Obama echoes Bush: CIA abductees can’t sue

Yesterday, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization act. The law now allows US military can to hold detainees indefinitely, without even a semblance of a trial.

This means that the Cheney/Bush position on due process stands vindicated, and that Senator Obama's protest against it stands abandoned. More importantly, though, this is terrible news for human rights.

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@Thomas,

This has been disturbing since I first heard of the Jose Padilla case back in, oh, maybe 2003. Obviously, the president doesn't have time to bother locking up people like you and I, but I'm sure he could learn how to delegate.

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@Thomas,

Oh dear. Does it at least include US citizens this time? Fair is fair.

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Barak, we hardly knew ye . . .

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@Setanta,

Indeed. But this one is alive so we can get to know him better.

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@dlowan,

One shudders . . .

To bastardize a Churchill quote, Mr. Obama is the worst choice for president, except for all the others . . .

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Oh dear. Does it at least include US citizens this time? Fair is fair.

No, but you'd never guess that from some of the hysterical headlines from the past couple of days.

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@Thomas,

It's hard to fathom how anyone can muster any enthusiasm for the man.

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@ehBeth,

I will agree with that, though likely for reasons different from yours.

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@georgeob1,

Well I'm certainly not going to be found referring to him as a saint. That's your shtick.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

One shudders . . .

To bastardize a Churchill quote, Mr. Obama is the worst choice for president, except for all the others . . .

Or, to put it another way, he's the best-looking horse in the glue factory.

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@Lustig Andrei,

That'd be the killer for me were I voting.

I haven't followed your election stuff, but from my brief gleanings, he's overall the least worst horse with a chance of winning.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Yesterday, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization act. The law now allows US military can to hold detainees indefinitely, without even a semblance of a trial.

"The law now allows" implies that this is something new.

However, the law already allows captured enemy fighters to be held as POWs, without trial, until the end of the war.

This new law just repeats what has been established law for centuries.

Incidentally, while there is no requirement for a full-blown criminal trial, people so detained would still be able to have a federal judge review whether they are legitimately being held.

Thomas wrote:

This means that the Cheney/Bush position on due process stands vindicated, and that Senator Obama's protest against it stands abandoned.

And rightly so.

I can see why people opposed the torture. But the fuss over detaining captured enemy soldiers was always pretty silly.

Thomas wrote:

More importantly, though, this is terrible news for human rights.

How so? Is it a human rights violation to detain captured enemy soldiers until the end of the war?

In any case, it probably is a non-issue. When everyone started screaming that the US no longer had the right to hold POWs until the end of the war, the US stopped capturing enemy fighters alive. I think 2005 was the last year that fresh captures were delivered to Guantanamo. I doubt we'll go back to capturing them alive again anytime soon.

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@Irishk,

Irishk wrote:

dlowan wrote:
Oh dear. Does it at least include US citizens this time? Fair is fair.

No, but you'd never guess that from some of the hysterical headlines from the past couple of days.

The law exempts US citizens from the part that *mandates* military detention for enemy fighters. However, US citizens are included in the section that gives the government power to hold fighters in military detention.

In other words, when it comes to citizens, it's up to government discretion.

That's nothing new though. During the Civil War, captured Confederate soldiers were detained in Union POW camps.

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@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

How so? Is it a human rights violation to detain captured enemy soldiers until the end of the war?

It doesn't under the traditional definitions of "enemy soldier" and "war". But it does once the government---

redefines "war" to include regular crimes like terrorist attacks,
redefines "battlefield" to include the whole world,
redefines "enemy soldier" to include any criminal who tries to harm the United States, and
assures that "the end of the war" will never come, given the over-broad definitions introduced.

These word games reduce due process to an empty shell: Americans arrest civilians who aren't soldiers in any meaningful sense of the word. The Americans never need to establish by any standard of evidence that those civilians have waged war against the United States in any meaninful sense of the word. And so the civilians get locked away indefinitely, with no practical way to assert that they never belonged in jail in the first place. That is the human-rights violation.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

That's nothing new though. During the Civil War, captured Confederate soldiers were detained in Union POW camps.

Right. So, why all the hysteria? You'd have thunk we turned into the Third Reich overnight.

Quote:

The final version of the bill also provides, in sub-section(e), that "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

oralloy wrote:
How so? Is it a human rights violation to detain captured enemy soldiers until the end of the war?

It doesn't under the traditional definitions of "enemy soldier" and "war". But it does once the government---
redefines "war" to include regular crimes like terrorist attacks,
redefines "battlefield" to include the whole world,
redefines "enemy soldier" to include any criminal who tries to harm the United States, and
assures that "the end of the war" will never come, given the over-broad definitions introduced.
These word games reduce due process to an empty shell: Americans arrest civilians who aren't soldiers in any meaningful sense of the word.

There is no redefinition, and no word games.

We have a foreign organization that is trying to make catastrophic attacks against us, and we are sending our soldiers to fight that foreign organization. That's a war.

And as this foreign enemy resides in multiple nations, and attacks multiple nations, the battlefield is indeed global in scope.

As for the length of the war, take that up with al-Qa'ida. If they elected to surrender and stop attacking us, the war would end.

Thomas wrote:

The Americans never need to establish by any standard of evidence that those civilians have waged war against the United States in any meaninful sense of the word. And so the civilians get locked away indefinitely, with no practical way to assert that they never belonged in jail in the first place. That is the human-rights violation.

Except it isn't true.

Captured enemy soldiers (should they have the rare fortune to be captured alive) have the right to have their case reviewed by a federal judge, where they can argue that they are actually not part of al-Qa'ida.

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@Irishk,

Irishk wrote:

Right. So, why all the hysteria? You'd have thunk we turned into the Third Reich overnight.

It's just a bunch of election year pandering by both parties.

Politicians who wanted to establish their support for the war on terrorism got to vote for the bill. And politicians who wanted to establish their opposition to the war on terror got to vote against the bill.

Now they're all happily crafting campaign ads proclaiming whichever vote they cast.

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@oralloy,

Quote:

We have a foreign organization that is trying to make catastrophic attacks against us, and we are sending our soldiers to fight that foreign organization. That's a war.

Only in Newspeak.

1 Reply

@McTag,

McTag wrote:

Oralloy wrote:
We have a foreign organization that is trying to make catastrophic attacks against us, and we are sending our soldiers to fight that foreign organization. That's a war.

Only in Newspeak.

Do you realize that this effort to deny us our right to hold captured enemy fighters as POWs actually has the unintended consequence of making it lawful for us to kill enemy soldiers without quarter?

The principle that "we have to accept an enemy's surrender and let them live" exists only so long as we have the right to detain that captured enemy as a POW.

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Obama echoes Bush: CIA abductees can’t sue

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