http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...etention-obama

Americans face Guantánamo detention after Obama climbdown

Defence funding bill allows American citizens to be arrested as
terrorists on home soil and held indefinitely without trial

Chris McGreal in Washington
Thursday 15 December 2011 04.34 GMT

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.