Barbara Boxer: Why she approved the National Defense Authorization Act

[Karl Frederick]

Dear Mr. Frederick:

Thank you for writing to me about provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) concerning the military detention of enemy combatants. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.
I was deeply disappointed that the final version of the NDAA did not include important language authored by Senators Mark Udall (D-CO) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) regarding detainees that would have protected civil liberties while helping to keep us safe. During floor consideration of the NDAA, I voted for an amendment offered by Senator Udall that would have replaced the detainee provisions in the bill with a requirement for the Administration to report to Congress on detention authorities. Unfortunately, this amendment failed by a vote of 38-60.
I also voted for an amendment offered by Senator Feinstein that would have clarified that mandatory military detention would apply only to terrorist suspects captured outside the United States. This amendment also failed by a vote of 45-55.
I have now agreed to be a co-sponsor of S.2003, the Due Process Guarantee Act. This important bipartisan legislation would protect American citizens arrested within the United States from being held indefinitely by the U.S. military.
I strongly oppose any expansion of military detention authority that erodes our civil liberties. However, I voted for the National Defense Authorization Act because it includes a number of provisions for our troops and their families, including a pay raise requested by President Obama and important health care benefits.

Again, thank you for writing. Please feel free to contact me again about this or other issues of concern to you.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

[Roland Jacopetti]

Not good enough, Barbara!

[phloem]

Boxer's craven response is so typical of the facile, enabling state of the Democratic Party. Boxer and the rest of the pathetic excuses for "alternative politics," aka "liberal" Democrats, in Congress are clueless. She doesn't offer, in her form letter response, any justification for sending American citizens into harm's way fighting illegal, immoral wars, but she'll support the needs of the military and their families. Well, bravo, Barbara, for tossing a few coins the way of the permanently disabled American, but what about your role in facilitating the deaths, debilitations, and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans who served only, ONLY, the interests of the privileged, the corporate, and their criminal masters in the banks and investment houses? So, the rest of us get totalitarian politics and dismantling of the U. S. Constitution in exchange for your treasonous support of illegal wars and arming the world to its teeth! You and your ilk are despicable traitors.

Barbara Boxer, be damned glad I don't have the authority to do so, because if I had a single stroke of a pen to do so, I'd send you to life in prison, along with several thousand of your corporate-, AIPAC-, banking-beholden brethren who are directly responsible for betraying America, the Earth, and all decent, sensible human beings. You are beneath contempt, and that goes double for the president.

[Hotspring 44]

There is a time to stand up, especially for "leaders" (or at least elected officials).
Both Boxer and Feinstein stood WAY (off the cliff) down on this one.
What a tragic, disgraceful, horrifying, weak, and unnecessary way to crumple!

[Peace Voyager]

Thank you for telling the truth on this.

Please see my post re: Bradly Manning.

Let's all move this anger into victories for peace and justice.

Boxer's craven response is so typical of the facile, enabling state of the Democratic Party. Boxer and the rest of the pathetic excuses for "alternative politics," aka "liberal" Democrats, in Congress are clueless. She doesn't offer, in her form letter response, any justification for sending American citizens into harm's way fighting illegal, immoral wars, but she'll support the needs of the military and their families. Well, bravo, Barbara, for tossing a few coins the way of the permanently disabled American, but what about your role in facilitating the deaths, debilitations, and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans who served only, ONLY, the interests of the privileged, the corporate, and their criminal masters in the banks and investment houses? So, the rest of us get totalitarian politics and dismantling of the U. S. Constitution in exchange for your treasonous support of illegal wars and arming the world to its teeth! You and your ilk are despicable traitors.

Barbara Boxer, be damned glad I don't have the authority to do so, because if I had a single stroke of a pen to do so, I'd send you to life in prison, along with several thousand of your corporate-, AIPAC-, banking-beholden brethren who are directly responsible for betraying America, the Earth, and all decent, sensible human beings. You are beneath contempt, and that goes double for the president.

[Karl Frederick]

And this arrived today (2/21/2012) from Senator Dianne Feinstein:


Dear Mr. Frederick:

Thank you for writing to express your concerns about the detention provisions in the "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012." I appreciate knowing your views and welcome the opportunity to respond.

