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The Polite Conference Rooms Where Liberties Are Saved and Lost
I spent four hours in a third-floor conference room at 86 Chambers St. in Manhattan on Friday as I underwent a government deposition. Benjamin H. Torrance, an assistant U.S. attorney, carried out the questioning as part of the government’s effort to decide whether it will challenge my standing as a plaintiff in the lawsuit I have brought with others against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta over the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Bill.
The NDAA implodes our most cherished constitutional protections. It permits the military to function on U.S. soil as a civilian law enforcement agency. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to selectively suspend due process and habeas corpus for citizens. The law can be used to detain people deemed threats to national security, including dissidents whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, and hold them until what is termed “the end of the hostilities.” Even the name itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian concept that endless war has to be waged within “the homeland” against internal enemies as well as foreign enemies.
Judge Katherine B. Forrest, in a session starting at 9 a.m. Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, will determine if I have standing and if the case can go forward. The attorneys handling my case, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, will ask, if I am granted standing, for a temporary injunction against the Homeland Battlefield Bill. An injunction would, in effect, nullify the law and set into motion a fierce duel between two very unequal adversaries—on the one hand, the U.S. government and, on the other, myself, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, the Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir and three other activists and journalists. All have joined me as plaintiffs and begun to mobilize resistance to the law through groups such as Stop NDAA.
The deposition was, as these things go, conducted civilly. Afran and Mayer, the attorneys bringing the suit on my behalf, were present. I was asked detailed questions by Torrance about my interpretation of Section 1021 and Section 1022 of the NDAA. I was asked about my relationships and contacts with groups on the U.S. State Department terrorism list. I was asked about my specific conflicts with the U.S. government when I was a foreign correspondent, a period in which I reported from El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Middle East, the Balkans and other places. And I was asked how the NDAA law had impeded my work.
It is in conference rooms like this one, where attorneys speak in the arcane and formal language of legal statutes, that we lose or save our civil liberties. The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the employment of the Espionage Act by the Obama White House against six suspected whistle-blowers and leakers, and the Homeland Battlefield Bill have crippled the work of investigative reporters in every major newsroom in the country. Government sources that once provided information to counter official narratives and lies have largely severed contact with the press. They are acutely aware that there is no longer any legal protection for those who dissent or who expose the crimes of state. The NDAA threw in a new and dangerous component that permits the government not only to silence journalists but imprison them and deny them due process because they “substantially supported” terrorist groups or “associated forces.”
Those of us who reach out to groups opposed to the U.S. in order to explain them to the American public will not be differentiated from terrorists under this law. I know how vicious the government can be when it feels challenged by the press. I covered the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua from 1983 to 1988. Press members who reported on the massacres and atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military, as well as atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed Contra forces in Nicaragua, were repeatedly denounced by senior officials in the Reagan administration as fellow travelers and supporters of El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) rebels or the leftist Sandinista government in Managua, Nicaragua.
The Reagan White House, in one example, set up an internal program to distort information and intimidate and attack those of us in the region who wrote articles that countered the official narrative. The program was called “public diplomacy.” Walter Raymond Jr., a veteran CIA propagandist, ran it. The goal of the program was to manage “perceptions” about the wars in Central America among the public. That management included aggressive efforts to destroy the careers of reporters who were not compliant by branding them as communists or communist sympathizers. If the power to lock us up indefinitely without legal representation had been in the hands of Elliott Abrams or Oliver North or Raymond, he surely would have used it.
Little has changed. On returning not long after 9/11 from a speaking engagement in Italy I was refused entry into the United States by customs officials at the Newark, N.J., airport. I was escorted to a room filled with foreign nationals. I was told to wait. A supervisor came into the room an hour later. He leaned over the shoulder of the official seated at a computer in front of me. He said to this official: “He is on a watch. Tell him he can go.” When I asked for further information I was told no one was authorized to speak to me. I was handed my passport and told to leave the airport.
Glenn Greenwald, the columnist and constitutional lawyer, has done the most detailed analysis of the NDAA bill. He has pointed out that the crucial phrases are “substantially supported” and “associated forces.” These two phrases, he writes, allow the government to expand the definition of terrorism to include groups that were not involved in the 9/11 attacks and may not have existed when those attacks took place.
It is worth reading Sections 1021 and 1022 of the bill. Section 1021 of the NDAA “includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.” Subsection B defines covered persons like this: “(b) Covered Persons—A covered person under this section is any person as follows: (1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks. (2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the U.S. or its coalition partners.” Section 1022, Subsection C, goes on to declare that covered persons are subject to: “(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” And Section 1022, Subsection A, Item 4, allows the president to waive the requirement of legal evidence in order to condemn a person as an enemy of the state if that is believed to be in the “national security interests of the United States.”
The law can be used to detain individuals who are not members of terrorist organizations but have provided, in the words of the bill, substantial support even to “associated forces.” But what constitutes substantial? What constitutes support? What are these “associated forces”? What is defined under this law as an act of terror? What are the specific activities of those purportedly “engaged in hostilities against the United States”? None of this is answered. And this is why, especially as acts of civil disobedience proliferate, the NDAA law is so terrifying. It can be used by the military to seize and detain citizens and deny legal recourse to anyone who defies the corporate state.
Torrance’s questions to me about incidents that occurred during my reporting were typified by this back and forth, which I recorded:
Torrance: In paragraph eight of your declaration you refer to the type of journalism we have just been discussing, which conveyed opinions, programs and ideas as being brought within the scope of Section 1021’s provision defining a covered people as one who has substantially supported or directly supported the acts and activities of such individuals or organizations and allies of associated forces. Why do you believe journalistic activity could be brought within that statute?
Hedges: Because anytime a journalist writes and reports in a way that challenges the official government narrative they come under fierce attack.
Torrance: What kind of attack do they come under?
Hedges: It is a range. First of all, the propaganda attempts to discredit the reporting. It would be an attempt to discredit the individual reporter. It would be a refusal to intercede when allied governments physically detain and expel the reporter because of reporting that both that allied government and the United States did not want. And any foreign correspondent that is any good through their whole career has endured all of this.
Torrance: Remind me, the phrase you used that you believed would trigger that was “coverage disfavorable to the United States”?
Hedges: I didn’t say that.
Torrance: Remind me of the phrase.
