According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Defense Authorization Act will allow the U.S. military to declare national territory part of the "battlefield" in the “War on Terror.”Fortunately, Senator Rand Paul has been a front line opponent of the bill. From The Hill:
Authored by U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, the act would “permit the federal government to indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil, without charge or trial, at the discretion of the President...”
Republican Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and John McCain (Ariz.) battled on the Senate floor Tuesday over a proposed amendment to the pending defense authorization bill that could allow American citizens who are suspected of terrorism to be denied a civilian trial.The video of the debate and a transcript of Paul's remarks can be found here. The text of the bill can be found here.
Note this particularly misleading passage in the bill Section 1032 (4) (b):
APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS.— (1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS.—The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.Therefore, under this provision, the government is simply not "required" to detain a US citizen under the law. But you can be detained. In other words, it does not say that US citizens can not be detained indefinitely and held in a military prison without due process, only that it is not a "requirement" that they be detained (as opposed to a non-US citizen who would have to be detained). As you can observe in the linked video above, when Senator Paul asked Senator McCain the direct question of whether American citizens could be held indefinitely without due process, McCain, without answering directly, essentially says "yes."
As I stated before in my ongoing attempt to chronicle attempts to usurp individual rights, rather than directly identifying and proving these direct threats to the United States and confronting them:
[T]he United States is constructing a vast police state, an "alternative geography", to monitor and control the flow of ideas within our own borders. At what point will any criticism of the government be regarded as "hate speech" or a potential "terrorist" threat which provokes government investigations and censorship?While the threat to Americans from terrorism may be real, I agree with Paul when he says:
“Should we err today and remove some of the most important checks on state power in the name of fighting terrorism, well then the terrorists have won,"...[D]etaining American citizens without a court trial is not American."Uh, yeah!!!!
