New laws threaten civil rights

  It's ironic that all those Leftists who were shrieking about Constitutional rights being lost with the Patriot Act under Bush seem to be pretty quiet about National Defense Authorization Act that Obama signed into law the other day.
  While on one hand Obama assures us that he doesn't currently intend to use the law to incarcerate American citizens, he was the one who insisted the clause be put into the act to enable the executive branch to illegally indefinitely detail American citizens:

From the video: Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) told Congress recently that under the original wording of the National Defense Authorization Act, American citizens were excluded from the provision that allowed for detention. Once Obama’s officials saw the text though, says Levin, “the administration asked us to remove the language which says that US citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.”

Specifically, the section that Obama asked to be reworded was Section 1031 of the NDAA FY2012, which says that “any person who has committed a belligerent act” could be held indefinitely.

  Gateway Pundit had the video from Leftist Levin on c-Span:
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 Let's combine this act with the SOPA and the Protect IP act Congress is threatening to pass this week. What unimaginable consequence could these acts, in combination with the NDAA, wreak upon the public and, more specifically, the opponents of the POTUS?
  From the Stanford Law Review:

Both bills suggest that these remedies can be meted out by courts after nothing more than ex parte proceedings—proceedings at which only one side (the prosecutor or even a private plaintiff) need present evidence and the operator of the allegedly infringing site need not be present nor even made aware that the action was pending against his or her “property.” 

This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that governmental action suppressing speech, if taken prior to anadversary proceeding and subsequent judicial determination that the speech in question is unlawful,[2] is a presumptively unconstitutional “prior restraint.” In other words, it is the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,”[3] permissible only in the narrowest range of circumstances. The Constitution requires a court “to make a final determination” that the material in question is unlawful “after an adversary hearing before the material is completely removed from circulation.”[4] 

The procedures outlined in both bills fail this fundamental constitutional test. Websites can be “completely removed from circulation”—rendered unreachable by, and invisible to, Internet users in the United States and abroad—immediately upon application by the government, without any reasonable opportunity for the owner or operator of the website in question to be heard or to present evidence on his or her own behalf. This falls far short of what the Constitution requires before speech can be eliminated from public circulation.

  No one seems to agree concerning the implications of the NDAA's wording but even some progressives have their doubts:

The NDAA has been the subject of much debate in the progressive blogosphere, with some seeing it as simply affirming existing law and others seeing it as mandating military detention of US citizens suspected of ties to terrorism. Neither position is fully accurate, but our overall read is that the NDAA detention provisions set a dangerous precedent that should have been vetoed or, at the minimum, vociferously objected to by President Obama.

    Who, after all, is "the person who has committed a belligerent act”?
    Being belligerent itself can simply be defined as combative, quarrelsome or antagonistic.
  Is that not, after all, the basis of political disagreement?
  Via Instapundit, from Occupy Canada, those on the Right aren't the only ones concerned:

Not a threat? And here. Here. Not sure anybody really knows how this will fall out.

UPDATE: Liberal Jonathan Turley is shocked:

On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The Administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the Constitution. 

There are also those who continue the long-standing effort to excuse Obama’s horrific record on civil liberties by either blaming others or the times. One successful myth is that there is an exception for citizens. The White House is saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. That spin is facially ridiculous. The changes were the inclusion of some meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting citizens were defeated.