Hedges: I said it was coverage that challenged the official narrative.
Torrance: Have you ever been detained by the United States government?
Hedges: Yes.
Torrance: When and where?
Hedges: The First Gulf War.
Torrance: What were the circumstances of that?
Hedges: I was reporting outside of the pool system.
Torrance: How did that come about that you were detained?
Hedges: I was discovered by military police without an escort.
Torrance: And they took you into custody?
Hedges: Yes.
Torrance: For how long?
Hedges: Not a long time. They seized my press credentials and they called Dhahran, which is where the sort of central operations were, and I was told that within a specified time—and I don’t remember what that time was—I had to report to the authorities in Dhahran.
Torrance: Where is Dhahran?
Hedges: Saudi Arabia.
Torrance: And that was a U.S. military headquarters of some sort?
Hedges: Well, it was the press operations run by the U.S. Army.
Torrance: And what was the asserted basis for detaining you?
Hedges: That I had been reporting without an escort.
Torrance: And was that a violation of some law or regulation that you know of?
Afran: Note, object to form. Laws and regulations are two different things.
Hedges: Not in my view. …
Torrance: Did the people who detained you specify any law or regulation that in their view you violated?
Hedges: Let me preface that by saying that as a foreign correspondent with a valid journalistic visa, which I had, in a country like Saudi Arabia, the United States does not have the authority to detain me or tell me what I can report on. They attempted to do that, but neither I [nor] The New York Times [my employer at the time] recognized their authority.
Torrance: When you obtained that journalistic visa did you agree to any conditions on what you would do or where you would be permitted to go?
Hedges: From the Saudis?
Torrance: The visa was issued by the Saudi government?
Hedges: Of course, I need a visa from the Saudi government to get into Saudi.
Torrance: Did you agree to any such conditions?
Hedges: No. Not with the Saudis.
Torrance: Were there any other journalists of which you were aware who [were] reporting outside of the pool system?
Hedges: Yes.
Torrance: Were they also detained, to your knowledge?
Hedges: Yes.
The politeness of the exchanges, the small courtesies extended when we needed a break, the idle asides that took place during the brief recesses, masked the deadly seriousness of the proceeding. If there is no rolling back of the NDAA law we cease to be a constitutional democracy.
Totalitarian systems always begin by rewriting the law. They make legal what was once illegal. Crimes become patriotic acts. The defense of freedom and truth becomes a crime. Foreign and domestic subjugation merges into the same brutal mechanism. Citizens are colonized. And it is always done in the name of national security. We obey the new laws as we obeyed the old laws, as if there was no difference. And we spend our energy and our lives appealing to a dead system.
Franz Kafka understood the totalitarian misuse of law, the ability by the state to make law serve injustice and yet be held up as the impartial arbiter of good and evil. In his stories “The Trial” and “The Castle” Kafka presents pathetic supplicants before the law who are passed from one doorkeeper, administrator or clerk to the next in an endless and futile quest for justice. In the parable “Before the Law” the supplicant dies before even being permitted to enter the halls of justice. In Kafka’s dystopian vision, the law is the mechanism by which injustice and tyranny are perpetuated. A bureaucratic legal system uses the language of justice to defend injustice. The cowed populations in tyrannies become for Kafka so broken, desperate and passive that they are finally complicit in their own enslavement. The central character in “The Trial,” known as Josef K, offers little resistance at the end of the story when two men arrive to oversee his execution. Josef K. leads them to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself. He cannot. The men do it for him. His last words are: “Like a dog!”
Comments
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209 Comments so far
Show AllSiouxrose,
i agree w/ your sentiments regarding hedges, chomsky, ellsberg and the others who are questioning this nefarious rule 'ndaa'.
"Likely it was Kennedy's assassination, part of a coup that's evolved very slowly over the past 50 years to assume more and more unchecked power, that's taken us to this juncture. "
"Fascism, after all involves the merger of corporations with government & its militias."
- - - - - - - - - -
yes, we are very far down the rabbit hole and the light of day is quickly receding.
JFK 2-The George H. W. Bush Connection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAQ5mFkrlDs
...peace...
Siouxrose
Thank you for your long response above to Leea's post that is above and dated 3/26, 11:03
Trolls do use some similar patterns. On dailykos.com one finds the obamabots who come out in droves to attack those who criticize him. Too much of dailykos is on the back and forth of elections and polls rather than the deeper issues. We don't have parties, we have two factions who control the debate and as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, when they avoid a topic it doesn't exist. It goes away.
There are good willed people thinking that they can work withing the existing parties with the memories of what the country used to be. I am that way to some extent. But the larger issue is that the parties are broken and as Chris Hedges points out, there needs to be a strong position that points this out.
I sorta realized it, but not exactly the way that you put it, namely how a troll has a couple of buddies that cheer them on. Not just an individual, but a pack of them. On Glenn's post that is up right now, a libertarian comes in and dominates the comments for quite a while.
It is not clear what Leea is. As I think you said, he/she is a disruptive. Muddy the water to piss people off so they go away. Throw in sound bites to get the masses angry.
Again, as others have before me, I thank you for your thoughtful comments.
Very thoughtful post, Don Utter.
I am among those who still see some utility in following and trying to constructively influence the personality focused "horse race" ups and downs of the two-party news cycle, as well as the traditional role of the court system in occasionally advancing a progressive social agenda or in putting some fragile constraints upon the institutional enemies of the Bill of Rights. I catch shit periodically in reply comments here and on other websites for doing so (usually for alleged naivite, or for perpetuating the Kabuki dance between the Dems and the Repugs), but I see it mostly as a matter of tactical choice upon which reasonable minds on the left can still differ.
As for trying to figure out who, or whose screen name on a particular day or subject, is a troll pushing some disguised hidden agenda, I expend no energy. I think it's largely a futile endeavor.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill from Saginaw,
Thank you for your perceptive comments and support for an improved comprehension and consciousness, of what goes "to constructively influence the personality focused" "Kabuki dance" theater.
Not that I hold any hope for the immediate tangible outcomes, in a fixed ""horse race"," where the lack of a real choice is part of disheartening and disempowerment of the people's soverign DIGNITY and intrinsic power.
What matters most to me, is somehow re-ingniting peoples' sense of their soverign DIGNITY and intrinsic power, as only through that, do we give consent to be governed.
