Americans should be wary of four 'scary' items in NDAA: Analyst

The $607-billion “defense policy bill” contains troubling provisions that threaten Americans’ constitutional rights, says an analyst and former Senate candidate in Texas.

The Senate voted 91-3 in favor of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday following last week's 370-58 vote in the House of Representatives.

Congress sent the measure to President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

“There are four things about this National Defense Authorization Act that continue to be totally scary to anyone concerned about America losing its status as a true constitutional republic,” Mark Dankof said in an interview with Press TV.

“The first is the mere size of this bill in terms of authorizing $607 billion of spending on all these so-called military and national security items” which “dwarf(s) the next 10 nations in the world,” Dankof noted.

The second area of concern, Dankorf argued, is that the NDAA “makes it explicitly clear that the [Guantanamo] detention facility is to stay open.”

A provision in the bill prohibits the transfer of detainees from the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba to US detention facilities. Congress has repeatedly prevented Obama from fulfilling a 2008 presidential campaign promise to close the Guantanamo prison.

“This is going to be an ongoing bone of contention between the president and Congress and whether or not the president decides to risk the use of executive order to override the Congress on this and whether or not that in fact is legal,” Dankof said.

There are two other provisions in the NDAA that “should concern every American” he added. “One is the indefinite detention and the other one is martial law.”

“Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act authorizes the president of the United States to declare martial law under circumstances where he in fact feels that the national security requires it,” the analyst said.

In addition, Dankof noted, the NDAA “has basically authorized the indefinite detention of American citizens when they are deemed to be ‘cooperating with terrorists’… without due process of the law, without legal presentation, without jury trial.”

“We have a situation where the president of the United States can act as a monarch if he so chooses both in the realm of declaring martial law under Section 1021 as well as indefinitely detaining American citizens,” he said.

“Since 2001, we have seen all kinds of authorizations for federal governmental activities that are completely unconstitutional,” the analyst concluded.

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