By Maria Cortes
Staff Writer
Do you remember when Congress woke up one morning and decided that the tomato paste in pizza was now considered a vegetable? Do you remember how ridiculous we all thought that was? Well hold on tight, because you haven’t seen anything yet.
The National Defense Authorization Act, and along side with it, the Indefinite Detention Bill was passed last December much to the dismay of all the citizens who enjoy their rights as Americans. The act not only nullifies the majority of our rights, but the fine print may have you wishing you lived in Europe.
The entire premise behind the act is to protect the United States against terrorism within it’s own borders. The military now has the power to detain, arrest and even torture citizens who are suspected of terrorist acts without a proper trial. You no longer have the power of innocent until proven guilty behind you. It is now guilty until proven innocent. It also calls for an entirely rewritten Bill of Rights if the moment calls for it. We will be stripped bare of all our rights if the military finds necessary.
Protesters against the bill are calling it one swift leap toward a military dictatorship in the United States. The military now has the power to unlawfully interrogate a person suspected of terrorism with whatever tactics they can come up with, conduct secret arrests in which your acquaintances and loved ones can go missing out of the blue and never be heard from again, and is a gate way for the torture and murder of innocent citizens who were never given a fair trial to prove their innocence.
Wired magazine spoke out against the bill and said, “The detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney, a nonpartisan authority on military detention, “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.” Maybe that’s how they got this past us; some tricky wording that fooled us all.
Many NDAA protesters are referring back to Nazi Germany and the Communist movement when discussing the NDAA. This act does nothing more than turn United States soil into an infinite battleground, turning citizens against each other and eliminating the possibility of peace within our own borders.
Acts like this get you thinking about what else are they planning behind our backs. What else is happening behind those closed doors?
