Blog
Published on May 9, 2011
There’s an effort underway to bring back torture and militarize law enforcement in the United States. While former Vice President Dick Cheney and other proponents of “enhanced interrogation” techniques trumpet the role of torture in the hunt for Bin Laden, Congress is considering a bill that would disrupt our counterterrorism efforts and grant huge amounts of power to the President without the necessary oversight. Write your members of Congress and urge them to oppose this bill by voting for amendments that would strip the bill’s key provisions from the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). H.R. 968 or The Detainee Security Act would :
This bill threatens to undermine national security by uprooting established counterterrorism tools and supplanting them with dangerous, untested, and overly-militarized procedures. The FBI and local law enforcement have successfully elicited a substantial amount of intelligence information from terrorism suspects. And our criminal justice system has a proven track record of handling terrorism in the courts, convicting over 400 terrorist suspects since 9/11. The military commissions have only convicted 6.. The United States government already has broad authority and strong tools to disrupt, detain, and prosecute international terrorists under current law. Congress should focus on strengthening established and effective counterterrorism tools, rather than expanding costly, unpopular wars and enshrining Guantanamo as a permanent fixture of second-class justice.
