[Here's a guest post from Jason Sparks aka @sparksjls. I meant to post this before the Iowa Caucus but -- SQUIRREL!! Oops. The points are still salient, and so you should still read it. Cheers! -ABLxx]
Cenk Uygur, late of MSNBC, now of Current, is featured in a new Huffington Post opinion piece urging Democrats to vote against President Obama in the Iowa caucuses. To support his underlying aim, Uygur cherry-picks a handful of issues on which he disagrees with the president’s actions, and in the process either purposefully misleads or, alternatively, has conducted so little research as to unintentionally mislead. Either way: He misleads. Let’s look at what he’s arguing.
Uygur opens his HuffPo piece with a screed about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); he takes issue with the final language contained in the NDAA sections pertaining to the detention of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. Uygur asserts that the NDAA allows for “the indefinite detention of US citizens by the military inside the US.” To bolster this frightening claim, Uygur links to this Glenn Greenwald post on Salon.com, in which Greenwald makes the same assertion: that the NDAA is the “indefinite detention bill.”
So, is it? How can we determine if the NDAA is the “indefinite detention bill” Uygur and Greenwald (to name just two) claim it is? How about if we look at the legislative language? The pertinent detention section of the NDAA is Sec. 1021/1022. Here’s the final language that came out of the House/Senate conference committee (the NDAA went to conference because the House-passed and Senate-passed NDAAs differed in key aspects, as we’ll discuss below.) I’m clipping at some length the key provisions at Sec. 1022, and have taken the liberty of bolding certain sub-sections:
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So, Amanda Terkel over at HuffPo picked up the story of a New Mexico Obama For America official who 
