Passed around the Internet is a screenshot that reports the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA)—which reportedly authorizes the government to detain US citizens without proof of threat in Section 1031—and pleads to distribute the news as “your responsibility, right, and obligation as an American citizen”. The source for the image is unknown, but it has already generated lots of attention on Facebook, Twitter, and right here on Tumblr. The urgent plea appeals to the Obama’s liberal base who have been hurt by his unfulfilled campaign promises, but it is also deeply misleading.

Presidential authority for the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects—who could also be US citizens—is arguably implied already in Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). (The Obama administration is making this argument.) The original language of the NDAA does codify presidential authority to “indefinitely imprison people, without charge or trial, both abroad and inside the United States and would mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control”, but due to an amendment, the the NDAA does not affect any existing law concerning the detention of US citizens. While the President could still potentially indefinitely detain US citizens without trial, that power was not given, but merely made explicit in the NDAA.

The NDAA is also a US federal law renewed each year “to specify the budget and expenditures of the United States Department of Defense”, meaning it is, essentially, the US defense budget. Commenter Mauve_Cubedweller on Reddit explains the political games that can arise with bills that are necessary to pass:

[Obama] signed [the NDAA] because if he didn’t, defense spending including benefits to veterans and their families would not have been authorized. The sections of NDAA that many people here seem to have a problem with are sections that were added into the document by primarily Republican legislators and which the President adamantly opposes but was powerless to stop. I’ll repeat that: the parts of this bill that many people here hate were included against the President’s wishes and in a way that he is powerless to stop. The only way he could have stopped these sections from being included would have been to try to veto the bill in its entirety, a move that would have been both political suicide as well as being futile, as Congress would simply have overridden him. He is explicit in his opposition to exactly the parts of the bill everyone here hates, going so far as to detail exactly which sections he opposes and why.

You’ll notice that the bill also restricts his ability to close Guantanamo Bay; this isn’t coincidence. These sections are openly hostile to the President’s stated mandate - they are effectively a giant ‘fuck you’ to the President, as well as a nasty way of eroding the President’s support with his own base. Observe:

1. Draft legislation that is almost guaranteed to piss [off] the President but more importantly piss of his base.

2. Attach said legislation to another piece of larger, more important legislation like, say, the Defense Spending budget for the entire year so that any attempt to dislodge the offensive legislation will result in a political shitstorm, as well as place the larger legislation in jeopardy.

3. Once attached, begin a PR campaign that highlights the offending legislation and brings it to the attention of as many media outlets as possible - not just the traditional media, but alternative media outlets as well (Fox news, MSNBC, Media Matters, Huff-Po, Infowars, etc.)

4. Here’s where it gets tricky: Simultaneously, speak to both your party’s base and the opposition’s. To your base, argue that the legislation is necessary to ‘Keep America safe’ and that the President, by opposing it, is clearly soft of terrorism and endangering the military by trying to strip the legislation out. At the same time, sit back and watch your opponent’s liberal supporters tear into the offending legislation as being dangerous, anti-democratic, and a threat to civil liberties. You know they will; that’s what they care about most. You’ve designed legislation that will make them froth at the mouth. You don’t even have to keep flogging the message; one look at the legislation will be enough to convince most people that it is anathema to everything they hold dear. Because it is.

5. Pass the ‘parent’ legislation. Doing so forces the President to sign it or attempt to veto it. Since the legislation in question just so happens to be the military’s operating budget, a veto is out of the question. The President must sign the bill, you get the legislation you wanted, but you also practically guarantee that your opponent’s base will be furious at him for passing a bill they see as evil. Even if he tries to explain in detail why he had to sign it and what he hates about it, it won’t matter; ignorance of the American political process, coupled with an almost militant indifference to subtle explanations will almost ensure that most people will only remember that the President passed a bill they hate.

6. Profit. you get the legislation you want, while the President has to contend with a furious base that feels he betrayed them - even though he agrees with their position but simply lacked the legislative tools to stop this from happening. It’s a classic piece of misdirection that needs only two things to work: A lack of principles (or a partisan ideology that is willing to say anything - do anything - to win), and an electorate that is easy to fool.

This is pretty basic political maneuvering and the biggest problem is that it almost always works because most people either don’t know or don’t care how their political system actually functions. The President was saddled with a lose-lose situation where he either seriously harmed American defense policy (political suicide), or passed offensive legislation knowing that it would cost him political capital. To all of you here lamenting that you ever voted for this ‘corporate shill’, congratulations: you are the result the Republicans were hoping for. They get the law they want, they get the weakened Presidential candidate they want. And many of you just don’t seem to see that. You don’t have to like your country’s two-party system, but it pays to be able to understand it so that you can recognize when it’s being used like this.

The analysis seems even more compelling given that the US has just entered an election year, but if Obama should not be the target of discontent, it is still not clear who would. According to Snopes, the bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) and then passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any hearing, so who should take the blame is uncertain. Also, the original bill explicitly excluded US citizens from Sec. 1031, and then that language was removed by request of the Obama Administration. Cedwyn at Daily Kos theorizes the motivations behind these changes in the NDAA:

If […] Obama specifically requested the language protecting U.S. citizens be struck, what is protecting them?  The 2002 AUMF and whatever legislation (War Powers Resolution, Geneva Conventions, etc.) that delineates it; section 1031, to which all the other detainee provisions are subordinate, is the crux of all of this.  Here is Obama’s statement on 1031 before it was modified:

Section 1031 attempts to expressly codify the detention authority that exists under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) (the “AUMF”). The authorities granted by the AUMF, including the detention authority, are essential to our ability to protect the American people from the threat posed by al-Qa’ida and its associated forces, and have enabled us to confront the full range of threats this country faces from those organizations and individuals. Because the authorities codified in this section already exist, the Administration does not believe codification is necessary and poses some risk.

Given that detainee provisions are already defined in AUMF, it is very likely that Obama asked for the changes in Sec. 1031 because the language may cause conflicts. Cedwyn continues:

So why would Obama object to the redundancy of specifying in section 1031 that section 1031 does not apply to U.S. citizens? […] IANAL and I can’t claim to know what is in Obama’s head. Taking a few wild guesses, though, it seems likely there is language in the AUMF that could be muddied by the specific language of excluding U.S. citizens in section 1031 of this bill.  I’m thinking the AUMF and its subordinating legislation already address how to deal with U.S. citizens.

Since Sec. 1031 originally and explicitly excluded US citizens, it doesn’t seem to be the Republican political maneuver that Mauve_Cubedweller suggested. Instead, this whole kerfuffle around the NDAA seems to be a mix of politicians doing their jobs with a heathy serving of well-intentioned but misinformed alarmism.

After all that, here is some good news: Included in the NDAA are the Klobuchar-Collins provisions, which requires the Department of Defense to develop policy to ensure the preservation of documents connected with sexual assault reports in the military and provide full privacy and identity protection for the victims.