This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
Senate Passes Bill Allowing Indefinite Detention of Americans ... Considers Bill Authorizing More Torture
The Senate passed a bill today allowing indefinite detention of American citizens living within the U.S.
While some have claimed that this is incorrect, and that American citizens would be exempted from the indefinite detention within U.S. borders authorized by the Act, the Committee chairman who co-sponsored the bill – Carl Levin – stated today in Senate debate that it could apply to American citizens.
Levin cited the Supreme Court case of Hamdi which ruled that American citizens can be treated as enemy combatants:
“The Supreme Court has recently ruled there is no bar to the United States holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant,” said Levin. “This is the Supreme Court speaking.“
Under questioning from Rand Paul, co-sponsor John McCain said that Americans suspected of terrorism could be sent to Guantanamo.
You can hear the statements from Levin and McCain on today’s broadcast of KFPA’s Letters and Politics.
As Raw Story notes:
The provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain individuals — including U.S. citizens — without charge or trial.
“If these provisions pass, we could see American citizens being sent to Guantanamo Bay,” Rand said in the video. “This should be alarming to everyone watching this proceeding today. Because it puts every single American citizen at risk.”
“There is one thing and one thing only protecting innocent Americans from being detained at will at the hands of a too-powerful state — our Constitution, and the checks we put on government power,” he continued. “Should we err today and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism, well, then the terrorists have won.”
“Detaining citizens without a court trial is not American. In fact, this alarming arbitrary power is reminiscent of Egypt’s ‘permanent’ Emergency Law authorizing preventive indefinite detention, a law that provoked ordinary Egyptians to tear their country apart last spring and risk their lives to fight.”
The debate is also being streamed live on CSpan-2.
While passage of the bill would make the Founding Fathers roll in their grave, it might not change that much. As former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald notes:
With very few exceptions, the McCain-Levin bill, awful though it is, doesn’t create any powers beyond what the O Admin thinks it now has.
Indeed, the U.S. has been a de facto police state for many years.
“A MIDDLE EAST DICTATORSHIP HAS MORE DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ABUSE OF POWER, INCLUDING TORTURE, THAN THE US UNDER OBAMA”
The same Senate is now considering a bill to repeal the prohibitions against torture:
The ACLU and over 30 other organizations sent a letter to the Senate asking them to oppose an effort in Congress that threatens to revive the use of torture and other inhumane interrogation techniques. If passed, an amendment introduced by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) to the Defense Authorization bill would roll back torture prevention measures that Congress overwhelmingly approved in the 2005 McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, as well as a 2009 Executive Order on ensuring lawful interrogations. It would also require the administration to create a secret list of approved interrogation techniques in a classified annex to the existing interrogation field manual.
In a related development, republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann renewed her attack on the prohibition of waterboarding and other forms of torture ….
Glenn Greenwald pointed out last week:
Andrew Sullivan … today noted that the U.S. under Obama imposes even less accountability for abuse of power and war crimes than does Bahrain:
Bahrain’s Sunni government promised “no immunity” for anyone suspected of abuses and said it would propose creating a permanent human rights watchdog commission. “All those who have broken the law or ignored lawful orders and instructions will be held accountable,” said a government statement, which says the report acknowledges that the “systematic practice of mistreatment” ended shortly after martial law was repealed on June 1.
As Andrew put it: “So a Middle East dictatorship has more democratic accountability for abuse of power, including torture, than the US under Obama.” Beyond things like this and the facts set forth in the last paragraph here, perhaps Andrew could use today’s post of his to help clear up the towering mystery he raised yesterday of liberal disenchantment with Obama. That American war criminals are being aggressively shielded from any and all accountability is not an ancillary matter but one of enduring historical significance.
That’s okay, though, because – according to top military, intelligence and civilian experts on interrogation – torture:
(1) Doesn’t produce actionable intelligence
(2) Reduces national security
(3) Creates more terrorists
(4) And is only useful for:
(A) Producing false confessions; and
(B) As a way of terrorizing the population
»
- advertisements -
Where's the Like button!
Where's the "idiot" button?
Sorry, can't go along with that. If we are going to throw the baby out with the bathwater it is not going to be so we can replace it with the good ole boy network and bigotry. We are in a really bad position as individuals, but that does not mean two wrongs make a right. I think a LOT of Germans went along with Nazis because it was the only avenue of power they had, they were in an untenable position and the only way through it was to side with the new party that gained so much power so fast, it was playing with fire and they got burned. As much as I am sad about the USA in it's current form I would never do THAT to my country and I would rather die an American that a hillbilly backwoods ignorant supporter of a dead and hate filled confederate abortion of religious theocratic horseshit! No intelligent, educated, sensible citizen would ever have their ISP associated with that website.
