by Naomi Wolf

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I never thought
I would have to write this: but – incredibly – Congress
has now passed the National Defense Appropriations Act, with
Amendment 1031, which allows for the military detention of American
citizens. The amendment is so loosely worded that any American citizen
could be held without due process. The language of this bill can
be read to assure Americans that they can challenge their detention
– but most people do not realize what this means: at Guantanamo
and in other military prisons, oneÂ’s lawyerÂ’s calls are
monitored, witnesses for oneÂ’s defense are not allowed to testify,
and one can be forced into nudity and isolation. Incredibly, ninety-three
Senators voted to support this bill and now most of Congress: a
roster of names that will live in infamy in the history of our nation,
and never be expunged from the dark column of the history books.

They may have
supported this bill because – although it’s hard to believe
– they think the military will only arrest active members of
Al Qaida; or maybe, less naively, they believe that ‘at most’,
low-level dissenting figures, activists, or troublesome protesters
might be subjected to military arrest. But they are forgetting something
critical: history shows that those who signed this bill will soon
be subject to arrest themselves.

Our leaders
appear to be supporting this bill thinking that they will always
be what they are now, in the fading light of a once-great democracy
– those civilian leaders who safely and securely sit in freedom
and DIRECT the military. In inhabiting this bubble, which their
own actions are about to destroy, they are cocooned by an arrogance
of power, placing their own security in jeopardy by their own hands,
and ignoring history and its inevitable laws. The moment this bill
becomes law, though Congress is accustomed, in a weak democracy,
to being the ones who direct and control the military, the power
roles will reverse: Congress will no longer be directing and in
charge of the military: rather, the military will be directing and
in charge of individual Congressional leaders, as well as in charge
of everyone else – as any Parliamentarian in any society who
handed this power over to the military can attest.

Perhaps Congress
assumes that it will always only be ‘they’ who are targeted
for arrest and military detention: but sadly, Parliamentary leaders
are the first to face pressure, threats, arrest and even violence
when the military obtains to power to make civilian arrests and
hold civilians in military facilities without due process. There
is no exception to this rule. Just as I traveled the country four
years ago warning against the introduction of torture and secret
prisons – and confidently offering a hundred thousand dollar
reward to anyone who could name a nation that allowed torture of
the ‘other’ that did not eventually turn this abuse on
its own citizens – (confident because I knew there was no such
place) – so today I warn that one cannot name a nation that
gave the military the power to make civilian arrests and hold citizens
in military detention, that did not almost at once turn that power
almost against members of that nationÂ’s own political ruling
class. This makes sense – the obverse sense of a democracy,
in which power protects you; political power endangers you in a
militarized police state: the more powerful a political leader is,
the more can be gained in a militarized police state by pressuring,
threatening or even arresting him or her.

Mussolini,
who created the modern template for fascism, was a duly elected
official when he started to direct paramilitary forces against Italian
citizens: yes, he sent the Blackshirts to beat up journalists, editors,
and union leaders; but where did these militarized groups appear
most dramatically and terrifyingly, snapping at last the fragile
hold of Italian democracy? In the halls of the Italian Parliament.
Whom did they physically attack and intimidate? MussoliniÂ’s
former colleagues in Parliament – as they sat, just as our
Congress is doing, peacefully deliberating and debating the laws.
Whom did HitlerÂ’s Brownshirts arrest in the first wave of mass
arrests in 1933? Yes, journalists, union leaders and editors; but
they also targeted local and regional political leaders and dragged
them off to secret prisons and to torture that the rest of society
had turned a blind eye to when it had been directed at the ‘other.’
Who was most at risk from assassination or arrest and torture, after
show trials, in StalinÂ’s Russia? Yes, journalists, editors
and dissidents: but also physically endangered, and often arrested
by militarized police and tortured or worse, were senior members
of the Politburo who had fallen out of favor.

Is this intimidation
and arrest by the military a vestige of the past? Hardly. We forget
in America that all over the world there are militarized societies
in which shells of democracy are propped up – in which Parliament
meets regularly and elections are held, but the generals are really
in charge, just as the Egyptian military is proposing with upcoming
elections and the Constitution itself. That is exactly what will
take place if Congress gives the power of arrest and detention to
the military: and in those societies if a given political leader
does not please the generals, he or she is in physical danger or
subjected to military arrest. Whom did John Perkins, author of Confessions
of an Economic Hit Man, say he was directed to intimidate and threaten
when he worked as a ‘jackal’, putting pressure on the
leadership in authoritarian countries? Latin American parliamentarians
who were in the position to decide the laws that affected the well-being
of his corporate clients. Who is under house arrest by the military
in Myanmar? The political leader of the opposition to the military
junta. Malalai Joya is an Afghani parliamentarian who has run afoul
of the military and has to sleep in a different venue every night
– for her own safety. An on, and on, in police states –
that is, countries with military detention of civilians – that
America is about to join.

US Congresspeople
and Senators may think that their power protects them from the treacherous
wording of Amendments 1031 and 1032: but their arrogance is leading
them to a blindness that is suicidal. The moment they sign this
NDAA into law, history shows that they themselves and their staff
are the most physically endangered by it. They will immediately
become, not the masters of the great might of the United States
military, but its subjects and even, if history is any guide –
and every single outcome of ramping up police state powers, unfortunately,
that I have warned for years that history points to, has come to
pass – sadly but inevitably, its very first targets.

Reprinted
with permisson from Naomi Wolf’s
blog.

January
6, 2012

Naomi Wolf is the
author of The
End of America and Give
Me Liberty.

Copyright
© 2012 Naomi Wolf