Impeach Obama for Demanding Indefinite Detention of US Citizens Without Trial

The U.S. Senate voted 86 to 13, this afternoon, to adopt the conference report on the fiscal year 2012 defense authorization bill, which among other things, legalizes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, by the military, without trial or any other rights of due process, merely by being suspected of being associated with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or any other group deemed to be at war with the U.S. and its coalition partners (whoever they are).

The fact that the detainee provision of the bill reads this way can be laid squarely at the feet of President Barack Obama. As Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, revealed on the floor of the Senate on Nov. 17, the bill was approved by the committee with language precluding application of that section (Section 1031 in the Senate bill, now Section 1021 in the conference report on the House bill, H.R. 1540) to American citizens. "It was the administration that asked us to remove the very language which we had in the bill which passed the committee and that we removed it at the request of the administration that would have said that this determination would not apply to US citizens and lawful residents..."

As Levin explained in a Nov. 18 statement, the reason why the administration wanted that language removed, is because it believes that it already has the authority to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that Congress rushed to passage in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. American citizens have already been detained under that earlier law, as in the case of Jose Padilla, who was held in a military brig in South Carolina for several years before being dumped into the Federal judicial system without explanation. What the new bill does, is codify those authorities that were already allowed under the earlier bill, and makes them a permanent part of U.S. law; it was the Obama Administration that demanded that, and demanded the power to detain, indefinitely and without trial, anyone, including American citizens, deemed to be terrorist threats to the U.S.

This blatantly un-Constitutional legislation requires the immediate removal of Obama from office either by impeachment or by implementation of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, while we still have a Constitution.

The House approved the same bill, yesterday, by a vote of 283 to 136, with 93 Democrats joining 43 Republicans in opposition. "In short, what this bill does, is it takes a wrecking ball to the United States Constitution and gives enormous power to the government," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). "Our children deserve a world without end, not a war without end. Our children deserve a world where they know that while their government will protect them, that it's not going to rule other than [?] by invading their very thoughts and going, as the PATRIOT Act does, into their banking records, or into their educational records."

While the detention provision has set off a firestorm among civil libertarians, such as the ACLU, many of their statements against it have been mealy-mouthed, in that they treat it as if the Congress put something over on Obama, when the reality is that the Congress is giving Obama and his controllers exactly what they want. Glenn Greenwald, writing this morning in salon.com, is one of the best statements in opposition. He lays responsibility for this atrocity squarely at the feet of Obama, who has been pursing exactly the same expansion of executive power to make war as did his predecessor, and objects to even the perception that Congress might be interfering with that drive. Obama "is one of history's most aggressive defenders of the power of indefinite detention," Greenwald writes. "As Human Rights Watch put it: 'President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.' There is no partisan loyalty or leader-reverent propaganda strong enough to obscure that fact," Greenwald concludes.

And the only way to stop it is by the immediate removal of Obama from office, the one remedy that Greenwald fails to mention.