December 18, 2011

A video bearing the above title was posted on YouTube months ago, when the Senate version of the “NDAA for FY2012″ was being debated on the floor, having recently come out of committee.  The video quality was excellent, and featured Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, detailing the short history of the uber-controversial “US citizen detention provision” that was initially removed, and later re-inserted into the bill at the insistence of the White House.

I took the liberty of… well, “liberating” it before it was removed just yesterday from YouTube in what can only be described as a “precipitous manner”, ostensibly by its author only one-day after the House passed H.R. 1540 (the NDAA bill’s official title in its final incarnation) and it was sent to the White House for signature.  You conspiracy theorists out there can draw your own conclusions regarding the seeming coincidence…

Regardless, I offer it for your consideration here…

January 1, 2012

By way of update… yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, President Obama did indeed sign H.R. 1540, while issuing an accompanying signing statement addressing his reservations in doing so.  While the ACLU’s attorneys insist that the legislative language is vague enough to allow the indefinite detention of US citizens by the military, under a claim as nebulous as constituting a “terrorist threat”, there are conflicting reports from other sources.

This from Mother Jones, a source I normally trust for accuracy and truth in reporting…

“So what exactly does the bill do? It says that the president has to hold a foreign Al Qaeda suspect captured on US soil in military detention—except it leaves enough procedural loopholes that someone like convicted underwear bomber and Nigerian citizen Umar Abdulmutallab could actually go from capture to trial without ever being held by the military. It does not, contrary to what many media outlets have reported, authorize the president to indefinitely detain without trial an American citizen suspected of terrorism who is captured in the US.”

In general, I tend to prefer raw data to Anyone’s interpretation of Anything, including legislative language contained in a bill, and especially a bill as controversial as this one.  For those like-minded readers, I offer this link to the complete text of H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, with encouragement to consider the language, and decide for yourself.