r/Politics has been debating this and it's just a god damn clusterfuck, don't even go in there. Jesus. I finally hunted down a good source. This site offers "legal analysis and commentary," which is still over my head a bit, but it's better than nothing. Obama apparently issued a waiver that will effectively end military detentions for non-citizen terrorism suspects. From what I can tell, it's really no different from the statement he issued soon after he signed the NDAA, promising to never follow through with the worst interpretations with its worst provisions. That's sort of irrelevant to me though, because I trusted him enough that he wouldn't pull that shit extensively anyway. That was never the issue for me. The issue is that once he leaves office, these laws will still be on the books. And doesn't look like that's changed.
One problem with a presidential directive is, of course, that it can be rescinded by a future president. And while the new directive represents a laudable effort to narrow some of the NDAA’s most objectionable provisions, it leaves section 1021 of the law untouched.
A much better, if more long-term, approach to remedying the law’s problems would be to repeal or amend it. The hearings held this morning by the Senate Judiciary Committee are a step in that direction.
I originally got this from the Daily Kos, which was pretty embarrassing to read. I'm really beginning to hate this site.
Considering that Obama's signing of NDAA led to a hysterical exodus of low-info Democratic and Independent support that probably measurably lowered his approval ratings, and could threaten his re-election...
Holy fuck. Just because someone disagrees with your interpretation of what the NDAA does doesn't mean they're "low-info." Fucking jackass. I'm still trying to make sense of what Obama did just now, but it is a fact that the NDAA allowed him to indefinitely detain Americans before he did it, and both he and Bush have been doing these things illegally for the past decade before the bill was even signed. But if we decide to react once they make it legal, we're suddenly "hysterical." Go fuck yourself.
I don't think I hate Obama as a person. For all I know, he's aware of what's at stake and he's trying to fix things a little. But this is all avoiding the key issue: we have allowed things to get so bad that we are debating this. For the sake of argument, let's just say that indefinite detention of American citizens is no longer legal. That still leaves the assassination of American citizens. That leaves the indefinite detention of non-American citizens. That leaves the Patriot Act. Law enforcement is about to get drones. The CIA is probably infiltrating Occupy Wall Street. The internet is being censored, and the FBI now officially considers hacktivists to be more dangerous to America than terrorists. Congress just passed an authoritarian anti-protest law that neuters the first amendment. Not a single Democrat voted against it. Obama supports all of it. The political center has been moved somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Francisco Franco. Whatever Obama just did doesn't change anything, because the culture that allowed it to arise still exists. At best, he is only a flimsy, cracked wall holding back the floodgates. The next time a charismatic tyrant gets into office, it's all over. That could be Obama's second term, for all we know. The most important thing of all is that the system is set up perfectly for a tyrannical government to just snap its jaws around us whenever it wants. I'm fucking paranoid about this, and you should be too. Fascism is a modern phenomenon. It is not a historical fairy tale that's restricted to words on a page.
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