Back   OpEd News
Font
PageWidth
Original Content at
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Indefinite-detention--A-by-Ian-Hansen-121008-691.html
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).

October 9, 2012

"Indefinite detention": A Song In Search of a Barbershop Quartet or Two

By Ian Hansen

The article introduces the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and solicits videos for an anti-NDAA song. I offer to donate two prizes of $500 each to the favorite charities of the selected winners.

::::::::

(Article changed on October 10, 2012 at 13:33)

"Indefinite detention": A Song In Search of a Barbershop Quartet or Two 

"If I had no sense of humor I would long ago have committed suicide."

--Mohandas Gandhi, 1928

You're in for an unusual treat, OpEdNews readers.    This article comes not only with song lyrics, but with an invitation to earn a green-colored sweetener.     $500 to $1000 in prizes might be yours (to donate to a good cause) if you can turn the song a couple of dozen paragraphs below from tuneless words on a page into a catchy video that will inspire joyously outraged Durkheimian choral ecstasy at protest venues all across the United States until the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act 2012 are retracted and apologized for [1] .   I am not kidding (not about the money anyway).  I have the money and will indeed distribute it to the winning videos.  If I were kidding, I would have offered $100,000,000, but $1000 I can swing.

NDAA 2012

First, a few words of introduction to the subject matter of the song: The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  The NDAA is a bill voted on yearly to authorize military appropriations and offer guidelines for the conduct of existing military operations.  The NDAA added two particularly vile sections in 2012: 1021 and 1022.  Section 1021 authorizes, for covered persons, "detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities", hostilities which, given our current open-ended cosmic battle against the abstract construct called "terror", can potentially go on until the earth crashes into the sun.   Section 1022 mandates that the armed forces of the U.S. hold "covered persons" in military custody, unless the president authorizes that they be detained under some other circumstances (whether more or less humane).  

Section 1021 also authorizes rendition of detainees to other countries, specifically "transfer to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity." These categories of location presumably include Guantanamo, Bagram/Parwan, CIA black sites, and the nations of our "allies" as well as other conditionally cooperative nations (like Sudan) who employ even more brutal methods of torture than the U.S. corporate government does. 

The people who can be detained indefinitely and transferred to torturing nations under section 1021 include not only those who appear (without trial or conviction) to be directly responsible for the September 11 attacks, but also anyone whom the government suspects "was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces."

The people who are mandated to military custody under section 1022 are those who are suspected both "to be a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda" and "to have participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners."

At first blush, the language of the bill makes it sound like the NDAA's atrocious human rights violations will only be inflicted on those suspected to be Very Bad Men--i.e. on the suspected members of al-Qaeda, affiliates of whom are known for destroying the Twin Towers and putting a big hole in the Pentagon as well as murdering 3,000 noncombatants; or on suspected members of the Taliban, who are known for viciously oppressing women, killing civilians, and blowing up Buddhist statues.  This optimistic view of who the victims of the NDAA will be grows less stable once it becomes clear that "al-Qaeda" is an arbitrarily-applied category marker used to describe a wide variety of terrorist and non-terrorist groups who often are not in communication with each other and are almost never in communication with Ayman Zawahiri or any of the other known figureheads of "al-Qaeda central".

Given that al-Qaeda exists only as a disparate swarm of groups united around a common set of ideas, this gives the state tremendous leeway to call anyone "al-Qaeda" if it is expedient and minimally plausible to do so.  As for the Taliban, they are more coordinated and they really do viciously oppress women, murder civilians and blow up Buddhist statues, but we have some terrible allies with equally bloody or bloodier hands (e.g. Saudi Arabia and...um...ourselves), and besides the Taliban did not fly planes into the Twin Towers, so why are we still fighting them more than a decade later under the banner of retaliation for the 9/11 attacks? This unexplained 11 year binge of "lesson-teaching" should be mysterious to all government-trusting individuals.

