Military Ready to “Round Up” and Detain Anti-War Protestors

Anti-war protesting is a dangerous business when the central government wishes to pursue wars.  Wars offer the opporunity for a country’s leaders to grow the government, shrink freedoms, and impose control over the people in ways that would not be tolerated in a time of peace. Perhaps that’s one reason why so much of human history is a record of war.

Anti-war activists challenge and even contradict the official government story.  So there is a natural tendency for those in power to try to shut them down.  The stronger the government and the weaker the tradition of free-speech, the more likely it is that government efforts to silence critics will turn ugly.

So what is happening now that should have those in the US who cherish their freedoms on alert?

U.S. intervention in Syria has provided the perfect context for escalating tensions. In its effort to topple the Assad government, the U.S. nurtured the Salafist fundamentalist sect in Syria, which went on to become a major part of ISIS. As U.S. military operations get dangerously close to Syrian or Russian forces (invited there by Assad), any “accidental” strike could be the spark for World War III.

If this were not disturbing enough, the reality in the homeland is downright frightening. Since 9/11, the U.S. military/surveillance state has been able to use – and perpetuate – the specter of terrorism to dismantle the rights of its citizens.

There’s the familiar pattern:  War and terrorism used to curtail freedoms.  And here’s more:

According to retired Army Major Todd Pierce, the U.S. government has everything in place to round up antiwar dissenters and put them in military detention.

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Pierce is a self-professed former neoconservative until the Gulf War began opening his eyes to the folly of U.S. imperialism, and then he personally witnessed how government began using 9/11 to assume totalitarian control in the name of fighting the tactic of terrorism. He now works as a Guantanamo defense attorney.

To go from neocon to Guantanamo defense attorney is more than just a huge career change, it reflects an enormous readjustment in Pierce’s thinking.

Current laws and the practices of the Obama Administration as it prosecutes its war on terrorism offer plenty of opportunity for concern.

Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act was perhaps the crowning achievement of the totalitarian U.S. State, which removed the right of habeus corpus during this never-ending war on terror – meaning that American citizens suspected as “belligerents” can be subject to military law and indefinite detention.

This is not the only possible fate that awaits American citizens should major war break out and government essentially becomes a military junta.

Pierce explains how he was in the court when the Obama administration argued they have the power to kill American citizens, as part of a sweeping authoritarianism granted unto itself to take “any means necessary” in the war on terror.

Obama demonstrated this power in 2011 by assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen, and then his 16-year-old son “for good measure.”

A robust anti-war movement can save a nation from destroying itself — provided those activists don’t find themselves in a detention facility.

As Pierce notes, American generals would have bankrupted the country pursuing their crusade in Vietnam, had it not been for the antiwar movement. He said that we now face a situation like Communist Russia, which bankrupted itself through perpetual war, or Nazi Germany’s failure at Stalingrad, which caused Germans to reconsider their ongoing conquest of Europe.

Only, things are more subtle for the United States. “We’ll just slowly erode our economy and– again, we’re doing it already, but we can conceal it,” said Pierce.

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Today, the U.S. government does not need to execute dissenters; it can simply make them disappear through indefinite military detention, using a vast surveillance empire, while the “war on terror” goes on endlessly.

It can happen here.  Far too many of the pieces needed to make it happen are already in place.  The only question might be is whether the people of the US are willing to stand up, take action and demand their freedoms, since once those liberties are lost for one group, it’s not long until they are lost for all.

Source:  Activist Post