Thread: Obama Wins Back The Right To Indefinitely Detain Under NDAA

Obama Wins Back The Right To Indefinitely Detain Under NDAA

July 18, 2013





By Christopher Twarowski
The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the government Wednesday in vacating a permanent injunction sought by several prominent journalists and activists barring the enforcement of a provision of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which they claim, legalizes the of American citizens on U.S. soil.
In a 60-page decision, the court ruled against such an injunction—which had previously been granted, and the provision, Section 1021, ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge—additionally arguing that the case’s plaintiffs, which include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, among four others (collectively nicknamed “The Magnificent Seven”), do not have standing.
“We conclude that plaintiffs lack standing to seek preenforcement review of Section 1021 and vacate the permanent injunction,” reads Wednesday’s decision. “The American citizen plaintiffs lack standing because Section 1021 says nothing at all about the President’s authority to detain American citizens. And while Section 1021 does have a real bearing on those who are neither citizens nor lawful resident aliens and who are apprehended abroad, the non-citizen plaintiffs also have failed to establish standing because they have not shown a sufficient threat that the government will detain them under Section 1021. Accordingly, we do not address the merits of plaintiffs’ constitutional claims.
Obama Wins Back The Right To Indefinitely Detain Under NDAA [continued]
Hedges v. Obama NDAA decision

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Appeals Court Affirms NDAA Indefinite Detentions


Throws Out Previous Court's Ban on Enforcement

by Jason Ditz, July 17, 2013



A Federal Appeals Court in New York has thrown out a previous ban on the enforcement of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) statute allowing the president to impose indefinite detention without trial.
A 2012 lawsuit against the NDAA, brought by Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and others, had sought to preemptively block the federal government from using the NDAA to detain them as dissidents, since the bill was extremely vague about who it could apply to and granted presidents seemingly enormous latitude on the matter.
Judge Katherine Forrest twice ruled in their favor, and in September permanently blocked the use of the NDAA’s detention clause. It is that block which was removed today by the Appellate Court, which ruled that Hedges et al hadn’t established “sufficient basis to fear detention.”
President Obama fought against the Forrest ruling, claiming it could force him to release some of the people he’s already detaining without trial, and administration officials have defended the idea of leeway on who counts as “aiding the enemy,” saying it was neither “possible nor advisable” to issue specific rules.
But while objecting to the idea of limitations in the abstract, the administration sought to avoid getting into any specifics of who it might detain with the NDAA, and simply argued that none of the listed participants in the case could prove ahead of time that they were liable to be detained. And of course once they’re detained without access to courts, they couldn’t challenge it anyhow.
Indeed, the court openly spurned the question of whether or not it could detain any of the listed people, seemingly conceding the point that Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir could conceivably be accused of “aiding al-Qaeda” for being involved in WikiLeaks, as Bradley Manning has been, and on those grounds might then be detained under the NDAA, but saying that she hadn’t proven her detention was “imminent” and therefore she couldn’t challenge it.

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/07/17/a...te-detentions/