Obama Signs Bill To Jail Americans Indefinitely Without Charge

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wild Cobra

It is the first step for Obama to make this a police state when our banks collapes and the paper gold is useless.

---

Yes and I'm sure the next Republican President will do everything in his power to reverse that step.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Spurminator

Yes and I'm sure the next Republican President will do everything in his power to reverse that step.

---

Only if Paul is elected.

Paul won't be the candidate, never mind elected

If Paul were elected, he wouldn't be able to implement his extreme radicalism because it would be blocked by Congress.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by boutons_deux

Paul won't be the candidate, never mind elected

If Paul were elected, he wouldn't be able to implement his extreme radicalism because it would be blocked by Congress.

---

He would shame them to tears over it. At least he wouldn't use the military against US citizens.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Winehole23

indefinite detention

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/thre...ill/singleton/

---

Greenwald

:lol

Glenn Greenwald made a choice to defend Matthew Hale in a series of civil lawsuits that Hale faced after he encouraged shooter Benjamin Smith to go on a two-state shooting rampage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Nathaniel_Smith

If you don't know who Hale is, well, he's a pretty famous white supremacist who is currently serving 40 years for soliciting the murder of a federal judge who ruled against him in a trademark case. Who put him away? Patrick Fitzgerald. (Yes. And Mr. Greenwald got an FBI visit regarding the passing of coded messages by Hale while under SAMS restrictions.)

Greenwald's latest masterpiece...

Quote:

---

Much of the reaction to the article I wrote last Saturday regarding progressives, the Obama presidency and Ron Paul (as well as reaction to this essay by Matt Stoller and even this tweet from Katrina vanden Heuvel) relied on exactly the sort of blatant distortions that I began that article by anticipating and renouncing: that I was endorsing Paul as the best presidential candidate, that I was urging progressives to sacrifice reproductive rights in order to vote for him over Obama, that I “pretend that the differences between Obama and Paul on economics are marginal”; that Paul’s bad positions negate the argument I made; that Ron Paul is my “hero,” etc. etc. So self-evidently petty and slimy are those kinds of distortions that (other than to note their falsehoods for the record) they warrant no discussion; indeed, as I wrote: “So potent is this poison that no inoculation against it exists” and would thus “proceed to make a couple of important points about both candidacies even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted.”

That said, it’s hard to believe that these distortions are anything but deliberate — deterrence-driven punishment for the ultimate Election Year crime of partisan heresy: i.e., suggesting that someone is uniquely advocating important ideas even though they lack a “D” after their name – given that (a) I expressly renounced in advance the beliefs now being attributed to me and, more important (b) the point I was actually making was clear and not all that complex.

---

http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

What a liberal-baiting poser....Greenwald better stop while he's ahead...

Greenwald jumps the shark...

Quote:

---

The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

---

http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

Now he wants to go back and say "I was just kidding around"

What an asshat...

chapter and verse cited. notice you've got no response other than to slag Greenwald. weak.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Winehole23

chapter and verse cited. notice you've got no response other than to slag Greenwald. weak.

---

...slagging Greenwald.....and I'll get to your verse later....

....Most times, Greenwald is a competent writer, but he isn't enduring himself to the left or right right now....

it's not a journalist's job to please political constituencies, but to tell the truth.

How about standing by his convictions?

Quote:

---

"It is little known that Greenwald supported the Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan before it. He does not mention it in writing anymore and rarely speaks of it. He supported the war for the same reason I did: he believed that Iraq possessed WMD and that the potential consequences of that possession could not be risked."

---

http://sadredearth.com/christopher-h...-war-of-ideas/

Obama did not support the Iraq war. Obama - plus, Greenwald - minus

Obama is pro civil liberties, against executive power.

Obama is not anti-war, but against wars that are stupid.

Obama is not for media corruption.

Greenwald was a Bush-baiter before he was a progressive-baiter. unlike you, his values don't blow with the political winds, but have been consistent.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nbadan

How about standing by his convictions?



http://sadredearth.com/christopher-h...-war-of-ideas/

Obama did not support the Iraq war. Obama - plus, Greenwald - minus

Obama is pro civil liberties, against executive power.

Obama is not anti-war, but against wars that are stupid.

Obama is not for media corruption.

---

that you disagree with Greenwald's views is no argument against them

Quote:

---

Obama is pro civil liberties, against executive power.

