Alex, you should take a look at the 2012 annual military defense act that was signed into law by Obama. Buried in it was language that allows the government to declare US citizens enemy combatants and be held without trial. The language goes on to define what they consider enemy combatants to be. I believe John McCain and Carl Levin (Mic…
Alex, you should take a look at the 2012 annual military defense act that was signed into law by Obama. Buried in it was language that allows the government to declare US citizens enemy combatants and be held without trial. The language goes on to define what they consider enemy combatants to be. I believe John McCain and Carl Levin (Michigan) were co-sponsors. I know LA Times covered it (that's where I read it), but I can't speak to other publications.
Yes, you are right. Obama signed that into law on December 31, 2011 (when most people were welcoming the New Year, rather than paying attention to political news.)
I just read the NY Times article about it, which intentionally obfuscates the issue you brought up, Terry.
However, I also read the comments section, which clarifies it. I'll post some of the better comments here.
Before I do so, I want to point out that many Americans - both Democrats and Republicans - were horrified by this law. Many decided then and there that they absolutely would not vote for Obama in the 2012 election, because he'd signed this into law.
I was among them. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2012, rather than for Obama, for whom I'd reluctantly voted in 2008. I thought he was an arrogant corporate shill, and I didn't trust him, but I thought the alternative (McCain) was worse. I even worked for Ralph Nader's campaign, such as it was, which was minimalist and ad hoc. Given his lack of funding and the nearly total mainstream media blackout against him, it's amazing Nader received as many votes as he did - which was about 700,000, if I remember correctly. At least that's what was reported. I don't trust anything the corporate media report now, nor did I then.
Read this story very carefully and take in the difficult information it contains. Our President objects to limitations on his power to detain, interrogate and prosecute WHOEVER, WHEREVER, WHENEVER. He believes in his right to send detainees, without charging them, to secret foreign prisons to be tortured if so desired. He wants to codify the abandonment of democratic principles, the violations of the Geneva Convention and the violations of the Constitution that began under Bush.
That is who he is. That is what he believes in. That is what he wants to allow ALL future Presidents to do. As a Democrat, it is now impossible for me to support him. I want him impeached.
The President should not compromise the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This is what he did. He says he will not use the dictatorial powers it provides but what about those who follow him? I believed in him, now I see him as just one more major cog of the cabal that is destroying our country and our rights as a free people. He will not get my vote again. He is a traitor to his oath of office as are all those who voted to pass this bill.
Mario Savio famously said, "...There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. ..."
That's where I'm at with Republicans and Democrats. Much gets made of their toxic disagreements. It's the stuff they agree on that I find so frightening; unjust war, empire building, the drug war, Guantanamo Bay, torture, warrantless surveillance, voodoo economics and a long list of other ills.
I've spent 30 years in the service of this country and I've reached that point Savio talks about, I'm sick at heart, I can no longer pretend that the Democrats present a substantive alternative to the Republicans. They are two sides of the same rotten coin.
Pick your poison. The perfidiousness of Obama, or the pure perfidy of the Republicans. Obama's “the devil made me do it,” vs the evil incarnate. They all can't wait to destroy democracy. And these are our choices in a so-called election year. Good corporatist vs bad corporatist. But there is no good in any of it.
Big mistake. He has become everything he promised us he wouldn't. He has destroyed Due Process. He has greatly expanded the Endless War. He has greatly expanded the Surveillance State. He has widened government secrecy to a point that is could be considered an Iron Curtain. His detention of Bradley Manning is inexcusable in its inhumanity, trashing every concept of fairness embodied in the Geneva Conventions. I WILL NOT vote for him in 2012. I will support Ron Paul in the republican primaries and if he is not the nominee then I will not vote in the general election. The "lesser" of two evils is no solace or excuse.
It is hard to imagine that America will experience a darker day than today, the day we lost our right to habeas corpus. This was a right so important that it was stated by our founding fathers in Article 1 of the Constitution.
The right to Habeas Corpus is one of the most ancient and fundamental rights of free men, preceding but mentioned in the Magna Carta. So it is incredible that the low scum who represent us and the spineless president who is charged with protecting the rights of all the people have the audacity to suspend this most important of all rights with the stroke of a pen.
On the other hand, it is easy to understand why they want to do this. Once someone has been seized by the government, denied the right to counsel, possibly tortured, held for an indeterminate amount of time without charge, what civil court would proceed against them? Clearly the next step will be creation of a kangaroo secrete judge to try them as we now have a secrete kangaroo judge to issue warrants in accordance with the Patriot act.
