Saturday, December 17, 2011

Levin: Obama REQUESTED authority to detain US citizens

I would like to apologize for what appears to be a mistake in my last post.

I assumed that since Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin were the chief architects of the NDAA bill, and since McCain has been arguably the leading hawk in Congress for the past two decades, that they were responsible for writing the bill so that it would not exempt US citizens from indefinite detention. As for Obama, I assumed that withdrawing his veto threat was yet another example of his lack of courage--similar to delaying the Keystone decision or deferring entirely to Pelosi on the 2009 stimulus bill.

However, according to Carl Levin (see the video below), the original bill--which passed the committee--contained language that DID exempt US citizens from indefinite detention, but the Obama administration requested that that language be taken out. Unless Levin is lying through his teeth here, Obama is about to perpetrate the worst assault on civil liberties since McCarthyism and the Japanese internment.

And now I can only wonder why Obama--who was once so critical of the war on terror that he attempted to close Guantanamo and try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court--would basically take a blowtorch to the Sixth Amendment.

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