I hope Obama doesn't lock me up

Less than two weeks ago, on Friday, December 2, I wrote about a proposal in Washington to authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect without charge or trial anywhere in the world. An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, sponsored by Michigan’s senior senator, Carl Levin, and Arizona’s senile senator, John McCain, would “effectively extend the definition of what is considered the military’s ‘battlefield’ to anywhere in the world, even within the United States,” according to Democracynow.org.

I was more annoyed than worried. After all, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director Robert Mueller all oppose the Levin-McCain provision and the Obama Administration promised to veto the bill.

Now I’m worried. Obama withdrew his veto threat yesterday.

Jameel Jaffer

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow interviewed American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer on her show last night - I posted the video below - and Jaffer told her the veto threat has been rescinded and Obama now intends to sign the bill.

Jaffer, a Harvard Law School graduate who directs the ACLU’s National Security Project, said this creates “all sorts of problems for the United States abroad,” there are human rights and national security problems, and the provision makes it harder to close the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. (Obama promised to close Guantanamo while on the campaign trail in 2008. Seven hundred and seventy-five “detainees” have been brought to Guantanamo since October of 2001; as of May 2011, 171 remain.)

According to Jaffer, the U.S. House passed the bill this week and the Senate will vote on it soon but the real debate will now move to the courts.

Obama and Levin

I also wrote, perhaps naively, that it was interesting how “some right-wing blogs are trying to cast this as a secret attempt by the Commander in Chief to secure the authority to unilaterally imprison anyone indefinitely, as if he’s going to morph into some kind of Dr. Evil, with the Armed Services Committee chair [Levin] serving as his Mini-Me. Anyone who knows Carl Levin knows he’s no one’s minion. And why would Obama promise a veto if it’s really what he wants?”

Maybe because it was just another promise he didn’t intend to keep?

One of the smartest people I know responded to my December 2 post by pointing out that Carl Levin has always been an honorable man and he must know something we don’t know.

That doesn’t reassure me. Honorable men make mistakes too.

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