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

Fri Dec 16 15:13:34 CST 2011

Stuart, thanks for this. Glenn Greenwald has a very good piece about this,
as well: http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/.

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Stuart Levy <stuartnlevy at gmail.com> wrote:

>  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><clowe at igc.org>  To:
> UFPJ-activist activist <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org><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
> *Date: *December 16, 2011 10:16:26 AM PST
> *To: *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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