NDAA Update: Military Detention Law Survives on 2nd Circuit Appeal

Well, not the best news and they lost to the mother of all cheesy technicalities. Lack of standing.

BoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo!

Without proof that the Obama administration's military detention law will target them specifically, a group of journalists opposed to it lack standing to sue, the 2nd Circuit ruled.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges filed suit days after President Barack Obama signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which Hedges claims has dangerously vague language that could be used against reporters, activists and human-rights workers.

One paragraph nestled in the 565-page doorstopper, Section 1021(b)(2), lets the military indefinitely detain anyone accused of having "substantially supported" al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces" until "the end of hostilities."

(BOLD added by Me)

That last part there is what this is all about for anyone who hasn't been following this all from the start when the NDAA was passed with this provision in it. It's something very concerning and not to just a few Journalists, either.

Six others opposed to the law, including renowned scholar Noam Chomsky and Pentagon Papers source Daniel Ellsberg, joined as co-plaintiffs

and now we get to the cheese on the cracker. The cheap in the bargain. The outright coward's way out of deciding a legal case, in my personal view and opinion.

"The American citizen plaintiffs lack standing because Section 1021 says nothing at all about the president's authority to detain American citizens," U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote for a three-member panel, sitting by designation from the Southern District of New York.

"And while Section 1021 does have a real bearing on those who are neither citizens nor lawful resident aliens and who are apprehended abroad, the non-citizen plaintiffs also have failed to establish standing because they have not shown a sufficient threat that the government will detain them under Section 1021," Kaplan added (emphasis in original). "Accordingly, we do not address the merits of plaintiffs' constitutional claims."

Source: Courthouse News

So...

Let me put my Government Legalese B.S. translator on and see if I can't make sense of that.

# Americans who feel threatened have no standing because while it doesn't say it does NOT apply to U.S. Citizens, it doesn't explicitly say that it DOES, either.

# Non-Americans also have no standing because while it doesn't say it's NOT for them, and apparently assumed to BE, in fact, intended for non-citizens going by the lines right above for the court's thinking, it's not SPECIFICALLY AND BY NAME targeting them as individual men and women.

I think I got that about right...... End result would seem to be, NO ONE has standing unless they've been arrested under this provision of the NDAA. Of course, if they HAVE, then they are also being held without trial, charges and quite possibly without access to a lawyer or outside communication. Thus, those who DO apparently have standing, by definition, are likely incapable of asserting it.

Oh... That's logic for ya. Why don't they just say we little people can't question this law and be blunt?

What more proof did the court need than Obama's team being unable to answer the question on whether or not journalists could be labeled belligerent and taken into military custody? That's not a frigging technicality it's willfully stating that something didn't occur!

FTS!

Without proof that the Obama administration's military detention law will target them specifically, a group of journalists opposed to it lack standing to sue, the 2nd Circuit ruled.

Without proof eh?

So just as long as its not 'journalists' and others everyone except us little people.

And the march to fascism continues onward, and upward.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


Now after this you really think the Judges for corporate America are going to let a cat out of the bag like Sovereignty and UCC movements?

What is remarkable, truly remarkable about this is how many people ranted about how the NDAA never said "American citizens. In fact, there were several threads on this site in which folks defended the NDAA with text stating it proved that it was not for Americans. Okay, so, let us say for a moment that is true, then why go to court defending what isn't there? Why did the AG office go to court to defend the right to detain Americans if there was no right to detain Americans.

The cognitive dissonance amongst the population is beyond confounding, it is truly scary. If the NDAA has no intention of making it so anyone can be dragged off to wherever for whatever reason, then the court case should have been unopposed, and yet, it was not only opposed, but in the end we learn that it indeed does allow for whatever anyone wants to do.

I have contended that this just some obscene technical formality, as anyone can be taken off the street by anyone with a gun, badge or not, and the recourse all but nil, should said gun toter want it that way. Folks disappear all the time, and nothing is ever sorted out.