Violence

NDAA DISSENTERS IN CONGRESS

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/truthdiggers_of_the_week_ndaa_dissenters_in_congress_20111216/

[....]

Even if President Obama couldn’t listen to the words of caution coming from the likes of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and FBI chief Robert Mueller, 136 members of the House of Representatives registered their disapproval of the bill in its final go-round, and 13 senators joined them. Six Republican senators dissented, including Rand Paul and Jim DeMint, and an equal number of Democrats, including Al Franken and Dick Durbin, along with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. As for the House, the breakdown was 93 Democrats and 43 Republicans. Good to know they were pushing back against this alarming, and ultimately successful, assault on Americans’ most sacred rights, even when the president failed to do his part.

we are all potentially homo sacer

“What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.”

Žižek, Slavoj. "How to begin: from the beginning." in: New Left Review. No. 57, p. 43-55, May/June 2009. (English).

"A Permanent State of Emergency"

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

“The Dangerous Defense Bill Heading Toward Obama's Desk”

Patricia J. Williams | December 14, 2011

You know these are interesting times when Glenn Beck, Dianne Feinstein, Rand Paul and the ACLU all stand on the same side of an issue. The issue in question is Subtitle D of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), particularly Sections 1031–1033, being discussed by the House and Senate as I write and headed to the president’s desk any day now. These hastily added, under-the-radar provisions, co-sponsored by Senators John McCain and Carl Levin, would allow for the indefinite military detention of any person alleged to be a member of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.” The provisions also apply to any person who supports or aids “belligerent” acts against the United States, whether the person is apprehended beyond our borders or on domestic soil.

For noncitizens, such detention would be mandatory. And while news agencies from Reuters to the Huffington Post have recently reported that American citizens would be “exempt” from this requirement, the truth is more complicated. Military detention would still be the default, even for citizens, but at the discretion of the president, it could be waived in favor of handing over the case to domestic law enforcement. Under this law, if the Defense Department thinks you’re a terrorist, there would be no presumption of innocence; you would be presumed a detainee of the military unless the executive decides otherwise. Without such a waiver, again, even if you’re a citizen, you will never hear words like “alleged” or “suspected.” You will be an “unprivileged enemy belligerent,” with limited rights to appeal that status, no rights to due process, or to a jury, or to a speedy trial guided by the rules of evidence.

According to the “law of war” invoked by these sections of the NDAA, a person in military custody can be held indefinitely, without charge and without access to civilian courts. Perhaps most significant, with the suspension of constitutional provisions for due process, there would be no Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. During the Congressional debate over the NDAA, proponents like Senators Saxby Chambliss and Lindsey Graham argued that when we capture someone who is deemed an enemy, we must start with the presumption that “the goal is to gather intelligence” and “prosecution is a secondary concern.” In numbingly infantile terms, they declared that “the meanest, nastiest killers in the world” should be questioned for “as long as it takes,” without them “lawyering up.” This need to make “them” talk was cited repeatedly, endlessly, as the main justification for military detention, with references to “surprise” technologies to get prisoners to speak. As though Abu Ghraib had never happened, there was exuberant embrace of methods Senator Graham promised would not be publicized by theArmy Field Manual.

Against the backdrop of President Obama’s recent exercise of that broadest of all possible executive actions—the targeted assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki—the controversy over military detention (and Obama’s threat to veto the NDAA) might seem less dramatic. (Senator Graham carried on gleefully about how much less constrained death is than “indefinite detention.”) But there is a crucial distinction: killing Awlaki, however extreme, was an action ostensibly based on tailored and specifically considered intelligence. Whether or not one agrees with it, it was not a decision generated by the kind of far-reaching, automatically militarizing mechanism this law would institutionalize.

As with much post-9/11 rhetoric, the Congressional debaters spoke of “terror” as though it were a clearly defined and embodied evil. But it is not at all clear what distinguishes mere dissent or sympathy or belief or commitment or satire from the kinds of expressions of hostile ideologies that this legislation would deem dangerous. If passed, the NDAA will inevitably be followed by a raft of First Amendment litigation. And what about “high crimes” like treason—would they still be tried in federal courts? Is treason more or less worrisome than “terrorism”?

