Just another little bulletin from the People’s Democratic National Security State of Heaven. Remember: this law was arrived at by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans (who led the charge for its passage), Democrats, and our God King (who valiantly fought to strip it of even the minimal protections against absolutely draconian abuse by the Executive, so as to give himself utter despotic power).
It is not Left v. Right anymore. It is the Ruling Elites of the Crony Capitalist Police State against the rest of us. Don’t get played anymore. Every legislator who voted for this (and the President who signed it) considers you a potential enemy and has taken steps to smash your freedom should you step out of line. You don’t need to be guilty of anything. You merely need to be somebody the Prez summarily declares an enemy of the state to be stripped of your rights.
This is why I’ve been warning foolish “conservative” Christians who were gaga for torture and indefinite detention that it’s fool’s bargain to cut down every law in England to get after the devil. We give the devil benefit of law for our own safety’s sake as much as for the sake of justice. God grant that we don’t see these insane policies wielded against the Church.
Given the text of the NDAA as enacted, the following statements from the LifeSite article you linked –
“Constitutional experts warn a new law that allows the president to permanently detain U.S. citizens without trial could be used against pro-life activists, who have already been defined as potential terrorists in documents by some government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security”
and
“‘This law can apply to pro-lifers, yes,’ said John W. Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead told LifeSiteNews.com the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) ‘would allow the military to show up at your door if you’re a “potential terrorist,” and put you in military detention where seeing a lawyer is difficult.’”
– are only true as to prolifers who “who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks” or “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” (Section 1021 of the NDAA) or are determined to be “a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda” and “to have participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners” (Section 1022 of the NDAA). So I am baffled by LifeSite’s article and Mr. Whitehead’s claims.
For a useful discussion of the actual text of the NDAA by lawyers with expertise in this area of the law and who are critical of the NDAA, I recommend the this post followed by this post.
And all that is necessary to establish that a given prolifer is the terrorist is the unquestioned word of the Dear Leader alone. Nice try.
In other words, abuse of the law is a conceivable possibility.
As it is of any and every law.
What frightens me about this is not that this particular law might be used against Enemies of the Agenda, but rather that it establishes a precedent for future bills which would not be restricted to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc.
Would you quote the specific provisions of the NDAA (available here) that support that statement?
I mean, the statement that “all that is necessary to establish that a given prolifer is the terrorist is the unquestioned word of the Dear Leader alone.”
“God grant that we don’t see these insane policies wielded against the Church.”
But they WILL be, and Mark knows full well they will be. Once a society creates the pretext and justification and infrastructure for the gulag, the rest is details. Just timing and mechanics, really. At some point it all just becomes an issue of train schedules and who boards in what order.
Christians who favor the persecution narrative these days like to imagine that the Church will be specially targeted because it’s the last true voice of human conscience or something heroic. The reality will be much more pedestrian, banal even. The Church and/or many of its members will simply fall in among tens of thousands of others who will make themselves inconvenient to those in power and who will, on some pretext or another, be adjudged threats to national security.
Some of them will go because they’re tireless advocates for universal rights. Sadly, many will board the train after vigorously campaigning to put others on it. In fact, the supreme irony of all this, the one bit of it that allows me a grim sort of gallows smirk is this fact: The very “patriots” who were the most enthusiastic architects of this new gulag will, one day, be on that train themselves. They may be some of the last ones to board, but board they will.
That phenomenon of human behavior and the dynamics of oppression is as predictable and reliable as the oscillation of an atomic clock, but every last one of these fools will tell themselves that they will be history’s exemption to this. They’ll believe that with all of their shriveled hearts until the very moment they get their own 3 a.m. knock on the door…..
On a related note, have you heard of the Enemy Expatriation Act? You can read about it here: http://rt.com/usa/news/expatriation-act-citizenship-ndaa-737/
Essentially, its a companion bill to the NDAA which allows our government to revoke the citizenship of any US citizen deemed to be engaged in “hostilities” against the United States by our wise and all-knowing betters.