Monday, January 16, 2012 by Truthdig.com
Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint
Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf
as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon
Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of
Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense
Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.
(Photo: AP / Dusan Vranic)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.
I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to
arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these
jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into
military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and
unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while
my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to
have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.
Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to
detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported
al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in
hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,
including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly
supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”
The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”
I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I
used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including
Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded
international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard
in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters
from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are
labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would
this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans
traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El
Salvador? What would it have meant for those of us who were with the
southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the
southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with
people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me
one.
Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a
Palestinian charity or an element of the Uighur independence movement,
the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported
charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical
supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and
closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that
supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can
be treated like card-carrying “terrorists” and sent to Guantanamo.
But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal,
domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a
terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are
probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not
locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in
our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers
you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have
weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more
than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the
obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a
seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist”
who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary
rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites
“until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will
be a very long stay.
This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a
conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated
in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every
organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by
the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands
our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental
constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word
“democracy” to describe our political system.
The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned
outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once
again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is
unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and
reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times
in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11.
The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has
been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin
Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea.
Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade
after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian
measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be
specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due
process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the
president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury
and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing
of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when
the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person
shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our
First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need
to fight “terrorism”?
Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems
of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in
the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t
afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from
any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap
forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the
nation and use state and military security to cow the population into
submission.
The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the
director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general
didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill
would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism
because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the
military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to
obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly
successful in gaining,” he told Congress.
But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the
corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are
about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand,
do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in
the Army. And now they can.
© 2012 TruthDig
