Celebrating a Rare Victory in Civil Liberties
Every once in a while there’s good news for those of us concerned that our liberties are being subjugated, and our democracy eroded away from under our feet.
As I had written previously:
The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provides broad authority for the federal government to use the military in domestic operations in order to detain Americans indefinitely and without trial. This nullifies the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the natural rights of Americans.
We’ve taken our system of law and government and regressed 800 years, to the days before the Magna Carta. Now, publicly criticizing the federal government (which is what I’m doing this very minute) can meet the vague definition of a “belligerent act,” and result in my arrest and indefinite detainment — without access to a lawyer.
This isn’t liberty, folks. This is not what our brave soldiers have fought and died to defend through the last 236 years.
So here’s the good news: U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was unconstitutional.
Journalist Chris Hedges writes:
It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where—as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31—the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government’s claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote.
Maybe the ruling won’t last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is something in this.
Indeed, there IS something in this, for you, for me, and for all of us.
I am encouraged by the decision and agree that it’s good news, and way overdue. However, there is a problem.
When an organization devoted to one issue becomes involved with other issues, it risks losing its influence on its principal issue. For example, if an organization devoted to racial equality became involved with economic policy, it would risk losing supporters who are strongly committed to racial equality but ascribe to different economic theories. Thus, it would, at least to some degree, become less effective in promoting racial equality.
Similarly, although I am very alarmed by the idea that the government can detain people indefinitely without charge or evidence, some people who favor clean energy may see such detention as a necessary evil to protect national security and may drop out of any organization that opposes such detention.
This is not a question of whether the supporters of a principal have the right to state opinions on other principals; of course they have such a right. But if they use an organization which is devoted to one principal to support principals which are not directly related, they risk weakening the organization.
When captured Axis combatants were brought to the U.S. during WW2, were their Constitutional rights violated? They were not charged with any crimes, were not arraigned, were not confronted with witnesses against them.
What’s the definition of an “enemy combatant,” anyway? Does somebody have to be wearing a uniform to be designated as such?
I’m just sayin’…
Duke,
The flaw in your logic stems from your acceptance of a number of false premises that have been foisted upon American citizens for at least the past two administrations.
The first of these is the comparison between a) American citizens who stand accused – or even merely suspected – of a terror-related crime, and b) foreign persons who are legitimate prisoners of war in a conflict between states and states between uniformed armed forces. These two categories are not comparable.
Indeed, the foggy and much bandied term “enemy combatant” was a creation out of whole cloth by the occupants of our White House – a creation that was (and remains) convenient to entirely avoiding the laws of war that still apply to all POW’s. Many of our government’s actions since have openly and blatantly violated the Geneva Conventions that our own government helped enact and enforce in the past.
Another important false premise is the assertion that we are engaged in a “war against terror” – as may have already occurred to you at some point, ‘terror’ is a tactic. A nation can no more engage in a war against terror than a war against ambushes.
Terrorism is nothing more than a vicious crime, a crime that is most often committed by radicalized and misguided individuals with real grievances – specifically, it is the use of violence or threats of violence against innocents to achieve political ends. Those political ends nearly always have a very significant basis in persistent injustices, for people would not otherwise so often sacrifice their lives for such a cause.
By our own generals’ admissions, our actions in Iraq and in Afghanistan have served as highly efficient radicalizing recruitment stimuli – the more collateral damage we do (and we’ve done much), the more terrorists are bred from our wayward deeds. In short, in their words, we are creating more terrorists than we can kill. Further, the more we fight them over there, the more they will persist in trying to hurt us here and across the globe. We are – in fact – far less safe today than we were ten years ago.
The way to combat terror groups is by acting on two fronts. The first is to treat terrorism as what it is – a crime – and using all the various state, national and international police organizations, and the courts and prisons, to identify, investigate, prosecute and imprison those who are guilty if these vicious acts. The second is to significantly address the many legitimate grievances that serve so well as recruiting tools for terrorist groups.
Among our historical disadvantages on the second front is the sad fact that we remain desperately dependent on a dirty resource that we draw from under the feet of these people. We cannot possibly hope to drill our way out of that desperation at home because we quite simply lack the petroleum resources to satisfy our thirst for fuel. We have therefore long supported brutal puppet regimes like the Saudis and the former Shah of Iran (and, for decades, our recent enemy Saddam Hussein). As a direct result, another aspect of that historical disadvantage is that any genuine democracy that emerges will promptly boot our numerous extraction firms out and raise the price that we pay for their oil.
If our politicians weren’t such thoroughly pocketed sock puppets of the oil industry (and related downstream product fields like the pharmaceutical industry, etc.), we might just be able to rehabilitate ourselves from our fevered addiction, and stop our longstanding and self-defeating brutalization of foreign lands for their resources in the name of “National Security”.
The answer is as simple as these eight steps: stop all the bribery; end the wars; bring our beloved troops home; use some of them to police our own borders; use the money and manpower we save to produce known renewable alternatives to fossil energy; inspect all incoming freight and traffic; root out and try the terrorist criminals in open courts; and resolve those old and enduring injustices that are creating so much traction and support for those criminals among the peoples of foreign lands.