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The now infamous Section 1031 of S. 1867 does not exclude U.S. citizens from those "covered persons" whom the President can have the military arrest and detain without charge or trial. In effect, S. 1867 suspends and removes the protection of the U.S. Constitution from American citizens if they/we are deemed to be "at war" with the United States, whatever "at war" means.
Obama's opposition to S. 1867 is not due to his passion to preserve our civil liberties.
Matt Apuzzo of the AP reports that on Dec. 1, 2011, "top national security lawyers" in the Obama administration said exactly what S. 1867′s Sec. 1031 says - that "U.S. citizens are legitimate military targets when they take up arms with al-Qaida."
The Obama administration's CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, were asked at a national security conference about the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and leading al-Qaida figure who died in a Sept. 30 U.S. drone strike in the mountains of Yemen. The two lawyers did not directly address the al-Awlaki case, but they did say U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States. Echoing S. 1867′s Sec. 1031, Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy.
So why is Obama opposed to S. 1867?
It is not for reasons of protecting U.S. citizens, but because Obama opposes S. 1867′s "military detention" of those "covered persons." Military detention means those "covered persons" become prisoners of war (POWs), and POWs are covered by the Geneva Convention, which forbids the torture of POWs.
In other words, Obama wants to continue to be able to use torture on "covered persons" - a category that, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein says in her e-mail, includes U.S. citizens.
As former Wall Street Journal editor and columnist Paul Craig Roberts explains:
"The Obama regime's objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war.[...]
Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime's ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. [Yes, Obama is still apparently allowing "extraordinary renditions" to torture people abroad.] This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime "flexibility."
The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but "enemy combatants," "terrorists," or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.
By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.
A careful reading of the Obama regime's objections to military detention supports this conclusion. [Link])"
Personally, I thought it was an election ploy. It may well be. There isn't much to stop them after the election cycle passes.