Are you a London banker that you fear the power of a free and liberated South?
When I was young I was taught by a certain bigoted good old boy network that
the Civil war was over some noble humanitarian cause of freedom.
Fancy that a people that always insisted they where slaves in Egypt where
the cheif progenitors and profiteers of the negro slave trade.
Emotional touchpoints to inflame the cause of war.
Hollywood with their depiction of every race imaginable other than the Chosen
as being subservient to pure emotionalism and reactionism.
When you tell enough lies eventually your spouse doesn't beleive a word
you say anymore.
And your comment coming from the mind of a person going by the moniker "BoilTheRich"...Right...
Did you forget to study history before you exited stage left 41 years ago? The south was fighting for real independence from economic control, first and foremost. It wasn't about blacks, at least nor primarily. Besides, it's well known that Lincoln wanted to send blacks back to Africa, he was convinced they could never fit in as ordinary citizens. That was -common thinking- back then, not the least bit controversial, and not based on some kind of seething animus. It took politics to really gin that up.
Today do you see a seceding south rounding up blacks en-mass and shipping them out, or killing them? If so, you underestimate both groups. Southern whites don't want secession so they can re-institute the democrats' Jim Crow laws. You said something about being gay, maybe that makes you more sensitive to discrimination. But that is the least of our worries. As for worrying about a theocracy, how's this: You get to do whatever you want in your community, I get to do the same. If you don't like it, you can fuck straight off, and if I don't like what you do, I can fuck off as well. Mutual disrespect and caution is vastly better than the mewling conformity we have today.
I have also learned recently that a large number of German communist immigrants who settled in the North supported Lincoln b/c they felt he could achieve much stronger federal control and further the cause of statism/communism. Many were either very high up in the Union military and also lower ranks. In fact, these German communists were the KEY to his narrow victory.
The immigrants fled Germany after the failed communist revolution and came to America. They hoped that Lincoln would help move their communist cause along in the US. As Judge Andrew Napolitano says, Lincoln was the MOST unconstitutional president in our history!
Most have NO idea that the Civil War was really about state sovereignty and the battle against federalism. But what do we expect when the textbooks are written by the globalist fascists?
judge napolitano is an "Asshole",... and a total retard about history!
foxnews sucks!
I lived in the deep south for a few years, a little place I like to call Baja Alabama, the Florida panhandle, Near Tallahassee.
It was an eye opener for certain and whatever the Civil War was about 150 years ago that is NOT what the champions of the "new" Dixie are about, what that flag represents today is nothing less than white (straight) supremacy. And it is backed by the most virulent hatreds in the modern USA, any and all of it's icons and it's memes must be treated as if they were the radioactive viral poison they are. You may be free to support such sentiments, but then you are also free to do a lot of dangerous and antisocial things, just be sure that consequences do come with practicing hate and subversion. Yes, being gay has made me more sensitive to hate and discrimination, ask yourself if those hatreds and discriminations are right and fair, then ask what you did to protect the rights of other citizens even when they are people you would never ask over to your house for a ball game or dinner. Keep in mind that when you turn a blind eye to the suffering and disenfranchisement of any citizen you are inviting the loss of your own "rights." THAT is how senate bills like this one become law.
Your experience with the south is not unique, but far from typical. As noted above, Lincoln ran roughshod over the constitution, and (as also noted above) he didn't love blacks. So if that conflice wasn't pure good vs evil, why treat one side's symbols as radioactive? The southerners who fought weren't nearly as keen about hanging onto slavery as they were about having their own home.
BTW, whites in general are more out-race oriented than other races. The Chinese, for instance, will come right our and tell you their race is the best. Most people of most races think that in their hearts, and it's got dick all to do with hatred. Lighten up.
+100 for:
That is the part that liberals just don't get: That a community might exist happily without their permission!!
They still cling to the hope that they can take control of the gun and enforce their ideals onto any one else within shooting distance ... in the next city, in the next state, across the Cuban border, or 10,000 miles away in Libya. Which is what America has been doing since the Damn Yankees started the Civil War. It wasn't about the blacks ... until the North looked like losing - at which point they changed the propaganda to drum up more support.
Have you actually visited the aforementioned website and read the material therein? Your response sounds as though you had a kneejerk reaction to the word "dixie".