In addition to the definitional nebulousness of "al-Qaeda" and the national security irrelevance of the Taliban, certain phrases in sections 1021 and 1022 like "substantially supported" and "associated forces" are disturbingly vague, as, for that matter, are words like "attack", "hostilities" and "belligerent act."  In English, an "attack" can, of course, be a violent and morally inexcusable attack, e.g. one that murders civilians en masse (like drone attacks, Shock and Awe attacks, cluster bomb attacks, and the helicopter attacks on Reuters journalists and ambulance drivers documented by the Collateral Murder video leaked to Wikileaks).  Attacks can also be violent but morally less atrocious attacks, like the kind of violent attacks made in self defense when someone else is directly and violently attacking you without reasonable provocation.  Attacks, belligerencies and hostilities can also be of a nonviolent nature, like the kind that inspire angry corporations to buy themselves up a posse of politicians employed  to destroy the labor unions that "attacked" them with their demands for living wages, reasonable safety conditions, sane working hours, etc.

For instance, when Wisconsin governor Scott Walker tried to strip collective bargaining rights from the public sector unions of Wisconsin, a state with the earliest-established public sector unions in the country, those union members "attacked" him by "belligerently" occupying the Wisconsin statehouse and organizing a "hostile" recall effort that fell short of recalling him but did make him a lame duck governor.  Likewise, Occupy Wall Street has been "attacking" the so-called "job-creating" investment bankers and hedge fund managers of our nation with peaceful protests attended by thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of people.  These belligerent hostile attacks can be considered terroristic and substantially supportive of al-Qaeda if looked at through an Orwellian-enough lens backed up by laws that take fair trials out of the evaluation process by which people are judged to have engaged in terrorism.  And it is not reassuring that the new Black Ops video game for would-be recruits to the armed forces targets an Assange-like villain dubbed "the messiah of the 99%."

Of course Wisconsonites and Occupiers are mostly American citizens, so for my concerns above to be justified, there must be some evidence that the NDAA authorizes indefinite military detention of American citizens.  The NDAA is an atrocious bill even if it only applies to foreign nationals, because it is wrong to indefinitely detain without trial the human beings of any nation.  However, a rough way of testing the outer limits of a nation's potential for madness and brutality is by examining what that nation allows to befall (or inflicts upon) its own citizens.  Nations that do not employ the state to murder, assassinate or torture their own people, for instance, should, in theory, be less prolific at mass murdering and mass torturing the people of other nations also (holding constant the raw power capacity to get away with murdering and torturing people of other nations).

The Japanese Imperial army may have been such an imaginatively murderous menace to Asia before and during World War II in part because Japanese warriors had developed a national habit of dispatching the people of their own nation in horrendously agonizing ways--they were thus inflicting on Asia an exaggerated version of what they had grown accustomed to inflicting on their own.  With this example in mind, if the U.S. corporate-run government feels comfortable indefinitely detaining its own citizens in military custody under NDAA 2012, then the rest of the world should start building bunkers to hide in now.   

Some pundits assert that it is not clear how sections 1021 and 1022 might apply to American citizens as section 1021 contains the following provision: "nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."   That sounds like American citizens are exempted from indefinite detention, until you do some background reading and discover that legal scholars argue the government has already written itself the right to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely without trial under "existing law" (pre-NDAA 2012, like the Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF).  By this scholarly account, the NDAA is just a coup de grace putting out of their misery our already mortally wounded Constitutional rights.

For instance, even before NDAA 2012, the government had already subjected an American citizen, Jose Padilla, to indefinite detention, and made accused whistle-blower Bradley Manning (tentatively credited with releasing to wikileaks the Collateral Murder video referenced above) suffer in psychosis-inducing isolation, sometimes naked and shivering in his cell, for a couple of years before intense protests convinced the Obama administration to put him in somewhat more humane detention conditions. 

