"You're Going To Detention!" Takes On A Sickening Sense Of Permanence

On Tuesday an ugly coalition of Republicans and mostly conservative Democrats beat back an amendment by Mark Udall (D-CO) to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. The amendment, defeated 60-38 would have been a slap in the face to Obama, who threatened to veto it, so it may seem off that virtually all the Republicans backed up the president. It called for replacing the current rules on detention of terrorism suspects and called for military and intelligence officials to come up with their own blueprint on how to interrogate and hold detainees. Obama's not especially keen on how it would have called for a plan to end this whole concept of holding suspects indefinitely without any judicial recourse. It's pretty grotesque, not just for Obama and the Republicans, but for the 15 Democrats (+ Lieberman) who joined Miss McConnell in giving the White House what they wanted. Oddly enough Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) voted for the amendment. The bad Democrats were:

Bob Casey (PA)
Kent Conrad (ND)
Kay Hagan (NC)
Daniel Inouye (HI)
Herb Kohl (WI)
Mary Landrieu (LA)
Carl Levin (MI)
Lieberman (I-CT)
Joe Manchin (WV)
Claire McCaskill (MO)
Ben Nelson (NE)
Mark Pryor (AR)
Jack Reed (RI)
Jeanne Shaheen (NH)
Debbie Stabenow (MI)
Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)

So now Obama-- or, say Willard Romney or the Newt thing or whomever winds up in the White House in 2013-- can hold any suspected terrorist forever. If you ever read books like 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley you probably already distrust the whole notion of the government being able to do this. I was surprised all the self-proclaimed "constitutionalists" like Jim DeMint, Mike Lee and Marco Rubio backed Obama on this. Nice that at least Rand Paul stood by principles.

During an often testy debate, Udall noted that US civilian courts have convicted 300 suspected terrorists since the September 11, 2001 attacks, with many expected to die in prison, and urged: "Let's not fix what isn't broken."

He also expressed worries that tough new standards for transferring detainees to other countries-- notably a requirement that top US officials formally declare them no longer a threat-- could hamper the US exit from Afghanistan.

The proposed rules explicitly say that the military detention requirement does not apply to US citizens, but supporters of the legislation stressed that American Al-Qaeda members may be held indefinitely without trial.

..."We could see American citizens being sent to Guantanamo Bay," countered Republican Senator Rand Paul, who warned the new provisions would not have prevented the failures that led to the September 11th attacks.

"These are not failures of laws. They are not failures of procedures. They are failures of imperfect men and women in bloated bureaucracies. No amount of liberty sacrificed on the altar of the state will ever change that," he said.

Who remembers this sickening segment from 2009?




UPDATE: Police State... Here?