Disappeared News

“In a rare move, a federal judge has struck down part of a controversial law signed by President Obama that gave the government the power to indefinitely detain anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial — including U.S. citizens. Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York ruled the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens.”

The Star-Advertiser did carry an AP story on page A7, so this news is not entirely “disappeared.” The commercial press will not speculate why Obama signed the NDAA, but there is plenty of material in the alternative media.

For a more in-depth analysis of this landmark ruling, check out today’s Democracy Now story Journalist, Plaintiff Chris Hedges Hails "Monumental" Ruling Blocking NDAA Indefinite Detention (Democracy Now, 5/17/2012).

The linked segment includes a video and transcript.  Since the website allows embedding, here is the video to encourage you to learn more not onlyabout  the ruling, but about President Obama’s role in the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act and candidate Mitt Romney’s position on indefinite detention as well.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A snip:

AMY GOODMAN: Now, President Obama signed it, but he was opposed by key members of his administration—for example, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta—
 
CHRIS HEDGES: Right.
 
AMY GOODMAN: —FBI Director Robert Mueller, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
 
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s what’s so interesting. None of the Pentagon, the FBI, as you—Mueller and everyone else, as you pointed out—none of them supported the bill, even to the extent where Mueller and others were testifying before Congress that it would make their work more difficult. And yet it passes anyway. And it is a kind of—I think it’s a kind of mystery to the rest of us as to what are the forces that—when you have the security establishment publicly opposing it, what are the forces that are putting it in place? And I can only suppose that what they’re doing is setting up a kind of legal mechanism to criminalize any kind of dissent. And Bruce can speak to this a little more. But in the course of the trial, with Alexa O’Brien, US Day of Rage, that WikiLeaks dump of five million emails of the public security firm Stratfor, we saw in those email correspondence an attempt to link US Day of Rage with al-Qaeda. Once they link you with a terrorist group, then these draconian forms of control can be used against legitimate forms of protest, and particularly the Occupy movement.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 5/17/2012 09:08:00 AM