On Dec. 31,2011, the Obama administration passed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows for spending $662 billion to protect and enforce the defense of the United States.
What is troublesome is that under title X, subtitle D, sub-sections 1021 and 1022, Congress affirms the President’s power to detain any individual suspected of terrorist acts, enacted in response to 9/11 by President Bush as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
Congress might as well just cancel the fifth and sixth Amendments, which state that a citizen cannot be held unless properly notified and has a speedy trial with an impartial jury where the accused must be allowed a lawyer.
The passing of this law ensures the government’s right to hold American citizens indefinitely without proper cause for imprisonment, a lawyer or a fair trial with due process of law in front of a jury.
Yes, this power of the government came into existence immediately after the passing of the USA Patriot Act, but the Patriot Act was passed as an executive order by the President alone (rather than the entire Congress), and it only applied for his term.
What is even more troublesome is that this law does not have any geographic or temporal limitations, thus allowing any President to capture not only citizens of the U.S., but from any battlefield.
Yes, we are in a war, but it is the war against terrorism. It is a war with no defined enemy, a seemingly never-ending war, because — how can you win a war against an indeterminate entity?
This type of infriction of rights is exactly what our founding fathers fought against. The Bill of Rights was passed for a reason. Since our fathers were afraid of an authoritarian form of government, they gave citizens basic rights that prevented the government from taking away citizens’ privacy and individuality.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the country’s fouding father’s, said, “I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
By enacting this law, the Obama administration is breaking one of the most important pillars on which the American people stand: citizens’ rights. It is absurd to think the American people will consciously approve of such a blatant disregard of their rights.
If Obama is thinking about his constituents, this is not the proper path considering it will probably hurt his re-election campaign. This was a move in the wrong direction from the beginning of the enactment of the Patriot Act by the Bush administration, and the fact that a majority of the members of Congress actually approve of this does not make it any more right or justifiable.
