Gitmo Law Could Someday Apply to American Citizens - Adam Serwer, Mother Jones

[Bozita]

Carl Levin's gone fucking nuts!


Gitmo Law Could Someday Apply to American Citizens
—By Adam Serwer| Wed Nov. 30, 2011 2:30 PM PST


Defenders of the detention provisions in the defense funding bill currently under debate in Congress are arguing that they do not authorize the indefinite military detention of American citizens. They're saying the Supreme Court already did that.

"There is no bar to this nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said during his floor speech defending the detention provisions Tuesday. "That's not me, that's not Sen. Graham, that's not Sen. McCain. That's the Supreme Court of the United States recently."

Levin was referring to 2004's Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a US national captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, could be held in military detention but not without habeas review.

That case, however, involved an actual battlefield in an actual war. The current version of the defense funding bill—formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA—goes further. It says the military can detain anyone deemed to be "a part of" or deemed to have "substantially supported" Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or "associated forces." Terror suspects would not have to be on an actual battlefield or fighting in an actual war, as Hamdi was, to be detained by the military. And although Americans, unlike foreigners, are not required to be held in military detention if apprehended on American soil, the NDAA affirms that they can be, based on the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al Qaeda. (Levin said in his floor speech that despite its threat to veto the bill, the administration had approved that language.)

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http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/gitmo-law-could-someday-apply-americans