The U.S. Congress has ended the year 2011 by assaulting the Constitution. The attack came in the form of the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) which passed both the House (December 14) and the Senate (December 15) by large margins despite having an attached provision (the “Homeland Battlefield Bill”) that allows the United States military to take into custody and hold indefinitely without trial, any American citizen designated a “terrorist suspect.”
Here are some reactions to the Homeland Battlefield Bill:
1.Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch: “It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration. It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries to drop.”
2. Senator Rand Paul: “Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.” In addition Paul points out that the present definition of a terrorist in U.S. law is broad to the point of meaninglessness. “There are laws on the books that characterize who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands….Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist.”
3.Professor Jonathan Turley, legal scholar: “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.”
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