Interrogate! Detain! Prosecute! American Citizens?

Tea Party Usurper Sarah Palen’s 2008 running mate, Republican Senator John McCain, has been working overboard to take away the rights of American citizens. In February he and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced S3002 to require registration of all manufacturers, distributors, and holders of supplements; to prohibit the sale of any dietary supplement noton an FDA-approved positive list; and the reporting of every adverse event, whether serious or trivial, attributed to dietary supplements.

This month he and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) have introduced S3081, The Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.

According to its summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of “suspected enemy belligerents” who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States, requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

The legislation, McCain declared, “would authorize detention of enemy belligerents without criminal charges for the duration of the hostilities consistent with standards under the law of war which have been recognized by the Supreme Court.”

There is no distinction in the bill between U.S. citizens, visa-holders and non-U.S. persons.

According to William Fisher (antiwar.com, 3/5/10), the bill was precipitated by the senators’ objections to the Obama administration’s decision to charge accused Christmas Day attacker Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in the criminal court system. Abdulmutallab was read his rights, including his right to remain silent and his right to an attorney. According to the U.S. Constitution, these rights are enjoyed by all persons, whether they are citizens or not, who are arrested on U.S. territory.

S3081 would require “belligerents” to be coded as “high-value detainee[s]” and interrogated by a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team, established by Obama last summer for extracting information from the most important terrorist suspects in its custody.

According to Sec. 3, d2 of the bill, criteria for designation of an individual as a “high-value detainee” includes: (1) the potential threat an individual poses for an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or abroad or; (2) to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities or; (3) his/her potential intelligence value; (4) if he/she is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda or; (5) any other matters as the President considers appropriate.

In 2007 Obama supported the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” (S. 1959) which vaguely defined “homegrown terrorists” as radicals with “extreme belief systems,” - which according to Homeland Security Governor Jay Nixon’s “innovative fusion center,” the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), includes Christians, pro-life activists, and anyone that questions the U.S. government. A 1/7/10 briefing by Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, states that “the President is ordering an immediate effort to strengthen the criteria used to add individuals to our terrorist watchlists, especially the ‘no fly’ list.” In the last four years several small U.S. children have been detained by TSA because their names appeared on the “no fly” list, including a 4-year-old, a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old.

“The most disturbing aspect surrounding [this] is the fact that people like Glenn Beck…have been aggressively promoting for months the notion that people who express dissent against the government are intent on killing people,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet.com in his recent article, “Pentagon Shooting: Now Everyone’s a Terrorist.”

“Last night’s shooting at the Pentagon …was preceded by weeks of hype from both the establishment left and right about the inevitability of 9/11-truthers going postal,” he added.

Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, summed it up when he said that this bill is just “another leg in the terrible race to the bottom in which politicians compete to seem ‘tougher’ on terrorism while really diminishing national security.”