Saturday, December 03, 2011

2012 national defense authorization act

Wired | Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight.

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.

But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. 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.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists. President Obama has promised to veto the bill.

Which is ironic. 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.

Weirder still, the bill’s chief architect, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), tried to persuade skeptics that the bill wasn’t so bad. His pitch? “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States,” he said on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill would just let the government detain a citizen in military custody, not force it to do that. Reassured yet?

Civil libertarians aren’t. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said it “denigrates the very foundations of this country.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, “it puts every single American citizen at risk.”

But there’s a reason this measure goes into the defense bill: Voting against the defense bill is usually considered political suicide. That’s why the bill will almost certainly pass tonight. If Obama backs down from his veto threat, get ready to see Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Fist tap Davera.

7 comments:

brotherbrown said...

I attended the Occupy San Bernardino Valley General Assembly today, my first GA.   This was a major topic of the free speech portion of the agenda.  It is possible a General Assembly could be interpreted as a threat to national security.

CNu said...

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the so-called "deliberative" body is responding specifically to the Occupy movement.

Ed Dunn said...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Los Angeles police used
nearly a dozen undercover detectives to infiltrate the Occupy LA
encampment before this week's raid to gather information on protesters'
intentions, according to media reports Friday.


None of the officers slept at the camp, but
tried to blend in during the weeks leading up to the raid to learn about
plans to resist or use weapons against police, a police source told the
Los Angeles Times. The source spoke on the condition of anonymity
because the case is ongoing.
 
Meanwhile, over in Toronto -- http://youtu.be/hH7h5Aezyrk

Facial Recognition software, encrypted communication lines, aerial surveillance, geo-intelligence and data manipulation with agents creating their own script to manipulate, but most important - mainstream media has a filter and yall still want to convince us that these public occupation are the way to go.

It's like we want to ignore COINTEL and other tactics used back in the day just to celebrate the public gathering aspect of OWS.

Ed Dunn said...

So you are suggests a DoS tactic? Don't you have to throw a lot of  "disposables" to disrupt the array matrix to make a DoS attack effective?

My thoughts were to counter with the same techniques I presented with facial recognition, bots, geo-intelligence, etc.. It is not a lot of agents on their end and it is more expensive to replace an unionized muni or federal agent on payroll than it is to replace a protestor - I would just like that bit of advantage actually leveraged just one time in revolutionary history, that's all.

CNu said...

lol, routers and firewalls are one thing magne, and municipal and county jails, overtime and special duty budgets another. The authorities HAVE NOT demonstrated any adaptability wrt tactics and strategy, and, their tactics and strategy are being coordinated for them at the federal level. There is no greater demonstrated competency for handling what Occupy is dishing out than there was demonstrated in the emergency response and incident management around Katrina.

If Occupy pulls a conficker over the next few hard winter months, and lays low going occupying foreclosures, courts, and otherwise gumming up the system in a highly distributed manner, while simultaneously recruiting additional "vulnerable" instance, i.e., becoming more and more popular, then come early spring, and given many more months in which to operate next year, Occupy will constitute an overwhelming force, without having even begun any kind of meaningful (criminal) force application of its own.

Let the authorities kill an Occupy protester (even accidentally) and you will see in very short order just how bad things can become in what is still just the prologue to American civil war.

CNu said...

rejected in the senate with surprising roll call results http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/senate/1/211

Tom said...

Slight sigh of relief here.   Don't know whether the Big Business - R party is holding out for something even more draconian, or what.   I'm beginning to wonder just what on earth the Big Business - D party does stand for, other than "if you're tired of the letter R, vote for us."

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