We can send LOVE to everyone -- and through that -- we individually AND collectively awaken that LIGHT within each and all of us.
---------
As far as tilting the windmills of "trying to figure out who, or whose screen name on a particular day or subject, is a troll pushing some disguised hidden agenda," I've grown to better understand that it is worse, than merely being a "largely a futile endeavor."
Yes, I have grown, not only to avoid personal counter-attacks, but now to avoid confrontation as to oppose that, which is only strengthened by our resistance.
We cannot fight WAR -- with more WAR -- only with PEACE and LOVE can we transform those upholding the status quo's insanity, as they are NOT our enemies (they are us, as we are connected and share everything).
As MLK provided a marvelous jujitsu against racism's authoritative leaders, saying that these folks' racism was a spiritual blight on them (a painful wound), that both placed the supposedly powerful in a position of actually being hurt and in acting out of reactive pain and suffering, but ALSO empowered civil rights workers to become healers of BOTH whites and blacks, those hurting on both sides of the both supposed color and power divides.
As Mahatma Gandhi well knew,
L O V E _ is a _ P O W E R ,
that is larger than any other .
We attack, subvert, and dehumanize ourselves, when we condemn or judge others -- as the only effective solution to DARKNESS (the absence of LIGHT), is to open the DOOR and imagine only LIGHT flowing in, and effortlessly extinguishing the shadows and darkness.
Please see old goats' posting and
my comments to that
(Mar 27 2012 - 2:52pm)
Those that we errantly (rationally, instead of spiritually) consider as supporting DARKNESS, have no existence other than out of our resisting them in kind, reactively feeding the vicious cycles of hate, fear, separation, and selfish survival.
When we choose love, courage, connection, and selfless sustainable survival -- our LIGHT extinguishes effortlessly what has only been temporarily granted existence by our reactive mental obliviousness and lack of consciousness
OxfordH somehow believes that Obama/Biden is the answer to Romney. Unfortunately he/she does not appear to understand that the lesser of two evils is never a proper and just solution to what ails America.
Obama murders innocent Muslims every day of the week, yet OxfordH supports him, because the little baby Jesus gave Amerikans the right to slaughter brown skinned people around the world.
Only evil people support evil. Some evil people like to choose the lesser of two evils in order to fool others.
Every single person who supports Barack the Baby Killer Obama is a racist and a mass murderer of innocent Muslim children, women, and men.
While I will vote for a third party candidate, in the real race I would prefer to see Romney win for multiple reasons.
First, Obama deserves to lose because he lies constantly and he loves slaughtering innocents.
Second, "progressives" like OxfordH believe in their own racist mindsets that handsome well-spoken black men like Obama have some secret moral virtue that white people lack. Let me cure you of that notion, Oxford H. Obama is whiter than me and I don't have a drop of African blood. Whiteness comes from within. "Progressives" like OxfordH have stood by passively while Obama has taken a blow torch to social programs and civil liberties. With Romney in the White House, maybe "progressives" will wake up from their decades long sleep. (I won't hold my breath)
Third, in contrast to Barack the Baby Killer, Romney doesn't lie well. He has a natural instinct to tell the truth, which cause him much embarrassment because the truth shows him as a callow member of the 1%.
"Only evil people support evil." -I'd tend to disagree with that as it suffers from the binary good-evil oversimplification so ingrained in the right-wing.e.g. "If you are not for us you are against us" -the never ending polarised false dilemma fallacies.
The world is not black and white but full of grays and I'd say the greatest supporters of evil are not themselves inherently evil. At the risk of over-simplification myself, since it is a little more nuanced than this, if I had to pick one word to sum up the greatest support for evil it would be the word 'apathy'.
Moral relativism got us into this boat. You have to recognize evil when it occurs. What else can you call killing babies other than evil?
Lesser of two evil democrats murder innocent Muslim children every day. I call that evil. You may see shades of gray in the murder of children, but I don't.
Satre and Camus fought the Nazis, while many other Frenchmen collaborated. Zarathrustra demanded that people choose between good and evil.
Amerikans don't think of themselves as evil, but they slaughter innocents decade after decade and call it defending their freedoms. What else should I call it but evil?
FWIW, I find it impossible to determine whether OxfordH is a genuine minimalist knee-jerk Obamabot/Dembot, or a prankster parody of one.
If the latter, OxfordH is the worst joke-teller in the world.
Perhaps an agent of "The City", speaking for its' kept politician at the helm of the U.S. sector of the Empire?
Inb, Obama is much more than just the "kept politician at the helm of the U.S. sector of the Empire" --- he is the consummate smooth and charming agent of this Empire.
At this late stage, nobody else could hope to keep the Empire's disguise in tact. Nobody else could hope to keep the Empire's 'inverted totalitarianism' as well disguised behind this veil of superficial democracy. Quite simply, "Nobody Does It Better. Makes you feel sad for the rest".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOd1JJvwlM
As the current and future faux-Emperor/president of our former country, only Obama has the guileful talent to keep an Empire, which is becoming clearly visible to anyone who seriously analyses our social ills, effectively camouflaged from the masses.
The crude and obvious cowboy fascist, George Bush, couldn't have dreamed of keeping the disguise of this two-party "Vichy" Empire in tact.
The current non-Romney Republican candidates for the role of faux-Emperor are barely able to conceal their fascist tendencies from even the dullest voters before they even have their hands' on the 'power'. And even Romney clearly carries the danger of going 'off the reservation' (or 'off the leash') of the powers that be, like happened with earlier selected leaders in the mid 20th century --- and thus can't be trusted by the Empire precisely because he would bridal to actually 'be' the Emperor, not just play one.
No, only Obama combines the skills of deception and also knows his place in this "Vichy" stage play. I find it literally impossible to envision anyone who could accomplish what this disguised global corporate/financial/militarist Empire will need during the short time remaining for the Broadway run of this play as a comedy.
Admittedly, there will be the tragedy version of the production that will follow Obama's second act, but by that time the very overt oppression of the populus will have tipped-off even the dullest pleb that the Rubicon has been crossed, and that they are actually living in an Empire --- which, of course, need no longer be kept disguised, when the blood really starts to flow.
Best luck and love to Occupy Empire.
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Signage and chant:
“What do we aspire?
Occupy the Empire!”
“What do we aspire?
Occupy the Empire!”
