Obama signs bill allowing indefinite detention of U.S. policy opponents

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4 Socialist Action january 2012 The kind of repression that can be expected to increase exponentially as a result of the new indefinite-detention rider to the National Defense Authorization Act was illustrated just a week before Obama signed it on New Year’s Eve. On Dec. 20, a Boston jury convicted the pharmacist Dr. Tarek Mehanna of material support to terrorism based on the fact that he translated and disseminated a document titled “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad,” a document that prosecutors failed to recognize as composed in great measure of lines from the Koran.

Mehanna was first targeted for prosecution when, as a young pharmacy student, he refused the FBI’s request that he act as an informer for them. His first arrest was orchestrated on the basis that he had made a false statement in an interview forced on him by the FBI, a charge that the government could never prove. He was released and later arrested for what the Massachusetts ACLU characterized as a political speech—that is, speech that should have been protected in the United States.

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riers has to do with the perceived need to boost naval presence in the Straits of Hormuz and the Pacific simultaneously.

The “War on Terror” in Africa The U.S. government’s desire to use its military might to have leverage over energy flows is now also manifesting itself in a more visible way on the African continent. Obama’s declaration that he was sending combat troops to Central Africa alerted the antiwar movement that the U.S. efforts to secure Somalia, which is strategically located on the shipping lanes adjacent to the Horn of Africa, was beginning again in earnest.

The proxy war there, which has recently involved the invasion of Somalia by Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia, is being disguised as part of a so-called War on Terror in Africa.

Despite the unjust character of the government case against Mehanna, his family and friends, as well as the broad civil liberties community, will likely know in which prison he may be found and be able to appeal his conviction. However, under the new indefinite-detention provisions codified in the NDAA, the government will be able to disappear someone like Mehanna and hold them indefinitely without trial or any kind of due process.

Combined with already existing government practice that allows the interpretation of political speech in opposition to U.S. foreign policy to be considered “material support to terrorism” and the mandate to “preemptively prosecute” those who express such opposition, the passage of the NDAA indefinite-detention provision marks a dramatic escalation of U.S. repressive policies.

The deliberate and well-documented debate in Congress about whether or not this provision would apply to U.S. citizens, a debate that ended with a majority affirming its applicability to everyone, has given the government tools for a new level of domestic repression.

Both the ACLU and Human Rights Watch The U.S. is training Nigerian troops with the supposed goal of subduing a fundamentalist Islamist group called Boko Haram. A December report by a subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security claims that Boko Haram is a link between a group called Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb in Niger and the group called Al Shabaab in Somalia and, naturally, an “emerging threat” to the U.S.

In truth, progressive scholars of African studies have been casting doubt on the U.S. characterizations of these groups for years. Jeremy Keenan, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, has documented the way in which the U.S. colluded with the Algerian secret military intelligence services to actually orchestrate a series of hostage takings and terrorist attacks that, over time, connected Algeria, the Sahel, and Nigeria as nations in need of an imperialist military presence.

According to Keenan, northern Nigeria lies on a path that will carry the central section of a proposed Trans-Saharan have noted that this is the first time that the U.S. has clearly legally enshrined indefinite detention since the Internal Security Act of 1950, a McCarthy-era law mostly overturned in 1971, authorized the imprisonment of Communists or “subversives” without full trials or due process.

One of the most shameful elements of the reaction to the NDAA within the broad antiwar and social justice movements has been the effort by a layer of Obama supporters to downplay the significance of the indefinite-detention provision. Some argue, in a perverse replay of a decade of inattention to the defense of the Muslim American victims of FBI entrapment and confinement in CMUs, that it really does not apply to U.S. citizens. Others have insisted that it only codifies what is already being done under the Bush era 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).

Activists who find this political stance toward the NDAA inexplicable should remember that due to their support for President Roosevelt’s war effort in the 1940s, both the Communist Party USA and the National Lawyer’s Guild ended up supporting FDR’s executive order for gas pipeline from Nigeria to Algeria. In addition to Nigeria’s high quality crude oil, the region contains oil, bauxite, uranium, and other strategic resources important to the U.S., the EU, and China.

Imperialist intervention has spurred corruption and the increasing impoverishment of the majority, with the highest inequality manifested in the Muslim north of Nigeria. The youth that today make up Boko Haram, according to Caroline Ifeka of the Department of Anthropology of University College London, began organizing as part of an anti-corruption movement that demanded more of the patronage pie for those at the bottom.

Iraq and oil The desire of the U.S. to throw its military weight around in Asia and Africa, and against Iran, has not in fact translated to a lack of attention to securing gains made in Iraq and Afghanistan. While U.S. has, at least temporarily, withdrawn combat troops to the borders of Iraq and abandoned the five large military bases in Iraq that it once had determined “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001.” The NDAA, on the other hand, adds as a target a person who “substantially supports”

such groups “and/or associated forces.”

This language could give the government a license to detain people who carry out solidarity work with groups working in opposition to U.S. foreign-policy aims.

Already, a number of antiwar activists in the Midwest have been threatened with having to give testimony to a grand jury convened to investigate “terrorism” because they sent aid to child-care centers in Gaza or publically explained the plight of peasants living in FARC-controlled sections of Colombia.

The NDAA indefinite-detention provisions must be opposed with all the strength the broad movements for social change can muster. The Muslim Peace Coalition, in collaboration with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), and many others, have begun assembling a national coalition that can implement a three-month campaign to build grassroots opposition.

The coalition will soon make available the tools for activists to seek support for a repeal campaign to bar associations, academics, 1000 members of the clergy, unions, and city and town councils around the United States. To become involved in this effort, contact UNAC via www.unacpeace.org. n characterized as “enduring,” it has left behind both a central client regime and regional client regimes whose political futures are based on the successful foreign exploitation of Iraqi oil.

In 2011, according to USA Today, U.S. companies reached deals worth $8.1 billion, and spokespeople compared Iraq, sectarian bombings notwithstanding, as an oasis of stability compared to Egypt and other neighboring countries. The failure of the coalition government to reach agreement on an oil law—i.e., an agreement among Iraqi elites about the division of the spoils of this war—has not really inhibited U.S. companies from profiting and from rewarding regional collaborators.

The New York Times reported in 2011 that U.S. firms like Halliburton and Baker Hughes were awarded at least $150 billion in oil services contracts. In December, Exxon was in the news because the Iraqi central government was threatening to revoke its substantial oil service contracts in the south of the country since the oil company had (continued on page 5, in “U.S. Justice Dept. charges Arizona sheriff with discrimination against immigrants”)

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... U.S. seeks new battlegrounds