What I feel is not anger, but rather patriotic duty. America is a grand experiment in self-determination, individual liberty, and innovation: an experiment not worth conceding without a fight.
On New Year's Eve, with almost no mainstream media attention given to it, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, or NDAA, into law. Since I am not an attorney, I will fall back on the ACLU's analysis of this disastrous new law: "On December 31, 2011, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), codifying indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. The NDAA’s dangerous detention provisions would authorize the president — and all future presidents — to order the military to pick up and indefinitely imprison people captured anywhere in the world, far from any battlefield."
Think about those words: indefinite military detention without charge or trial.
Obama's administration, and all future administrations (including a Romney or Gingrich administration), can now use the military to detain individuals, including political dissidents -- even American citizens on U.S. soil -- without trial or formal charges. Without court involvement or a jury deciding you are actually guilty. And "detain" is really a euphemism for IMPRISON, of course. You won't be spending the lunch hour in detention. You'll be in a semi-secret military black site, without access to your attorney, potentially for life.
This is what kings do. This is what bloodthirsty dictators do. This is not what freely elected American presidents are authorized by the Constitution to do.
Moving on: Obama also signed into law something which attacks your First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. No, this is not an Onion article.
You see, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, or Trespass Bill, signed into law by Barack Obama on March 9, 2012, "potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the U.S. a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison." More specifically, peaceful protest within proximity to those protected by the Secret Service, including presidential candidates and the President, may be a federal felony now. (Source.)
Even worse: a former high-ranking NSA official, who spent more than three decades within the spy agency, just yesterday came out in a nationally televised interview and asserted that more than 20 trillion (yes, with a T) of American citizens' communications have been intercepted -- mostly without a warrant or judicial review of any kind.
One could say that William Binney, a whistleblowing patriot of the highest order, is now toward the top of the list of people who might experience a "slip in the shower" or "unexpected suicide" within the next few weeks.
Furthermore, the NSA is now building a $2 billion data center in Utah to crunch all of this data. In other words, $2 billion of our taxpayer dollars are going toward spying on American citizens within the U.S. without warrant or court approval. This is not only an outlandish waste of money, it's illegal.
Also: reporters at ridiculously mainstream publication USA Today are now claiming that Pentagon-sponsored "propaganda contractors" have initiated a widespread character assassination and reputation destroying campaign against them.
This is not the America I learned about in school. I want my country back.
Am I willing to sacrifice my reputation for this? Am I willing to sacrifice my life for this? Sure.
People throughout history have sacrificed far more, for far less.
The next time a TSA agent at the airport gropes your wife in front of you, massages her breasts and places his hand on her genitals, you may want to speak up. You may want to remind yourself that you are an American citizen -- with rights and duties vested in you by the Constitution -- and not a coward living in some creeper starvation state like North Korea.
Wake up, speak up, and don't trust the pacifying mainstream media -- which has lost more than 50% of its viewers since last year, due to their inability (or unwillingness) to cover these crucial issues. They are complicit in the destruction of your basic civil rights, and your dignity.
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