Jon Stewart takes on the detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act:
My personal favorite line is “you can take away our lives, but only we can take away our freedom!”
Still, as I explained yesterday, the bill no longer authorizes indefinite detention without trial of American citizens apprehended in the US, due to the compromise amendment adopted by the Senate. Nonetheless, proponents of indefinite detention of Americans say the legislation doesn’t need to explicitly grant that power because the president already has that authority (we’ll see what the Supreme Court says about that if and when the time comes). The bill still mandates indefinite detention of non-citizens under the same circumstances, a provision that pretty much every top national security official in the Obama administration—and a some former Bush officials as well—say will harm national security.
