NDAA Provisions Struck Down in Federal Court

 

Michelle Obama said she was for once in her adult life proud of her country when support for her husband as President of the United States reached a crescendo.  Hope was returning to America.  That idea has been significantly called into question over the intervening years.  However, what occurred yesterday should make all Americans proud.  Our system, seemingly broken in countless ways – still works.

The controversial National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) signed by Barack Obama, whose provisions (SEC. 1031 & 1032) give the National Security Council and the U.S. government the power to detain anyone deemed to be a “terrorist” indefinitely without charge or trial anywhere in the world including U.S. citizens was struck down in federal court on Wednesday by Judge Katherine Forest.

The ruling was due to a lawsuit brought about by titans in the civil rights community.  The plaintiffs in the case include scholars, journalists and activists namely Noam Chomskey, Daniel Elseberg, Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolf, and Cornel West.

NDAA was borne out of bipartisan effort with rabid support from Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Carl Levin (D-MI) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT).  Sen. Graham is probably the most vociferous proponent literally screaming at his colleagues in the senate, “When [terrorists] ask for their lawyer, you tell them ‘shut up’!”

Here Sen. Graham reiterates that National Security interests supersede those rights and liberties ensconced in the bill of rights and Constitution he is sworn to protect.  “You are not to be given a lawyer if our national security interests [a.k.a. National Security Council an unelected body] dictate you are not to be given a lawyer.”

Judge Kathrine Forest of the southern district of New York evidently disagrees with the senator.  She struck down provisions 1031 & 1032 precisely because she feels they infringe on 1st and 5th Amendment rights.  Those Amendments guarantee freedom of speech and due process.  Why the law wasn’t also struck down on 6th Amendemnt grounds, right to speedy trial and concepts of habeaus corpus, is unclear.

Sen. Lindsey Graham may see the entire world as a battlefield, including the internet, but his legislation puts in jepordy nearly 800 years of common law respecting the individual rights against aggressive encroachment by the state, whatever the excuse.  The Magna Carta from which our Constitution and bill of rights owes so much, signed in 1215, says as much:

In clause 39 of the Magna Carta, John of England promised as follows:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

World War 3: Covert, high tech, and still very expensive

Topher Morrison
PurpleSerf.com

Special operations forces span the globe in the War on Terror.  
Photo credit: ABP World Group LTD.

"The Special Operations Command's (SOCOM) overall strength now stands at 60,000.  Of these, some 13,000 were deployed last week in 79 countries."  - Kenneth McGraw, Spokesman for SOCOM, according to The Daily Beast - June 25th, 2011

With Osama Bin Laden now officially dead, the World Wide War on Terror has entered its next phase.  What began with relatively conventional warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq characterized by large troop deployments, aerial "shock and awe" bombardments, and the expensive ancillary civil reconstruction efforts has morphed into a multidimensional high tech operation blending covert and overt tactics extending into "79 countries" around the world.


The US military in Afghanistan allegedly still pursues the "Doctor of Death", Ayman Al Zawahiri, who has purportedly been tapped (by whom or by what mechanism it is not known) to take over as Supreme Ultimate Commander of all disgruntled Islamic radicals around the world (a.k.a Al Qaeda).  Yemen, however, is the US military's growing priority as it plays host to the enigmatic American, Anwar al-Awlaki of Las Cruces, New Mexico, commander of the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) franchise, and the US' new counterinsurgency warfare lab.


Although GQ noted that a May 5th attempt on al-Awlkai was the "first drone attack in Yemen in a decade" this "lab", according to the Daily Beast last week, is where a "covert war has raged for nearly three years" (keep in mind if this is true, it precedes both the Ft. Hood Shooting and the Christmas Day Bomber both of which al-Awlaki is charged with orchestrating.  Any argument using al-Awlaki and his purported connections with these events as a pretext for intervention in Yemen should be viewed as highly dubious).  


