C.S. Muncy

Protestors Flooded the Federa Court of Appeals to Rally Against the NDAA.

It sounded like a panel of Federal Appeals Court judges drilled lawyers with a barrage of questions yesterday during a hearing of oral arguments in the high-profile lawsuit against the Obama administration over the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

Of course, that's a bit tough to confirm considering that despite numerous requests from plaintiffs to have the arguments heard in a large courtroom, it was held in a rather small one. Unfortunate journalists and onlookers such as myself were subjected to listening to the hearing in a spacious overflow courtroom decked-out with two antiquated speakers fit for an iPod-Mini dock-system--which court technicians didn't get to work until 15 minutes into the hearing.

Public interest in the case is so high that many spectators and journalists couldn't even get into the ill-equipped overflow room. No biggie though, it's only a case that will decide whether the U.S. Military and the Executive Branch have the right to detain American citizens.

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Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs who successfully sued over unconstitutional provisions of the NDAA.

A lot of Americans breathed a little easier last week when a federal judge ruled that the National Defense Authorization Act -- which allows the executive branch, after thinking about it for a minute, to throw anyone in a military jail forever, effectively doing an end-run around the judicial branch and the whole balance-of-powers thing -- is completely unconstitutional.

Well, stop breathing so goddamn easily, you slack-diaphragmed potential future lifelong Guantanamo detainees! That was last week.

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Chris Hedges, one of the plaintiffs who successfully sued over unconstitutional provisions of the NDAA.

The Obama administration's efforts to enshrine sweeping 9/11-era rollbacks of civil liberties and constitutional rights as federal law hit a serious roadblock yesterday, as a federal judge struck down clauses of the National Defense Authorization Act as unconstitutional.

The offending section of the NDAA, signed by Obama on New Year's Eve last year, grants the government the power to put citizens in military detention indefinitely and without the usual recourse to civil courts.

Chris Hedges, along with other writers and activists including Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, challenged the law soon after in a federal lawsuit.

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