Steady Erosion of Civil Liberties Is a Real Challenge for “The Land of the Free”

Journalist Chris Hedges’ op-ed “Why I’m Suing Barack Obama” provides the rationale behind his use of the U.S. court system to challenge Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, questioning the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act. In it he writes:

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

A catastrophic blow indeed. It’s hard to remain upbeat in the face of an ever-growing list of authoritarian acts here in the “Land of the Free,” e.g., recent changes to federal law concerning:

 Assassination of U.S. citizens
 Indefinite detention
 Arbitrary justice
 Warrantless searches
 Secret evidence
 War crimes
 Secret court
 Immunity from judicial review
 Continual monitoring of citizens
 Extraordinary renditions

Jonathan Turley, columnist and Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University writes:

The continued rollbacks on civil liberties in the United States conflicts with the view of the country as the land of the free. If we are going to adopt Chinese legal principles, we should at least have the integrity to adopt one Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies. Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were.

He closes with the famous, albeit brief, discussion with Benjamin Franklin and a Mrs. Powel who confronted Franklin in 1787 after the signing of the Constitution and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” His response was a bit chilling: “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”