This year's defense authorization bill authorizes funding for the U.S. Department of Defense. As you know, section 1021 authorizes the U.S. government to detain suspected terrorists until the end of hostilities, and section 1022 requires suspected terrorists connected to al Qaeda be automatically detained in military custody when apprehended.

I strenuously opposed both these provisions during Senate debate and offered amendments to prohibit the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial or charge and to clarify that the presumption of military detention only exists for individuals captured abroad.

Unfortunately, on December 1, 2011, one of my amendments failed by a vote of 45-55 in the Senate.

I was, however, able to reach a compromise with the authors of the defense bill to state that no existing law or authorities to detain Americans are changed by section 1021. While I would have preferred to have restricted the government's ability to detain U.S. citizens without charge, this compromise ensures the government's authority in this area does not expand.

I continue to believe that Congress should explicitly prohibit indefinite military detention without charge or trial. To that end, I have introduced the "Due Process Guarantee Act" (S. 2003) to guarantee that a congressional authorization for military force does not usurp the right to due process for American citizens apprehended on U.S. soil.

A bipartisan group of senators have cosponsored this important legislation that will preserve this fundamental American right. The legislation has been referred to the Judiciary committee where it will be the subject of an upcoming hearing.

Americans all across the country believe, as you do, that the government cannot indefinitely detain American citizens inside this country without trial or charge. Since you cared enough to write me about this important issue, I'm going to ask for your help. Please continue to speak out and contact members of Congress urging them to support the "Due Process Guarantee Act." We need your help.

Once again, thank you for your letter. I am committed to ensuring that our nation has the appropriate tools to combat terrorism, and committed to upholding our fundamental constitutional rights. If you have any additional comments or questions, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841.



Sincerely yours,


Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

Dear Mr. Frederick:

Thank you for writing to me about provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) concerning the military detention of enemy combatants. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue. . . . .

[Karl Frederick]

Stay tuned . . .

Leaders Unite Across Party Lines to Defend Constitution from NDAA

Transpartisan leaders from across the country work to restore due process


WASHINGTON - February 22 - In the first few weeks of 2012, at least six jurisdictions have enacted local resolutions opposing the military detention provisions of the controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law by the president only a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, legislation to nullify the NDAA has been introduced in legislatures of several states from coast-to-coast, with a Virginia bill passing the House of Delegates 96-4 last week.
Concerns about NDAA detention provisions transcend political party, ideology, and geography, and representatives in these diverse jurisdictions have stood up to resist an ongoing bipartisan assault on constitutional rights by federal officials. While a debate about the scope of the NDAA’s potential abuses continues to distract congressional policymakers, who voted without realizing the law’s terrifying implications, their counterparts in state and local governments are proving more conscientious, proactively acting on their oaths of office to defend the Constitution.
This Thursday, Feb. 23, a diverse group of state and local elected leaders from both major political parties, representing various parts of the country, will address their shared concerns about the need to restore due process in the wake of the damage wrought by the NDAA. These women and men have answered the call for all levels of government to actively work to restore vital limits on dangerous—and profoundly un-American—federal powers.
What: A conference call to brief journalists about national momentum across local and state governments to repeal or nullify the NDAA’s detention provisions

When: Thursday, Feb. 23, at 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST)

Where: Register online at https://myaccount.maestroconference.com/conference/register/MX3AV13968E4HAO


Who: Speakers will include the following:

• Naomi Wolf, author, journalist, former consultant to Vice President Al Gore
• Bruce Fein, attorney and former Justice Department official under President Reagan
• Missouri State Representative and former US Marine Paul Curtman (R)
• North Carolina State Senator Ellie Kinnaird (D)
• Washington State Rep. Matt Shea (R)
• Northampton, MA City Councilor Bill Dwight (D)
• El Paso, CO County Commissioner Peggy Littleton (R)

Sponsors: Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Tenth Amendment Center, and Demand Progress
About the Bill of Rights Defense Committee

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) is a national non-profit grassroots organization formed in 2001 to defend the rule of law and rights and liberties challenged by overbroad national security and counter-terrorism policies. BORDC supports an ideologically, ethnically, geographically, and generationally diverse grassroots movement to protect and restore these principles by encouraging widespread civic participation; educating people about the significance of our rights; and cultivating grassroots networks to convert concern, outrage, and fear into debate and action. For more information, visithttps://www.bordc.org or call (413) 582-0110.
About the Tenth Amendment Center

