Trace Sharp

Rep. Cooper had already responded to my question of whether he would support legislation to take indefinite detention out of the 2012 defense authorization bill by not really answering whether he would support it. He called indefinite detention a “murky, presidential powers/Supreme Court issue”. He continued: “the current law on that is that if they are a proven terrorist or there are a lot of factors here that then they can be detained, but it is infinitely worrisome anytime it is a citizen.” I would put it more strongly: it’s not just worrisome, it’s an absolute violation of basic human rights. Rep. Cooper called this a “gray area”, and he argued that Congress has failed to make sense of this ‘murky area”. He mentioned the drone attack on Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen on foreign soil. He seemed to suggest that we have been down the rabbit hole since World War II. However, he also insisted that President Obama is trying to get us away from this by winding down the war in Iraq. I did not get how this connected with defending the the rights of citizens who are more likely to be indefinitely detained, who are more likely to disappear under this act.

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