Welcome To The Minority Report: Pre-emptive Prosecution,The Next Chapter In The Death Of Democracy

The United States, land of the free, home of the brave…or is it?

Day in and day out, freedoms are being ridden over rough-shod by the people who run the country. The freedom to drink a large, sweet beverage, the freedom to let your children play outside, the freedom to own a legally licensed gun and the freedom to go about your business without being spied on from above have all been open to intensive debate and discussion over the last few months. We have been assaulted from every side by those who seek to log our movements, control our diet, and stop us from protecting our families and ourselves.

The NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) will take the curtailing of our civil liberty to a whole new level by effectively allowing pre-emptive prosecution and indefinite incarceration based on your views, religion, or anything else that a small elite group of people decide MAY be a threat to national security.

Individuals WHO HAVE COMMITTED NO CRIME can be arrested and incarcerated at the will of the government without proven cause. The government, it seems, is able to see into the future and decide, in advance, who is and is not a threat.

Thinking that this will just apply to those of a certain religion, or those who are born in a certain country will be a massive mistake. It will ultimately apply to us all.

The government denies this, but the word terrorism means simply to strike terror into people, nothing more, nothing less. So wide is the scope of the word that it can be used to encompass a huge variety of acts, events and situations.

Tareq Abufayyad, a young, well educated Palestinian male, was held at San Francisco International Airport as he made attempts to go to a family reunion. All of his family are naturalized US citizens. He was not allowed to fly on the grounds that he had the POTENTIAL to become a Hamas operative. FBI Agent Robert Miranda argued that because he was a young, well educated Palestinian he would be “attractive to Hamas” as a future recruit.

Abufayyad had no history of protest, no history of contact with Hamas or people connected to Hamas. He has no criminal record of any kind. He was pre-emptively detained….just in case, as are thousands of people whose names are on secret, unpublished no-fly lists in the United States today. 500 of these people are born and bred US citizens.

Where will pre-emptive arrest and detention stop?

On May 16th 2012, just days before the NATO summit in Chicago, nine Occupy activists were arrested after their apartment was raided. They had gathered to protest the convention. Three of those people, Brian Church, Brent Betterly and Jared Chase were indicted on May 19th under anti-terrorism charges. They were charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism and possession of explosives.

Two undercover police officers had infiltrated the group, and although the nine were committed to peaceful resistance, the evidence surfaced that the police officers had actually talked the young men into making Molotov cocktails so they would be a “force to be reckoned with” and so “the government would take them seriously”. As soon as the cocktails were made the police called it in and the apartment was raided. The police actually radicalized these young men, who prior to their infiltration would never have dreamed of making explosive devices.

Although cases with such obvious entrapment may well have been thrown out of court in the past, that is far less likely under NDAA….the young men will now be viewed as having a different ideology, they have crossed a line and therefore are a risk to national security. This law in Illinois is now under scrutiny as the constitutionality of the state’s anti-terrorism laws has been challenged by lawyers for the three men. Should it be found unconstitutional they will still be charged with possession of explosives, but would not face the minimum 40 year sentence faced by those found guilty of terrorism.

You can see where this is going. From the point that the NDAA comes into force entrapment cases will be countered with the comment that those people must have been predisposed to commit acts of terrorism or they wouldn’t have been ‘turned’ so easily.

The very nature of the Act makes it possible to extend, expand and alter at will the kinds of things that can get you arrested and detained.

Owning an assault rifle if they are banned MAY  imply that you intend to go out and shoot people at random, which could be construed as an act of striking terror into people and therefore you could  be subject to legal detention by the state, without ever having committed a crime let alone.  Because no actual crime has been committed, you won’t be able to fight your detention in court. Before the Act the charge would have been owning an illegal firearm.

The NDAA is as much about controlling the people as preventing terrorism.  It’s about containing those who disagree.  It’s about keeping control of the population of a country where more and more people are waking up each day and realizing that their rights are being eroded piecemeal by officials that were elected to do the exact opposite.