Once again the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address condemned as “pretended patriotism.”

The defense authorization bill that Congress passed and President Obama had threatened to veto will soon become law, a fact that should be met with public outrage. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, responding to Obama’s craven collapse on the bill’s most controversial provision, said, “By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in U.S. law.” On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney claimed “the most recent changes give the president additional discretion in determining how the law will be implemented, consistent with our values and the rule of law, which are at the heart of our country’s strength.”

What rubbish, coming from a president who taught constitutional law. The point is not to hock our civil liberty to the discretion of the president, but rather to guarantee our freedoms even if a Dick Cheney or Newt Gingrich should attain the highest office.

Sadly, this flagrant subversion of the constitutionally guaranteed right to due process of law was opposed in the Senate by only seven senators, including libertarian Republican Rand Paul and progressive Independent Bernie Sanders.

That onerous provision of the defense budget bill, much discussed on the Internet but far less so in the mass media, assumes a permanent war against terrorism that extends the battlefield to our homeland. It reeks of a militarized state that threatens the foundations of our republican form of government.

This is not only a disaster in the making for civil liberty but a blow to effective anti-terrorist police work. Recall that it was the FBI that was most effective in interrogating al-Qaida suspects before the military let loose the torturers. Under the newly approved legislation, that bypassing of civilian experts will be codified as a routine option for a president.

As The New York Times editorialized, the bill “would take the most experienced and successful anti-terrorism agencies—the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors—out of the business of interrogating, charging and trying most terrorism cases, and turn the job over to the military.” Not only has FBI Director Robert Mueller III opposed this shift in the law, but so has Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who previously ran the CIA.

What’s alarming is not just that one pernicious aspect of the defense spending bill, but the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can’t manage minimal funding for job creation and unemployment relief can find the money to fund at Cold War levels a massive sophisticated arsenal to defeat an enemy that no longer exists.

Throwing $662 billion, plus hundreds of billions more in non-Pentagon “security” programs, at what that other great-general-turned-president, Dwight Eisenhower, condemned as the “military-industrial complex,” with its tentacles in every congressional district, is an act of absurdity in a world bereft of a serious military challenge to the United States. Not even the best-funded terrorists can afford aircraft carriers.

There is simply no militarily significant enemy in sight, yet we spend almost as much on our armed forces as the rest of the world combined, and are already ludicrously superior in military might to any rogue power, like Iran, that might threaten us. The hawks who attempt to justify Cold War levels of spending on advanced weaponry by reviving “Red China” as a formidable enemy are undermined in their argument by China’s sharply limited regional force projection. The real leverage that China exercises over U.S. policy options is not military but rather economic and derives precisely from the fact that we have gone into debt to those same communists in order to fund our irrational military spending.

Military spending is rationalized with patriotic froth, but it is driven by the unfortunate fact that it is the most reliable source of government-funded profits and jobs. It is an obviously inefficient use of resources as a means of lifting the overall economy compared with building infrastructure and training workers for the jobs of the future, but don’t count on Congress or the president to change that dynamic anytime soon. The White House’s five-year projection of defense spending aims not at the one-third budget cut initiated by the first President Bush in response to the end of the Cold War, but at a “flattening” of military expenditures between 2013 and 2017.

We had every right to expect President Obama to stick to his word and veto this bill, not as a means of forcing a much needed bigger cut in government waste, but more urgently because its assault on the Constitution’s requirement of due process represents a direct threat to the freedom of the American people every bit as menacing as any we face from foreign enemies.

There Goes the Republic

The National Defence Authorisation Act of 2012 (NDAA) has now been passed by both the US Congress & the Senate, & requires only Obama’s signature to become law. Obama has already indicated that he will sign the Act, which will effectively consign the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution & the Bill of Rights to the dustbin of history. That Obama should be the person to sign this Act is enormously ironic considering his previous history as a Harvard Professor teaching Constitutional Law.

Of course, the passage of NDAA will have larger ramifications for the world & not just the US. Whilst this Act effectively sounds the death knell of the US democratic republic, it also ushers in a legalized police state. Moreover, not only does this Act herald the destruction of the US Constitution, but also the basic principles of western jurisprudence that underpinned its creation & that of the Bill of Rights. These principles, central to which is the notion that a person cannot be held without a charge & cannot be detained indefinitely without a trial, date back to Greco-Roman times & were developed by English common law beginning in 1215 with the Magna Carta, before being universalized by the Enlightenment.

