I try to avoid hyperbole, but waking up this morning I see both that a provision has been inserted into the most recent National Defense Authorization to seize and hold without Miranda, without Habeas Corpus, and without limit, anyone American citizen SUSPECTED of being an accomplice to, or participant in FUTURE terror acts. Essentially, any American can be detained without due process for any reason indefinitely. The military can do body snatches, and make people disappear, legally, just like they used to do all over Latin America.
This is unfuckingbelievable. That the goddamn idiots supposedly representing our interests signed on to this is simply inexplicable. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it is truly beyond my capacity to understand how anyone could fail to see how this power could be abused, and how PATENTLY unConstitutional is it.
Here is a link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alton-lu/the-national-defense-auth_b_1180869.html
What is further inexplicable to me is why it is on HuffPost and not Drudge and The Blaze and Lucianne and Foxnews.
We need to be clear: OF COURSE the law will apply initially only to people like whoever they blew up in Yemen. Bad guy. His death was a benefit to the world. I get that. But if there is no DUE PROCESS in place, what is to prevent a situation like that in Enemy of the State, where an innocent person is targeted for political reasons, and not reasons of national security? What, in other words, is to prevent someone with the inclination and capacity for secrecy to do so from creating literal gulags in the American hinterlands, or transferring political opponents to Guantanamo Bay? My argument for Gitmo all along was these were bad people and they were NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS. With citizenship, though, you get all the RIGHTS which are enumerated under the Constitution, which include the right to a trial by jury.
Then I read our fucking First Amendment rights are under attack, in another foolish bill sponsored by Democrats: http://copyrightem.com/internet-copyocalypse-senate-bill-968-online-threats-to-economic-creativity
The pretext for this bill–and that is all it is–is that foreign nations are allowing the piracy of copyrighted materials–typically presumably movies and music–and that we need a means to stop this. However, the powers invested in the Attorney General in this bill are large, and largely discretionary. In pondering that, consider that he was quite willing to countenance the murder of a Border Patrol agent so that he could work to undermine the right to gun ownership in this country. He is an unprincipled asshole, with an anti-freedom agenda.
In effect, he can DECLARE a website to be a “pirate” website, and shut it down, with substantially NO supervision. This is a patent violation of the First Amendment. The way our system is supposed to work is you bring suit against someone for violating the law, go through due process, THEN you get them shut down. This is how it is supposed to work. It is not that there are procedures by means of which you can shut down offending websites.
This goes way, way too far.
What a crappy way to start the day. These things are quite real, and they are not getting covered by ANY media to the extent their potential importance warrants. Huffpost hit story one, but not story two.
Again: I understand the theoretical underpinnings of both laws. If the people governing us were saints, we would need NO legal restrictions on them, as they would invariably do the right thing. But reading history is a terrifying thing, and it is abundantly clear that large things start as small things. When Hitler’s party won roughly one third of the vote–the largest single segment, but far, far short of a majority–he was put into a Cabinet as Prime Minister with a lot of other ministers who were expected to check him, and subject to a Chancellor–Paul Hindenburd–who could veto him. Little by little, though, he took power, took power, took power, and eventually upon Hindenburg’s death was able, through trickery, to assume “emergency” powers that he never afterward relinquished.
I choose not to believe in organized conspiracies, but this sort of shit makes me worry. For his part, I can’t believe Romney will do ANYTHING serious to shake the status quo. He will say what he needs to say to get elected, make some cosmetic alterations in office, but we will have to count ourselves lucky if after 2 years in office we have our monthly borrowing down to $100 billion a month. That is not the scale of change we need. Yes, he may stop Obamacare, but the extent of the disaster we face will not be much altered by simply slowing the pace of the wreck.