The bill is only 12 pages long, but that is plenty of room to grant the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone -- including a U.S. citizen -- indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president's sole authority as commander in chief.
The Act begins with the following (convoluted) requirement:
Whenever within the United States, its territories, and possessions, or outside the territorial limits of the United States, an individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act.
...Now, however, as president, Obama has helped pave the way for such radical legislative efforts as the one introduced by McCain and Lieberman, by embracing -- and re-branding -- the military commissions he once opposed.
"Belligerents" are the new "Combatants"
Three years after Obama eloquently opposed the Military Commissions Act, the now-president signed a Military Commissions Act of his own, as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill. The law, which sought to overhaul the discredited Bush-era military commissions for "alien enemy combatants," introduced what is apparently turning out to be an important new term to the counterterror lexicon: Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent, defined as "an individual who: 1) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or 2) has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners."
Months before, in March of 2009, the Obama administration announced that it was phasing out the term "alien enemy combatant," even as it held on to the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely. "Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent," then, was its replacement.
As Human Rights Watch attorney Joanne Mariner wrote last fall, "this is a cosmetic change, not a real improvement, which mirrors the administration's decision to drop the enemy combatant formula in habeas litigation at Guantanamo Bay."
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