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 US 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-Qaeda 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.
Geoffrey R. Stone: Obama on Republican Economic Policy: "It Doesn't Work"
Our government no longer finds itself bound by the US Constitution. I am afraid that I may no longer be able to support or vote for a president who cannot follow the rules of our nation.
The Oil Lobby wants protection from the American people and, unless stopped, they shall have it.
It will soon be apparent "why" they should want to be able to silence the American people, to be able to label anyone they want a "terrorist"
By about 2015, oil should start to be rather expensive and the average American is going to find it difficult to maintain their standard of living in the face of some rather austere conditions, I would expect that anyone not in the business of controlling the public will have little access to petroleum fuels that are not rationed and consequently any measure of security from police or law enforcement. Basically the 1% are better off with you dead.
That is why this law is so important, as is the Patriot act...
I really think it's sad that there's only one candidate in this next election in both parties that is strongly against this policy, which is Ron Paul. I want to hear more high ranking Democrats (there have been a few) not be afraid to say, "Mr. President, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq is over. We have to stop with these insane policies. We are the greatest economic and military super power, for crying out loud!!"
Also, as David Kopel documents,
“it was the Obama administration which told Congress to remove the language in the original bill which exempted American citizens and lawful residents from the detention power,” on the ground it would unduly restrict the decision-making of Executive Branch officials. In other words, Obama officials wanted the flexibility to militarily detain even U.S. citizens if they were so inclined, and are angry that this bill purports to limit their actions.
Who stand to make the most from the same tactics that a german guy used back in the 30's?
It took a southern president to give us the Civil Rights Act
It took a military president to warn us of the Military Industrial Complex.
It took a constitutional scholar president to destroy one of the foundations of our constitution.
The irony is very very rich. So rich that it is sickening to my stomach.
You know what they would make them in the eyes of the Founders, don't you???
The main thing to understand, jr, is that this country has, in fact, been taken over by an international group of b@nkster/terror1sts who will brook no opposition to their cr1minal endeavors. They control all 3 branches of the US government, the military, the media and the money. Take a real hard look & you'll see.
It's terribly sad and frightening.
If the citizens of our country finally decide they have had enough, martial law will be declared when the uprisings start and blood of our own citizens will be spilled on our streets en mass.
Free country? Think again. Our media is controlled. Our politicians are bought off. Our rights have been stripped, and our laws ignored. Our country is no better than the ones our Gov condemns.