This is a terrible thing that happened today but what is worse is the mild and disinterested fashion in which it has been reported by the American press and the lack of outrage by the people. We have given up this most fundamental right for the illusion of security but in fact we now have neither rights nor security.
Our Founding Fathers advisedly used the term "person" -- as opposed to "citizen" (used elsewhere in the Constitution to protect the rights of "citizens") -- when they drafted and adopted the Fifth Amendment due process clause, absolutely prohibiting our federal Government from denying any "person" life, liberty or property without "due process of law." The Fifth Amendment is not and never has been limited to protecting US citizens, so President Obama's purported concern for the rights of "citizens" does not meet the Fifth Amendment's requirement that all "persons" be accorded due process by our Government. And of course indefinite detention without any criminal charges or a trial cannot be considered "due process of law" under numerous Supreme Court interpretations of the Fifth Amendment. As a former professor of constitutional law, President Obama knows this just as well as do I (another former professor of constitutional law). President Obama is a disgrace to the legal profession and a traitor to the Constitution which he has taken a sworn oath to uphold and defend. He should resign immediately and seek private employment commensurate with his ethical values, such as selling used cars or fraudulent derivatives.
As a loyal supporter of President Obama since voting for him in the New Jersey Primary, and a proud veteran of our military, I am totally disheartened by the President’s capitulation in signing the current defense legislation. This Bill is a direct injection of autocratic architecture into our system of government. To allow our country’s military to arrest some US citizens on suspicion of some crimes, to hold them indefinitely, and to strip them of their right to a hearing in civilian court is not “defending the constitution”. I doubt that we will see the worst repercussions of these terrible provisions in the immediate future, but there is now a virus in our system of justice. Have none of the President’s advisers noticed that this is precisely the type of law that protestors throughout the Arab world rebelled against in the biggest global story of the year just ended? It is a sad day for our constitution, and a sad day for our country. Perhaps it was not surprising that the law was signed in the last dark hours of the year, when the nation’s citizenry were engaged in their year-end diversions. I cannot know how many votes the President has lost by this action. I can only count my own.
It is quite ironic that a country that fought wars in the 20th Century for freedom and democracy is slowly transforming itself into a state we fought against. Very soon a blog commentary like this will be considered terrorism against the state.
What's next? Special military prisons for American citizens (gulags)?
Yes, and they are called FEMA camps. And don't worry about the Supreme Court being involved because people "detained" in this manner may never come to trial, they will simply disappear at the President's whim.
One small stroke of a unitary executive pen, one giant leap backward for democracy. ACLU Director Anthony Romero calls this craven act the moment when Barack Obama gained the dubious distinction of becoming "forever remembered as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law."
Obama's accompanying signing statement is disingenuous at best, cynical at worst. It was a cowardly New Year's Eve news dump. We are told to trust him unquestioningly because he is the good guy, the Democrat, who would never go against the Constitution and deny an American citizen due process. If he has thought at all about possible dangerous successors waiting in the wings to broaden the scope of this dangerous and muddy bill to accusing and "disappearing" peaceful domestic protesters, it was not enough to make him veto it. This should scare us all to death.
We finally know why the president chose not to prosecute the Bush war criminals. He shares many if not most of the same neocon values and is using the same fear factor to keep the populace cowed, "secure" and stripped of their basic rights.
And this is the man who dares ask us to help him fight a recalcitrant Congress? When it comes to enabling the Security State and the Military Industrial Complex, the two warring political factions never fail to jump into each other's arms to call a complicit truce.
One more reason to Occupy, as if we needed another reason.
Thanks, Terry. And thanks very much for bringing this up!
I think many, or perhaps most Americans have forgotten about this, or maybe they never even noticed it in the first place. Certainly the corporate / mainstream media downplayed its seriousness. I was well aware of it at the time.
My memory of the year I volunteered and voted for Nader was incorrect. It was 2008, not 2012. At least I correctly recalled who the Republican candidate had been at the time. If it'd been the 2012 election it would've been Mitt Romney, not McCain. My memory has been damaged by the Pfizer poison injections.
President Obama is not the man we hoped he would be. He is instead a traitor to the US Constitution. I will not vote for such a traitor. I will call for his imprisonment.
Many Americans are concerned about the recent amendment to the NDAA bill that was signed into law by President Obama. We should be. This assault on our rights is very difficult to read and understand. The difficulty probably has more to do with sloppy drafting than intentional misrepresentation. Anyway, I decided to do a sort of John Yoo interpretation of the thing and write it out in one paragraph of plain language. Here it is:
“Congress agrees with the President’s claim that he can order the forceable seizure, transportation and endless military imprisonment of any American citizen without legal proof and without access to the courts. The President’s chosen Americans can be imprisoned in the US or any other country or corporation the President chooses.”