Working in tandem with US trained Yemeni forces is Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, CIA paramilitary groups, the amphibious mini-carrier USS Boxer, its cruise missile laden submarine chaperone, and "an armada of drones many of designs (and sizes) that are still classified."  We can, however, quantify the breadth of this drone army.  According to the New York Times, "from blimps to bugs...the Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago."  With names like Global Hawk, Predator, Reaper, Shadow, popularized names like the "Beast of Kandahar", and deploying nefarious sounding technologies like the "Gorgon Stare" one has to wonder whether the Armies of Freedom are in fact becoming viewed as something else.

Insect drones like this one will be designed

to hide in the shadows while recording in swarms. 

Posted at Wired.com

 A Predator drone armed for action.  
Posted at Wired.com.

As a part of a larger $45 million aid package to Somalia relatively new "Raven" drones are being outsourced in America's ever expanding shadow war to Burundi and Ugandan "peacekeepers" in order to cut costs and diversify the counter terrorism efforts there, according to Danger Room.  While it may seem odd that the US would give up operational control it looks as if the Pentagon is merely riding shotgun on this one as they are to purchase an unspecified $17.7 million aircraft for the US base in Djibouti, ostensibly a staging ground for the aforementioned drone war raging in Yemen.  


The larger portion of the foreign military aid package will be distributed to other corners of the empire, according to the Air Force Times, and will fund and equip foreign security forces with biometric instrumentation, weapons, night vision, armor, etc. in countries like Bangladesh, the Philipines, Maldives, Oman, Malaysia, Kenya, and Mali.  Evidently what we're seeing here is just another routine wealth and weapons transfer in the charitable business of military welfare. 


While some hawks may hem and haw over "cuts" to the defense budget because of a bad economy and the political appeal of austere budgets on Capitol Hill, most recently evidenced in the reduction of DARPA's budget (a paltry 5%), one must keep in mind the grand strategy of wartime finance.  Even though Secretary of Defense Robert Gates humbly claims "as budgets draw down, we have no option but to learn to fight smarter with less" these musings must be consumed while keeping in mind Gates recently ordered the Pentagon to come up with $100 billion in savings and redirected to combat forces (special forces included).  


Dubious statements like "budget draw down[s]" must be balanced with the facts.  Although DARPA may lose $150 million, Obama has on the other hand asked for a 5.7% increase in the Special Operations budget amounting to $6.5 billion on top of $3.5 billion already requested this year.  Therefore, not only is Sec. Gates to funnel massive savings back into various combat theaters around the world, Obama is doubling down on top of it - not exactly austere.  This can, however, be appended to Obama's stimulus package; it takes 19 analysts and one or two pilots to operate a drone's mission from take off to analysis.  If all 7,000 of the Pentagon's drones were called into action it would mean 133k jobs, imagine that!


World War is defined as "war that spans multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in multiple theaters, and last for multiple years" according to Wikipedia.  With the United States officially involved in Pakistan, Yemen, Somolia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and unofficially in the rest of the "79 other [unknown] countries" do we doubt at all that this is in fact a world war?  This is merely the style of war in the 21st century, fought not by proxy, but by small elite forces under the aegis of incredible technology.  The body counts may be lower, but the same principles remain.  One major difference between WWIII and its predecessors, however, is this war is also being fought on American soil so don't be alarmed when a swarm of insect drones accompanies you to a town hall meeting, its for your protection - see "Planes, trains, and automobiles: TSA's ever expanding jurisdiction."


For an excellent documentary on the issue of covert remote controlled war visit "Remote Control War's" Facebook fan page and find out how to watch the mind bending documentary. 


UPDATE 8/8/11:  New article by Al Jazeera details the US military's secret armies.

The Patriot Act Is Not Conservative

Jack Hunter
The American Conservative
5/31/11

If Americans needed another reminder of why the Democratic Party is absolutely worthless, they got it during last week’s Patriot Act extension debate when Senate Majority leader Harry Reid again behaved exactly like the Bush-era Republicans he once vigorously opposed. In 2005, Reid bragged to fellow Democrats, “We killed the Patriot Act.” Today, Reid says that anyone who opposes the Patriot Act might be responsible for the killing of Americans. Dick Cheney now hears an echo and Americans deserve congressional hearings—as to whether Harry Reid is a sociopath, mere liar, or both.