The Tenth Amendment Center is a national think tank that works to preserve and protect the principles of strictly limited government through information, education, and activism. The center serves as a forum for the study and exploration of state and individual sovereignty issues, focusing primarily on the decentralization of federal government power as required by the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment Center, in conjunction with the Rhode Island Liberty Coalition, drafted the Liberty Preservation Act, now spreading across the country at both the state and local level." For more information, visithttps://tenthamendmentcenter.com/about/ or call (213) 935-0553.
About Demand Progress

Demand Progress is a grassroots organization with more than one million members which works to promote civil rights, civil liberties, and progressive government reform. It helped lead the organizing effort in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, and has generated more than 200,000 emails to Congress and President Obama in opposition to the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA. For more information, visit https://demandprogress.org.

###

BORDC's mission is to promote, organize, and support a diverse, effective, national grassroots movement to restore and protect civil rights and liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Our purpose is to educate people about the significance of those rights in our lives; to encourage widespread civic participation; and to cultivate and share the organizing tools and strategies needed for people to convert their concern, outrage, and fear into debate and action to restore Bill of Rights protections.

And this arrived today (2/21/2012) from Senator Dianne Feinstein:


Dear Mr. Frederick:

Thank you for writing to express your concerns about the detention provisions in the "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012." I appreciate knowing your views and welcome the opportunity to respond . . .

[Peace Voyager]

It's official. I will be on the ballot for UNITED States Senate in the upcoming, open, primary* this June 5th.

*All voters can vote for candidates from any party.

You have until 2 weeks before the election to register.

The 1% have held this seat for too long. I'm here to make sure the under-served 99%; get their balanced needs met. Please help me "Occupy" this seat for all Californians' best interest.

Patriotically yours,

Colleen Fernald

www.campaignforpeace.org

There is a time to stand up, especially for "leaders" (or at least elected officials).
Both Boxer and Feinstein stood WAY (off the cliff) down on this one.
What a tragic, disgraceful, horrifying, weak, and unnecessary way to crumple!

[Karl Frederick]

Naomi Wolf weighs in on the day the NDAA takes effect . . . March 1, 2012.

Published on Thursday, March 1, 2012 by The Guardian/UK The NDAA: A Clear and Present Danger to American Liberty


The US is sleepwalking into becoming a police state, where, like a pre-Magna Carta monarch, the president can lock up anyone

by Naomi Wolf


Yes, the worst things you may have heard about the National Defense Authorization Act, which has formally ended 254 years of democracy in the United States of America, and driven a stake through the heart of the bill of rights, are all really true. The act passed with large margins in both the House and the Senate on the last day of last year – even as tens of thousands of Americans were frantically begging their representatives to secure Americans' habeas corpus rights in the final version.
NDAA critics say that it enables ordinary US citizens to be treated like 'enemy combatants' in Guantánamo. (Photo: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images)
It does indeed – contrary to the many flatout-false form letters I have seen that both senators and representatives sent to their constituents, misleading them about the fact that the NDAA destroys their due process rights. Under the act, anyone can be described as a 'belligerent". As the New American website puts it,

"[S]ubsequent clauses (Section 1022, for example) unlawfully give the president the absolute and unquestionable authority to deploy the armed forces of the United States to apprehend and to indefinitely detain those suspected of threatening the security of the 'homeland'. In the language of this legislation, these people are called 'covered persons'.
"The universe of potential 'covered persons' includes every citizen of the United States of America. Any American could one day find himself or herself branded a 'belligerent' and thus subject to the complete confiscation of his or her constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a military prison."

