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Civil rights groups dismayed as Barack Obama abandons commitment to veto new security law contained in defence bill

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of “a war that appears to have no end”.

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military, effectively extends the battlefield in the “war on terror” to the US and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are subject to military detention.

The legislation’s supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay. But the law’s critics describe it as a draconian piece of legislation that extends the reach of detention without trial to include US citizens arrested in their own country.

“It’s something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “It establishes precisely the kind of system that the United States has consistently urged other countries not to adopt. At a time when the United States is urging Egypt, for example, to scrap its emergency law and military courts, this is not consistent.”

There was heated debate in both houses of Congress on the legislation, requiring that suspects with links to Islamist foreign terrorist organisations arrested in the US, who were previously held by the FBI or other civilian law enforcement agencies, now be handed to the military and held indefinitely without trial.

The law applies to anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaida, the Taliban or associated forces”.

Senator Lindsey Graham said the extraordinary measures were necessary because terrorism suspects were wholly different to regular criminals.

“We’re facing an enemy, not a common criminal organisation, who will do anything and everything possible to destroy our way of life,” he said. “When you join al-Qaida you haven’t joined the mafia, you haven’t joined a gang. You’ve joined people who are bent on our destruction and who are a military threat.”

Other senators supported the new powers on the grounds that al-Qaida was fighting a war inside the US and that its followers should be treated as combatants, not civilians with constitutional protections.

But another conservative senator, Rand Paul, a strong libertarian, has said “detaining citizens without a court trial is not American” and that if the law passes “the terrorists have won”.

“We’re talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk,” he said. “Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.”

Paul was backed by Senator Dianne Feinstein.

“Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge,” she said. “We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.”

Paul said there were already strong laws against support for terrorist groups. He noted that the definition of a terrorism suspect under existing legislation was so broad that millions of Americans could fall within it.

“There are laws on the books now that characterise who might be a terrorist: someone missing fingers on their hands is a suspect according to the department of justice. Someone who has guns, someone who has ammunition that is weatherproofed, someone who has more than seven days of food in their house can be considered a potential terrorist,” Paul said. “If you are suspected because of these activities, do you want the government to have the ability to send you to Guantánamo Bay for indefinite detention?”

Under the legislation suspects can be held without trial “until the end of hostilities”. They will have the right to appear once a year before a committee that will decide if the detention will continue.

The Senate is expected to give final approval to the bill before the end of the week. It will then go to the president, who previously said he would block the legislation not on moral grounds but because it would “cause confusion” in the intelligence community and encroached on his own powers.

But on Wednesday the White House said Obama had lifted the threat of a veto after changes to the law giving the president greater discretion to prevent individuals from being handed to the military.

Critics accused the president of caving in again to pressure from some Republicans on a counter-terrorism issue for fear of being painted in next year’s election campaign as weak and of failing to defend America.

Human Rights Watch said that by signing the bill Obama would go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.

“The paradigm of the war on terror has advanced so far in people’s minds that this has to appear more normal than it actually is,” Malinowski said. “It wasn’t asked for by any of the agencies on the frontlines in the fight against terrorism in the United States. It breaks with over 200 years of tradition in America against using the military in domestic affairs.”

In fact, the heads of several security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. The Pentagon also said it was against the bill.

The FBI director, Robert Mueller, said he feared the law could compromise the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be more complicated to win co-operation from suspects held by the military.

“The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain co-operation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

Civil liberties groups say the FBI and federal courts have dealt with more than 400 alleged terrorism cases, including the successful prosecutions of Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, Umar Farouk, the “underwear bomber”, and Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square bomber”.

Elements of the law are so legally confusing, as well as being constitutionally questionable, that any detentions are almost certain to be challenged all the way to the supreme court.

Malinowski said “vague language” was deliberately included in the bill in order to get it passed. “The very lack of clarity is itself a problem. If people are confused about what it means, if people disagree about what it means, that in and of itself makes it bad law,” he said.

Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And even though the leaders of the military and the spy community have said they want no such power, the Senate is poised to pass its bill as early as tonight.

There are still changes swirling around the Senate, but this looks like the basic shape of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Someone the government says is “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force” can be held in military custody “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” Those hostilities are currently scheduled to end the Wednesday after never. The move would shut down criminal trials for terror suspects.

But far more dramatically, the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

An amendment that would limit military detentions to people captured overseas failed on Thursday afternoon. The Senate soundly defeated a measure to strip out all the detention provisions on Tuesday.