The subsequent vision of the US founding fathers, conceived & brought to life through the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution & the Bill of Rights, held that inalienable right to liberty at its core, theoretically thereby making the US the enemy of every despot & tinpot dictator the world over & heralding it as the light to the world’s downtrodden.

By deliberately turning its back on its own heritage & the foundations of western civilisation, the US has abandoned the west’s noble thousand year quest to build a higher civilisation & heralded a return to the dark ages. But to assume that these developments have simply come about in response to the events of 911 & Usama bin Laden is to ignore the truth & delude ourselves.

It was Dwight D. Eisenhower who alerted the world to the real danger to our freedoms when he highlighted the rise of the US military-industrial complex some 60 years ago. Those interests have gone on to spawn an oligopoly of financial, industrial, media & military/intelligence interests that now own & control Wall Street, Washington, London & Canberra, & it is that corpocracy that has always represented a far greater danger to our freedoms than any misguided ideologue, revolutionary, fundamentalist religious fanatic or other lunatic dressed-up as a master of the universe.

Usama bin Laden was simply the fall guy.

Mother Jones notes today that Congress has explicitly authorized rendition, allowing American Citizens on U.S. soil to be sent to other countries which do torture:

A defense spending bill that passed both houses of Congress overwhelmingly and is set to be signed by President Barack Obama as early as this week could make it easier for the government to transfer American terrorist suspects to foreign regimes and security forces.

The National Defense Authorization Act (PDF) contains a section that says the president has the power to transfer suspected members and supporters of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated” groups “to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.”

That means if the president determines you’re a member or supporter of Al Qaeda or “associated forces,” he could order you to be handed over to the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Yemenis (“any other foreign country”), any of their respective security forces, or even the United Nations (“any other foreign entity”).

[Daphne Eviatar, a lawyer with Human Rights First] adds that there are “a whole lot of scenarios” where the government might want to transfer a suspected terrorist—even a US citizen—to foreign custody. For example, the administration might not want to go through the political mess of determining whether to send a suspect to Gitmo, try him in a military commission, or use the civilian system. The administration might also want to avoid the mandatory habeas corpus review that would come if the US held the suspect itself. In such a case, transferring the suspect to a foreign security force might present an appealing option.

The US Founding Fathers would not recognize their nation as America.

The U.S. today is threatening to attack Iran “under the completely bogus pretext” that it might have a nuclear weapon, a distinguished American international legal authority says.

When Obama administration officials, like those of the Bush regime before it, say “all options are on the table,” they are threatening nuclear war and that is prohibited by international law, says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign.

Not only has the International Atomic Energy Commission said this charge against Iran “is simply not true,” Boyle pointed out, but threatening Iran with nuclear war in itself constitutes an international crime.

“If we don't act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran that has already been threatened publicly by (President George W.) Bush Jr.,” he asserted.

In a speech on nuclear deterrence to the 18th conference on “Direct Democracy” in Feldkirch, Austria, Boyle said it has been estimated an attack on Iran with tactical nuclear weapons by the U.S. and Israel could kill nearly 3-million people.

(Boyle charges the U.S. has already committed “acts of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and has authorized, armed, equipped, and supplied Israel to commit...outright genocide against Lebanon and Palestine.”)

Nuclear weapons and “nuclear deterrence” have “never been legitimate instruments of state policy but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior,” Boyle said.

Thus, the governments of all the nuclear weapons states are “criminal” for threatening to exterminate humanity. Boyle named the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. He reminded that “If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime.”

“The whole (George W.) Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare, which is yet to be officially repealed by Obama now after 18 months, was made by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and it was rejected,” Boyle said.

He noted Article 2 of the UN Charter “prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense” and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, “do not qualify under that definition.” He adds the U.S. today is engaged in “ongoing international criminal activity” for “planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.”

What's more, “the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, and purchase and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law,” Boyle said.

And the leaders of NATO states that go along with U.S. nuclear policies “are all accomplices as well,” Boyle said, noting that pressure is mounting within Germany for the removal of U.S. nuclear warheads and that public opinion in much of Europe favors the elimination of nuclear arsenals.

The expansion of NATO, Boyle says, has now drawn in “almost all of Europe” and that even Sweden, Austria, and Finland have basically abandoned their neutrality. “Even Ireland,” Boyle says, has been compelled to join the so-called Partnership For Peace and send troops to Afghanistan. “The only state in Europe still holding out is Switzerland,” Boyle says, and because it refuses to commit troops to the wars in the Middle East it has been subjected to much pressure by the U.S. “including an attack on its banking and financial system.”