I am a veteran and a retired judge. I know something but not everything about statutory interpretation. I have also been an advocate and know a little about how to play on that one-way street. For an American imprisoned under this act it really doesn’t matter what any real judge thinks about this law anyway because the imprisoned American has no access to the courts anyway. Kind of a snake eating its tail sort of thing. I’d really appreciate a persuasive rebuttal to my interpretation of this law written in plain language.
How does a Constitutional Law Professor not get the provisions of this law which are in direct conflict with the rights enumerated in the Constitution? This law abandons the right of habeas corpus, the fifth and sixth Amendments. The right of trial by jury of your peers, the right to face accusers in a court of law with legal council before being imprisoned, the concept that persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in a duly appointed court in the jurisdiction in which the crime occurred. These are basic rights to our democracy and should never be discarded by fear.
Further, the law allows our military to violate protections established by Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits the US military from being used as a civilian police force. All of these provisions are based on fear of a defeated enemy. Nothing could be more shameful for any politician to violate their oath of office than this egregious act. What is even more galling is that this law was not an appropriations bill and will not provide any funds to do any thing for the military. It merely authorized the Government to do the tasked defined.
Whether this President uses this law to corrupt the Constitution or not is not important. What is important is the barrier to dictatorship is now much closer than ever before. It may simply be a matter of time.
In the coming elections, we must weigh the acts of not just this President, but also of those in the Senate and House who drew this horrible amendment or allowed it to pass.
I, too, vowed that if Obama signed this Bill, I would not vote for him. And I am closely watching the actions of those representing me in Washington and my State Houses. We need to cleanse our government at all levels if we are ever to regain our freedoms - - And I am convinced it will be far more difficult to reclaim them than it was to first declare them.
I do not. It was a 2012 article (I believe November of that year). I read it at the time the military budget was up for renewal and required Obama sign it into law. I'll add, again, I read it first hand. I'm absolutely confident that occurred.
Alex, you should take a look at the 2012 annual military defense act that was signed into law by Obama. Buried in it was language that allows the government to declare US citizens enemy combatants and be held without trial. The language goes on to define what they consider enemy combatants to be. I believe John McCain and Carl Levin (Michigan) were co-sponsors. I know LA Times covered it (that's where I read it), but I can't speak to other publications.
Yes, you are right. Obama signed that into law on December 31, 2011 (when most people were welcoming the New Year, rather than paying attention to political news.)
I just read the NY Times article about it, which intentionally obfuscates the issue you brought up, Terry.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-signs-military-spending-bill.html#commentsContainer
However, I also read the comments section, which clarifies it. I'll post some of the better comments here.
Before I do so, I want to point out that many Americans - both Democrats and Republicans - were horrified by this law. Many decided then and there that they absolutely would not vote for Obama in the 2012 election, because he'd signed this into law.
I was among them. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2012, rather than for Obama, for whom I'd reluctantly voted in 2008. I thought he was an arrogant corporate shill, and I didn't trust him, but I thought the alternative (McCain) was worse. I even worked for Ralph Nader's campaign, such as it was, which was minimalist and ad hoc. Given his lack of funding and the nearly total mainstream media blackout against him, it's amazing Nader received as many votes as he did - which was about 700,000, if I remember correctly. At least that's what was reported. I don't trust anything the corporate media report now, nor did I then.
Read this story very carefully and take in the difficult information it contains. Our President objects to limitations on his power to detain, interrogate and prosecute WHOEVER, WHEREVER, WHENEVER. He believes in his right to send detainees, without charging them, to secret foreign prisons to be tortured if so desired. He wants to codify the abandonment of democratic principles, the violations of the Geneva Convention and the violations of the Constitution that began under Bush.
That is who he is. That is what he believes in. That is what he wants to allow ALL future Presidents to do. As a Democrat, it is now impossible for me to support him. I want him impeached.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The President should not compromise the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This is what he did. He says he will not use the dictatorial powers it provides but what about those who follow him? I believed in him, now I see him as just one more major cog of the cabal that is destroying our country and our rights as a free people. He will not get my vote again. He is a traitor to his oath of office as are all those who voted to pass this bill.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is our country's darkest hour.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So much for The Magna Carta...
It was fun while it lasted.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mario Savio famously said, "...There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. ..."
That's where I'm at with Republicans and Democrats. Much gets made of their toxic disagreements. It's the stuff they agree on that I find so frightening; unjust war, empire building, the drug war, Guantanamo Bay, torture, warrantless surveillance, voodoo economics and a long list of other ills.
