[The L.A. Times failed to mention today that this bill affects foreigners AND AMERICAN CITIZENS.]
How vague. "Materially." I know that word is intended to include giving money, but the whole phrase is mighty chilling considering the rhetoric of the right and Republicans who accuse anyone who challenges their ideas for fighting terrorism as a person who coddles, encourages, or supports terrorists. Maybe "materially supporting hostilities against the U.S." means being a liberal who wants to pay for our wars with tax money now instead of leveraging our children's future.
The truth is, no one has made a case for the NEED for this law, which undermines the Bill of Rights.
When the President signs this law, it means any American citizen can be held in a military prison forever without a right to a hearing. It overules the constitutional Bill of Rights--and the Supreme Court has yet to care, they would't hear the appeal of the American who was arrested below.
G-d help you if you are innocent but arrested as an enemy combatant because you're automatically presumed to be guilty, folks.
Our Congress just passed this law for our President, although he was already breaking the law and acting on it:
"We are not dealing with hypothetical abuses. The president has already subjected a citizen to military confinement. Consider the case of Jose Padilla. A few months after 9/11, he was seized by the Bush administration as an "enemy combatant" upon his arrival at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. He was wearing civilian clothes and had no weapons. Despite his American citizenship, he was held for more than three years in a military brig, without any chance to challenge his detention before a military or civilian tribunal. After a federal appellate court upheld the president's extraordinary action, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, handing the administration's lawyers a terrible precedent."
So this is what it was like to live during WWII when it became legal for our government to round up anyone of Japanese decent and put them in ghettos.
Far too many Republicans and Democrats have voted to crap on what it means to be American, then and now.
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