President Obama, while vacationing in Hawaii, sneakily used last Saturday (when few would notice) to sign the NDAA that gives him the power to order anyone, including US citizens, arrested without charge, turned over to the military and imprisoned indefinitely without a trial or recourse to the courts.
You wouldn’t know that from the corporate media’s vague headlines about him signing the “defense bill despite reservations (AP),” signing the “bill imposing Iran banking sanctions” (Reuters), signing “new Iran sanctions into law” (AFP), signing “sweeping defense bill into law” (front page of the Washington Post), singing “defense bill, pledges to maintain legal rights of terror suspects” (headline on Washington Post’s article), and signing “$662 billion defense bill into law” (New York Times).
What legal rights of “terror suspects”? Those went out with Gitmo that Obama pledged to close and has since reneged on doing.
While Obama may (or may not) exempt Americans, as though Americans are more special than other peoples, from being renditioned to who-knows-where or Gitmo, there is nothing to stop his successors from doing the opposite. Once a power is granted, it’s nearly impossible to take it away, and Obama has not only capitalized on the powers granted to his predecessors but has expanded them.
The Corporate-owned United States of America is now a Kafkaesque fascist police state where its citizens, along with all the people of the world, may be deemed terrorists by the figurehead in the White House, arrested and handed over to the military to be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial or recourse to the courts.
This is what it has come down to. The overthrow of what most Americans believed was their democratic republic has come not from the outside but from the inside, as some warned would happen. Those of us who saw this coming were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.” While there is no pleasure in saying it, this requires an “I told you so.”
Happy New Year, good people!!
Bev Conover is the editor and publisher of Intrepid Report. Email her at editor@intrepidreport.com.
“Not with a bang but a whimper”. Everything is in place here, the legions of body armored jack-booted goons, the TSA gropers who are ready to take their act to the highways and train stations, the so-called SWAT teams that need no encouragement to become death squads, the overlapping, redundant and ever-proliferating surveillance agencies that can monitor our every move, the FEMA camps for the dissatisfied, and lastly, a populace so besotted with commercial culture and ignorant of their own interests that the passage of the NDAA hardly makes a blip on the screen of the weekend’s news. When our rotten economy and currency finally collapses and, as in Argentina not long ago, the devastating effects are felt by everyone, the true mission of all these forces will become apparent. They are not in place to prevent someone from burning his underwear or shoe on an airplane.
The U.S. was never democratic in its behaviour to the rest of the world. It was, on the contrary, cruelly dictatorial and autocratic – beginning, of course, as all good charitable endeavours should, at home with treatment of its Native and non-white and even white poor people in ways that were anything but democratic. However, as the late Harold Pinter pointed out, one does “have to hand it to America” for its “clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.” But masquerades eventually crumble; illusions, however painstakingly sustained, eventually collapse. The illusion of American benevolence, which never took in the rest of the world, is turning threadbare even to the eyes of Americans themselves. The gibbering death’s head that is the reality is showing through – as it had to do.