Manning's case offers evidence that some powerful people in government consider non-violent whistle-blowing on U.S. military atrocities to be a terrorist attack, which explains not only Manning's treatment but also the calls by some government officials to extra-judicially assassinate wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  Though Assange is not a U.S. citizen, he is a citizen of Australia--a close ally.  Assange is now living at the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain and denied safe transfer.  Recent leaks suggest the U.S. considers Assange an "enemy of the state"--like, say, Osama Bin Laden and Anwar Al-Awlaki used to be.  Manning may finally receive a trial in spite of this climate of hair trigger paranoia--though any such trial would be held in a military court, of course, complete with the requisite kangaroos.  With regard to Assange, however, I fear that the U.S. will find a way to dispatch him without the public relations messiness of putting a journalist on trial.

In addition to detaining U.S. citizens without respecting their Constitutional or human rights, the Obama administration has taken a hard line against allowing any kind of accountability for torturing people.  Obama does not even want to give justice to two American contractors, Donald Vance (a U.S. Navy veteran) and Nathan Ertel, whom various U.S. government agencies tortured "by mistake" after they trustingly reported to the FBI their suspicions of illegal activity (like dealing arms to death squads) by the Iraqi company they were working for (Shield Group Security).  In addition to being indifferent to the torture of U.S. citizens with enhanced interrogation techniques, the Obama administration has actually assassinated a few American citizens as well, including Anwar al-Awlaki (who made pro-Al Qaeda youtube videos) and his sixteen year old child.  Needless to say none of these dead Americans were tried in court, let alone charged with anything.

Perhaps this kind of government behavior was intended to keep our expectations low enough that the NDAA would be perceived as raising the heat just one degree higher as part of the long, slow boiling of the U.S. Constitutional frog--as the old tale goes, slowly-boiled frogs do not jump out of the pot.  Part of the NDAA's coup de grace against American Constitutional and human rights is the option, implied in section 1022, to hold U.S. citizen detainees in military custody indefinitely.  Section 1022 notes that the NDAA 2012 does not oblige the government to put U.S. detainees in military custody, but neither does it recognize U.S. detainees' Constitutional rights to be clearly charged, provided with a lawyer and determination of bail, and then held in civilian jails under habeas corpus while expecting speedy trials before juries of their peers in civilian courts.  The precise language in 1022 is simply, "the requirement [italics mine] to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States."  Hooray"? [2]  

All this vague language around who could reasonably be detained indefinitely without trial under military custody led Chris Hedges and a number of other journalists and public figures (including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg) to sue the Obama administration out of concern that their normal journalistic and activist activities might be covered under one or both indefinite detention sections of the NDAA.  The plaintiffs argued, therefore, that the bill infringes on their First Amendment rights.  Journalistic activities have, for Hedges at least, historically included interviews with members of groups designated terrorist organizations as well as the Taliban.  These interviews have involved extensive contact and shared movement, and might also be construed by some as offering "substantial support" insofar as interviews allowed these groups to publicly assert their positions.

Shockingly, the Obama administration refused to rule out indefinitely detaining the plaintiffs for their journalistic activities in the future, and so the District Court ruled that sections 1021 and 1022 are too vaguely articulated, and in their present form violate the plaintiffs' first amendment rights and thus the U.S. Constitution.  Recently District Court Judge Forrest, who presided over the case, issued a permanent injunction against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA.  The Obama administration continues to appeal the decision.

This is an odd move by the government.  After going to such great lengths in the media to make it look like U.S. citizens probably would not be indefinitely detained under the NDAA (at least not under a compassionate and loving Obama administration), why would Obama's lawyers in the District Court case refuse to rule out indefinitely detaining not only American citizens but American journalists?  Isn't that kind of refusal a clear giveaway about the broad scope of "covered persons" under the act?

Notably, and consistent with the government's current refusal to rule out detaining journalists under the NDAA, some of the U.S. citizens (and citizens of close allies) that Obama has assassinated, tortured, indefinitely detained or declared "enemies of the state" include (1) an individual whose support for al-Qaeda was more or less rhetorical (al-Awlaki, assassinated with his 16 year old son), (2) an individual accused of blowing the whistle on government atrocities (Bradley Manning, indefinitely detained and tortured), and (3) an individual who journalistically disseminated the content of this whistle-blowing (Julian Assange, discussed in government documents as an "enemy of the state").  This indifference to the free speech rights and basic rights to procedural justice, dignity, and life of American citizens (and citizens of close allies) makes it difficult to remember that there once was a time when American citizens and their allies could feel protected from other governments by having the appropriate passport when travelling abroad--it was kind of like a "don't mess with me" amulet.  Now the American empire that once protected us eyes us with drones at the ready.  What we built up to fight monsters has now become one [3] .

