For Your Holiday Depression

What are the holidays without that smothering, deadening certainty that life is an endless horror and nothing will ever change it? Read this, all you cheerful people. Read this, and despair.

Digby:

Codifying Chateau d'If

I think one of the most stunning aspects of the administration's decision not to veto an historic expansion of government power to imprison even its own citizens indefinitely and without due process is the context. Sure, we live in a very dangerous world. But we've been living in one at least since the advent of of The Bomb and the last I heard we were picking off Ad Qaeda members three at a time. The fact that this is happening with the war in Iraq wound down and Afghanistan scheduled to do so as well is what's odd.

Ginny Sloan of the Constitution Project put it well:

But what will we say to future generations if the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) becomes law? That legislation contains a provision that authorizes the president to indefinitely imprison, without a criminal charge or court hearing, any suspected terrorist who is captured within the United States -- including American citizens.

It is difficult to imagine a greater attack on one of the most basic of individual freedoms protected by our great Constitution. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive."

If members of Congress choose -- for the first time in our nation's history -- to codify a system of indefinite detention without charge and authorize such confinement on the basis of suspicion alone, they will do so with their eyes wide open. The attacks of 9/11 are now more than ten years old. Although our troops are still engaged in Afghanistan, the fog of war has long since lifted.

Indefinite detention will now be law, not some emergency measure that history will judge to have been a mistake made in a crisis. It is a well thought out codification of certain views that have become commonplace in American society --- that "terrorists" (to be defined by whomever sits in the White House) are not to be allowed the due process allowed to other human beings because our government just *knows* they are so dangerous we cannot even take the chance that they won't be found guilty. That turns the rule of law on its head.

There's more, including a blood-chilling description of what happened to detained American citizen Jose Padilla.

But let's skip to one of the few Democratic voices in the Senate that actually opposed this monstrosity.

Update: Patrick Leahy released a statement. An excerpt:

I continue to strongly oppose the detention related provisions in this conference report, which I believe are unwise and unnecessary. These provisions undermine our Nation’s fundamental principles of due process and civil liberties, and inject operational uncertainty into our counterterrorism efforts in a way that I believe harms our national security.

I strongly oppose Section 1021 of this conference report, which statutorily authorizes indefinite detention. I am fundamentally opposed to indefinite detention, and certainly when the detainee is a U.S. citizen held without charge. Indefinite detention contradicts the most basic principles of law that I subscribed to when I was a prosecutor, and it severely weakens our credibility when we criticize other governments for engaging in similar conduct.

Supporters of this measure will argue that this language simply codifies the status quo. That is not good enough. I am not satisfied with the status quo. Under no circumstances should the United States of America have a policy of indefinite detention. I fought against Bush administration policies that left us in the situation we face now, with indefinite detention being the de facto administration policy. And I strongly opposed President Obama’s executive order on detention when it was announced last March, because it contemplated, if not outright endorsed, indefinite detention.

This is not a partisan issue for me. I have opposed indefinite detention no matter which party holds the keys to the jailhouse. I fought to preserve habeas corpus review for those detained at Guantanamo Bay because I believe that the United States must uphold the principles of due process, and should only deprive a person of their liberty subject to judicial review.

Read the whole thing. There's more. A lot more.

This is what dictators do. This is what cowards do. This is what authoritarian freakazoids terrified of their own citizens do.

And increasingly since 9-11 gave them the perfect excuse, this is what American political "leaders" do.