Thread: Happy New Year: Don’t Bother Asking for an Attorney When You’re Detained

Happy New Year: Don’t Bother Asking for an Attorney When You’re Detained

by Gale Courey Toensing
Global Research, January 2, 2012

The headlines said it all. The Huffington Post teaser shouted: HAPPY NEW YEAR: YOU CAN NOW BE DETAINED INDEFINITELY while Infowars proclaimed a more sedate: Happy New Year: Obama Signs NDAA, Indefinite Detention Now Law of the Land.

The NDAA is the $662 billion National Defense Authorization Act that President Obama signed into law on New Year’s Eve. In addition to funding the United States’ ongoing wars and the 900 military bases it maintains in 130 countries, the bill provides for the U.S. president to have draconian worldwide authority to have the military seize anyone suspected of “terrorism” or providing aid to terrorists or “associated forces” anywhere in the world, including U.S. citizens on American soil, and detain them without charge or trial indefinitely. “It’s a little New Year’s present to our constitutional republic,” Alex Jones says angrily in a YouTube video.

Amnesty International announced it would join over 45 other organizations to protest the NDAA and the military prison at Guantanamo in front of the White House on January 11 – the 10th anniversary of the “war on terror” prison. More information is available here.

The December 31 signing came after weeks of conflicting claims by the White House and the Senate, which approved the final version of the revised NDAA by a vote of 86-13 on December 15 – ironically, Bill of Rights Day. Obama had promised to veto an earlier version of the bill, claiming he “strongly objects” to the military custody provisions because “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.” He later changed his mind and agreed to sign the bill after revisions shifted the ultimate authority for detaining people from the State Department to the presidency. Meanwhile, in a C-Span video of a Senate debate on the bill, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) revealed it was the Obama administration that asked the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee to remove language from the bill that would have prohibited U.S. citizens’ military detention without due process. Levin is chairman of the committee and drafted the NDAA with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

The president issued a signing statement with the bill in which he claimed “serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.” The reservations do not center around constitutional rights regarding due process or international human rights laws concerning detention and interrogation, but rather over concerns that “some in Congress continue to insist upon restricting the options available to our counterterrorism professionals and interfering with the very operations that have kept us safe.”

Those operations may include killing or capturing American militants such as Anwar Al Awlaki, who was killed in Yemen on September 20, 2011, by a missile fired from an American drone, according to a Reuters report. “American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials,” the report says. “There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate… The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.