The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is a grotesque and un-American piece of legislation which redefines your rights into meaningless shadows of their former substance.
This abomination degrades your rights under the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and possibly, Seventh Amendments. As well as renders all but meaningless your former right to habeas corpus (the right to challenge your detention by the government). The NDAA is the foundation for the police state. Democrats voted for it. Republicans voted for it.
If you are against a military police state, you now have no political party in Washington, D.C., to represent your interests.
Assurances from politicians that this act does not apply to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, are misleading in the extreme. The exemptions for U.S. citizens, in section 1022, do nothing to protect us from the nearly identical provisions in section 1021, from which we are not exempt. Imagine the level of duplicity involved in such a deception!
“Look over here at section 1022 folks! See, we arenot taking your rights away, we are just taking away the rights of those nasty old terrorists (or people we say are terrorists).”
Meanwhile, section 1021 authorizes almost identical treatment for you and your neighbor.
Does “the right to petition for habeas corpus” still exist under the act as Congressman Tim Griffin and others claim? Only in name, not in substance. In the new version, hearsay evidence is allowed and the government does not have the burden of proof, you do. And, you don’t get to stand in front of a real judge anymore, just an officer from a “military tribunal.”
Paid government informants could give false second-hand information about your supposed involvement in an “anti-government plot” and based on that, you could be indefinitely detained. The government does not have to show that the hearsay evidencefrom the paid informants is true in order to keep you detained. Rather, you have to persuade whomever the executive branch picked to run your kangaroo court that it’s false.
What both Republicans and Democrats are doing is setting up a “due process lite” system, whereby the government declares that persons it accuses of certain acts don’t get what is traditionally and constitutionally meant by “rights.” Instead people get a very different sort of treatment that politicians are deceptively calling the same thing. They maintain the illusion and name of due process, while implementing a conniving death blow to its substance.
Our ruling class seems very nervous. I suppose I would be too if I had allowed the Federal Reserve to create trillions of dollars out of thin air and essentially giving it to multi-national banks and associated corporations while telling Joe Six-pack that the new money is a debt he now owes and that he needs to sacrifice his Social Security, Medicare, Education, etc., to pay it back. I suspect thatis what is coming as the magnitude of the looting becomes manifest.
Fraud is an interesting crime. For a while, the perpetrators and the victims both think they have the money, and so everyone is happy. Bernie Madoff’s “clients” were happy even for years after Madoff stole their money, because they did not realize it was gone.
Today’s political class has stolen our money, but like Madoff, they are able to arrange things for a while to make it appear to us that the money is not gone.
Unlike Madoff, they are in position to make preparations, so that once the fraud is discovered and people do become upset, they are not arrested for ripping us off, but rather, we are to be arrested if we complain about it too strenuously.
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Editor’s note: Mark Moore is the lead writer for an Internet blog on matters pertaining to Arkansas culture and government, Arkansas Watch, and on Tuesday nights is the host of an Internet-based radio program, Patriots on Watch. He can be reached through The Times at [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 4 on 01/18/2012