What is the government doing? Last year, when Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with its contentious passages endorsing the mandatory military detention of terror suspects, there was uproar across the political spectrum from Americans who believed that it would be used on US citizens.

In fact, it was unclear whether or not this was the case. The NDAA was in many ways a follow-up to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

As confirmed by the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the NDAA also allowed those seized — who were allegedly involved with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban — to be held until the end of hostilities. The AUMF was, and remains the basis for the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo, but on two occasions President Bush decided that it applied to US citizens — in the cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, who were held on US soil as “enemy combatants” and subjected to torture. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, in New York, a US judge, District Judge Katherine Forrest, took a stand against a contentious provision inserted into the current National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), ruling that it was unconstitutional for lawmakers to demand that, in future, those accused of involvement with terrorism — including US citizens and residents — must be subjected to mandatory military custody, and held indefinitely without charge or trial (PDF).

The provision (Section 1021), designed to allow detention without trial until the end of the hostilities in the “war on terror,” is meant to apply to anyone “who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks,” or anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

Of particular concern to the plaintiffs in the case — led by the journalist Chris Hedges, and also including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelandic parliamentarian and WikiLeaks activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Kai Wargalla of Occupy London, and the US journalists and activists Jennifer Bolen and Alexa O’Brien — was the inclusion of anyone who “has directly supported … hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” because they perceived that it could apply to speech, or the written word, endangering journalists and activists, for example, and would contravene Americans’ First Amendment rights. Read the rest of this entry »