[Peace-discuss] the masque in the iron man

[E. Wayne Johnson]

The NDAA: a clear and present danger to American liberty
by Naomi Wolf

The US is sleepwalking into becoming a police state, where, like a 
pre-Magna Carta monarch, the president can lock up anyone
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/feb/29/ndaa-danger-american-liberty

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.

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". As 
the New American website puts it,

"[S]ubsequent 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."

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.

And Guantánamo has indeed come home: Guantánamo is in our front yards 
now and our workplaces; it did not even take much more than half a 
decade. On 1 March, the NDAA will go into effect – if a judicial hearing 
scheduled for this week does not block it – and no one in America, no US 
citizen, will be safe from being detained indefinitely – in effect, 
"disappeared.".

<read more>

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