A judge issued an injunction against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA in front of tomorrow’s vote. Demand Progress has an email Congress page here:
http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/ndaa_tmrw/
Lawsuit news here:
A federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of a part of the National Defense Authorization Act that opponents claim could subject them to indefinite military detention for activities including news reporting and political activism.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan today ruled in favor of a group of writers and activists who sued President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Defense Department, claiming a provision of the act, signed into law Dec. 31, puts them in fear that they could be arrested and held by U.S. armed forces.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-16/military-detention-law-blocked-by-new-york-judge.html
My letter with the petition:
As your constituent, I urge you to support the Smith-Amash amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the only opportunity to truly fix the indefinite detention without charge or trial sections of last year’s NDAA.
The excuse of the “War on Terror” even if one were fool enough to believe in such an Orwellian myth of a perpetual war, does not justify the stripping of human rights to Medieval levels.
As Ben Franklin put it: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Worst, such laws as promise “temporary” are all too often not temporary. The TSA is still forcing passengers to discard liquids though the idea of concocting explosives in an airplane bathroom was debunked years ago. Guantanamo remains.
And even worst, laws ostensibly drafted to address a specific threat, in this case “terrorism” are inevitably exploited by ambitious prosecutors and police to fight “crime” in general, as in the case of New York City’s exponential growth in the use of ‘Stop and Frisk’ which has turned walking the streets with dark skin into a frightening gauntlet and which is filling our overcrowded prisons with minor offenders, much like in Louisiana, which has 5 times the rate of incarceration as Iran, primarily because of their almost wholly privatized prison industry which has created an incentive to fill jails whose inmates provide a convenient source of slave labor.
ENOUGH! Building prisons is not a way to build an economy. It is social cannibalism, a sick society consuming itself in lieu of producing or contributing anything of beauty or value to the world.
- Jasperodus
