Such other matters as the President considers appropriate.

[nancylebov]

McCain and Leiberman have proposed a bill which allows for indefinite detention of American citizens at the president's whim.

Niemöller [1] is not mocked.

The whole point of "enemy combatant" was to put people outside the law, so that the government could do whatever it pleased to them. The law isn't an absolutely reliable protection, but it's a good bit better than nothing.

It was obvious to me that there was no reason for American government lawlessness to be limited to people who aren't American citizens.

I don't take the abuse of non-Americans lightly. A good bit of the anger in this post is for the Americans who thought indefinite detention without charge could only happen to someone else.

SEC. 5. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.

An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.

Information about the bill from Glenn Greenwald, from an article at The Huffington Post which I found out about it because Steve Barnes was interested in the people from the French Television show who weren't willing to give big electric shocks.

I'm feeling let down by my friendslist. What happened to the glory days when every frightening thing the government was doing was urgent news? Teapartyers behaving like assholes is not a substitute.

Perhaps I'm being unfair-- I don't follow facebook or twitter, and lj's been kind of quiet lately. Has anyone else heard about this monstrous bill?

Anyway, here are the sponsors of the bill:
Sen. John McCain [R-AZ]

Scott Brown [R-MA]

Saxby Chambliss [R-GA]

James Inhofe [R-OK]

George LeMieux [R-FL]

Joseph Lieberman [I-CT]

Jefferson Sessions [R-AL]

John Thune [R-SD]

David Vitter [R-LA]

Roger Wicker [R-MS]

More, more, more. Did Obama really authorize INTERPOL to operate independently in the US, without regard for the bill of rights.


[1] First they came for the..... and when they finally came for me, there was no one to speak up.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

cared about nothing but achieving a left-wing seizure of power
Is there necessarily such a thing as a left wing, breathed into existence by the need for a conceptual opposite to the right, or can we finally let right flow free as a signifier, allowing it simply to act as an umbrella term for people who would restrict our freedoms? I haven't been able to distinguish anything recognisable as a left wing in US politics since I arrived in 1997.

I think there is a proper place for epithets in politics; ridicule is an acceptable and useful political tool - perhaps the only one left - for placing those ridiculed beyond the pale of debate. I'm trying to think of a good term of ridicule for McCain et al and their astonishingly tyrannical goals. Something with the grace and power of "underpants bomber." But I'm still too angry to be able to summon the funny, and Victor Hugo's "nocturnal strangler of liberty" really isn't twitter-ready.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

If you want to define "left" and "right" in terms of attitudes to freedom, you are going to need an unequivocal definition of what "freedom" is. For example, if I vote for low taxes that will not support a social safety net, is that a denial of the freedom of poor people, or is it an affirmation of my own freedom to the secure enjoyment of my own income and property? Different people have different opinions. Back when I was first getting involved in politics, a friend of mine described his political spectrum, with communism at the extreme left, followed successively by fascism, the welfare state, capitalism under constitutional government, and anarchism at the extreme right—the metric being that "right" meant "pro-freedom" and "left" meant "anti-freedom." I thought that was oversimple in the same way that I now think your equation of "left" with "pro-freedom" is oversimple.

"Left" and "right" do not have uniform meanings in different cultures. In terms of the American political spectrum, people like Obama and Pelosi are left; people like Palin are right. And neither one has much to do with freedom, to my mind.

As to placing people beyond the pale of debate, remember that there is ultimately only one alternative to reasoned debate, and that is killing people. I think every step away from dealing with people by mutual homicide or mutual coercion is a good thing.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Also, the parties in the US are huge coalitions, and it's unsurprising if they both have pro and anti liberty aspects.

I don't think there's nothing but reasoned debate and killing-- people can throw insults at each other for a long time without it coming to murder.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I'll cordially disagree that our only options are reasoned debate and killing: I'm a firm believer in both liberating/Rabelaisian and oppressive/institutionalising laughter, as well as framing of all kinds - I rather think that in the US today debate as we remember it has been largely replaced by such framings, which is the worse for us.

I'm with you on your analysis of freedom, treating it as an abstract concept or Platonic ideal. For the time being, however, I'm restricting myself to the kinds of freedoms outlined in the bill of rights and the expectation that ordinary citizens of the US need not fear arbitrary detainment from a government that acts on them like a predator - freedoms that have been abrogated over the past decade and that this bill sets about formally dismantling. In using "right" to mean "restriction of freedoms," well, it occurs to me that the sponsors of this bill are identified as right wing within US politics and I'm drawing a rather lazy comparison with what have traditionally been termed right wing movements in Europe - when I was growing up to declare yourself "right wing" was to identify yourself with racists, ultra-nationalists and believers in autocratic leaders, so it was a useful term of insult. I understand the term may have a different meaning in the US, although I think I still detect a certain correlation.

In the end, though, neither "left" nor "right" are important to me as labels; I would just as happily merely call McCain et al "would-be tyrants." I think the framing of politics on a left-right axis is misleading and leads to poor habits of thought: it suggests that for whatever strange coalition of ideas that exists in one place, there should be a counterbalancing opposite coalition which serves to legitimise it.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

McCain may have been a would-be tyrant when he was running, but it isn't likely he'll run again, so maybe he's just a tyrant facilitator.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I can almost see that on a business card - maybe for the protagonist in George Clooney's next vehicle.
The idea that he's given up his dreams of tyranny in order to destroy democracy on behalf of others makes me see him as a sort of anti-Everyman, who suddenly leaves his senses at the end of his life and decides on hell for everyone. Or maybe it's just the fox and the grapes all over again.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

all that, and I still didn't finish...

...so I'm sorry that I made any allusion to the left or right, and I will cease to talk about the bill in such terms. I think left-right language gets in the way when you look at developments, like this bill, that openly threaten civil liberties. Such language places the bill in a frame that stresses a political continuum capable of stretching to fit whatever strange ideas come up, capable of endowing those ideas with a ready-made constituency, of absorbing it into the already-existing coalitions of interests and generating a phantom reverse version of itself, which can be imagined to exist in the other camp (which, I think, is what the spectre of socialism is today in US politics: a kind of uncanny thought-form generated out of the nightmares of the business press, rather than any actual movement).

I think the bill should be framed instead as a political rupture - from the constitution, from past norms, from American ideals. Perhaps it could be explained as part of a latent tendency - that old quote about giving up freedom for present security sounds nicely neurotic. Perhaps it can be framed as a childish, uncontrolled impulse, like the "nanny state" used to describe Thatcher's, and later Blair's, Britain. Perhaps the accusation that it's unpatriotic could actually be given some legs. The most effective means of all for fighting it would be to link it somehow to pederastry. That would give it the kind of legitimacy it deserves.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

absorbing them... phantom reverse version of themselves (the ideas).
Sorry, I really must proofread more carefully. I'm off balance because of this business.