..Alan MacDonald
~ ~ ~
aah, i can see clearly, now! during campaign '08 a guest on moyers "faith and reason" opined that once "elected" obama would don the emperor’s mantle. i held to "hope" yet a little longer. i understand the bitter disappointment many here express as i once nursed a long and unhealthy hatred toward tricky dicky till one day i realiased the man suffered extreme paranoiac ego mania.
another pbs documentary which must have received pentagon approval openly explained the empire. young uniformed soldiers were presented more as ambassadors bringing stuffed animals, candies and democracy to our friends around the world. that must have gone over like the proverbial lead balloon because in a snap the pentagon press corps did an about face. i pulled this bit of obama's speech on afghanistan from nyt.
~ ~ ~
In all that we do, we must remember that what sets America apart is not solely our power -– it is the principles upon which our union was founded.
We stand not for empire, but for self-determination.
~ ~ ~
~"the principles upon which our union was founded"~ uh-huh, desicration of the indigenous population, slavery, imperialism!
yes, hummingbird, I liked your quote of Obama saying, "We stand not for empire".
Apparently, the only time Obama ever mentions the word 'empire' is to lie about not being one.
Gutless-wonder, Obama, and his motley crew of Demo fools, are doing a great job, as the second-team "Vichy" cons, in keeping most of the people confused and hoping for the best most of the time, while they continue the help disguise this global corporate/financial/militarist EMPIRE by never even whispering the word 'empire' -- except as Obama did in his deceitful speech on the reasons to bomb Libya, when he claimed the exact opposite by lying and saying, "we're not there for Empire" [which reminded me of the old SNL skit in which the land shark knocks on the door and replies to the question of "Who's there" with the obvious lie, "It's not the land-shark"].
No, hummingbird, it's certainly NOT the Empire, it's just the
Ever-loving
Mother-friggin
Pricks
Invisibly
Running
Everything
Best luck and love to Occupy Empire.
Liberty, democracy, justice, & equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Signage and chant:
“What do we aspire?
Occupy the Empire!”
Just when I think I'm ready to lose it I listen to a little bit of Hedges and he grounds me with his guts and integrity. Hedges is a native Vermont, which means he also maybe part cyote.
About a year ago I moved from the Detroit area to Vermont, Hedges home state. I always ask Vermonter's, "Ever hear of Chris Hedges?" Repeatedly I hear "nope, never have". So I tell them and they nearly everyone of them writes his name down.
I guess my calling was to Vermont in order to educate Vermonter's about who Chris Hedges is, these people love their own, but they’re not very fond of us “flat landers” (that’s what they call outsiders).
NOTE: If all hell should ever break out, move to Vermont, there's less than 700,000 people in this state. If you hear a gun go off, it will likely be someone shooting at something wild.
Without getting drawn into the fascinating interchange with Siouxrose, Leaa, lanista, and others, let me revisit the original comment posted by Michael F at 9:20 am and 11:30 am, with Z1's helpful quotation of the text of the NDAA statute which Chris Hedges short titles as the Homeland Battlefield Bill.
I suspect Hedges is keenly aware of the irony in play when he showed up for his four-hour deposition with assistant US attorney Torrence, as evidenced by his concluding references to Franz Kafka. Quickly scroll up and read the actual first question Hedges' adversary posed. Notice how one of the plaintiffs, a courageous career foreign correspondent seeking to get the statute declared unconstitutional, had to begin by first answering "Why do you believe journalistic activity COULD be brought within that statute?"
Holy Franz Kafaka indeed! In order to have standing to litigate, the plaintiff must begin by conceding that he is very probably a "covered person" subject to the Act's vicious sanctions because his professional journalism very probably does constitute providing "substantial support" to terrorist evildoers. Heads Big Brother wins. Tails you lose.
If you are not a covered person, or (if arguably a covered person) your news gathering, news analysis, and opinion writing journalism is constitutionally protected First Amendment activity not subject to the Act at all, then you lack standing and are booted out of court. Mr. Torrence was no doubt genteel and civil to the bone when he slid into this line of inquiry. Kindly drop in for a visit, said the spider to the fly.
Isn't it surreal that Christopher Hedges, who would no doubt die for the noble, crusading principle that freedom of the press could never, ever, be subjected to criminal prosecution as espionage, sedition, or aiding and abetting some vaguely-defined global terrorist conspiracy gets immediately put into the position of personally tossing the baby out with the bathwater in order to even get a day in court?
Kafka would feel right at home here. No standing, no test case. No ticket, no laundry. Now let's have a pleasant little chat about all of the reasons why you think professional journalists are vulnerable to arrest and prosecution here........
Bill from Saginaw
Neat observation, you sly old lawyer you! It slipped right by me. But, in light of Wikileaks and all the rest, do you think the government would dare admit, let alone assert, that journalism has any protections against the government's national security authority?
Excellent Commentary Bill.
Good pick up, Bill. Hedges could have referred them to the video Bradley Manning leaked of the helicopter slaughtering the reporters in Iraq to the glee of the pilot and his gunner. The murderers got promotions and Manning got solitary confinement.
Thank you for your kind on topic responses.
Note, too, how Mr. Torrance adroitly returns to this theme a couple of deposition questions later, feigning a lack of understanding: Oh please remind me, Mr. Hedges, what the phrase was that you used - journalistic "coverage disfavorable to the United States" - that you, Mr. Hedges, believe brings the exercise of freedom of the press within the proper scope of the Homeland Battlefield Bill? As a humble representative of the US Justice Department, I just want to be sure I understand your position, and that you and I agree that news reporting, analysis, investigative journalism, and even opinion pieces "disfavorable to the United States" has now been outlawed, and may under appropriate circumstances, warrant military detention pending federal criminal investigation.....
Chris Hedges immediately responds "I didn't say that", and goes on to reframe, narrowly dancing away from the subtle, tender trap.
But had Mr. Hedges inadvertantly swallowed the bait, think of the fun that the military prosecution team at Bradley Manning's upcoming court martial trial could have, citing sworn testimony to the judge (perhaps in a footnote) from veteran NY Times foreign correspondent Christopher Hedges conceding how publishing the helicopter war crime footage from Iraq was very clearly criminal now courtesy of the NDAA of 2011, if even if it was ever, perhaps, a potentially murky area of federal law once upon a time before.
