Ah,
raging, frantic paranoia. It's always my favorite part of
Thanksgiving, how about you?
Fevered panic gripped the Internet (and, I admit, my brain) over the holiday weekend as word of the next great stride toward the looming American Police State went viral, this time in a shocking ACLU article:
According to author Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, Senate Bill 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act — a “must pass” piece of legislation that will be on the Senate floor on Monday, November 28 — was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing.
But most appallingly:
It contains the provision allowing for worldwide indefinite detention of citizens without charge or trial provision, including American citizens.
How odd to discover that the language of the bill seems to state the exact opposite of this terrifying claim:
(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens-
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.
(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS- The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.
The most maddening thing about this article is not so much that it appears, at least on the surface, to be inaccurate, but that it’s suspiciously so. When you click on any of the 9 links to learn more about S. 1867, they only take you to the ACLU petition to support Mark Udall’s (D-CO) amendment, which Anders vaguely promises us “will delete the harmful provisions and replace them with a requirement for an orderly Congressional review of detention power. The Udall Amendment will make sure that the bill matches up with American values.”
And even more head-scratchy: apparently the Udall Amendment objects to the parts of the bill that would center more Homeland Security power in the Defense Department, rather than the Justice Department. Great but, where is the language stating opposition to the fundamental, ongoing violations of American civil liberties through the Homeland Security apparatus? How exactly is this bill now matching up with our "values"? Granted, I am no legal scholar, but this is confusing.
I thought I was getting a little wacky from too much turkey tryptophan, but apparently it wasn't just me. On liberal and libertarian websites, people confusedly pointed to the bill itself, warning everyone to actually read it before hysterically forwarding the related ACLU petition to everyone you know (too late for me on that count). Of course, we give money to the ACLU so we don’t have to read and interpret this kind of monstrously complex legislation. We count on them to analyze the data appropriately and report back to us, clearly.
Meanwhile on the ACLU Facebook page, posts to their Wall demanding an answer are immediately deleted.
So . . . what the hell is going on around here?
To be honest, I don’t know. I plan to call the ACLU today and try to get to the bottom of it. (See updated respose 11/28 from the ACLU at the bottom of this article). Most people, however, will not bother to check the facts in this case because . . . it doesn’t really matter to them anyway. Millions already believe the American government has gone rogue.
And they’re right.
Yesterday, Carl Gibson, US Uncut organizer, wrote a piece that paralleled my darker thinking as I researched over this long holiday weekend: America Has Become a Fascist Police State.
Gibson writes:
Today, in the Land of the Free, nonviolent political protesters using their First Amendment rights to speak out against all of the above can be beaten,tasered, and maced by heavily-militarized police forces, using military-grade equipment, without any provocation.
- Students sitting down in the quad at UC Davis were covered with military-grade pepper spray, before cops in riot gear knelt on them and sprayed indiscriminately down student's throats according to Professor Nathan Brown of UC Davis.
- At UC Berkeley, Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, was clubbed by police while nonviolently protesting with students.
- In Seattle, cops clad in riot gear pepper-sprayed an 84-year-old woman, and an expectant mother.
- In Oakland, veterans who served overseas to allegedly protect the rights we hold dear come home and get aggressively beaten without warning, and shot in the face with tear-gas canisters. Oakland police even threw a flash-bang grenade at people rushing to give medical attention to the wounded vet.
So, what do you think? Are we headed toward a police state in America? Have we arrived? Where are we? These questions matter for all of us, particularly for activists.
The term police state describes a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive. The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. -- Wikipedia definition of Police State
There is one thing we know. This latest Defense Authorization Act S. 1867 may not hasten, but certainly does not halt, the undermining and desiccation of the American Constitution, and our flagrant trashing of every international agreement on peace and human rights since September 11, 2001.
10 Years of Disappearence, Torture, and Extrajudicial Acts -- The End or Just the Beginning?
The 2001 PATRIOT Act and the 2006 Military Commissions Act were not just Congressional “mistakes” (as the ACLU bafflingly editorializes on its website). The architects and supporters of these treasonous laws purposefully gutted our Bill of Rights, eliminated habeas corpus for non-citizens — the right to due process and a trial — and built a superhighway around the protections of the Geneva Conventions (which also protect our soldiers from torture when captured on foreign soil).