---

hard to believe said this with a straight face.

what are Obama's civil liberties accomplishments?

how has he been against executive power?

please be specific.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Winehole23

that you disagree with Greenwald's views is no argument against them

---

Yeah, we all saw how the M$M hysteria over Iraq WMD's worked out for all of us.....there was more than enough evidence to show that Saddam destroyed his stockpiles of WMD after the first Iraq war.....Greenwald was not part of any solution then...just as he is not being now...

section 1021. you're ignoring it.

just because Greenwald was mistaken about something else doesn't mean he's mistaken about this.

basically you got nothing, so you're just throwing crap on the wall.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Winehole23

hard to believe said this with a straight face.

what are Obama's civil liberties accomplishments?

how has he been against executive power?

please be specific.

---

If Congress wants to relinquish it's oversight responsibility that's on them...Obama never asked for any new authorization which wasn't already part of the AUMF...

judging from this thread, that appears to be your MO

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nbadan

If Congress wants to relinquish it's oversight responsibility that's on them...Obama never asked for any new authorization which wasn't already part of the AUMF...

---

I've already responded to this point twice. it's a fucking strawman. NO ONE HAS ARGUED THE NDAA CREATES NEW AUTHORITY.

the president is at the high ebb of his power when he acts under the express authorization of Congress. the NDAA furnishes that authorization, in what was a grey area.

You believe what you want to believe...

NDAA FAQ: A Guide for the Perplexed
by Benjamin Wittes

Quote:

---

<...>

Does the NDAA authorize the indefinite detention of citizens?

No, though it does not foreclose the possibility either. Congress ultimately included language in the NDAA expressly designed to leave this question untouched–that is, governed by pre-existing law, which as we explain below is unsettled on this question.

<...>

So if it doesn’t significantly expand the government’s detention authority, doesn’t authorize detention of citizens, doesn’t really mandate the military detention of other terrorist suspects, and doesn’t do more to prevent the closure of Gitmo than does current law, what’s all the fuss about? Is it even important?

The final bill is, indeed, far less consequential than earlier versions would have been. Much of the fuss is overblown. That said, the bill has several important elements:

The codification of detention authority in statute is a significant development, not because it enables anything that Congress had previously forbidden but because it puts the legislature squarely behind a set of policies on which it had always retained a kind of strategic ambiguity–a tolerance for detention without a clear endorsement of it of the sort that would make members accountable. Congress has now given that endorsement, and that is no small thing.

The transfer restrictions will continue to have negative effects on administration management of detainee affairs, reducing flexibility and agility and compelling the continued detention of people the administration does not want to detain, in a status the administration does not wish to use, and at a facility it would prefer to vacate. That this is no change from current law–indeed, that the NDAA offers slightly more flexibility than does current law–does not make these restrictions any less troublesome.

The rump mandatory detention provision remains a bit of a wild card that could have mischievous effects in practice. Though it ends up requiring very little, it does impose–as we have described–a default option of military detention for certain categories of cases. And this option might prove politically difficult to jettison.

Is there anything in the NDAA about which human rights groups and civil libertarians ought to be pleased?

Yes, actually, there is. Section 1024 of the bill, as we’ve noted, requires that people subject to long-term military detention in circumstances not already subject to habeas corpus review–think the Detention Facility in Parwan, Afghanistan–henceforth shall have the right to a military lawyer and a proceeding before a military judge in order to contest the government’s factual basis for believing them to be subject to detention. This is an extraordinary and novel development. Detainees in Afghanistan currently have access to the Detainee Review Board process, which as described in this article already provide a relatively robust screening mechanism, particularly compared to years past. The DRB process does not include lawyers and judges, however, and human rights advocacy groups have criticized them on this ground. Requiring lawyers and judges to staff out the screening process is a pretty remarkable shift in the direction of accomodating those concerns.

- more -

---

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/n...the-perplexed/

Close GITMO....oh we can't...

Quote:

---

Sections 1026 and 1027 prevent the use of federal funds for building detention facilities in the United States or transferring Guantanamo detainees to domestic facilities or releasing them into the United States. It effectively continues a congressional policy of preventing more Article III criminal trials of Guantanamo detainees and preventing the construction of alternative facilities that would enable President Obama to fulfill his promise to shutter Guantanamo.

