White
House demands military prisons for Americans under NDAA
RT,
17
September, 2012
The White
House has asked the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals to place an
emergency stay on a ruling made last week by a federal judge so that
the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans without
charge is reaffirmed immediately.
On
Wednesday, September 12, US District Court Judge Katherine Forrest
made permanent a temporary injunction she issued in May that bars the
federal government from abiding by the indefinite detention provision
in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, or
NDAA. Judge Forrest ruled that a clause that gives the government the
power to arrest US citizens suspected of maintaining alliances with
terrorists and hold them without due process violated the
Constitution and that the White House would be stripped of that
ability immediately.
Only hours
after Judge
Forrest issued last week’s ruling, the Obama administration
threatened
to appeal the decision, and on Monday morning they followed
through.
At around 9
a.m. Monday, September 17, the White House filed an emergency stay in
federal appeals court in an effort to have the Second Circuit strip
away Judge Forrest’s ruling from the week earlier.
“Almost
immediately after Judge Forrest ruled, the Obama administration
challenged the decision,” writes Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist that is listed as the lead plaintiff in the
case. According to Hedges, the government called Judge Forrest’s
most recent ruling an “extraordinary injunction of worldwide
scope,” and Executive Branch attorneys worked into the weekend
to find a way to file their stay.
“The
Justice Department sent a letter to Forrest and the Second Circuit
late Friday night informing them that at 9 a.m. Monday the Obama
administration would ask the Second Circuit for an emergency stay
that would lift Forrest’s injunction,” Hedges writes. “This
would allow Obama to continue to operate with indefinite detention
authority until a formal appeal was heard. The government’s
decision has triggered a constitutional showdown between the
president and the judiciary.”
Attorney
Carl Mayer, a counsel for Hedges and his co-plaintiffs, confirmed to
RT early Monday that the stay was in fact filed with the Second
Circuit.
“This
may be the most significant constitutional standoff since the
Pentagon Papers case,” Carl Mayer says in a separate statement
posted on Mr. Hedge’s blog.
Bruce
Afran, who serves as co-lead counsel along with Mayer, tells Hedges
that the White House could be waging a war against the injunction to
ensure that the Obama administration has ample time to turn the NDAA
against any protesters participating in domestic demonstrations.
“A
Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming
that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the US and
saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely
riots,” Afran tells Hedges. “It is my view that this is why the
government wants to reopen the NDAA — so it has a tool to round up
would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest,
violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest
would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power.
Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the
day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that
the two are connected. The government wants to reopen the NDAA
injunction so that they can use it to block protests.”
Hedges, who
has previously reported for papers including the New York Times and
the Christian Science Monitor, argued that his job as a journalist
requires him to routinely interact and converse with persons that may
be considered terrorists in the eyes of the US government.
Under the
NDAA, Americans “who was part of or substantially supported
al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in
hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners"
can be held in prison cells “until the end of hostilities,”
vague verbiage that essentially allows for those suspect of such
associations to be decided under the discretion of US President
Barack Obama or any federal agent underneath him.
“Because
the language is so vague in this law,” Mr.
Mayer explains to RT, “if any journalist or activist is
seen as reporting or offering opinions about groups that could
somehow be linked not just to al-Qaeda but to any opponent of the
United States or even opponents of our allies”
“I
spent many years in countries where the military had the power to
arrest and detain citizens without charge,” Hedges wrote when
he first filed his suit in January. “I have been in some of
these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have ‘disappeared’
into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping
and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation.
And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought
if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from
corporate fascism.”
Monday
morning, Hedges once more responded to the White House’s relentless
attempts to reauthorize powers granted under the NDAA, asking, “If
the administration is this anxious to restore this section of the
NDAA, is it because the Obama government has already used it? Or does
it have plans to use the section in the immediate future?”
“The
decision to vigorously fight Forrest’s ruling is a further example
of the Obama White House’s steady and relentless assault against
civil liberties, an assault that is more severe than that carried out
by George W. Bush,” writes Hedges. “Obama has refused to restore
habeas corpus. He supports the FISA Amendment Act, which
retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution has
traditionally been illegal — warrantless wire tapping,
eavesdropping and monitoring directed against US citizens. He has
used the Espionage Act six times against whistle-blowers who have
exposed government crimes, including war crimes, to the public. He
interprets the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as giving
him the authority to assassinate US citizens, as he did the cleric
Anwar al-Awlaki. And now he wants the right to use the armed forces
to throw U.S. citizens into military prisons, where they will have no
right to a trial and no defined length of detention.”
In his
latest blog post, Hedges acknowledges, “The government has now
lost four times in a litigation that has gone on almost nine months.”
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