God and Country
by PHIL JONES
On December 31, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, despite vowing to veto it. Included in the NDAA was a provision that authorizes the President of the United States to jail any American citizen indefinitely, without trial and without charge, on suspicion of being a terrorist. Presumably, the place of such detention could be undisclosed. The U.S. President now has the power to “disappear” (read, “legally kidnap”) any of us.
In signing the bill, Obama pledged never to use this newfound presidential power. His pledge means nothing. After all, he pledged not to sign the bill in the first place. Considering all the other human rights-related pledges he has already broken as President, why should this one be any different?
Furthermore, why would he shrink from jailing American citizens without due process, when he has already killed an American citizen without due process? You remember: that Muslim cleric who was snuffed out by a drone in Yemen. (Obama received widespread applause from both the left and the right for doing so, I might add.) After all, which is more drastic – killing somebody, or jailing them?
The United States of Corporate America is now just one short step away from dictatorship. You see, now that the President can throw anybody in jail at any time, without accountability to anyone, what is to restrain the President – whoever the President happens to be from now on – from jailing his political opponents as terrorists?
Granted, such a move would be politically risky. But it would be entirely legal. And if carried out skillfully, with the right timing, it could permanently cripple the opposition party.
Imagine for a moment that it is an election year, and the opposition has nominated its candidate. Imagine further that the challenger has a good shot at winning the election.
Now imagine that on about September 1, suddenly all the challenger’s key supporters are rounded up by federal agents, and jailed as terrorists. The challenger himself remains at large, but suddenly has no funding and no infrastructure. This leaves the incumbent President to “shape the narrative” all alone. (In other words, lie over the airwaves so often that it becomes “true.”) The challenger would not be able to get his message out. Journalists rising to the defense of the challenger could also be jailed, leaving only one voice still speaking – the President’s.
Sound far-fetched? Well, I’ll grant you that it doesn’t seem within Obama’s character to do such a thing. Nor would George W. Bush have used his power in this way, I think. Nor Bill Clinton, nor Pappy Bush, nor Jimmy Carter. Reagan? I’m not sure. But there has definitely been one U.S. President who one could easily imagine doing exactly this, and he ruled less than 40 years ago: Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon equated his own re-election with national security. This is a well-documented fact. Anyone working for Nixon’s opponents was therefore seen by Nixon as an enemy of the state. He had a long and detailed list of his enemies. It is difficult to imagine Richard Nixon refraining from jailing his political opponents in order to win re-election. Even without that power, he came chillingly close to installing himself as dictator during the Watergate investigation.
If we have already had at least one President who would abuse the power currently vested in the chief executive to jail his political opponents without trial or due process of any kind on the grounds that they are “terrorists”, then it is only a matter of time until we have another. In the name of “the war on terror,” we are now just one Richard Nixon away from dictatorship.
Naw, such a thing couldn’t happen in the good old U. S. of Corporate A. Could it?