I've spent 30 years in the service of this country and I've reached that point Savio talks about, I'm sick at heart, I can no longer pretend that the Democrats present a substantive alternative to the Republicans. They are two sides of the same rotten coin.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pick your poison. The perfidiousness of Obama, or the pure perfidy of the Republicans. Obama's “the devil made me do it,” vs the evil incarnate. They all can't wait to destroy democracy. And these are our choices in a so-called election year. Good corporatist vs bad corporatist. But there is no good in any of it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Big mistake. He has become everything he promised us he wouldn't. He has destroyed Due Process. He has greatly expanded the Endless War. He has greatly expanded the Surveillance State. He has widened government secrecy to a point that is could be considered an Iron Curtain. His detention of Bradley Manning is inexcusable in its inhumanity, trashing every concept of fairness embodied in the Geneva Conventions. I WILL NOT vote for him in 2012. I will support Ron Paul in the republican primaries and if he is not the nominee then I will not vote in the general election. The "lesser" of two evils is no solace or excuse.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is hard to imagine that America will experience a darker day than today, the day we lost our right to habeas corpus. This was a right so important that it was stated by our founding fathers in Article 1 of the Constitution.
The right to Habeas Corpus is one of the most ancient and fundamental rights of free men, preceding but mentioned in the Magna Carta. So it is incredible that the low scum who represent us and the spineless president who is charged with protecting the rights of all the people have the audacity to suspend this most important of all rights with the stroke of a pen.
On the other hand, it is easy to understand why they want to do this. Once someone has been seized by the government, denied the right to counsel, possibly tortured, held for an indeterminate amount of time without charge, what civil court would proceed against them? Clearly the next step will be creation of a kangaroo secrete judge to try them as we now have a secrete kangaroo judge to issue warrants in accordance with the Patriot act.
This is a terrible thing that happened today but what is worse is the mild and disinterested fashion in which it has been reported by the American press and the lack of outrage by the people. We have given up this most fundamental right for the illusion of security but in fact we now have neither rights nor security.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our Founding Fathers advisedly used the term "person" -- as opposed to "citizen" (used elsewhere in the Constitution to protect the rights of "citizens") -- when they drafted and adopted the Fifth Amendment due process clause, absolutely prohibiting our federal Government from denying any "person" life, liberty or property without "due process of law." The Fifth Amendment is not and never has been limited to protecting US citizens, so President Obama's purported concern for the rights of "citizens" does not meet the Fifth Amendment's requirement that all "persons" be accorded due process by our Government. And of course indefinite detention without any criminal charges or a trial cannot be considered "due process of law" under numerous Supreme Court interpretations of the Fifth Amendment. As a former professor of constitutional law, President Obama knows this just as well as do I (another former professor of constitutional law). President Obama is a disgrace to the legal profession and a traitor to the Constitution which he has taken a sworn oath to uphold and defend. He should resign immediately and seek private employment commensurate with his ethical values, such as selling used cars or fraudulent derivatives.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a loyal supporter of President Obama since voting for him in the New Jersey Primary, and a proud veteran of our military, I am totally disheartened by the President’s capitulation in signing the current defense legislation. This Bill is a direct injection of autocratic architecture into our system of government. To allow our country’s military to arrest some US citizens on suspicion of some crimes, to hold them indefinitely, and to strip them of their right to a hearing in civilian court is not “defending the constitution”. I doubt that we will see the worst repercussions of these terrible provisions in the immediate future, but there is now a virus in our system of justice. Have none of the President’s advisers noticed that this is precisely the type of law that protestors throughout the Arab world rebelled against in the biggest global story of the year just ended? It is a sad day for our constitution, and a sad day for our country. Perhaps it was not surprising that the law was signed in the last dark hours of the year, when the nation’s citizenry were engaged in their year-end diversions. I cannot know how many votes the President has lost by this action. I can only count my own.
It is quite ironic that a country that fought wars in the 20th Century for freedom and democracy is slowly transforming itself into a state we fought against. Very soon a blog commentary like this will be considered terrorism against the state.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What's next? Special military prisons for American citizens (gulags)?
Yes, and they are called FEMA camps. And don't worry about the Supreme Court being involved because people "detained" in this manner may never come to trial, they will simply disappear at the President's whim.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One small stroke of a unitary executive pen, one giant leap backward for democracy. ACLU Director Anthony Romero calls this craven act the moment when Barack Obama gained the dubious distinction of becoming "forever remembered as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law."
