I was on the 15th floor of the Southern
U.S. District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine
Forrest last Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought
in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta. I filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I.
Afran, over Section 1021
of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We were late joined
by six co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg.
This section of the NDAA, signed into law
by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important
constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order
the military to seize U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists or
associated with terrorists. Those taken into custody by the military,
which becomes under the NDAA a domestic law enforcement agency, can be
denied due process and habeas corpus and held indefinitely in military
facilities. Any activist or dissident, whose rights were once protected
under the First Amendment, can be threatened under this law with
indefinite incarceration in military prisons, including our offshore
penal colonies. The very name of the law itself—the Homeland Battlefield
Bill—suggests the totalitarian credo of endless war waged against
enemies within “the homeland” as well as those abroad.
“The essential thrust of the NDAA is to
create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers,”
Mayer told the court. “[The Obama administration has] taken detention
out of the judicial branch and put it under the executive branch.”
