The grim face of
totalitarianism is emerging in the National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) now
before Congress.
This bill is the last mile
post on America ’s
sad, well-traveled road to the butcher shop of dictatorship. We have been
headed that way for some time and, with a little help from Congress, we’ll
arrive there shortly, putting an ugly end to the American experiment. The
Senate December 1st passed the bill by a vote of 93-7.
In the name of “defense,”
NDAA underwrites $662-billion for continued U.S. aggression in our many foreign
wars while, on the domestic front, it incinerates the last surviving shreds of
the Bill of Rights. According to the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU), it
authorizes presidents “to order the military to pick up and imprison people,
including U.S.
citizens, without charging them or putting them on trial.” (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
So much for Amendment VI to our Constitution that “the accused shall enjoy the
right to a speedy and public trial.”
Just destroying your
protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment means the bill’s authors
Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and John
McCain of Arizona
don’t have to bother with junking anything else. Once you’re imprisoned you
won’t need any other “stinkin’ rights.”
The ACLU charges the
provisions of NDAA “were negotiated by a small group of members of Congress, in
secret, and without proper congressional review (and), are inconsistent with
fundamental American values embodied in the Constitution....(our) fundamental
freedoms are on the line.”
A few years back, President
Carter denounced the Patriot Act for authorizing federal agents “to search
people’s homes and businesses secretly, to confiscate property without any
deadline or without giving notice that the intrusion had taken place, and to
collect without notice personal information on American citizens including
their medical histories, books checked out of libraries, and goods they
purchase.” The NDAA is far worse than that.
According to Noam Chomsky,
the arbitrary arrest philosophy in this country dates back to the Bush regime.
“The current (Bush) government,” he writes in “Imperial Ambitions”(Metropolitan
Books, 2005), “has claimed rights that go beyond any precedents, including even
the right to arrest citizens, hold them in detention without access to their
family or lawyers, and do so indefinitely, without charges.”
“What the American People
are witnessing now with this new legislation is the further
development of an American Police State into a Military Dictatorship, a
process that was started by the so-called USA Patriot Act in 2001,” says
Professor Francis Boyle, the constitutional law authority at the University of
Illinois, Champaign.
“If it is enacted into
law, America
will lose all pretense of having our Military subjected to the control of
democratically elected civilian leaders as originally envisioned and
required by the Constitution. Our experiment in 1776 will have failed,” adds
Boyle, author of “Tackling America ’s
Toughest Questions”(Clarity Press.)
President Obama is already
exercising his kingly right to rain Hellfire missiles from drone assault planes
down on any human being anywhere on the planet without a legal authorization.
This is called assassination as it is utterly devoid of any semblance of
rudimentary justice. Unfortunately, the president appears to have no qualms
about his actions. Will such a man hesitate to arrest Americans on suspicion
and imprison them for years, or worse, without trial?
Adds the prescient Paul
Craig Roberts, “The (Obama) regime’s objection to (the) military detention
(provision in NDAA) 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...(and) 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.”
Perhaps this is a good time
to remind swindled American taxpayers that totalitarianism is what comes of
funding a perpetual warfare state that spies on all global communications,
builds the greatest military in human history, assassinates foreign leaders,
overthrows elected governments, invades small nations based on lies to seize
their natural resources, and threatens the world from its 800 military bases.
The NDAA perpetuates all
this and now endows the criminal leadership in Congress and the White House
with the weapons to turn upon their own.
The only senators with guts
to oppose the bill were Democrats Tom Harkin of Iowa; Ron Wyden and Jeff
Merkley of Oregon; Republicans Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Mike Lee of Utah, Rand
Paul of Kentucky; and Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont. As Sen. Paul asked
during the debate, "Under the provisions, wouldn't it be possible, then,
that an American citizen could be declared an enemy combatant and sent to Guantanamo Bay and detained indefinitely?"
If you don’t call your
congressperson today to stop the NDAA, you are not likely to enjoy the
blessings of liberty tomorrow. The light in the torch of the Statue of Liberty
has already been snuffed out by our illegal foreign wars. The final
disgrace will be to imprison the beautiful lady behind the barbed wire of the
NDAA.
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