Obama's accompanying signing statement is disingenuous at best, cynical at worst. It was a cowardly New Year's Eve news dump. We are told to trust him unquestioningly because he is the good guy, the Democrat, who would never go against the Constitution and deny an American citizen due process. If he has thought at all about possible dangerous successors waiting in the wings to broaden the scope of this dangerous and muddy bill to accusing and "disappearing" peaceful domestic protesters, it was not enough to make him veto it. This should scare us all to death.
We finally know why the president chose not to prosecute the Bush war criminals. He shares many if not most of the same neocon values and is using the same fear factor to keep the populace cowed, "secure" and stripped of their basic rights.
And this is the man who dares ask us to help him fight a recalcitrant Congress? When it comes to enabling the Security State and the Military Industrial Complex, the two warring political factions never fail to jump into each other's arms to call a complicit truce.
One more reason to Occupy, as if we needed another reason.
I'm glad you found the info. After reading your link I tried to find the LA Times article I initially read. Couldn't find it, but I did find a well written article by the Huffington Post on the bill. They even highlighted the two relevant sections on the bill. Here is the link. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dear-americans-this-law-makes-it-possible-to-arrest_b_57c9b648e4b06c750dd9cd6f
Thanks, Terry. And thanks very much for bringing this up!
I think many, or perhaps most Americans have forgotten about this, or maybe they never even noticed it in the first place. Certainly the corporate / mainstream media downplayed its seriousness. I was well aware of it at the time.
Ha, interesting, my husband and I helped organize some events for Ralph Nader's campaign in Chicago back in 2008. :)
Thanks for posting your comment, Inconsolable!
My memory of the year I volunteered and voted for Nader was incorrect. It was 2008, not 2012. At least I correctly recalled who the Republican candidate had been at the time. If it'd been the 2012 election it would've been Mitt Romney, not McCain. My memory has been damaged by the Pfizer poison injections.
This law is outrageous and unconstitutional.
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Welcome to marshal law!
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President Obama is not the man we hoped he would be. He is instead a traitor to the US Constitution. I will not vote for such a traitor. I will call for his imprisonment.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many Americans are concerned about the recent amendment to the NDAA bill that was signed into law by President Obama. We should be. This assault on our rights is very difficult to read and understand. The difficulty probably has more to do with sloppy drafting than intentional misrepresentation. Anyway, I decided to do a sort of John Yoo interpretation of the thing and write it out in one paragraph of plain language. Here it is:
“Congress agrees with the President’s claim that he can order the forceable seizure, transportation and endless military imprisonment of any American citizen without legal proof and without access to the courts. The President’s chosen Americans can be imprisoned in the US or any other country or corporation the President chooses.”
I am a veteran and a retired judge. I know something but not everything about statutory interpretation. I have also been an advocate and know a little about how to play on that one-way street. For an American imprisoned under this act it really doesn’t matter what any real judge thinks about this law anyway because the imprisoned American has no access to the courts anyway. Kind of a snake eating its tail sort of thing. I’d really appreciate a persuasive rebuttal to my interpretation of this law written in plain language.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How does a Constitutional Law Professor not get the provisions of this law which are in direct conflict with the rights enumerated in the Constitution? This law abandons the right of habeas corpus, the fifth and sixth Amendments. The right of trial by jury of your peers, the right to face accusers in a court of law with legal council before being imprisoned, the concept that persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in a duly appointed court in the jurisdiction in which the crime occurred. These are basic rights to our democracy and should never be discarded by fear.
Further, the law allows our military to violate protections established by Posse Comitatus Act which prohibits the US military from being used as a civilian police force. All of these provisions are based on fear of a defeated enemy. Nothing could be more shameful for any politician to violate their oath of office than this egregious act. What is even more galling is that this law was not an appropriations bill and will not provide any funds to do any thing for the military. It merely authorized the Government to do the tasked defined.
Whether this President uses this law to corrupt the Constitution or not is not important. What is important is the barrier to dictatorship is now much closer than ever before. It may simply be a matter of time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the coming elections, we must weigh the acts of not just this President, but also of those in the Senate and House who drew this horrible amendment or allowed it to pass.
I, too, vowed that if Obama signed this Bill, I would not vote for him. And I am closely watching the actions of those representing me in Washington and my State Houses. We need to cleanse our government at all levels if we are ever to regain our freedoms - - And I am convinced it will be far more difficult to reclaim them than it was to first declare them.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Confirms that Hanoi Songbird McCain was always a traitor!
One of a few Tokyo roses.
Did not know this since the LA Times is a worthless propaganda rag. Do you have a link to the docuement? Thanks
I do not. It was a 2012 article (I believe November of that year). I read it at the time the military budget was up for renewal and required Obama sign it into law. I'll add, again, I read it first hand. I'm absolutely confident that occurred.