I want to believe that Obama secretly intended to provoke the court into declaring NDAA 2012 unconstitutional because he really doesn't want to be the dictatorial handmaiden of the military-media- financial-corporate-industrial complex that the pressures of his office force him to be.  Deep in his heart, I hope, he's still beloved Candidate Obama of 2008, deftly employing the power of his office to do as much good as possible and as little harm as possible as he makes only the most absolutely necessary moral compromises in his valiant attempt to govern better than the Republicans whose agenda is so much worse [4] .  I cannot rule out, however, the possibility that Obama simply figured that no one with substantial media impact would ever make a big deal out of the District Court case.  Well, I'm making a big deal out of it and...oh.  Good move, Obama.

What is perhaps most atrocious and disturbing about NDAA 2012 is the widespread bipartisan support it received.  In the first Senate vote, after the attempt to remove or modify the indefinite detention sections of the bill was soundly defeated, the Senate voted 93 to 7 in favor of ratifying the NDAA.  93 to 7.  Of the seven nay votes, three were Republicans, three were Democrats, and one was independent (actually, socialist--Bernie Sanders of Vermont [cheer]).  Almost all were from relatively low population states that do not require multi-million dollar campaigns for candidates to win office.  It is thus plausible to see money rather than conservatism as the main culprit of this bill. The bill was pushed through both houses of Congress relatively quickly, with barely any debate.  The attempt by stunned human rights organizations to raise the alarm gained what minimal momentum it achieved far too late.  Obama signed the bill into law on New Year's Eve, 2011 into 2012.  It is difficult to interpret what this symbolic choice of date was intended to mean, but it is hard not to imagine that the intent was to spread an ominous pall of doom over the New Year.  So far, he has been successful.

The song

And now a few words of introduction to my as yet unperformed song about the NDAA.  I am somewhat concerned that more earnestly-inclined readers will find the tone of the song (and the numerous pre-ambulatory paragraphs introducing it) inappropriate.  It might seem dangerous to employ a sardonic demeanor when one's society is on (or past) the brink of fascism.  In the mid-1960's, songwriter and mathematician Tom Lehrer put out three albums of some of the best social and political satire ever written, and then abruptly stopped writing and performing.  When asked why, he replied, "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."  He had a point.

There are certainly moments when I would like to see some soma-disrupting alarm-raising sobreity from otherwise brilliant contemporary satirists like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but then their ratings would drop, and people would again have to get their news from serious-looking journalists (and serious-looking corporate hacks disguised as journalists).  The upshot of this infotainment withdrawal would likely be a regressive descent into dissociative fantasy for a good share of the US population.  Out of deference to our addiction to handling unbearably horrifying facts through the comforting filter of irony, therefore, I am going to defend my sardonic tone as a necessary anesthetic for a traumatized national patient.

As Tom Lehrer's work illustrated, songs can be efficient and memorable carriers of message, so a song about the NDAA should be a worthwhile addition to the troubling and still too rare news pieces about this assault on our Constitutional and human rights.  Perhaps I should have tried harder to write a directly and earnestly outraged song, but it's difficult to soberly engage a subject like the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act without slipping into despair or paranoia, and difficult to soberly engage any subject while trying to make each pair of lines rhyme.  I can, at least, attest to the fact that my song is not funny (unlike Tom Lehrer's work, which is typically hysterical), but if it makes you laugh, my apologies.

The angle I've taken in the song is to send up the "bipartisan" nature of the NDAA.  I consider NDAA 2012 a classic example of the toxic bipartisanship that gave us the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and everything else that has begun to consume the fragile resurgence of peace, procedural justice and democracy that the world had been cautiously enjoying after the Cold War ended.

