This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 1st, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

There is at least one bright spot in the National Defense Authorization Act winding its way through

Congress, the dramatically under-appreciated element of previous NDAA's that is providing

for in some cases the indefinite detention of US citizens

without trial may finally be coming to an end.

Cato's Pat Eddington explains. The National Defense Authorization Act is one of those massive bills that gets pushed through Congress and whatever's in there is in there.

And individual rank and file members of Congress don't often have a whole lot to say about it.

Like it's a must pass piece of legislation.

And in years past, that has meant some pretty unconscionable elements included within that legislation with significant

civil liberties implications, most notably the indefinite detention of US citizens.

Yeah, this of course occurred in the fiscal year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, and for those who may want to poke around on the web and try to find this, it's actually public Law 112-81 or if you prefer you can go to 10

US code 801 section 801 note.

And what it did in that particular version of the NDA

is it created a radically expansive definition

of who the military could detain

and what we were calling then, and I guess a lot of people still call now the so-called war on terror.

And you know at the time this thing was included in the NDA. A lot of us were really those of us who worked these issues

were really kind of blown away that they would include language that was this sweeping

essentially and just to kind of give folks, you know, a sense of what this actually sounds like or looks like.

It said specifically a person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for the attacks.

And then section 2, a person who was part of or substantially supported Al-Qaeda, the Taliban,

or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States and so on and so forth.

...