US Government Says It Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone…Even US Citizens: “There is no bar to this Nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant.”

FOR OVER 17 years, Moath al-Alwi has been held at Guantánamo Bay without charge. A Yemeni citizen, al-Alwi is one of Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners,” those whom the U.S. government has not charged with a crime but is unwilling to release. On June 10, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in his case, the latest setback in al-Alwi’s long effort to obtain due process rights. Even though the court wouldn’t take al-Alwi up, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that it would only be a matter of time before the court had to grapple with the forever prisoners and the scope of the government’s power to hold them.

The Supreme Court rejection — and Breyer’s comments — briefly brought al-Alwi’s case back to national attention. Little noted, however, were the eyebrow-raising assertions that the government has made in this case about its powers to indefinitely detain not just al-Alwi, but anyone — including U.S. citizens.

In a filing with the Supreme Court this April, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that the United States can continue to hold al-Alwi indefinitely without charging him. They also embraced the power to detain a U.S. citizen as an “enemy combatant”, an assertion they haven’t advanced openly since the era of President George W. Bush. Notably, the lawyers seemed to indicate, for the first time in a filing with the Supreme Court, that the government could even detain a U.S. citizen for as long as it has held al-Alwi, 17 years and counting, without charge.”

“There is no bar to this Nation’s holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant,” the filing read. Were al-Alwi a citizen, they argued, he “would pose the same threat of returning to the front during the ongoing conflict.” There were no “constitutional questions” raised by this hypothetical, they maintained.

theintercept.com/2019/06/21/guantanamo-bay-indefinite-detention/

This surely is what the Founding Fathers of the US fought against in the Revolutionary War.

No state has the authority to indefinitely detain a human being without due process and a fair trial.

The fact that the US government is evoking this authority is the clearest evidence of them all that it has been usurped by actual enemies of the Republic.

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This should be a massive wake up call for the American population. Sadly, many appear completely consumed by technology and propaganda to effect any real change.

How do we get these people out of their soporific stupor?

 

h/t axolotl_peyotl

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