But while Democrats stand pat for Bush Republicanism, the GOP now debates the extent to which it will remain the party of Dubya. Tea Party favorites like Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Congressmen Ron Paul, Justin Amash, Allen West and others, all voted against the Patriot Act. To varying degrees, each of these GOP representatives questioned the act’s effectiveness and legality. But unfortunately, most Republicans still won’t ask any questions.

The “War on Terror” that defined and preoccupied Republicans during the Bush era brought with it not only massive government growth and debt, but an unprecedented expansion of extra-constitutional state power, symbolized most famously by the Patriot Act. In the name of national security, government officials could begin wiretapping phones, hacking into email accounts, prying into business records and spying on citizens—all without a warrant and at government officials’ own discretion. Defenders say the Patriot Act did what needed to be done after 9/11. Critics say it did away with the 4^th amendment.

Let us say both have a point, and that for arguments sake, both Harry Reid and Dick Cheney are correct in arguing that it is sometimes necessary to surrender our liberties for increased security. Is this still true a decade after 9/11? Will it be true two decades after 9/11? How about three? Have the actions of Osama Bin Laden and his fellow terrorists forever altered our Bill of Rights?

Allegedly, the default position for conservatives is to distrust the government and defer to the Constitution. Concerning the Patriot Act, too many conservatives blindly trust the government at the expense of the Constitution. This type of thinking mirrors the logic of the Left, in which the constitutionality of a big government program like Obamacare is considered irrelevant due to the severity of the problem at hand. The liberal healthcare ends justify the unconstitutional means. This characteristic mentality of the Left is exactly how most of the Right approaches the Patriot Act—though it is an outright rejection of what most conservatives of any generation have held most dear.

Think about it. Conservatives get upset about many things on a regular basis—ACORN corruption, NPR funding, demanding that French fries be renamed “Freedom Fries.” At any given time there is always some new and outrageous rightwing distaste of the week.

But most of these controversies are a speck on a gnat’s ass compared to the damage done to the Constitution by the Patriot Act. For genuine constitutional conservatives, something like NPR funding is undoubtedly wrong but ultimately trivial and peripheral—while the protection of the Bill of Rights is crucial and integral. If George Washington or Thomas Jefferson were alive today, are we to believe that they would be more outraged that: A. The federal government helps fund public radio. B. The federal government snoops on citizens without restraint. Those who answered A. truly don’t understand the mindset of the men who founded this country.

A Republican critic of mine once asked me during a radio broadcast “Jack, can you show me where any American has been harmed due to the Patriot Act?” I replied, “Can you show me where any American has been harmed by Wikileaks?” The caller said he couldn’t, but stated that he believed private individuals shouldn’t haven’t access to private government documents. The gentleman was basically saying that whether or not Wikileaks has hurt anyone to date is irrelevant—the whistleblower outfit shouldn’t be trusted with such power to begin with. I argue the same is true of the federal government. So did the Founding Fathers. That’s why they wrote the 4^th amendment.

The entire reason we have a written charter like the Constitution is to specify the enumerated powers that define the hard parameters of our federal government. Among those powers is national defense and security. But much of what we call “defense” is anything but. Similarly, a total police state could undoubtedly provide much better security, though few Americans would desire a country so void of liberty. After all, most Americans can barely tolerate the way the federal government handles air travel these days.

When Ronald Reagan said there was nothing closer to eternal life on this earth than a government program he could have easily been describing the Patriot Act. When Barry Goldwater said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” he could have easily been describing the minority of Republicans who now at least question the Patriot Act. When James Madison wrote, “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other,” he could have easily been describing our current state of perpetual war that now gives seemingly permanent life to the Patriot Act.

If the “War on Terror” is a perpetual war—as so many politicians readily contend—have we now permanently given up our liberties? If terrorists really do “hate us for our freedoms” is the best method of defeating them to permanently surrender our historic freedoms? And if so, who is really winning the War on Terror? Us or the terrorists?

By the very nature of their philosophy, conservatives are supposed to question their government. And given the very nature of our Constitution, this is precisely how the Founders would expect any true patriot to act.

Read more of Jack Hunter's work at The Southern Avenger.