From Democracy to Dictatorship by Becky Akers

As I walk the streets of Manhattan, I study the other pedestrians and wonder if they sense our danger. A mother pushing her son’s stroller laughs into her cell phone; two elderly gentlemen greet each other effusively; a jogger shuffles past; shoppers lug their treasures home. No one looks especially worried or upset, and I wonder if they’ve heard about the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA).

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How can the sun brightly shine and taxis whiz past as if nothing has changed?

With this legislation, America joins some of the modern world’s most brutal dictatorships – regimes like Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, and communist Russia. Places where people disappear into concentration camps or gulags, for any reason or, more usually, none at all. Nations in which citizens don’t count except for the taxes and labor they furnish the State. These contemporary serfs exist only to further their rulers’ whims; they dare not voice even the faintest opposition for fear of ruthless reprisal.

This is what happens when governments accuse and imprison whomever they please without an iota of evidence.

And this is the future to which our elected sociopaths have sentenced us with the NDAA. Its suspension of habeas corpus inevitably condemns this country to dictatorship, while its deputizing the armed forces to “detain” civilians – indefinitely, no less – just as inevitably insures that the dictatorship will be a military one.

We might excuse Congress on the assumption that as with most lengthy bills, its liars, thieves, and killers didn’t read this one either – except debate in both houses specifically argued about the provisions relating to habeas corpus. No one could have possibly misconstrued the stakes. Sen. Lindsey Cracker-sorry, Graham [R-SC] alone crystallized the stark choice of freedom or totalitarianism in unforgettable words: “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next. And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”

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via From Democracy to Dictatorship by Becky Akers.

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