A repository for Marcospinelli's comments and essays published at other websites.

Barack Obama Waives Rule Allowing Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans

Wednesday, February 29, 2012


 You mean this video on You Tube (or the many identical copies of it)?

Here's the problem with what you're claiming:  

It would mean that I couldn't believe my own eyes and ears when I heard Carl Levin say it on the Senate floor.

It would also mean that the transcript and video of the proceedings on CSpan (Levin speaks at 4:43:38) were also edited.

If you'd followed the actual proceedings, you'd know that Obama had threatened to veto this bill, but it was never about substantive objections to the detention powers vested by this bill -- Obama's objections had nothing to do with civil liberties, or due process or the Constitution. It had everything to do with Executive power.  Obama's not an opponent of indefinite detention; he’s a vigorous proponent of it, as evidenced by his continuous, multi-faceted embrace of that policy.

His complaint was that Congress had no business tying the hands of the President when deciding who should go into military detention, who should be denied a trial, which agencies should interrogate suspects (the FBI or the CIA). Such decisions, Obama insists, are for the President, not Congress, to make. In other words, his veto threat was not grounded in the premise that indefinite military detention is wrong; it was grounded in the premise that it should be the President who decides who goes into military detention and why, not Congress.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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