Obama administration demands appeals court overturn ‘dangerous’ indefinite detention ruling
By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the Lie
(Image credit: CC-BY-SA-3.0/Matt H. Wade at Wikipedia)
The Obama White House is not giving up in their fight to hold on to the power to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial after federal appeals court judge Katherine Forrest blocked the administration’s ability to hold anyone who they claim “substantially support[s]” any entities allegedly “engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”
The Obama administration is now calling on the court to reverse the decision which they called “dangerous” and a threat to national security even though it is in clear violation of our rights protected by the constitution.
Indeed, unlike those who attempted to claim that the legislation in fact only applied to non-U.S. citizens involved in terrorist activities, Judge Forrest was able to see just how vague the language actually is.
This ambiguous wording would allow U.S. citizens and journalists engaged in activities otherwise wholly protected by the constitution to be held indefinitely without charge or trial. This is precisely what I was writing about long before the decision along with many others who were regularly confronted with sometimes laughable attempts to minimize the sheer danger of this legislation.
One memorable example came from Robert Blaskiewicz, Ph.D, a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia and the man mostly responsible for the blog Skeptical Humanities.
Among other things, Blaskiewicz wrote in the comments section of my December 2, 2011 post entitled, “The entire United States is now a war zone: S.1867 passes the Senate with massive support,”
“I’m reading all of this as saying that the act is self-limiting to non-residents and “combatants” (a disturbing legal fiction some people take seriously, but there you have it). It says nothing about citizens. And because it does not alter the status of American citizens and legal resident aliens, it simply does not apply to them.”
Of course, we now know that couldn’t be further from the truth. Blaskiewicz concluded by writing,
“I think that part of what is different is that when I see something is not mentioned, I leave it as ‘not mentioned.’ When you see something as not mentioned but not explicitly forbidden, you see it as probably going on.”
Thankfully Blaskiewicz is not one to engage in egregious ad hominem attacks as others have when addressing this issue but nonetheless it would be wonderful to see individuals like Blaskiewicz account for their now clearly incorrect beliefs.
One might be able to brush off the decision of Judge Forrest if it wasn’t for the quite heated statement made in an emergency appeal (PDF hosted by Threat Level) filed by the administration in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.
“The district court has entered a sweeping injunction, directly against the President and the Secretary of Defense, that strikes down as facially unconstitutional a federal statute relating to the United States’ power to detain individuals as part of the conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, with implications for ongoing military operations and causing potential harm to national security,” stated the emergency appeal.
“The district court’s overbroad worldwide injunction is erroneous as a matter of law and threatens tangible and dangerous consequences in the conduct of an active military conflict,” the administration wrote.
“The order should be stayed immediately and remain stayed until final resolution of the appeal,” they added, thus calling on the court to undermine the entirety of Judge Forrest’s ruling.
This is a quite disturbing, yet not all that surprising, display of just how far gone the Obama administration really is.
Not only are they claiming they can indefinitely detain Americans without charge or trial – despite Obama’s clearly meaningless signing statement – but they also now claim they can assassinate Americans based on a secret review of classified evidence.
If the American people allow the Obama administration to continue to flout the law and completely ignore the constitution, I don’t think it is at all reasonable to expect the situation to fix itself.
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Madison Ruppert is a Los Angeles-based independent journalist and researcher as well as the founder, owner, administrator and editor of EndtheLie.com. He has no affiliations with any government agencies, political parties, non-governmental organizations, or economic schools. He is available for freelance writing assignments and appearances or interviews in any format. He can be reached by emailing
Is this guy the President of the US or some third world dictator?
Did he vow to uphold and defend the Constitution of the US or did he think that was a joke and did not apply to him since he was not born in the US?
waimeajim recently posted: Mysterious bird-like drone may have popped up in both Iraq and Pakistan, origin still unknown
The Obama administration is a clearly out of control, terroristic and power mad collection of psychopaths, bent on the destruction of everything Americans hold dear. Having allowed the bankers to destroy main street and the lives of decent, hardworking people while lying and concealing the facts is bad enough, but our dictator is planning to push us from socialism into communism. Every day, the Obama administration pushes some new form of oppression on us, enacts new legislation to take our freedoms in the name of “security” and steals our liberties like a thief in the night.
We keep this administration in power and the banks that run it by paying our taxes–directly funding this regime–when the solution to these terrible problems is to simply stop paying. We still have the power in our numbers to bring this crisis to a halt.