Chris Hedges: Why I am Suing Barack Obama!

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern US District Court in New York City on Chris Hedges' behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31. The act authorizes the military, in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled "Counter-Terrorism," for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any US citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. Suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until "the end of hostilities." This is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties. Chris spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge, and he has been in some of these jails. He has friends and colleagues who have "diappeared" into military gulags. He knows the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. While his battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.