Remarkable how the gentlemanly gavotte of civil litigation can mask a dark and deadly dance for others unsuspecting and innocent who aren't even present in the ballroom.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill,
Thank you for your comments regarding this article by Chris Hedges.. It appears that Hedges has proven himself a worthy opponent in this case.
Thomas Gilbert-
Extraordinary commentary and insight by Chris Hedges. His narrative, one could easily see, is the back story of our own and future 'Hunger Games'
I especially noticed the comment about Benjamin H. Torrance, an assistant U.S. attorney asking about relationships and contacts with groups on the U.S. State Department terrorism list. This is a fine example of hypocrisy and corruption in our judiciary. I wonder if Mr. Torrance or any other US attorney has EVER looked into the record of government officials cavorting with the terrorist group, MEK, which is listed on the U.S. State Department terrorism list.
RE: "In Kafka’s dystopian vision, the law is the mechanism by which injustice and tyranny are perpetuated." ~ Chris Hedges
JOSEF K’s PREDICAMENT IN KAFKA’s “THE TRIAL”: …after months of trial postponement, Joseph K goes to court painter Titorelli to ask for advice. He is told to hope for little. He might get definite acquittal, ostensible acquittal, or indefinite postponement. No one is ever really acquitted, but sometimes cases can be extended indefinitely.
• Titorelli: “You see, in definite acquittal, all the documents are annulled. But with ostensible acquittal, your whole dossier continues to circulate. Up to the higher courts, down to the lower ones, up again, down. These oscillations and peregrinations, you just can’t figure ‘em.”
• Joseph K: “No use in trying either, I suppose.”
• Titorelli: “Not a hope. Why, I’ve known cases of an acquitted man coming home from the court and finding the cops waiting there to arrest him all over again. But then, of course, theoretically it’s always possible to get another ostensible acquittal.”
• Joseph K: “The second acquittal wouldn’t be final either.”
• Titorelli: “It’s automatically followed by the third arrest. The third acquittal, by the fourth arrest. The fourth...”
PARTIAL SOURCE - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057427/quotes?qt=qt0135410
Part 2
Now, in this country, we have pewrhaps two generation which have grown up hearing almost nothing but bad things about the peoples of the Middle East, which have been taught at home and in church and sometimes even in school on the sly. Two generations, at least, taught by our culture and our media to distrust Muslims and, in general, to distrust or even hate anyone brown from that part of the world.
Look how easily the "enemy" of the U.S. was morphed from one unlikely subject to another and another until millions of Americans wake up each day just naturally hating and wanting tokill "Taliban" or whoever the enemy of the month may be.
Unfortunately, those easily led Americans each get a vote, and I get a vote, which doesn't seem fair.
Actually, I fear a police state less than I fear the evolving kind of pseudo-democracy- or theo theo-pseudo-democracy- which is the tyranny of the majority, if the majority is fanatic half-Zionist evangelistic Armageddonist Christian Crusader religious types who want to have a cross in one hand and a machine gun in the other, and then with those two items want to go save the world, and whoever doesn't want to be saved with the cross can dealt with by the gun.
Don't laugh, this wasn't my idea, but a theme of the "Left Behind" stories, and it seems a lot of people seriously believe this kind of madness..
Too long a comment.. and my brain just went blank. But your struggle moved me to try and write something, I'm afraid it comes out a bit manic, hope it is more of less readable. Thank you for doing this, on our behalf. It is very important.
I'm with you in spirit, Chris, as are many people, but if they are like me, they are plagued by feelings of helplessness. Many of us feel we can do nothing to help, or only something very small. However, if I don't try in my little way, even if it only a comment on the Web, then what right would I have to expect changes?
Compared to what you are doing my "peace work" is like almost nothing.
However, each of us who supports your efforts, as best he or she can, may add to some invisible good energy which will somehow help bring a drop or a mote of success to your David and Goliath situation.
Reading in your article about the (illegal, unconstitutional, fascist) NDAA caused me to think about the way the law is like a net with an adjustable mesh.
There are so many laws, in such fine detail, that when law enforcement really wants to put someone off the street, it is usually easy to do.
There are so many laws that probably it would be hard to find an American who gets through even a single day without breaking some law or regulation serious enough to result in a fine, or a jail sentence, or both.
Recently I forgot to put the tiny sticker on my license plate. A cop pulled me over. I was insured but the insurance papers had not arrived yet. I ended up having to go to court, wasting half a day, and even though all charges were dropped I had to cough up 100 dollars for court costs.
I'm on Social Secuirty, so that was a week's groceeries, or the electric bill for the month. but had to pay it. I was a criminal and had to pay up. and couldn't even say what i thought of this kind of extortion masquerading as a court process.
Force Majeure rules in this land not democracy. Inalienable rights are not inalienable but can be taken from us in the middle of the night by anti-constitutional blasphemies such as this odious NDAA. But i guress that if I expect to live in a place called Homeland I can't also get the liberties I was formerly accustomed to having as my birthright. Oh well! Funny, though, i don't feel safe, but the opposite.
So I paid the hundred bucks to the insatiable maw of the State, over a sticker little bigger than a stamp. I confess, it was a terrible crime!
This is the kind of fine mesh I mean. The police use it when they feel like it, and don't when they don't feel like it.
As we know, the worst criminals are the ones who are least likely to be arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated- partially because in many causes they own the judge, the prison, the governor, key people in Justice, and can throw money around to skate out of trouble.
Just as the robbers took control of the treasury, the criminals took over law enforcement, all the way to the top, even to the Court, in my opinion.
Of course this is nothing new. Poe could have written his wonderful story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" specifically for our time.
For those who don't know the story, it is a classic "inmates take over the asylum" tale. The sane people are behind bars, insisting they are who they really in fact are, while the "staff" and the "doctors", who are really the patients, and "a danger to themselves or others" for certain, pooh-pooh the protests of the sane ones.
When Edgar Allan Poe was alive, aluminum foil was not yet invented, and so the insane people in his story could not ridicule the sane with jokes about hats made of it; but otherwise, it is much the same tale as the situation we have today.
Good luck. If only the whole body of citizens would wake up! But propaganda has been too successful- going back to the late seventies and early eighties, when the learned lessons of Vietnam and the civil rights struggles were. or seemed to be, one by one rewritten, or swept under the rug, to be replaced by, in the civil rights arena, a diabolically clever new form of Jim Crow - the slickest one yet; and it fooled most of us. And in the foreign policy arena, the war in Vietnam was buried, as World War Two was resurrected.
