(NEW YORK) MintPress — President Obama on Thursday may have scored a victory in the debate over a proposed amendment to his health care plan — the Senate voted Thursday to scrap an amendment allowing employers and insurers to opt out of provisions in the plan on moral or religious grounds — but he faces a fresh battle over a bill that would alter his national defense plan.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is challenging the controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012 that President Obama signed on December 31, 2011 which authorizes $662 billion in funding, “for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad,” including the indefinite detention, without charge or trial, of Americans the government suspects of involvement in terrorism.
Those sections of the bill begin by affirming that “the authority of the President under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a joint resolution passed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, includes the power to detain, via the Armed Forces, any person “who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces… without trial, until the end of the hostilities authorized by the AUMF.”
Obama had previously resolved to veto the NDAA, but abandoned that commitment.
In his Signing Statement, he explained, “I have signed the Act chiefly because it authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, crucial services for service members and their families, and vital national security programs that must be renewed . . . I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”
Throwback to a controversial past
Feinstein has argued that the detainee provisions of the NDAA violate basic due process rights and are a contemporary version of a World War II executive order that sent about 110,000 Japanese Americans to relocation camps throughout California and the West and held them there. It is considered one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.
The bill she is sponsoring, the Due Process Guarantee Act, would change those portions of the law to protect U.S. citizens and permanent legal residents but not tourists, business travelers, illegal residents and anyone who is not a citizen or green-card holder.
Feinstein has support from a unique coalition of liberals on the left and libertarians on the right. The bill has 24 co-sponsors including four Republicans, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jerry Moran of Kansas. Legislatures in several states, including Virginia, Missouri and Tennessee, have already passed resolutions to urge that the law not be implemented.
Public at risk?
The NDAA is one of several pieces of legislation that threaten to restrict the daily freedoms provided for in the Constitution. Implementation of these laws began shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks with the highly controversial Patriot Act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001.
Bruce Fein, a former Justice Deparment official in the Reagan Administration said the law “authorizes the president to employ the military to show up on any of our doorsteps and say, ‘We think, based upon secret facts, you’re … in some kind of way associated with al Qaeda that is fighting against our coalition partners, whoever they are. You can’t challenge any of our evidence, and you can go to Guantanamo Bay and rot for the rest of your life.’ ”
The law’s defenders argued that critics are exaggerating the civil liberties threat. Ken Gude, a national security analyst for the liberal Center for American Progress, argued that the law “establishes no new detention authority.”
But Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, an activist group rallying opposition to the law, argued there was no hearing on the detainee provisions.
He accused the sponsors — Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona — of “a spectacular abuse of the legislative process” and accused all who voted for the bill of “a profound abdication of the oath of office to protect the Constitution.”
Taking Feinstein one step further
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and others want even greater protection for individuals than Feinstein’s bill provides for.
Feinstein has been a true hero in fighting back against the NDAA,” said Chris Anders, legislative director of the ACLU. But, he contended, “The bill still needs some more work to meet the goals of explicitly blocking indefinite detention without charge or trial in the United States and ending illegal indefinite detention worldwide.”