About the Military Commissions Act, ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said (and in this case was definitely correct),
"The president can now, with the approval of Congress, indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions."
The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in 2001 with no debate or discussion, and extended in 2011 by Barack Obama, also allows for indefinite detention upon secret evidence, along with expanded powers of surveillance and searches with little or no judicial oversight that violate our 1st, 4th and 5thAmendment rights.
Is that it? They only killed the 1st, 4th and 5th? Really, how do we know what rights we still have left? We don’t.
The Truth is Classified
When the most controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act came to the floor of Congress for extension early in 2011, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) wrote the following bold and honest statement in their article: How Can You Debate a Secret Law?
"As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee we have been provided with the executive branch's classified interpretation of those provisions and can tell you that we believe there is a significant discrepancy between what most people - including many Members of Congress - think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and what government officials secretly believe the Patriot Act allows them to do.
Legal scholars, law professors, advocacy groups, and the Congressional Research Service have all written interpretations of the Patriot Act and Americans can read any of these interpretations and decide whether they support or agree with them. But by far the most important interpretation of what the law means is the official interpretation used by the U.S. government and this interpretation is - stunningly -classified.
What does this mean? It means that Congress and the public are prevented from having an informed, open debate on the Patriot Act because the official meaning of the law itself is secret. Most members of Congress have not even seen the secret legal interpretations that the executive branch is currently relying on and do not have any staff who are cleared to read them. Even if these members come down to the Intelligence Committee and read these interpretations themselves, they cannot openly debate them on the floor without violating classification rules."
As John Lennon once said, "All I want is the truth now, just
gimme some truth now."
Here is some truth -- maybe not all of it, but I feel pretty confident about this much:
It’s no longer a slippery slope to fascism in the United States. It’s more of a greased slide, slick with money; billions in campaign dollars, billions to rig our elections, billions in oil profits, billions in corporate subsidies, trillions in derivates trading, trillions in arms deals, trillions in military and mercenary contracts (with untold billions still officially “missing”), trillions in bailouts, multi-trillions in debt that can never be repaid, that is being used to squeeze unto death the poor and middle class who are guilty of only one thing: we let this happen.
We let them steal our government. We let them steal our elections, buy our representatives, appoint their crooked judges, control our media.
We sat back and watched, commented, complained, maybe even protested on occasion, but it wasn’t enough. We knew it wasn’t enough.
Now our day of reckoning is coming. The inevitable uprising has begun, and what we activists all must understand is that an entire body of unconstitutional, indeed, openly fascist law is poised like a net above our heads — and if it drops, it will make the police brutality we’re enduring now look like a bad episode of Dancing with the Stars.
Prolonged Diapering? Really?
"Enhanced interrogation techniques” is code for American-style torture of the creepy S&M kind (which clearly titillates that brainless glassy-eyed lunatic Michele Bachmann) including;
water boarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects inside confinement boxes, freezing, hooding, stripping, shaving and prolonged diapering
“Extraordinary rendition” has been our more straight forward, less kinky process of kidnapping and illegally transferring a person from one nation to another, where they may be fully “tortured by proxy” in countries with no human rights protections.
According to the European Parliament report of February 2007, the CIA has conducted 1,245 rendition flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2006 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) accused the United States of operating a "clandestine spiderweb of disappearances, secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers.”
Indeed. American laws were changed to serve not the People, but the post 9/11 National Security State and its network of gulags; CIA run secret “black” sites in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and even secret prison ships anchored outside the jurisdiction of our courts. In these lawless places of suffering and fear, prisoners are no different than any who have been "disappeared" by rogue governments, from the victims of Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) program, to Pinochet’s Desaparecidos. These lost souls may spend the rest of their days in torment, separated from friends and family, with no recourse, voiceless, forgotten. They are known officially by the American military today as "ghost detainees."
