We've Crossed the Rubicon

By Eric Peters
Daily Reckoning
Dec. 20, 2011

Do you suppose cows have any idea what's coming as they're marched down the chute? Or do they stare with bovine indifference at the tail and hind quarters in front of them, until they're suddenly -- and very briefly -- startled by the man with the nail gun?

Perhaps Americans will -- likewise too late -- ask themselves what happened in the very near future. Perhaps just after the midnight knock comes and they are taken away into the night.

It is not an exaggeration.

America is now on the cusp of becoming a state that does exactly such things -- things exactly like the things done by 20th-century horror shows such as National Socialist Germany or Stalin's USSR. Literally. Not "this is where it might lead" or "the tendency is similar." Exactly, literally, the same thing. The only difference is that it awaits being done on a mass scale. But the power to do it openly -- brazenly -- has been asserted.

And is about to be sanctified by law.

The National Defense Authorization Act will make it official. It will confer upon the executive branch and the military (increasingly, the same things) the permanent authority to snatch and grab any person, US citizens included, whom they decree to be a "terrorist" -- as defined or not by the executive or the military -- and imprison him indefinitely, without formal charge, presentation of evidence or judicial proceeding of any kind. These "detainees" will have neither civilian rights in the civil court system nor -- crucially -- even the minimal rights to due process and decent treatment conferred upon prisoners of war. (And we are allegedly "at war," are we not?)

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