Truthdig - Mar 30, 2014
By Chris Hedges
The Barack Obama administration, determined to thwart the attempt by
other plaintiffs and myself to have the courts void a law that permits
the military to arrest U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and
indefinitely detain them, has filed a detailed brief with the Supreme Court asking the justices to refuse to accept our petition to hear our appeal. We will respond within 10 days.
“The administration’s unstated goal appears to be to get court to
agree that [the administration] has the authority to use the military to
detain U.S. citizens,” Bruce Afran, one of two attorneys handling the
case, said when I spoke with him Sunday. “It appears to be asking the
court to go against nearly 150 years of repeated decisions in which the
court has refused to give the military such power. No court in U.S.
history has ever recognized the right of the government to use the
military to detain citizens. It would be very easy for the government to
state in the brief that citizens and permanent residents are not within
the scope of this law. But once again, it will not do this. It says the
opposite. It argues that the activities of the plaintiffs do not fall
within the scope of the law, but it clearly is reserving for itself the
right to use the statute to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely.”
The lawsuit, Hedges v. Obama, challenges Section 1021(b)(2)
of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It was signed into
law the last day of 2011. Afran and fellow attorney Carl Mayer filed the
lawsuit in January 2012. I was later joined by co-plaintiffs Noam
Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, journalist Alexa O’Brien, Tangerine Bolen, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir and Occupy London activist Kai Wargalla.
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