Griffin Misleads on NDAA Part 2

Griffin: Telling it like it isn't on NDAA.
Part 3 Here

The NDAA is a grotesque and un-American piece of legislation which re-defines your rights into meaningless shadows of their former substance. This abomination degrades your rights under the fourth, fifth, sixth amendments, and possibly the seventh amendment as well, as rendering all but meaningless your former right to habeas corpus (the right to challenge your detention by the government). NDAA is the foundation for the police state. Democrats voted for it. Republicans voted for it. If you are for real Due Process you now have no political party in Washington D.C. to represent your interests. At least not for federal law enforcement.

They don’t want you to realize that of course. That’s why men like Republican Congressman Tim Griffin put out misinformation about the bill, all the while accusing those on the other side of doing so.  In my first analysis of his deceitful assurances, I focused on why his claim that the bill was OK because it only codified what the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld was absurd.   Please read the article for more details, but in short the court gave mixed messages in Hamdi, the facts of the case were about a citizen caught on an actual foreign battlefield where the NDAA would apply similar standards over the entire United States, and Scalia was correct in his dissent.

  

Does “the right to petition for habeas corpus” still exist under the act as Griffin claims? Only in name, not in substance. In the new version, hearsay evidence is allowed and the government does not have the burden of proof, you do.  And you don’t get to stand in front of a real judge anymore, just an officer from a “military tribunal.” Paid government informants could give false second hand information about your supposed involvement in an “anti-government plot” and based on that you could be indefinitely detained. The government does not have to show that the hearsay evidence from the paid informants is true in order to keep you detained, rather you have to persuade whoever the executive branch picked to run your kangaroo court that it’s false.   

In his defense of the NDAA, Griffin tries to reassure readers with these words: “I would never support legislation that granted the government authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens in the U.S. without the right to challenge the legality of any such detention through a petition for habeas corpus. Nor would any judge, court, or attorney in this nation uphold such an infringement of our rights.”  

This man is so slippery it is scary.  He parses better than Bill Clinton. Everything he claims he would never do and no judge would ever do has already been done in Justice Thomas’ dissent in Hamdi- the very case he cites as the legal foundation for the NDAA. In Hamdi, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the government did not have to provide due process rights to persons it alleged were “enemy combatants” even when they were U.S. citizens. 

When Griffin inserts the words “in the U.S.” to his statement above he sneaks around the fact that a Supreme Court Justice has already agreed that the government can do everything that Griffin claims that neither he nor they would ever agree to. The only difference is that the “battlefield” in that case was overseas.  But the NDAA makes no distinction in geography. The entire United States is now treated as “the battlefield” in a never ending “war on terror.” As Griffin himself says, the NDAA was codified Hamdi, and it applies the chaotic opinions in that case to the homeland. Notice that if they indefinitely detained you without due process in Guantanamo, or shipped you off to some other place that is not really U.S. soil then Griffin's statement would be technically true, but non-the-less unacceptable.

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