{"id":4165,"date":"2011-12-08T21:30:08","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T04:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=4165"},"modified":"2011-12-08T21:30:08","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T04:30:08","slug":"deranged-senate-votes-for-military-detention-of-all-terror-suspects-and-a-permanent-guantanamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=4165","title":{"rendered":"Deranged Senate Votes for Military Detention Of All Terror Suspects And A Permanent Guantanamo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deranged Senate Votes for Military Detention Of All Terror Suspects And A Permanent Guantanamo<\/strong>
\nBy Andy Worthington – The Public Record – Dec 3rd, 2011<\/p>\n

(Left to right) Senators Joseph Lieberman, Carl Levin, chair, Senate Armed Services Committee, and John McCain. The controversial provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act were hatched in secret by Levin and McCain. Army photo by D. Myles Cullen<\/p>\n

The shameful dinosaurs of the Senate \u2014 hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making \u2014 approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), which contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions \u2014 Sections 1031 and 1032, designed to make mandatory the indefinite military detention of terror suspects until the end of hostilities in a \u201cwar on terror\u201d that seems to have no end (if they are identified as a member of al-Qaeda or an alleged affiliate, or have planned or carried out an attack on the United States), ending a long and entirely appropriate tradition of trying terror suspects in federal court for their alleged crimes, and Sections 1033 and 1034, which seek to prevent the closure of Guant\u00e1namo by imposing onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners, and banning the use of funds to purchase an alternative prison anywhere else. I have previously remarked on these depressing developments in articles in July and October, as they have had a horribly long period of gestation, in which no one with a grip on reality \u2014 and admiration for the law \u2014 has been able to wipe them out.<\/p>\n

The four sections are connected, as cheerleaders for the mandatory military detention of terror suspects want them to be sent to Guant\u00e1namo, and have done, if I recall correctly, at least since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas plane bomber in 2009, was arrested, read his Miranda rights, and interrogated by the FBI. Recently, Abdulmutallab, who told his interrogators all they wanted to know without being held in military custody \u2014 and, for that matter, without being tortured, which is what the hardcore cheerleaders for military detention also want \u2014 was tried and convicted in a federal court.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of other terror suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court, throughout the Bush years, and under Obama, but supporters of military custody like to forget this, as it conflicts with their notions, held since the aftermath of 9\/11 and the Bush administration\u2019s horrendous flight from the law, that terrorists are warriors. Underpinning it all is the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the founding document of the \u201cwar on terror,\u201d passed the week after the 9\/11 attacks. This authorizes the President to pursue anyone, anywhere who he thinks was involved in the 9\/11 attacks, and it is a dreadfully open-ended excuse for endless war whose repeal I have long encouraged, but which some lawmakers have been itching to renew, even after the death of Osama bin Laden, and the obvious incentives for the winding-down of the ruinous, decade-long \u201cwar on terror.\u201d …more<\/a><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deranged Senate Votes for Military Detention Of All Terror Suspects And A Permanent Guantanamo By Andy Worthington – The Public Record – Dec 3rd, 2011 (Left to right) Senators Joseph Lieberman, Carl Levin, chair, Senate Armed Services Committee, and John McCain. The controversial provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act were hatched in secret by more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2164],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}