James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, warned in a speech to the Virginia Convention on June 16, 1788, that “there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” This warning appears to have been prescient when considering the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Obama on New Year’s Eve 2011. This law strips American citizens of their First Amendment rights of speech, press, assembly and petition, and allows the President to order the military to arrest and imprison anyone indefinitely on suspicion without trial.
The NDAA is just the latest chapter in a story of creeping totalitarianism that dates back decades. In 1950, President Harry Truman vetoed the Internal Security Act, which codified indefinite detention without trial, but his veto was overturned by Congress. Truman called the Act “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798”. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and set up the FISA Court and Court of Review, which Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois described as “nothing more than rubber stamps for government requests for unconstitutional surveillance on U.S. citizens.”
The Patriot Act of 2003, passed after the events of 9/11, has opened the floodgates of totalitarianism in the United States. It has been renewed at leisure and has been described by the ACLU as “disastrous for Americans’ rights”. This law has been met with scant public outcry, and President Obama’s executive order in 2011 that Guantanamo detainees could be held indefinitely is an example of this.
The NDAA is reminiscent of the Korematsu Era of World War II, when President Roosevelt ordered the military to round up law-abiding Japanese-American citizens and place them in concentration camps. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has said that “the law replaces an effective system of civilian-court prosecutions with a system that has generated the kind of global outrage that would delight recruiters of terrorists”.
The NDAA, combined with Pentagon and CIA “murder lists”, has raised fears that President Obama could start CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) death squads and/or disappearance squads to render American citizens to Guantanamo Bay prison or abroad “for torture and murder.”
The erosion of civil liberties in the United States has been enabled by the indifference of the American people, and the lack of public outcry against these laws is a reflection of this. James Madison’s warning of 1788 appears to have been prescient, and it is a reminder that the protection of civil liberties must remain a priority.