What I mean about the Jim Crow comment is that with the election of Obama, we all hoped for a broadening of civil rights And African-Americans overall had hopes that finally they might get a little more of the equal treatment under the law they had heard about, but never experienced, for so many decades.
But a new=old picture of war and warriors was painted for the people of the U.S.A. and it was a long and through mis-education but it did its job.
A big part of the general morphing of history into neoconservative prattle across the land in the 80's and 90's was a replacement of the bitterly learned lessons of Vietnam with the "Good War" . From the 1980's and on right up to 9/11 and beyond, movies of heroic, good wars, and movies about the brotherhood of soldiers were made, and the and lots of talk of The Greatest Generation and of "honor", "sacrifice", and the like; and World War Two became the war people in this country remembered, as if it we were still in the nineteen-fifties.
It was almost as if Korea and Vietnam were, if not erased from history, relegated to back pages and footnotes and facile reinterpretations of all aspects of that war- so that eventually it seemed (if one didn't actually dig too deeply into facts) that the only two things that had ever been wrong with the Vietnam War were, one, Hanoi Jane, and two, the idiot civilians in Washington "made the U.S. military fight with one hand tied behind its back".
Even hippie-bashing came back as part of the whole big pacakge of rage and resentment so often mindlessly directed against anyone who is a "lib" or a "leftie". Freedom of speech now meant no speech against war, no speech against crime in government, and no speech against hypocrisy in the theocrats. Such speech was met with much blind hostility,, if not real repression, but with some real danger. To get along, one would best just chant "USA! USA! and put a flag on the car.
Frodnonag:
Very nice posts.
These forums are bruising - intentionally made so I think by the forces against which Chris Hedges and Company fight.
I suppose we had better get used to it - we have been for too long on the sidelines.
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Good post. We should not forget to be decent and human toward each other, especially those who are trying each in their own way to fight against indecency and inhumanity,
We all can do many small things. The UN recommends we become vegans. This would reduce a meat eater's environmental footprint by well over 90%. Live simply, don't over consume. Shop locally from local merchants, not the big box stores. It costs a little more, but since you don't over consume, it doesn't make that much difference. Buy organic. It too costs more, but again you consume less so it doesn't cost more, and it not only improves your health, but the health of the planet, too.
If you turn to a healthy form of a vegan diet with fresh organic vegetables (as opposed to processed soy meat looking patties, etc), you will see your health improve greatly, your heart disease will heal, your diabetes will disappear, and other marvelous things will happen. Really, people have known this for years.
The less you eat, the longer you will live. But you must eat healthy food.
http://www.nursingdegree.net/blog/19/57-health-benefits-of-going-vegan/
"The law is like a net with an adjustable mesh....." Bravo! Bravo!
Frodnag, I'm going to steal your simile and tuck it in my quiver for future use some day soon.
I also agree entirely with your point about how Korea and Vietnam have been subjected to sustained, systematic revisionist history treatment by Hollywood and the mainstream US media from the 1980's forward. For a fuller prospecive, take a quick trip back down memory lane like I did last night, when I re-watched one of my all time four-star favorites on Turner Classic Movies - Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Edward G. Robinson in "Key Largo."
Key Largo was filmed and released in 1946-47, in the immediate aftermath of "the greatest generation's" victorious return from World War II. Bogey is a US Army major returned safely from the European theatre, readjusting stoically to civilian life, who is making a promised pilgrimage to Florida (where he's never been) to pay respects to the father and widow (Bacall) of a fallen comrade-in-arms from his old infantry unit. Bogart winds up stranded to ride out a hurricane in their family-run hotel, which it turns out has been completely taken over by a gang of ruthless mobster thugs whose godfather is a cigar chomping parody of Al Capone nicknamed "Rocco", played to the hilt by Edward G. Robinson. Rocco (viewers soon learn) was a former mob kingpin, deported as an undesirable alien by Uncle Sam, who is sneaking into back into the country by ship to set up operations anew with his gangster crew by a rendevous to deliver a shipment of counterfeit US currency to cohorts in the Miami crime syndicate.
The plot line of this classic gangster flick progresses predictably for the genre: there is the murder of a police detective, the mistaken shooting of two fleeing native Americans by the local sheriff who believes they murdered the slain officer, sexual innuendo bordering on attempted rape directed at Ms. Bacall, hostage taking, extortion, alcoholism, not so veiled hints at prostitution, threats of mayhem, gunplay, survival of the hurricane, and a grand shootout at the movie's end in which justice triumphs and Bogey is the last man standing. What floored me on this re-watch of a great pop film melodrama was its hidden political subtext, messages I'd completely missed the first few times I'd seen it.
In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, with much ballyhoo Hollywood went off to war all right. And (as the great historian Chalmers Johnson reminds us) like the rest of the American military/industrial/intelligence complex, the patriotic propaganda narrative campaign seemlessly never missed a beat with the arrival of V-E and V-J day.
We are told Lauren Bacall's husband valiantly died a hero's death to rid the world of the Nazi gangsters, and (along with the sinister Reds) the new post-war threat to the American way of life was the return of brutal Prohibition-era gangster culture (symbolized by Rocco and his thugs). The good sargeant lying in an unmarked grave on a hillside in Sicily had not died in vain - he died for something much more, "we paid for, and so we now own a piece of that land" the tear stained grieving dad declares. We fought and died to cleanse the world first of fascism. Now the cause was to crusade on together in a war upon crime.
What is stunning about this sub theme is how it turns the real history of 1941 to 1947 squarely on its head. Over thirty years passed before the record was declassified, but here's a thumbnail sketch.
Shortly after the entry of the United States into World War II, a huge ship was successfully and spectacularly sabotaged dockside in New York City harbor. Nazi saboteurs were suspected, almost certainly with help from the inside. The port, the docks, and the longshoremen were in the pocket of the New York Mafia. Japs lurked on the west coast, swarthy Itallians and Krauts of unsure loyalty in the east. In the interest of very highest priority wartime national security, a deal was struck at the very top level of the United States government to enlist the clandestine support of organized crime in winning the war effort.
