[Peace-discuss] On NDAA, "David Swanson Set Your Doomsday Clock to 11:51", & how apartheid South Africa became a police state

Fri Dec 16 14:53:51 CST 2011

Thought this was a good piece from the United for Peace and Justice list 
- as well as the David Swanson column that it responds to.

We could well adopt the South African term, "securocrats", for 
operatives in our own merging military/nationalsecurity/local police 
agglomeration.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[ufpj-activist] Fwd: [Ufpj-leg-action] David Swanson Set Your 
Doomsday Clock to 11:51
Date: 	Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:23:02 -0800
From: 	Christopher Lowe <clowe at igc.org>
To: 	UFPJ-activist activist <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>

Thanks to David Swanson for the brilliant clarity of this piece.

Regarding this:  "The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap 
from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and 
accelerating decade-long march toward a police state," allow me to offer 
a mite of perspective from an atypical angle:  the history of South 
Africa.  It has been resonating in my mind in recent years and weeks.

The steps were different.  In some ways they were smaller, through many 
increments of expanded time of detention without trial and restriction 
of detainee ability to seek legal redress and judicial ability to 
intervene.  The leap to indefinite detention without legal recourse has 
occurred with breathless haste in our case, by old South African standards.

Conversely, in some ways in South Africa the application was much 
broader, as the detention provisions applied across civil society to all 
South African citizens and residents (including those whose citizenship 
"grand apartheid" sought to end) and were carried out by the police, 
including the secret political police.

By old South African standards, the restriction of detention without 
trial to military agencies under the law of war and the quibbling over 
issues like/posse comitatus/ and distinctions between executive military 
jurisdiction vs. prosecutorial powers in civilian jurisdictions, while 
fastidious in a way that betrays their pantomime character and bad 
conscience, nonetheless defines a narrowness of scope, along with the 
frontiers of potential expansion as principle erodes.

However, in the period between the first detention without trial laws 
around 1960 and the full blown police state "states of emergency" in the 
1980s, South Africa also saw an erosion and ultimately collapse of the 
military vs. secret police vs. civilian police distinction.

South African opposition intellectuals developed a new word, 
"securocrats," to describe those acting within the increasingly merged 
structures.  In the U.S. we have been undergoing a similar process since 
September 2001, and  the undermining of /posse comitatus/ under the 
"global battlefield" doctrine is a further step in that process.

Even before those developments, the old South African state was only 
unevenly and ambiguously liberal, in rule-of-law terms, but there was a 
realm of civil liberties and a legal tradition behind it that was 
progressively strangled from about 1960 to 1989.  After a certain point 
defense in the legal system became almost purely tactical, as there was 
nothing left of principle to defend, but the tactical fights still 
mattered.

We start from a somewhat stronger place, especially insofar as old South 
Africa was a parliamentary republic lacking an independent judiciary and 
having no constitutionally established rights and liberties.  It seems 
to me that we need to continue asserting that these purported laws are 
in fact illegal, even while the political meaning of such assertion may 
be shifting toward highlighting the growing illegitimacy of the state, 
and even if the courts for a time abdicate their duties and rule 
erroneously or refuse to rule.

All this by way of offering one relatively historical precedent for 
David's "march toward a police state" analysis.

Chris L
Portland, OR

Begin forwarded message:

> *From: *Hiscze at aol.com <mailto:Hiscze at aol.com>
> *Date: *December 16, 2011 10:16:26 AM PST
> *To: *ufpj-leg-action at lists.mayfirst.org 
> <mailto:ufpj-leg-action at lists.mayfirst.org>
> *Subject: **[Ufpj-leg-action] David Swanson Set Your Doomsday Clock to 
> 11:51*
>
>
>   Set Your Doomsday Clock to 11:51
>
> By David Swanson
> http://warisacrime.org/content/set-your-doomsday-clock-1151
>
> The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to 
> tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating 
> decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our 
> republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that 
> almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit 
> further still.
>
> I'm not referring to the ?doomsday? predicted 
> <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/panetta-doomsday-scenario-may-exaggerate-cuts.html> 
> by Leon Panetta should military spending be scaled back to the 
> obscenely inflated levels of 2007. I'm talking about the complete 
> failure to /keep/ the republic that Benjamin Franklin warned we might 
> not. Practices that were avoided, outsourced, or kept secret when Bill 
> Clinton was president were directly engaged in on such a scale under 
> president George W. Bush that they became common knowledge. Under 
> President Obama they are becoming formal law and acceptable policy.
>
> Obama has claimed the power 
> <http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/22/vince_warren> to imprison 
> people without a trial since his earliest months in office. He spoke 
> <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/21/obama-national-archives-s_n_206189.html> 
> in front of the Constitution in the National Archives while gutting 
> our founding document in 2009. So why not pick the 220th anniversary 
> of the Bill of Rights to further codify its elimination? President 
> Obama has claimed <http://warisacrime.org/ongoingtorture> the power to 
> torture "if needed," issued an executive order 
> <http://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama-issues-executive-order-institutionalizing-indefinite-detention> 
> claiming the power of imprisonment without trial, exercised that power 
> on a massive scale at Bagram, and claimed and exercised 
> <http://www.salon.com/2010/04/07/assassinations_2/> the power to 
> assassinate U.S. citizens. Obama routinely kills people with unmanned 
> drones.
>
> As Obama's Justice Department has broken new ground in the 
> construction of state secrecy and immunity, the Bush era advancers of 
> imperial presidential power have gone on book tours bragging about 
> their misdeeds. One can expect the next step to involve serious abuse 
> of those who question and resist the current bipartisan trajectory.
>
> So what does the latest bill do, other than dumping another $660 
> billion into wars and war preparation? Well, it says this 
> <http://warisacrime.org/content/changes-made-won-obamas-approval>:
>
>     "Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the
>     authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for
>     Use of Military Force."
>
> In other words, Congress is giving its stamp of approval to the 
> unconstitutional outrages already claimed by the president. But then, 
> why create a new law at all? Well, because some outrages are more 
> equal than others, and Congress has chosen to specify some of those 
> and in fact to expand some of them. For example:
>
>     "Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all
>     necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for
>     Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority
>     for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered
>     persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under
>     the law of war."
>
> And this:
>
>     "The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in
>     subsection (a) may include the following: (1) Detention under the
>     law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities
>     authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force."
>
> Jon Stewart explained when those detained without trial under the law 
> might be released: ?So when the war on terror ends, and terror 
> surrenders and is no longer available as a human emotion, you are free 
> to go.?
>
> An exception for U.S. citizens was kept out of the bill at President 
> Obama's request <http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/>.
>
> So why did Obama threaten to veto the bill initially and again after 
> it passed the Senate? Well, one change made by the conference 
> committee was this:
>
>     "The Secretary of Defense President may, in consultation with the
>     Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence,
>     waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary President
>     submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver
>     is in the national security interests of the United States."
>
> The reference here is to military tribunals. The President ? that is, 
> the current one and future ones ? need not hand someone over even to a 
> military tribunal if . . . well, if he (or she) chooses not to.
>
> President Obama wanted a bill that limited him in no way, and he is 
> likely to issue a law-altering signing-statement that further removes 
> any offensive limits on absolute tyrannical power. This type of 
> signing statement is another example of something done secretly by 
> Bush, exposed, turned into a temporary scandal, denounced by candidate 
> Obama, then utilized by President Obama, formally established by 
> executive order, and now more or less accepted by everyone as the norm.
>
> That is what will happen with trial-free imprisonment and 
> assassination as well. And the presidents who engage in these 
> practices will be from both major political parties. So readers should 
> weigh the acceptable crimes and abuses of the good tyrants on their 
> team against the risk of presidents from the other team doing the 
> same. Of course, this team loyalty is the main reason the streets of 
> Washington are not filled with protesters. The corporate media 
> believes that outrages agreed to by both parties are not news. Many 
> Democrats believe any power a Democratic president wants he should 
> have, even though all of his successors will have it too. And many 
> Republicans back whatever comes out of a Republican House of 
> Representatives.
>
> A large majority of Republicans in the House voted to eviscerate our 
> Bill of Rights, and the Democrats split 93 to 93. In the Senate both 
> parties overwhelmingly voted "Aye."
>
> If ever there was a time to build an independent, principled movement 
> based in activism rather than elections and to put a few more minutes 
> back on the doomsday clock, this is it. While Obama's decision not to 
> veto this bill has discouraged many, at RootsAction we've continued 
> demanding a veto 
> <http://rootsaction.org/featured-actions/316-veto-imprisonment-without-charge-or-trial> 
> because we think the Constitution should be upheld and improved, not 
> dismantled. If signed into law, we will demand that this elimination 
> of our rights be repealed by Congress or overturned in court, and we 
> will use that campaign to educate the public about what just happened.
>
> ##
>
> David Swanson is a campaigner for http://rootsaction.org and the 
> author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: 
> Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union."
>
>
>
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