So despite the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a right to trial, the Senate bill would let the government lock up any citizen it swears is a terrorist, without the burden of proving its case to an independent judge, and for the lifespan of an amorphous war that conceivably will never end. And because the Senate is using the bill that authorizes funding for the military as its vehicle for this dramatic constitutional claim, it’s pretty likely to pass.

It would be one thing if the military was clamoring for the authority to become the nation’s jailer. But to the contrary: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta opposes the maneuver. So does CIA Director David Petraeus, who usually commands deference from senators in both parties. Pretty much every security official has lined up against the Senate detention provisions, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who worry that they’ll get in the way of FBI investigations of domestic terrorists. President Obama has promised to veto the bill.

Which is ironic. After all, Obama approved of the execution without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaida’s YouTube preacher, based entirely on the unproven assertion that Awlaki was dangerous. Awlaki was an American citizen. So Obama thinks he has the right to kill Americans the government says are terrorists, but he doesn’t want the military to lock them up forever without trial. OK then.

Weirder still, the bill’s chief architect, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), tried to persuade skeptics that the bill wasn’t so bad. His pitch? “The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States,” he said on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill would just let the government detain a citizen in military custody, not force it to do that. Reassured yet?

Civil libertarians aren’t. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said it “denigrates the very foundations of this country.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, “it puts every single American citizen at risk.”

But there’s a reason this measure goes into the defense bill: Voting against the defense bill is usually considered political suicide. That’s why the bill will almost certainly pass tonight. If Obama backs down from his veto threat, get ready to see Americans at Guantanamo Bay.

Peterborough will play the role of a failed state for military exercise that runs from Tuesday until Nov. 9, the Department of National Defence announced in a release Friday.

The exercise will deal with the military evacuating Canadian non-combatants from a failed state. Most of the exercise will take place near Lansdowne St. and Ashburnham Dr.

The public should be aware that military personnel will be in uniform during the exercise, the Department of National Defence states.

The 1st Canadian Division Headquarters that’s based in Kingston, Ont. issued the release.

(Source: thepeterboroughexaminer.com)

Before its Emergency Alert System test goes out over airwaves nationwide on Nov. 9, the Federal Emergency Management Association wants to make sure there won’t be a public response in the vein of the widespread panic that followed Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.”

FEMA, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Communications Commission, will initiate the three-minute national test at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on Nov. 9. The test will run concurrently across all time zones and run on almost all broadcast, cable and satellite radio and television stations. Various agencies use the Emergency Alert System to notify members of the public about child abductions, severe weather and other emergencies. While monthly tests are carried out on local and regional branches of the system, typically lasting from 30 seconds to a minute, next week will mark the first time an all-inclusive national test has been conducted, according to a press release issued by FEMA.Newton Police Chief Mike Richards said, with rapid-fire technological advances, it’s wise for FEMA to conduct a nationwide test. In the post-9/11 landscape, Richards said, it’s feasible that uninitiated viewers or listeners who tune into the test broadcast could assume a real terrorist attack or other emergency is in progress.”It’s a reasonable concern that people could think something serious may actually be happening,” Richards said. “Hopefully, getting the word out can help FEMA avert an overblown response.”During the test, listeners will hear a message indicating that “This is a test.” While the audio message will be the same across the board, limitations for some outlets that will participate in the test mean the video test message may not indicate the nature of the test broadcast. For some outlets, the text at the top of the television screen may instead indicate that an “Emergency Alert Notification has been issued,” according to a press release.

(Source: njherald.com)

On November 9, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will conduct the first-ever nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST), a test that will last for approximately three minutes.

The EAS is a system designed to transmit emergency alerts and warnings to the public at the national, state, and local levels.

EAS participants broadcast alerts and warnings regarding severe weather, child abductions and other types of emergencies. EAS alerts are transmitted over radio and television broadcast stations, cable television and other media services.

Although local and state components of the EAS are tested on a weekly and monthly basis, there has never been a nationwide test or a national activation of the system.

Unlike the monthly tests, the national test will occur almost simultaneously on almost all TV and radio stations.

The purpose of the test is to assess the reliability and effectiveness of the system as a way to alert the public during nationwide emergencies.

Although the EAS test will be initiated by FEMA, the FCC is telling local governments they can use the test as an opportunity to work with local broadcasters and cable providers to educate appropriate government officials and staff about the EAS, such as how it works and when it should be activated.

Finally, the FCC is asking local government officials to help inform residents in advance of the test, so that they will know what to expect.

(Source: nlc.org)