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marmar

(77,091 posts)
Mon Apr 2, 2012, 09:18 AM Apr 2012

Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You


from truthdig:



Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You

Posted on Apr 2, 2012
By Chris Hedges


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 between. You are for us 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 invented 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 (NDAA), which was contested by me and three other plaintiffs before Judge Katherine B. Forrest in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, is so dangerous. This act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last Dec. 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, or 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. It does not differentiate. And the testimony of my fellow plaintiffs, who understand that the NDAA is not about them but about us, repeatedly illustrated this.

Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and information architect who co-founded the U.S. Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process and wrest it back from corporate hands, was the first plaintiff to address the court. She testified that when WikiLeaks released 5 million emails from Stratfor, a private security firm that does work for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, she discovered that the company was attempting to link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as jihadist ideology.

Last August there was an email exchange between Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for counterterrorism and corporate security and a former deputy director of the counterterrorism division of the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, and Thomas Kopecky, director of operations at Investigative Research Consultants Inc. and Fortis Protective Services LLC. In that exchange, leaked Feb. 27 by WikiLeaks, Kopecky wrote: “I was looking into that U.S. Day of Rage movement and specifically asked to connect it to any Saudi or other fundamentalist Islamic movements. Thus far, I have only heard rumors but not gotten any substantial connection. Do you guys know much about this other than its US Domestic fiscal ideals?”? ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/coming_to_a_gulag_near_you_20120402/



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Chris Hedges: Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You (Original Post) marmar Apr 2012 OP
I love Chris Hedges.... lib2DaBone Apr 2012 #1
KNR...what is happening is truly frightening. joeybee12 Apr 2012 #2
Oh, how alarmist! gratuitous Apr 2012 #3
The end of Hedge's piece hits home Oilwellian Apr 2012 #4
 

lib2DaBone

(8,124 posts)
1. I love Chris Hedges....
Mon Apr 2, 2012, 11:44 AM
Apr 2012

Hedges (a foreign war correspondent for many years) has an ability to cut through the lies and deception.

Much like the late Molly Ivins... even the most right-wing hack on Fox can not out-shout and discredit him.

Once he lays out the facts.. it is clear to all...... "The Emperor has no clothes".



gratuitous

(82,849 posts)
3. Oh, how alarmist!
Mon Apr 2, 2012, 01:06 PM
Apr 2012

Really, the very idea that someone would try to advance his career by ruining someone else's life is just so far-fetched! Besides, it's all in the name of national security, just like the black-lists of the 1950s and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. If you've done nothing wrong . . .

Oilwellian

(12,647 posts)
4. The end of Hedge's piece hits home
Mon Apr 2, 2012, 01:29 PM
Apr 2012

If we lose this case it will hand to the vast network of operatives and agencies that investigate and demonize anyone who is not subservient to the corporate state the power to detain citizens and strip them of due process. It will permit the security and surveillance state to brand as terrorists any nonviolent protesters and movements, along with social and political critics, that in the government’s imagination have any trace of connection to al-Qaida or “associated forces.” If the National Defense Authorization Act is not reversed it will plunge us into despotism, leaving us without a voice, trapped in eddies of fear and terror, unsure of what small comment, what small action, could be misinterpreted to push us out of our jobs or send us to jail. This is the future before us. And we better fight back now while we can.

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