UPDATE: 8:45PM CST - The bill has passed the Senate with the Levin/Mccain provisions intact
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As I wrote earlier this week, when the the first effort to block this un-Constitutional expansion of power failed, there were other proposals to do so. I also wrote that they were no more likely to succeed. With today's renewed fighting, it's time to look this arch redefinition of our system squarely in the eye.
Via HuffPo:
"This constant push that everything has to be militarized ... I don't think that creates a good country," Feinstein said. "Because we have values, and due process of law is one of those values. And so I object, I object to holding American citizens without trial. I do not believe that makes us more safe."
Adam Serwer, as ever ahead of the curve, flagged this a few weeks ago before most others were discussing it:
"The provision mandates the military detention of terrorism suspects believed to be members of Al Qaeda-affiliated groups, even if they're apprehended on American soil. This turns the presumption of innocence on its head, since it essentially concludes someone is a terrorist without so much as a trial.
The bill also authorizes the indefinite military detention of American citizens and permanent residents if they are suspected of links to Al Qaeda, something so controversial that even the Bush administration balked at it, slipping Jose Padilla back into the criminal justice system after years of military detention in order to avoid a confrontation with the Supreme Court." EMPHASIS OURS
Glenn Greenwald writes:
There are several very revealing aspects to all of this. First, the 9/11 attack happened more than a decade ago; Osama bin Laden is dead; the U.S. Government claims it has killed virtually all of Al Qaeda’s leadership and the group is “operationally ineffective” in the Afghan-Pakistan region; and many commentators insisted that these developments would mean that the War on Terror would finally begin to recede. And yet here we have the Congress, on a fully bipartisan basis, acting not only to re-affirm the war but to expand it even further: by formally declaring that the entire world (including the U.S.) is a battlefield and the war will essentially go on forever."
Permawar, a concept which has worked so 'effectively' in the arenas of poverty and drugs, now is being expanded into an area even more murkily defined; for the umpteenth time in a decade, I feel compelled to remind everyone that "terror" is a tactic, not an enemy.
Why the push from Senators on both sides of the aisle to do this now? Who knows? Dahlia Lithwick points out that nobody in positions of responsibility for actually prosecuting such matters wants the Levin/McCain provisions:
"Now, perhaps you suspect these thorny questions about the handling of terrorists are best left to the experts, and that the Senate was simply listening to them. Such suspicions would be unfounded. The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, theCIA 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. It sees the proposed language as limiting its flexibility."
We haven't mandated military custody since the days of Joe McCarthy. We have expressly forbidden, by law (the Posse Comitatus Act), the use of military troops against our own citizens on our own soil since shortly after the Civil War.
Now that we have effectively defeated al-Qaeda by every traditional, strategic metric, we have no need to further erode our fundamental values.
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