The Polite Conference Rooms Where Liberties Are Saved and Lost by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
March 26, 2012

Image by Shrieking Tree via Flickr

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.

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via Truthdig

Copyright © 2012 Truthdig

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Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.

see

Chris Hedges: NDAA is a decimation of our civil liberties

Chris Hedges on the reality and the seriousness of the NDAA

Chris Hedges: Challenging the legality of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

Ron Paul Moves To Repeal Indefinite Detention Of American Citizens Without Trial!

Chris Hedges and Carl Mayer: NDAA – Who is a Terrorist? + Ron Paul: I’d Veto the Indefinite Detention Act (NDAA)

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama by Chris Hedges

Barack Obama signs H.R. 1540, NDAA into law