Their motives were various. Some senators wanted to put the incarceration of (suspected) terrorists into the hands of the military precisely to take it out of the hands of the administration (an interesting distinction in itself).
That - and nothing else - is what Obama objected to, and what led him to make his veto threats. His signing statement makes that clear. (The code word is "flexibility" - it means to keep the administration unfettered by law.)
Some of these senators voted no because the bill didn't clearly delimit the administration & empower the military.
Actually, that might have been a good idea: to require military custody is to admit that the suspected terrorists must be regarded as prisoners of war, and thus treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush administration invented the category of "unlawful combatant" to avoid that, and of course the dodge was continued by the Obama administration.
Obama is intending to violate both the Bill of Rights and the laws of war, as Bush did. No wonder he doesn't want to prosecute Bush & co. for war crimes: he's committing all of them himself.
--CGE
On Dec 31, 2011, at 9:41 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
> Obama has signed the clearly unconstitutional Military Detention
> Bill (NDAA) - quietly, on New Year's Eve, while on vacation in
> Hawaii. He and the congressional representatives who voted for it
> have violated their oath to uphold the Constitution. It's not too
> much to suggest that this bill resembles the Enabling Act of 23
> March 1933.
>
> "Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all.
> Liberals are never very energetic in protecting constitutional
> rights. That’s more the province of libertarians and other wackos
> like Ron Paul actually prepared to draw lines in the sand in
> matters of principle" [Alex Cockburn].
>
> "Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written
> provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere
> force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any
> clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of
> view, justify revolution - certainly would, if such right were a
> vital one" [Abraham Lincoln].
>
> All the more so if a minority - 1% - should through its agents
> deprive the majority of a "clearly written constitutional right":
> the bill Obama signed today is a direct assault on the First,
> Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments.
>
> --CGE
>
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