They could be guilty, or they could be innocent. They could be you and me.
Why should we assume that these practices have ended with President Obama — who has extended the PATRIOT Act, not closed Guantanamo Bay as he repeatedly promised, (Guantanamo remains the most expensive prison on Earth with nearly 200 “detainees” still held without charges or trial, some for over 10 years, and some brought in as teenagers), who has reneged on his commitment to end military tribunals, and who has has actually fought habeas corpus in the courts, taking a position to the right of the Bush administration?
Should we feel relieved to know that Obama signed an executive order in 2009 entitled “Ensuring Lawful Interrogations,” establishing a Special Task Force to study and evaluate “rendition” without actually ending the process? Does this make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Why would we continue to kidnap people to foreign countries instead of trying them in Federal Courts if we were not interested in torturing them? Perhaps someone reading has an answer to this; I don’t.
Obama still maintains a massive No-Fly list of over 10,000 names, a Terrorist Watch List of around 400,000 names, and allows for the detention of even American citizens while abroad, with no guarantee of being able to return home, even after their release.
(Btw: On my way to the August, 2011 Democracy Convention in Madison, WI, I was pulled out of line for especially invasive searching at the airport. Do we surrender our right to protection against unwarranted search and seizure the moment we check our luggage?)
Meanwhile on November 2, 2009 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that victims of "extraordinary rendition" cannot sue Washington for torture suffered overseas, because Congress has not authorized such lawsuits.
And a California court has ruled that:
The victims of the Bush administration's programme of "extraordinary rendition" will not be able to sue the private company which transported them to foreign countries for torture by the CIA, after the present White House stepped in to squash their lawsuit on the grounds of national security.
That’s the Obama White House they’re talking about.
It Don’t Take a Weatherman
The Occupy protesters are one infiltrator-planted bomb away from being deemed “enemy combatants” or “domestic terrorists” and finding their rights abruptly "disappeared."
Under current United States law, set forth in the USA PATRIOT Act, acts of domestic terrorism are those which:
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States."
The election integrity activists — should we ever manage to organize effectively — may be monitored, infiltrated, and if necessary, detained indefinitely. Probably for the crime of “interfering” with an election. Or perhaps for physically protesting the next series of stolen elections, coming up in 2012. A colleague of mine some years back was facing a year in prison for tossing a handful of dry Green Tea bags at a Diebold voting machine in Colorado, in an act of symbolic protest (this was long before the Tea Party) while wearing a Revolutionary hat.
One year in prison, for a handful of teabags and a hat.
As Howard Zinn famously said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Certainly not on the USA Fascism Express, hurtling into the gulag-darkness at increasing speed. At this point there is only one question that matters, and that is “Which side are you on?”
The side that stokes the furnaces, or the side that blows up the tracks?
If we don't blow those tracks up, how long before it’s us — you and me, American democracy activists — with that stinking black bag over our heads? With that cold water down our throats? Or how about “dry boarding” — have you heard of that? Do you even want to know what it is?
Ask Michele Bachmann, a proto-Fascist religious fanatic and, stunningly, a legitimate contender for the highest office in America in 2012. She’s dying to tell you all about it.
------------------------------------
Response from the ACLU on their Facebook page:
ACLU Nationwide: Don’t be confused by anyone claiming that
the indefinite detention legislation does not apply to
American citizens. It does.
There is an exemption for American citizens from the
mandatory detention requirement (section 1032 of the bill),
but no exemption for American citizens from the
authorization to use the military to indefinitely detain
people without charge or trial (section 1031 of the bill).
So, the result is that, under the bill, the military has the
power to indefinitely imprison American citizens, but it
does not have to use its power unless ordered to do so.
But you don’t have to believe us. Instead, read what one of
the bill’s sponsors, Senator Lindsey Graham said about it on
the Senate floor – “1031, the statement of authority to
detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates
the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.” There
you have it—indefinite military detention of American
citizens without charge or trial. And the Senate is likely
to vote on it tonight or tomorrow.