Civil Rights

The National Defense Authorization Act is not a leap from democracy to tyranny, but it is another major step on a steady and accelerating decade-long march toward a police state. The doomsday clock of our republic just got noticeably closer to midnight, and the fact that almost nobody knows it, simply moves that fatal minute-hand a bit further still.

I’m not referring to the “doomsday” predicted read more

The National Defense Authorization Act, if it becomes law, will allow the U.S. president and military to lock you or anyone else up indefinitely without charge or trial. President Obama had threatened to veto, because he wanted even more power than that. He wanted the power to imprison or murder anyone with or without the military. The conference committee has modified the bill read more

I’m editing a book in which one of the contributors writes:

In 1971, Congress passed the Anti-Detention Act, 18 U.S.C. § 4001(a), which states that “no person shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress.” Fred Koramatsu, who had brought the unsuccessful case before the Supreme Court, was eventually awarded the Medal of Honor. Congress apologized and provided for limited reparations for this heinous act.

Presumably this would read more

The Merkley amendment calling for a swifter withdrawal from Afghanistan passed on Wednesday.  And a “compromise” was forced on Thursday over the section allowing process-free imprisonment of anyone, including U.S. citizens.

Sadly, the so-called compromise simply states that this new law will not change existing law.  Yet this new law’s language is worse than existing written law, and the Obama Administration’s view of existing law is worse still.

We read more

The occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC was planned for several months to begin on the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan War.  It was planned prior to and quickly endorsed and supported the planning for Occupy Wall St.  In numerous blog posts through the summer I described it as an occupation.  Here is a video of me demanding an occupation of DC and George Galloway demanding an occupation of London.  This is from June:

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Wednesday evening, when the news was mistakenly announced that Troy Davis would not be killed, the crowd that I was with erupted with joy and with the enthusiastic realization that we all were capable of believing that something good had been done by our government.  I was at the dedication of the Howard Zinn room in the new Busboys and Poets restaurant in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Some of us had been assigned to read selections from the late Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History read more