Senate approves Martial Law: Military can jail
indefinitely, no charge, no trial
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Human rights campaign to prevent codification of Martial Law in America fails
Although the Obama administration has threatened to veto what is being called the “Secret Martial Law Act” if Congress approved it, on Tuesday, the Senate, mainly with Republican backing, voted 61 to 37 in favor of it, empowering the military to imprison “terror suspects” including people arrested inside the United States, without charge or trial and to hold them indefinitely, a Constitutional and human rights violation that even the national-security team has said is unacceptable and that the U.S. has used military aggression to end in foreign countries.
With a 61 to 37 fast-tracked vote, the U.S. Senate betrayed Americans by turning back a national grassroots effort to strip the major secretive military bill of a set of disputed provisions that impact managing so-called terrorism cases.
The Congressional vote reflects one reason 9/11 Truthers have campaigned to raise awareness that the September 11, 2001 attacks were an inside job.
A related provision of the legislation would create a federal statute giving legal authority to the government to keep Americans “suspected of terrorism” (not found guilty) in: 1) military custody, 2) indefinitely, and 3) without trial.
“It contains no exception for American citizens,” reports theNew York Times.
It is reportedly intended to boost authorization to “use military force against the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which lawmakers enacted a decade ago.”
Head of the official White House Commission of the 9/11 attacks and most of that commission that reported on the attacks have stated that almost everything they reported in the official white paper about the event was untrue and that President George W. Bush ordered them to falsify the official report.
(See: “HR Headlines: 9/11 Commission rejects its official report: ‘Almost entirely untrue’”)
That same “official 9/11 story” that was falsified, resulting in thousands of American soldiers’ deaths and many more innocent Middle Easterners’ deaths, is being used to enact martial law within the U.S., enabling Americans to be victims of same human rights violations perpetrated against innocent foreigners for over ten years: captured, detained without charge, and held indefinitely without trial.
“We are at war with Al Qaeda, and people who are determined to be part of Al Qaeda should be treated as people who are at war with us,” said Mr. Levin whom, with John McCain had drafted and introduced the bill in June — behind closed doors.
In recent days, top national security officials including Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta; Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper; and even Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert S. Mueller III have each voiced opposition to the proposed law, as have several former Bush administration counterterrorism officials.
Republican senators, however, nearly unanimously supported for the martial law bill: 44 in favor and only two opposed, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
A last minute human rights campaign on Tuesday, in support of Senator Mark Udall (D – CO) and a member of the Armed Services Committee who sponsored a proposal to strip the detainee proposals from the bill, failed.
Senator Udall warned that the provisions could ‘destabilize’ counterterrorism efforts, ‘open the door to domestic military police powers and possibly deny U.S. citizens their due process rights,’” according to NY Times.
In June, the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, Andrea Prasow stated that “mandatory military detention is what martial-law states do, not democracies.”
Political analyst Naomi Wolf has outlined steps a fascistic group (or government) takes to destroy democratic character of a nation-state and subvert the social/political liberty previously exercised by its citizens. In this writer’s article,“End of America, The ten steps that have been taken for fascism,” American examples of Wolf’s steps are listed.
This new legislation codifies U.S. martial law.