Shahid Buttar

by Jeremy Leaming

Apparently consumed by what Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi calls the “most meaningless national election we’ve ever had,” the recent enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act, a sweeping law that some constitutional experts argue poses grave dangers to civil liberties, has garnered limited attention from the media.

In a three-part series for the People’s Blog for the Constitution, Shahid Buttar, in a Q-and-A format, explains why the NDAA, which President Obama signed at the end of December, deserves far more attention for its possible detrimental effects on civil liberties. (The bill does more than authorize billions in military spending, $662 billion to be exact. It also, as Buttar explains, provides the executive branch with potentially far-reaching powers to detain Americans suspected of terrorism-related activities. In signing the bill, Obama maintained he would never authorize indefinite military detention of Americans citizens, and that he would not feel compelled to try all suspects in military tribunals, as the law authorizes. Buttar’s exhaustive series, however, explains why such assurances are wobbly.)

Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, in his first blog post, “The NDAA: Another assault in the dead of night,” blasts Congress for supporting, with passage of the NDAA, “indefinite military detention of even US citizens.” The version that Obama signed into law contains provisions that only appear to limit the law’s reach, Buttar writes.

“Apologists for the NDAA,” Buttar states, “forget that laws remain fixed until changed, beyond the terms of particular officials who write them. And the ambiguity created by the law could be construed by future Presidents (or their advisors) to confer dramatic, sweeping powers to detain US citizens without a right to trial or Due Process. In the wrong hands, it could be used as a powerful tool to suppress dissent, with predictably catastrophic consequences.”