The OSS (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), the FBI, and the White House through the Justice Department cut a grand top secret bargain. Several imprisoned Mafia dons were granted leniency, and others were released from US prisons after the war to return to their native Sicily, in exchange for the mob's help in port security along the eastern US seaboard and (equally important) the Mafia's third column assistance against Moussilini throughout the invasion of Sicily and the march on to Rome. It worked. And postwar, the quid quo pro side of the deal was upheld.
That the CIA in its infancy cut deals with the Itallian mob was part of the hidden history of WWII. Comparable deals were later cut at the highest levels with former Nazi intelligence officers, military elites, and scientists determining who got spirited away to a new life in America (rather than in the USSR) once Hitler was dead and occupied Germany was being divvied up.
So look real close next time it replays at the contours of a major story line lurking inside "Key Largo."
Rocco was a bad man, an evil gangster finally brought to justice and ultimately deported as an undesirable alien back where he belonged. He was seeking to secretly return and regain a corrupt foothold back in the good old USA, now that the war was over.
Good, upright patriotic Americans should therefore hate the Roccos of the world with the same righteous passion that we all hated those goose stepping black shirts and brown shirts of Italy and Germany, who forced this terrible war we had to fight upon the world and our peace-loving homeland. Evil doers like them are all much the same. They are not like us at all.
Our heroic dead must not have died in vain. Brave men lie buried over there. So now we own a piece of that hallowed ground. We look back only briefly, so we can soldier on forward together tomorrow to forge a better world.
Just be careful not to look back too closely.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill from Saginaw,
Very well set up, but you only obliquely take us through to the POGO'esque punch line, saying :
"Just be careful not to look back too closely."
The explicit demonization and externalization of evil enemies, is the BIGGEST and most devious of SELF deceptions, where plausible superficialities and patriotic expediency, replace real meaning and truth.
" Cui bono ("To whose benefit?", literally "as a benefit to whom?",…also rendered as Cui prodest, is a Latin adage that is used either to suggest a hidden motive or to indicate that the party responsible for something may not be who it appears at first to be. " (wikipedia)
Since when, has the PUBLIC EVER benefited, from ANY WAR ?
The real enemy, is our (ego's) fallaciously and disempoweringly feeling separated from each other, and thereby creating delusionary thoughts that supposed externalized darkness can ONLY be fought with violent force, instead of being the absence of LIGHT -- which is easily dealt with by sending ever more lightness and LOVE (both, internally and externally).
Greed is ONLY an 'enemy,' to the extent that some folks' act and think (from scarcity) that they are outside of our collective society's interdependence, that repress and deny harming themselves in causing harm and suffering of others.
As I mentioned in another reply to you (Mar 27 2012 - 4:30pm):
MLK provided a marvelous jujitsu against racism's authoritative leaders, by saying that these folks' racism was a spiritual blight on them (a painful wound), that both placed the supposedly powerful in a position of actually being hurt and in acting out of reactive pain and suffering, but ALSO empowered civil rights workers to become healers of BOTH whites and blacks, those hurting on both sides of the both supposed color and power divides.
As Mahatma Gandhi well knew,
L O V E _ is a _ P O W E R ,
that is larger than any other .
Frodnonag,
Very well expressed and focused posting, upon the heresy and blasphemy of anti-Constitutional perversion. See my comment to sallysense, about how inviolate those rights are, at Mar 27 2012 - 8:44pm.
And yes to the law's only apparent solidity (to the poor), as the impunity of the wealthy allows them to selectively ignore such passing through holes, "like a net with an adjustable mesh."
Yes, the rich pass through wide enough holes so as to make the wealthy too-big-to-fail-sink titanics of Walleyed St camels merely blink instead of cringing (as previously unable to pass through the eye of a needle, to get to heaven).
Yes, I'm guilty of mixed metaphors -- and soon that too, will be defined as a terrorist activity …
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As to your skirmish about DMV renewal (license plate tags), it may be true in your state (as it is in mine) -- that you could have gone for free to the State's Highway Patrol (e.g. CA) before the court date, with proof of a valid license. The officer physically inspects your vehicle for compliance, and will VOID the pending court case -- or at worse allow your to go to the court's clerk -- and thereby VOID the need to appear before the judge in court.
As Maya Angelou informs us :
"When we know better, we do better"
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has strongly criticized Obama’s moves towards dictatorial powers. When I saw Dr. Stein speak in Schenectady and Troy this weekend, she devoted a good amount of time to educating the audience about the NDAA and HR 347, a little-publicized bill that is a huge attack on our first amendment right to assembly.
To learn more about Jill Stein and her platform, check out http://www.jillstein.org/
Are you saying third parties are educating the people? Wow, I thought third parties only stole elections from the elites.
Your testimony makes a compelling case that you are hindered in your ability to practice your profession by NDAA. A competent court would be hard-pressed to deprive you of standing to sue.
More likely the court will deny standing to Hedges and then Obama will arrest him under the NDAA.
As to "competent" court, while not all politicians are judges, all judges are politicians. This holds doubly true in the federal court, because to become a federal judge you have to have serious 1% insider help. The framers designed the federal courts to protect the 1% and they have done so for over 200 years.
Good for the great Chris Hedges, but I think we all know how this story ends: he is ruled to have no standing and the disappearances start at OWS and at the conventions. Don't ignore also the fact that the Secret Service protection around war criminals like W and Cheney now are impenetrable under threat of disappearance, torture and assassination.
The frantic attempts to escape all possibility of justice show well the guilt of these scumbags. As far as I can discern, Barack Obama is little more than a slick CIA skunkworks project that was successfully deployed to keep the Bush cabal out of prison and to set the table for the reign of Jeb in 2016.
The Bushes are America's Saudi Royal Family, and daddy Bush is our Putin: a creepy spook that oozed from the blackest holes of the intelligence services into the White House.
So what's my point? I think my point is there ain't no stopping these fuckers other than climate catastrophe choking the life out of the entire species. So bring it on. At least the sleazy oil men will finally, at long last choke on their own hubris and bad karma.
One problem might be that we examine things mainly from the socioeconomic and legal aspects in lieu of the sociobiologic one. Looking at things from the latter point of view, they become clear: Nature is culling the population of the human species globally. The greedy, reactionary conservative beast within appears in a chain reaction orgy of death and destruction until an inter and intra-species balance results. Unless the cycle is broken by our human side, it begins all over again.