And with a new bill now being introduced to make it a crime to protest in a way that disrupts any government process – or to get close to anyone with secret service protection – the push to legally lock down the United Police States is in full force.
Overstated? Let's be clear: the NDAA grants the president the power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her in prison forever without trial. The president's own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had that power. As I have been warning since 2006: there is not a country on the planet that you can name that has ever set in place a system of torture, and of detention without trial, for an "other", supposedly external threat that did not end up using it pretty quickly on its own citizens.
And Guantánamo has indeed come home: Guantánamo is in our front yards now and our workplaces; it did not even take much more than half a decade. On 1 March, the NDAA will go into effect – if a judicial hearing scheduled for this week does not block it – and no one in America, no US citizen, will be safe from being detained indefinitely – in effect, "disappeared.".
As former Reagan official, now Ron Paul supporter, Bruce Fein points out, on 1 March, we won't just lose the bill of rights; we will lose due process altogether. We will be back at the place where we were, in terms of legal tradition, before the signing of the Magna Carta – when kings could throw people in prison at will, to rot there forever. If we had cared more about what was being done to brown people with Muslim names on a Cuban coastline, and raised our voices louder against their having been held without charge for years, or against their being tried in kangaroo courts called military tribunals, we might now be safer now from a new law mandating for us also the threat of abduction and fear of perpetual incarceration.
We didn't care, or we didn't care enough – and here we are. We acclimated, we got distracted, the Oscars were coming up … but the fake "battlefield" was brought home to us, now real enough. Though it is not "we" versus Muslims in this conflict; it is our very own government versus "us". As one of my Facebook community members remarked bitterly, of our House representatives, our Senate leaders and our president, "They hate our freedoms."
The NDAA is, in the words of Shahid Buttar of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, "the worst threat to civil liberties since COINTELPRO. It gives the government the power to presume guilt rather than innocence, and indefinitely imprison anyone accused of a 'belligerent act' or terror-related offense without trial." He points out that it gives future presidents the power to arrest their political critics. That may even be understating things: it is actually, in my view, the worst threat to civil liberty in the US since habeas corpus was last suspended, during the American civil war.
On a conference call for media last Friday, hosted by the cross-partisan BORDC (which now includes the 40,000 members of the American Freedom Campaign, which we had co-founded as a response to the warning in 2007 that America was facing a "fascist shift") and the right-leaning Tenth Amendment Foundation, we were all speaking the same language of fear for our freedom, even though our perspectives spanned the political spectrum. As the Tenth Amendment Foundation put it, we are a family with diverse views – and families know when it is time to put aside their differences. If there were ever a time to do so, it is now.
This grassroots effort is pushing hard in many places. Protests that included libertarians, progressives, Tea Party members and Occupy participants have been held nationwide in recent weeks. State legislators in Virginia, Tennessee, and Washington have also introduced bills to prevent state agencies from aiding in any detention operations that might be authorized by the NDAA. In other words, they are educating sheriffs and police to refuse to comply with the NDAA's orders. This presents an Orwellian or 1776-type scenario, depending upon your point of view, in which the federal government, or even the president, might issue orders to detain US citizens – which local sheriffs and police would be legally bound to resist.
What will happen next? I wrote recently that the US is experiencing something like a civil war, with only one side at this point – the corporatist side – aggressing. This grassroots, local-leader movement represents a defensive strategy in what is being now tacitly recognized as unprovoked aggression against an entire nation, and an entire people. (Here I should say, mindful of the warning issued to me by NYPD, which arrested me, to avoid saying anything that could be construed as "incitement to riot" and that I believe in nonviolent resistance.)
The local resistance to the police state goes further: midwestern cities, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, are considering "torture-free city" resolutions that would prohibit the torture which civil libertarians see as likely under a military detention regime expanded by the NDAA. (Bradley Manning's initial treatment in solitary confinement, for instance, met some Red Cross definitions of torture.)
But I am far more scared than hopeful, because nothing about the NDAA's legislative passage worked as democracy is supposed to work. Senator Dianne Feinstein, for instance, in spite of her proposed (defeated) amendment that could have defended due process more completely, has nonetheless not fought to repeal the law – even though her constituents in California would, no doubt, overwhelmingly support her in doing so. Huge majorities passed this bill into law – despite the fact that Americans across the spectrum were appalled and besieging their legislators. And this president nailed it to the table – even though his own constituency is up in arms about it.
History shows that at this point, there isn't much time to mount a defense: once the first few arrests take place, people go quiet. There is only one solution: organize votes loudly and publicly to defeat every single signer of this bill in November's general election. Then, once we have our Republic back and the rule of law, we can deal with the actual treason that this law represents.
© 2012 The Guardian