Sometimes the truth hides in plain sight. Sometimes it is as hard to find as a needle in a haystack. For the last several days I have searched for the truth behind the signing into law of the NDAA – The National Defense Authorization Act - and the language it contains.
Here is a quick review in case you missed out on the story during the holiday season. The main purpose of the NDAA is to pay for the military for another year. We could argue for the rest of the year about what that money actually buys, but the current controversy is about language in the bill which allows the state to detain American citizens and hold them without a trial. After threatening to veto the bill, Obama signed it into law on the last day of 2011.
Opponents of the law point out the obvious threat to our civil liberties inherent in any legislation which validates the ability of the government to sidestep the Constitution. Nine states have already begun recall procedures to punish those representatives who voted for the bill. Outrage is growing as more people begin to realize the implications of this latest move towards totalitarianism.
The march towards totalitarianism is something that we have chronicled here for many years. There appears to be an unbroken chain of intent from at least the Clinton years, when plans were discussed for using United Nations troops on American soil in the event of a national emergency, as declared by the president, through the Bush years and the “patriot” laws. The capitulation of Obama to the fascist trend is only the latest in a long series of movements by the state to increase its power. Shortly after September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration began detaining terrorism suspects without a trial at Guantanamo. When those detentions were challenged in the courts, the government argued that the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by the Congress on Sep. 18, 2001, allowed those detentions, and in 2004, the Supreme Court agreed in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The NDAA of 2011-2012 is therefore nothing new.
Fear has long been a tool used by the state to maintain and to increase power. The decision by the Congress to declare the United States as part of the battleground in the war on terror is a good indicator of the level of fear which must now prevail in Washington. One has to wonder; just what is in those security briefings that members of Congress receive which destroys the high minded rhetoric of the campaign?
There are several possibilities. One possibility is that some members of the government live in fear of another devastating attack on American soil. We certainly have enemies who would stage such an attack if they could, but the trend towards totalitarianism predates the destruction of the Twin Towers. I think it is more likely that the state fears for its own survival in the face of several trends that combine to indicate volatility and unrest in the future. The world economy is a house of paper. The climate is changing. Overpopulation is beginning to strain infrastructure and resources. This is not the first time these factors have converged, and every time they have, unrest has occurred. Change has occurred. Whenever civilization has faced fundamental change, the mechanisms of the state have acted to ensure their own survival, at all costs.
Nevertheless, I remain optimistic for the United States of America. We still possess the tools to endure the coming changes with our ideals intact – if we do not succumb to fear – and if we stay informed and involved as citizens and as voters. I have often wondered at what point along the road from private citizen to elected official, idealism dies. The disparity between speech and action implies that something changes between Main Street and Capitol Hill, unless you choose to believe that the motives of anyone seeking office are corrupt from the beginning. I think it is more likely that there are those who seek to serve and those who seek power. The difficulty for us as voters is that both use the same language.