Yup, read it. a simplistic cartoon-rendering of history, which substitutes myth and correlation for fact and causation. Tho' I do get a good chuckle from the assertion that them damn yankees caused two World Wars. I'm sure the Jews were pulling some trans-Atlantic strings from Wall Street...
Retarded.
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..."
US General Douglas MacArthur
This federal government is so overthrown that just thirty years ago this legislation would have been considered fiction from the minds of paranoids. Now it’s the new normal along with the Orwellian named Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act (taken right out of the Nazi playbook), and so on and so forth. I hear they have teams of monkey traitors working around the clock over at the Council On Foreign Relations getting this un-American, subversive crap drafted up. It is then handed over to completely compromised, Globalist bootlicking legislators for the rubber stamp. And what about that federal judge that was assassinated in the congresswoman Gabby what’s her name shooting? Nobody talks about him and he was the real target of that slick MK Ultra style shooting. That should send a chilling message to those on the federal bench that haven’t been bought off. Law’s?...We Don’t need no stinking laws. Pretty soon they might as well place giant statues of kangaroos out side the federal courthouses.
Spot on! I hear the Council on Globalist....I mean Foreign Relations is where its at! (sorry for finishing a sentence with a preposition...that always haunts me.)
From time to time, the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants.
Ah, another one quoting Jefferson. I'm sure are you polishing up the musket for your shot as the new world redcoats march onto the village green.
Spare me.
Maybe you'll like Sam Adams better:
“If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” Samuel Adams
Liberty is the great parent of science and of virtue; and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
And patriots - no free ride on this
Incredible -the Senate is full of traitors -treasonous bastards -elected by a moronic populace that has their heads up their asses addicted to watching Dancing with the retards , living for a peek of sex tapes of Kim Kardashian- and watching football all Sunday - actujally I watch a lot of football and other sports -but I stay away from dancing with the retards and I'm very careful not to put my head up my ass - I don't like sniffing my own shit, like so many other Americans apparently enjoy.
I'm so pissed off at my fellow Americans -although it seems like half the people in Dallas are a bunch of third world foreigners who don't seem to care about what America used to stand for.
Well, I'm just south of you a couple hour's and I give a shit. This is a total outrage to say the least. Fuck the m-fer's. We have worked our ball's of to stay afloat in this country with moral's I might add. Patient's are starting to run thin all over............
Don't insult third world foreigners by comparing them to Texans.
Before you insult people with a foreign accent...just keep in mind...they probably speak at least one more language than you do.
Yeah, that fellow Khalid Sheik Mohammed told everything after just 3 molasses cookies and two cups of tea.
Geo Wash, why do you continue to make the nonsense assertions?
He probably didn't have to talk, and he probably wasn't tortured... it's the West that's destroying the world, not the Iraqis... did you not notice? There is enough suspicion about what exactly Al Qaeda is and who financed / organized it, that I'm not sure it's not a western creation operated by the west for the benefit of the grand opera being performed as we're being raped.
I'm fairly convinced by the actions of the oligarchs / government stooges since 9.11.01 that perhaps all of world history as we know it is just complete nonsense. I don't think we know any of the truth, just the misinformation they want us to know so we cooperate with their ridiculous plans.
I'm keeping my eyes and ears open, and my skepticism high.
Of COURSE AL-CIA-da is a Western creation! OBL was created, trained, and funded by the US back in the 70-80's. And notice how AL-CIA-DA miraculously shows up to help overthrow Libya and next, Syria. That is NO coincidence! If you want to learn more about US-created "terrorists", search the archives at infowars.com or prisonplanet.com and you will find myriad data.
Did you know that Anwar al Alaki dined at the Pentagon just months after 9/11? How curious is THAT!
Man...I'd really love to waterboard you. Fortunately for both of us...it's not "torture"...you'll love it. It'll be fun:-)
And I'll bet that if we do it long enough...you'll admit to me that your granny was a slut and you wear ladies underwear if that's what I want to hear you say...in order for me to stop.
Yes...it's very "effective" at getting people to say whatever the fuck you want them to say.
Anyone can be a threat to national security. Recently, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez fired his gun at the White House, two bullets hitting the building. Anyone who even looks suspiceous should be reported immediately so that person can be addressed. This is for the good of our country and all must cooperate for the good of the country. Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you sacrifice to secure your country.
BO,Fuck off.Stick to selling your arsehole for crack while you attended harvard as an affirmative action poster boy.