And talk about iconic constitutional constructions: Glenn Beck’s online magazine, The Blaze, recently published a straightforwardly libertarian critique of the bill; the comments from his readers sizzle with Second Amendment belligerence from those “patriots” who declare that they are running out to buy more ammo and defecting to the hills. (“Want to see an army vet become a domestic terrorist?” reads the first comment. “If they pass this law…I will adopt a strategy of asymmetric warfare against the US government.”)

This latter breed of discontent also dovetails, no doubt, with deep, lingering resentments over states’ rights dating back to the Civil War, when the Union army occupied and governed Southern states in an effort to maintain order and protect ex-slaves. (Indeed, the proposed law would in effect revoke the Posse Comitatus Act, the Reconstruction-era law that bars the Army from engaging in domestic law enforcement.) In a less obvious way, the stripping of due process also re-establishes first- and second-class tiers of citizenship, eviscerating the Fourteenth Amendment by allowing the rights of citizenship to be suspended even more comprehensively than birthers and anti-immigration activists could have dreamed: by simple fiat.

“Citizen or not,” insists Senator Graham, it’s only “using good old-fashioned common sense” that persons covered by the act shouldn’t be given more rights than if they were in Afghanistan. And with that conceptual wand, I guess we have lowered the constitutional bar to whatever it is in Afghanistan.

NDAA 1031

Why This Is Important

UPDATE: Obama administration officially states he is signing the NDAA. House of Representatives have submitted for his signature. (7:10PM ET, 12/14).

The President will promptly sign NDAA Section 1031 into law, codifying who is eligible for "Detention under the law of war without trial." Without a trial, there is no chance to tell a judge the Executive Branch's evidence is bogus. The worst thing about this law is that it originally exempted U.S. citizens, but now it is sadly "agnostic" because the Obama administration asked to remove the exemption for citizens. See the C-SPAN video clip showing this fact:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ARkiJM2bA

Nader against NDAA section 1031

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/8915-congressional-tyranny-white-house-surrender

[....]

All of Obama's leading military and security officials oppose this codification of the ultimate Big Brother power. Imagine allowing the government to deny people accused of involvement with terrorism (undefined), including U.S. citizens arrested within the United States, the right to a trial by jury. Imagine allowing indefinite imprisonment for those accused without even proffering charges against them. Goodbye 5th and 6th Amendments.

On some government agency's unbridled order: just pick them up, arrest them without charges and throw them into the military brig indefinitely. This atrocity deserves to be repeatedly condemned loudly throughout the land by Americans who believe in the rights of due process, habeas corpus, right to confront your accusers, right to a jury trial--in short, liberty and the just rule of law.

Some stalwart lawyers are speaking out soundly: They include Georgetown Law Professor, David Cole, George Washington University Law Professor, Jonathan Turley, Republican lawyer, Bruce Fein, former American Bar Association (2005-2006) president, Michael Greco, and the always alert lawyers at the civil liberties groups. Their well-grounded outcries are not awakening the citizenry.

[....]

"In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture..."

The LAPD, Obama, and the National Defense Authorization Act: WTF?

By Mud Baron on Dec 14, 2011

http://mobile.laist.com/2011/12/14/obama_the_lapd_and_the_national_def.php

"Shut your fucking mouth! We can lose you in here."

That's what "Officer K" of the Los Angeles Police Department's Metro Detention facility said to me as I was lining up to be bailed out with 8 other arrestees forty hours after my own arrest at the raid of the Occupy LA encampment. It seems "Officer K" wanted me not to discuss legal instructions from the glass of the neighboring pod, D block, from a few of the occupiers who had not been able to contact their lawyers two days into their arrest.

Not having planned to be arrested nor memorized my attorney's landline phone number (have you?) I'd asked Family Guy writer Patrick Meighan, my bunkmate who got out four hours earlier, to get in touch with my lawyer on my behalf. Though it was someone else who bonded me out, I was surprised but glad that I had been sprung and could say goodbye to the prison catering done by the same company used by the Los Angeles Unified School District. "Officer K" may been merely trying to provoke a response out of me, but the behavior was unacceptable of someone sworn to "Serve and Protect."

So how does a tale of civilian police and how they handle arrested protesters connect to national politics and policy?

"Shut your fucking mouth! We can lose you in here" becomes even more poignant as the constitutionally challenged National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 sits on President Obama's desk. As it currently stands, spokespeople for Obama have stated he would not veto it.

[....]