The nonpartisan Arms Control Association of Washington, meanwhile, has published an article in the October issue of “Arms Control Today” calling for NATO ministers at their forthcoming Oct. 14th session “to initiate a comprehensive review of outdated NATO nuclear policy” to “reduce the role and salience of nuclear weapons and support reductions of U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear bombs.”

Co-authors Oliver Meier and Paul Ingram point out that NATO's 28 states “remain divided” over key issues, including “the future role of nuclear weapons in NATO's defense posture.” What's more, they say, in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands “there now exists broad parliamentary and popular support for a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from their territories.”

In a related development, the Associated Press reported October 9, “From the 1950s' Pentagon to today's Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.”

“Just this past April,” AP writers Charles Hanley and Randy Herschaft said, “issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “all options are on the table” for dealing with Pyongyang---meaning U.S. nuclear strikes are not ruled out.”

During the Korean War (1950-53), U.S. Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea's capital and on August 20, 1953, after the fighting ended, the Strategic Air Command sent Air Force headquarters a plan for “an air atomic offensive against China, Manchuria, and North Korea” if the Communists resumed hostilities. Called OpPlan 8-53, it advocated use of “large numbers of atomic weapons.

President Jimmy Carter scaled back the U.S. nuclear arsenal in South Korea and its complete withdrawal was announced in 1991, “although the North Koreans at times accuse the U.S. of maintaining a secret nuclear stockpile,” AP says. Korea specialists generally accept Pyongyang's stated rationale that it sought its own bomb for defensive reasons in response to U.S. positioning of nuclear weapons in South Korea, AP reported.

Professor Boyle is the author of “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” and “Destroying World Order,” both published by Clarity Press.

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic moment, to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country ... and citizens partied in unwitting bliss into the New Year.

Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely (see the text of the statement here).

Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.

The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not "support our troops" by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The "American way of life" is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.

The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush administration. Even today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding torture despite the long line of cases and experts defining waterboarding as torture for decades.

On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.

There are also those who continue the longstanding effort to excuse Obama's horrific record on civil liberties by blaming either others or the times. One successful myth is that there is an exception for citizens. The White House is saying that changes to the law made it unnecessary to veto the legislation. That spin is ridiculous. The changes were the inclusion of some meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting citizens were defeated. The provision merely states that nothing in the provisions could be construed to alter Americans' legal rights. Since the Senate clearly views citizens as not just subject to indefinite detention but even to execution without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the harsh reality.

The Obama administration and Democratic members are in full spin mode - using language designed to obscure the authority given to the military. The exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention requirement (section 1032) is the screening language for the next section, 1031, which offers no exemption for American citizens from the authorisation to use the military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial.

Obama could have refused to sign the bill and the Congress would have rushed to fund the troops. Instead, as confirmed by Senator Levin, the White House conducted a misinformation campaign to secure this power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant absolute ruler, or, as Obama maintains, a reluctant president with dictatorial powers.

Most Democratic members joined their Republican colleagues in voting for this un-American measure. Some Montana citizens are moving to force the removal of these members who, they insist, betrayed their oaths of office and their constituents. Most citizens, however, are continuing to treat the matter as a distraction from the holiday cheer.

For civil libertarians, the NDAA is our Mayan moment: 2012 is when the nation embraced authoritarian powers with little more than a pause between rounds of drinks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty

President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law on New Year’s Eve. The bill provides a massive $662 billion for the US war machine and makes unprecedented inroads into democratic rights, authorizing the US military to seize individuals anywhere in the world and hold them in a military detention facility indefinitely, without a trial or any other legal recourse.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans ratified the NDAA in a series of House and Senate votes in November and December that beat back nearly all efforts to set limits to the presidential power to arrest and imprison without trial or charge. As Republican Senator Lindsey Graham emphasized during the congressional debate, the legislation defines the entire world to be part of the battlefield against Al Qaeda, including the territory of the United States itself, making every human being on the planet, including every American citizen, a potential prisoner of the American military.

The NDAA effectively revokes the oldest democratic right, habeas corpus, which bars arbitrary imprisonment by requiring that the government present evidence to a judge or court to justify taking a person into custody. This right was first asserted in England during the Middle Ages and finally established and codified in the course of the English Revolution of the 17th century, which shattered the arbitrary power of the monarchy and established the supremacy of parliament.