---

Quote:

---

ection 1028 prevents overseas transfers of Guantanamo detainees in the absence of a rigorous certification by the Secretary of Defense that they will not pose a danger. Such a requirement under current law has effectively ground to a halt efforts to resettle certain Guantanamo detainees. This version’s certification requirement allows slightly more flexibility, though it’s not clear whether that difference will be meaningful in practice.

---

Further..

Quote:

---

Meanwhile, the government had arrested a suspected al Qaeda member–and U.S. citizen–named Jose Padilla, taking him into custody at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. He eventually ended up in military custody, and he too brought a habeas proceeding. To make a long story very short, his case first proceeded through the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel of which concluded that detention authority under the AUMF did not apply to a citizen suspected of being an al Qaeda member and captured in the U.S. After the Supreme Court required the petition to be refiled and relitigated in the Fourth Circuit (because that is where Padilla actually was held), a district court judge took the same position, but on appeal a Fourth Circuit panel held that Padilla could lawfully be detained after all–though in so holding, the panel focused on the factual assumption that Padilla had, like Hamdi, been on the battlefield in Afghanistan previously. The case was then set to go before the Supreme Court, but before it could weigh in on the merits, Padilla was shifted into civilian custody for a criminal trial (he was convicted, and is now in prison).

The government has not asserted authority to detain a citizen under the AUMF since this time, so the question of citizen detention has remained unsettled ever since. Which brings us at last to the NDAA.

An earlier version of the NDAA in the Senate contained language that strongly implied, without quite saying it, that citizens were included within the general grant of detention authority discussed above (see Bobby’s contemporaneous assessment here). This generated much debate and criticism, and eventually a group of senators offered an amendment to state explicitly that citizens could not be detained under the NDAA’s restatement of detention authority. That amendment was rejected, and at that point, Senator Feinstein offered a compromise, fall-back amendment stating simply that nothing in the NDAA should be taken to address this issue one way or the other. The explicit idea was to preserve the unsettled status quo described above, leaving it to the courts to determine if detention authority extends to citizens should the government ever again attempt to assert it (see here and here). That is the position on which the NDAA has now settled (here).

A final note: As Steve points out here, the courts may in the end adopt a “clear statement” requirement in relation to the citizen detention question. That is, they may hold that Congress must explicitly grant such authority before a statute like the AUMF or the NDAA can be read to grant it. If that occurs, of course, that likely will be the end of the matter, particularly in light of the explicit effort in the NDAA to remain agnostic rather than take sides on the question.

---

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2011/12/n...the-perplexed/


and a statement from the White House

Quote:

---

The Administration strongly objects to the military custody provision of section 1032, which would appear to mandate military custody for a certain class of terrorism suspects. This unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President's authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals. Moreover, applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets. We have spent ten years since September 11, 2001, breaking down the walls between intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals; Congress should not now rebuild those walls and unnecessarily make the job of preventing terrorist attacks more difficult. Specifically, the provision would limit the flexibility of our national security professionals to choose, based on the evidence and the facts and circumstances of each case, which tool for incapacitating dangerous terrorists best serves our national security interests. The waiver provision fails to address these concerns, particularly in time-sensitive operations in which law enforcement personnel have traditionally played the leading role. These problems are all the more acute because the section defines the category of individuals who would be subject to mandatory military custody by substituting new and untested legislative criteria for the criteria the Executive and Judicial branches are currently using for detention under the AUMF in both habeas litigation and military operations. Such confusion threatens our ability to act swiftly and decisively to capture, detain, and interrogate terrorism suspects, and could disrupt the collection of vital intelligence about threats to the American people.

Rather than fix the fundamental defects of section 1032 or remove it entirely, as the Administration and the chairs of several congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters have advocated, the revised text merely directs the President to develop procedures to ensure the myriad problems that would result from such a requirement do not come to fruition. Requiring the President to devise such procedures concedes the substantial risks created by mandating military custody, without providing an adequate solution. As a result, it is likely that implementing such procedures would inject significant confusion into counterterrorism operations.

---

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/defa...s_20111117.pdf

Like I said, all this is political spin to hurt Obama...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nbadan

Greenwald jumps the shark...



http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

Now he wants to go back and say "I was just kidding around"

What an asshat...

---

Where did he say he was kidding around?

In which of the above bolded sentences do you disagree with Greenwald?