In a healthy ecosystem, every one is provided for.
Direct democracy
I actually think that it's more that our traditional intra-species predators --sociopaths and psychopaths-- have hit upon a system (trans-national corporate capitalism) that is allowing them to run the table, amass all wealth and power and abuse, murder, exploit and enslave those with any human empathy.
We need to criminalize sociopathy. An inability to experience empathy MUST disqualify one from holding positions of power. We don't let drunks drive school busses and it's insane that we let sociopaths wield nuclear weapons.
It's time for the empathetic to turn on the 4 percent of the population without consciences and bring them down before they do even more damage.
"We need to criminalize sociopathy."
I can remember a time not so long ago when it was. Today it's celebrated. One only needs to consider: Who went without a heart so Cheney could corrupt and pollute another one. Too bad he didn't have to put his feet in stirrups and listen to a lecture.
Sociopaths have run human societies for thousands of years. But today with modern technology their sociopathy threatens to kill all of us.
When I read the story about Cheney getting a new heart I thought I should remove my donor permission from my driver's license. What young deserving person died because the old war criminal Cheney went to the head of the transplant line?
Unfortunately, CD posted the Cheney article with a twitter feed, so no one had the opportunity to vent.
Huffington Post actually seems to be censoring negative comments to its Cheney-lives-again story so that way it looks like an endless series of horrible Hallmark cards for one of the least deserving human beings on the planet right now.
If the universe had got him at Heart Attack #1, it's entirely possible a lot of people would still be alive right now.
When I read the story about Cheney getting a new heart I thought I should remove my donor permission from my driver's license.
~ ~ ~
i so enjoy reading your posts, tomcarberry. i suspect you apply "introspective" thinking skills more than you realize. rv retiree once commented "i should listen to my right brain more often." thanks for the reminder rvr! i believe "introspection" provides the only path to retrieve all that sublimial information the left brain can't handle. by the way i loved that you checked out the background on rogers and hammerstein's "you've got to be taught to hate." i worked as a stage hand in an off broadway production and thought i knew the score by heart. i had not known about the socio-political backlash. thanks for the enlightenment!
i'll let my donor okay remain as is. anyway, don't know what my organs will be worth when i'm all finished with them. now, my first thought was "wonder if chenney will tell the people of ontario, 'hey! i've had a real change of heart. can i come and you won't arrest me?'."
"Even the name itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian concept that endless war has to be waged within “the homeland” against internal enemies as well as foreign enemies."
I am wondering which focus group and consultant told them that was "great" name for the bill. They are not even trying to hide their intentions anymore.
I honor Chris Hedges' quixotic law-suit to command a stop to the waves of totalitarianism. When he loses he'll be able to say: "I told you so". Then he can sit back in his Vishy-chair and let the resistance do the real work of stopping the physical attacks on people's rights. And he can keep on writing good articles on how brave he is.
"It is in conference rooms like this one, where attorneys speak in the arcane and formal language of legal statutes, that we lose or save our civil liberties." - Sorry, Hedges, you got that wrong. It is in the physical limits and limitations put on Power "that we lose or save our civil liberties".
Attorneys only represent and some times defend the liberties hard fighting have won.
"If there is no rolling back of the NDAA law we cease to be a constitutional democracy."
Holy Mackerel! As much as I admire Hedges, if he really believes that we are currently living within a functioning constitutional democracy--he has fallen asleep.
Mr Hedges, it is a most serious game of chess you are playing with the american government.You have now moved your bishop into check of the KING. We now await your opponents next move and then hopefully you will able to soon say CHECKMATE. The good thing is that this GAME is now being played on a national stage for all to see. Another brilliant move. All the best to you Chris as many are on your side.
I'll add another two cents here.
Abraham Lincoln thought constitutional checks and a four year term would limit the amount of damage that could be done by any person or group to within acceptable limits. And he thought that the other end of the democratic system, anarchy - totally unworkable.
The military industrial complex has now not only found the means to bypass the constitution, they own outright the political system's machinery, most of the Congressional representatives, and in addition, have subverted both the Supreme Court and the free press.
As to anarchy - it does seem unworkable in a world of armed nation states.
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Lysander Spooner thought the trial by jury the final arbiter in a system of representative democracy, provided the jury was fairly chosen, represented the country, and was compelled to judge not only the facts of the case, but also the justice of the law, and to set free, on one dissenting opinion in either case, the accused. This process also required that the presiding judge was on side with this concept, that no instructions to the jury by the judge were obligatory, and further that any and all evidence that the jury thought relevant be admitted.
It can be easily seen I think that no one reading this has ever seen this type of trial by jury practiced in the United States of America.
Finally, Mr. Spooner turned to personal anarchy, stating that all legislation whatsoever was a usurpation of the natural rights of the people. His argument is difficult to assault logically, but obviously this is a type of fantasy world today.
------------------
So where does that leave us?
I think with John Kennedy's final summation - that the United Nations was the only real hope, and that war as it has been practiced for thousands of years and is practiced now must finally be brought to heel - by those same United Nations.
--------------
This also seems a fantasy today.
But there is Evo Morales and Bolivia - and the United Nations, in many ways a eunuch - at least still exists.
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How many people are aware that the National Security Agency is building the biggest spy center ever (called the Utah Data Center) in Bluffdale, Utah? Another aspect of our rapidly disappearing liberties. Read about it from renowned intelligence investigative journalist James Bamford:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1/
This is an important article detailing the abysmal reach of the NDAA bill. In spite of Hedges being an armchair-warrior "only", it's clear those are needed, too. Tnx to Hedges for making the effort - and, indeed, taking the risk - of denouncing the NDAA bill both in court and columns. His historical anecdotes are very timely reminders, of how the Powers in Place push legal rights to the max. And how bills of law thereby are crucial arenas for fighting for rights. (And, yes, this is amending and adding to an earlier comment by this poster.)
The roll-out of totalitarianism in the USA is a horror to behold. It seems too sinister and cynically planned to be possible to stop. Cf. Hedges' hair-raising point that the NDAA bill: "allows the president to waive the requirement of legal evidence in order to condemn a person as an enemy of the state". Yet it's equally clear that the totalitarianism CAN be stopped - if only enough people react and speak up like Hedges do. The subliminal civil war is happening.