And Now, a Message from Mr. Fawkes . . .

The hacker collective Anonymous has, to no one’s surprise, come out against the National Defense Authorization Act, which recently passed the Senate on a 93-7 vote.

For those of you unfamiliar with the act— which may be most of you, since the mainstream media seems too caught up in the doings of the Kardashians and the Republican Flavor-of-the-Month to report anything about this— it contains a provision jointly authored by John McCain (R-Ariz) and John Levin (D-Mich) that (1) declares that the United States of America— every inch of it— is now a war zone,therefore giving (2) the United States military the sole authority to arrest and indefinitely detain without trial members of al-Qaeda on American soil, while (3) explaining that United States citizens are not subject to military arrest and detention (4) unless someone says so, and (5) PS, you’re in al-Qaeda if we say you are.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is fucking nuts.

Yet another demonstration of why the popularity of congress ranks somewhere below that of, say, Casey Anthony.  I can only imagine that 93 senators were so swollen with privilege, power, and hubris that they could never in a million years imagine that this power would be used against them.

It seems to be something the politicians came up with on their own.  The FBI (which has arrested over 400 terror suspects since 2001) didn’t request this bill, and neither did the military, which has neither the training, experience, or personnel to do the FBI’s job.  in fact, under this bill, it would be illegal for the FBI, or any other civilian agency, to arrest a terror suspect.  Only GI Joe is allowed to fight H/y/d/r/a/ al-Qaeda.

President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, though he hasn’t made the threat lately.

Admiral John Hutson, the former Judge Advocate-General of the Navy, has spoken against the bill:

“The enemy is just laughing over this, because they will have gotten another victory.  There’ll be one more victory. There won’t be any bloodshed or immediate bloodshed, there’s not a big explosion, except in a metaphorical sense, but it is a victory nonetheless for the enemy. And it’s a self-inflicted wound.”

“In this war, the enemy doesn’t have to win,” Hutson said. “They can cause us to do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, such as indefinite detentions, in the name of fighting a war,” he said, noting that the country has already subjected itself to invasive scrutiny that would not have been tolerated before Sept. 11, 2001.

In the case of the defense bill, the detention provisions would raise key questions about basic legal concepts that have long underpinned guarantees of freedom in America, including the habeas corpus right to contest being jailed and the Posse Comitatus Act passed after the Civil War to limit the military’s role in law enforcement.

“This is an asymmetric war. In asymmetric wars, you want to pit your greatest strength against the enemy’s greatest weakness,” Hutson said. “Our great strengths are our ideals and our system of justice.”

Or, as Anonymous put it in their inimitable style:

…the detention mandate to use indefinite military detention in terrorism cases isn’t limited to foreigners. It’s confusing, because two different sections of the bill seem to contradict each other, but in the judgment of the University of Texas’ Robert Chesney — a nonpartisan authority on military detention — “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

The passage of this law is nothing less than an outright declaration of WAR against the American People by the military-connected power elite. If this is signed into law, it will shred the remaining tenants of the Bill of Rights and unleash upon America a total military dictatorship, complete with secret arrests, secret prisons, unlawful interrogations, indefinite detainment without ever being charged with a crime, the torture of Americans and even the “legitimate assassination” of U.S. citizens right here on American soil! (You kinda get the feeling that Anonymous is looking forward to all this.)

(Ironic that the spokesman is dressed as Guy Fawkes, who died following a completely looney, unsuccessful attempt to impose a religious dictatorship on Britain.  I’d guess they haven’t read the history, but instead saw the movie, where the bad guy was blown up by the good guy in the Guy.)

This isn’t a left-right issue.  Civil libertarians on all sides of the political spectrum are appalled. 

All is not lost, fortunately.  The Senate bill will still have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, the revised bill passed by both houses, and then signed into law by the president. And then survive the inevitable court challenges, assuming of course that not all the judges have been arrested and confined to some steel-walled institute run by the Corrections Corporation of America.

So in the meantime I suggest that you contact your representatives in Washington, and tell them that you really like having civil liberties and that you oppose the provisions of this bill.

And we can also lay down a few bets.  Anonoymous, on the grounds that the Senate has declared war— or, as they put it, “WAR”— on America, have now declared war— or WAR— on the Senate.

Who do you think will win?