Now that Bawney Fwank is going to have more time on his hands, maybe he and Barry can get together for a "joint venture", if ya know what I mean. Bawney can show him the ropes on how to turn a profit with such activity....
Ah I see our troll is done with dinner is back giving every post red arrows. Such a sad little creep.
I gave one of those red arrows. I don't like fascists- sue me.
Sean, sorry I was not refering to the BO post above but to posts further up the line, I red arrowed that BO post as well. No suit needed here.
Oh well, those willing to sacrifice essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither.
Barry - suspicious, not suspiceous.
Also, on behalf of the world, please return your Nobel Peace Prize.
Thanks.
Brilliant re NPP.
I hope my bunk in the FEMA camp has a view of the mountains. I like to see snow capped mountains when I get up. And those 40 man showers, humma humma, can I scrub your back? Not being able to smoke or have morning coffee will be a real major bummer though. Good thing I am skinny, the tunnel will not have to be big enough to drive a Peterbuilt through.
Don't drop the soap in those 40 man showers
Do remember I am gay, that soap is going to be flying all over that shower!
I don't think it's a good idea , Boiltheritch, to associate gay with concentration camps.
Maybe they will give us our own camp, it will be like a huge version of CraigsList M4M, but without the feather boas.
A factiod for all, the first use of concentration camps in Germany circa 1935 was for "legitimate" criminals and mostly those were for violating Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, making homosexual (between males) activity a criminal offense. They went out and rounded up thousands and thousands and needed the first concentration camps to accomodate all of them.
From Wiki: In 1935, the Nazis broadened the law so that the courts could pursue any "lewd act" whatsoever, even one involving no physical contact, such as masturbating next to each other. Convictions multiplied by a factor of ten to about 8,000 per year. Furthermore, the Gestapo could transport suspected offenders to concentration camps without any legal justification at all (even if they had been acquitted or already served their sentence in jail). Thus, between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexual men were forced into concentration camps, where they were identified by the pink triangle. The majority of them died there.
And for the more shameful news about it WE continued the practice after the war.
"While the Nazi persecution of homosexuals is reasonably well-known today, far less attention had been given to the continuation of this persecution in post-war Germany. In 1945, when concentration camps were liberated, homosexual prisoners were not freed but were instead made to serve out their sentence under Paragraph 175."
My bold but that section seemed so germain to todays discussion. Today they come for me tomorrow they come for you!
It's raining men....
HALLELUJAH
Sorry... someone had to say it boiltherich. :D
How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
Since the rule of law and its consequences is being diluted mightily these days as evidenced on Wall Street, high finance, mortgages, etc., why would anyone expect that even if they hadn't passed this bill they still would honor Constitutional Rights involving a defined citizen-terrorist as interpreted by them? Bottomline what they're really saying here is that they don't need a civilian judge, judicial process, due process, to transform an enemy-combatant interpretation into motion - rather a military judge, process, etc., is better suited for that.
They would've done what they wanted to do regardless under the emergency guise of National Security. All this Bill does is codify everything to eliminate civilian legal paperwork hassles and other related red-tape obstacles to an already decided upon course of military action. In effect, they consider the U.S. right now is in a domestic war. We've always pretty much considered 'going to war' to mean on foreign soil. That unfortunately is no longer the case in their eyes after 9/11.
Well, that's the way I see this alternate-universe.
Oh and btw, in case anyone believes this alternate-universe hasn't been created before in this nation's history, read about the Copperheads during the Civil War.
History may not repeat itself completely but one hell of a lot of times it rhymes really damn well. Indeed. Just one excerpt...............
"The Copperheads sometimes talked of violent resistance, and in some cases started to organize. They never actually made an organized attack, however. As war opponents, Copperheads were suspected of disloyalty, and their leaders were sometimes arrested and held for months in military prisons without trial."
Perhaps in some ways, we're seeing a modern quasi-version of The Copperheads with the OWS movement. But I digress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperheads_(politics)
Perhaps the government cough assholes are just trying to suppress all opposition and oppress all opponents. I am fairly certain this is intended to intimidate the citizenry not to go out into the street to protest, becuase it will be considered hostile to the regime. Fucking sickening.
I think it will also discourage folk from sharing "news" with those they don't know well or trust, thus further limiting the spread of useful information, or spreading networks, making allies, etc.
last year people wrote posts about having talks with friends and family about precious metals as a store of value, etc. - this idea started getting negative feedback here over the summer, and more people talk of just keeping quiet about any type of prep they're doing.
feels like a significant shift to me, sadly.
Did this guy get VOTED in...???
It makes a difference?