The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.
I suggest we all ask any candidate for any federal office if they feel the government should nbe able to arbitrarily snatch anyone off the streets at any time and lock them up without counsel or being charged for an indeterminate amount of time. I’m sure they’ll all be outraged just as surely as they all voted for the NDAA giving the government that exact power to battle “terrorism.”
The real terror is fear and we have already lost the battle to those which would make over the US into a lawless state of goon squads doing as they wish in the moment to fight “terror.” The worst part of the whole debacle is that it isn’t Bush’s fault, it’s our constitutional scholar Democratic President Obama who did this to us.