Posted on Dec 23, 2012
By Chris Hedges
Over the past year I and other plaintiffs
including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the
federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government
to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold
them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed
by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in
the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens
would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to
foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the
Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The
fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill
of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will
be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag
state will be cemented into place. >complete article<
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