Bipartisanship is supposed to be superior to partisanship, an embrace of political peace that brings justice, truth and good judgment in its wake.  It would appear that things do not work that way in reality, though, at least not in the American government.  Bipartisanship has two faces in the U.S.  One is the benevolent face of the seven Senators--Republicans, Democrats and Independent--who had the courage (and the lack of bribe pressure) to stand against NDAA 2012.  The other is the face of the vast majority of Republicans and Democrats, who took their wages and served their masters well.

I hope you enjoy reading the song below in spite of perhaps feeling that it is inappropriate to enjoy anything at all under the circumstances.  For an idea of the tune I had in mind, please see the linked version of the song, which has guitar chords inserted awkwardly in parentheses throughout.  Imagine the singers as two immaculately-dressed barbershop quartets signifying the views of bought-and-paid-for Republicans and bought-and-paid-for Democrats respectively.  Each chorus seeks to exploit what is most decent, humane and endearing about conservatives and liberals respectfully, so you can imagine these choruses being sung cluelessly to the salt-of-the-earth liberal and conservative constituents of each party (you will notice I did not pick the most persuasive possible arguments).  During the choruses, the appropriate quartet (Democrat or Republican) sings in unison.  For the verses, individuals from each quartet sing a line of each verse.  Whether they are Democratic individuals or Republican individuals is signified by "D" or "R" at the beginning of each line.  The two choruses are listed here:

Indefinite Detention: A Love Song to America's New Tradition 

CHORUS 1 (venal and soulless Republican wing of the political class lying to its religious, conservative, patriotic constituents):

Indefinite detention will keep our nation free

Indefinite detention is a boon to liberty

It's a Sacred Practice that our Founding Fathers love

They cry for it from Heaven now, joined by God above!

CHORUS 2 (venal and soulless Democrat wing of the political class lying to its hip, liberal, fun-loving constituents):

Indefinite detention, it's groovy and it's cool

Indefinite detention transgresses all the rules

Think some more about it with a few hits from the bong

Then, my man, you'll see the fascists were right all along!

For the full song, please visit a blog-of-convenience that I set up specifically to allow the reader to take in the song without having to click "next page" 500,000 times.  The song is linked here.  Also, just to save you having to scroll through the pages to find it again, it's linked in the title and first paragraph of this article.

The solicitation

I understand that the song may be underwhelming as a set of lyrics on a page.  I comfort myself with the fact that written transcripts do not do justice to Bob Marley's lyrics either.  For instance, when reading the song above, you probably had trouble figuring out the appropriate rhythm (made clearer in the guitar chord version).  You might also have failed to appreciate the moment of return to each of the two choruses, a return that should become gradually more enthusiastic as the familiarity and bounciness of each chorus gives an increasingly welcome respite from the attentional drag of the seemingly endless verses.   It's also good to insert a wake-yourself-up "Hey!" after each verse to get a more positive flavor of the song-as-it-might-be-sung.

It would be best, I suppose, if I could find a way to make the song into a video myself, but I sing well only within a narrow range, cannot play an instrument, and besides would make an unconvincing barbership quartet, let alone two of them.   Given the urgency of the issue the song addresses, however, I would like to see the lyrics above not only performed but made into an online video--and one much better than the kind of online video I myself am currently capable of making [5] .

I am therefore soliciting videos that capture my vision of how best to perform these lyrics.  I sketched that vision roughly above, and I would also ask for a montage of appropriately biting images to illustrate the content of the lyrics.  The lyrics should appear in captions, so people can sing along as if singing "My Way" in a karaoke room.

I know on some level that "Indefinite Detention" will not become the "This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land" for the Occupy generation, but if even two or three people could be bribed into singing it, I would feel less touchable by the hand of death.  I will continue to fantasize about it being sung in unison with marching band accompaniment (and perhaps some baton-twirlers on stilts) as Occupy marchers raise detailed political awareness everywhere they bellow it, but I will try to maintain equanimity if that imagined universe opens up only for some other existentially remote version of myself and not the one my experiencing consciousness inhabits.

