Chris Hedges: Coming To A Gulag Near You!

The security and surveillance state does not deal in nuance or ambiguity. Its millions of agents, intelligence gatherers, spies, clandestine operatives, analysts and armed paramilitary units live in a binary world of opposites, of good and evil, black and white, opponent and ally. There is nothing in between: You are for or against us. You are a patriot or an enemy of freedom. You either embrace the crusade to physically eradicate evildoers from the face of the earth, or you are an Islamic terrorist, a collaborator or an unwitting tool of terrorists. And now that we have created this monster, it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to free ourselves from it. Our 16 national intelligence agencies and army of private contractors feed on paranoia, rumor, rampant careerism, demonization of critical free speech and often inventive narratives. They justify their existence, and their consuming of vast governmental resources, by turning even the banal and the mundane into a potential threat, and by the time they finish, the nation will be a gulag. This is why the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2012, (NDAA), which was contested by me and three other plaintiffs before Judge Katherine B Forrest in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, is so dangerous. This act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last December 31, puts into the hands of people with no discernible understanding of legitimate dissent, the power to use the military to deny due process to all deemed to be terrorists, to terrorist sympathizers, and hold them indefinitely in military detention. The deliberate obtuseness of the NDAA's language, which defines "covered persons" as those who "substantially supported" al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces," makes all Americans, in the eyes of our expanding homeland security apparatus, potential terrorists.