Naomi Wolf: "U.S. is sleepwalking into becoming a police state ... the president can lock up anyone" [View all]

[Better Believe It]

The NDAA: a clear and present danger to American liberty
The US is sleepwalking into becoming a police state, where, like a pre-Magna Carta monarch, the president can lock up anyone
February 29, 2012

Yes, the worst things you may have heard about the National Defense Authorization Act, which has formally ended 254 years of democracy in the United States of America, and driven a stake through the heart of the bill of rights, are all really true. The act passed with large margins in both the House and the Senate on the last day of last year – even as tens of thousands of Americans were frantically begging their representatives to secure Americans' habeas corpus rights in the final version.NDAA critics say that it enables ordinary US citizens to be treated like 'enemy combatants' in Guantánamo.

It does indeed – contrary to the many flatout-false form letters I have seen that both senators and representatives sent to their constituents, misleading them about the fact that the NDAA destroys their due process rights. Under the act, anyone can be described as a 'belligerent".

And with a new bill now being introduced to make it a crime to protest in a way that disrupts any government process – or to get close to anyone with secret service protection – the push to legally lock down the United Police States is in full force.

Overstated? Let's be clear: the NDAA grants the president the power to kidnap any American anywhere in the United States and hold him or her in prison forever without trial. The president's own signing statement, incredibly, confirmed that he had that power. As I have been warning since 2006: there is not a country on the planet that you can name that has ever set in place a system of torture, and of detention without trial, for an "other", supposedly external threat that did not end up using it pretty quickly on its own citizens.

Read the full article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/29/ndaa-danger-american-liberty


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Leaders From Across Political Spectrum Unite to Oppose NDAA
Written by Joe Wolverton, II
February 24, 2012

This liberty-extinguishing legislation converts America into a war zone and turns Americans into potential suspected terrorists, complete with the full roster of rights typically afforded to terrorists — none.

A key component of this reconciled bill mandates a frightening grant of immense and unconstitutional power to the executive branch. Under the provisions of Section 1021, the President is afforded the absolute power to arrest and detain citizens of the United States without their being informed of any criminal charges, without a trial on the merits of those charges, and without a scintilla of the due process safeguards protected by the Constitution of the United States.

Further, in order to execute the provisions of Section 1021 described in the previous paragraph, subsequent clauses (Section 1022, for example) unlawfully give the President the absolute and unquestionable authority to deploy the armed forces of the United States to apprehend and to indefinitely detain those suspected of threatening the security of the “homeland.” In the language of this legislation, these people are called “covered persons.”

The universe of potential “covered persons” includes every citizen of the United States of America. Any American could one day find himself or herself branded a “belligerent” and thus subject to the complete confiscation of his or her constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a military prison.

Read the full article at:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/10982-leaders-from-across-political-spectrum-unite-to-oppose-ndaa


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An execrable ancestor
By Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer who served as an associate deputy attorney to President Ronald Reagan and is a senior adviser to the Ron Paul 2012 campaign.
February 28, 2012

The execrable ancestor of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Frederick Douglass protested, “Under this [Fugitive Slave] law the oaths of any two villains (the capturer and the claimant) are sufficient to confine a free man to slavery for life.” Under the NDAA, the suspicion of the president is sufficient to confine an American citizen to military detention for life without accusation or trial. The twin laws make for an alarming tale.

The NDAA defiles due process more egregiously than did the Fugitive Slave Act.Section 1021 empowers the military to detain for life without trial any American citizen captured in the United States whom the president maintains is “substantially support[ing] … al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces” engaged in hostilities against “coalition partners” of the United States. None of the key terms in section 1021 are defined to constrain the president’s power to disappear Americans into dungeons at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere. “Al Qaeda” is undefined. “The Taliban” is undefined. “Associated forces” is undefined. “Coalition partners” is undefined. “Substantially supporting” is undefined. The words can mean whatever the president, like Humpty Dumpty, wants them to mean. “Substantial support” might be said to include any criticism of the United States government for flouting the Constitution in combatting international terrorism.

The president is crowned by the NDAA with untrammeled authority to decide the proof and method for the executive branch to determine whether an American is substantially aiding al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces against a coalition partner. There is no judicial involvement. In sum, under the NDAA the president may imprison for life any American citizen for an alleged linkage to international terrorism against coalition partners of the United States on his say-so alone — the very definition of tyranny articulated by James Madison, father of the Constitution, in Federalist No. 47.

The NDAA emerged from the Senate and House Armed Services Committees without a single hearing. The Judiciary Committees waived jurisdiction. Only 13 senators voted against the sacrilege to due process. The statute is naked of findings that the awesome power lodged in the president was necessary to cure a deficiency in existing laws. It was enacted more than a decade after the 9/11 abominations, when it was known that no American citizen on American soil who substantially supported al Qaeda had ever eluded prosecution and punishment in the criminal justice system before any American in America had been harmed.

Read the full article at:

http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/28/an-execrable-ancestor/