Last week, the Senate approved the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which, along with the annual defense budget, included a section that President Barack Obama has threatened to veto if it comes to his desk intact. Sections 1031 and 1032 include language that, if passed into law, would give the president and the military full authority to arrest, indefinitely detain and interrogate anyone involved in Al Qaeda, the Taliban or anyone associated with a terrorist organization. American citizens would not be exempt from these provisions and thus, if arrested, would also be afforded no trial, no representation and no charges — basically stripping them of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights.
Without going into a slippery slope argument about the foreseeable application of this act on law-abiding Americans, there are numerous causes for alarm here. The language of this bill explicitly affirms for the future what the president is already doing now — detaining alleged terrorists with no charges. To give one singular person the power to do this, unchecked by anyone else, is incredibly troubling. And nothing is more corrosive than unchecked power.
The government claims that most of Al Qaeda is dead. Combat troops will be coming home from Iraq by month's end, and there is a popular movement to significantly scale back combat in Afghanistan. The NDAA is what Congress is using to convince the public that the war is still necessary and that the prior justifications for indefinite detention still exist. But, luckily, all of that Congressional gridlock and lack of bipartisanship we hear about — wait, what? It passed 93-7?
Even Senator Mark Udall's amendment, which would have stripped the bill of its most unconstitutional provisions, failed by a 37-61 vote, with more than enough Democrats joining Senate Republicans — the alleged party of small government — to strike it down.
The bill, cosponsored by Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Senator Carl Levin, also stipulates that these prisoners, potentially American, can be detained "without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force." The AUMF, passed in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, is another murky statute, granting the president the broadly interpreted power to pursue any of the individuals or groups associated with the Sept. 11 attacks.
Since then, this has basically meant, well, anybody we want. If you are declared a terrorist by the state, sans trial, you fall into this realm. And you'll be able to count on the American people to vigorously nod their heads in blind loyalty, acquiescing to a stripping-down of liberty in the name of security. We nodded in agreement when the president assassinated an American citizen without due process, so why not give him the power to detain who he wants as well? No need to flaunt our justice system's efficacy by affording them rights and placing them behind bars.
In this new, 21st-century international landscape, war has become more amorphous than ever. The U.S. is waging war on a tactic instead of a state, and acts of a criminal nature have been redefined as acts of terrorism and thus, acts of war. The ever-widening "war zone" is not where the bombs are planted; it includes our own backyards. This creates a perpetual Orwellian state of war, one in which we can detain individuals indefinitely, without the slightest bit of evidentiary support.
Obama has threatened to veto the bill with these current provisions, and I pray he does. Lost in the partisan kerfuffle where winning and losing power dominates headlines, Congress can sneak this in and the American people end up losing. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, that makes us neither free nor brave. It makes us less American.
