“It denigrates the very foundations of this country.”
by digby
Spencer Ackerman on the Senate’s latest atrocity:
Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: they don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is posed to pass its bill as early as tonight.
There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.
But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”
An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.
So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.
This is such a good idea I don’t see why we can’t apply this to criminal law as well. After all, if the government just “knows” who’s guilty and who isn’t we it could save scads of money on trials. It’s really very inefficient and shows such a lack of trust in our government to always do the right thing to force them to prove such things.
And anyway, they know exactly who the American terrorists are so there’s no need to worry that they might make an error or overreact to domestic dissent. It’s not like they’ve ever done that before or anything.
Let’s just let them do their job, shall we? If you’re innocent you have absolutely nothing to worry about. After all, except for that little issue with the WMD in Iraq, the government’s hardly made any mistakes at all lately.
Update: Emptywheel has more