During an interview
with RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been
shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens
from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain
and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment
permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military.
I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican
members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their
constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus
Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo
Party.
These conclusions
are self-evident, and I stand by them.
However, I
jumped to conclusions when I implied that the Obama regime opposes
military detention on constitutional grounds. Ray
McGovern and Glenn
Greenwald might have jumped to the same conclusions.
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An article
by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate reported that the entire Obama regime
opposed the military detention provision in the McCain/Levin amendment.
Lithwick wrote: "The secretary of defense, the director of
national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the CIA director,
and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division
have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill
are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president
will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed."
I checked the
URLs that Lithwick supplied. It is clear that the Obama regime objects
to military detention, and I mistook this objection for constitutional
scruples.
However, on
further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection
to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional
rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention
because the implication of military detention is that detainees
are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman
Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined "to be a member
of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation
to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person
be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes."
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Detainees
treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the
Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime
opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights.
These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees
to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means
when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the
regime "flexibility."
The Bush/Obama
regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees
are not POWs, but "enemy combatants," "terrorists,"
or some other designation that removes all accountability from the
US government for their treatment.
By requiring
military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the
maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status
from detainees.
A careful reading
of the Obama
regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion.
The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of
the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority
it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF),
Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime
says. "After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention
authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series
of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect
the country."
In
other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive
branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats
detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion,
no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees
are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability,
and the executive branch does not want accountability.
Those who see
hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they
think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.
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