In a later piece for OpEdNews I will recognize (and link to) all contributions to this competition that meet a certain minimum standard, and I will also give a prize for the best one.  Specifically, I will donate $500 to the favorite charity of anyone who makes the best video within the parameters of my vision [and keep in mind OpEdNews as a recipient of your generosity].  I will select a panel of aesthetically-astute judges, perhaps consisting entirely of myself, to decide who receives this honor.  If your favorite charity is yourself, please make sure you are the CEO of a 501(c)(3), because I'm not writing any checks that are not tax-deductible.   The deadline for submission is November 1, as I'd like to circulate the video in time to shake up the elections a little, but I may extend that deadline if the submissions are too paltry.  I also welcome supplementary donation pledges from others to sweeten the incentive.

In the event that my vision of how the song should be sung and made into video is an obstacle to the song's full potential (a distinct possibility), I will give another $500 to one person who is able to revise the tune and make a video that exceeds the wildest dreams of my vision.  Ideally the rebellious video should make me realize that my vision was actually a plodding soulless consequence of too many years allowing grad school and professordom to stunt my once promising artistic talent.

For either prize to be awarded, there must be a minimum of five half-decent entries into that prize's competition--or I must be astoundingly impressed with one of the few entries that I receive.  In the depressing event that only two or three half-hearted "give me your money and go to hell" entries trickle in, I'd rather use my two $500 checks to apply for dual citizenship in some country still ruled by its people.  To be sure that I am not pretending to have received fewer entries than I really have, you can post your entry as a link in the comments if you are willing to put the product of your work online.

Send entries to hainansen at hotmail dot com, or invite me to a dropbox folder with the video saved as a file there.



[1] And, ideally, the original pages corresponding to the indefinite detention sections of that bill should be publicly burned, along with the deed to Guantanamo, a territory which should be promptly returned to Cuba after the remaining detainees there are given a fair trial in Federal Court or released to countries that will respect their human rights.  Though Cuba is still not a model of human rights observance (understatement), it is hard to imagine them making worse use of that piece of land than we have.

[2] Also, some good news (?) for legal immigrants: mandated military detention does not apply to "lawful resident aliens" on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States."  That's a lot of ifs ands and buts tacked onto your good news, lawful resident aliens.  Just be glad you're not undocumented.

[3] Truth be told, our official (elected) and actual (financial-corporate-administered) governments have often behaved monstrously ever since their respective inceptions, but recently they have become particularly unaccountable in their monstrousness.  The system "worked" once upon a time to impeach Nixon.  Would it still work today?

[4] In truth, the Republican agenda is much worse, because the Republicans are, on average, considerably more corrupt, brutal and incompetent at sane governance than Democrats.  Romney has expressed his strong support for the NDAA as well, and probably would deploy it even more enthusiastically against all kinds of inappropriate but politically convenient victims.  A leaked memo from his campaign also reveals that Romney wishes to bring back enhanced interrogations, presumably because he feels that the torture detainees still suffer under extraordinary rendition, or even just under Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, is not sufficiently inhuman.

[5] For an example of my limited talent in this regard, see my two-minute video on the surprising views that Kiefer Sutherland has about torture and Guantanamo.  Mr. Sutherland is both one of the executive producers of 24--a five season advertisement for the moral defensibility of torture--and also the star of the show: Jack Bauer, America's favorite torturer.  The shocker: Kiefer Sutherland is strongly opposed to torture.  He is not so opposed that he's launched a nationwide campaign to stop torture or scratched his signature prominently all over petitions to close Guantanamo, but at least he's opposed enough to admit to Charlie Rose that torture is a clumsy and error-prone tool for seeking information and that the detainees at GTMO have the right under the Constitution to be tried or freed.  In any case, this myth-busting video might have more hits if it had been made by someone who actually knows how to make videos.



Authors Bio:

Ian Hansen is an Associate Professor of psychology and the 2017 president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.


Back