The National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA is passed each year so as determine the powers and duties of the military personnel and the other activities which may be undertaken by the military so as to save the country from terrorism. The Bill of 2013 has been in news for being controversial where the President’s Press secretary said that “the most recent changes give the President additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law. On the other hand, Representative Jerrold Nadler called it a “momentous challenge to one of the founding principles of the United States—that no person may be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.”

In a recent case of Hedges v. Obama (can be accessed at: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&id=223) provisions of National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 were brought into question. The plaintiffs are a group of people whose work involve writing, speech and associational activities. The group claims that their acts are protected by the First Amendment but a potential threat of detention is foreseeable under § 1021(b)(2) of NDAA (Act is accessible at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-112hr1540enr/pdf/BILLS-112hr1540enr.pdf).

The Government described the stance of the impugned section in the May 2012 hearing. According to the explanation, plaintiffs shall not be subject to detention under § 1021 if they would act independently. But the government failed to satisfy the anxiety that the acts protected under First amendment would not become subjects of indefinite military detention.

This New York District Court vehemently rejected the Government’s suggestion on indefinite detention of American citizens. It was proposed that the citizens in detention would possess only the remedy of habeas corpus that too adjudicated by a single decision maker. The Government also could not delineate the requirements or specify the meaning of “substantial support”, “material support”, “direct support” and “associated forces”.

For the above stated reasons, the court held that section §  1021(b)(2) violates rights guaranteed by the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

Robert Scheer, in his article on NDAA, wrote and I quote “[this Act] would take the most experienced and successful anti-terrorism agencies—the FBI and federal prosecutors—out of the business of interrogating, charging and trying most terrorism cases, and turn the job over to the military” condoning the passage of the Act. For now the indefinite detention has been condoned by this court but it is unclear to me if these laws are protecting us against the terrorism or is it slowly scaling towards anarchy!