Chris Hedges: Criminalizing Dissent!

I was on the 15th floor of the Southern US District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Forest last Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I filed the suit. along with lawyers Carl J Mayer and Brice I Afran, over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We were late joined by six co-plaintiffs, including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on December 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to seize US citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists. Those taken into custody by the military. which becomes under the NDAA a domestic law enforcement agency, can be denied due process and "habeas corpus", and held indefinitely in military facilities. Any activist or dissident, whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, can be threatened under this law with indefinite incarceration in military prisons, including our offshore penal colonies. The very name of the law itself, the Homeland Battlefield Bill, suggests the totalitarian credo of endless war waged against enemies within the homeland, as well as those abroad. The essential thrust of the NDAA is to create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers, Mayer told the court. The Obama administration has taken detention out of the judicial branch and put it under the executive branch. In May, Judge Forrest issued a temporary injunction, invalidating Section 1021 as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments. It was a courageous decision. Forrest will decide within a couple of weeks, whether she will make the injunction permanent.