This is the second part of a 3-part series about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that began with “Another Assault in the Dead of Night“. As I concluded there:

“[B]elieve the hype: the NDAA’s detention provisions represent a frontal assault on the Bill of Rights. They are noxious now. They will be worse in the future. We will live to regret ever even considering this law, and our leaders will be judged harshly for allowing it to become law without even a single congressional hearing and over the objections of concerned Americans all over the country.”

The key is the PATRIOT Act’s extension of “material support for terrorism” to include associational and speech crimes, even where the defendants had no intention of supporting violence. In Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder (2010), the Supreme Court denied a First Amendment defense to the terror prosecution of a charity whose offence entailed funding workshops encouraging non-violence in Turkey (in the same Term that the Supreme Court held that corporations do enjoy a First Amendment right to buy elections).

The funny thing about the bill that the Senate just passed that lets presidents and the military lock you up without a charge or a trial — well, not funny ha ha but funny unusual — is that the basic bill to which that little monstrosity was attached is even worse. It’s a bill to dump over $650 billion into wars and aggressive weaponry, continue the slaughter in Afghanistan, ramp up the creation and use of drones, and expand U.S. military bases around the globe.

What could possibly make a human being torture another human being?

That’s a question that, as a young boy, I recall asking my grandparents—Holocaust survivors—after they described to me in vivid detail the torture they and other members of my extended family were subjected to by the Nazis during World War II.

It’s a question I returned to earlier this year when I had the opportunity to interview a veteran of the US Army Reserves who was torn up about the torture he says he witnessed and participated in against some “war on terror” detainees while serving as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. [That guard, Pfc. Albert Melise, has since been barred from reenlistment for speaking to me.]

In 2008, I was one of the many who hit the streets, knocked at doors and stood under the hot Florida sun to help President Obama get elected. After two and a half years, what did I get from my hard work? 1 million deportations and a total devastation of my community! President Obama is the president that has deported more people in our nation’s history –with the grand majority posing no threat to society at all.

The ACLU was in court today to defend a US citizen, who was illegally detained and mistreated by US officials in Kenya and Ethiopia. The citizen, Amir Meshal, a man from New Jersey, was in Mogadishu, Somalia, studying Islam in December 2006 when violence erupted. He fled to Kenya in a boat, spent three weeks in a forest looking for shelter and assistance and was arrested by the joint US-Kenyan-Ethiopian task force.

Joe Miller reversed himself and discussed his background yesterday, acknowledging that he committed ethics violations while working at the Fairbanks North Star Borough in 2008. He used company time and resources to help depose the head of the Alaska GOP.

After yet again firing his lawyers, Gitmo detainee Omar Khadr appeared resigned. “[N]ot one of the lawyers I’ve had, or human right organization or any person say that the commission is fair, or looking for justice, but on the contrary they say it is unfair and unjust and that it has been constructed solely to convict detainees and not to find the truth,” Khadr wrote.

On MSNBC Laura Flanders calls for the media to get off Cheney’s talking points and get to the problems with Obama’s security plan.