The Senate’s overwhelming vote for dictatorship

The collapse of the First American Republic and the rise of a post-constitutional era - which we first noted eight years ago - has taken a particularly bad turn for the worse. To the month, and just two weeks short of the day, it was 220 years ago that the Bill of Rights was ratified by all the states.

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. . .

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

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?

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.”


Wonkette - Ever since launching major foreign invasions got a little too expensive and pointless (mostly expensive) even for Congress, and Times Are Tough, our nations’ lawmakers have decided to start “focusing on the domestic issues” like everyone keeps asking them to do, ad nauseum. But since it is impossible for Congress to agree any piece of legislation relating to actual domestic issues like, say, rising poverty, they’ve defaulted back to their only known area of total agreement, “permanent war.” The Senate . . . passed a bill effectively declaring the United States its own shiny new warzone that would codify the military’s power to hunt on its own soil for anyone — foreign national or American citizen — that they determine meets the vaguely-worded criteria of being “a participant in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States” and ship them off to an internment camp to rot away without trial, forever. Will Bradley Manning finally get some company from his fellow citizens?

There were many, many idiotic defenses of this rancid bill that passed with bipartisan support, but let’s hear from our old standard warmonger neocon jaw-flapping pal Lindsey Graham as he drops yet another pick-up line on longtime crush John McCain, who co-sponsored the bill:

“The enemy is all over the world. Here at home. And when people take up arms against the United States and [are] captured within the United States, why should we not be able to use our military and intelligence community to question that person as to what they know about enemy activity?” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.

“They should not be read their Miranda Rights. They should not be given a lawyer,” Graham said.

Opponents of the bill tried in vain to point out that the FBI and Homeland Security already get billions of dollars to stop domestic terrorists instead of more reasonably pointing out that this legislation is completely insane, but since those guys have such a horrible track record of “no successful major terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11,” this obviously calls for the military to use its war powers to indefinitely detain “enemy combatants.”

Doesn’t that sound, uh, vaguely unconstitutional, sort of? Nah, said the bill’s other sponsor, Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, in his floor speech:

The Supreme Court said — and I’m going to read these words again – “there is no bar to this nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.”

Yeah, Levin’s probably right. The 14th-century legal concept of habeus corpus was just getting to be a little too “progressive.” Better stick to the older, more tried-and-true “military rule” concept favored by leaders for helping the restive masses learn to shut the hell up.


Jonathan Turley - In one of the greatest attacks on civil liberties in this country’s history, Democratic and Republican Senators voted yesterday to approve a measure as part of the $662 billion defense bill that would allow for the military to hold both citizens and non-citizens indefinitely without trial — even those arrested on U.S. soil. . . . While some members of Congress like Ron Paul (R., Texas) have denounced the bill, the measure passed at the same time that administration lawyers publicly declared that the military and intelligence agencies alone should decide whether a citizen should be killed without a charge or hearing (including killing citizens on U.S. soil) — a position supported by President Obama who has ordered the killing of U.S. citizens under his claim of inherent authority.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, tried to pass an amendment that would have limited it to suspects captured “abroad” — a measure that still raised constitutional and international law problems. . . A watered down amendment was then passed 99-1 that left the matter (it would appear) to the Administration. The provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans’ legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens are not just subject to indefinite detention but even execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.

Virtually all Democrats and Republicans voted to strip citizens of their rights in a vote of 93-7. . .

The national debate has become positively otherworldly for civil libertarians. As the Senate set about rolling back civil liberties, Administration lawyers — CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson — publicly explained to an audience this week that the decision whether to kill a U.S. citizens anywhere and anytime must be left solely to the discretion of the military and intelligence branches. President Obama has supported this view and claims the right to kill any citizen on his unilateral and unchecked executive authority.

How did we come to this place? Well, it took the joint efforts of both parties and a country that has been lured into a dangerous passivity by years of war rhetoric. We now appear to define ourselves by our lifestyle rather than our rights. Being American appears to be treated as conclusory and self-evident — untethered to our defining principles. So in comes to this. The loss of the most basic right of citizens met not by applause but, even worse, a collective yawn.



http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/12/americans-are-military-targets-in-the-war-on-terror.html

Washingtons Blog - You might assume – in a vacuum – that this might be okay (even though it trashes the Constitution, the separation of military and police actions, and the division between internal and external affairs).

But it is dangerous in a climate where you can be labeled as or suspected of being a terrorist simply for questioning war, protesting anything, asking questions about pollution or about Wall Street shenanigans, supporting Ron Paul, being a libertarian, holding gold, or stocking up on more than 7 days of food.

And it is counter-productive in an age when the government – instead of doing the things which could actually make us safer – are doing things which increase the risk of terrorism.

And it is insane in a time of perpetual war.

And when the “War on Terror” in the Middle East and North Africa which is being used to justify the attack on Americans was planned long before 9/11.

And when Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser told the Senate in 2007 that the war on terror is “a mythical historical narrative”. . . .

As I noted in March:

The government’s indefinite detention policy – stripped of it’s spin – is literally insane, and based on circular reasoning. Stripped of p.r., this is the actual policy:

If you are an enemy combatant or a threat to national security, we will detain you indefinitely until the war is over

It is a perpetual war, which will never be over

Neither you or your lawyers have a right to see the evidence against you, nor to face your accusers

But trust us, we know you are an enemy combatant and a threat to national security

We may torture you (and try to cover up the fact that you were tortured), because you are an enemy combatant, and so basic rights of a prisoner guaranteed by the Geneva Convention don’t apply to you

Since you admitted that you’re a bad guy (while trying to tell us whatever you think we want to hear to make the torture stop), it proves that we should hold you in indefinite detention

See how that works?

And – given that U.S. soldiers admit that if they accidentally kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants – it is unlikely that the government would ever admit that an American citizen it assassinated was an innocent civilian who has nothing at all to do with terrorism.

Democratic senators who voted to trash the Constitution

Casey (D-PA)
Conrad (D-ND)
Hagan (D-NC)
Inouye (D-HI)
Kohl (D-WI)
Levin (D-MI)
Manchin (D-WV)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Whitehouse (D-RI)