Good point. I read somewhere that the Prez. had dropped his objection to the bill and I believed it. It shouldn't be too hard to get a first-hand direct answer from the Whitehouse, I'm not sure how though.
Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald said it and I just believed them, not sure if that was a bad idea or not, but I'd rather see a first hand statement from the Whitehouse. If anybody has a link, please post it.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Glenn, I wanted to ask you about a not wholly unrelated issue, and that is the issue of the military authorization bill that President Obama threatened to veto if it continued to contain the provisions about the treatment of terrorism prisoners, people who could be picked up, Americans in the United States, without trial, without hearing, and held indefinitely. President Obama has dropped the veto threat, saying the changes have satisfied him. Your thoughts?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, let’s remember that under the status quo, because of the way that the Bush and Obama administrations have interpreted their own powers in the original 2001 authorization to use military force, they already claim, the executive branch does, the power to indefinitely detain people. That’s what’s happening right now at Guantánamo. It’s what’s happening at Bagram and several other facilities. And the Obama administration has vehemently defended this power to put people into prison without any trial or charges for as long as they want to keep them there. Additionally, they—the Obama administration claims the power to target even American citizens as enemy combatants, and not just to detain them indefinitely, but to kill them, as well. That’s what they did with Anwar al-Awlaki, far from any battlefield, based on this theory that they already have this power, even before this bill is passed.
But what this bill will do, and it will be signed into law now by President Obama, as you indicated, is that it will be the first time that the United States Congress has codified the power of indefinite detention into the law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. The 1950 Congress passed a bill saying that communists and subversives could be imprisoned without a trial, without full due process, based on the allegation that they presented a national threat, an emergency, a threat to the national security of the United States.
http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2011/12/19/obama_prepares_to_authorize_indefinite_detention
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