “participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.” But it says “the requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.”

Taken together, these two sections mean military detention is authorized but not required for U.S. citizens. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a leading supporter of the bill, put it on the Senate floor last month, “1032, the military custody provision … doesn’t apply to American citizens. 1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens, and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.”

In short, the bill asserts the president’s power to snatch anyone from anywhere, including a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and confine him in a military prison without charge until the end of a perpetual, worldwide war against an amorphous enemy. Senators from both parties who were alarmed at that prospect tried to remove the detention provisions, but the most they could achieve was an amendment saying the bill does not “limit or expand” the president’s powers under the AUMF or “affect existing law or authorities” regarding detention of people “captured or arrested in the United States.”

I’ll be keeping tabs on this. But I don’t think there is a happy ending here.

View the original post at Dateline Zero

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