Under the new law, the president of the United States can designate any individual, whether an American citizen, resident alien, or citizen of any other country, to be arrested and detained for life by the US military. The law defines a “covered person” in the following terms: “A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

This goes far beyond terrorists linked to the 9/11 attacks, the purported target of the Bush and Obama administrations’ “war on terror,” to include anyone defined by the president as “engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” This could include Kurdish separatists in Turkey (a US NATO ally), Palestinian protesters in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza, and anyone engaged in resisting the ongoing US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, or any future wars initiated by Obama or his successors.

It could include youth in Tahrir Square fighting the Egyptian military dictatorship (the second largest recipient of US military aid and a key US ally), workers on strike against the governments of Greece, Spain or Italy (all NATO allies), or those opposed to the stationing of US military forces anywhere in the world, including Obama’s latest deployment of 2,500 US Marines in Australia.

It could well include domestic opponents of US military action, including opponents of the repressive actions of the military-intelligence apparatus at home. There have been repeated attempts by spokesmen for the political right to smear antiwar groups and the Occupy Wall Street protesters as allies of terrorists—and therefore potential targets for military incarceration.

First under Bush and then under Obama, the US government has advanced, with full sanction by the federal courts, an extremely broad reading of what constitutes “material support” to include anyone who engages in political activity that is in any way aligned with the actions of a supposedly “terrorist” organization. In several cases, the US government has even brought “material support” prosecutions against human rights activists who have advised nationalist movements fighting US-backed governments on how to shift from guerrilla war to electoral politics.

The American Civil Liberties Union denounced Obama’s signing of the legislation. Obama “will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today,” he added.

Obama sought to conceal the implications of this massive attack on democratic rights by claiming to oppose the applicable provisions of the bill even as he was signing them into law. The weasel-worded statement issued by the White House only underscores the duplicity of the Obama reelection campaign, in which the Democratic president will seek to appeal to youth, minorities and popular antiwar sentiment, while carrying out policies even more militaristic and anti-democratic than those of the Republican Bush.

In the signing statement, Obama claims to have “serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.” He continues: “I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation.”

The language is carefully crafted. Obama admits that the NDAA represents a repudiation of the democratic traditions associated with the American Revolution and the Civil War. He makes an extremely limited promise—no military detention without trial of a US citizen—which does not bind any successor and which he can break just as easily as he broke his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.

The promise is an easy one to make, since even the Bush administration abandoned its lone attempt to carry out “indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” in the case of Jose Padilla, turning him over to the federal courts rather than risk a Supreme Court ruling on the issue.

But in signing the law, Obama has asserted his right to carry out such indefinite detention of an American citizen in the future, and thus the right of any future president to do so. This amounts to giving a green light to the abrogation of habeas corpus, with the dimensions of the breach in democratic rights dependent solely on the arbitrary whim of the executive power.

Even more ominously, Obama has already asserted an even more drastic power—the “right” to assassinate any American citizen designated by the president as an “enemy combatant,” without trial or charge. The White House authorized the drone missile assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki four months ago, claiming the US-born Islamic preacher was a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A few weeks later, the CIA murdered Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also a US citizen, with the same weapon.

Much of the White House signing statement criticized the NDAA’s detention provisions as too restrictive of the executive branch, essentially declaring that Obama wanted the flexibility to decide on military or civilian detention facilities and judicial processes on a case-by-case basis. An aide, speaking to the press in Hawaii, where Obama is vacationing, said that the president would be “making sure that none of these congressional provisions impede the ability of the counter-terrorism and law enforcement and military professionals who are keeping this country safe.”

The White House statement specifically criticized “unwarranted restrictions on the executive branch’s authority to transfer detainees to a foreign country.” The Obama administration has continued the practice of “extraordinary rendition” in which individuals are seized by the US military or intelligence services overseas and transferred to third countries for torture and interrogation.

Obama also objected to any limitation on US military flexibility in transferring prisoners in Afghanistan to the custody of the Afghan government—another instance in which prisoner interrogation and torture have been “outsourced.”

There is an intrinsic connection between the main purpose of the NDAA—to authorize and fund the Pentagon’s operations for fiscal year 2012—and the sections on military detention of prisoners both inside and outside the United States. The legislation includes new US sanctions against Iran aimed at choking off the country’s oil exports, an act of economic warfare, while financing the worldwide operations of American imperialism. It demonstrates that militarism and aggressive war abroad go hand in hand with authoritarianism and dictatorship at home.

Watch Out : USA's Long Arm Has Reached You!

Two protesters mic check about the loss of freedom brought about by the passage of the NDAA and both are promptly arrested and whisked out of public sight

Grand Central Terminal Arrests