Barack Obama now appears ready to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. Among other provisions, this bill mandates that terrorism suspects be indefinitely imprisoned under the authority of the U.S. military, rather than civilian courts; allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, even when they are captured in the country; and makes it more difficult to transfer detainees out of the war prison at Guantanamo.
Amnesty International protests that "the NDAA enshrines the war paradigm that has eroded the United States’ human rights record and served it so poorly over the past decade as the country’s primary counterterrorism tool."
Reflecting on the NDAA, Glenn Greenwald at Salon has this to say about the President's record on civil liberties and human rights: "Obama has, for three years now, been defending and entrenching exactly the detention powers this law vests, but doing it through radical legal theories..., continuities with the Bush/Cheney template, and devotion to Endless War and the civil liberties assaults it entails."
For Mother Jones's coverage, see "White House Caves on Defense Veto Threat," here.
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