Richard Nixon only got it half right when he wrote during the Reagan years: "At present we occupy a treacherous no man's land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them."
Nixon's words were those of a man who had nothing left to lose American presidents seldom have the wherewithal to speak the truth until they have left office. Nixon's indictment of the vast subterranean power structure of the American military-industrial complex echoes both Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell address and the militaristic tenor of our times, but it is only half correct in that the expansion of authoritarianism at the expense of liberty is sadly one of the only issues bridging our partisan divide.
The nature of our Constitutional government has been gradually subverted by both major political parties over the last decade by hitherto unimaginable executive branch privilege, the Patriot Act, extrajudicial killings, secret overseas prisons and other repugnant excesses of an increasingly repressive security state.
Spinning Benjamin Franklin's famous injunction on its head, our American security state has traded our liberty for its security a security from its own people, a citizenry who has, through the digital information boom, awoken to the inherent plutocratic control mechanisms of constant war and endemic economic stratification. This is all to say that the incremental march toward despotism recently took a great leap when President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 into law.
The NDAA allows the government to detain citizens indefinitely not just nebulously-defined "enemy combatants" in prisons foreign or domestic, under the mere suspicion of "terrorism." This law is an apostasy: a wholesale repudiation of a legal system meant to protect all citizens equally, including those suspected of committing crimes even crimes against the state. This law codifies exceptions to our Bill of Rights not just for members of Al-Qaeda but for all Americans.
When a "liberal" president who ran on campaign promises to end illegal rendition and overseas wars expands the surveillance state and military-industrial complex in ways that even Dick Cheney could have only fantasized about in moments of somber reflection while playing violent Xbox games in the Situation Room, we know we are in trouble. Despotism has now bridged the political divide party affiliation is meaningless in a landscape where our two major parties affect a farce of good cop-bad cop, while both in actuality are worse cops, tripping over each other to expand statist autocracy.
Likewise, as innumerable journalists and Occupiers have demonstrated, the organs of our federal government serve only the interests of the economic elite. It is apparent now that the military-industrial complex decried by past presidents as diverse as Washington, Eisenhower, Nixon and Carter has finally reigned supreme. Colorado's moderate Democratic Senator Mark Udall recently remarked on the NDAA: "These provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect."
Obama's signing statement strikes the tone of reluctant dictator, mildly objecting in principle to the bill but rendering it law regardless while promising to never actually use its enumerated powers. As we have seen, once executive power is expanded, it is seldom revoked. And these powers are such that no responsible president should sign them into law not just for the fear of he himself or one of his successors using them, but for the fear of them existing at all.
It is now abundantly clear knowing as we do that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were manufactured by falsehoods that the constantly conjured specter of eternal threat abroad has now become, as it historically does, the conjured specter of eternal threat at home. Free citizens acting within their rights have become the threat itself. The main mechanisms of martial law have been put into effect.
The only people who should be detained are our leaders, who have betrayed their constituents by betraying their oath to our Constitution.
